Waylon, Jesus, Diarrhea

The following is an actual transcript of a conversation with my 4-year-old son, Waylon. I have to preface it by saying that Waylon had his first experience with diarrhea recently, and it was confusing and a little scary, so we’ve been processing.

Waylon: I have to poop right now, or else I'm gonna poop in my pants.

Paige: (getting up and heading for the bathroom) We don’t want that to happen.

Waylon: No.

Paige: But sometimes you can't help it, like when you have diarrhea. No one can help pooping in their pants if they have bad diarrhea.

Waylon: (from the toilet) Jesus could.

Paige: Hmmmmm. I don't know, he was supposed to be just a regular man.

Waylon: Well, if he could walk on water, why couldn't he stop diarrhea?

Yes.

It’s true.

We’ve been talking to Waylon about Jesus.

No one can be more shocked than myself, because it wasn’t part of my parenting plan. But then, two months before Waylon was born, George Bush launched the Iraq war. And then Katy, my wife, suffered a long and painful illness. Then I saw An Inconvenient Truth. And then, as if my mood was not apocalyptic enough, I read Dave Eggers’ What is the What, a re-telling of the experiences of the Sudanese lost boys.

Reading about the experiences of young children making their way, without parents, through treacherous terrain, hunger, thirst, loneliness, war and then years of uncertainty in refugee camps, I often felt like I was going to have a panic attack. Many times I had to take the luxury of closing the book and taking some deep breaths. Five years ago, that book might not have affected me in the same way, but now that I am a parent, the suffering of children is more real to me. It’s partly because I know Waylon’s complex thoughts, feelings, and needs, and partly because of the way that parenting has forced me to revisit the emotional landscapes of my own childhood.

As brilliant as I think Eggers’ book is, it didn’t help me understand what sustained Valentino Achak Deng or any of the other children who kept walking and living even as they watched their peers succumb to hunger, madness, and death. I couldn’t help wondering—rather self-indulgently, I’ll admit—if I had the inner resources to survive that kind of walk. And I couldn’t help imagining my baby walking that path alone and wondering if I could bequeath to him what he would need to survive.

When Waylon was eighteen months old, my wife Katy started chemotherapy for Hepatitis C. The drugs that were supposed to cure her made her sick. So sick that for a while she was like a feeble specter of her usual self, drifting in and out of agonizing pain. I wish I could tell you that this experience forced me to tap into heretofore unrealized wells of patience and compassion. Instead, my paranoid, self-protective brain switched into overdrive, frantically anticipating the ultimate blow by preparing for her death. It was like the fact that she was going to die was in the forefront of my brain at all times, so that I could be teaching a class or parking my car but in my mind I’d be flipping through a mental checklist that ranged from choosing the music for her funeral to selling the house.

In other words, I responded to crisis by becoming extremely morbid. Less Mother Teresa than Woody Allen. And once I was so chummy with the fact of Katy’s mortality, it was only a slight stretch to thinking about my own, and to imagining my son as an orphan, alone on a treacherous path. The Bush administration wasn’t helping my apocalyptic mood. Whether they were shunning the Kyoto accords or reviving the rhetoric of the Crusades, it all seemed like some kind of crazy plot to destroy the world that my child would inherit.

Eventually I found myself sitting in tiny Trinity United Methodist Church. That’s a whole story of its own. But basically I needed some framework for making meaning out of suffering and a space to tap into compassion. And I am kind of a community junkie. I loved the fact that people shared their prayers out loud. Free group therapy! But going to church still didn’t get me to Jesus, or to any kind of faith.

Although I was baptized into the Catholic church, and dutifully attended CCD, I left at 16 when my (probably gay) priest tried to explain away my concerns about the church’s stances on birth control and homosexuality as matters for local pastoral interpretation. I was a teenager with a teenager’s keen nose for hypocrisy. A couple of years later, I read On the Genealogy of Morals, and somehow Nietzsche’s sneering diagnosis of Judeo-Christian morality as a compensatory strategy of the weak got stuck in mind, in spite of my very different politics, and in spite of everything I later read about the Bible as a roadmap for liberation movements.

For most of my adult life I have felt like an outsider to faith. I remember asking my best friend from college, the product of a truly religious upbringing, what does it feel like to believe? How do you get there? In many ways I feel like I’m still struggling with those questions. My wife, who knows me better than anyone, was convinced that I could get there by reading. “That’s how you make sense of the world, you need to read about it.” (I should note here that Katy confected her own unique spirituality in her days as a speed addict, when she would wander into the public library and read whatever books she felt were calling her name.) So, around Christmas time last year I decided to start with Matthew and make my way through the New Testament. But almost immediately I got hung up on language. What was all of this talk about Dominion and the Kingdom? It seemed so masculine and imperialist. I read some of Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan’s The First Christmas, and that helped. I tried re-telling the story of Jesus’ birth the way they do, as an anti-imperialist parable. Now Waylon associates King Herod with George Bush, but something about starting with Christmas still didn’t work for me. It’s too pat, too much a part of our mono-culture, and I just felt like I was joining some smug cultural enclave.  (Waylon wasn't really helping, because he kept saying "it's Jesus's birthday!" in a sing-songy voice.)

My sister the sociologist told me about interviewing a woman who was narrating a moment when everything in her life changed. “What happened?” my sister asked. “Well, I met Jesus,” the woman replied, as if he had just walked right up to her in the supermarket. Reading has not helped me meet Jesus, at least not yet. I have begun to think that the intellectual route is not the way that I am going to get there. I am not even sure why I think that it is Jesus that I am going to meet, except that I have been listening to a lot of Mavis Staples. Usually when people talk about prayer, it feels like they are approaching the universe as a big piggy bank: you put some prayer in and you get the good stuff out. But when Mavis sings “Jesus is on the main line, tell him what you want,” it sounds like something I need to understand.

And then there’s Sunday school. To be quite honest, I ended up in church because there’s no Sunday school at the Buddhist Sangha around the corner from my house. I needed a place to make sense of suffering and get in touch with compassion, but I needed to bring Waylon along with me—for practical reasons, but also because, for all of my skepticism about church, it seemed like a place that might foster the elusive internal something that would help him navigate and survive this crazy world.

Surviving Sunday School has not been easy (for me). That first Easter, when the lovely blonde Director of Children’s Programs started passing out little plastic bottles of bubbles in the shape of crosses, I had to fight the urge to turn on the heel of my summer sandals and run. Luckily for me, our pastor, Sid, is the perfect antidote to mass market Christianity. Sid looks like an average, mild-mannered white guy in a Hawaiian shirt, but about 85% percent of his sermons are about darkness and doubt. I think of him as the goth Methodist. Sid gave an Easter sermon about how our culture tends to focus on the crucifixion as the promise of personal salvation and ignores the difficult, unpopular work that got Jesus crucified in the first place.

Ironically, Sid’s sermons about darkness and difficulty created just enough of a safe space that I could relax and begin to let in a tiny bit of the light. The first time I heard him announce that all were welcome to take communion, I started crying and couldn’t stop until the service was over. Having been raised Catholic, I thought of communion as something that you had to prepare for and earn. Yet there I was, sitting in the back row, full of doubt, having made no profession of faith and no confession, and I was welcome to partake. I didn’t even know how much I had internalized the feeling of unworthiness until the experience of radical hospitality overwhelmed me.

I spent last weekend in a room full of gay Christians who feel compelled by their faith to work for justice. The way these people talk about (and live) the presence of God in their lives seems so real and compelling, by the end of the weekend part of me really wanted to feel like one of them. I was beginning to understand what a conversion experience might feel like, because these people and our experience together felt so special. And at the same time I was acutely aware of how potentially exclusionary and Christian-centric this special club was. I kept thinking about the few people in the room who were explicitly not identified as Christians and how quickly and easily our group shifted into talking as if we all believed the same thing.

Jay Bakker was there. His church, Revolution NYC, puts up stickers that say “As Christians, we’re sorry for being self-righteous judgmental bastards.” Jay gave a beautiful sermon about Grace, and, miraculously, Waylon sat sweetly in my lap the whole time, helping me to soak it up without squirming. In the past, I couldn’t tolerate even reading about grace. Katy once tried to get me to read a book called There is Nothing Wrong with You, and I wanted to throw it across the room before I read the first 10 pages. For most of my life, my internal monologue was a laundry list of failures, vows to do better, and fears that people were going to find out just how imperfect and unlovable I was. In some ways, living through Katy’s illness cured me of all that, because I had to let it all hang out—and because I saw how she still loved me in spite of my empathic failures. Having Waylon has helped me too, because I now understand what it means to love someone unconditionally. Ultimately, I think it’s that sense of being loved unconditionally—by me, by Katy, by the Universe or Jesus or whatever we decide to call it—that will sustain him through the mundane and catastrophic.

Last week, Waylon was engaged in an art project of his own devising, which involved gluing a bunch of sequins to a cork that he found on the playground. As he was working at the kitchen table, I heard him singing a little song that went “God is inside of every thing, god is inside of everything, god is inside of everything!” It sounded a lot like the Ramones, but immediately I flashed back to elementary school when my sister went to vacation Bible school with a friend and came back singing cheery songs about beating the Devil.

“Who taught you that song? Did you learn that in Sunday school?” I said, trying not to jump his shit but expecting a treacly conspiracy.

“No one taught it to me. I taught it to myself.”

“Oh, okay. That’s good.”

“Mom,” he said, still gluing.

“Yes?”

“God is inside of this table.”