Gnothi Seauton: Surrendering To The Unknown

This Lenten season, it was ordered to be so, according to His Good Wisdom, that my father should pass away on the last monday of February.  In the wake of his passing, much of my mind has been tasked with casting and recasting who he was, from when I was five through when he dropped me off at the train station just two weeks prior.  That is, my mind has been harried with the question adjoined to this loss: what am I to make of his death?

Amid the panoply of memories that emerge, stands that of staying up to watch basketball with him.  To note, this recollection is not so esteemed because of my affection for the sport. 

The red numbers scream that they’re out of time, but, with determined eyes and sweat beading down their foreheads, the players push on. 

“Abba, who’s in the lead?”  

“The red team.”  

“Are you rooting for them, then?” 

“No, it’s more fun if you root for the underdogs.”

The Miami Heat was up twenty-two points, but my dad–who wasn’t personally loyal to any one team–was still rooting for the Oklahoma City Thunder. I chuckled, thinking it was a silly thing. They didn’t stand a chance.  

What might have been the trite interaction between an eight-year-old and her father is what I believe to be an iteration of a patterned thought process: the philosophy of fatalism, which sows naught but the nutrient-void crop of defeatism.  Given a decisive concept of the final outcome, especially a negative one, one is apt to disengage from and give up on living an upright life.  Given a determinate end, one is denied agency over his life; he is relegated to an accident, by which his will and his efforts are trivialized.  The basketball player, in that losing game, is but witless in shooting layups to close a twenty-two point gap. 

This anecdote bears up among others insofar as it demonstrates the fork in my path ahead, fixed by grief: the divergent paths of despair and hope.  I am tempted, naturally, by his new absence, to surrender hope because mortality is real and it is at least one aspect of our finality.  Nonetheless, I am conscious of an error which belies fatalism: man, constrained to his finitude, has no claims on absolute knowledge.  He is not privy to the Wisdom of God’s orderings, and he has no knowledge of finality, neither about himself or another.  As posed by the Apostle Paul, we are insufficient to judge even ourselves (1 Corinthians 4:3).  The Ultimate remains a mystery.  In effect, what the scoreboard reads overhead is not final. 

Tempted as I am to despair, I have, as modeled by my father, a reason for hope.  My dad, cheerleader of underdogs, especially his children and actual dull-witted hava-poo, was, admittedly, correct in pushing back against the emergence of this erroneous pseudophilosophy in me.  I am not Loving-Understanding.  I am not Ipsum Intelligere, nor do I have access to what that constitutes.  This anti-determinism, abandon to uncertainty,  has become a teaching point for me, especially in light of his passing.  

My dad was a good father to me, and he was so not by instinct but by habituation. It is safe to say I made it a struggle for him. Providentially, however, my dad was suited to the task.  He had made practice of complying to and searching for the agreeable, by obliquely inclining himself to the disagreeable.  To paint you a picture, my father loved open-water swimming.  Indeed, it was here that he found his Eternal Home in the liminal space between the earth and sea. Physically as well as figuratively, he acclimated himself to waves of anomaly and uncertainty, anchored to the good of swimming without the consolation of this or that resolution or intelligible end. He made himself at home in the ocean, habituating himself to swimming without seeing.  

Therealong, he mirrored—loosely in a very poor pre-industrialization sort of mirror, for he stood just a bit over 5’9”— that player, who unwittingly kept playing, beyond the prospects of victory (i.e. he adapted himself to being an underdog).  Consequently, it was fitting that he began to take up piano and swimming in his forties, and tennis in his fifties.  On my part, I was reluctant to learn tennis at the exceptionally advanced age of nineteen, what would come of this whim?  Certainly, my nineteen year old self’s pursuit of tennis was set in the desert of fortune; you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Nonetheless, I followed my dad to the tennis court; and, much to my shock, I did learn.  

My dad demonstrated to me, in his one-off stint as tennis-coach, that I could learn a ground-stroke, ad-term that I could hold my own on the court.  I learned from him that there was an inexhaustible supply of things to be learned, and that this infinite was not reason for despair because it was never so late to begin.  He seemed to have access to a reason for joy hidden behind all that is worthy of protest about the transient nature of our conditioning here below.  He granted me a glimpse of the good of disposing yourself to uncertainty in obedient self emptying—in surrender to all the discomforts attendant with being an ignorant and a novice.  

My dad demonstrated this virtue of fiat to me alike in his fatherhood.  Herein, he was increasingly attuned to the limitations of his understanding.  He relinquished the determinacy of his experience and judgment in such a way that granted him the flexibility to modify his approach according to where I was in my life.  He evolved to be generous enough to forgo the comforts of settling into one mode of parenting, such that he could fluidly transition from jester, to teacher, coach, and friend.  In a word, my dad modeled a life borne up by hope in response to uncertainty and change.  

Upon reflection, I see that my dad came to be who he was because of his ability to suspend himself from judgments of finality.  That is, my dad was not hedged in by self proclaimed limits proportionate to statistical probability or comfort.  He let his foibles be just foibles, his quirks just quirks.  And, he was moved to look at things anew: mayhaps, I can be a morning person starting now.. I can still become a swimmer in my forties.. It wouldn’t hurt to at least try to take up tennis in my fifties..probably, it’s not all too late to be a better father to my daughters, grown as they are… 

As concerns the options laid before me—of hope and despair—I am granted, by his model, an invitation to hope.  This is because his hope, though initially anomalous, was not in the end unfounded.  My dad, 53, at last, passed away a morning person, a seasoned swimmer, an okay tennis player, and most importantly a good father, dearer to me as he was this past February, when he bid me off handing me my suitcase with a characteristically austere pat on my shoulder and a gruff kiss on the head, than he was as the hero of my childhood. Hence, I am given a scaffolding for how to stay the course now that he has taken leave: to center and recenter myself in hopeful fiat to God. Perhaps, this Lenten season, this is what we might do well to surrender (vis. certainty, especially concerning ourselves).  It would be well with us that we entrust ourselves to our Lord, Who is most trustworthy, so that ad-fin we might be anchored in Him alone, that we might allow Him to disclose Himself to us as He is in the quiet, still, vast twilight of knowingwho we are, “for He wounds, but he binds up; he shatters but His hands heal.  He will deliver you from six troubles; in seven no evil shall touch you.  In famine He will redeem you from death, and in war from the power of the sword. You shall be hidden from the lash of the tongue, and shall not fear destruction when it comes.  At destruction and famine you shall laugh, and you shall not fear the beasts of the earth.  For you shall be in league with the stones of the field, and the beasts of the field shall be at peace with you.  You shall know that your tent is at peace, and you shall inspect your fold and miss nothing… You shall come to your grave in ripe old age, like a sheaf gathered up in its season” (Job 5:8-26).  Thus, I can yet rest in such a Father on High. For, although I am no longer granted the shelter and solace of my earthly father, this too was removed from me under the provision of my Heavenly Father from Whom all blessings flow.