Nine years ago today, our 12-year-old daughter died of renal failure. The way the parents in this video handled their son’s birth, catastrophic diagnosis, and death seems very beautiful to me. I wanted to share it as an expression of how we too feel about our daughter’s short but blessed life.

This is for you, honey. I miss you and love you, carry you in my heart, and always thank God for you.

We’d had heavy thunderstorms for several days, but the temperature had not dropped. When I took the dogs out first thing that morning, the air felt heavy, warm, and wet. Low-lying clouds hung over the woods in the distance, teats full of rain. Another storm was coming.

As I waited on the dogs, a small movement caught my eye to the left. With surprise, I noticed a fledgling bird on our back porch, peering up at me and seeming as surprised to see me as I was to see him. “Why, hello there,” I said, bending down to get a better look. “What are you doing here?”

The little bird looked at me soberly, craning his neck. Not the least bit afraid, he stared me full in the face as if to say, “What do you think I’m doing here? I’m lost!”

He didn’t appear to be wounded or hurt in any way, but was so still he looked carved of wood. Only his eyes blinked. As I ushered the oblivious dogs back into our house, I speculated about how he might have become lost. I knew of no nests near that part of the house, but scanned the trees for them anyway.

I went back inside and watched the little bird through the window, mulling over what to do. I could capture the bird, cage him, and feed him until he was old enough to fly and care for himself. Our youngest girls would be thrilled. I could leave him alone and see if he worked out his destiny on his own. I could wait and see whether his mother might find him. Surely by now she had noticed him missing.

“What are you looking at?” my daughter Juniper asked as she entered the room. “This fledgling,” I pointed. He’s fallen from his nest somewhere and is lost on our porch.” Juniper observed the little fellow with interest. “What are you gonna do about him?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I was just wondering about that,” I said as I fixed my second cup of tea for the day.

After a few minutes, Juniper exclaimed, “Mom! Look! I think his mother’s out there!”

Sure enough, a larger bird with his same coloring and markings was perched on the plant hook above the little fellow, chirping. “Chirp! Chirp! Chirp!” she’d say, and “Peep! Peep! Peep!” he’d reply. Once a hearty litany of chirping and peeping had been established, the mother began to move a foot away from her baby with each series of chirps. The fledgling followed, flapping his stubby little wings with excited salutes and standing tall on tippy-toes as if to say, “I’m with you, Mum! Aye-aye, Mum!”

Attracted by all the chirping and peeping, three or four birds of other varieties joined in the chorus and began to flutter around the mother-child pair with some excitement, one settling in our Redbud tree, another perching on the edge of a flower pot, one hopping between the roof and the top of a deck chair.

The mother and baby appeared to be Scissor-tailed Flycatchers, our state bird. With tails four times longer than their bodies, they can do air stunts and acrobatics like nobody’s business. But the fledgling had still the stubby wings and short tail of a child; without his mother’s help he was unlikely to find his way to safety.

I followed the pair past our pool house and to the mature pear tree near the fence dividing our yard from our pasture. In spite of the other bird calls surrounding him, the fledgling steadfastly followed his mother’s voice. The mother appeared to be leading her baby toward our barn. I worried about his ability to survive in the open as he crossed the field, and about what would happen when he couldn’t be returned to the nest due to his inability to fly. Still, his mother continued to chirp with confidence, insisting, “Follow me! Come this way!”

The last time I observed the pair, he had taken shelter under a lawnmower and she was perched on a branch above him, urging him forward. My husband had driven past us with a load of lumber and it was as if the mother had called, “Hide under that thing, junior, until Danger has passed!” Once my husband drove away, their journey commenced. Though a part of me fretted about what prey this baby might become in the open field, I had confidence in the mother’s ability to direct her offspring. She had gotten him this far; what she did with her baby was her business. She had not, after all, ever tried to interfere with my childrearing.

As I went about my morning chores, I thought about the small drama I’d witnessed over the past 45 minutes and a parable of Jesus came to mind. St. John the Apostle records that after Jesus healed the man who had been blind from birth, the religious leaders of the day confronted the healed man, accusing him of being a blasphemer and follower of Jesus rather than a true Jew and follower of Moses. Jesus had healed the blind man on the Sabbath, an act prohibited by law according to the religious leaders, who began to bicker over whether Jesus could truly be from God and be a Sabbath-breaker at the same time.

In response to all the bickering, Jesus told his followers,

“Truly, truly, I say to you, he who does not enter by the door into the fold of the sheep, but climbs up some other way, he is a thief and a robber. But he who enters by the door is a shepherd of the sheep. To him the doorkeeper opens, and the sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name, and leads them out. When he puts forth all his own, he goes before them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. And a stranger they simply will not follow, but will flee from him, because they do not know the voice of strangers.”

This figure of speech Jesus spoke to them, but they did not understand what those things were which He had been saying to them.

Jesus therefore said to them again, “Truly, truly, I say to you, I am the door of the sheep. All who came before Me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not hear them. I am the door; if anyone enters through Me, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal, and kill, and destroy; I came that they might have life, and might have it abundantly. I am the good shepherd; the good shepherd lays down His life for the sheep. He who is a hireling, and not a shepherd, who is not the owner of the sheep, beholds the wolf coming, and leaves the sheep, and flees, and the wolf snatches them, and scatters them. He flees because he is a hireling, and is not concerned about the sheep. I am the good shepherd; and I know My own, and My own know Me, even as the Father knows Me and I know the Father; and I lay down My life for the sheep. (John 10:1-18)

“A stranger they simply will not follow.” Like the fledgling who knew his mother’s voice and followed it, beloved children hear the voice of the Good Mother, the Good Father, the Good Shepherd, and follow. It is the simplest thing in the world to follow the good shepherd of our souls when we know his voice, when we know from long experience that this voice can be trusted.

Children who have not been loved, but who have been abused and neglected and grown up unprotected do not know the voice of the good shepherd. Having been trained by parents who act like thieves, hirelings, and robbers, they became habituated to the voices of thieves, hirelings, and robbers. Their childhoods were lived in emotional war zones rather than sunny, verdant pastures fit for lambs. Never knowing from which direction danger might come, they lost the ability to hear the good voice and became accustomed to the survival mentality necessary for those raised in war zones. They cannot live in true community, do not understand or manifest loyalty, and deeply mistrust everyone, including themselves. Without a spiritual rebirth, they are doomed; this is why Jesus said, “You must be born again.”

Where is the hope for the lost lamb, the lamb who has been raised by hirelings, thieves and robbers, by shepherds who flee when danger approaches and teach their sheep that they’re on their own? It is in being born again, in somehow being taken to a place where they are once again protected in womb-like safety, nurtured and protected until the time comes when they are ready to come out of the womb (the tomb) and live.

Last week I wrote about the difference between personality or temperament preferences according to one’s type and moral choices. There’s no personality preference that excuses a person from moral, sane behavior. While working on this series, I was reminded of a family therapy group I co-led with a colleague some years ago. One of the indispensable tools in our tool box was the MBTI, which we used to help couples understand why they often didn’t see eye-to-eye, and what they could do to gain insight and change the way they related to one another.

An interesting byproduct of our work on personality types was a question raised by one of the group’s participants, Ned: what’s the difference between a personality type and a personality disorder? How do I know which is which when I’m dealing with problematic interpersonal relationships?

ned’s story

Ned was a single dad who attended the group because he was trying to heal a broken relationships with his son. After taking the MBTI and learning about personality preferences, he expressed concerns that his own preferences for introverted, intuitive thinking ran so far counter to his son’s extraverted, sensing personality that maybe he had alienated his son needlessly. Perhaps, he suggested, his son took after his ex-wife, the young man’s mother. They hadn’t gotten along very well, either. Were the problems and the falling out they’d had Ned’s fault, after all?

We found that as people learned about type and how it can affect one’s marriage and especially one’s child-rearing experiences, they often became concerned about whether they’d done their children a disservice by not fully accepting or understanding their personality preferences. Decent parents are always concerned about screwing their kids up. Unfortunately, screwed up parents are also concerned about screwing their kids up; they just can’t or won’t do what it takes to produce a healthy child, which primarily involves becoming a healthy parent first. Our work in the group was to try to separate one sort of parent from another, give the able parents the tools they needed, and get the screwed up folks into individual therapy.

I couldn’t answer Ned’s question about the estrangement with his son without knowing more details of the circumstances. Ned came in for several sessions of individual counseling so that we could try to sort things out. Ned was the adult child of an alcoholic whose early childhood was spent in a tense household occupied by an intelligent alcoholic father and dependent mother. After his parents divorced, he’d had to grow up quickly, becoming the “little man” around the house and juggling life between two households, as children of divorce must do. When he grew up, he fell in love with and married another adult child of an alcoholic, Allison, whose childhood had been chaotic and full of abuse and abandonment.

Ned and Allison believed that their love would pull them through any difficulty, and their love worked for them until Allison’s first pregnancy, which ended in a stillbirth. Ned recalled that she had never seemed to recover from the loss of their first child, and gradually developed a wine habit over the next few years. By the time their second child, Gabe, was born, Allison was drinking a bottle of wine every night. One evening while Ned worked late, Allison had passed out on the couch and Gabe had wandered out into the neighborhood. A concerned neighbor had taken the child home and notified Ned.

Ned had given Allison an ultimatum: either she got sober, or he would leave with Gabe. Allison agreed to stop drinking, and they attended AA and Al-Anon, where they learned about the addictive process, recovery, and mental and moral health. Allison had a year’s sobriety under her belt by the time Gabe was four years old.

Over time, however, Ned realized that sober Allison wasn’t much improvement over drunk Allison. She was intensely self-centered, had mood swings, and was also clingy and demanding of his time. She called Ned’s office several times a day “just to talk,” and regularly called him home for one emergency or another. She expressed many fears, including fear of strangers, fear of intruders, and suspicions about friends and family members. She was hyper-vigilant, observing and commenting on everything. Though always busy and occupied with a great many tasks that involved Gabe spending a substantial part of his time with her strapped into a car seat, stroller, or shopping cart, she was deeply lonely. She had no close friends and had alienated the few recovered family members they had. She was obsessive, driven, and tightly wound. Ned began to feel he was being choked.

In an effort to help his wife, Ned suggested she try yoga, which might calm her down, give her something to do, and expose her to other women who might befriend her. Allison loved yoga and began to practice religiously. “Emphasize ‘religiously,’” Ned had smiled wryly. Allison seemed to need an obsession to keep her from being in the present with Ned and Gabe. Though the principles taught in yoga included being present, attending to one’s breathing, and learning to be peaceful, Allison merely talked about her intentions to be present, be peaceful, and be available to others, too. No one who knew her could say that she had improved and could actually manifest her intentions, though Allison sang her own praises to heaven.

There wasn’t a single problem that led to Ned and Allison’s divorce. Rather, he explained, it was “a thousand little things, and the feeling that she was always just acting like a wife and mother but was never really in it.” She created chaos and tension out of thin air, particularly causing conflict with other women. She couldn’t seem to get along with her female bosses or with Ned’s mother or sisters, and regularly seemed to fabricate division in the workplace and family. I told Ned that she had probably been unable to confront her inner “bad mother” and so had to manifest it outwardly, demanding division, fractures, and abandonment in every intimate relationship because she had to externalize her ongoing self-abandonment.

I told Ned about research done by sociologist Jan Yager, who writes that healthy interpersonal relationships are unlikely to be had with people who grew up abused, neglected, or intensely criticized, for they are likely to act out the negative patterns of childhood and adolescence in all their subsequent relationships. People thus treated in childhood must get and act on good therapy or everyone around them will suffer the consequences, consequences the bewildered personality disordered never fully appreciate.

The courts gave Ned and Allison joint custody of Gabe, who hadn’t been well served by the traditional custodial arrangement of seeing his father only four days a month and on summer vacations. Steeped in Allisons’s chaotic, intense environment, Gabe had problems of his own.

We could see why estrangement was the nearly inevitable outcome of Ned’s relationship with his son. The question was, what (if anything) could we do about it?

This month’s O! Magazine is finally worth its cover price for an article on writing. Impossible to find among the effusive, bold-faced red of the Table of  Contents, which blubber on about adventures in adult sex education, how to dress 10 pounds slimmer, and whether baby carrots are safe to eat, novelist Jim Shepard’s article “Castles in the Mind” was a scrumptuous read. Ostensibly about the uses of imagination, it is really about writing and writers–writers as people who never let go of our innate ability to become, and stay, engaged.

Also a teacher at Williams College, Shepard underscores the writer’s shamanistic side. Writing forces us to step over to the “other side,” and into the unknown.

Grace Paley’s nice way of putting it is that we don’t write about what we know; we write about what we don’t know about what we know. Tobias Wolff’s version is that every time you write you’re stepping off into darkness and hoping for some light.

If that’s true, and we don’t know what we’re doing at first, then at least for a little while when we’re trying to compose something, we need to remember to cut ourselves some slack. There’ll be plenty of time for brutality later, when revising the mess we made. But we need to be allowed to make that mess in the first place. When we shut ourselves down prematurely, it’s as if we came across a child happily playing in the sandbox and asked what she was making, and when she said she didn’t know, we told her, “Then get out of the sandbox. If you don’t know what you’re making, you have no business in there.” Or if she answered, “I’m making a castle,” we responded, “Oh, a castle. That’s original. No one’s ever made a castle before.”

That girl in the sandbox has every right to respond, “I don’t know if it’s original. I won’t know until I’ve made it.”

We need to do everything we can, when writing, to stay in touch with pleasure. With fun. With the passionate engagement that we all manage, as children. Not only because that will keep us going, but also because it will generate the freedom and the energy that allows us to exhilarate ourselves, and so exhilarate others.

Alongside Shepard’s article is an interview with Toni Morrison, who says, “I start out with an image, even if I don’t know yet how to use it.”

As if this weren’t enough, just hours after reading this article, I listened to a lecture by philosopher and apologist Peter Kreeft, who says that C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narniabegan with an image and burst into life when Aslan came bounding into the spotlight of Lewis’s imagination. The point is not only that inspiration must be honored and respected. It is that the writer or artist must never let go of her respect for the Muses, and must never cease honoring them through practical means. We mustn’t let our freedom of mind and spirit be compromised.

paradise lost

Seeing Shepard’s image of the girl in the sandbox in my mind’s eye, I was also reminded of a conversation I had with my young daughters yesterday. They were chattering on in the backseat of the car about their 11- and 12-year-old friends spending their summer shopping, tanning by the pool, and otherwise doing what their affluent mothers do all summer, too. “They don’t read books,” Sage complained, “they don’t paint and draw.”

“They don’t catch tadpoles and frogs!” Juniper interjected, “They don’t like to get dirty!” Giggles erupted in the backseat.

“Can you see Ashley catching crawdads?!” Their classmate, 11-year-old Ashley, wears Chanel sunglasses and carries a cute little Gucci purse.

Heat slithered up at us from the blacktop parking lot as we threw the car doors open. Cicadas throbbed their beat. I remembered my own childhood, the hours I spent outside in trees, under the shade of my grandmother’s Crape Myrtle, reading in the porch swing, lying on the chenille bedspread, book in hand, the old GE tabletop fan humming along at 80 mph. I had hour upon uninterrupted hour with books, with paint and chalk, with blank pieces of paper and fine-lined ones. With my dad’s old portable Smith-Corona typewriter, writing the Great American Novel. With my tiny, red and gold colored notebook, writing poetry.

I felt sorry for my children’s classmates, for the neighborhood children who, like their parents, don’t come home from jobs and day care until almost 7:00 p.m., eat hurried meals, rush through evenings full of activities–soccer, dance, swim lessons, sleepovers, television, back-and-forth between divorced parents, full up with American culture where CASH IS KING! LIMITED TIME OFFER! ACT NOW!

I realized that I can write, in part, because I was left to myself for long hours in childhood, given the freedom to meander through the library and check out books to my heart’s content, given paints and crisp white paper, given my dad’s old portable Smith-Corona typewriter and a typing book and showed how I could teach myself how to type. It never occurred to me, or to any of us back then, to spend hours in front of the television, because there were no daytime television shows, no HBO, no Showtime, no DVDs or video games.

With all these things available today, what is in short supply is time. If we don’t have long, leisurely, undulating hours for basking in our God-given light, neither will our kids. I won’t be surprised if we find ourselves unable to produce many great writers in this generation, or if the world’s best writers don’t come from cultures where cash is not king and where the children are not being MTV’d, Twittered, and Facebooked to death.