I can stand on the curb and watch thousands endlessly marching toward another blind corner with their fingers in their ears. Disappointment is around that corner, too. I would know. We change directions and try another alley, but the passions remain unsatisfied. Like drug addicts, we must text, we must multitask, we must have sex, we must have the weekend. And the water slips through our balled-up fist: these are the chains of our mortality. We have sold our souls for ethereal promises and vast mirages. Like our fathers, we are carried away for nothing (Isaiah 52:5).
Nothing.
Diddly-squat.
Augustine’s impassioned recollection of his own pilgrimage fits our own: “I had been deafened by the clanking of the chains of my morality, the punishment for my soul’s pride, and I wandered farther from you, and you permitted me to do so. I was tossed to and fro, and wasted, and poured out, and I boiled over in my fornications—and yet you held your peace, O my tardy Joy! You still held your peace, and I wandered still farther from you into more and yet, more barren fields of sorrow, in proud dejection and restless lassitude” (Confessions). He wandered deep into the wilderness of dissatisfied pleasure. He was carried away for nothing and searched recklessly for an opiate. Augustine’s opiates looked a lot like ours.
What is our favorite opiate? Distraction: it is our greatest aid in avoiding the reality of exile. Distract us. Please distract us. Distraction takes a million forms and nobody cares what the form, as long as it works. Unfortunately, the distractions are only one more mirage on the horizon. After all, “man was born for trouble, as the sparks fly upward” (Job 5:7). And again, “How frail is humanity! How short is life and how full of turmoil” (Job 14:1).
Everyone wants to be on the other side of emptiness. Each of us chases varying promises of satisfaction, but this inherited wasteland is a satisfaction vacuum. All the happiness we try to hold slips through our fingers. We were made for happiness, made for the garden of Eden, but the garden is gone and happiness evades us. Still, we keep trying.
Sex.
Sports.
Weekends.
Exercise.
Drugs.
Facebook.
Activity.
Opiates, every single one. Very few of us listen to our emptiness. The grumbling of our starved souls is shouted down by our harried lives. Few of us are asking what the emptiness means. Why the fracture? Why the restlessness? Why the letdown? Until we stop to listen to this misery, we’ll keep trying to satisfy the need with all the wrong things. Our opiates cannot fix the fracture. They will only end in dissatisfaction and we will find ourselves dragged through the wasteland, lashed to a horse that will not tire, nor will it die. Indeed, God has made us for himself and “restless is our heart until it comes to rest in him” (Augustine, Confessions).
My dad was always a little restless and the proverbial apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree. My father’s vocation is medical doctor. His calling, however, swings between writing poetry and exploring whatever is in front of him. This particular day worth remembering was one of exploration; specifically, Mt. Elgon. The mountain was north, northwest of my childhood home in Lugulu, Kenya and for whatever reason, it always seemed to me a gloomy, brooding mountain. It was, of course, tropical but high enough to catch snow with the tip of its head. We never reached those heights, but the jungle vines surrounded us and they were thick enough to hold a full grown man. Dad looped a vine and tied it off like a hanging lasso. He sat down in it and I sat on his lap. We swung like Tarzan and his son. Maybe next time we will take our shirts off and swing one-handed over the jungle floor.
For now, we explored the mountain: sometimes on vines, sometimes on the dirt paths. My little strides could barely keep up with my dad and a medical intern. Trackers, hunting the prints of wild jungle life, we found traces of elephants: elephant dung, enormous piles of poop big enough to cover me up to my knees. Three guys, an entire mountain, all the time in the world, and an opportunity for scientific exploration. We felt like three kings, so we squatted and turned the pile with sticks. Dad and the intern were looking for something. They found it soon enough: a dung beetle, dark like obsidian rock with a trace of blue buried in its blackness.
The beetle moved quickly, trying to recover and rebuild its warm dome. It tried to ignore us, but our sticks were hard to ignore. We kept turning over the lumps and discovered more beetles. There was apparently enough room to share the warmth. Such busy activity kept us occupied for awhile, but we decided to hunt bigger and better game.
My dad began walking again and I had to run just to keep up—we ventured further up and further in. The trees were taller and thicker now. We could hear the Colobus monkeys squealing among the towering cedars and eucalyptus trees, and sometimes I caught glimpses of their white tails and white beards, bushy like balls of cotton. There was no time to sit and watch them swing. Again, we followed a dirt road. Like the road before, this one was littered with elephant dung. The sight was familiar and so we paused, waiting for my little lungs to fill.
The earth suddenly began to tremble beneath my feet and in the distance to my right I heard tall trees creak and groan as they crashed to the jungle floor. Many of them were falling and the earth grumbled loudly. My eyes grew wide, as did the intern’s. Dad clutched his camera with a wild look of adventure peeking behind his shaggy beard.
“Elephant stampede,” he whispered.
Logic, even a child’s logic, said run away.
“Stay with Ben,” Dad told the intern. “I’ll be right back.” Then, without another word, he dashed off into the tall timber. I yelled for him to stop, but my cries of terror did not deter the bearded white hunter with camera. He disappeared from sight, and within a moment I was sure that the last thing I would remember of my dad would be his back and striding crane legs. Surely, he would be trampled to death. I wept and worried, but the worry soon turned to indignation and bitterness: it would be his fault if he got crushed.
I moped and whined and prayed for a few minutes and then I saw him appear through the trees. He was sweating, but sagged at the shoulders. “They were too fast for me. I never saw them,” he said and I was elated to hear the news. Dad described a wide swath cut through the jungle by the stampeding elephants, and I was overwhelmingly glad that he was not a permanent part of that landscape.
This memory ties no knots in my stomach as I record it, even though the event itself caused plenty of them. What is interesting is that over time, my mind has objectively distanced itself from that little terrified boy and put me smack in the middle of Dad’s shoes. I understand the urge, I think, to witness something so frolickingly fearsome. I was cowed at the time, but there is something inside me now that admires and understands my father’s tenacity. He too would be satisfied, but he too met dissatisfaction. We will discuss where such imaginative satisfaction is found in the next edition of “A Fist Full of Water.” In the meantime, if you’d like to be a part of the conversation let me know what other ways we try to satisfy ourselves.
