More Behind the Picture than the Wall

I have a passed-down photograph taken of me when just an infant. While my parents are now both deceased, for decades the gold-plated frame holding the almost sepia-toned image graced their bedroom dresser.

There was more behind the picture, as the saying goes, than the wall.

I’m chubby cheeked in the shot, two locks of my hair curled and pasted down on my forehead. I’m pushing myself up from my tummy on my baby-fat-laden forearms; someone off-camera—my mom? my dad?—had caught my attention. I’m delighting in the fuss, it seems, liking getting my picture taken.

And to look at me then you’d say I greeted my first weeks and months with wide smiles, with a child’s wide inquisitive open eyes.

And I see that I arrived, as I believe we all do when born into this wonder-filled and fallen world, with a longing to be loved and liked, along with occasional fears that I would not. I smiled for the photographer, but I must also have known in some moments a rattled need for security.

And the realities of the world that made me smile also showed up in the daily working of a household, sometimes to wound and harm. Sometimes not offering all I longed for or felt I needed. I was welcomed, and I was at the mercy of everyone in the household I was taken home to. At their mercy indeed: I’d find how the people God has had a hand in creating, those who in turn have a hand in creating us—sometimes make choices that hurt or injure. Our families receive us and leave us both loved and diminished. Human love has its glories along with its frailties and inevitable failures.

I think, for instance, that while my dad’s care for me was steady, it was also divided. Like many of his era, work, the office, the ways his boss evaluated him, his sense of sometimes being slighted because he lacked a college degree, proved the focus of his greatest energy. I was more than an afterthought but less than a fervent focus. My efforts to connect with him and get his attention would sometimes meet with a turned-away face. I can be preoccupied with work, too, losing focus on the person right next to me or in front of me in favor of some imagined need always to be “on.” And yes, our parents’ missed cues and mistakes can be a tired trope of personal essays. I get that.

But then there was a time of outright rejection. The hard years came during a desert in our relating as I transitioned to full adulthood. For then the parents who had loved me and shielded me then virtually disowned me, punched out words in a scrawl in the letter my mom wrote asking me to send back the house key, a key which I still carried when I moved away to grad school, innocently, without thinking.

“Send us your address where we can send your things,” she wrote with what I now think was a feigned finality.

And the mother who held me close when she rocked me and nursed me when I was at the age of the infant in the photo, would turn away for a time and then turn back again to lash out in her own confused reactions to my growing independence. My kindly but largely distant dad would stand by quietly during her rants when I’d be home for semester breaks. Then, when I wouldn’t consent to their demands, I was no longer (for a time) welcome home.

Of course I’m not alone in recognizing the limits of human love. As a pastor and priest, I’ve seen the way families can go wrong, devastatingly so, the veneer of projected images scuffed and gouged. “Now remember,” Homer Simpson coaches his family, “as far as anyone knows, we’re a nice, normal family.” But in caring for my flocks I’ve been privy to households’ hidden dysfunctions, their secrets artfully covered over. Even “nice, normal” families both launch us and disappoint us; they love us and then leave bruises on the heart.

For what if Dad for us in this world we’ve inhabited wasn’t a nice guy (or Mom, for that matter)? A jerk, even—or worse, an abuser or not-so-charming scoundrel? That was not my situation, but my dad’s distracted distance at times left me longing, left something not quite fulfilled. I knew what a friend meant when he reflected on how his dad spent a lot of time involved with his work, with his impressive career in publishing. “He was someone to be proud of,” my friend said, “not someone to know.”

Which means what we long for today goes back to our beginnings, to the relating that formed us, to the distances that made us ache. We are born wanting to get woven into what we soon realize is a spiderweb of interrelationships. So babies scan the field of their vision, looking for a face to fix upon, like I would have even while having my photo taken. Especially when held. The young irises of the newborn can focus only within a range of a foot or so, but still they scan, wired to search for a set of eyes: What better conveys our relational bent! Does that haunted, hunting stance ever completely leave us?

And when the infant’s eyes meet another’s, especially one that returns the gaze, they glue their eyes to that face.They relate. They long to keep looking. They connect. “We are all born into the world,” writes psychiatrist Curt Thompson, “looking for someone looking for us.”

What We Want When We Can’t Stop Wanting

Loneliness is a kind of homesickness for a heavenly household, I’m coming to believe, for it goes yet further down, to our spiritual depths. “What is we want when we can’t stop wanting?” asks poet Christian Wiman in Zero at the Bone. Nothing less than God, he says, admitting others may answer the nagging question differently. But I agree with him, knowing how loneliness can feel like “the isolating dread of not having found your place in the world,” as Allie Volpe put it in a Vox article online early this year. “There’s more than one way to feel lonely,” was the title of her article. Indeed.

And we’d like help, all the more in our fractured, isolating world, with what someone called an ache for cosmic specialness. More than ever, I agree with how Wiman declares that “such “primal loneliness [has] its origin and end in God,” that we are “lonely in a way that only God eases.” Might not, then, our hurt and brokenness drive us to God? Might it all make me even more open?

I love to believe that I have been fashioned out of divine delight, by a kindly Someone. So the one sentence we crave to hear from stories, wrote Reynolds Price, “is that the Maker of all things loves and wants me.” There’s never a time I don’t need to hear that. Of course there is in human love a partial help for the lonely nights and worrying dawns. But even better, might we not be preloved? I think about this divine involvement because I’m interested in a God who is not distant, indifferent, aloof. Love makes us welcome, gives us a bigger answer to our loneliest moments.

Some years ago I attended a retreat where the leader had us close our eyes. “Place your hand on your heart,” she instructed quietly. “Feel it beating.” Then she read from psalm 139:13-14:

[Lord] you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

I got to thinking how much care God puts in to making us, caring for us, knitting us together. One of my goals in this still-new year is to live with more awareness that I’m loved. That I’m cherished as a child of God. That my heart beat matters to this God. I forget it too easily. I get caught up in ignoring that quietly explosive truth. I want to, as Thomas Merton put it, know that I can make “a vital contact of love with the living God.” A God who not only shows evidence of great creativity, but overflows with compassionate, loneliness-countering goodness.