When I turned 50 in 2009, I told my immediate family that I didn’t want any presents for my birthday. Having notched half a century, I thought, “Finally, I shall dictate the terms of my birthday!” But my family – strong-willed and pig-headed to a person - ignored me and bought presents, anyway. Around my cake they sang our own, irritating take on “Happy Birthday” and presented me presents, which I opened, tight-lipped and thankless.
Lest you think my curmudgeondry betrays dismay for my advancing age, please know I’ve never enjoyed birthdays. My earliest birthday memory dates from my third or fourth year, and I remember hiding most, running from our kitchen table as everybody began to sing “Happy Birthday.” In our den we kept a three-legged, corner end table that crashed over occasionally, if we were careless. Underneath, I loved to hide, way back in the corner. I hid there then. If my memory is close to accurate, I hid first from embarrassment over my family’s singing to me, but also from no little fear.
You may think it strange that I should fear my family’s celebrating my birthday, but I encourage you to think back to your own young childhood and remember how often you were afraid. In my memories of those early years, I’m often afraid but just as often compelled to do the very thing that frightened me. I was afraid – no, terrified actually – to walk out on the pier at Panama City Beach because I could look down between the boards and see the water growing deeper the further out we walked. I remember making a public spectacle, screaming and crying to go back because I feared falling in and drowning. I feared going to the doctor and getting a shot, often the fear proving the worst of the three. As I was born in late November, my birthday looks forward to Christmas, and I remember also looking forward to fearing Santa Claus. About my birthday, I certainly didn’t fear presents, just the public receiving of presents, my family’s celebrating me alone on this day with singing and the expectation that I would have to sit still for it.
I used to hide from bullies, too. I take the current, public descrying of bullies and bullying sympathetically and seriously. I grew up without a man around the house, so until my mom remarried when I was ten my brother and I were especially susceptible to bullies in your neighborhood: we were easy targets, already marked as socially weak. If we stayed in our yard or on our front porch, we were almost entirely safe. But then no one stayed in their own yards, even at pre-school ages, especially not my brother and I: we were two who had “too much energy,” so we were often away from our “home base.” I remember one instance when three brothers, current and future delinquents all, came around the block and, finding my brother and me around the corner from our house, declared that we would have a boxing match. I was teamed with the youngest, my brother with the oldest, with the third serving as “referee.” When he pantomimed dinging a ringside bell, I adopted a boxing stance, but my opponent leapt up, grabbed both my ears and pulled down, hard. I began to cry, to wail, actually, and the two older boys jumped on my brother and pummeled him. Somehow we got away and made it back to our front porch, both of us crying, our maid rushing out the front door to see what was the matter. And this was by no means an isolated event: our neighbor thugs – young children not even ten years of age but already well along the path to thugdom – stalked us, constantly. We had to stay on our toes, practice constant vigilance, to keep from being punched and ending up on our front porch, crying.
Childhood is, I think, rife with such instances of anticipating the time when one will be afraid and then, when the time arrives, of being afraid. When my daughter was slightly older than I was in the aforementioned events, she wrote a poem that captures feelings about death very similar to those I remember feeling about bullies and compulsory events. In her poem, she described death as a huge, heartless cat and herself as a small, hyper-vigilant mouse. She wrote quite well from the mouse’s perspective describing the mouse’s watchfulness, its terror, and also the inevitability of the cat – silent, stalking, still as a statue – pouncing on the mouse, death pouncing on her eventually. And my daughter, as young as she was, described some of my own, adult dreads about death, dread that you and I go mincing through life, constantly casting worried glances over our shoulders though ultimately becoming too consumed with some life matter, while death implacably stalks us and will pounce some day, perhaps when we become engrossed in life and forget to keep watch. I find myself hoping death will do quickly for me and not toy.
As I grew older I often thought of death in implacable terms: the day of my birth, even the act of my being born, created simultaneously the day of my cessation, of my expiring, and there’s no way humanly possibly that I can avoid that final day. Over the years I’ve thought of death as a debt I owe, a bill that will come due, but those concepts do not capture the feelings that, if I am honest, reverberate with childhood fear both of the bald fact of death and of my fearing anticipating my death. I’ve found myself regretting my own birth because it drags along with it an inseparable, hideous twin. I’ve found myself hating the fact of my birth because, had I not been born, I wouldn’t have to go through dying – nay, so that I wouldn’t even have to anticipate dying, that I wouldn’t have to fear expecting to die. In such times, I’ve imagined it preferable never to have existed at all, rather than to be and know that someday I won’t.
Now, you may say if you know me and my calling, “Preacher, what about your immortal soul?” I don’t believe you or I have an immortal soul and, here’s an interesting bit of trivia, neither does Scripture. Scripture seems intent on reminding us that we are mortal from the tops of our heads to the bottom of our feet and all points in between, that there’s nothing in us that has life in itself that is not dependent on its existence to Someone outside. Except for a very few places, Scripture sees us all as coming from and going back to dust, walking and talking mud briefly animated by God’s own breath. So if there’s any hope at all for any existence beyond death, we have to rely on God for it, that just as God once created everything seen and unseen out of nothing at all, some day God will recreate God’s faithful people even though they’ve fallen completely into dust, even though the world itself may have fallen completely into dust. That’s all orthodox, but to be honest, I don’t really believe all that, either.
Sometimes, I hear people argue that the only reason we have religions is to help people deal with the fact that they’re going to die. Though religion certainly holds comfort in death, that’s hardly the only reason for religion, nor is religion’s comfort a sufficient reason for the phenomenon to be so prevalent in our history and culture, even today. Personally, except for a few brief, intensely evangelical times, I’ve never escaped dreading my death and those of those I love, even though except for a brief period in college I’ve always been firmly religious. During that period in college, I had crushing doubts that any religious conviction – my or anyone’s – was true. And these doubts, more specifically their “crushing” character, were feelings of hopelessness, worthlessness, futility and inconsequence.
At the time, such feelings hit me invariably and most forcefully in the backcountry. Perhaps because of the absence of electricity and, consequently, light and television, when my wife and I would backpack I’d feel death dread most acutely. I remember one time, in November of 1982 when Nancy had come to Maryville around my birthday so we could go backpacking, we hiked up above Cades Cove to a campsite we’d visited before. The night was cold and crisp, illuminated only by starlight, and I lay staring at the roof of our tent frantically trying to think some way out of my thoroughgoing, shivering dread of dying. Eventually, somewhere in that night, I thought of the postulate that if God exists God may have a beneficent interest in me. Please know, I considered this a bare and remote possibility, that even should God exist that certainly did not necessitate God’s ensuring I’d live eternally. But somehow, that possibility – the barest hope that if God exists God may condescend to keep my existence – proved enough to dampen my despair, my dread. Over the last quarter-century, I’ve had ample occasion to revisit that dread and, please be assured, my religion has proved no buffer to its despair. I have practiced my religion more because I fear living a faithless life than because I dread dying. I recognize neither of these is a ringing endorsements for the faith.
So I don’t like birthdays. Birthdays remind me that I’m small, powerless, that even two or three of my family are together stronger than I. Birthdays seem to me to be an unappreciated example of blaming the victim, of taking a person and rubbing their noses not just in their birth but in birth’s inseparable consequence and then having the temerity to sing about it. And I’m sorry, but I can’t think of a single gift that would make that sting any less. So I refuse to cooperate. I fear to do otherwise. Thank you for reading.
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