For today, the traditional reprint of the essay, "The Night My Father Shot Santa," under Essays in the website. Merry Christmas! FK
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Quite a risqué heading, I know all too well. Back in the 1970’s it was considered a shocking affront to show bare-naked lady breasts, only dared at certain dark city theaters and rural drive-ins, and now…well, to NOT show the afore mentioned signifies that the production is probably a Disney cartoon intended not to offend the austere sexual morality of global despots in places like China or Saudi Arabia. But that is not what I am getting at. Rather, what I am asking in my title is, how far would you go in risking your capital wealth or health or even life itself for another, or for an ideal? There is the obvious example at the center of Christianity, of course, a religion based on giving everything, all, to others for God’s sake regardless, but that is way over the heads of most of us. Instead, consider what you would give under certain circumstances. Would you give your kidney to your child? To your wife? To your mother-in-law? A stranger in need? Would you give your savings to your struggling grown-up son, or to orphans in Haiti, or for mistreated dogs? How about your health and your life? For who and under what circumstances would you give yourself up to excruciating torture and eventual death? It is an age-old question, I know, but it came up with us after viewing “The Courier” on Amazon Prime. Based on a true story, the movie has us witness the recruitment by British intelligence of an average European salesman in the early 1960’s to bring messages from a KGB informant in Moscow back to the salesman’s hometown of London. He is terrified to do so, but is assured that he is only a courier, and should be safe from imprisonment and execution in the USSR – probably. As just an average Joe – or Nigel - he is torn between his patriotic duty and natural fear. Sure, the KGB probably won’t get him, he thinks, but they might. Still, he does it. This causes him to drink more heavily and to fight with his wife and son until both leave him, setting off to a hotel until he comes back to his senses. After several exchanges of information, his handler in MI6 (British intel.) finds that things are getting hairy both at home and abroad in Moscow, and so he dismisses the salesman after thanking him for his service. But by then something has changed. In the course of the few years our salesman has been meeting with the KGB informant, he finds that the latter is truly a brave and dedicated man, betraying his government not for gold, but to save humanity from nuclear catastrophe. At the time of his dismissal, he also learns (from an American CIA agent) that his KGB colonel friend is on the verge of being discovered by his own (KGB) agency. At this, this timid salesman insists that he be allowed to return to Moscow just one more time to help save the man he now considers a hero. I will not explain the events further for those who wish to see it, but I must add that our British everyman turns into a stout hero himself, not only out of respect for the Russian colonel, but for the ideal the Colonel willing is willing to die for. The ideal concerns the continuation of life itself – life for everyone, not just for Russian autocrats or for Russian propaganda, an ideal that stretches far beyond a concern for home, country, or family. Through the ideal, our average salesman is brought to understand that there is something in life that is greater than one’s personal life. We have seen this kind of movie before, but in this, the British everyman is so much like ourselves in his fears and lifestyle that it is particularly impactful, and necessarily raises the question in the heading of this essay: how far would YOU go for family, country, the world; that is, for an ideal that requires tremendous self-sacrifice? Pain hurts. Fear is fearful. I hate them both and shudder to think of placing myself at the tender mercy of professional torturers for anything. Of course I would have to for my children and immediate family regardless simply because the pain of not doing so would be even greater than physical pain. But for anything or anyone more? For the “world?” For country? Or how about, as the nuns in my religious classes in grammar school always demanded, for an idea of God? In grammar school we always thought that dying for an immortal god was stupid. Why not, we all reasoned, agree with the commie Russian invaders while keeping your fingers crossed? God, who knows all, would know our true heart, right? We should get a pass, right? Which gets to the heart of sacrifice. The Buddha nearly starved himself to death to find wisdom, and Christ went for 40 days in the desert without food and with minimal amounts of water to purify himself for His Father. This was not to lose weight, mind you, or to impress the neighbors, but rather to come closer to universal truth by giving up what the rest of the world craves. This is also what bravery does: it raises us above our normal fears of pain and death so that life itself becomes less important than the mission, or the idea behind the mission, which is self-sacrifice, which is the denial of life’s rawest instincts. So it has always been, even for those who do not consciously understand what they are doing by their sacrifice or acts of bravery. The profound truth of sacrifice has always been with us – that to forsake our safety or the pleasures of the world for an ideal is a good and noble thing. It is as much a part of the grammar school code as it is a part of the creed from the Vatican, but it ultimately amounts to the same thing – that, as Jesus said, we must give up our life, or the world, to gain either in full. This, life for the simple sake of living it, is the cloud that keeps us from seeing further into the meaning of existence. It must be pushed aside like a curtain so that we may see the sun and sky and the reality outside our little room. In practicality, this means pushing aside much that holds us to this life. That means fasting, giving up objects of our desires, and ultimately, giving up life itself if called for. The nobility that is at the heart of self-denial and the warrior’s courage, then, is not only for those of warrior cultures or for those contemplating religious abstractions, but rather is at the heart of self-discovery and salvation. It is something born into us, and strives to live through us in whatever way it can – from putting money aside for our children’s education to giving up our lives for our family, our country, or our god. In the end, sacrifice points to the same absolute necessity. In the end, it turns our faces towards the window and raises our hands to the curtain so that we might see real life in its eternal fullness. So why, then, if we are born to this path, is denial so hard? It is the pain and the suffering and the want and the fear. These form the curtain. How far are we willing to reach, then, so that the curtain can be pushed aside? Or rather, if we are like our everyman salesman, how far must some thing or some circumstance need to push us before we see the light beyond the curtain? See the response essay to "A Charlie Brown Christmas Tree" in "comments," placed Dec 9. For some reason, it was attached to the last essay below it (see below) from Nov 20. FK
We set off again for “Up Nort” in the UP for Thanksgiving break, a time when all the deer had most probably vanished deeply into the forest after the opening of the season the weekend before. With difficulty, we got ‘Loaded for Bear,’ my son eagerly awaiting his first big-game kill, and me almost, kinda hoping we got nothing. To my way of thinking, deer hunting is so regulated and the out-of-state licenses so expensive that it is better left to the rich and foolish, but we attached the baggage rack to the Jeep just the same and motored up in the gloom of late November. Once there, the gloom continued, aided by a constant flurry of Lake Effect snow that drifted slowly but relentlessly onto the six inches already on the ground. We attended the outhouse, got our gear set for early morning, and I, by tradition, opened the first beer to while away the quiet, lightless hours of the late-season evening out beyond the grid. I should like to report that we shot and then tracked a 12-point buck through the darkening forest, got lost for the night after finding it panting and panicked, and then barely made it back at pewter-colored dawn, our adventure set for all time. That, however, would be a lie - not my first, but one so bad that not even the evening news would have the chutzpa to repeat it. No. Rather, we froze our pattooties off for nothing, and then, on the last morning, packed up early to beat the threat of a large storm just begun, threatening to bring down another six inches and the possibility that we would be stuck until God knows when – with the beer supply almost gone. My son, however, would not have us return with the back-rack empty. “Hey Dad, why don’t we cut a Christmas tree on the way out and avoid the supply chain mess?” “But,” said I, wanting nothing more than to get back to roads that were plowed, “we really have to get out of here. Anyway, we’d have to search for an hour to find a good one. Forget about it.” Of course he did not, and as we crunched and slid down the two-track from the cabin, he pointed to one small, spindly tree by the side of the trail. “It will only take a minute with the chainsaw,” he said, to which I replied, “and half an hour to wrap and tie it down,” but my voice of reason was quickly lost. The tree, maybe not so terribly bad after all, would be ours to bring in the birthday of Mankind’s savior king. We arrived home well after dark, and all I wanted to do was unload the baggage and check my e-mail, but noooooo - Jeff would have us trim the tree and set it up. He did do the preliminary decorating, though, and afterwards it didn’t look too bad, at least not as bad as the cedar we had cut off our property the year before in the midst of the Covid crises, when I had to attach additional boughs to the tree with duct tape to give it at least a little character. So, OK, we had saved seventy bucks by not shooting a buck and instead taking a tree, and the tree was off our own northern property, so what the heck. The lights strung from its slender branches shown in the shadows of night, and all seemed at least kind of well. Until the next morning. When you buy a tree off the lot, it arrives cold and stiff at the house, smaller than expected, until it has time to warm. The boughs then lower and, usually, the tree seems to be much fuller. But not this one. With this little spruce, what little body it had was completely lost as the boughs drooped to indoor-heating level. While the tree had not been glorious the night before, the morning surprised me with the sparsest, ugliest tree that I had ever seen in any home that I had lived in, from the age I started to remember things to the present. “Holy crap,” I uttered to myself. My first thought was to take off the lights and ornaments and chuck the thing out the front door, where it would dwindle into total nothingness in a matter of weeks. But no. For Jeff, even after he became fully awake, it was not so bad, no, and besides, it had come off our property - and besides too, thought I, it had also become a substitute for your buck, the tiny limbs an acceptable alternative to a massive rack. I had to laugh at the situation in the dark way that we old people do because of our so many defeats in life, and then said, “Oh well. It’s gonna be a Charlie Brown Christmas Tree for us this year.” “What,” said Jeff, “is a Charlie Brown Christmas Tree? I saw the cartoon like, twenty years ago, but I don’t remember.” “What the …? That’s un-American!,” I exclaimed with horror, and then went on to expound – expounding on small things is what do best – on just what a Charlie Brown Christmas tree is. We remember it, don’t we? There was to be a Christmas nativity play at the grammar school, back in 1965 when such plays were possible, and Charlie “Blockhead” Brown was picked by bossy Lucy to get the tree, as he could do little else. Charlie was not stupid, but depressed from a world he saw as hard and unfair. He always had to side with the underdog, so of course he almost always lost, marking him out from all his peers as The Looser. And so it was at the Christmas tree lot. There, amid the normal trees, was one scraggly little one that cried out for attention and care. Of course Charlie bought it, and of course the kids were appalled that this spindly little tree would be up there on stage with them as one of the centers for their school play. Charlie Brown became even more depressed, of course, until the day of the glorious play itself. Then Linus, the thumb-sucking philosopher in the bunch, proclaimed that maybe the tree wasn’t so bad at all. Maybe, in fact, Charlie Brown was right, and all it needed was a little love. So the kids dropped their contempt for Charlie and his tree and set out to make it full and beautiful, which they did as one can only do in make-believe. Later, the play went on with all the shepherds and wise men and Mary and Jesus, until it came time for Linus to speak, playing what looked to be the smallest and most vulnerable of the shepherds: “…And the angel said to them, Fear not: for behold, / I bring you good tidings of great joy, /which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, / which is Christ the Lord…/ “And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, / Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will towards men.” (From Luke, chap. 2, St James Bible) Thus spoke Dad, with a butchered version of ‘Luke’ as written above, and then the most amazing thing happened. Instead of a snort or a casual shrug or rebuff from our worldly son, he said, “You know, that’s right. All it needs is love to bring out its beauty.” And this said with complete sincerity, as if he were discovering a truth that had been hidden within him for years. Could the author of the cartoon and the play, Charles Schultz, wish for anything more? Could the meaning of Christmas be understood any more clearly? Of course the tree remains just as ugly as before, but good Lord, could anyone be given a better family legacy through any Christmas tree? For there, as Linus understood, stands a mere plant in all its poverty and want that speaks for what we need most and all that we could wish for. |
about the authorAll right, already, I'll write something: I was born in 1954 and had mystical tendencies for as long as I can remember. In high school, the administrators referred to me as "dream-world Keogh." Did too much unnecessary chemical experimentation in my college years - as disclosed in my book about hitching in the 70's, Dream Weaver (available on Amazon, Kindle, Barnes and Noble and Nook). (Look also for my book of essays, Beneath the Turning Stars, and my novel of suspense, Hurricane River, also at Amazon). Lived with Amazon Indians for a few years, hiked the Sierra Madre's, rode the bus on the Bolivian highway of death, and received a PhD in anthropology for it all in 1995. Have been dad, house fixer, editor and writer since. Fascinating, frustrating, awe-inspiring, puzzling, it has been an honor to serve in life. Archives
December 2024
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