As Seen Through Our Children’s Eyes

Sometimes the right words show up at the right time.

That happened in the days following the Orlando shootings at the Pulse Nightclub on June 12, 2016. A poem by Maggie Smith, written before the rampage at Pulse but published by Waxwing Literary Journal a few days later (Issue IX, Summer 2016) and shared widely in the weeks since, offers the right words for many who struggle to believe in the beauty of the world:

Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

In an interview after her poem went viral, Smith described how her poetry is often about the tension of our lives. She wonders:

How do we love this world as it is, with all of its flaws and dangers, and how do we to teach our kids to love it? How do we ‘sell them the world’ without lying to them about its realities? How do we let them see the rotten parts—because we must, eventually—and how do we empower them to do good and force change?

As a parent myself, I know that struggle. Only this struggle is not one known only by parents, but by all who care about the children growing up within our neighborhoods and congregations and schools.

But while “Good Bones” offers a powerful testimony to this effort in which so many of us are engaged, the struggle to “sell (our children) the world,” it’s also true that our children are doing the same for us.

It was my friend Jenn, a marvelous poet herself, who helped me to see this. When she shared “Good Bones” on her Facebook page, she introduced it with these words:

This poem has been shared by many, and it’s really wonderful. But I will also say this: in these past days it has often been my child who, aware of the atrocity against the LGBTQ community at Pulse this weekend, has been the decent realtor for the world to me, whispering that we can make the world beautiful, as he has shared stories that he’s read about people’s responses of promise and hope.

As I have lived with Jenn’s words these past few weeks, I realized that my son has been doing the same for me. Everywhere he goes lately, he has left his message. I have seen it scrawled on the whiteboard in my office hallway. I have found it colorfully and carefully written on the erasable boards hanging in our home. And I have found his message written on scraps of paper that he leaves lying around the house. The same words, his simple witness, just whispering as best as he can the words his father needs to hear: Love, peace, and joy.

I continue to be surprised when I discover the whispers Aaron has shared as a witness to the world he sees.

Sometimes I find his message easily, for he writes it in places that are impossible to miss. Other times, his message whispers from its hiding place in the chaos of life, his unmistakeable words appearing as a swirl of color against a darkened scroll.

Love, peace, and joy.

It’s as if he’s the one reminding me of what I want him to know. “This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.”

So thanks, Maggie, for reminding me that the world can be a beautiful place.

And thanks, Jenn, for reminding me that the burden of “selling the world” is not mine alone.

But most of all, thank you, Aaron, for your whispers through which you sell me the world you see, a world filled with the right words for this time.

Love, peace, and joy.