Slingshot
Slingshot
Kurt Armstrong
I knew what it meant to be a good Christian long before I knew what it meant to be male. Before I had any sense of the complicated set of behaviors, speech patterns, and postures that would shape my understanding of masculinity, I had a sense that God was real and present, the ground of my very existence.
My parents read Bible stories to me and my siblings and we listened to playful children’s records of bible-themed stories since before I could remember. I invited Jesus into my heart when I was four. I was sitting on the steps in the front entrance of our house, and my mom led me through the sinner’s prayer. She told me that at that moment, the angels in heaven were rejoicing. Every Sunday, my family worshiped at our small-town, conservative evangelical church, and in the summer my mom took me and my siblings to Vacation Bible School.
When I was a teenager I went to bible camp in July and youth group meetings on Tuesdays throughout the school year. Until I was fifteen I only listened to Christian music because I was wary of the seductive influence of secular culture. In my teens I went to as many weekend youth retreats as I could, mostly to meet Christian girls and to hear Christian bands. Before the weekend was finished I had a brand new crush, and at every single one of those youth retreats, I had some kind of intense spiritual moment. I didn’t drink, didn’t try drugs, didn’t swear, didn’t mess around with girls. I followed all the rules and never saw any need to rebel. My life was safe and loving, orderly and sensible, and I loved it.
My soul was formed in a rational, modernist view of the world and an unquestioning, pietist expression of Christianity. It was a system of belief as strong as tempered glass. It told me what I needed to know about the origins of the galaxies and about the good and evil in my heart, and it filled in meaning for all the spaces in between the stars and me. Politics, history, biology, education, music, current events: everything had its place within my religious rubric. I assumed that the narrative as I understood it was self-evident, and that anyone with an open heart would sooner or later discover the very same God that I believed in.
Because I was such a sensitive kid, the tone and emphasis of my early religious formation gave me an exaggerated sense of personal responsibility and a deep sense of shame, like a bowl full of sticky, viscous liquid that would spill over the edges at the slightest nudge, and that tacky sheen is all over my childhood sense of self. Normal childhood events, like getting into a mean little scrap with my brother or teasing my sister until she cried, were moral failings. Mistakes carried existential gravitas: when I screwed up, it meant I was a bad person. I’ve worked very hard to put real distance between myself and my narrow, conservative understanding of Christianity, but I’ve not yet managed to shake that fundamental guilt and shame, the abiding, pernicious gut-sense that I’m a bad person.
But even those distorted parts of my religious formation never made me cut ties with the religion of my childhood. No question, I picked up some damaging metaphysical notions early on, things I work hard to counter but may never entirely outgrow, i.e. my core sense of shame is inextricably tied to my childhood understanding of sin. But I can’t blame all my emotional/ psychological/spiritual hangups on bad childhood religious education. I was an unusually sensitive kid, and my whole childhood was a long train of complicated, loaded, weighty existential moments. But my childhood Christian education, flawed and problematic though it was, gave me robust narrative tools to help me make sense of myself the world. It would be a mistake to blame Christianity for the fact that, when I was a child, I used to think like a child. I’ve jettisoned the fundamentalist leanings and lost any sense of religious certainty and its’ satisfying consolations. But Christian belief still has a hold on me, and I’ve spent decades trying to round-out and refine my relationship with my childhood faith, to nurture and grow it into something adult-sized.
I now have three of my own kids, including a teenage son. Being a father offers me a chance to revisit some of my childhood memories to see if I can sponge off some of those pernicious, sticky layers. I watch my son, now 14, and I can see in him a simple innocence and deep goodness I could never see in myself when I was young. I try to be gracious to my son, which helps me be gracious to myself. God help me, I think that if I can love him well, he could help lead me towards becoming a good man.
*
I only remember my own dad ever really losing his temper with me twice, both times because I just wouldn’t let go of some stupid, pointless argument with my brother. I don’t remember him ever getting upset over simple mistakes or broken things.
When I was sixteen I crumpled the front end of the family car. I accidentally ran the garden tractor out of engine oil, got a tractor stuck deep in a mudhole more than once, flipped the four-wheeler more than once, too. My cousins and I accidentally burned up part an old bunkhouse in the farmyard. Dad never fussed much over any of it.
One summer I ran the tractor out of diesel when I was pulling the rock picker around a stony field. An empty tank of gas is easy enough to remedy, but a dry tank on a diesel engine means a more tedious process of bleeding air out of the lines to get fuel to the engine, something I needed Dad to do. I radioed home and told him I was out of fuel. He stopped whatever he had been working on and drove to the field with the old school-bus he’d converted to a portable shop, complete with diesel tanks and a pump that ran off the engine battery. He never gave me a hard time.
On a family road trip through the BC Rockies when I was ten, we all climbed out of the car to stretch our legs at a roadside stop. We stood in silence before the stunning alpine scenery, then walked to the edge of the barricade where we could spot a wandering stream at the bottom of the steep drop. We breathed the piney, mountain-fresh air, did a few jumping jacks. Just before it was time for us all to pile back into the car, Dad baited me into a quick, impromptu wrestling match. For my very first move, I kneed him in the balls. He bent double, groaned, and crouched down next to the car. I was mortified. I told him I was sorry, and he told me that kneeing a guy in the balls might be a strategic move if you were in real trouble, but maybe not in a playful match. He promptly absolved me of my guilt. I still feel like an idiot for it thirty years later, but not because he made me feel badly.
That same year, I shot a window out of the machine shed with my slingshot. It certainly wasn’t the first time I’d fired a slingshot, and it wasn’t the first time I’d fired off a stone without really thinking. Our farmyard was vast and full of wooden grainaries, a workshop, an old garage, the partially-burned bunkhouse, a slumping, long-abandoned farmhouse, a pump house, a big red barn: plenty of broad-sided targets if I was looking for something to shoot at and not actually do any damage. I wasn’t even aiming at anything, but as soon as that slingshot rubber snapped and the stone launched into the air I felt a sickening, squirming, wormy twist in my stomach because I knew exactly what where that smooth little stone was headed. It sailed an arcing parabola and then with a faint and distant plink, knocked the corner out of one of the six single-panes that made up a mutined window high on the front of the shed.
I had deliberately aimed hundreds of stones at hundreds of sparrows and barn swallows and never once hit one, not even close. And now, with one random, thoughtless shot fired to kill nothing more than time, I’d taken out a sparrow-sized corner of a window. Even the combined surface area of all the windows on the farm – houses, barn, shop, garages, machine sheds, pickup trucks, grain trucks, cars and tractors included – would have been a fraction of a percent of the total surface area of all the things available for me to shoot rocks at, and yet I had thoroughly defied incredible odds and knocked the corner out this one tiny little window.
I knew my dad would notice the broken pane even though it was small and high and out of the way, but more than that I knew that my overly sensitive conscience would burn a hole in my insides like acid if I didn’t fess up, pronto. I walked up to the house and told my mom what I had done. “You’d better go out and tell Dad,” she said. “He’s out cultivating near George’s. You can take the four-wheeler.”
I put my helmet on and fired up the four-wheeler and headed off. George’s place, the quarter section nick-named for the homesteader who abandoned the place more than half-a-century ago, was two miles east and two miles north of home, but the road felt a hundred miles long as I roared down the back route to the field. I had always known my dad to be moderate and reasonable when it came to my screw-ups, consistently gentle and quick to forgive. I didn’t feel afraid. I just felt stupid.
Halfway there, I could see the cloud of dust behind the big tractor working its way around the field. By the time I got there, the tractor was near the east end of the field so I followed the road around to the corner and then pulled out onto the field so I could flag him down. I waved and then he waved and I stopped and then he stopped and I walked and met him halfway. “Dad, mom said I should come out and tell you I broke one of the windows in the machine shed. With my slingshot.” The big four-wheel drive tractor rumbled behind him.
“Did you mean to do that?” he asked.
“No, I just shot a rock and broke it. It was an accident.”
“Well I’m glad you came out here to tell me,” he said. “Thanks. I guess you should try to be more careful.” And that was it. No hollering, no threat of a spanking at the end of the day to dread all afternoon long, not even a simple lecture. Not that I expected any of those things because Dad wasn’t that kind of father. An accident is an accident, even if it’s a dumb one. I drove home, my heart light and easy.
Because dad’s go-to disciplinary tactics were kindness and forgiveness rather than threats, hollering, or hitting, as soon as I got back home I went back down to the yard to aimlessly launch more rocks with my slingshot. And with my very first, poorly-planned shot, I took out the corner out of another pane, same machine shed, same window, top left pane. Plink. Busted.
Who does that? Who in the world makes a stupid mistake like that, properly fesses up, asks for forgiveness, and then does the exact same stupid thing all over again? By age ten, I already knew plenty about what it meant to be a farm boy, and I knew farm boys were supposed to be smarter than to go around wrecking windows with a slingshot. If only I had been more useful, if I’d been doing some daily chores or baling hay or chasing cows or mowing the grass or driving tractor or fixing fence or feeding chickens or washing the family car or riding my bike, something – anything – more worthy of a true farm boy; if I had been a better boy – a better person – I wouldn’t have been out idly wasting my time with my stupid slingshot and a pocket full of pebbles. My thoughtless mistake felt like a moral failing; my aimless, lazy, stupid, useless boredom had led to this. How in the world could I have been so stupid and so thoroughly in defiance of the odds as to take the corner out of a small pane in a wee window, and then been so unlucky as to do the whole thing all over again moments later? One stupid mistake might be forgivable, but the very same mistake right after the first one?
Back up to the house, same confession to mom, same reply: “Well, you’re going to have to go back out there and tell your dad. Again.”
Same four-wheeler ride back to the field, same cloud of dust behind the tractor, same stupid, sick feeling of shame. I drove onto the field and stopped short of the tractor, and he stopped again and walked across the tilled ground to meet me. No doubt he could read on my face that something had happened, but he waited to let me explain what I had done.
“Dad, I did it again,” I said. “I shot out another window.”
“Which one?” he asked
I hung my head. “Same window in the machine shed, but a different pane of glass. It didn’t break the whole thing, just the corner. I’m really sorry.”
He paused for a second, then gently placed one of his wide, powerful hands on my shoulder. “Thanks for coming to tell me,” he said. “That must have been really hard for you to do.”
*
My rationalist, modernist, pietist Christian faith fell apart when I was eighteen, sitting in an intro sociology course, listening to the professor describe religion and spiritual experiences in a way that seemed not to depend in any way upon the actual existence of God. Six weeks into the semester, and the tempered-glass-strong, fundamentalist-style Christianity I’d known my whole life was all in pieces. I spent years searching for something to replace that strong, confident, religious system, but no: my Christian belief is now continuously fraught, complicated and difficult, because with every move I make in the direction of faith, I drag along behind me decades of questions and doubt. Even the most powerful sense of spiritual encounter is clouded with uncertainty. My Christian belief is a patchwork of belief, duty, familiarity, identity, and experience, hard enough for me to make sense of for myself, never mind trying to describe it in any sort of evangelistic way.
With so much talk of toxic masculinity these days, we’ve got to consider once again, how the masculine language of the church, particularly God as father, can become a serious stumbling block for cradle church folks like me, when we finally start to consider our religious formation with a critical eye. It’s been said countless times, but it’s nevertheless true, that if your dad had a drinking problem, or hollered and swore and accused when got angry, or used his fists as instruments of so-called discipline, well, chances are you’re going to have a hard time with the idea of a heavenly father who’s genuinely loving. Or, say, your father was emotionally unavailable or quietly resentful, or maybe wasn’t around, wasn’t a part of your life at all: the idea of a relationship with God the father is likely to be complicated, at best. Lauren Winner says that those masculine metaphors for God as father, king, shepherd and judge are all good and true. But having relied too heavily on those few in particular, we’ve left out out dozens of other metaphors that have nothing to do with stereotypical manliness. Our diminished repertoire of metaphors has left us with incomplete, inadequate images of the divine. Scripture describes the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as a father and a king, yes, but it also describes him as a loaf of bread, a tailor, a cheese-maker. Scripture describes God as an enormous tree, as food to chew, drink to satisfy our thirst, and as a protective mother hen. God as a mournful gravedigger, a drunkard, a beekeeper. God as one who inhales the smoke from the fires we burn. God as an untamed dog. God as a woman labouring in childbirth. There is much, much more to God than manliness and kingship.
So a childhood of harmful, cruel, abusive, or negligent experiences with an earthly father can make it hard to trust a celestial father, but that was not the case for me. I have a good dad. I am now at the age now where I have made enough mistakes as a father that I’m right within range of the place where I will be able to forgive my father of all the mistakes he ever made. When I was little I believed he was actually perfect. In adolescence I found him overbearing. In my early twenties I thought he was naïve. And now over the last twenty years, and especially since my own children have slowly and systematically dismantled my sanctimonious, self-absorbed idealism, I’ve come to see him, first and foremost, as loving. He loved us, my siblings and I, when we were kids. He truly loves us now.
I think of the literary men I wish I could be like: the patient Atticus Finch in Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird, or the faithful, wise, gentle Rev. John Ames in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead. My favourite might be Sam Hamilton in Steinbeck's East of Eden, a tender farmer, practical and kind, unsentimental, unapologetically tough only in those rare moments when true love and neighbourliness call for a moral, existential wake-up call. But there is something in me of "Papa-Toe" Chance, the father in David James Duncan's The Brother's K, whose resentment smolders beneath the surface layer of disappointment, like the subterranean embers that glow long after the wildfire devours a forest of dry spruce. "Papa-Toe's" rage flares, and he lashes out and punches his son in the face, and is immediately filled with remorse. And me, I lash out at my kids, not with my fists but with my sharp, bully tongue, and I feel the burn of regret before I've even finished my sentence. My love for my kids jostles mightily with the myriad fears I have for them, and some days love doesn't win. I am not the storybook father I wish I could be.
Will I one day be the fatherly image that pushes my children away from the faith tradition that has shaped me indelibly, marked my life every bit as much as my gender? Or will my love, flawed as it is, be for them a buoyant gift, a hint and reminder pointing them God as perfect in love?
I am earthy, normal, real, so much like my dad in quotidian ways: the exact same staccato cough when I get a tickle in my throat; the same ability to take a restorative, five-minute nap, anytime, anywhere; same capacity for hard work without complaint. I worry about my kids' taste in music, like my dad worried about my brother's and mine, and I fret over the gaps in their education, just as he did for me. I love to talk to strangers and tell corny jokes, and I get moist-eyed at sentimental TV commercials, just like him.
But can I love my kids like he loved us? Do I have a heart big enough to be as kind, gentle, and forgiving as him?
Will my kids remember me as a father who loved them?
Kurt Armstrong
Writer & Builder
Kurt has previously been published by Image, Breaking Ground, The Plough, Sojourners, CBC Radio, The Globe and Mail, Mockingbird, Geez, and Christ and Pop Culture, among others.
Photography by Michael Melber