Growling and Barking, Still!

My mind whirls this morning, but finally seems to settle in upon a “once upon a time” thought — a time when I was young.  A song, sung by the late Roy Clark of country music fame, sounds within me. Do you remember it?  “Yesterday when I was young—So many happy songs were waiting to be sung, so many wild pleasures lay in store for me—And so much pain my dazzled eyes refused to see.  I ran so fast that time and youth at last ran out, I never stopped to think what life was all about—and every conversation I can now recall concerned itself with me and nothing else at all.”  Even the Bible speaks to my “once upon a time” thought this morning.  “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.  When I became a man, I gave up childish things” (I Corinthians 13:11).

What “childish things” did I give up when I became a man?  Nikos Kazantzakis suggests that when one is a child he or she becomes one with the sky, insects, sea, wind—whatever was seen or touched as a child—was recreated or reshaped out of one’s imagination. The world became a fairy tale where one (as a child) lived, spoke and moved—a fairy tale which the child created at every moment, carving out paths in that imaginary world to allow him to pass.” As children we are linked to a world we create and not the world as it really is.  “Little by little, however,” Kazantzakis wrote, “I drew myself out of its embrace.  It stood on one side, I on the other, and the battle began.”  When the battle begins, Kazantzakis suggests, the innocent, gentle, sweet voice within us (the Child) never again seems able to cover over the growl!

A friend who accompanied me in my early young adult days says that one of the most notable things he remembers about me was my “growl” and my “bark,” though he does not use those terms.  He remembers me “taking on the world” and having a “rebellious spirit’”wanting to change the world as it was into what I thought it could or ought to be.  My growling and barking has increased over the years and I make no apology for either.  Once in a while, a “sweet” (Kazantzakis’ word), or a gentle, or innocent voice comes out of me, but that kind of voice never seems able to cover up the growl and the barking.

I am growling and I’m barking.  I growl and bark because I am not content with the world as it is.  I know I’m no longer a child who can recreate, reshape or imagine this world as I would like it to be.  I also know that my ideas about how the world could be may not be your ideas.  Be that as it may, I growl and bark still.  Better to growl and bark than to be complaisant.  Better to growl and bark than to do obeisance to the antihuman purposes and policies presently at work in our society.  Better to growl and bark than to have a failure of conscience, a hardness of heart, which ignores and even fails to see the contempt for human life being demonstrated in the highest offices of the land. Better to growl and bark than to allow oneself to be a captive of the power of Death in all its varied forms.  

Once upon a time, I reshaped and recreated the world--
a world that pleased the child in me.