On Being Prepared for the Flood: Honoring my Late Father-In-Law
These past weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about my late father-in-law, David.
In January 2021, he slipped off a ladder while chipping ice from the rain gutters of his home, falling into a two-week coma from which he did not recover. The unexpected and overwhelming tragedy of his death provided no answers on the moral structure of the universe. His death, in fact, may have furthered my more nihilistic views about the fundamental nature of reality: there’s no point to anything, so we ought to childishly pursue gratification until our time is up.
After David’s death and then the loss of our beloved Canaan dog, Taboush, the following year, I grew distant from my most adamantly held skepticisms about spirituality. About the existence of God.
David, for all intents and purposes, was not “saved” by his faith when he failed to recover from the coma. God didn’t intervene and wake him. But that wasn’t the point of David’s faith — he spent his entire life dedicated to and prepared for such a moment. None of us get out of this game alive.
When David died, he left nothing for us to do but mourn his absence. But there were no unfinished, half-baked projects around the house. My mother-in-law didn’t have to sift through a piles of chicken-scratch notes for computer passwords or dig for safe keys, or have to figure out how he wanted his affects divided. There was no embittered feud or resentment amongst his children and grandchildren about whether or not they were appropriately “compensated,” as is so often the case. His affairs were in order. David lived in a way that would minimize the chaos that results from the inevitable. One could argue that this is what we’re all supposed to do. We are supposed to be prepared and well organized, and yet as is more often the case, we are not. Every one knows of an embittered family rivalry that ensues upon the death of a parent. Instead of rallying in support of each other — as David’s family did — they fight and squabble and embody our worst inclinations. The resentment takes over, the score settling becomes the means, not the end. And after years of lawsuits and rage and heartache, the winners still lose. We know these people. They’re probably very close to you. It could be you.
Between Thanksgiving and Christmas of 2023 I came to the 14-part lecture series on The Book of Genesis by Jordan Peterson. I started listening to Peterson’s college lectures in 2016 because they were so captivating, but I avoided his lectures on the Bible to this point for reasons I cannot explain. I probably just wasn’t ready for the message. I was, of course, an erudite and enlightened “humanist,” — a prancing dork. I won’t betray my former self and the life I’ve lived so far, but, damn, I wish this series was available to 20-year-old me. The 28 hours or so of lectures is a master-class in parsing the context and wisdom surrounding the Bible. Most significantly I find myself completely awestruck by Peterson’s ability to synthesize the psychological significance of Noah and the Flood.
From Genesis 6:
“Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God.”
“Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence…
And God said to Noah, “I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence through them. Behold, I will destroy them with the earth…
But with thee will I establish my covenant; and thou shalt come into the ark, thou, and thy sons, and thy wife, and thy sons' wives with thee.”
From Jordan Peterson’s lecture on Noah and the Flood:
So when this old story says, well, God’s not happy and he’s going to wipe everything out, it’s like, well, you might want to take that seriously. And then when it says, but there’s one person who had a mode of being that protected him from that, that’s also something you might want to take seriously, because you might want to know what that mode of being is, because you might need to use it. And so these sorts of things are practical in the deepest possible sense. They’re real in the deepest possible sense and practical in the deepest possible sense. So Noah walked with God.
A mode of being that will protect you from the flood. This gets me back to David. David lived his life in accordance with the values and wisdom of Christianity. He was a church elder who wholly integrated the concepts of justice, charity, integrity, honesty — not out of fear of Hell, as my simpleton mind might have argued in the past — but in pursuit of the ideal. To improve the circumstances of those around him. To walk with God.
You can see him in his daughters — I’m married to one of them — she’s wonderful. You can see him in his grandchildren, our nieces. They’re bright, thoughtful and delightful company — of course as a result of their parents, but their link to David is unbroken.
These past weeks I’ve been staring into my navel, asking the questions I really didn’t want to answer. What are you doing to make things better? What are you doing to make things worse? When answered honestly, it hit me like a ton of bricks. So, I gave up alcohol because it was making things worse. And I stopped resenting my career path, because that was definitely making things worse. And I finished One Way Ticket (typos and all), which made things a little better. And I started to think about what actions I would need to take to walk with God.
The flood is on the horizon, it’s always coming. My father-in-law was prepared for it. Are you?