Trouble

Man is born for trouble as the sparks fly upward. 

• Job

One of the most oft-quoted sayings of Mary Oliver is, “what are you going to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Well, first, I'm going to disagree. We don't have one. We have a chapter here, a determinative chapter, like the call to adventure. A chapter in kingdom come and will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven. And then? We don’t know much, but we know that we are the children of a great Author and He probably has a few ideas. Also, it will be most excellent. There will be a new heaven and a new Earth with new wild and momentous life. This one is temporary and full of complications from sin, but also full of complications because man is born for trouble.

Trouble is not necessarily a bad thing. It is  inconvenient and uncooperative, and a group of complications to our stories. Things we wouldn't choose for ourselves that train us to be better people,   like prodromal contractions, which my husband frequently reminds me I would not do for myself. For some reason, we don’t like being stories and a lot of that might have to do with the fact that all stories have trouble.

In this story phase, troubles are things we want to discount as critical pieces of dominion. The toddler training, the drippy foam nozzle that has been fixed three times, the cement block that has to be removed for work to be done, this is Lewis's real life that we have to set aside our todo list for in order to take care of. And poopy diapers, a toilet backing up, a tree falling in your yard are all troubles that only contain the sin you bring with you.

Of course, the biggest joke of all is that God made the woman for man, and man for trouble. So the interruptions to our days are real life, and we need to train ourselves to give off a scent and not be a stench when the routine is bruised or life plan altered.

Trouble can be chosen and borne well. The first way is just in living your kind of life, which not everyone can or should do. We all have troubles, but we get to choose some problems to solve for ourselves and for the great glory of God.

At its most basic level, there are the trade-offs of living different lives. You can decide you’d rather have a house full of flies and the windows open. This creates a problem for those who hate the pests, but it encourages them to install screens, moving the air without bugs. Another person invents forced air. Then the trouble for everyone is keeping the door shut. There is a whole section of trouble that is not natural or moral evil, it's just development. These are often the things that drive us nuts, and there's no reason why they should stop in the resurrection.

Why shouldn't trees stop growing over roof lines, gutters stop clogging, dirt stop being dirty? God made them for these things. The cows he made will still have to be milked. The change will be in our virtue to handle them. We take our model for work from the world of Eden: six days shall we work.

So we get to pick our problems in this category. But there's a sense where what is ours won't leave us alone. Mine include sorting and tracking seven pairs of shoes for various occasions, but you could choose troubles of climbing stairs every day when you choose your house or cleaning three bathrooms versus only having to clean one. Or the trouble of carving time to write with seven children bustling about. 

The other kind of trouble we have is the kind we take for others through bearing their burdens and doing things for them. This is the kind you take that answers to the apathy of our society, like fasting answers gluttony or fighting to begin counters negligence in Purgatorio. When people say, "Let's keep it easy," this is the thing we should smell under the surface. 

It used to be that you have to take the trouble to survive. Many want to return to subsistence as a solution to modernity's problem when one of its few virtues is getting to be alive for longer than before. The gift of getting to exist as a baseline shouldn't be thrown away. We should move to do more with it. The temptation to be a physical and intellectual blob isn't answered with neutrality. I grew up with the ideas of natural evil and moral evil, and natural good and moral good in my head. In between an idea started wedging, a neutral. I'm sure it came along with relativism initially, a natural extension of evil being undefinable is a muddy middle of neither good nor evil.

Piffle, as a good great aunt would say. Natural neutral is the muddy middle of not working and not resting we fall into as a result of protracted existence assumed. It is exhausting because nothing ever gets done, and because new levels are not achieved.

Everything resets with no accruing progress. It's like being stuck in Groundhog Day, the video game, never achieving a save point and resetting every morning. Then we push for longer hours instead of effective ones. We wait until the house is dirty to clean it because the actual use of a house when it is clean is a much more difficult and complicated thing.

The answer, of course, is trouble. The trouble of choosing things that are hard and hard-won, that create and cultivate and sometimes keep you up at night. Natural neutral is opting out mode, but instead of getting off the email thread, you opt out of the stories of life.

Story-dense lives have a way of running away with you. People who want to survive run with it. People who can survive without them think twice. 

We have to learn to do things awkwardly- meet neighbors, dance in public, be embarrassed over and over again because your feet don't move right, and then maybe they’ll let you teach everyone Aesop. Make your life a labor of love, a long one, because surviving is comprehensible, but love is not.

Charles Williams is a mixed bag, an interesting one, though. In Descent into Hell, he had a young woman in the terror of seeing herself, sure she was going to meet her doppelganger in the street. It stalked her, the terror and the surety. An older man, probably Williams interjecting himself into the narrative, notices her palpable fear and insists she tell him about it. His clear blue eyes stare out the page at the reader, insisting that he really must take her burden. For him it would be light, little more than an interesting side note. His own burden has passed along long ago, which readies him for receiving others' lighter loads.

 Williams was a proponent of intercessory prayer among many other more controversial things. He even sought to help Lewis intercede to bear Joy's cancer. This kind of trouble-taking is reflective of the medieval king Gustavus Adolphus, who bore the burden of battling a brother king who insisted on murdering Protestants. He staked his own life's blood to take the Protestants' trouble on himself, dying too.

 But in a time and place of ease, the trouble can be choosing to make the sweater, paint the wall, or create something. Literally, anything I make can be outdone by AI or a Chinese factory. But AI and China can't do it for the girls in the room down the hall. If a scarf arrives imperfect from the great beyond, it's rejected. If it comes from my purse, it's warm and is a badge of honor.

This brings us to the trouble taken by the gift receivers. Those who take food as the daily bread of God's provision and eat flat, dense angel food cake like it came from above. They're kind, interested, and do not mind wearing your first attempts in public long after you've improved.

So chase the things that you were meant to do. Bear one another's burdens and go the extra mile in how you give and receive. Trouble others by the trouble that you take for them. 

And don’t count the time, not in the way we are tempted to when we think about how much time baking a cake actually takes. We have a wild and precious time here. We might need to be bothered enough to do something about it.