I’m a neat-and-tidy kind of guy. I’m not quite OCD, but I do like things to have their assigned places and to be returned to those places after use. I like to clean and do dishes as I cook rather than binge-clean after eating. I like an orderly computer desktop and an organized email inbox.1
This type of personality has much to reckon with in the presence of an infant/toddler. At first, as my daughter, Lucy, graduated from tummy time to rolling over, her playtime habitat included just a blanket and a handful of toys. As she began to crawl, the growing number of toys needed a little box. As she moved on to cruising and now walking, the toys got bigger and more numerous. And now, no longer confined to smaller areas of our home, her path of destruction from end to end and through each room can sometimes rival General Sherman.
The baseline scene in the morning is books on their shelves, small toys in their crate, large toys at their stations, stuffed animals in their places. After a few minutes of free-range time, these items can migrate to just about anywhere, now that their escort is on the loose. My strategy is to try to restore order every half hour to hour or so, partially to maintain my mental sanity and partially to keep track of the things she has displaced with her explorations.2
As Lucy roams her new world, up on two feet with orangutang-like arms flailing in a daring display of “balance,” her instinct and operative mode is destruction. While fleeting, heart-warming moments briefly elapse in which she puts toys back in a crate or hands loose items back to me, the majority of her time is spent tearing things apart -- ripping magnets from the fridge, pulling every toy out if its crate, pulling every stuffed animal from the shelf, snatching every loose paper from its basket.3 In her primitive toddler fashion, Lucy defaults to tearing things up.I don’t mean to complain or bemoan my daughter; she’s a lot of fun and pretty even keeled. 4 I’ve just been amazed at how sharply she tilts toward destruction. I knew babies are fairly simple-minded as they begin to explore and learn, executing simple tasks over and over again as they study the world and develop their minds. I did not realize how much her exploration would be dominated by pure destruction. As she approaches new areas and apparatuses, her default setting is to tear them apart.
Why doesn’t she incline towards organizing things? Why isn’t her instinct putting disarray into order? Basically, I guess order is a higher level of thinking than lack of order. Even before disorder, a lack of order is the preexisting condition to the prospect of order. So apparently, before she can become any sort of agent of order, she has to explore the disintegration of everything. She has to tear apart each new realm of her world before she can understand how it may potentially go back together. It’s been intriguing to watch.
Her little travels have shown me how innate our default setting of destruction really is. Over time, education, experience, environment, and so much more combine to help us learn and develop, yet at that foundational point in our infancy, we have this sort of default human inclination toward destruction, toward tearing things apart, toward disarray. Whatever understanding we gain of order only comes later.
I can’t help but think of how we socialize as humans. Creating, growing, and sustaining friendships is hard; it takes a lot of time and energy to establish and nurture a strong friendship. On the other hand, it can take as little as a moment to destroy one. For whatever reason, our complex nature contributes to the massive outlay of effort that is required to become friends, but at its core, that same nature makes it comparatively easy to sever a friendship.
I think this reality of our human nature illustrates the insightfulness of metanoia. With all due respect to the born-again experience of our evangelical brothers and sisters, I’ve always found more resonance with the idea of constant conversion. Our broken hearts are in need of frequent renewal. We are always needing to turn more fully toward God. Given our complex nature and this baseline reality of destruction at our core -- surely built upon or within our concupiscence and original sin -- we need to be refilled and refreshed over and over again to reorient our hearts rightly.
While Christian initiation commits our life irrevocably to God in Christ, it’s the metanoia of Sacramental living that sustains and solidifies that truth in our hearts. Commitment to Christ in the Eucharist draws us to communion with others and with God and fuels our hearts with the very person of Christ. The Sacraments of Healing help get us back on this road, and the Sacraments in Service to the Church invite us to commit our very selves and lives to this path. So even as this destructive nature lurks deep within, Christ comes to be with us and in us as we endeavor toward the hard work of love, while resisting the temptingly easy path of destruction.
From our very roots in Creation, we have revealed to us a God who brings order to chaos. While it’s tempting to think God created the world from nothing, the words of Genesis more accurately are describing a God who takes the disorder of an anarchic matter and organizes it into the created world: “In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth -- and the earth was without form or shape, with darkness over the abyss and a mighty wind sweeping over the waters…” (Genesis 1:1-2).
At whatever literal or symbolic levels you read that, when gazing upon the clutter of the universe, God commanded it into the order and beauty of Creation. Seeing the state of disorder, God chose not destruction but Creation. Made in God’s image, our call as stewards of the earth and as the hands and feet of Christ for one another is to carry forth this goodness -- How can the love of God I bring to others draw them from brokenness toward right relationship? How can I prioritize my life, my time, and my energy to most reflect God’s love? How can my Christian living be not just rigid, strict organizing but a firmer orientation toward God? Even as I chuckle at Lucy’s destruction, swallowing my tidy streak to instead enjoy my toddler’s earnest exploration, I know her learning will eventually crest this hill to discover order, and that her experience of Love in our family will be the roots that grow her toward bringing that goodness to our world.
1 You folks with the multi-digit numbers in parentheses and in your red circles drive me bananas.↩
2 Stuffed animals and books are fairly easy to track. Each of the 26 magnetic letters for the phonics toy on the fridge -- not so much. I also find (perhaps biased-ly) that she plays better when she has fresh order to destroy every once in a while instead of an unchecked daylong jag of destruction.
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3 I promise you that I am not prone to exaggeration and prefer literal descriptions when possible. This is a literal description. She works until the crate is empty, until the shelf is bare, etc.
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4 For now… I know her 2nd birthday looms, and all you parents out there are preparing your Terrible Twos warnings and advice as you read! As wisely put by fellow Restless Heart and parent, Laura, “I mean, i just a super illustration of how we reject the good merely because it's willed by someone else.”
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