© 2007 all rights reserved
Culture Shock and Making a Clean Break
K. G. Powderly Jr.
K. G. Powderly Jr.
Young adults and parents both have hurdles to clear when it comes time for the children to leave home for college, the military, jobs, marriage, or all of the above. Parents have to get used to a whole new way of thinking about their kids, and young adults have a legitimate need to forge ahead into their lives without being tied to mum’s apron strings or dad’s curfew limits. Many of you may feel that you’ve already made the transition, and you may be right. Then again, it may still be a work in process, so be patient with me being an old guy as I present a few ideas.
When young people and their parents are both walking with the Lord it can make the transition easier, but in a sense it can also make things harder. For example, in this Post-Christian, Postmodern society, young adults face a good deal of culture shock coming out of a Christian home—a culture shock that is not quickly or easily dealt with by most.
Parents also can sometimes misinterpret the grown child’s need to break the strings and establish themselves as if it were "rebellion," while kids face unique temptations at this time to be drawn away from not just "the faith of their fathers," but from their own core convictions as well. The temptation to departure may be partial or full-on, but either way it is all too real. The popular culture tells us that "it’s normal for young people to rebel" and this repetitive message can find unwanted traction even in the hearts of parents and young adults that do not think this is so. A good question to ask here is, "normal in what sense?" Is rebellion normal in the sense that it is healthy and desirable, or normal in the sense that it commonly happens these days? These are two entirely different definitions for the word normal. Some other good questions to ask at this time of life (for both parents and young adults) are:
Is contrasting perspective always the same as rebellion? (Proverbs 27:17)
Is it necessary to rebel in order to establish legitimate independence? (Proverbs 3)
Is legitimate independence the same as non-accountable autonomy? (Ephesians 4:11-14)
Or to sum it up—in what ways do the parent-child relationship change once the child leaves home or comes of age? (1 Corinthians 13:11, Genesis 2:24, Proverbs 1:8, Galatians 4:1-7)
It is often at this time of life that young adults are seriously confronted for the first time with the question of whether or not the Christian worldview and lifestyle they have been raised with is the truth about how things really are. This question hits on many different levels, in many versions, through many voices, and with varying degrees of intensity. It comes in a high-pressure environment where other people seem highly committed to convincing you that your parent’s (or pastor’s) faith is just a dying remnant of a bygone age. Sometimes the case such people present can feel compelling—if only by sheer weight of repetition or emotional pressure.
Parents also face a great deal of uncertainty. Speaking as a father, I can dredge up long litanies of my own mistakes—some of them systematic—made while raising and passing on the faith to my daughter. It is as frightening as it is humbling.
In the second book of The Windows of Heaven novel series, The Paladin’s Odyssey, I dealt with a young adult character that faced culture shock of an extreme variety in extreme circumstances. U’Sumi is destined to become the Biblical Shem, son of Noah (who is called A’Nu-Ahki in the story.) Early in the book both U’Sumi and his father are drafted to fight in a foreign war; far from the calling they knew God had on their lives. U’Sumi discovers his spiritual gift only as he hits rock bottom as a prisoner of war, and wonders if his faith in E’Yahavah (the Creator God) can really still work in the real world:
For U’Sumi and his father the death march west ended in an ocean voyage up the inland Yawam Tsafuni, or Northern Sea.
A’Nu-Ahki had barely survived, his wound infected and his body dehydrated by fever. Soon after they had gotten under way, he faded to unconsciousness in their cell within the brig of a huge Consortium ironclad.
Harsh steel bulkheads closed in with the twisted pipe-lined overhead, like the lair of some metallic octopus that waited hungrily entwined above to strike down and finish its captive prey. The place vibrated in the sickly artificial light that flickered on and off at irregular intervals. The stench of salt, sweat and mildew permeated the sultry air and every surface seemed coated in oily grit. U’Sumi was left alone, with his father near death and a bunch of sailors that came into the cabin from time to time to stare at him weirdly through the bars and call him feminine pet names. With nothing to do but wait, grief finally had time for its massive assault…
Maybe this was it? Maybe everybody was wrong. Maybe this was the beginning of world-end—a slow, agonized war where the entire human race would simply exterminate itself in an orgy of blood!
What of Muhet’Usala’s promise? Iyapeti and Lumekki were dead. U’Sumi was not sure if he had gotten that across to his half-coherent father during the long march. Yet this he knew: Each minute steamed them further away from his father’s calling—the people of Comfort, the cask of Atum-Ra, and A’Nu-Ahki’s prophetic charge to somehow take them to a new land after the world’s end.
Could it be his father had been taken out of the Valley of Seers so that one of the other messengers of judgment could rise instead? It didn’t seem fair, after all A’Nu-Ahki had gone through and how faithful he had been. What about the testimony of both Iyared and Lumekki’s prophecies? Had we misinterpreted them somehow? They seemed straightforward enough—my father is both the "prophesied Comforter" and the "one who would be left" to carry the Remnant to safety. There appeared to be no room for any other man to fill those roles. Could the prophecies have failed?
It suddenly struck U’Sumi that each of the Akh’Uzan visionaries considered themselves to be just as steady and faithful in their own ways. A few had even contrived interpretations of prophecy that either finished A’Nu-Ahki’s role as Comforter with the Comet Vision seventy years ago or cast doubt on Iyared’s deathbed intent. Despite the irritating fanaticism of some, many of Akh’Uzan’s recent crop of seers were not evil men by the average person’s reckoning. Most lived moral lives or at least appeared to. Most had families that seemed well behaved and honorable.
U’Sumi had seen so much death so rapidly—the slaughter of both good and evil men alike. The implications staggered his very core beliefs. Both good and evil men alike!
The impact hit with an almost physical blow that shattered his internal world. The entire superstructure of his view of reality crashed around him in a catastrophic ethical and emotional holocaust that suddenly went visual.
The hysteria consumed him in its engulfing wave. "They’re all going to die, aren’t they? Billions upon billions of them, all at once!"
Images of fire and water roared around and through him. A cavalcade of terrified faces burned or drowned, bloated and charred. He heard them gag and scream in one massive torrent of ocean, ice and flame.
Somebody shook him and the noisy spectacle slipped away in a black vapor that left his ears ringing.
"What’s da matter wit you, lad?" roared the sailor on guard duty. He grasped U’Sumi roughly by each shoulder, a look of fear and concern on his stubbly face.
U’Sumi came around slowly. "Sorry. Just remembered something in a dream that happened to me on the battlefield," he lied.
"But you was awake, boy. Does you always dream whiles you’re awake?"
"I’m sorry—it was an awful time," explained U’Sumi again, hoping the big sailor would buy it.
"They says you kill an Agent of Judgment with bare hands and a knife."
"That’s right."
"You gut right to get screamy then."
"Thanks," U’Sumi smiled, as the guard closed the cell door behind himself.
I have a right to get screamy? The specter of world-end has hung over my entire life and I’ve never once gotten "screamy." Is this really what it will be like?
He stood still and gripped the bars of his cell, while inside he careened helplessly toward an intellectual wall that threatened to shatter his sanity into a million tortured shards. Falling—endless falling—or was it just the motion of the ship? The more he tried to sort things out the more tangled they became, until there seemed to be no way left to deal with it but to shove it back and try to forget—the same way he now gulped and hyperventilated to keep his bile down. He knew he couldn’t keep it down forever. The persistent unseen rocking would bring it all up again sooner or later.
U’Sumi ground his teeth and willed himself to emotional steel. The soldiers, the visionaries, the Zaqenar, the fathers, mothers, even the children of the world, suddenly lost their humanity. They became like mere cockroaches—filthy, manipulative vermin in human form. That was what they had to be to deserve such a terrible fate! It was the only way to see them and still make sense of it. Why else would E’Yahavah destroy them? The only alternative he could see was too unthinkable.
Nevertheless, on a wave from hidden deeps in the blackest recess of his psyche, that shadow-mind alternative voiced itself in his mind.
What if E’Yahavah is really the Serpent-king of evil, and these are all just nice normal people caught up in a terrible situation—people who make mistakes just like you do?
U’Sumi shook, wanting to argue, but unable to form a coherent response.
Think about it! You know those people aren’t roaches! They are created in E’Yahavah’s image.
You’ve been trained to approach things logically, what’s the only rational alternative?
"Noooo!" he screamed wildly, pulling at his tussled black curls. "I won’t believe that! It makes no sense!"
Yet it made perfect sense, especially in that filthy brig.
While college, the military, or a job are not quite the harrowing ordeal that being a prisoner of war is, powerful voices in these places can often make it seem that evil is good and good is evil in a way that seems to make perfect sense in that environment. Notice also how U’Sumi tries to deal with this by desensitizing himself emotionally and intellectually. The temptation to desensitize oneself is perhaps the strongest seduction from the world a Christian young adult faces. It was for me. It allows us to continue in our church and home relationships seemingly unscathed—just as U’Sumi would continue to hold to his father’s prophecy about the end of the world. But he would do so by disconnecting himself from the moral and emotional implications to save himself pain. In so doing, he disconnects himself from God’s true heart of love and grace, as well as from a complete understanding of the motives behind God’s judgment. Later in the book, U’Sumi witnesses another traumatic event in the Desolation of Nhod (the Genesis land of Nod). This time his father’s words help him to process his experience and make both intellectual and moral sense of it. This time U’Sumi and his father have been captured by corsair marauders with goofy names and absolutely no conscience whatsoever. The marauders have stopped in their journey to watch something they think will be entertaining:
A procession of shadow people emerged from the village and marched towards the circle of pillars to the beat of a skin drum. They led a line of about twenty youngsters and mothers who carried malnourished infants. Skeleton men painted in death masques scrambled on ahead to light torches set on posts that overlooked the hollow. Women from the line wailed along with the infants that cried in their arms. Their noise reached the spectator’s hill, a discordant music from Under-world.
U’Sumi knew what was coming, but he made no effort to turn away.
The villagers chained the struggling children to the pillars, while the mothers laid their babies in the center of the ring, on the shallow slab…
Silently, U’Sumi called out to E’Yahavah for some kind of intervention. Yet it seemed that Shadow-mind smothered the effort.
The maddening drumbeat from the village not-quite masked the children’s shrieks. The mothers and tribal elders retreated to the safety of their thorn-bordered compound to wait. The cockatrice packs of Nhod scavenged down from the hills only at night…
U’Sumi fixed his eyes on the children. His thoughts raced for an answer that could only work in an adolescent daydream. Have I not been given power to beat multiple foes before? Why not now? Where is the battle anointing now? The spotted skull-baby faces gazed up at him with their wide eyes that called down silent curses on him for his inaction. But what can I do? Every E’Yahavah-inspired word and deed had been spoken and done too little too late for these people…
Dragon-breath pulled out his own skin bag of grain spirits and deliberately exposed the automatic hand-cannon he had taken from U’Sumi as he yanked back his cloak. He took a long guzzle and called to A’Nu-Ahki, "Ay Yava man! Look down hill. You see? No big Yava in sky! Wurms’ll come and eat the little stick-bones an’ nothing’ll happen to stop it. It’ll go on forever and ever because there’s nobody really up there that cares!"
"This is the Day of the Dragon," A’Nu-Ahki agreed with a tremor in his voice. "Man gave him the steward’s scepter in Aeden’s Orchard at dawn. Therefore, the torment of the outer world matches man’s inner soul. Now dusk approaches quickly. Yet, Serpent-king’s dominion is incomplete and unstable. The children will die today, but it will not go on forever and ever. The growing violence is not a sign of Serpent-king’s power but of his desperation over impending defeat."
"Same old riddles to me, Yava-man!" Dragon-breath laughed, as he tossed the skin over to Blood-fang.
But they were not riddles to U’Sumi. Again, his father’s words acted as a filter for what he saw.
A horde of tiny eyes glinted from the growing darkness around the torch-lit circle. The basilisk pack skittered cautiously nearer to the man-light, snapping hungrily from the shadows to test the safety of their surroundings.
The village drums banged louder, to desperately mask the wailing of the children in the ring. The vipers got braver with each trial lunge. U’Sumi could see them more clearly as they exposed themselves to the fire glow—small red wurms—hardly even as large as the children who stumbled over each other in their chains to avoid them…
The bolder wurms scrambled onto their meal, attaching themselves to their thrashing victims with bird-of-prey talons and scimitar toe claws, while their jaws struck.
"Here is Serpent-king’s plan for all of us!" screamed A’Nu-Ahki. "Destroy the children! One way or another—destroy the children! Drag us through the poisoned mud of our own twisted desires and then laugh as we destroy our own hope for the future…"
"It starts in a place like Akh’Uzan! (U’Sumi and A’Nu-Ahki’s homeland)" continued the Seer. "Where men comfortably hold the truth about E’Yahavah with arrogance over their own knowledge! They reduce it to mere cultural taboo and a set of rituals, until the rituals become the only reality they know. They set standards for their children that they themselves don’t even live up to. Yet they pretend to live up to them and then wonder why their children rebel in frustration."
"Quiet!" roared Blood-fang.
"Let’im ramble," drawled Dragon-breath, "ain’t nobody to hear."
But U’Sumi heard and it was enough. Understanding suddenly broke through to his afflicted mind: To E’Yahavah it made little difference how children were destroyed. Those who destroyed them were equally guilty, because the end of the progression was equally terrible.
Until that moment, there had always been a void in U’Sumi’s picture of world-end. Either he had subtly questioned E’Yahavah’s justice or else blindly and boldly accepted the need for universal judgment, with all the bigoted assumptions that went with any blindly accepted idea, no matter how correct. Yet now he saw the need in its fullness and with a restored sense of compassion. The cultural, ethical and theological foundations of everything that kept life sane and livable had become so badly eroded that within a few short decades all the world would become like one giant Desolation of Nhod, if not in landscape then in social chaos. Either that or some tyrant bent on becoming the functional god of the world would rise to fill the spiritual vacuum and seize such total control that life would become equally intolerable. Advancing technology in the hands of an ambitious few would give such a tyrant the ability to crush even the smallest dissent. If the sons of Samyaza or Psydonu or Tubaal-qayin or Avarnon-Set each represented dominions where freedom to walk with E’Yahavah had been all but crushed, what would it be like under a global regime where even these powers no longer existed to keep each other in check? What would happen in a world where Serpent-king’s pawns united into one all-encompassing empire?
U’Sumi suddenly understood that there was a certain momentum to ideas and events in human history. After a certain point that only E’Yahavah really knew, what was done could not be undone, only annihilated so that a new process could start. Only E’Yahavah had the authority, wisdom and power to demolish and rebuild on such a scale however, though kings, sages and priests often tried to usurp that prerogative.
The oracles of truth had been entrusted to U’Sumi’s people—the foundations of family, order, love, life, civilization and sanity. But the sons of Seti had failed. Whether E’Yahavah should be blamed for entrusting something so fragile to an incompetent clan of human beings was not U’Sumi’s place to judge, much as part of him wanted to do so. Yet how could people be equipped to choose without some control over how to build on those foundations—or whether to build on them at all or discard them for future generations? How could the choices of individuals, tribes and nations have any meaning unless these foundations were entrusted in some sense to individuals, tribes and nations?
Originally all men had access to these foundations, though not all men chose to build on them and preserve them. It dawned on A’Nu-Ahki’s son that inequities had been introduced into the system by the selfishness and carelessness of men. Yet equality of access to truth and opportunity at the beginning could not guarantee equality of results. Any continuity of love, civilization, truth and moral sanity required U’Sumi to accept that whatever they might be, E’Yahavah must have had his reasons for entrusting these oracles—and that the Divine Name did not owe U’Sumi the son of A’Nu-Ahki any explanations. A man would simply have to trust the character of his creator to be good, despite an environment where it seemed that arguments could be made to the contrary.
U’Sumi now understood the terrible bottom line. E’Yahavah had finally given to humanity what humanity had chosen for himself—autonomy from divine restraint at any cost. And this was the inevitable result. Understanding brought little comfort. Indeed, for every particle of peace it gave him in the big picture, an equal particle of heaviness was added to the burden of the knowledge he carried.
A’Nu-Ahki continued his tirade, arming U’Sumi’s thoughts against Shadow-mind’s on-going interpretative assault on what he saw.
"¼ In Khavilakki and now Sa-utar, E’Yahavah’s truth is mingled with myth and empty ceremonies that once had meaning. Children are taught to follow their conscience with little more than fables to undergird them! Religion and morality remains, but with no knowledge of a foundation in fact. The intelligent man is set up to ultimately reject such a fractured base!"
Shadow-mind revealed to U’Sumi how inappropriate and silly his father sounded sermonizing while little children were dismembered right beneath their eyes.
"Only an impotent fool could do such a thing! Wouldn’t a respectful silence be more appropriate?"
The point felt compelling. For a moment U’Sumi almost agreed.
"I might be powerless to stop this, but I can still take a stab at how you all see it!" cried A’Nu-Ahki, blasting away the Shadow-mind with the only weapon left to him.
"Stab away, Yava-man!" Dragon-breath laughed, as he chugged more spirits.
"At Ayar Adi’In and Aztlan the destruction is more obvious. Yet even there it is still governed by some civil limits! But here all the layers of disguise are stripped away! The plan of the Great Dragon lays exposed! This is where it all leads, folks! All the self-indulgent manipulation of religion and economics in the quest for bigger and better things to satisfy bigger and more demanding appetites! Sane entertainment just won’t do it anymore, will it? It all leads here, one way or another—from Atum-Ra’s fall to the mothers who feed these wurms! If E’Yahavah didn’t cut the time short with world-end, the whole earth would eventually get just like this!"
Blood-fang pulled his side arm and leveled it at A’Nu-Ahki’s head. "You shut face, or I’ll kill you now!"
"Go ahead!" challenged U’Sumi’s father. "You people forget that for something to be worth living for, it must first be worth dying for."
By now, most of you probably realize that your parents and pastors have feet of clay. We are imperfect vessels trying to carry perfect truth and love from God. By God’s grace we each have our gifts, but we are just as needy now as we were on the day we were saved. Notice how U’Sumi allows his father’s words now to be a filter through which he understands the terrible environment he finds himself in. He is no longer trying to avoid the implications of what he sees either by pretending that "it’s not really that bad," or by accepting his father’s word blindly while he protects himself in a cloak of self-righteous arrogance. He is not in rebellion against his father, nor is he an unthinking drone blindly following his father’s ideas. His father’s words give him help and perspective that only age and experience can provide, but U’Sumi’s faith is now his own. In the next chapter of The Paladin’s Odyssey we see how U’Sumi must function independently of his father, yet in accord with him also, when his father is struck by a traumatic and emotionally debilitating blow.
For now, however, you each have your own odysseys to get back to. God bless, and to cite the famous admonition from that treasure trove of postmodern wisdom, The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, "Don’t Panic!"
When young people and their parents are both walking with the Lord it can make the transition easier, but in a sense it can also make things harder. For example, in this Post-Christian, Postmodern society, young adults face a good deal of culture shock coming out of a Christian home—a culture shock that is not quickly or easily dealt with by most.
Parents also can sometimes misinterpret the grown child’s need to break the strings and establish themselves as if it were "rebellion," while kids face unique temptations at this time to be drawn away from not just "the faith of their fathers," but from their own core convictions as well. The temptation to departure may be partial or full-on, but either way it is all too real. The popular culture tells us that "it’s normal for young people to rebel" and this repetitive message can find unwanted traction even in the hearts of parents and young adults that do not think this is so. A good question to ask here is, "normal in what sense?" Is rebellion normal in the sense that it is healthy and desirable, or normal in the sense that it commonly happens these days? These are two entirely different definitions for the word normal. Some other good questions to ask at this time of life (for both parents and young adults) are:
Is contrasting perspective always the same as rebellion? (Proverbs 27:17)
Is it necessary to rebel in order to establish legitimate independence? (Proverbs 3)
Is legitimate independence the same as non-accountable autonomy? (Ephesians 4:11-14)
Or to sum it up—in what ways do the parent-child relationship change once the child leaves home or comes of age? (1 Corinthians 13:11, Genesis 2:24, Proverbs 1:8, Galatians 4:1-7)
It is often at this time of life that young adults are seriously confronted for the first time with the question of whether or not the Christian worldview and lifestyle they have been raised with is the truth about how things really are. This question hits on many different levels, in many versions, through many voices, and with varying degrees of intensity. It comes in a high-pressure environment where other people seem highly committed to convincing you that your parent’s (or pastor’s) faith is just a dying remnant of a bygone age. Sometimes the case such people present can feel compelling—if only by sheer weight of repetition or emotional pressure.
Parents also face a great deal of uncertainty. Speaking as a father, I can dredge up long litanies of my own mistakes—some of them systematic—made while raising and passing on the faith to my daughter. It is as frightening as it is humbling.
In the second book of The Windows of Heaven novel series, The Paladin’s Odyssey, I dealt with a young adult character that faced culture shock of an extreme variety in extreme circumstances. U’Sumi is destined to become the Biblical Shem, son of Noah (who is called A’Nu-Ahki in the story.) Early in the book both U’Sumi and his father are drafted to fight in a foreign war; far from the calling they knew God had on their lives. U’Sumi discovers his spiritual gift only as he hits rock bottom as a prisoner of war, and wonders if his faith in E’Yahavah (the Creator God) can really still work in the real world:
For U’Sumi and his father the death march west ended in an ocean voyage up the inland Yawam Tsafuni, or Northern Sea.
A’Nu-Ahki had barely survived, his wound infected and his body dehydrated by fever. Soon after they had gotten under way, he faded to unconsciousness in their cell within the brig of a huge Consortium ironclad.
Harsh steel bulkheads closed in with the twisted pipe-lined overhead, like the lair of some metallic octopus that waited hungrily entwined above to strike down and finish its captive prey. The place vibrated in the sickly artificial light that flickered on and off at irregular intervals. The stench of salt, sweat and mildew permeated the sultry air and every surface seemed coated in oily grit. U’Sumi was left alone, with his father near death and a bunch of sailors that came into the cabin from time to time to stare at him weirdly through the bars and call him feminine pet names. With nothing to do but wait, grief finally had time for its massive assault…
Maybe this was it? Maybe everybody was wrong. Maybe this was the beginning of world-end—a slow, agonized war where the entire human race would simply exterminate itself in an orgy of blood!
What of Muhet’Usala’s promise? Iyapeti and Lumekki were dead. U’Sumi was not sure if he had gotten that across to his half-coherent father during the long march. Yet this he knew: Each minute steamed them further away from his father’s calling—the people of Comfort, the cask of Atum-Ra, and A’Nu-Ahki’s prophetic charge to somehow take them to a new land after the world’s end.
Could it be his father had been taken out of the Valley of Seers so that one of the other messengers of judgment could rise instead? It didn’t seem fair, after all A’Nu-Ahki had gone through and how faithful he had been. What about the testimony of both Iyared and Lumekki’s prophecies? Had we misinterpreted them somehow? They seemed straightforward enough—my father is both the "prophesied Comforter" and the "one who would be left" to carry the Remnant to safety. There appeared to be no room for any other man to fill those roles. Could the prophecies have failed?
It suddenly struck U’Sumi that each of the Akh’Uzan visionaries considered themselves to be just as steady and faithful in their own ways. A few had even contrived interpretations of prophecy that either finished A’Nu-Ahki’s role as Comforter with the Comet Vision seventy years ago or cast doubt on Iyared’s deathbed intent. Despite the irritating fanaticism of some, many of Akh’Uzan’s recent crop of seers were not evil men by the average person’s reckoning. Most lived moral lives or at least appeared to. Most had families that seemed well behaved and honorable.
U’Sumi had seen so much death so rapidly—the slaughter of both good and evil men alike. The implications staggered his very core beliefs. Both good and evil men alike!
The impact hit with an almost physical blow that shattered his internal world. The entire superstructure of his view of reality crashed around him in a catastrophic ethical and emotional holocaust that suddenly went visual.
The hysteria consumed him in its engulfing wave. "They’re all going to die, aren’t they? Billions upon billions of them, all at once!"
Images of fire and water roared around and through him. A cavalcade of terrified faces burned or drowned, bloated and charred. He heard them gag and scream in one massive torrent of ocean, ice and flame.
Somebody shook him and the noisy spectacle slipped away in a black vapor that left his ears ringing.
"What’s da matter wit you, lad?" roared the sailor on guard duty. He grasped U’Sumi roughly by each shoulder, a look of fear and concern on his stubbly face.
U’Sumi came around slowly. "Sorry. Just remembered something in a dream that happened to me on the battlefield," he lied.
"But you was awake, boy. Does you always dream whiles you’re awake?"
"I’m sorry—it was an awful time," explained U’Sumi again, hoping the big sailor would buy it.
"They says you kill an Agent of Judgment with bare hands and a knife."
"That’s right."
"You gut right to get screamy then."
"Thanks," U’Sumi smiled, as the guard closed the cell door behind himself.
I have a right to get screamy? The specter of world-end has hung over my entire life and I’ve never once gotten "screamy." Is this really what it will be like?
He stood still and gripped the bars of his cell, while inside he careened helplessly toward an intellectual wall that threatened to shatter his sanity into a million tortured shards. Falling—endless falling—or was it just the motion of the ship? The more he tried to sort things out the more tangled they became, until there seemed to be no way left to deal with it but to shove it back and try to forget—the same way he now gulped and hyperventilated to keep his bile down. He knew he couldn’t keep it down forever. The persistent unseen rocking would bring it all up again sooner or later.
U’Sumi ground his teeth and willed himself to emotional steel. The soldiers, the visionaries, the Zaqenar, the fathers, mothers, even the children of the world, suddenly lost their humanity. They became like mere cockroaches—filthy, manipulative vermin in human form. That was what they had to be to deserve such a terrible fate! It was the only way to see them and still make sense of it. Why else would E’Yahavah destroy them? The only alternative he could see was too unthinkable.
Nevertheless, on a wave from hidden deeps in the blackest recess of his psyche, that shadow-mind alternative voiced itself in his mind.
What if E’Yahavah is really the Serpent-king of evil, and these are all just nice normal people caught up in a terrible situation—people who make mistakes just like you do?
U’Sumi shook, wanting to argue, but unable to form a coherent response.
Think about it! You know those people aren’t roaches! They are created in E’Yahavah’s image.
You’ve been trained to approach things logically, what’s the only rational alternative?
"Noooo!" he screamed wildly, pulling at his tussled black curls. "I won’t believe that! It makes no sense!"
Yet it made perfect sense, especially in that filthy brig.
While college, the military, or a job are not quite the harrowing ordeal that being a prisoner of war is, powerful voices in these places can often make it seem that evil is good and good is evil in a way that seems to make perfect sense in that environment. Notice also how U’Sumi tries to deal with this by desensitizing himself emotionally and intellectually. The temptation to desensitize oneself is perhaps the strongest seduction from the world a Christian young adult faces. It was for me. It allows us to continue in our church and home relationships seemingly unscathed—just as U’Sumi would continue to hold to his father’s prophecy about the end of the world. But he would do so by disconnecting himself from the moral and emotional implications to save himself pain. In so doing, he disconnects himself from God’s true heart of love and grace, as well as from a complete understanding of the motives behind God’s judgment. Later in the book, U’Sumi witnesses another traumatic event in the Desolation of Nhod (the Genesis land of Nod). This time his father’s words help him to process his experience and make both intellectual and moral sense of it. This time U’Sumi and his father have been captured by corsair marauders with goofy names and absolutely no conscience whatsoever. The marauders have stopped in their journey to watch something they think will be entertaining:
A procession of shadow people emerged from the village and marched towards the circle of pillars to the beat of a skin drum. They led a line of about twenty youngsters and mothers who carried malnourished infants. Skeleton men painted in death masques scrambled on ahead to light torches set on posts that overlooked the hollow. Women from the line wailed along with the infants that cried in their arms. Their noise reached the spectator’s hill, a discordant music from Under-world.
U’Sumi knew what was coming, but he made no effort to turn away.
The villagers chained the struggling children to the pillars, while the mothers laid their babies in the center of the ring, on the shallow slab…
Silently, U’Sumi called out to E’Yahavah for some kind of intervention. Yet it seemed that Shadow-mind smothered the effort.
The maddening drumbeat from the village not-quite masked the children’s shrieks. The mothers and tribal elders retreated to the safety of their thorn-bordered compound to wait. The cockatrice packs of Nhod scavenged down from the hills only at night…
U’Sumi fixed his eyes on the children. His thoughts raced for an answer that could only work in an adolescent daydream. Have I not been given power to beat multiple foes before? Why not now? Where is the battle anointing now? The spotted skull-baby faces gazed up at him with their wide eyes that called down silent curses on him for his inaction. But what can I do? Every E’Yahavah-inspired word and deed had been spoken and done too little too late for these people…
Dragon-breath pulled out his own skin bag of grain spirits and deliberately exposed the automatic hand-cannon he had taken from U’Sumi as he yanked back his cloak. He took a long guzzle and called to A’Nu-Ahki, "Ay Yava man! Look down hill. You see? No big Yava in sky! Wurms’ll come and eat the little stick-bones an’ nothing’ll happen to stop it. It’ll go on forever and ever because there’s nobody really up there that cares!"
"This is the Day of the Dragon," A’Nu-Ahki agreed with a tremor in his voice. "Man gave him the steward’s scepter in Aeden’s Orchard at dawn. Therefore, the torment of the outer world matches man’s inner soul. Now dusk approaches quickly. Yet, Serpent-king’s dominion is incomplete and unstable. The children will die today, but it will not go on forever and ever. The growing violence is not a sign of Serpent-king’s power but of his desperation over impending defeat."
"Same old riddles to me, Yava-man!" Dragon-breath laughed, as he tossed the skin over to Blood-fang.
But they were not riddles to U’Sumi. Again, his father’s words acted as a filter for what he saw.
A horde of tiny eyes glinted from the growing darkness around the torch-lit circle. The basilisk pack skittered cautiously nearer to the man-light, snapping hungrily from the shadows to test the safety of their surroundings.
The village drums banged louder, to desperately mask the wailing of the children in the ring. The vipers got braver with each trial lunge. U’Sumi could see them more clearly as they exposed themselves to the fire glow—small red wurms—hardly even as large as the children who stumbled over each other in their chains to avoid them…
The bolder wurms scrambled onto their meal, attaching themselves to their thrashing victims with bird-of-prey talons and scimitar toe claws, while their jaws struck.
"Here is Serpent-king’s plan for all of us!" screamed A’Nu-Ahki. "Destroy the children! One way or another—destroy the children! Drag us through the poisoned mud of our own twisted desires and then laugh as we destroy our own hope for the future…"
"It starts in a place like Akh’Uzan! (U’Sumi and A’Nu-Ahki’s homeland)" continued the Seer. "Where men comfortably hold the truth about E’Yahavah with arrogance over their own knowledge! They reduce it to mere cultural taboo and a set of rituals, until the rituals become the only reality they know. They set standards for their children that they themselves don’t even live up to. Yet they pretend to live up to them and then wonder why their children rebel in frustration."
"Quiet!" roared Blood-fang.
"Let’im ramble," drawled Dragon-breath, "ain’t nobody to hear."
But U’Sumi heard and it was enough. Understanding suddenly broke through to his afflicted mind: To E’Yahavah it made little difference how children were destroyed. Those who destroyed them were equally guilty, because the end of the progression was equally terrible.
Until that moment, there had always been a void in U’Sumi’s picture of world-end. Either he had subtly questioned E’Yahavah’s justice or else blindly and boldly accepted the need for universal judgment, with all the bigoted assumptions that went with any blindly accepted idea, no matter how correct. Yet now he saw the need in its fullness and with a restored sense of compassion. The cultural, ethical and theological foundations of everything that kept life sane and livable had become so badly eroded that within a few short decades all the world would become like one giant Desolation of Nhod, if not in landscape then in social chaos. Either that or some tyrant bent on becoming the functional god of the world would rise to fill the spiritual vacuum and seize such total control that life would become equally intolerable. Advancing technology in the hands of an ambitious few would give such a tyrant the ability to crush even the smallest dissent. If the sons of Samyaza or Psydonu or Tubaal-qayin or Avarnon-Set each represented dominions where freedom to walk with E’Yahavah had been all but crushed, what would it be like under a global regime where even these powers no longer existed to keep each other in check? What would happen in a world where Serpent-king’s pawns united into one all-encompassing empire?
U’Sumi suddenly understood that there was a certain momentum to ideas and events in human history. After a certain point that only E’Yahavah really knew, what was done could not be undone, only annihilated so that a new process could start. Only E’Yahavah had the authority, wisdom and power to demolish and rebuild on such a scale however, though kings, sages and priests often tried to usurp that prerogative.
The oracles of truth had been entrusted to U’Sumi’s people—the foundations of family, order, love, life, civilization and sanity. But the sons of Seti had failed. Whether E’Yahavah should be blamed for entrusting something so fragile to an incompetent clan of human beings was not U’Sumi’s place to judge, much as part of him wanted to do so. Yet how could people be equipped to choose without some control over how to build on those foundations—or whether to build on them at all or discard them for future generations? How could the choices of individuals, tribes and nations have any meaning unless these foundations were entrusted in some sense to individuals, tribes and nations?
Originally all men had access to these foundations, though not all men chose to build on them and preserve them. It dawned on A’Nu-Ahki’s son that inequities had been introduced into the system by the selfishness and carelessness of men. Yet equality of access to truth and opportunity at the beginning could not guarantee equality of results. Any continuity of love, civilization, truth and moral sanity required U’Sumi to accept that whatever they might be, E’Yahavah must have had his reasons for entrusting these oracles—and that the Divine Name did not owe U’Sumi the son of A’Nu-Ahki any explanations. A man would simply have to trust the character of his creator to be good, despite an environment where it seemed that arguments could be made to the contrary.
U’Sumi now understood the terrible bottom line. E’Yahavah had finally given to humanity what humanity had chosen for himself—autonomy from divine restraint at any cost. And this was the inevitable result. Understanding brought little comfort. Indeed, for every particle of peace it gave him in the big picture, an equal particle of heaviness was added to the burden of the knowledge he carried.
A’Nu-Ahki continued his tirade, arming U’Sumi’s thoughts against Shadow-mind’s on-going interpretative assault on what he saw.
"¼ In Khavilakki and now Sa-utar, E’Yahavah’s truth is mingled with myth and empty ceremonies that once had meaning. Children are taught to follow their conscience with little more than fables to undergird them! Religion and morality remains, but with no knowledge of a foundation in fact. The intelligent man is set up to ultimately reject such a fractured base!"
Shadow-mind revealed to U’Sumi how inappropriate and silly his father sounded sermonizing while little children were dismembered right beneath their eyes.
"Only an impotent fool could do such a thing! Wouldn’t a respectful silence be more appropriate?"
The point felt compelling. For a moment U’Sumi almost agreed.
"I might be powerless to stop this, but I can still take a stab at how you all see it!" cried A’Nu-Ahki, blasting away the Shadow-mind with the only weapon left to him.
"Stab away, Yava-man!" Dragon-breath laughed, as he chugged more spirits.
"At Ayar Adi’In and Aztlan the destruction is more obvious. Yet even there it is still governed by some civil limits! But here all the layers of disguise are stripped away! The plan of the Great Dragon lays exposed! This is where it all leads, folks! All the self-indulgent manipulation of religion and economics in the quest for bigger and better things to satisfy bigger and more demanding appetites! Sane entertainment just won’t do it anymore, will it? It all leads here, one way or another—from Atum-Ra’s fall to the mothers who feed these wurms! If E’Yahavah didn’t cut the time short with world-end, the whole earth would eventually get just like this!"
Blood-fang pulled his side arm and leveled it at A’Nu-Ahki’s head. "You shut face, or I’ll kill you now!"
"Go ahead!" challenged U’Sumi’s father. "You people forget that for something to be worth living for, it must first be worth dying for."
By now, most of you probably realize that your parents and pastors have feet of clay. We are imperfect vessels trying to carry perfect truth and love from God. By God’s grace we each have our gifts, but we are just as needy now as we were on the day we were saved. Notice how U’Sumi allows his father’s words now to be a filter through which he understands the terrible environment he finds himself in. He is no longer trying to avoid the implications of what he sees either by pretending that "it’s not really that bad," or by accepting his father’s word blindly while he protects himself in a cloak of self-righteous arrogance. He is not in rebellion against his father, nor is he an unthinking drone blindly following his father’s ideas. His father’s words give him help and perspective that only age and experience can provide, but U’Sumi’s faith is now his own. In the next chapter of The Paladin’s Odyssey we see how U’Sumi must function independently of his father, yet in accord with him also, when his father is struck by a traumatic and emotionally debilitating blow.
For now, however, you each have your own odysseys to get back to. God bless, and to cite the famous admonition from that treasure trove of postmodern wisdom, The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, "Don’t Panic!"
