But there are other, darker incompatibilities that inhabit
this world as well; absurdities that do more than make us chuckle, they make us
weep. Priests, pastors, teachers, and coaches who abuse children, bankers who
are thieves, police who are drug dealers, marriage counselors who have affairs…or
architects with broken homes; a reality of which I discovered after taking in
Ken Burn’s documentary on the life and legacy of the most famous architect in
American history, Frank Lloyd Wright.
Early in Wright’s life, after years of marital conflict, his
father walked out the front door of their home and never returned. The
abandonment was so profound for Wright that he never spoke to his father again,
and even refused later to attend his funeral. It also became, as it does for so
many men, the fuel for his unquenchable appetite for greatness and success; without
the presence of his father, Wright’s longing for approval and nagging questions
about his sufficiency became unanswerable. And instead of healing the wounds of
his past, he chose to anesthetize them through endless hours at his draft
table.
The story is disheartening enough until you learn that even
Wright’s workaholic lifestyle could not fill the emptiness left by his father.
And so it was, after fathering six children of his own, that Wright too walked
out the front door with another woman and abandoned his family forever.
Like the opening clichés, such stories are all too common
and leave us groping for answers. How often have you heard the strange, but
somehow un-strange, news in which the abused become abusers, the children of addicts
become addicts themselves, or the sons of adulterers become adulterers. Sadly,
the pain and wounds we experience in childhood frequently become the pain and
wounds we inflict on others later in life.
I have written before about generational sin in an earlier blog.
Without simply repeating myself again, I want to highlight the wisdom presented
by Heidi Grogan in her recent blog about Lent where she wrote “when we have not yet attended to the trauma we’ve
experienced, we walk as if there are nails in our soles.” We are not trapped by
our past unless we fail to be aware that being trapped in our past is the
default mechanics of our souls. Change only happens when staying the same costs
more than we are willing to pay. It is hard work, and even for brilliant,
“successful” men like Frank Lloyd Wright, who could spend endless weeks at the
office, it was ultimately work that was too difficult to undertake. Wright
could make the most exquisite spaces for people to live. Homes for families
fashioned to foster intimacy and communion, retreats designed for contemplation,
rest and renewal, galleries to display the world’s art and temples for the
worship of gods. But no building was grand enough to rebuild the broken home in
which he was raised.
Lent, this season of preparation
and reflection is an especially appropriate time to take a glance behind us to
see where we have come from, lest we too, endlessly tread the same worn path we
first learned to walk on so many years ago.
Continue the conversation on twitter @steve_woodworth and @ThursdayCircle
