A Child Is Crying

An essay

When I saw the kid on a Saturday evening in a subway car, it was almost seven o’clock. The kid looked eight, or nine years old at most. He shrieked and jumped to grab his father’s phone. No passenger in the subway car, including me, seemed to have noticed that he was there before the shriek. It felt as if he had cried himself into existence. He screamed into the phone he held, weeping: I said I’m sorry! I said I’m sorry! Two Japanese girls began whispering to each other. Possibly, they thought they could have better understood what was going on if they had known Korean.

I kept on praying on a prayer rope as the kid repeated the same words, crying harder and harder. His pronunciation was becoming indistinct. The prayer rope had a hundred knots where I would recite Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner, and ten beads for Most Holy Mother of God, save me. Silently, my prayer changed from Have mercy on me, a sinner, to Have mercy on them.

It is hard to bear witness to a child in distress. The sentiment goes beyond time and space. In his tragedy Medea, Euripides brilliantly involves the audience in its pathos with the line “Go, thou art wet with children’s tears!” Mencius claimed that human nature is inherently good, stating that any person will feel compassion if he sees a child in danger. A sixteenth-century work, The Miracles of King Henry VI, records that a “inconsolable crowd” prayed to Henry VI “in one voice” as a boy was getting drowned in Westwell, Kent. Elizabeth Barrett Browning composed The Cry of the Children, effectively protesting child labor. Dostoevsky created Ivan Karamazov, who could not accept God’s created world with suffering children in it. The list can go on and on.

My mind drifted away from prayer, reached Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, and was about to make an odd jump to Freud’s essay A Child Is Being Beaten, the title of which I wrongly recalled as A Child Is Crying. The kid was still crying and screaming into the phone, having taken the seat right next to the Japanese girls. All the same, it was hard to understand what the kid was saying, but I could tell he was no longer stuttering the same words. The next moment, I clearly understood his words.

Why are you only saying so what?

I felt something crack in my soul. Apparently, the kid’s mother was on the other end of the line, and he had been repeatedly telling her that he was sorry. Nevertheless, the mother was answering him with so what? The father just stood there, watching.

I knew I was not in the position to judge the kid’s parents. I had no idea what he had done and what the family was going through. Maybe the parents had no better option than to let the kid have his breakdown on his own. It still felt horrendous, however, without blaming the parents, that a kid was being forced to face the brutal reality of the world: sometimes, an apology, no matter how sincere it may be, will never be enough to bring the desired reconciliation, only to be answered with a so what.

I think I need to see the psychiatrist tomorrow, I need to see the psychiatrist tomorrow… The kid’s scream turned into whimpers. I must be so naïve, since I was shocked to see that a kid knew the word psychiatrist and acknowledged the need to see one himself. While I had to accept that the kid must have some issues, I could not help but become judgmental and think that his need for psychiatric treatments would drastically diminish if the parents did not say so what when he apologized.

The kid and his father got off the train at a station. The tension that had been shared by all the passengers in the car slowly disappeared. A party crowd got on the train at Seongsu Station, and the anxious silence gave way to light-hearted chattering. That was when I noticed I had reached the last knot of my prayer rope. I could not tell if I had been praying for the kid’s family or myself.

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Later in the night, I was praying the rosary this time. A terrifying thought hit me: what if the Father just says, so what? I know I have certain religious tendencies which I cannot better describe than with the term Jansenist, though not so historically accurate. (To be fair, the Jansenists themselves were also confused about what it means to be a Jansenist other than attacking Jesuits.) In a nutshell, voluntarily or not, I often adhere to the following view: God the Father clearly stated His terms and conditions, you signed up for it, and when a breach of conditions happens at any point, He may rightfully terminate your right of occupancy in Heaven. It is no wonder that Jansenists believed that very few will make it to Heaven, but what is fair is fair—strait is the gate and narrow is the road, told you. Don’t act like you didn’t read the terms.

Reading through all the surviving works by St. John of the Cross, I found it rather striking that the Doctor of Mystic Theology and the patron saint of Spanish poets rarely, if ever, characterizes God as a father figure both in his poetry and prose. God is constantly depicted as a lover who leads a soul on her journey to Him but almost never appears as the father of mankind. This, indeed, is a somewhat odd propensity to be observed within the Judeo-Christian tradition.

One may plausibly argue that it is common for a mystic to visualize the relationship between God and a person as that between lovers, and that St. John of the Cross simply paid more attention to a certain aspect of prayer life in his writing. A more radical theory will be that the absence of God’s image as a father in the Spanish saint’s work could indicate the Islamic influence on him, a Sufi one, to be more precise. Not necessarily objecting to the forementioned hypotheses, I speculate that the decisive factor was the poet-theologian’s lack of direct experience, from which he could have formulated a father image within himself. His father, Gonzalo de Yepes, died when he was around three. It is doubtful that St. John remembered him, much less grasped what it is like to be loved by a father.

Many verses of St. John that deal with God have erotic undertones in the fashion of the Canticle of Canticles. From his biography, it can be concluded that he knew very well how romantic passion works: the mystic poet once turned down a lady who had been chasing him, like a good saint and friar should, despite admitting later that he had also been completely smitten with her. St. John did not have only theoretical knowledge about eros—he knew what it feels like and could apply it to describe his experience with God.

Roughly two months ago, I was talking with A—. She and I would sometimes discuss St. Thérèse of Lisieux or other Carmelite saints. You get St. John of the Cross because you have been in love. That’s why you pray so well. Her sudden words, accompanied by a sigh, took me aback. On the surface, she was a happily married woman with a daughter. As if there had been a need to clarify her implication, she continued: I don’t know what it feels like to be in love. Never have been. Her husband, being a sailor, was often away from her, but that was obviously not what she was getting at. I chose to use common sense and did not get nosy about her relationship with her husband. I stayed silent for a while, ruminating only on what she had said about me.

A—‘s understanding of my prayer, or theology in general, as in theo-logos, the knowledge of God, hinted at an epistemological premise: we grapple with God, incomprehensible and indefinite, via analogies formed and restricted by our experiences. You understand God as a lover insomuch as you have had lovers, and as a parent insomuch as you have had parents. If you have never been in love, you will not get God in that regard.

It was true that I often treat God like a lover. David writes in his psalm: my cup overflows. In a more archaic translation, we see the same line translated as my chalice which inebriateth me. This is the image attributed to God that I keep in mind. His erotic love, which unites all, overflows and inebriates like that of a passionate lover. Similar imagery of divine eros can be found in Plotinus’ Enneads or the vision St. Gregory Palamas had, where his hands and garments were drenched with overflowing milk and wine. I can resonate with David, Plotinus, St. Gregory Palamas, St. John of the Cross. Sometimes, love feels like that, and you do not want the sensation to be taken away. You just want to stay intoxicated forever—and that I may dwell in the house of the Lord unto length of days.

Then I recalled that I seldom imagine God as Father.

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I was six when I concluded that no parents are impelled or obliged to love their children unconditionally. There was no physical law that dictated parents should love their children like apples should fall from trees, and I could see that, technically, it was not wrong for parents not to wholeheartedly love their children. Another incident at age nine fortified the conclusion. In other words, even before reaching the age of ten, I felt that any time, my parents could choose to say, so what, and I would not be able to plead further.

I do not want to blame my parents for anything. Someone may cause incidents that make another person reach a disturbing realization, but it does not mean he or she should be held accountable for the other person’s thoughts. My parents were good parents, objectively speaking. They still are, and they love me, even. It was just that a kid can think too, and that thoughts do not always bring pleasant results. A few years of my boyhood were thus spent on thinking that there are certain obligations to fulfill to stay a son, and this would evolve into a mentality that I kept from my teenage years to my twenties—you can love me if you feel like it, and I will love you too if I feel like it. No hard feelings, and no mutual obligations. I believe I still partially keep such an attitude towards my parents.

Do I not want God to be Father, or a parent to me, because in my mental schema, it would equate to inevitably acknowledging that He can just say so what and walk away? Bishop Cornelius Jansen and Prof. Dr. Freud may hold an interesting debate while conducting psychoanalysis on me together—should I say I think I need to see a psychoanalyst and a priest tomorrow, then?

Father, have mercy on me, an over-thinker. Amen.

If you enjoyed my work, you can buy me a cup of tea. I am not a coffee person, by the way.