The Education of Matthew Wangerin

When a neighbor informed us that my young son could no longer play with her daughter, I was sad, but I did not argue. I thought it a righteous request. Moreover, to put the best face on a painful situation, I took the chance to school my son in self-restraint.

Even from his infancy, Matthew had been an exuberant child. Life and every desire were matters of gladness for him. He was up with the morning light, loud and laughing and out the door, a host of children in our back yard, but one boy only: Matthew, three years old.

We lived in the country in those days—and in those early summer days, when strawberries fattened and peopled the green patch, Matthew didn’t, as he said, “think two times.” He flew on wings of an aching hunger and satisfied his appetite, smearing the sweet red juice all over his face.

I yearned to delight in life as he did. At the same time, I yearned for him to learn my own self-discipline, because the kid could hurt himself. He could hurt others—and did, and always felt remorse for so doing, but did it again. Well, desire and delight gave Matthew the edge: he got there first, he ate it first, he thought of nothing but sweet strawberries, the sugarjoy bursting against his palate, and he filled himself at others’ expense. At our expense. At the expense of our neighbor’s daughter, who often stood in his smoke.

So then, that child’s mother imposed a prohibition. “Your son is out of control,” she said, and she sundered the friendship. Neither could go to the other’s house. No more playing, no more talking together, no more whispered secrets—no more nothing.

Matthew was sad when I told him this law. Loud delights make very low sorrows, and he truly liked the child. I did, too. She was a porcelain creature, small-boned, lisping, wispyhaired. Blue veins in a milk-white skin. Breakable.

So I seized the opportunity to teach my son that he must think of others always before he thinks of himself. “Please, give before you take. Walk before you run. Listen before you whisper, and whisper before you shout.”

He suffered the new knowledge, this three-year-old boy, that his own behavior had lost him his friend, and she had lost a good friend, too, and he was the cause. His sadness grew sadder.

“Can I take her a bowl of strawberries?” he wondered, large-eyed. Can I fix the friendship?

“Not now.” I said. “Let’s wait a while. I will go talk to her mother, and we’ll see. Okay?”

After a decent interval, I did go to talk to my neighbor, my son’s friend’s mother.

The conversation first startled me, then angered me so suddenly and deeply that I could scarcely speak, then grieved me—which dead-sorrow of soul I have not forgotten even to this day.

I went immediately to look for my son. I saw him downhill behind our house, standing in a field full of yellow flowers, his arms flung out to some interior melody, turning circles. In fact, the flowers were a kind of weed, profuse that particular summer, but to me most terribly beautiful because of the presence of Matthew in their midst. They were a sort of grounded sunlight, a glory around his dark complexion.

So I knelt down in front of him in the field of yellow flowers, and I gathered him into a hug so tight that he grunted, and I did not speak for a long time.

He didn’t understand. “Daddy? What’s the matter?”

“Well, I don’t think you should take strawberries over. Not now. Maybe not ever.”

“Why? Don’t they like strawberries?”

No, my son did not understand. In time he would, but then he would be more than sad. He would be confused. Worse, he would suffer that confusion, the assaults of an iniquitous world.

We teach our children fairness. We do well.

The selfish child is a danger. The self-centered child grows into a marauding adult whose sins are justified by that same idol, Self.

We wish our children to be good, so we teach them to be just, to be selfless themselves, to do to others as they would have others do to them: to be fair.

We do well.

And we do it from a deep parental love, don’t we? We teach them fairness for their own protection, because we don’t want them to suffer blame or slaps hereafter. In a world bigger and badder than he is, the selfish child is a danger mostly to himself.

So we say, “Share with your friends, and they will stay friends with you.” Cause and effect. We button their coats for school, and we say, “Play by the rules, my child, and others will trust you.” Connections! Good things lead to good things. We drive them to college, repeating a fine, fundamental ethic: “Be fair, even when I am not nearby to watch you. Out of your own soul, be fair. This is moral independence. This is maturity.”

So we say, implying thereby that they shall have some control over their destinies: certain behaviors will have certain consequences. Choose the right behavior.

Throughout our instruction, we presume that there is a reasonable law at work in the world—reasonable, feasible, universal, and impartial: the Law of Fairness.

Its positive expression is this: Good behavior earns a good reward. Good gets goodness in return—a consoling logic!

Its neutral expression: If you do not misbehave, you will be left in peace.

And its negative: But if you break the law, the world will punish you according to your deserving. Ill deeds earn an ill response—a cold logic, but orderly withal and necessary.

The Law of Fairness does not pretend to love people; rather, it loves stability in the community, and everyone benefits. It maintains a structure that all can understand, within which every individual can choose good or evil for himself. Its very rigidity permits, therefore, a moral liberty person by person, child by child.

And so we teach our children that law, both to know it and to obey it, and we do well, and all should be well.

And all would be well—if the world as well obeyed the law.

But what if the world itself tears fairness to shreds? What then?

At ten-thirty on a Saturday night, Matthew was stepping out of the gas station counting change when he heard shouts from his car. Men’s voices, rough and angry. He looked up to see two police officers bearing down on his friends.

His friends were lifting their hands in helplessness.

The cops were shouting. “Get in the car!”—but the car was locked. By habit Matt had punched the locks down. “Get in that car now or you’re going to jail.”

Exact quotes. Matthew does not forget what he met in emotion. His mind and his heart together are strong.

He began to run, snatching the keys from his pocket, and the officers, seeing him, redirected wrath: “Unlock this car. Get in and drive away now! Now! Or you’re the one going to jail.” Matt’s the one. My son’s the one.

He was 17 years old. He had by then developed a flat manner for precisely this sort of situation—that is, he blanked his eyes and slacked his face and slowed all motion to nothing suggesting threat or flight. Deliberately he began to unlock the four doors of the big Buick LeSabre, back first, front second, his last—

And the uniforms exploded: “Not fast enough. I don’t like your attitude. In fact, show me some ID! Now! Now! Now!”

At that last bellow, a friend whom the officers had not seen stepped out around the car, surprising them.

“Yow!” cried one cop, leaping backward and snatching his sidearm all in a single motion. “Oh, yeah! Oh, yeah, you’re going to jail. Bet on it.”

Matthew stood absolutely still, now not giving back what he was getting, now not invoking fairness, for he had learned, Lord; he had learned beyond my teaching him: that the best, in such moments as these, is, as much as possible, not to be. Vanish.

He had learned by cruel and finally redundant experience.

I do not lie. I declare it as an objective and verifiable fact, that Matthew had often been harassed by officers of the law for no ill he had done and in spite of the good he had sincerely chosen.

My son is adopted. He is black.

We live in a black neighborhood, in the center of our city, where there is congeniality of community for our children.

The officers are mostly white.

We were not wrong to move here. Here most of the people suffer the same distortion of the Law of Fairness, and here we can talk of the trouble and still be understood.

In the country we had experienced the cold, white eye alone, and we, at first, were inclined to accept the guilt. Surely we suffered the sundering from our neighbors and the isolation.

That’s why I hugged my son so hard and why he looked so terribly beautiful and tragic in the field of yellow flowers. The mother of his young friend had said to me, without perciptible anger but with absolute conviction and condemnation: “They won’t never talk again, ’cause black and white don’t marry.” She said. “I don’t want ’em touchin’, hear me? It’s unnatural. Black and white don’t marry. Y’ go on an’ keep him hobbled and home, away from my girl, ’cause black and white—”

“—don’t marry,” she said, when they were three years old. And even then the walls of my protective law began to crumble. The Law of Fairness was less effective a ward in the world than the trick the “brothers” taught my son: the blank expression, the slack face, the vanishing. Do nothing. Say nothing. Be nothing.

It worked. At the gas station that night he seemed sufficiently subservient. He did not go to jail. He came home. He shrugged when he told me the story, and he told it only incidentally. No big deal. This is the way things are.

But I wish he were three, beautiful in a field of yellow flowers, laughing as once he laughed when he was innocent.

All of our children will suffer the loss of the good law.

So what do we do when the world, and not our children, proves selfish and hurtful and unrepentant and unpunished after all?

Teachers will deal unfairly; coaches will scream, pink and popeyed; friends will trash them for other friends; bosses will play favorites; the marketplace will not love our children as we do, but rather will love itself at their expense; countless promises will be made and, though the children shall count on them, not be kept. So what do we do when bad people have power, when good and goodness is crushed as wimp and weakness?

Injustice, in this sinful world, will certainly strike the child both bluntly and personally.

Listen, parents: If we do nothing, if we do no more than communicate the Law of Fairness strictly and only, then our children will change to protect themselves, but the change will break our hearts.

One young man may respond with an anger so radical that all our teaching is lost on him. He may mimic the world, exchanging laws of fairness for laws of brutality: Might makes right. The strong survive. Look out for number one, since you have no better friend than yourself.

Or one young woman, having been deceived, may never trust another person again. To the degree that she was burned for her faith, she shall now doubt promises and dread the motives of people. Scared child! If hurt came from the place she thought safe, then hurt can come from anywhere. And love itself becomes the ultimate personal risk—too dangerous ever to take.

Or the saddest change within our children is this, that they never let go of the Law of Fairness, that they accept guilt for all the hurt visited upon them, believing that they must deserve whatever they receive. And if they cannot discern what wrong they did, soon they will conclude that it is the wrong they are.

If, when the good law breaks in a broken world, we do nothing new, our children shall begin to die an early death.

For three years in high school, Matthew played the point position on his basketball team. Something of a leader. Even off court he wove the players together by driving them hither and yon in the LeSabre, by gathering them at our house before games and giving them haircuts. I remember with pleasure the laughter booming in our basement.

All but two of the Bosse H.S. players were black.

I remember, too, a rather more nervous group on the days they were to be bused from the city, into the counties of southern Indiana, to meet small-town high schools in all-white communities.

These folk in their own gymnasiums enjoyed a joke or two: they ran onto the court carrying hubcaps. They wore watermelon patches, red and green and seeded. “Fun! It’s all in good fun.” The adults in the stands shouted epithets rather more unkind.

Neither Matthew nor his teammates felt comfortable under such white glare. But they cohered. They endured.

In the dark midwinter of 1988—just as the bus and the basketball team were slowing down to turn off Highway 231 into the parking lot of a rural high school—there flared beside the windows a violent fire, a bright, ascending flame. Boys could see boys’ faces in the immediate orange, and the bus driver gunned his engine. Matthew’s eyes went wide. The whole team fell perfectly silent.

This was the first time any of them had seen a cross afire.

Matthew (he later told me) had such tightness in his stomach that he couldn’t breathe. It occurred to him that a fire near a high school was unsafe. Even the building could burn, couldn’t it?

So then, how do you enter the white glare of the basketball court when your mood is confusion? The act seemed so clearly obscene, so vile—that someone should burn the cross of Jesus! Nothing had prepared Matthew for this. So, how do you walk onto the court when everyone else is happy, laughing, ordinary, but someone here was just outside torching the wood of a cross?

You enter stiff. Wooden-legged. You put on the blank-eyed mask, the impenetrable wall, the slack-faced declaration that nothing matters. You pretend indifference, even while your heart ticks so quickly that you feel pulse in your throat, and your ears are acute, hearing even the whispered epithets, Nigger, nigger. But hearing registers nowhere in your face. Take the ball. Shoot. Warm up. Stretch. Don’t look to the stands. Shoot. Shoot. Shoot.

There is another law. The laws of fairness and brutality are not the only ones a child may learn. Against these two—or against lawlessness altogether—the third law is essential.

This is what we do when the children suffer the failure of fairness: with all our hearts, by all our love, we model before them and for them the Law of Forgiveness.

This is not a matter of choice. It’s at the core of our Christian faith. Moreover, it is absolutely necessary for life. Without it, the children are caught in a killing society—dying.

We parents, in the place of the true Father, God, must by all our action image the forgiveness of Christ himself—and must name Christ Jesus both as the Lord and the source of what we are doing. No secrets here! His forgiveness shall pattern the children’s; his forgiveness shall empower theirs; and as their spirits more and more reflect the Spirit of God, they shall more and more be free of the world—neither to be ruled nor to be crushed by it.

This is not merely an abstract doctrine to be conned.

This is practical action. This is a daily shield, their best protection after all. Even as we train our children in eating and sleeping and some sustaining profession, so we must train them to sever themselves from the hurt and the powers of the world (though not from the world itself) by a true and holy pardoning.

“Sinner, sincerely, I do not hold this thing against you.”

No, the children do not say this simply on their own. They must know (by your good guidance) that Jesus said it first to them from the cross. Whisper their sins to their souls until they ache in sore repentance: but then quickly sing to them the measure of mercy they have received from Jesus. Their sins are gone. In place of sin is righteousness and the love of God. The Spirit of the love lives in them! God is actually inside of them! And from that God truly, truly, comes the miraculous power to forgive people who do not in fact deserve forgiveness.

Such forgiving children are liberated from this world, utterly free, making choices altogether on their own. Such children enjoy partnership with the Almighty God. The world can destroy the Law of Fairness, but it cannot again destroy this Holy Companion or the child whom Jesus keeps.

And look at the marvelous accomplishments of such children: they become the means by which God enters the world again; for their forgiveness is the coming of Jesus, again and again. Is there a higher calling for any child than this?

They won. Matthew’s team won. No razzle dazzle, no slam dunks, no show—a steady game, a solid and solemn win, that’s all. The fans in the stands were not happy.

Neither was Matthew’s coach, despite the triumph. He was angry, rather. Jumpy. Nervous.

As the teams walked off the court, one man halfway to the rafters bellowed about the “nigger win,” and the coach blew up. With a roar he began to climb the risers, clearing a path by short chops of his arms, preparing to split the skull of a very fat and very frightened fan. At the same time, people began to scramble toward the coach, balling their fists and shouting. And then both teams swept up the stands like birds in flight.

Amazingly (Matthew told me), he was not afraid. He was the first to reach the coach. He tried to restrain him and got tossed aside for his effort, but he wasn’t scared. He truly did not expect a fight, because of what had happened during the game.

Early in the second half—by habit, I suppose, a spontaneous act—Matthew complimented his opposite on a good shot. Just a nod. An acknowledgment of skill between equals: “Hey, man.”

And, “Hey,” said the opponent.

No, not once. Several times over Matt indicated by glances and touches his praise and his pleasure in the contest.

In response, the white guard smiled. Grinned. Matthew was an outstanding player. His compliment carried weight.

So then, there was a mutual relationship here, independent of other noises in the gym. So then, Matthew’s mask cracked. So (by the minor marks of forgiveness) then Matthew smiled too, and the rest of the team observed this weird, uncaused behavior (except as God causes things that otherwise would not have happened), so both teams began to shut out the idiocy of sinful fans and apoplectic coaches, and all the players attended to what they liked anyway: the game!

That’s why, when the coach arose in a rage, Matthew wasn’t really afraid. It was a single team—a mixed team, white and black, all of the players, rural and city—that swarmed up the stands and interposed itself between a choking coach and a fat fan and a possible brawl among adults.

You see? The children were perfectly free.

Yesterday I said goodby to my son all over again. He went back to college. He is 19. I feel so homesick for him.

Matthew has changed. Innocence is gone from him. His exuberance is much tempered. He is cautious now—and I am altogether helpless to protect him. The sense of general fairness and universal beauty in this world has been compromised for both of us.

He departs this home for a difficult life, my dear one does. I hugged him. I hugged him hard, but I could not hug him long, as once among the flowers. There are no fields of yellow flowers any more.

I hugged him and let him go, and now I console my loneliness in prayer:

O Holy Father of my son, he bears in your forgiveness his veriest strength. Forgiven, he can forgive—and forgiving, he shall survive unto eternity. Never let my boy forget this best of lessons. Never.

Amen.

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