Beloved son,
Shortly after we moved into our first home—a good four years before you were born—Mom and I installed a new ceiling fan in our kitchen.
We had ambition and vision aplenty, but little know-how between us. What would take someone handy like your grandpa maybe a couple hours became for us an entire weekend of trips to Home Depot, viewings and re-viewings of YouTube how-to videos, Mission Impossible-style crawls across the attic rafters, and, as the project neared completion, a number of silent prayers that the ceiling would not collapse into our cereal bowls the next morning.
Our prayers must have been heard, because the fan did not drop out of the ceiling the next morning, nor the morning after that, nor any morning since. It quickly became, well, a fixture, something stable, something sure. For years I regarded our ceiling fan the same way most people regard their ceiling fans: Unless a bulb went out, I paid no attention to it whatsoever.
That is, until you noticed it. There is no fixation quite so unadulterated as a baby’s desire for an object. When you were around five months old and learning to reach and grab and pull, you discovered the two chains dangling from our ceiling fan, one for the light, one for the fan. Like mystical talismans descending from the heavens, the chains drew you in, called to you—who knows, maybe you heard them speak your name. “Greetings, little one. We are called Hampton Bay. We have powers beyond your imagination. If you find a way to reach us, we will share our magic with you.”
Whatever undiscovered particle it is that determines babies’ predilection for certain objects and horror at others, you were taken in. You needed to grab those chains.
At first you did just that, stretching out your arms whenever I walked through the kitchen carrying you. You would wrap your fingers around the oval metal trinket and stare at it as only a baby can. It didn’t take long before you combined “grab” and “pull” to create “yank.”
Click. Suddenly you could create shadow or, just as easily—click—light. While your arms understood the motion, I’m not sure your brain understood the cause. Whereas now, as a toddler, you might do something over and over again out of pride, as a baby you always seemed to yank on the chain out of duty. When we held you up toward the fixture, your face was serious and focused, your arms straining desperately to grab hold. It clearly wasn’t a game; it wasn’t even a job. It seemed a sacred responsibility.
I’d wager that if I held you up there long enough, you would yank and yank and yank and yank—on, off, on, off, on—until either your little baby muscles gave out or the ceiling fan itself ripped through the drywall and crashed onto our heads.
And that was precisely the problem: Embarrassing as it is to admit, I was fairly certain that you, at five months, were strong enough to tear our pet project down to the ground. The gentle, measured tug with which Mom and I pulled the chains was too subtle a motion for your reflexive yank.
At first this got me thinking about the obvious: What does it say about the quality of my handiwork if I don’t trust our ceiling fan to withstand the force of a 15-pound person?
But then I started to see—as I imagine all parents do at some point—that the whole world is made of nothing but questionably installed ceiling fans.
Wherever I looked, it became clear to me that the everyday existence of human adults is perfectly breakable. We are so naïve as to place plants on windowsills, candles on coffee tables, laptops on the couch. We are so delusional as to believe in the fixedness of fixtures. Drop in a grabby baby like you at five months, and it is just one giant demolition site waiting to happen.
Not to mention, of course, that the demolition crew is perfectly breakable, too. Mom and I have always taken numerous precautions to make things safer for you and your sister, but the very notion of babyproofing suggests that the world is inherently dangerous; it’s just that adults know how not to kill themselves navigating it.
Since we’re past your babyproofing phase, you might be wondering why this ceiling fan episode has come back to me now, over two years later. Well, for one, we just moved houses, so I got to say goodbye to the ceiling fan, hoping that it will hold up okay for the next folks. (I am pretty sure it will. By now it’s undergone years of rigorous testing.)
Our new place is nicer, better built, sturdier. But even as we enter an updated, recently shampooed, freshly painted home, reminders of its brokenness—current or eventual—abound. An outlet covering is pulling away from the wall. The lightbulb above the kitchen sink is out. Dings and pockmarks show where previous tenants installed their curtains and shelves and baby gate. The doorbell casing is shattered. Heck, we have a whole rite dedicated to documenting such signs of decay: the rental inspection, where we list every busted thing we can find.
Beyond our recent move, I am also keenly aware of the world’s fragility in this moment because your sister, now seven months old, is revealing to us every day new ways that our house is a death trap. With her recently learning to roll, and then crawl, and then pull herself to standing, we have swiftly entered the no-and-move phase, as in, “No, don’t touch that” as we move her away from a hazard—and inevitably toward another.
There are the obvious hazards, the ones that make it on the wellness check sheets: outlets, medicine bottles, stairs, cleaning supplies. But there is a whole host of mundane scenarios that pose a threat, too—really any everyday arrangement of reality. A scrap of paper on the office floor? Choking hazard. A fallen strand of hair on the bathroom floor? Tourniquet hazard. (Yes, it’s a thing.) A crumb of food on the kitchen floor? Bacterial hazard. A thick carpet floor? Suffocation hazard. A smooth tiled floor? Slipping hazard. The existence of floors? Gravity hazard.
It’s hazards all the way down. And if it doesn’t pose a threat to you or your sister, then you surely pose a threat to it. The only books we can let sister freely examine are two that we have in the “Indestructibles” series, which I believe are printed on camping tarp and bound with fishing line. Anything else is destined for her mouth and a slow, saliva-soaked death by dissolution.
Through my eyes as someone raising little breakable people surrounded by little breakable things, I end up with the impression that the essential condition of the world is brokenness—whether it is currently broken, is eventually going to break, or is imminently going to break us.
And that is the third reason unstable ceiling fans are on my mind: You wouldn’t know it, dear son, but as I write this people are enduring a season of great instability. Just about every brand of calamity has made an appearance this year: global health crisis, shuttered businesses, sweeping joblessness, racial injustice, months-long protests, political pandemonium, record-breaking heat and forest fires and hurricanes. Whoever moves in in 2021 will have a doozy of a time completing the rental inspection.
There are many who would rush to remind me that it’s pretty much always been that way, that 2020 is not unique in its unraveling. One of the most famous novels of the 20th century borrows a line from one of the most famous poems of the 20th century: “things fall apart.” A century earlier, physicists conceptualized entropy, which describes the inevitable trend of all things[1] toward disorder.
Long before that, the ancient poets and teachers insisted that this world is no sturdier than we are. The Bible says that the world is passing away (1 John 2) and will be destroyed by moths and rust (Matthew 6), that we its inhabitants are as fixed as a flower blown away in the wind (Psalm 103), as enduring as a breath or a shadow (Psalm 39 and 144), as permanent as mist (James 4).
But then, the gospel doesn’t end there. It begins there. It starts with our brokenness, our frailty, our fragile-as-a-flower existence, and it promises healing, wholeness, life everlasting. The gospel is not about babyproofing. It is not about fixing, patching, making do. It doesn’t install fixtures and then pray that they will hold up.
The gospel will hold up. The assurance of God’s eternal, redemptive love is a reality that will last. It is the Reality upon which our reality is built. In an audacious counter to the decay and disorder we see around us, Jesus promises nothing less than the “renewal of all things” (Matthew 19): our bodies, our relationships, our earth—yes, even our ceiling fans.
One day all these things will be new, not just fixed up, patched up, cleaned up, but new, regenerated, re-created. One day there will be no lives ended by disease, no people caste by race, no homes destroyed by fires. One day the books will not dissolve in sister’s mouth and the fans will not wobble and the five-month-old in you can yank and yank and yank to your heart’s content. Until then, we look up and pray.
[1] If you go on to study physics, you’ll point out that, technically, entropy only applies to closed systems, not all things per se. The point stands: Even physical laws seem to suggest that our very existence, if not already broken, is in the process of breaking.