AROUND THE KITCHEN TABLE

By Lloyd Ratzlaff

(From a memoir in progress)

I had grown convinced that my childhood was deprived, full as it was of fundamentalist undercurrents to twist my mind. The supposedly sad story of my childhood — absent father, devouring mother, haranguing preachers, or what not. Followed by anxious teenage years of trying (abortively) to help myself to freedoms I didn’t have when I thought I should have been entitled.

Then at the age of 21, green as a peapod, I thought I had found a woman who would redress those childhood wrongs; and since she’d had a similar history, we married hastily, with me believing she would join me in a belated renaissance, and we’d become the good husband and wife we both wanted to be. It was grossly unfair that a wife should be expected also to be mother and muse; unfair too that a husband should become both father and pastor before having properly reached adolescence himself.

When I entered, very belatedly, a psychology program at the university, one of my professors said I was doing in my mid-20s what most others do at 14.

But from about the age of 25 — 35, I thought I was beginning to see how all my deficits were paying off, thereby proving St. Paul’s aphorism: When I am weak, then I am strong. I believed I understood the meaning of paradox and metaphor, where opposite things can be equally true, where things are each other.

The breakdown of logic has become a familiar experience. I am humbled — or humiliated — by every reminder that this is not a lesson learned once for all, but which keeps teaching itself anew at every level of understanding I suppose I have reached. When you’re first, you’re last, the gospels say; if you’re rich you’re poor, and vice versa. Cling to life, and you lose it; let go, and it’s found. Fools for Christ’s sake are wise. Those who live by the law are sinners, and those who forgive know justice.

Who can be orthodox when all existence is paradox?

The more these apparent opposites forced themselves on me, the more “Christian” I hoped to be after all. Didn’t the parables of Judgment Day disclose the souls’ ignorance of both virtues and sins, with the sheep on the right hand asking, Lord, when did we visit, feed, comfort you? the goats on the left bleating, When didn’t we clothe you, when didn’t we cast out devils in your name?

I recall the combined blow and illumination when I first saw the text in St. John 8 (though I’d read it often before): If you were blind, you would not be guilty; but because you say We see, therefore your guilt remains.

Then somewhere along the way, the new “strength” turned to weakness again. As if God himself had set out to prove the converse of Paul’s paradox: When you imagine you’re strong, Lloyd, you’re weaker than you could guess.

In the early years of marriage, I thought the wrongs against me were being righted. Twenty years later, and on this side of a bitter divorce, I concluded that it’s never safe to say I understand anything.

When did I do this, when didn’t I do that?

Ratzlaff is the author of two books of literary non-fiction, The Crow Who Tampered With Time and Backwater Mystic Blues. Formerly a minister, counsellor and university instructor, he now makes his living as a writer in Saskatoon.