theblackdostoyevsky

Enoch Ya’el,

            Other than Jesus, your name is the strongest I know in the Holy Scriptures. How evil was it, then, that I, your father, was the one to cut off that strength. Lord, please . . . Jesus, help me.

            I’m sorry, son. That wasn’t the best way to open this letter. Too much damning self-pity. Let me start from a better position. What’s the better position? You’d prolly know better than me, because you’re with Him. How does He say I oughta start? I’m unsure. Self-pity’s safer. I can punish myself before He has a chance to flog my conscience with conviction. Or you.

            You are my first child, but not the child of my wife. I knew my wife, Jenny, then, but we ain’t know then I’d one day ask her hand. We were acquaintances, then. But what that gotta do with you, right? Let me cut to the chase. Nah, lemme take my time. Right? On you, though. Not on what was built without you. This is so embarrassing. You know what I wish? . . . Forget it; never mind. It don’t matter what I wish.

            Your mother and I dated in college. She was Muslim; I’m Christian. We fornicated and you were conceived. I was 23. She was 19. I was ambivalent, mostly about the religion thing, but I cared about her a lot, though it prolly wasn’t love. Love wouldn’t fornicate. I know that now. God, help me. But anyways, I was afraid of having you because I ain’t know if I wanted to marry your mother. I wanted to abort you, but I didn’t tell her that. I kept quiet and waited. She told me all her heart. She was scared, too, but for different reasons. Well, I can’t know that. I picked up on what I wanted to hear. I learned what “honor-killing” was from her. She was afraid that her parents would punish her for being pregnant. So she told me she wanted an abortion.

Enoch, I admit, I was relieved. But what I did next was even more wicked than that. I feigned remorse. I pretended with her to fight for your life, but just enough not to persuade her to fight with me. I cast away my influence as a man, as your father, as a Christian, as a lover of men, as somebody who, in public, argued for pro-life, and I, like an amateur matador weakly charged by a sick bull, stepped aside and allowed her fear and sorrow to have the final say on your life.

            I paid. $450. I kept the receipt in my wallet for years. I still remember the night, Christmas Eve 2009. She took the pill and we drug the mattress out onto the balcony of her apartment to lay under the stars until it kicked in. Your mother passed some painful hours. Then she passed yourself. I saw your tiny fingers in the toilet, your tiny head, the rest of you a mass of tissue. We flushed you together. How foolishly romantic and sentimental! I knew what I was doing. I knew you were a life God was sending to earth, but I was too selfish, too lustful, too conniving, to callously concerned for my own future, to care about yours.

“An honest and specific confession of sin,” is what recovery calls for.

Please, son, forgive me for being so graphic. I only want, no, need, for you to grasp the depth of my depravity and selfishness. It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t your mother’s. I’m to blame. I sinned greatly against your life. I’m guilty of murder before God and before you, my own child. And to pay for that sin in a way that would satisfy my debt to you would mean ending my own life. Can you see now the grave depth of the injustice? Can you, truly? I can’t even feign wanting restitution, because I know that, given the chance, I wouldn’t pay the cost. I can’t even pretend to want to.

“Oh, wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from the body of this death?!” I was supposed to protect you and nurture you and guide you. I was supposed to teach you how to tie a tie. I was supposed to train you up in the way that you should go. I was supposed to help you with your homework. I was supposed to honor you as a blessing and heritage from the Lord. I was supposed to keep your fade tight. I was supposed to cherish you and teach you and pray for you and rebuke you when you were wrong, in loving hope for your salvation in our Lord, the One smiling in your face now.

            He is the One, Enoch. Jesus is the one who paid my debt to you. He is the One who deserves all of your love and praise and honor and loyalty and faith. There is none like Him nor will there ever be another. The only begotten Son of God. The obedient One. Even unto the most excruciating death on a cross, who despised the shame, who was reviled and reviled not in return, who was abused and did not threaten. That blessed man who is God paid my debt. And it is in Him that I have found forgiveness. And because I know you are in Him and were from the beginning, not as I, who was later called by His great condescension of grace in His enduring mercy, it is on that basis, the basis of our, now, common relationship in Him and through Him, my son, that I humbly, boldly, brokenly, ask for your forgiveness.

Son, will you forgive me?

Love,

Daddy.