Generational Failure

 If someone imagines that the world of the Bible is old news, dead and buried: you're just not paying attention.


The world of the Bible is very much alive and well and working its dynamics on us here in America just as it did on the ancient Israelites. There is nothing new under the Sun. It is the same story, and has been from the beginning. The story of sin and spiritual decay and death. And sometimes, grace and redemption.

The generational aspects of the Bible are unavoidable, as inconvenient as they may be to a modern reader. The spiritual destiny of the individual is still between them and G-d alone, but generational sin will color the pain, unpleasantness, injury and even persecution of the journey to that destiny. We are not islands: each one of us carries our part of the generational burden of sin.

You can pretty well say that if anything is said in Exodus 20, right in and alongside the Ten Commandments G-d spoke from Mt. Sinai, it is really really really important. And right at the beginning of those Commandments, G-d says this:

"For I the Lord your G-d am an impassioned G-d, visiting the guilt of the parents upon the children, upon the third and upon the fourth generations of those who reject Me, but showing kindness to the thousandth generation of those who love Me and keep My commandments."

~Exodus 20:5-6

I am living in the very midst of massive generational failure. Our grandparents failed, our parents failed, we failed, our children failed, and now a new generation of further failure. This is a spiritual cascade failure. Like a house made of dominoes, falling in on itself.

My paternal grandfather was a drunkard, which was often blamed on him having part Indian blood. While my grandfather did look a little Native American, as far as I know the Native American blood in the Dodd family line is only a myth. Genetic analysis reveals overwhelmingly Scots-Irish ancestry. And the Celts were always a bloody violent chaotic and often self-destructive people. Anyway, he pretty much drank himself to death, spending the end of his life in an insane asylum.

My maternal grandfather I knew much less of, though paradoxically he seemed much more stable. On my mother's side people tended to disown or distance their own family a lot. His father, Salvatore, was a womanizer who the family essentially disowned. I know nothing of him except his name, that he was Italian, and that he had relationships with women that caused his family to disown him. But that was Salvatore. Larry,  my grandfather, was a barber and aside from marrying my wild drunken grandmother seemed to have a stable life. What I never heard from his lips is anything about G-d. RIP.

My paternal grandmother, Mildred, was a rock of stability, and did seem to be a woman of faith, a faith that she more or less completely failed to communicate to her own sons. She, despite her own (perhaps lukewarm) beliefs, never spoke to me about G-d at all. I know she believed and later in life I think she deepened that faith, but while her conduct might have spoken of her beliefs her mouth essentially never did. Perhaps one reason why I cannot stop talking about G-d is that I fear one day having the kind of unassertive faith she had. She believed, I know she did, but she didn't bring it home when it mattered. Maybe she still had that "women should be silent and in the kitchen" thing of past ages going on. She could definitely speak up, but usually long after the horse fled the corral. I remember one time her accidentally revealing the truth of my bastard birth to me in an argument with my mother. Perhaps she imagined that her son was blameless in that event. Fortunately nobody cares if you are a bastard anymore. I was wild in my youth, and when once I came home stinking drunk she read me the riot act - but the proper time for her to have inculcated moral fiber and fear of G-d in me was long before that. As usual, she acted after the horse had bolted the corral.

There is no point lecturing an intoxicated person while they are intoxicated. Catch them first thing the next morning, when they are already in a mood to repent. ;)

My maternal grandmother was... surprise! A drunkard and a loose woman. Ah, drink and sex: how the love of you has ravaged my family. Vera Pecella. In my mother's childhood she brought a series of men and bottles home to the boarding house that her mother ran. And then came the DT's which traumatized my mother. Vera drank herself to death, so early that I do not really remember much of her at all. She saw me, but I do not really remember seeing her. How she hooked up with the seemingly stable Lawrence Pecella, my maternal grandfather, I do not know, but it didn't last long. My mother's memories of home were of being an only child in her grandmother's boarding house, where her grandmother read fortunes for the Depression-era suckers. Wow, I have witches in my background, and unscrupulous money-motivated witches besides! ;) Meanwhile her mother trotted men back and forth, and drank.

Perhaps she imagined she was cool and liberated.

I spoke of my paternal grandmother, Mildred. As to her sons - I cannot speak to my uncle's faith, but my father Robert Sr. (I am a Jr.,) had a deep hatred of Christianity, which was the only Abrahimic religion he had any real contact with. When I first started my walk with G-d I was a Christian (having later accepted the religion of the sole only G-d of Sinai and His Law,) and he could barely conceal his disgust at it. He used to happily gloat at how he terribly abused the religious students at Baylor University where he went to school on a football scholarship. He was a weak cowardly man in many ways, a bully when it suited him, thanks to his football-playing muscles. That said, compared to his own father he was a paragon. His vices, while not particularly restrained, were restrained enough to mostly keep him out of trouble. He handled his drink pretty responsibly and moderately, even more so than my mother who could down a few too many on occasion. I don't even remember ever seeing him drunk. Perhaps the lesson of his own father was enough to keep him clear of that. He had a few sexual flings, but kept within bounds. He seemed to have adopted the Playboy philosophy of a man of the world: enjoy a lot, but under control. His least moderated sin was gluttony, but at least that had cultural benefits. I learned of the exotic foods of foreign lands at an age and time when my peers were still firmly in meatloaf-and-potatoes territory. This vice like all vices bore its ultimate fruit: a series of gastric disorders that ultimately along with diabetes contributed to his death. True, he did not die YOUNG: he was old enough to be called old, but he died in his seventies. Compared to many in the family history, he didn't get off too badly. Not compared to the DT's and early death of alcoholism. But he had a deep revulsion for G-d. He loved to ridicule preachers, which granted many are worthy of ridicule, but he enjoyed ridiculing them too much not to have a bit of special personal bile in the ridicule.

Now we come to my mother, Mary. My feelings of reverence make me want to just go, "Mom was a saint" and move on. Mom was not a saint though. She believed in Christianity, but not enough to try to instill it in us, and she belonged to the most archetypally lukewarm of denominations, the Episcopalians. She did try to force us wayward children to go to church, but in my own case not successfully for long. Like many, I think she was comfortable with God in a box. As long as G-d stayed in his God box, which of course would be infinitely too narrow for the real G-d, she was happy being nominally religious. G-d does not stay in a box, of course. G-d is way bigger than any of us OR our boxes. She was especially happy with the religious holidays, when she could build a sense of home life in her home with her children that she never had in her childhood.

And it was, no mistaking, HER home. She was the boss though not initially. I have a memory of my father coming home from road trips and reading her the riot act on not keeping the home clean and fulfilling all her wifely duties as well as her career. But soon my dad bowed to the one with the stronger will and the most strings to pull, and that was my mom. Most of the time she made more money; almost always she HAD more money. She was not as prone to the luxuries that my dad was weak to. She was stronger. Money is might, and might makes right far more in the economic realm than in the realm of Dad's muscles. And he did love her, and she did love him, though their fights were enough to make me swear off marriage. That was the background noise of my childhood: them fighting.

Any other shortcomings my mother had are private. She loved us, her children, though she did not understand us and did not teach us to be God-fearing people. She just kind of assumed we would follow in her mold, which in some ways we did.

Now we come to me. What was my part in this multigenerational saga?

I think that at a very early age I came to realize that I was 1. very different from the people around me and 2. I was haunted by the feeling that something was not quite right in all this. It was like that scene from the original Matrix movie, the scene that the rest of the movie never quite lived up to:

"Let me tell you why you're here. You're here because you know something. What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad."

So, naturally, being a Dodd, I tried to drown that feeling in drink and drugs. After alcohol lost its appeal, I turned to pot and psychedelics. Ultimately, I hoped that LSD would free me from the Matrix. It did not, though the hundred or so trips I took were very interesting. Not ultimately meaningful, more full of questions than answers. A few bad trips in a row disabused me of the notion of following that path any further. What the world was offering was not enough, and I knew that, but I did not know what to do with what I knew. So like the world, I too was broken.

Since this is a confessional of sorts, I won't go into the path from there. This is a post about intergenerational sin, not grace. I was a deeply dysfunctional person in my youth, and in many ways still am. My people skills range from poor to downright autistic. I anger easily, though I am not violent. It is no mystery why I am a lifelong bachelor: I push people away very readily. Get off my lawn. I used my nerdy interests like a drug: for a long time it was computer games, but it was always something nerdy that I used to escape from the real broken world. That wasn't entirely negative, sometimes it could dovetail nicely with building a constructive life, but often not.

And now we get to the point of this whole thing, if it has a point. It has slammed home so very hard to me how I am in the midst of this generational sin. My grandparents failed, my parents failed, I failed, and now I see the wreckage of our collective failure as a people all around me, coming home to roost. The way you live your life does not only affect you. It affects everyone around you. How would my mother have been different, if her mother had been a sober and G-d - fearing woman? How would my dad have been different if his dad had not been an abusive drunkard? Can we even imagine a world that isn't dysfunctional anymore? Can we imagine getting on the right path as a people, as a family, as a nation?

I like to imagine it, but that's not what is. Instead we are burdened with this intergenerational intersocial, collective guilt. Because we turned our back on the Only G-d and HIS truth. We sought our own interests only. G-d have mercy on us.

G-d is telling us, up front and center, that if you do not love Him and keep His law, you are not the only one who will suffer. Your kids will suffer. Their kids will suffer. Their kids kids will suffer. This is not through the special vindictiveness of G-d. It is inherent in the nature of things. Evil, in the Tanakh, is a contagion that permeates a whole society like a disease. It is communicable. Evil is like a virus. You will suffer, your kids will suffer, ultimately the whole world will suffer and grow darker and darker.

There is one and only one way to heal from this mortal wound. Turn to G-d with your whole heart and strive to keep His law. That is the one and only one way.