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January 1, 2007 by djackson.

I’ve completed my annual New Year’s re-read of “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.”  Because I’m a masochist.  Luther frapped himself with a flail in his cell at Wittenburg; I subject myself to Tolstoy.  I figure we’re even.  In case you’re not familiar with the novella, it concerns a man whose imminent death forces him, for the first time, to consider his life.  Though I’ve reconned the work repeatedly over the years, one line, camoflauged as innocuous filler, drew a bead from its deer-blind and sent an armor-piercing round straight into my soul.  General irritability emerges as the indicator species of Ivan Ilyich’s terminal illness, the first sign that something serious is afoot.  Describing the sick man’s rages over things like cracked crockery, overdone pot roast, or bad table manners, Tolstoy writes, “And for all this, he blamed Praskovya Fedorovna.”

That’s his wife, and the sentence ticks like an IED on the roadside of the plot.  Ivan married Praskovya as a career move and their relationship has been a sort of uneasy detente in an ongoing conjugal cold war.  Career success and good luck have allowed them to hold happy poses for an extended photo-op, but the first sign of real trouble unmasks their fundamental animosity.  This is more important than it seems, because as Ivan’s death drags on, this dislike deepens to hatred.  In one of their last encounters, “He shifted his gaze to her.  So great was the animostiy in that look - animosity toward her - that she broke off without finishing what she had to say.”  One of the worst torments of Ivan’s last days is his loneliness.  His loneliness rules because hatred drives away the one who should relieve it.  That hatred flourishes because Ivan nourished it early on.  The pup of half-conscious dislike has become the pitbull of outright animosity and can no longer be brought to heel.

This brings us to the disturbing (indeed, for us old fundamentalists, downright embarrassing) language of Psalm 137.9.  Recounting Babylonian atrocities against his nation, the writer offers a hellish eulogy:  “How blessed will be the one who siezes and dashes your little ones against the rock.”  Better apologists than I have attempted to reconcile that prayer with Christian theology.  At the moment I’m not interested in domesticating it, but in applying it.  Ambrose, one of the post-Nicene fathers, allegorizes the passage in a sermon on repentence.  He writes,

That is to say, dash all corrupt and filthy thoughts against Christ, Who by His fear and His rebuke will break down all motions against reason, so as, if any one is siezed by an adulterous love, to extinguish the fire, that he may by his zeal put away the love of a harlot, and deny himself that he may gain Christ.

In other words, smash sinful thoughts before they become deadly deeds.  C. S. Lewis popularizes this powerful concept when he writes,

I know things in the inner world which are like babies; the infantile beginnings of small indulgences, small resentments, which may one day become dipsomania or settled hatred, but which woo us and wheedle us with special pleadings and seem so tiny, so helpless that in resisting them we feel we are being cruel to animals.

With characteristic bluntness the Oxford don concludes,

Against all such pretty infants (the dears have such winning ways) the advice of the Psalm is the best.  Knock the little bastards’ brains out.

What infant hatreds are we suckling?  What Ivan Ilyich-like monsters can we afford to feed because temporary good fortune provides sufficient funds of physical and emotional energy to let us mistreat, if only in our own minds, those we most should love?  Tomorrow I may be too weak to do without those I have driven away.  Small steps into sin can render me too spiritually depleated to defeat the Cerberus whose slavering jaws keep me from the land of living relationships and lock loved ones out of my self-made Hell.  Will I regret too late the puppy chow I lavished on what seemed a charming imp?

In light of all of this, let me suggest a New Year’s resolution, a small one, in keeping with the advice of experts not to overreach ourselves and thus engineer our own frustration.  Strangle an infant hatred in its crib.  Bash the brains out of a baby resentment.  Say no to a small selfishness.  To paraphrase Our Lord, love your potential enemies; you may need them as friends later on.

If even this sounds too difficult (and I admit that it does to me), I offer the wisdom of Dietrich Bonhoeffer regarding the psalm in question.  He points out that the writer’s righteous wrath against the sins of the Babylonians really only represents the punishment deserved by us all.  He then reveals the good news:  another infant has already embodied all of that evil.  Though innocent himself, he absorbed our wickedness and let the Father’s righteous wrath smash him on the rock called Calvary.  Sin did not kill Christ; he dragged it down to death - took it clean to Hell, if we are to believe the old creeds - and dumped its broken corpse in the darkest pits of that place.  So I don’t even have to kill sin myself, just cry to the one who has done so, then re-construct that prefabricated victory in my own life.  Hard enough, but possible, since I rely on a power outside myself.

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