“Our inability to deal with unpleasantness in life all goes back to the invention of the flush toilet.” That was the thesis of a great book entitled The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade by Thomas Lynch, a Milford, MI funeral director. Lynch notes that in the old days when people died, their family took care of preparing the body at home, and that the unpleasantness of death was buffered by preparing the  loved one’s body for burial. Life included death. 

With the advent of the flush toilet, came a shift in the human psyche, Lynch posits. The flush toilet got rid of life’s unpleasantness with the push of a lever, and thus began the softening of our ability to deal with the many unpleasantries that are part and parcel to the human experience.

People laugh, or look at me weirdly when I tell that story. However, I think Lynch is on to something. I grew up around a funeral home; drawn their by a young lass with whom I was smitten. My first kiss came on the doorstep of a funeral home. Didn’t seem weird to me. She was very much alive! Through the years I occasionally helped to move a body or to deliver the daily dead to another town. I remember when the congressman I’d grown up hearing about as a hometown hero came home in a casket. We opened it and found that when they prepared bodies in Washington D.C. they posed them with their heads turned to face out of the casket. I remember watching as Gary (the funeral director and father of the lass) grabbed the congressman’s head and proceeded to turn his neck until he was facing the direction that dead people were supposed to face in our little town.

I grew up on the farm, and value the lessons I learned there greatly. Death, life, sex, hard-work, economics, it was all there on the farm. It created in me a “rootedness” and a sense of “balance” and understanding of the rhythms of life that I value greatly and am attempting to pass on to my kids through the same farm experiences. But my learning didn’t end on the farm, and it extended past the funeral home. I remember being a Medical Explorer at Cox Hospital when I was 16 years old. Suddenly I was thrust into the delivery room with wailing mommas seeing things I’d never seen before. I remember standing by the bedside of an elderly woman as she took her last breathe. All of these things mixed into the milieu that was my growing up and that have served me well as a pastor, an advisor and counselor, a teacher, a Dad and friend.

So, why do I bring this all up? Unpleasantness, that’s why. In soft America we’ll go far to avoid unpleasantness. We lie and don’t tell the truth to each other because it’s more comfortable to tell the lie than to risk the outburst that the truth might elicit. We tolerate underperformance from our peers and disobedience from our kids because we value faux peace over the clarity and accomplishment that truth and discipline would produce. We don’t fight for truth, because the fight is unpleasant. Case in point: I heard a guy from Minneapolis today on CNN talking about how wars can’t be won, so we shouldn’t fight them because the costs are so high. Hmmm. Let’s think about that a moment. If we used his logic we’d still pay allegiance to the King of England, Obama would likely be a slave instead of the President, and all of Europe would be under control of Hitler’s offspring. Detestable as it is, I think there’s a place and a time for the unpleasantness of war. And confrontation. And moral absolutes.

My house has seven flush toilets. I wouldn’t take for my indoor plumbing. I’m infinitely glad there’s no chamber pot under our bed. But I’m not afraid of unpleasantness. When I know it is lurking, I seek it out so that it can be resolved.

Embrace the unpleasantness. Make the best of it. Learn to deal with it. If you need help, take a look in the toilet. But don’t forget to flush.