Beauty and Grace

Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.
—Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Toys with lots of pieces are a mother’s curse. They never stay in the box they are supposed to, they seem to be in the places most likely to be stepped on, and the most important piece is always the one that is missing. But recently my son has been playing with a set of pattern blocks and causing me to re-think all that I hate about multi-pieced toys.

The beauty of pattern blocks is that it doesn’t matter if one is missing; you can always make some kind of design no matter which seemingly random assortment you have in front of you. In the chaos after our move, I imagine there is something soothing for my son about sitting quietly in his room on the floor, adding one piece and then another and another until all are used up. And where once was a jumbled pile of colored shapes, there is instead something orderly and beautiful. It is a small way of setting things right.

My daughter had her own way of setting things right when she was younger. As a toddler, she would sit inside a pop-up tent and narrate stories that always included elements of surprise that she would re-live over and over, usually in the unexpected but delightful arrival of her friend Elmo. And over and over she would exclaim with joy that he had come to see her, that he could laugh so nicely, that he was such a good friend.

This holiday as I have enjoyed family reunions and rooms full of kids, the thing that stays with me is how they are able to simply be there, as Annie Dillard would say. They are able to see patterns and meaning where I see incompleteness and missing pieces. They are able to find joy in the ever-recurring presence of those they love most. They are alive to beauty and grace. And my new year’s wish is that somehow, like them, I will learn to simply be there.

Promise

“The time is coming when I will keep the promise I made.”
—Jeremiah 33:14 (The Message)

“It’s exactly what he promised, beginning with Abraham and right up to now.”
—Luke 1:26 (The Message)

From the time she was born Mary’s parents were so proud. “She is full of promise,” they told themselves and their friends and Mary, too, as she grew: “You are so full of promise.” Believing it, would she be filled with plans, anticipating all the ways she would accomplish the dreams of those she loved? Or fearing it, would she be nervously calculating the balance sheet of her life to see if in the end, all the hoped-for promise paid off. But when the angel came to her and asked, she was open enough to be willing: “Be it unto me…” even though in this case being willing seemed to mean the certain death of the promise entrusted to her. “She was so full of promise, then this happened…” Mary, full of promise, ends up pregnant. And then, to the surprise of everyone who thought that was the end of Mary’s bright future, she is at last (and completely in the way God meant) full of promise.

In the space between “the time is coming” and “exactly what he promised,” there is a long and silent wait. Does delay of a promise intensify desire of its coming? Or does it cause us bit by bit to die to its light? When we are “full of promise,” does that mean we have more-than-the-average share of gifts and talents? Or it is to be so broken with waiting we have nothing left but promise to fill us up. We are so full of promise. We break promises and we keep them, and in the end they keep us. Keep us from falling apart, from falling into the worst of ourselves, from falling so far we are beyond the call of anyone to save us. And in that moment when “exactly as he promised” is fulfilled, it happens.

On the eve of a promise kept, a word to answer the silent prayers of the ages, a gift given over and over as many times as we remember. From that gift—now and ever, the call: To the ones who break promises, from the one who never does. Calling through noise, through time, through pain, through the silent places of the strongest heart. Calling, till there is nothing left but to take it up: A promise as rich and bright as the Indian sun. A promise hidden in the deep, dark eyes of a baby boy whose tiny hand never stops holding the hope of a world made new.

Manna

There have been times I’ve felt abandoned by God. Sometimes I think it’s just him dissing me and other times I think maybe it’s a “for-my-own-good” kind of thing. But as a friend pointed out at lunch today, it’s an odd way to think about God. You wouldn’t do that to your own kid—leave them so they learn to love you more. Good point. And then another friend commented, “That’s the one thing God does promise—his presence.” I have been thinking about that a lot. On some deep level I know it is true, but I definitely don’t understand it.

The very essence of Christmas—Immanuel, God with us—announces God’s presence with humanity. But do I know how to recognize God? If he never abandons me but it feels like he has, it must be that I don’t know how to see him, or I’m looking for the wrong thing. Maybe we don’t see God himself, but we see him through his provisions, like manna in the wilderness. Do we know God has not abandoned us because we have enough to eat, because we have friends, because we have _______ (fill in the blank)? Then what about people who are literally dying from hunger or loneliness or lack of some other thing? Where do those people find evidence of God’s presence? I think any one of them would smack me upside the head for implying it is their fault that they don’t see God or feel his presence or get full from the invisible spiritual manna all around their feet. And rightly so.

Just as I need to be dis-illusioned of the Christ that I am expecting, so I need to be dis-illusioned of the manna I am expecting. I have these things set in my mind: this is what it looks like when God is near, and this is what it looks like when he feeds his people. But I am drowning in wrong ideas about God, and there are so many things I totally miss because I don’t know what I’m looking for. In spite of all this, God comes, holds out his hands to me again, and says, “This is my body, broken for you.” And when I even come close to the edges of knowing what that means, it is no problem for me to believe that there is bread enough for us all and that the one who offers it will help us see him when he comes.

Dis-illusioned

In church today, the scripture came from the words of John the Baptist as he is in prison, wondering if Jesus is truly the Messiah: “Are you the one who was to come, or are we to expect someone else?” (Matthew 11:3). You’d think all of his trumpeting “Prepare the way of the Lord!” would have convinced John as it did others that this was, in fact, the hoped-for one. But the sermon today talked about our need to be dis-illusioned of the Christ we expect in order that we can discover the Christ who is here.

And for me, this was a very meaningful contrast. I long for the Christ who rides in to rescue and heal all the wounded ones, who brings justice to the oppressed ones, who brings peace to my own disordered heart and sets my feet forever on a path of purpose and joy. But that is not the Christ who comes. The Christ who comes is not interested in saving me in the ways I expect to be saved. He is not interested in reinforcing my small-minded ideas of how he should work in this world. In the end, what he is interested in, is me.

And he tells me to save my life, I have to lose it. He says that healing my life might mean breaking it to pieces. He calls me to quiet all the noise of my own expectations and listen, quietly, patiently, not all at once, but over the long haul, for the steady sounds of his mercy pulsing into my life and the call of his grace that never ends. And what I hear when I listen is so simple: I am love, love, love.

Still

“I have stilled and quieted my soul.” (Psalm 131:2)
“For you O Lord, my soul in stillness waits. Truly my hope is in you.”

There is a new kind of cold that I have experienced since we moved to Edmonton. It is a deep, dry cold and when the sky is dark, it is the kind of cold that could make you forget anything warm you ever knew. But it is also a cold that forces quiet in you because it literally takes your breath away.

“I have stilled my soul” usually means something like quieting anxious thoughts, waiting with a certain amount of patience and calm. I have stilled my soul. But still may not only describe the method of waiting, but also the length of waiting. I wait with a soul that is still. And though the waiting is long, I wait still.

Maybe I can also “still” my soul by convincing it that in the dark of a windless night, there is still reason to hope. Still, my soul, there is reason to hope still. A reason that pierces through the darkness and cold in which we wait without breath. Still, we wait. Still.

Don't Stop

I saw this sign in a park here in Edmonton. While I’m sure it has something to do with parking or not idling by the curb in your car, all I can see when I look at it is a somewhat desperate plea: “DON’T STOP!”

This past week, I have enjoyed an evening of music, a laughter-filled dinner with friends, the bright sun, soup and spiritual reflection, and the life-giving energy of students. And in the midst of all of the things I’ve been writing about darkness and tears, I want to also write about food, music, and friends, and the place of light within me that wants to shout “Don’t stop!” to all those good gifts. Because they are the ones that call me back from the edges where I wander to the place within me where God dwells.

Henri Nouwen describes the journey of the prodigal son as one “so disconnected from what gives life—family, friends, community, acquaintances, and even food—that he realized that death would be the natural next step” (The Prodigal Son, 48). The unstated correlation here is: isolation = death. But when I hear music, when I sing, when I eat with others, when I listen to stories and put myself in places where these things happen, I put myself also in the path of life because I am no longer alone.

I do not doubt that I will fall in and out of seasons of darkness for the rest of my life. But what I hope is that the more times I see them end, the more patient I can be within them, the more trusting that they are, in fact, only a season. The more I can make the conscious choice to wait them out, to socialize and be with people even when I don’t think I want to, the more I will begin to remember and believe, as Nouwen reminds me, that God has never stopped stretching out his hands waiting for me to return.

Walking with God

“He took me by the hand and walked me
into pitch-black darkness.”
—Lamentations 3:3, The Message

“When life is heavy and hard to take, go off by yourself. Enter the silence. Bow in prayer. Don't ask questions: Wait for hope to appear. Don't run from trouble. Take it full-face. The ‘worst’ is never the worst. Why? Because the Master won't ever walk out and fail to return.”
—Lamentations 3:28-31, The Message

There is a great old song “I Want Jesus to Walk with Me,” and in my mind I can hear it being sung in rich, resonant tones with a touch of melancholy yearning. Reading through the book of Lamentations in The Message version, I have been struck again how little I really understand about God. And some of the stuff I read there makes me think about this more: Do I really want Jesus to walk with me? Do I want the God who takes me by the hand and leads me into pitch-black darkness to walk with me? I suppose if I have to go into pitch-black darkness, I want him with me, but “walking with God” is maybe not the saccharine, moralistic, clearly defined road some of us want it to be. Instead walking with God might mean taking one step and another and another into the pitch-black night.

So what do I do in the darkness? Lamentations assures me God won’t ever walk out and fail to return; but that implies he does walk out. He takes me by the hand and leads me into pitch-black darkness. And he walks out.

I want Jesus to walk with me. But I’m terrified of him sometimes.

Priests

“I need you for my priest, and while we are at it, I’m available to you as your priest.”
—Eugene Peterson, The Jesus Way

“This is how one should regard us, as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God.”
—1 Corinthians 4:1

I think everyone wants to have someone be a step above them, willing to provide support or give direction. For most people, that would be parents or maybe a teacher. And there is a kind of safety in knowing there is some last resort you can turn to, someone with whom you will always be welcome. But what happens when that step above is suddenly gone? When a parent dies or is unavailable, when a teacher moves on to other things? When there is no one but you at the top of the ladder with lots of others below looking up. There is an aching sense of loneliness, of being cut off and unprotected in the world that no amount of other good things can take away.

This Sunday, the pastor of the church I visited talked about tears as the only way the soul can express the love it needs to express. So tears are about something that was loved and is lost. Or something that was needed and did not come. Tears are about parents who are gone too soon or even in good time, about innocence lost and loving the girl who lost it. As the sermon Sunday explained, God never says, “stop crying,” but he does say “stop doubting.” When the God who raised people to life seems so far off, when grief and sadness seem so near, how can I stop doubting?

I need you to be my priest. I need you to keep hope when I can’t, and then I need you to know that even in my weakness I will be a priest for you. And what I get from that is not the protection of knowing there is someone a step up from me, but recognition that it’s normal for things to be hard sometimes and now it’s me but maybe later it will be you. I get the revelation that it’s not about some place to stop where things are just as I always wanted them to be, but it’s about walking and keeping on walking until I am home. And the only way I can do that is with you. Maybe it is in the long process of walking that I finally come to approach the mysteries of God, that I begin to see even dimly what it means to have a God who does not often stop death but is able to raise the dead.

Tears and the Limits of Darkness

I have come to the somewhat obvious but long-coming conclusion that I can’t outrun sadness. I can’t leave it behind moving 2,000 miles away; I can’t convince it by doing all the right things that I am no longer deserving of its presence.

I am struggling to accept both the inevitability of sorrow and the necessity that it be limited. When I spent an afternoon at my silent retreat in tears, my spiritual director asked what my soul was telling me. Without thinking, I said: “This is what it feels like to breathe.” This is what it feels like to feel the limits of your humanity, this is what it feels like to know where your edges are, this is what it feels like to join with others in the Bible and ever since who grieve deeply but not without end, this is what it feels like to touch the edges of the mystery and the suffering of Christ. This is what it feels like to breathe.

Perhaps a measure of my habit in wanting to be “fine” or writing happy endings is that when I considered how to tell about this I right away wanted to say “Since I’ve learned to embrace my tears, my life has been great.” The fact is since I’ve tried to embrace my sadness, I have cried a lot, sometimes without anything like hope. I have asked questions with no answers and the pain of it feels nearly impossible to live with. But what has also happened is I have shared more of myself with others, I have prayed perhaps more authentically, realizing that if God can’t take my questions, no one can. I have experienced more of myself—having wept my way all the way to the edges of who I am. But still, it hurts. A lot.

At the same time I worry about endlessly indulging in a kind of morose recitation of my sorrows. Because then what happens is the dark things take too much place in my life and I am no longer able (or even willing) to fight them. A friend suggested I read something Eugene Peterson wrote in Five Smooth Stones about Lamentations. In it, Peterson talks about the need for limits to grief:

“Let the tears flow, but let them also cease! … Evil is not inexhaustible. It is not infinite. It is not worthy of a lifetime of attention…. Suffering assumes its place as one among other things. It is not everything. It is not the whole world” (pp. 123ff).

Without limits to the suffering, without locating it in place and time and naming it, the sorrow is not open to grace, which Peterson notes operates in history in the actual details of specific events. This has given me words with which to name both the exact things that cause me sorrow and also to name the seemingly irresistible darkness that threatens to overtake me at times. When sorrow is specific, when it is shared, it is not infinite, not everything, not the whole world. And when it is shared, it saves me from mercilessly blaming myself for its presence—something I do so completely and from such deep habit I hardly realize it. I need all these truths so much: accept the tears; name the sorrow but know its limits; it's not your fault.

I don’t know if these scattered words are enough to explain the deep effect this has had on me—is still having on me. I am trying both to be sad and at the same time to not be overwhelmed by darkness. The prayer of my heart comes best from Frederick Buechner in The Hungering Dark (p. 125):

“Lord Jesus Christ,
Help us not to fall in love with the night that covers us but through the darkness to watch for you as well as to work for you; to dream and hunger in the dark for the light of you. Help us to know that the madness of God is saner than men and that nothing God has wrought in this world was ever possible.

Give us back the great hope again that the future is yours, that not even the world can hide you from us forever, that at the end the One who came will come back in power to work joy in us stronger even than death. Amen.”

The Day I'm Waiting For

“I’ve been there and am going back. Make of it what you will.”
—Leif Enger, Peace Like a River

I walk up a long hill and I know—even before I get to the top I know what the river will be like because I can already hear it singing. And there it is at last, running clear and bright and irresistible in the warm white of that day. Without thinking I am drawn to it; I know at once it is the place I’ve always been going. When I get to the river’s edge I take the robe, full of dirt and torn with many sorrows, and sink it into the river—sink it with both hands pushing down until it touches all the way to the stones at the bottom.

For a moment it is just a crumpled pile of rags, then all at once the current catches and the robe is unfurled beside me. There is one place near the collar that I hold while the rest is pulled in time to the rhythm of the waters. And there at the bottom of the river just above the rocks, there in beauty of the light and crystal water I see my sorrows dance like the morning sun. The robe waves and trembles caught in the river’s pull, and I want to laugh to see how it is so quickly washed white, how it is so completely mended. It is pure and shining in the light and even after all that happened, even after so many things broke apart, there it is all the same but better—one and whole and soaked through with the glory of God.

I pull it out heavy and wet, and as I do a gust of wind billows the robe full and light and floats it gently through the air. I put it on and look around me at the others who have come. Now we know. Now we can say at last that we survived the great ordeal. And there is nothing left but to sing, to dance, to laugh, to delight in the new-making tears and the river of the blood of the Lamb.

Sabbath Breath

I am not sure I know how to breathe. If I’m aware of my breath at all, it is almost always too shallow and anxious. Even when I make a conscious effort to slow my breathing down, I still never feel like I’ve gotten that one big draught of air that would fill all my pores with oxygen and renew me with energy and life. In so many ways, I am dying for lack of breath.

Today the kids have school and Will and I are off work. This rare blessed event has dropped like an unexpected gift into the usual busy-ness of our days. And so I drink tea, have long conversations, remember again how much I love my husband, write, read, pet the cats, and in it all I breathe deeply.

I was reading the section in Eugene Peterson’s Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places about Sabbath. He talks about how our work can easily give us the wrong perspective about ourselves:

“When we work we are most god-like, which means that it is in our work that it is easiest to develop god-pretensions. Un-sabbathed, our work becomes the entire context in which we define our lives. We lose God-consciousness, God-awareness, sightings of resurrection.” (p. 117)

Going back again to the gifts of my silent retreat, I realize paradoxically that the weakness I so often fight against is itself a call to deeper breath, to an awareness of my own limitations and my deep need for God. So often I think I simply have to try harder, be more organized, do more stuff. But those thoughts merely perpetuate the lie that I am the one who is keeping everything going. Sabbath breath means I breathe in all the fear and uncertainty of my own limitations, and breathe out the ultimately comforting revelation that it is not I, but God who is in charge. And that is the breath in which I find life—the humility of recognizing it’s not up to me, and the peace of knowing it never was.

Willing

I ended the “prayer of tears” (see below) that I wrote on my silent retreat with the phrase “willingness to remember.” For me willingness has to do not only with a willingness to call to mind the things that cause me sadness, but a willingness to stay with them long enough to see what I might learn from them. It has been my habit to avoid simply sitting and feeling something. I’d rather fill my head with all the reasons I should not be feeling it or the reasons I must be pathological for feeling it, or at the very least a detailed intellectual and poetic explanation of why I should be happy enough to not feel it any more. You get the picture.

But one of the things that has really stuck with me after the retreat this weekend is a comment made by my spiritual director. He said, “Until you embrace your own suffering, the suffering of Christ will mean nothing to you—nothing more than an intellectual exercise.” What does it mean to embrace my suffering? I have spent enough time with my sorrows to think that I have embraced them. But the fact is, while they are very familiar to me, I am still embarrassed by them. I bite back tears even when there’s no good reason I shouldn’t share them with the person I am sitting with. Does embracing my suffering mean, in part, that I stop trying to push the part of me full of tears back out into the snow like an unruly aunt who keeps showing up drunk at family holidays?

I don’t think embracing suffering means that I spend my time wallowing endlessly in sadness. For me, at least, it means a willingness to go to those places where there are no answers and let my tears speak. It means embracing all of the ways I am broken, failing, and flawed. It means recognizing the limits of my own humanity. I do not know what will happen if I even come close to understanding what it means to embrace my suffering, or what I will discover about God in the depths of it. For now, let me find courage to simply stay with the prayer that I am willing to find out. I am willing …

The Prayer of Tears

With Rachel refusing comfort from beyond the grave,
with all those who weep ahead for a world they do not yet see ...

With those who sat and wept by the rivers of Babylon
and all those who spend their days as exiles and strangers in the land ...

With barren women waiting to be remembered
and tortured kings mourning losses through the night ...

With the kneeling Christ alone in the garden
and the hopeless disciples after his death ...

I bring my tears as a prayer for all that is in me saying:
we were not made for this,
for all that protests against the seemingly endless night ...

And before there is hope of resurrection or even light,
there is only this:
a flood of tears, an empty sky, and a willingness to remember.

Something from Nothing

In their Sunday school class, my kids were learning how God made something out of nothing. They were given the chance to make something from blocks, from clay, and then there was nothing but an empty box. No one could make something from that.

I have been reading Michael Card’s book about lament, The Hidden Face of God. He describes the darkest place of pain as being when one has completely given up hope of being comforted:

“[T]here is no hope. It simply does not exist … anywhere…. At this darkest stage—in order for comfort to exist—it must be created out of the nothingness that smothers the sufferer. Comfort ex nihilo, which is to say, a comfort that can only come from the God who alone can create something out of nothing” (p. 38).

I wonder what it would look like for God to create comfort out of nothingness? As that moment when the light first ripped through the darkness (“And God said …”) how would comfort be spread through the lonely vigil of suffering? Whatever that comfort looks like, there is creativity in that moment, where something previously unimagined comes into being. When I am lost in darkness, I am least able to be creative and find myself again and again being drawn into a hopeless spiral of nothingness and I can’t begin to imagine something strong enough to pull me away from its vortex. And I also can’t imagine that I would know how to share myself with others in that state or that they would even want me to if I could.

But maybe it’s not so complicated as I always want to make it. Maybe it’s as simple as someone walking into a room and speaking my name, someone holding my eyes a moment longer than is needed, someone who offers a hug and with it a deep and healing acceptance. When the darkness threatens to overtake me still, I am praying and hoping and begging to be reminded: into that space of suffering, there is a God whose imagination is never-ending, a God with ongoing power to create something from nothing—whether the very world itself or hope from the deepest despair.

The Risk of Surrender

I came to know the hymn “I Surrender All” in the small Baptist church my dad was pastor of during my childhood years. We’d stand at the end of the evening service, the stained glass windows muted black with night and sing. The mood of the song was tired, gentle, even peaceful at the end of a long Sunday. But what I have come to think about surrender is far more unsettling.

Surrender is always a choice with unknown result, and so of necessity must involve risk. Whether I surrender to a feeling, such as grief, or to my husband of fifteen years, I am surrendering at least in some part to the unknown. No matter how many times I’ve grieved, I will never completely know its depths. No matter how long I’ve known someone I will never know them fully. There is always the risk that this particular time, my giving will not be wanted, or that things will interfere and it will not be received as I intended.

In An Experiment in Criticism, C.S. Lewis describes the risk in surrendering without a guaranteed result, in this case to a work of art.

The first demand any work of any art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)

In the case of God, I can at least know that he deserves my surrender. And maybe I can think of my life as a work of art to which I must surrender. My task as Lewis describes is to look, listen, receive, and get out of the way. And, even with trembling hands, my task is to learn surrender: to surrender my past and my dreams for the future, to surrender my children to the violence of an unpredictable world, to surrender myself to the unknown depths of grief, to the fears of new relationships, new work, new routines, to the confusing mystery of an inscrutable God. But even as I surrender with fear and self-doubt and sometimes even anger, I pray that I will discover the God who deserves it, singing presence and comfort into my life like a song in an old church at night.

Of Impatience, Intolerance, and Intensity

If patience were the only fruit of the Spirit, I would likely spend my life in a decidedly fruitless state. One definition of impatience is intolerance, as in “impatient of delay.” Another definition is “eagerly desirous,” as in an intensity of yearning. So I ask myself in my current impatient state: where is the place where my intolerance meets my eager intensity?

I am intolerant of pain, and so I try to be busy enough to not have to notice it. I am eagerly desirous of doing something meaningful with my life. Perhaps the place where intolerance meets intensity is the place those two desires are in conflict. What if my way of doing something meaningful throws me into the path of pain (as it almost certainly will)? Or what if I am not able to do something meaningful until I slow down enough to accept, even welcome, the pain or the lack of purpose I sometimes feel?

I love to write about the redemption of suffering, love to write about doubt and darkness and the search for meaning within it. But the fact is, for all my many words, I find myself so often feeling bewildered by life and confused about what to do next. Maybe in the end, what I’m most impatient with is myself. But you can’t will yourself to be less intense, can’t will yourself to be less critical of yourself—or at least if you can, I’m lousy at it. So what do I do? Today, I found an answer in my dog.

One minute, his entire being is focused on finding a way through the fence to see what is on the other side and he is totally and completely intolerant of delay. But all I need to do is call his name, even softly, and in a split-second it’s as if the fence never existed and all he can see is me, his joy expressed in an eager thrashing of his tail as he jumps up to greet me. His intensity is focused, but also amazingly flexible. There will always be something else. Whether the depths are of pain or purpose, why not find your patience in what is most present and stay with it as long as you can?

Gratitude

There are some who advocate an “attitude of gratitude” because of the benefits it offers for one’s emotional health. The more grateful you are, goes the thinking, the happier you will be. And I’m sure this is at least partly true. Recognizing the things that often go unnoticed and giving thanks for them surely deepens our sense of wonder and our joy at what it means to be human. But what about giving thanks when things are hard? Giving thanks when we don’t get what we want, when we are lonely, when we despair?

There is a song by Nicole Nordeman called “Gratitude” in which she describes giving thanks if we never get rain, daily bread, safety, peace—giving thanks for lessons learned in hungering and thirsting after God. A friend recently told me that anyone who hungers and thirsts after righteousness will find herself restless and ill at ease much of the time. But what other way is there to be?

The joy of this kind of restlessness comes in the times when in spite of circumstances, we find ourselves drawn in to caring conversation, find ourselves unaccountably moved to tears by the gentleness of men singing, find ourselves filled with the sense that though we are thirsty and hungry, we are not alone.

So this Canadian Thanksgiving day, I am grateful for brothers and sisters on the journey. I am grateful for times of absence and how they make me appreciate presence more. I am grateful for tears. And if nothing else, I am grateful for a heart still alive enough to burn.

(Not) Knowing God

“When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple courts he found men selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple area, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables.” (John 2:13-15)

Jesus made a whip out of cords. How did it happen? He took in the scene and was enraged. He stopped, sat down maybe, turned his fingers over and formed knots, one after another, to make a whip. Before his hands touched blind eyes with mud to make them see, before his hands broke bread to feed the hungry, his hands worked leather (or whatever the cords were made of) and created a whip.

What I realize thinking about this passage is I don’t know the first thing about God. I want him to be tame, to be someone I can understand, someone who talks to me and makes me feel good about who I am and what I am doing. But other times I think God’s not interested in making me feel good, but making me, simply … less. Less of me. More of him. Less of my own self-preoccupation and fretfulness with pleasing people and more of that nameless beauty I find but do not understand in rare moments of pure grace. More of the one who, with his own hands, makes whips but who also later gives his back to be struck with them on our behalf. What kind of terrifying mystery is that God?

For me, that is a God who asks you to follow even if you never see, never understand why terrible things happen—who asks you to follow even without anything like some big thing that makes it all “worth” it. A God who asks you to face up to the very worst of who you are, but who also leaves you with the hope of finding the very best of who he is. I guess lately I am thinking how much I don’t want to underestimate God, to tuck him in my back pocket and thank him for making me happy in precisely the way I wanted. Maybe I get closer to thanking him for making me unhappy if it means it grows me and shapes me to be more than I ever could be without him. There are times when it hurts like hell, but I can’t abide the alternative—being stuck in my own self with no way of escape.

A friend gave me an article from the web site of Fleming Rutledge, an Episcopal Priest, about Mother Teresa’s faith and doubt. The article (worth reading for its own merits), also contains following quote from Flannery O’Connor:

"What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe. If you feel you can’t believe, you must at least do this: keep an open mind. Keep it open toward faith, keep wanting it, keep asking for it, and leave the rest to God…You arrive at enough certainty to be able to make your way, but it is making it in darkness. Don’t expect faith to clear things up for you. It is trust, not certainty." (The Habit of Being, p. 354)

The God who makes whips, the God who is not at all an electric blanket but more of a cross … that God is the one I reach after in the darkness. And though terrifying, he is much more satisfying than the God I fashion after myself and fit in my back pocket. The 17th century poet John Donne addresses God thus in Holy Sonnet XIV: “Batter my heart, three personed God.” Batter indeed. And teach me not fight it when you do.

Mercy

When I was a child, I was painfully shy and quiet. Not many people who know me now would believe it, but it is true. I remember horrible times in class when I would erase so hard I’d make a hole in the paper and would need another one, but I was too afraid to ask the teacher. I would sit and hope, I suppose, for something like mercy—for the teacher to walk by and notice my need and so provide for it.

For one definition of mercy, there must be some kind of power relationship. The person with the power shows mercy; the one without power receives it. In the Bible, the Pharisees had power and a whole lot of rules; they did not have mercy. There is a way of looking down on someone that would seem to have the air of compassion, but it in fact maintains the power relationship. I am here looking down on you in pity, and I, the one who has it together and understands how things should go, will lower myself to help you. It feels great to give that kind of mercy, but utterly lousy to receive it. Biblical mercy, it seems to me, is something different:

“Chesed, mercy, means the ability to get right inside the other person's skin until we can see things with his eyes, think things with his mind, and feel things with his feelings” (William Barclay, Daily Study Bible, commentary on Matthew).

Blessed are the ones that can get inside someone’s skin so much that they are able to show grace without power getting in the way. I am usually so preoccupied with what is going on in my own skin that I am half-hearted at best in my attention to those around me. And even the times when I am able to break past my self-consciousness and try to focus on another’s experience, I find myself filled with despair. There is so much sadness in me, so much more in other people. Where is God in all this? Where, indeed, is mercy?

Maybe mercy is found in that very moment of letting down your guard to another person, in having someone you can trust with your weakness. Maybe mercy is found in recognizing that though we suffer deeply, we are not the only ones. Mercy is all about relationship, not power. Mercy is what God shows to us and what we show to each other when we best live up to the example of Christ. In this way, mercy is not just a noun but a verb—not a thing, but an action. So my prayer today and always is for me to “mercy” others and for God to “mercy” me.

Disorientation

Today I was at a coffee shop with my kids. While they ate their breakfast bagels, I watched a man with dirty clothes and scruffy hair count coins on his table. He had a small coffee and he kept sorting out his change, occasionally looking up at the menu board. He counted again, looked up once more, and finally stopped. Then he put the money in his pocket and slumped over his coffee again, a tired look in his eyes.

I grew up in a large city and spent time working with the poor, so I am no stranger to people down on their luck and no stranger to the multitude of arguments people have on whether you should ever give money. What surprised me today was how hard it was for me to even look at the man because when I did I had to bite back tears.

This week at work we had a conference for the students with Dr. Gideon Strauss and the theme was “Wonder, Heartbreak, and Hope.” Part of the talk was modeled on Walter Brueggemann’s Spirituality of the Psalms in which he describes movement among the psalms through orientation, disorientation, and reorientation. Brueggemann re-configured an earlier work on the psalms for this version, which came out in response to September 11: “these tragic events suggest how urgent the descent into disorientation is for the practice of faith” (xv). It is difficult and yet necessary to reach for God in moments of disorientation. And yet so often we put all our energy into convincing others we are fine, keep ourselves so busy that we can’t hear the heartbreaking questions rolling around in our minds.

The question I most want to answer, and likewise the one I most like to ask is this: How did you survive? And sometimes I have to ask it of myself, so I remember that reorientation is not always where I live. We are all of us pilgrims in a land of darkness and sooner or later we will find ourselves in the storms of disorientation. What we need is to tell each other the stories of how we found our way back, to tell those stories loudly and with hope so we can believe.

For the man in the coffee shop, I paused slightly on my way out the door to drop a toonie on his table. Before I was even close enough, he put his hand out—a response he made automatically and without hesitation. And he said “thank you” to me as I dropped the coin in his hand and kept walking. Part of me criticized myself for giving money, something I had so often been warned against, and part of me wanted to pat myself on the back for enacting some kind of biblical parable of lost coins found and the gift of unexpected grace. Instead I found myself once again biting back tears. For all the times I want to deny my own descent into disorientation and the weakness I find there, I saw in this man what I have not yet learned: the simple act of being broken and ready to receive.

Uncreated Light

I don’t know when or why this ritual started, but it has been part of my children’s bedtime routine as long as I can remember. When I tuck them in, I say the Numbers 6 blessing over them: “The Lord bless you and keep you, the Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you, the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.” I tried for a while using other blessings from the Bible, but they didn’t go for it. Their sense of ownership of these words is so complete, they still smile whenever they hear it in church and whisper, “Mom, that’s my blessing!”

Yesterday we were walking around the zoo and it was a beautiful sunny day. Sitting on a bench, I closed my eyes and soaked in the sense of warmth, well-being, and life that sun brought to me. I could almost feel my anxieties letting go, the irritation of being sick and the loneliness of moving lessening as my body relaxed. There, with the sun on my face, I felt strong, at peace, and whole. And maybe I got right then a hint of what it must be like for God to make his face shine on me. I wish it were as easy as finding some sun to soak my face in. But the light that truly cuts through despair comes from God alone, which I suppose is good news for despair that seems at times God-sized.

Today in church we sang an old Latin hymn, paraphrased here by John Dryden. The second verse addresses the Creator Spirit as “source of uncreated light.” The word “uncreated” stuck with me. Uncreated in that it is above, before, and beyond created things; uncreated in that it is beyond human strength to produce it. I think it is normal to want to find again the feeling of goodness I got sitting with the sun on my face. But no matter how determined my efforts to find it, the lesson of uncreated light is that it comes ever and only as a gift. I can’t create it. I can’t control it. I can only yearn for it, and pray for myself and for others that God would “make his face shine on us.”

Maybe the best news about uncreated light is that it is, by nature, greater than all the created darkness humans have brought forth in the world since Eden. Uncreated light that shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it. Light made not by human hands, but the irrepressible light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. So God of uncreated light, shine this day your face upon us. Cut through the night that threatens and make us believe again in light so great that no darkness created by human hands can even come close to dimming its glory.

The Soundtrack of My Life

The words that we speak and hear and think every day are like the lines in a movie. The same words, the same lines, can have a completely different meaning depending on the soundtrack behind them. A simple phrase like “Here he comes!” can conjure up dread or delight, depending on whether the music hits an ominous tone or a crescendo of excitement. So with our words, we say “Here he comes!” or whatever else and we think, perhaps, that we know what those words mean, that somehow we are in control of them. But running underneath the noise of our many words runs a soundtrack of God’s story for us, and if we do not make time and space to listen, it is entirely possible we will get the meanings completely wrong.

When we lived in Grand Rapids, I heard a few notes and thought I knew where my story was going: working with the poor, visiting prisons and homeless shelters, taking seminary classes—it all fit together and seemed like good work that God would be pleased for me to do. But into this there is a giant turn as we move far away from family and friends, cutting me off from what I think I was supposed to be doing. And in that process, I have realized how much I think there is some kind of hierarchy with God—people who work with the poor are the “coolest,” people who serve privileged white corporate places are less admirable. Is it so hard for me to let go of that instant sense of moral superiority that working with the oppressed gave me? Have I in fact moved farther from God’s will being farther from the poor in my day-to-day life? I am impatient for God to use me in some large, obvious way, but perhaps what he wants is for me to do a whole lot of small, hidden things instead.

I find myself constantly thinking of better stories than the one God seems to be writing for me, stories that even seem more in line with God’s purposes on earth. But then I go back to the idea of soundtrack and realize I have no clue about God’s purposes on earth or how I might best serve them. I have the music of my own desires playing so loudly in my head I don't "get" it even when I think I do.

During our move and just after, my son watched the movie King of Dreams over and over again. In the part where Joseph struggles to understand God’s purpose he sings a song from jail called, “You Know Better Than I.” I downloaded it because I find it so compelling. And maybe God is trying to show me even as I write that this is the soundtrack of my life at this moment. A soundtrack that tells me God does know better than I do. Do I really believe that? No. But every time I hear it playing as I drive alone in the car, I find myself weeping. Tears for what I had that I find it so hard to let go of, tears for how much I want to be able to lose myself in whatever story God is writing, tears for all the things that make it hard for me to trust, tears for recognizing that whether I am serving in prison or feeding the corporate bottom line, God loves me the same. EXACTLY the same. And when I can hear even faintly that music behind the work of my life, I finally begin to believe the story will turn out right in the end.

Where Water Once Was

Recently we hiked out into the Badlands of Alberta. Although that day it was dry and dusty, all around me were evidences that at some point in the not too distant past there had been small rivers of water flowing down the clay hills into the dirt.

As I think about my life now that I have entered what Eugene Peterson calls “the exile of moving to a new place,” I compare it to the rugged landscape of the Badlands. Not that I consider Edmonton a bad land—on the contrary, there are many things that are lively and interesting in this city. But for me, leaving an established identity connected with community, vocation, and even geography was leaving behind something like a lush and growing forest in which I was comfortably rooted. And now I find myself in an unfamiliar place, rootless and disconnected. I can either spend my days endlessly sighing and looking back at where I came from or find a way to grow through the experience.

In Under the Unpredictable Plant, Eugene Peterson describes this possibility of growth: “None of these acts of limitation or confinement in itself produces a deepened and more authentic life, but they provide the conditions that make it possible” (p. 90). So there I am with the question: Is the seemingly inhospitable environment of the Badlands actually the best place for growth? Is this time in my life, with so much more silence than I was used to, a time where I can look deeper into the person I am and find a way to live more authentically?

I believe it is, but I also know that life in the Badlands can be tough and no one really wants to stay there. So while I try to grow new life, while I nurture within me the gifts of patience and acceptance, all I can do is set firmly in my mind the image of places where water once was. And depending on the day, I may be filled with sadness—thinking of how much I wish the water were still there, or filled with hope—knowing that someday it will be back. I stand where water once was. And in the tension between sadness and I hope, I live.

Amazing Wonders (or, Surviving 5 Pets, 4 People, and 3 Days Driving)

How is it done? I can hardly tell you, only that it is, in fact, DONE! All of us (including the 5 pets) made it alive and well to Edmonton. I am taking a detour from my usual blogging of deep thoughts to share some photos of this extraordinary event and some things we learned along the way.

It begins with a truck--which is later packed with the fine-tuned skill of a master artist by an amazing brother-in-law and a big crowd of friends happy to give up a Saturday morning to haul books.


Clear out the house and deal with a cranky car carrier that was NOT, in fact, "easy to install" before departing.


Enjoy rainy Chicago on the way to Wisconsin:


Travel through Wisconsin to Minneapolis at Ray & Janel's house to spend the night. Lovely to have relatives who do not fear the descent of 6 people, 5 pets, and 2 vehicles into their space. Now that's hospitality!



It really helps to have a dog who happily trots around rest stops...



... and is equally happy to hop back in the car (along with the guinea pig and gecko in their cages)!



And the cats? In their cages in the back of the camper. Seriously annoyed but helped by large doses of catnip and Feliway (the "happy kitty" phermone). I kept sniffing it but it didn't seem to help me.



Apparently we were in North Dakota. This is about all I remember:



The key to any successful border crossing when immigrating to Canada: get one agent who is more interested in giving your kids a flag than looking at your paperwork and another agent who asks in amazement "hey, where'd you get this, the internet?" when you hand over your paperwork and told his friend "look, they already did this--so I don't need to look at their stuff, then, right?" That's right, buddy boy.



Night at a lovely hotel in Manitoba made peaceful by a ridiculously lenient pet policy (if only they knew how far that $5 pet fee took us...) and by some welcome presents from adoring aunts:



All I can say about Saskatchewan is the prairies are drop-dead gorgeous...





But there's not much to do but count hay bales.



And besides going on FOREVER, they do not believe in rest stops. Or any kind of stop. Except tiny little gas stations like this one, which were quaint in theory but not really in reality. But it's amazing how 4 hours with nothing in sight but more hay bales will make you welcome even this little shack with rejoicing and great anticipation.



And after I have no clue how many HOURS and KILOMETERS (don't say miles--this is Canada, remember?), we finally arrive in Alberta.



And to Edmonton and our new house with all 4 of us and all 5 of the pets alive and (mostly) well!! If that's not worthy of amazement and wonder, I don't know what is.

Do It Anyway

There are people we don’t see that much with whom we have made conscious efforts to connect in this time before we move. And every time we leave, I think, “Why don’t we do this more often?” Even though my first instinct most of the time is to burrow in at home, telling myself I am just too tired to socialize, there is always something I get from being with people that connects me in deeper ways that I realize only afterwards that I am hungry for. Last Sunday we stood up in front of church to say and receive goodbyes from the congregation and even though it was full of sadness and even though my initial instinct is to slink quietly out of town and avoid goodbyes of every kind, it was well worth doing.

In saying goodbye, in the last times you see people there is awkwardness—who hugs whom and how do you approach the other person? Do you sit and cry together or make jokes and remember the good times? How do you get past the gigantic white elephant in the room which shouts loudly of your impending separation? How can anything good you say overcome that loss? My own prohibitive nature tells me to avoid such tension but I believe firmly this is something I should overcome. In these gatherings with friends, every single time—not one exception—I have come away with a deeper love of others and a greater sense of well-being that comes in being part of that caring community. Something I know I can’t get being tired on the couch at home by myself.

So I push beyond my inertia, my weariness, my exhaustion at saying goodbye too much, and I listen to the voice urging me forward … do it anyway. Get past your tattered emotions, past your awkwardness, past your fears of saying or doing the wrong thing, and just be with the people who love you. Be with the people who have helped define who you are, and receive the gift of their humanity—imperfect and tentative though it may be.

More Than We Are

“Never confuse your perception of yourself with the mystery of who you really are” (Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel).


All of us want to be more than we fear we are. We see ourselves as competent maybe, admired hopefully, but underneath there is the nagging suspicion that we are simply insignificant nobodies whose lives matter to none but a very few.

It is so easy for me to set up my perception of myself—my anxious, fretful, loathsome, small-minded perception—as the all-encompassing truth, to make it so large that all the compliments in the world are dwarfed into nothingness beside it. But what is the truth? Can I accept the love of others and believe in my heart that God loves me with pure and constant grace?

Twice this week I’ve heard people wonder—we know that God loves the poor, calls them “blessed,” so does that mean the opposite is also true? That he does not love the rich? What then are we, as members of the richest part of the world, to do? Harder than the eye of a needle for us to figure it out, but I don’t think God’s love for the poor necessitates disdain of the rich. It all has to do with perception.

Whether rich or poor, we all of us want to believe that at our core there is mystery beyond our wildest imaginings, that we are of great significance and the world would simply not be the same without us. And where God comes is to the ones in whom that craving for mystery is strongest, to those who most know how completely beyond their own minds it is to even imagine a better way to be, to the ones who yearn with all their heart to get to something true and deep. No matter what our economic status, no matter whether we are crippled by self-perceptions or preoccupied with maintaining them, all of us in the end must search beyond the things that make us shallow and keep us starved and listen for the longings within us that whisper over and over like a song: You matter. More than it is in you to think, you matter, yes, you do!

What It Is to Be at Home

"Loss is as daily as bread; happiness alights where it will ... and for all this, life is good." (Robert Clark, In the Deep Midwinter)

I know what it is to feel like there is no place you can land. Not only in your physical space, which in my case is filled with chaos and boxes right now, but also in the deepest parts of your mind. There are times when I can literally think myself in circles, not finding a safe place of certainty that feels solid enough to stay more than a few momentary seconds.

But I have noticed more in these days of confusion how much it means to have places and people around which I feel completely at home. A kitchen that is more comforting than the one in my own home partly because it is filled with people who “get” me so well that I don’t put on any sort of pretense. I know whatever I say it will be okay and they will love me anyway and maybe even laugh with me. A poplar tree I can see in my backyard that I can stare at for hours as the leaves ripple in the wind. The way it is when Will holds me slightly longer than I expect. The way I feel with people who aren't ever sick of hearing from me, people who in their words and in their silence says that they are truly for me, wanting to do whatever they can to make it okay because they believe in me. And into my self-doubt, there is one who speaks the most amazing thing: that I make other people feel good.

I read someplace that grief is intensified depending on your sense of permanence. The more permanent the loss, the deeper the grief. I find for me these people and places where I know I am at home cause me great sadness for how much I will miss them. And it is only right that I should feel grief over so great a loss. But this time feels different than others I have left because this time I have a more convincing belief in solidness, belief that places like home do exist and however long it takes or however surprising the source, I will and must find those places again.
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Using the Poor

It seems like social justice is becoming trendy—at least among a certain crowd. There are lots of new books about revolutions, rebuilding under-resourced communities, alternative living with the poor. All these join the line of folks like John Perkins who have been working in community development for decades. Why this interest? I think that it taps into a major part of what’s wrong with our wealthy, selfish, society and maybe has awakened people to the fact that we can’t live the way we want without affecting others in our city and even across the globe.

I love this interest in poverty and issues of justice, but I am concerned that we not jump so quickly on the bandwagon that we do damage to others. Are we so eager to prove that we are “hip” with the poor that we organize 1-day work projects and sling our arms over the shoulder of someone we don’t know in order to show our friends how helpful and servant-like we are? What about the person in the photo after the day-long work project? Do you continue to call her? If not, if you don’t even know her name, then you have no right whatsoever to prop her up like some kind of decoration in your shiny self-image of savior to the poor.

I understand the impulse to help, but I believe our desire to have something back, something that reflects well on us, is full of the same kind of selfishness and superiority that we are trying to fight against. Culture weeds its way deeply into our hearts and we must every day again cut away the illusions to the ugly truth of what we really are.

The long-term, committed relationship that brings real change in the lives of others is a hard, labor-intensive, and often pain-filled journey. Many times with nothing like a happy ending—quite the opposite. So why do it? Because people deserve the honor of being more than a nameless prop in our photo albums. Because we ourselves cannot hope to be more than shallow props unless we risk living deeply with others.

Dignity and Drawing Lines

Is it automatic that the minute you take a stand believing in something you automatically draw an invisible line of sorts between you and those who do not believe? Do we need some “other” person to stand for all that we are not in order to give us our own sense of identity? By making them the “not-me” we see them only as a two-dimensional featureless being whose only purpose comes in relation to me: what they are does not matter, only that they are NOT this. But why must our sense of self come at the price of another person’s dignity?

It breaks my heart that religious people are often the best line-drawers of them all—not only between us and those on the other side of the belief line, but also among ourselves. We are so quick to set up the lines, the “shoulds” and “have-to’s” and all the detailed explanations of our belief that clearly mark the lines around us, shutting off all those who do not meet our criteria. Can we see past the lines to the person on the other side? Can we see past the lines to the reality of our own contradictions and complexity and allow that same contradiction and complexity in others?

Moral superiority feels great, and I freely admit how easily I slip into it, especially with those who are supposed to believe the same things that I do but live as though none of it really matters. I “get it” so much more than they do, I tell myself, and I feel great sitting in judgment on them. I enjoy drawing lines between myself and them just as much as they may enjoy drawing lines between themselves and non-believers.

But what is missing in me, in everyone who draws lines and allows other people to become two-dimensional representations of some anti-belief is a fundamental value of human dignity. What would change if even in my worst “enemies,” even in those believers whose lives seem empty and shallow and selfish, I began to see real people filled with confusion and suffering and mystery—real people with failings no more or less than my own? Am I up to the task of loving that much? It’s far, far easier to draw lines than embrace dignity. And no matter how I wish I was a person who loved unconditionally and saw the dignity in every person, I know in my heart I am the worst line-drawer of them all.

Baptism Every Day

I was baptized just over 20 years ago in the immersion tank at South Baptist Church. What I remember most are the sounds. The sound the water made when I waded down the stairs, the sound all muffled as I was dunked under, and most of all, the sound the water made as I was raised up again. There was something fresh and new about it—a whole new life possible with the resurrection promise of the water falling off me.

So now with a whole new life before me in our move, I remember my baptism and wonder … how easy is it really to believe in “newness of life”? Taken out of all that is familiar, will it be easier to re-imagine myself, to rid myself of old habits and ruts in my thinking and truly be able to live with wholeness and creativity? Or will all those things that have imprinted themselves into my very being cling stubbornly to my skin no matter how far away I move, no matter many times the water of new life cascades over me?

Maybe what I need is baptism every day again. At the start of each morning, someone could take me out to a lake or pool and dunk me under the water, saying, “Buried in the likeness of his death; raised in the likeness of his resurrection.” And I could hear that sound of water falling away and be shocked enough out of all that pulls me toward lethargy and status quo and despair to believe again in a new way. To trust that no matter how slowly, those ruts in my mind can begin to “fill in” with more positive ways of thinking, that even if only imperceptibly, I may be able to inch closer toward who I am meant to be.

It’s hard to believe in “newness of life.” And I have no doubt that it will take something as dramatic as a lake full of water in my face to help me try.

Tears, Part 2: At the Jail

After my midnight thoughts last night, this morning at the jail workshop, one of the women who had been pretty quiet talked about a painful breakup she never saw coming. She asked, "But what I want to know is really, what do I do about this? How do I even start to rebuild when all I can do is cry?"

Trying not to leap out of my seat, I said to her something about what it's like to have your faith in the world shaken, to doubt the things you thought were true and have everything tainted by that mistrust. Then I told her, "Sometimes we want to make it more complicated than it is. Rebuilding trust is a long process, but you can heal, and most importantly, your tears right now--nothing more than sitting and crying and saying this is worth grieving because it hurt me badly--just crying is creating a foundation of health on which you can rebuild your life. Without those tears now, you cannot have health later. You could walk away from it all, harden with the cynicism and say, 'I'm fine,' but by allowing yourself to cry, you are honoring yourself and your pain and making the best possible future."

After which the rest of the room burst into applause and she continued to cry. I say this in part because I am a neurotic approval-seeker like the rest of the world and I was touched deeply by their response, but more so to point out the improbable connection between my own midnight neurosis and the very word a room full of women in jail needed to hear. Maybe this explains why I stake so much on the one who allows us, even in our greatest weakness, to speak lovely words to one another.

Tears and the Last Person You'd Want

I am realizing how hard it is for me to just cry ... just cry and not judge that I should not be crying so much, not wonder what pathology my too-frequent weepfests may be symptoms of, not imagine what the perfect person would do and say if he or she were with me in my pain. It's all just mental gymnastics as a way of avoiding the simple, unadultered grief of loss, and the reality that there is nothing to do but feel it.

Alone with my midnight thoughts I realize how often tears are an opening for something else. When in pain, God is often the first person I blame. He is the source of the suffering, the one whose world seems hopelessly unjust and terribly wounding. So why would I care where he is in my pain? Mostly he feels far away. Tears, however, can be the place by which the last person we wish to see enters into the deepest parts of us. My seminary prof told me the early church saw the Good Samaritan story as just this sort of dilemma--bleeding on the side of the road, you'd love to be rescued by the priest, the Levite, by some doctor, or just about anyone EXCEPT the one guy who's actually there. You'd rather stay alone and rot than be helped by him. But maybe it's the desperation of the moment--there is simply no one else to turn to--that allows the possibility for grace, allows us to push past the walls of defense, blame, anger, self-righteousness, or whatever else, to realize that right in front of us is one with the depths of compassion we so desperately need.

The moment of tears is a moment of possibility. Will they close me off farther--turn me into someone whose heart is too burdened to enter into the lives of others? Or will they awaken in me the possibility that God, the very one I so often imagined standing far off indifferent to my pain is in fact the one leaning over my face, waiting out my reluctance and keeping me alive with his breath.

Holding on to Water

Getting ready in less than 8 weeks to move to another country so far from the people and places by which I have identified myself has caused me at certain moments to feel a fearful sort of grasping. It happens every time I am with a friend or in a familiar environment. Right in the midst of these moments, I find myself thinking “I won’t ever come here again; I won’t sit face-to-face with this person in such an off-hand, unplanned way again …” and instead of being present and enjoying the moment, I am filled with dread trying to hold on to what I know I cannot keep.

You’d think I would have grown accustomed to losses by now and figured out how, as a friend recently reminded me, to “grieve deeply and fully.” But still I resist it. Is resisting loss a sign of life and hope or a way to avoid the painful feelings it creates? Do I resist because something in me believes that we are created for more than unredeemed sorrow or because I see myself as less than adequate to the task of feeling grief fully and well? Maybe it’s something of both.

Either way, the effort to grasp is like holding on to water—fingers curled tightly around my fist letting water splash the outside of my hands, thinking that because I’m holding so tightly, somehow I have captured the essence of what water is. But in doing so, I entirely miss the point, which is that water gives its gifts only as it is let go. I am refreshed because I pour out the water, not because I keep it in the predictable and contained safety of a cup. I am delighted on a summer day because I throw my whole body through the spray of a sprinkler, not because I keep it forever in a closed and stagnant pool. I am calmed by the sound that water makes only as it babbles over rocks and stones as it runs. The point is for water to show me its essence, I must let it go.



Which sounds very poetic and everything, but I am still left wondering how to let go, how to grieve fully and well? Do I simply cry as I walk through the grocery store, let the tears go down my cheeks unaccountably as I sit in the kitchen of my friend? Do I dare myself to be fully present even if it means feeling the pain wash over me?

Just minutes after I wrote these words, my friend Pat and I met for the last time before my move. She gave me a beautiful and deeply meaningful gift: a print by the artist Luba Lukova called “Rebekah, the Spring”. It is a depiction of Rebekah leaning forward with her hands wide open and out of her hands is flowing a rushing stream. I have had it less than 2 hours and already it is my favorite picture I own. I can’t stop staring at it. There is serenity in the face of Rebekah, and a smile on her face because with her care-worn brow and world-wise eyes, she has learned the life-giving power of letting water flow. Maybe if I stare at it enough, I will start to believe it is true.

All We Have

I have been thinking a lot lately about the quest for something perfect--for some perfect spiritual experience that convinces you once and for all of God's presence, some perfect lover or friend who will never disappoint, some perfect place from which you will never have to leave. No matter how obvious it may seem that I will never find such things, I am nonetheless surprised lately at how often I am disappointed by NOT finding them. Realizing that the steady, monotonous dust we walk through every day is as much part of God as dazzling shoots of flame in a bush. That people’s awkward words and unintended failures are as much a part of their gift to us as their love. That the potholes and root-invading trees of the place we live are the things we will miss as much as the rivers and blue skies.

I have been reading Walter Brueggemann’s Hope within History (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1987). He talks about the stages of faith experience in communal terms: “the stages are never about interiority and yet are always about interaction in which the person is evoked, assaulted, and impinged upon in formative and transformative ways” (p. 7). A profound thought: that even the times I feel assaulted or impinged upon are as valuable in transforming and forming my faith as those times when I feel loved or at home.

In the end, all I can do is think on the quote from which I titled this blog and realize that while we live within pain and imperfection, the people and words we find are “lovely, and all that we have.” And maybe the truest evidence of grace is that they are enough.