Lovely and All We Have

It's Not Working for Me

2012-02-10T08:37:00.000-08:00

Recently I heard the modern-day prophet and poet Walter Brueggemann speak about the Psalms. He said before we can receive the counter-world offered us in the Psalms, we have to speak the truth about the world we live in. And that is a world characterized by, among other things, greed, anxiety, amnesia, and despair. We have to tell the truth, Brueggemann suggests, to be willing to say it straight up: “It’s not working for me.”

This strikes a deep chord with me. Brueggemann named something I’ve been struggling to articulate as I look around me at so many people I know facing uncertain finances, exhaustion, vocational upheaval, and nearly debilitating anxiety. While a generation past could count on stable jobs for decades, it feels lucky now to have one that lasts more than five years. Even for hard-working middle-class folks, it’s becoming a less-achievable dream to own a home or put kids through college. And yet every day we wake up again, go to jobs, run around busy as anything, trying to deny these truths or ignore them because what choice do we have? No wonder despair is the end of it all.

It’s not working for me. I am tired of pretending it is.

When I reach out to that most ancient prayer book for comfort, I struggle to believe, as Brueggemann told us, we need not inhabit this world we are given, that every time we do so much as read a psalm we are engaging in a subversive action, holding on to the hope of a world of abundance where a table is spread and all are welcome, where Yahweh is every faithful in spite of change everywhere, where all the world is not on its way to hopelessness and despair but to renewal and shalom and newness of life. I reach out for that world with eagerness, with desperation; sometimes I can believe in that world, but sometimes I cannot.

It’s been a week or so since I heard Brueggemann and as I sit with his words, the thing I remember most is the palpable relief I felt deep in my soul at hearing someone say, “It’s not working. Of course it’s not. You’re not crazy for wishing it were otherwise. It’s not working.” Wherever we want to go next, I'm certain that is the point to begin.

Maybe it is truth-telling itself that holds the key. Maybe not until the truth is told does the door begin to open to the counter-world that all our hearts are longing for.

Go

2012-01-10T09:58:00.000-08:00

Reading Genesis again I am struck by how often the Lord God says to Abram “Rise up and move your tent” or “Go.” And he goes. Later he even says “take your only son and offer him as a sacrifice.”

I can run through this in my mind several different ways, including thinking of the Hebrew scriptures as training a wayward people how to be faithful to God’s leading, or even all of it as a metaphor or allegory. But mostly it reads like God’s just messing with Abram.

A friend said to me recently that she had “transition fatigue.” There’s the sense that after a time you will have landed someplace, be doing some work that fulfills your vocation, your purpose. To be in mid-life and not have found that may be approximately the same as how Abram felt when God was forever telling him to pull up his stakes and “go” somewhere else. Again? Really? It’s exhausting and there is an emotional cost to constantly applying for new jobs, moving to a new place, starting again.

What comfort can be found in all this? Maybe that I think it’s a new story in my life but really it’s an old, old story. Uprooting and sacrifice and uncertainty. And in all of it, God going with you from place to place to place. I wonder what it takes, if it’s possible to see it in the midst of the confusion or only years afterward, to be able to see the angels going up and down, to proclaim with surprise like Jacob: “God was in this place and I did not know it”?

Certain

2011-12-31T12:24:00.000-08:00

“The first noel, the angel did say, was to certain poor shepherds …”

The shepherds always seem to be on the edges of the nativity scene. Off to one side or another standing watch over the sheep or the donkey or maybe even the camel if the three kings aren’t up to the job. I’ve always had a soft spot for the shepherds, and I always try to edge them as close to the manger as I can in our little set. Those poor old shepherds know something. I’m sure of it.

For years when I was a kid, I misunderstood the use of the word “certain” the traditional carol “The First Noel.” I thought it was the verb. The carol wasn’t telling us which shepherds; it was telling us that the first noel happened to “certain” them—to make them sure of something. I love that. Even now, I hear it this way.

I love those shepherds in their certainty. As for me, most often I am not certain. I find myself waffling the instant I say something: “Well, I this is how I see it, but I can also see the other side.” In a postmodern age, it’s not unusual to do this, to be aware of options, to stand in the gray haze of infinite possibility rather than to stick your neck out and stand solid on one thing that makes you certain.

This isn’t all bad. I think it’s important to be aware of how power structures influence narratives, how we are necessarily limited when we speak by our own points of view. I also think it’s a very good thing that the church is growing in its acceptance of doubt, becoming more honest about the mysteries and paradoxes of the life of faith. We need to hear those things.

But we also need to hear that sometimes, on the edges of the action, are people who might have had an experience—as fleeting or inexplicable as it may be—when they were sure of something, when God’s love was real to them, when it all made sense. This coming year, those are the stories I want to hear—starting with the shepherds, and coming back to you. Because in those stories is life. I’m certain of it.

Advent: Finding the Way Home

2011-11-25T14:49:00.000-08:00

There is a stretch of country I drive on my way to work where the sky blends so seamlessly into the land that it’s hard to tell where the horizon is. When the sky is overcast, it’s even more difficult.

I wonder how I’d find my way if I were out in one of those fields in a snowstorm, blinded by the monotony of white. What anchors would I search out to help me find my way? a bit of fence or some dried brown grass on the crest of a hill? The fewer things there are in a landscape, the more desperately each one matters to show you where you are.

During times of tragedy we are stripped to essentials. The familiar anchors of belief seem far away and we are left numb, lost, with few signs to help us find our way home. We wander in the far country of despair, unsure of anything solid we can hold on to.

And this is Advent: the world waiting in quiet blindness, familiar anchors fading into white. It’s the moment before. What happens next changes the story forever, when into that nothingness, something solid, wrapped in flesh, is born. But for now, we wait. And the sky grows heavy with our longing.

A Holy Pause: Remembering 9/11

2011-09-10T10:17:00.000-07:00

Ten years later and the news, to borrow a phrase from Wordsworth, is “too much with us.” Bombarded with images of burning towers, stories of heartbreak and recovery, and endless analysis, I find myself desperate for a little more quiet, a little more space to reflect and remember, to sit with nothing but the clear blue sky and images and memories that are already too vivid in my mind.

Ten years later and when I look at the familiar skyline of my childhood, I still see only absence: the place where the towers used to be. And instead of filling that space with anything else, I would like to sit in silence. There is a different way to do this than what we see in the news.

In his post-9/11 reflection, Writing in the Dust, Archbishop Rowan Williams tells the story from John 8 of the woman caught in adultery. The tragedy seemed to have only two movements: guilt and death. It was an overdetermined narrative—with one way the story could be told, one way it could end. She was guilty and she should die for it, and the teachers of the law were waiting because there was no way Jesus could get out of this one.

So much of the news around 9/11 has had the same feel for the last decade. There are sweeping words used, black-and-white analysis with “good guys” and “bad guys,” and seemingly only one way for the story to end. The political scene has grown increasingly polarized, and there is more rigidity than ever in our debate. Is there a different way to do this? Is there another way to talk about tragic events that leaves room for the presence of the word? We might take a cue from what happens next in John 8.

Instead of playing out that moment the way everyone expected it to go, Jesus bends down and writes in the dust. Williams writes, “He hesitates. He does not draw a line, fix an interpretation, tell the woman who she is and what her fate should be. He allows a moment, a longish moment, in which people are given time to see themselves differently” (78). The story ends the way no one could have imagined: the accusers a little less self-righteous, the woman, freed in love, given the gift of a new life if she will take it.

This anniversary date, I wish for the same thing—for a moment of hesitation, a longish moment with space to tell this story differently, a holy pause to make our debate more compassionate, a chance to write in the dust of so many lives lost the promise of love arising still, new life out of ruins, hope from impossibility.

This 9/11 you won’t find me watching the special reports or reading the newspaper or listening to endless analysis on the radio. You will find me sitting outside someplace under a wide blue sky, taking a holy pause, letting the emptiness speak in sighs too deep for words.

Being Present

2011-05-25T12:14:00.000-07:00

Recently I went on a retreat. One question from my spiritual director has stuck with me. She asked: “Is there a different way to be present to an issue other than getting tangled up in it or ignoring it?”

I didn’t know at first how that could be possible—to be present to a concern without trying to solve it somehow or getting trapped in the intricacy of its emotional cords. More often I am guilty of thinking too much about things rather than not enough. More often I spend my time trying to solve or understand a situation. But to simply be present to it without doing that? It felt too much like laziness or neglect to me, failing to do the hard work needed to move forward. Yet as I have sat with the insights from the retreat, that is the one I keep coming back to, which must mean there is some truth there for me.

I remember the chair in the middle of the woods I sat in for a long time at the retreat. And then I look at a chair in my living room. I wonder how I can invite these questions and unresolved issues in, have them sit in the room with me in one of those chairs, even offer them a cup of tea, but not feel obliged to pull them apart or get sucked into their pull. Just to be present with them in a new way that is neither neglectful nor anxious but aware, calm, and hospitable.

I think it may be possible to do that; I also think it may be important for me to try. Not forever, because sometimes you do have to just dig in and work at something. But given my make-up as a person, it’s less likely that I would ignore something forever than it is I would simply sit with it in silence, like an old friend, and wait quietly for what is going to happen next, with our without my worrying it into being. To simply be present. And be still.

Resurrection in the Dark

2011-04-26T18:56:00.000-07:00

“Until we discover a new vision of the Savior, a savior who has risen out of our disappointments, we’ll never understand Easter.”
—Craig Barnes, Christian Century, March 13-20, 2002

After seeing the snow start to melt, the people coming outdoors on bikes, with dogs, walking together after the long season of indoors, I find this time of year it’s not hard to believe in resurrection.

It’s much, much harder in the dead of winter. In the dead of anything. How do we believe in resurrection there? But it is the places we are least able to hear the news of resurrection that we most need to hear it.

I am come to think that resurrection takes place not with a blast of trumpets shouting “Christ the Lord is risen today” amid the joyous songs of the faithful, but more the way it happens in the gospel of John: with a whole lot of running around, weeping beside a grave, and terrified people locking doors because they don’t have a blessed clue what is going on. That is how Easter begins. In the dark.

And that is how Easter still begins today—in our disappointments, in the death of dreams, in the exhausted depression that too much grief can bring. In those places, we are not surprised to find ourselves worried, confused, weeping in the dark. We are surprised to find every now and then that we are capable of hope, able to love others deeply enough to forget ourselves, able to experience comfort we-know-not-how, and able to go on living in spite of it. Resurrection hope may come as inconspicuously as the first shoot of green after a long gray-brown, but it is no less worth celebrating for its subtlety.

That's Not Snow

2011-03-21T06:36:00.000-07:00

Today in the supermarket a mom was naming things for her toddler. “That’s a lobster. See the lobsters? Say ‘Hi, lobsters!'” And the toddler obediently waved a greeting and tried to say “lobster.” We learn the properties of things as we learn their names: in this case, lobsters are crab-like things with big rubber bands around their claws stuck in a fish tank in the seafood section. And some of that is true about lobsters and some is not. But when you are less than two-years-old, you go with what you know and there is little room for ambiguity.

The other day I had a similar experience. I was out for lunch with my friend’s preschool-age son, who looked out the window at the piles of dirt-covered snow. This is snow that has completely lost its pure, ground-covering pristine beauty and has, after five or six months of being around, become old snow. “Look at that snow,” I said with a sigh.

“That’s not snow,” he said to me with absolute certainty. “That’s garbage. A garbage truck must have dumped that there.”

I look into my soul and wonder how to name the person I am becoming. There are times I’d like someone to give me that same kind of clear-cut reminder: “That’s not snow.” Or, “That’s not who you are—you are better than that.” Better than the pile of petty insecurities and resentments that often haunt me. Better than the selfish, inward-curving weariness that keeps me from the joys of knowing others. “That’s not who you are.”

And then I could remember once again what snow and I were made to be.

Windrows

2011-02-18T12:29:00.000-08:00

The dictionary says a windrow is a “row of hay raked up to dry before being baled,” and right now I can almost imagine the smell of new hay and the warm summer sun. Almost, but not quite. Because outside it’s February, which seems to go on forever. And everywhere on the roads I see another type of windrow: piles of snow shoved the side by giant graders clearing the streets.
This week in the newspaper, a number of people were complaining about the increasingly large windrows, with due cause. The streets get so narrow you can’t pass two cars side by side, you have to pull far into the intersection when you are making a turn to see if it’s clear, and there is not the smallest hope of parking on the road.

Windrows are a great image for the way my career has gone—an increasingly large pile of “stuff” that has been pushed to the side, at times violently by a sharp blade. It’s hard not to stare at those piles, to pick through them and relive the disappointments and confusion of each successive loss and change, to try to make sense of it all. Yet spending my energy picking through those piles feels like a waste; I should be looking instead at the path that has been cleared ahead of me.

That’s a nice metaphor, but it isn’t really working for me. Because where the path is cleared is only empty space, and there are times I have no idea how to fill it. As a woman I’m forced in so many different ways to be creative, to fit things in depending on what my family needs, or what others need, and it’s hard to think about that empty space as something I can fill entirely on my own. There are too many other competing demands to consider. And I know whatever I put into that space is just as likely to change yet again, to move in another direction. I am weary of change and the older I get, the more I just want some things to stay the same.

It takes a certain amount of courage to walk into empty space, to suck back the disappointments and self-doubt and keep being available for whatever life puts in front of you. So I try to keep forgiving myself, forgiving the snowplows, forgiving the narrowed spaces and the long cold of winter, and trust that all the courage it takes to keep walking will make me the kind of person that can come alive again in spring.

The Problem of Snow

2011-01-13T11:23:00.000-08:00

Like many places in North America, we have had record amounts of snowfall lately. And I always get a kick out of seeing the big dump trucks full of snow. Because there comes a point when there is simply nowhere else to put it, when the streets have become so narrow because of leftover snow piles that it’s no longer possible to drive on them. So the snow becomes a problem and they have to cart it away.

The same day as we saw the truck carting away snow, we saw this giant pile in a parking lot. And while I thought bitter things about how much winter can a person really take, my kids both said (almost in unison): “Wow, wouldn’t it be great to climb that?”

And there is the difference. Is snow a problem to be solved or is it a gift?

Too often I see my life as a problem to be solved. Snow to scrape off, roads to manage, strategies to think through and implement. But what would it take, what does it take every day to get back that sense of life as a gift, as a giant snow pile just waiting to be touched, climbed, and laughed over in the fading winter sun?

Bear Eyes

2010-12-16T13:41:00.000-08:00

The family story goes like this: I had a teddy bear that my brother threw in the mud. For some reason (and to this day I’m not sure what that is), it was impossible to simply throw it in the wash; it was beyond repair. My parents wanted to offer some kind of replacement, so I got a wise-looking stuffed mouse, which I proceeded to name “bear eyes.” In whatever way my two-year-old mind could process, I knew that this mouse, no matter how lovely, would never replace the bear I had lost. She might be a mouse, but there was clearly bear in her eyes.

Every holiday season when I see what’s going on around me—exhaustion, despair, busy-ness, greed, and worry—I wish again for the ability to simply rename them. To take all that turmoil and sadness and call them “Advent peace.” And find that somehow the words alone could make it true.

Naming something so clearly in opposition to reality is the province of children, with endless circular arguments of “it is too” and “it is not.” But the ability to remember is the true gift of childhood. To know that no matter how many things the world takes away, no matter how deep the losses, there will always be the memory of peace, joy, wholeness, the certainty of being loved beyond what we imagine. And those memories are continually calling us back home, to eyes that we’ve definitely seen before and never forgot how to love.

Holding Back Chaos

2010-11-11T20:37:00.000-08:00

If my husband stays up much later than I do, a predictable thing happens: I inevitably drift over to his side of the bed. So when he gets in, he has to make his body into a kind of battering ram that pushes me back to my side of the bed. And while he may think of this as an example of me being a bed hog, I think it has much to say about the theology of creation.

There are so many parts of the Genesis 1 story that involve setting boundaries and limits: the light is separated from the darkness, the vault of the sky is defined over the chaos of the water, the sea is held back from the land, the day and night are named as distinct.

In a simple way, my husband’s presence in bed is a limit that says, “You will go no further.” When he is not there, I wonder if the night went on long enough whether I’d simply drop off the other side of the bed. But when he is there, I know where the bed ends and that I am safe from the drop on the far side. My own side of the bed I know instinctively; it’s that other, far-off edge that represents the unknown, the fearful limits of what I don’t understand.

Oftentimes I wish for some dramatic re-creation moment in my life: for new ground to appear out of endless seas, for light to push back a long darkness, for the naming of order out of chaos. But time and time again, those order-making moments don’t happen, even when they are needed most.

What I have instead is a kind of wall that keeps me from going over the edge—a tenuous wall made by intangible things such as the faithful constancy of a communion of friends, the perfect resonance of songs sung into the night, and the quiet certitude of the sun setting to end each day. It’s not much to hold on to when you add those things up, but somehow it’s enough to keep the chaos at bay and hold me back from going over the edge.

... And

2010-09-19T15:14:00.000-07:00

For Krista
... and for you.

There is a prayer in the daily office that pleads “that I may not fall into sin nor be overcome by adversity.” There is something about that word overcome that falls from the tongue like a full stop, a period at the end of a word or a sentence that gives a note of finality. Overcome. And so often with adversity—things like unemployment, loneliness, despair, it is hard to find much more to say, much hope beyond that closed-off sense of ending.

And yet, as Scott Bader-Saye said at the King’s Interdisciplinary Studies conference last week, people of faith are the ones who are able to always say “and.” So it’s unemployment … and. Loneliness … and. Despair … and. There is so much grace in that one word, to be able to say, after even death, there is an “and” in the hope of resurrection.

Whatever the adversity you find yourself overcome by today, there is, even now, an “and.” May it find you as quickly and as certainly as the grace of God, in which we live, and move, and have our being.

Burning

2010-08-27T19:24:00.000-07:00

“At that time the kingdom of heaven will be like ten virgins who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish and five were wise. The foolish ones took their lamps but did not take any oil with them. The wise, however, took oil in jars along with their lamps.”

—Matthew 25:1-4

There is something about the song “Give me oil in my lamp, keep me burning, burning, burning” that makes me tired. Not just because I often hear its peppy tune on still-sleepy Sunday mornings, but also because I’m not so sure it would be a good thing to just keep burning all the time without a break.

It’s not that I don’t prepare; like the wise girls I am always over-prepared with everything I might possibly need for my trips. So I’m sure I would have enough oil in my backpack, ready to go even through a long night of waiting. But even with enough oil, I imagine myself getting angrier by the minute as that oil is used up, wondering what the delay was about and silently scorning those who didn’t think ahead as well as I did. With every second that went by, with every lick of oil on that flame, I would grow slightly less loving, slightly less gracious, slightly less alive.

Today I heard something on the pray-as-you-go podcast that encouraged me to think symbolically about the passage: what might the lighted lamp represent in my life? And what is the oil that will keep it burning?

Because of course the story isn’t about being prepared; it’s not about greed or getting high marks from the bridegroom for planning ahead. It’s about a different kind of oil, one that keeps you alive instead of consuming you.

What is the oil that keeps me going, that keeps my lamp alive, that keeps my soul from growing dark and dead and tired? Because whatever it is, this kind of oil—oil that flows down the beard of Aaron, oil that anoints my head, oil that brings gladness instead of morning—is not about scarcity at all, but abundance. And maybe with enough of that kind of oil, I can keep my heart alive and full of grace, burning, burning, burning till the break of day.

Possible

2010-08-21T10:07:00.000-07:00

“Everything is possible for one who believes.” —Mark 9:23

We have friends a newborn baby, and last time we visited, my husband leaned close and smiled at the baby, talking in a voice I haven’t heard him use in years. As I watched him, I thought to myself with a pang, This is impossible. How am I supposed to look at him doing that and NOT want another baby? And yet, that, too, is impossible. I’m too old; there would be too much space between our now eleven- and thirteen-year-olds; we don’t have any baby stuff any more; we couldn’t adjust our lives to a baby schedule again.

So we ended our visit with the baby, and I came home and stared at my daughter’s teenage feet, which it seems just yesterday could fit entirely in my hand when she herself was a baby. And those lanky, impossibly large teenage feet hit me like a wave of sadness: some things are no longer possible.

It’s not possible to get back the days that are gone. Long summer days when entertainment was as simple as a popsicle and a wading pool and “making it better” as easy as a band-aid and kiss. Evenings with newly bathed kids in blanket sleepers snuggled beside me to read a story for the one hundredth time. Days that seemed impossibly long at the time, but now seem impossibly far away.

Even as I am grieving what I miss, I see in those big feet other things that are still possible. It’s possible to talk to my children about things in the world like floods and forest fires and poverty and wonder with them about why they happen. It’s possible to sit on the edge of their beds and night and hear their ideas and questions about the world without knowing, as I used to, how I can answer easily in response. It’s possible to love what someone else has without needing to possess it for yourself.

And this is the art of living by faith: finding what is still possible in a world that shuts us down from a delightful sense of openness. This is one reason I have joined the High Calling Blogs Network—to see, in the voices of others who struggle to walk the life of faith, what is still possible. And in hearing their stories, to trust the words of truth that everything is still possible for one who believes.

Under Wide-Open Skies

2010-06-30T13:59:00.000-07:00

“We live under wide open skies and know where we stand.”

—1 Thessalonians 5:4, The Message

These days I have been driving more often through farmland, and I am entranced with the way the clouds make patterns on the pastureland below. You could be standing in one spot, thinking it is a dark and gray day, when not 10 yards away is a place outside the shadow of the cloud in full sun. And I understand something now that I have not understood before: without that kind of wide-open space, it’s impossible to know where you are standing.

As someone who grew up in the city, I am not used to seeing so far around me, miles of open space rolling into the horizon. Time and experience come in small packages. If the sky is gray when you look up, dark is all there is; dark is everything. You don’t have the perspective to see that maybe a short hop away it is already getting lighter.

There is healing in the wideness of creation. There is a grace in seeing the big picture, in knowing how the story ends a short skip across the rolling farmland, in seeing a moment in the shadow of the clouds is only one small drop of dark in a wind-swept land of light, in a world of grace, in a universe of blessedness.

Why? Yes.

2010-06-15T12:03:00.000-07:00

Recently I watched the classic movie Out of Africa again and was moved by many things I hadn’t noticed the first time I watched it as a teenager. One exchange in the movie has really stuck with me. After Karen and Denys spend a night together she is full of questions the next day about what this means for their relationship and for her future. The short dialogue goes something like this:

Karen: I need to know what this means.
Denys: Why?

And that’s it. As someone who spends probably way too much time asking “what does this mean?” I love the simplicity of his response. Why do you need to know what it means? Maybe you don’t need to know at all. Some things may not need such close examination. They just are.

This past Sunday, we went on a hike on a beautiful sunny day. There were tufts of dandelion fluff in the air, the sky was liquid blue, the green leaves were filling out the trees, and my son caught a frog in his bare hands just before falling into the creek. It was a day of laughing, a day of slowing down and living in the moment. It was a day that in all ways seemed to be God’s “yes” to a question I never asked.

Why? I don’t know. But yes. Definitely yes, and amen, and yes again.

Spring Snow

2010-05-14T20:05:00.000-07:00

Spring in Edmonton is a tease. You get several warm days—enough to make you dig out the t-shirts and want to run to the garden store—but then you are slammed once again with cold and possibly even snow. So we sometimes see two things that don’t often go together: new green leaves and cold white snow.

I wonder why the leaves don’t just figure out by now that they need to wait a little longer. But there is no caution in spring. It will not wait for a better time. It just is. Is now. So very green and new.

Once it’s begun, growth is never straightforward. We step ahead and we fall back. We step ahead and we are slammed with snow. Why are we surprised? After all, we were told: “In this world you will have trouble.” You will, you will have trouble. We’re also told to “take heart” because Christ has overcome the world.

Overcoming is as long and hard to pin down as anything I know. But if snow and new leaves can survive each other, maybe we will survive too.

Hospitality

2010-04-14T19:36:00.000-07:00

"Hospitality requires the creation of friendly, empty space..."
—Henri Nouwen, Reaching Out

The word "hospitality" instantly conjures up images of a crowded room full of people talking around a table of food. But this past weekend, I experienced hospitality of a very different kind. I attended a silent retreat at King's Fold Retreat & Renewal Centre (one of the most beautiful places in southern Alberta). In the absence of words , there are only thoughtful preparations to speak hospitality to the stranger.

For example, there are the slippers: when you enter into the outdoor greenhouse, you are supposed to remove your shoes. But your feet might get cold, so ready and waiting for you is a basket of handmade slippers in a variety of sizes.

In the outdoor nature paths, there are little brooms to whisk away any debris that may have collected from the woods so you can sit on a clean bench.

This weekend showed me in some small way that the essence of hospitality is not filling the space with words, or filling the space with anything, but simply creating what Nouwen calls a "friendly, empty space" by the sense of thoughtful preparation. There is deep human connection even in that kind of emptiness: someone who has gone ahead, who has your best comfort in mind, and who offers you nothing more than the gift of their forethought and some quiet to enjoy it.

Learning to Walk

2010-03-15T17:50:00.000-07:00

This past week I was working with a group of elementary students on the topic of self-esteem, asking them to fill in a worksheet with something they could do that they were proud of. It's so much easier for little kids to give you a long list of things they are proud of than it is for adults to do the same.

But what most struck me most in that afternoon was was a timid girl who asked me quietly, "Does it have to be something from now or can it be from a long time ago?" I said of course it could be from a long time ago and what was she thinking about? And she replied: "When I was a baby, I didn't know how to walk at all. Then when I was one, I had to try really hard, but by the time I was two, I didn't even have to think about it." I smiled and said "that's great" and she turned to her worksheet and proudly filled in the blank: "good at walking."

By that standard, I'm still a baby in terms of living the Christian life the way I want to. I either don't do it at all, or have to think about it very hard. But I know several older women for whom acting gracefully doesn't seem to take much effort at all. That gives me hope that one day I will be as good at acting gracefully as I am at walking, that it will be so natural I forget to be proud about it at all.

Harbor

2010-02-16T07:43:00.000-08:00

“He stilled the storm to a whisper and quieted the waves of the sea. Then they were glad because of the calm, and he brought them to the harbor they were bound for.”
—Psalm 107:29-30

There is something about a storm that wants to shout—the loudness of the crashing waves, of thunder, cracks of lightning, and the whipping wind thrashing everyday objects into projectiles. And maybe because of this loudness or maybe because of the panic of being unsafe, you can hardly hear yourself think to know what to do, to know the way ahead. And then…

“He stilled the storm to a whisper and quieted the waves of the sea.” And then all is quiet again and silent. And you can hear your thoughts and hear the whisper and then you know it will somehow be okay.

“Then they were glad because of the calm.” They were glad for the quiet, glad for predictability and safety, glad for the little everyday things like a cup of tea or a hot bath or sitting quietly on the couch talking to one who loves you. They were glad because of these things, glad because they realized they could be taken from you and because they had them back again.

“And he brought them to the harbor they were bound for.” And the end of all the chaos of the storm is being brought to the place you were supposed to be all along. What I would give in the midst of the storm for one glimpse of that harbor I am bound for, that we are all of us bound for, far away on the other side of all this wind and rain.

Today

2010-02-07T17:53:00.000-08:00

“Do not worry about tomorrow … each day has enough trouble of its own.”
—Matthew 6:34

“Today in your hearing this scripture is fulfilled.”
—Luke 4:21

There is something about working among the poor that puts the words above into a vivid context. People are missing some of the most basic necessities—food, shelter, safety. And these needs are urgent. I have talked to people who need bread today—not tomorrow, not in a little while. Right now. Today. So we open up the freezer at my place of work and send them away with a loaf.

In some ways, it is a luxury to have the space to worry about what might happen tomorrow or the day after that or the day after that. You have confidence that enough of the basic necessities will be met today to allow you to reflect on other needs down the road—a sense of purpose, meaningful relationships, being valued in community, healing and wholeness for the soul and the body. Yet having the luxury to think about tomorrow does not make it any easier to survive today.

These other needs are just a different kind of bread for which our souls may be starving. The call here is to be present in today, whatever we are missing. In these words from Luke, Jesus speaks in this kind of immediacy with his announcement of hope: “Today in your hearing this scripture is fulfilled.” Not tomorrow, not in some distant far-off future, but today. Right now.

It is easy to mark off the ways I am fortunate (I have a freezer full of bread). It is harder to admit the ways I fall short of the hope in these words. I worry about tomorrow. I fail to fulfill the promise of this “today” for those who are in dire need of bread of all kinds. And yet I hope that the one who announced these words of promise will keep announcing them to the places in my heart where things are missing, keep announcing them through all who extend a hand to those in need, keep announcing them to all of us who sometimes find it hard to be here, in this moment, today.

Frazils and Ice Fog

2010-01-09T20:53:00.000-08:00

Two new weather concepts I have learned about this winter: frazils and ice fog. Frazils are the first stage in a river freezing over. Ice crystals called frazils begin to join together. At the “pancake” stage, seen in the picture above, the frazils begin to form round clusters. And eventually these little frazils wind up forming a solid sheet of ice across the river.

Ice fog comes when tiny crystals of ice have frozen in mid-air. This is common when temperatures are below -30 C, mostly in arctic regions; apparently Edmonton is close enough to an arctic region (it’s certainly cold enough) because we have it here from time to time.

The strong current of a river becomes immobile in a frozen sheet; the free and invisible air hangs heavy in a fog. It all begins slowly, on a much smaller scale. Frazils become frozen rivers; drops of mist become ice fog. The world is rolling, changing, pulsing along and somehow in the smallest molecules of water at the most unexpected times, things become solid.

This season of epiphany, I am thinking about the small beginnings of things—small beginnings that make big things or invisible things stop and be known by us. Like words become flesh, like one small star that pierced the Bethlehem sky: started small, made something solid, and meant that night would never be the same again.

What's Lost

2009-11-19T18:38:00.000-08:00

The other night I had a dream that I went into a small thrift shop. After a quick scan of the nearly empty shelves, I turned to leave but was stopped by the quiet voice of an old lady behind the counter. “Don’t you want to take a look through those boxes?” To humor her, I started flipping through a box of old baby clothes when all of a sudden something caught my eye.

On one of the outfits, I recognized a small embroidered patch that was on the baby sleepers I had when my own kids were little. In the dream I held it up to rub on my face and was filled with longing and deep sorrow. The old lady was watching me closely and she said, “It’s like the lost coin. Or the lost son.” I turned my head slowly to look at her face and just before I could see it, the dream ended.

When do we get back that sense of newness and hope that comes with the wistful nostalgia of remembered childhood? As Wordsworth says, “There hath pass’d away a glory from the earth” and we are often left with a kind of permanent low-grade depression at the way things turn out. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised at this; after all, Christ himself said “in this world you WILL have trouble.” But expecting suffering makes it no less easy to bear. Nor does some far-off sense that “one day” the story turns out for good.

So what do we have in the meantime? The hope that in the least likely place, we might be surprised by something lost but still loved; that there is some part of us able to be new again with a child’s unfettered hopes; that in the faces we are often too busy to see we might find gentleness and hear words of grace that will keep us going for one more go through the boxes.

Extravagance

2009-10-22T11:16:00.000-07:00

There is a large plot of land in a city-owned utility corridor that one of my neighbors has taken as a garden. As we walked by there this summer, it was lovely to see his well-tended rows of veggies and produce grow. There was one section that had a whole plot of flowers. I kept waiting for the time when he would dig them up, section them off into pots or hanging baskets, because why else would you plant so many flowers in a spot virtually no one would ever see? But he never did.

There is something lovely and extravagant about that—planting flowers in abundance just for your own joy when you’re working in the garden. Planting them for unknown neighbors who wander by with their dogs. Planting them not for economic profit but just because they grow and they are beautiful.

If you looked at the front of my neighbor’s house, you would not see much at all, but in that secret place out back he has tons of flowers blooming. With this hidden beauty, he feeds those of us who know.

I am looking for that kind of evidence of grace—purposeless, extravagant, beautiful, hidden out back behind the house—because I know there has to be proof of this “exceedingly more than all we ask or imagine” everywhere around me and I’m just lining up my pots and planters too guarded to try it for myself.

We are here today ...

2009-09-02T13:29:00.000-07:00

Today is the first day of school. I dropped off my son to the care of his new teacher and found it hard to just walk away and leave him sitting at his little desk. “This is Jon,” I said to his teacher, who responded with a friendly “Hi, Jon” and turned his attention to something else. I almost blurted out “he likes rockets” because I wanted the teacher realize something about him, something that makes him special, not just another name in a room full of kids.

It was no easier bringing my daughter to her first day of junior high, as I was filled with questions: Why do the kids look so BIG all of a sudden? Didn’t I just bring her home from the hospital? But even though she was nervous, she walked in to her classroom, greeted her teacher in French, found a friend, sat down, and said an unequivocal “bye, mom.” Her confident demonstration of strength under stress was also enough to make me want to cry.

Beginning routines again in September is a way of orienting us again to the order that was placed in the world at the moment of creation. Elementary school classrooms tell us in a hundred different ways “we are here.” Students sit each morning before a bulletin board decked out in bright complementary colors with the basics: today’s month, day, months of the year, numbers, seasons; and also some added information like the letter of the day, special person of the week, who has a birthday, who is absent, and in case you really are keeping track, how many days you’ve been in school so far.

I like the call to remember the rhythms of things—the things that happen every day again no matter what else is uncertain: the date and seasons change, the sun goes up and down again, the months fold over one on top of the other, there are special people who surround us, and patterns in the details of our lives if we pay attention to such things.

We are here today. And no matter what else we may not know, that much is certain. We are here today and there is a world of comfort in the daily-ness of our routines. Routines that speak to an order greater than the smallness of our stories. We are here today, and someone knows where we were yesterday and where we will be tomorrow. We are known, and we are here. That’s a good place to start this fall and a good reason to give thanks.

Gentleness

2009-08-24T06:45:00.000-07:00

“I hear this most gentle whisper from one I never guessed would speak to me.”
—Psalm 81:5, The Message

There are a thousand ways the world does violence to us every single day—from the harshness of unkind words to the subtle reminders of time passing and decay. We are dying. And whenever we stop long enough to notice that in any of its forms, the grief brings a sort of violence to our hearts.

Over and against the reality of that violence, there is the gentleness of God. Sometimes that gentleness comes as sweet relief, as the remedy of breathing space in a world that constricts us. Other times it is almost unwelcome; to hold that gentleness means we are unable to give ourselves over to defensive anger protecting us against a life that is hard. God is here; we cannot give in to despair.

Thomas á Kempis, medieval mystic and author of The Imitation of Christ, had this to say:

Banish discouragement from your heart as best you can, and if trouble comes, never let it depress or hinder you for long.... The violence of your feelings will soon subside, and grace return to heal your inner pain.

Whatever violence we feel, there is one who stands ready to help and comfort, one who speaks with gentle whispers where we do not expect to hear anything at all. Receiving that gentleness can itself cause pain when it comes as such sharp contrast to the suffering within us, but it is perhaps one of the best and most hopeful signs of our humanity that we remain willing to feel it.

Wheels

2009-08-11T07:01:00.000-07:00

Both of my kids love to make things. My daughter’s room is filled with scraps of paper, bits of plastic, and a giant vat of markers, colored pencils, and crayons—all of which she keeps “just in case” she needs to make something. Because really, at any moment, you could be called on to make something and you have to be ready.

My son tends toward the recycle box when it comes to crafts. Lately he was making a very long racer car from a plastic box that used to house a set of blinds. He was stuck for wheels and the other night he pushed me to help him find some. I was impatient, thinking of the boxes of Lego in the basement wondering if I could dig out at least two sets of plastic wheels. I discouraged him at first, “No, we don’t have any wheels; maybe wait till Dad gets home and he can help.” But my son’s persistence paid off and I finally gave in with a half-hearted, “Well, at least let’s Google it.”

We found a website with directions to make wheels out of tealight candles. Thanks to the fine folks at IKEA, I had a large bag of over 100 little candles that I never seemed to use. My son was joyous with excitement as we put the wheels together. “They even look like REAL wheels!” he said on seeing the finished result wrapped with electrical tape. He then proceeded to invent three new games using said wheels that did not involve putting them on the car, but rolling them back and forth on the table using bamboo skewers like a pinball machine to repel your opponent’s wheels.

There is something holy in that moment when what you want becomes what you have, when you look around and are willing, even eager, to make something new out of the scrap heap of your life. There is something holy about creation, to be ready at any moment to put your hands to the familiar and find joy in the transformation.

Creator Spirit, by whose aid 
The world’s foundations first were laid, 
Come, visit every pious mind; 
Come, pour Thy joys on human kind;
From sin, and sorrow set us free; 
And make Thy temples worthy Thee.

In the quiet following the joy of creation, I took a candle, lit it, and watched it burn the rest of the night.

Throwing Prayers

2009-07-26T20:05:00.000-07:00

Excerpt from a sermon I gave last Sunday:

Perhaps it is the very act of prayer itself, the act of longing and waiting and crying through our times of waiting and emptiness, that trains us as God’s people. Not prayer for once, but over and over and for always. Prayer that teaches us almost like the physical act of throwing, training each muscle again and again to strain toward God, developing strength that never would have come if we did it only once and expected to be done. And every time it is a healing kind of prayer. Prayer that gives up easy answers and makes its home with the churning sludge of uncertainty and mystery, prayer that gives up a faith that cannot survive the worst and the worst that cannot survive faith, and simply says to God, “Here I am. Take all of me.”

We are called in our times of waiting and emptiness to voice our cries and give our prayers to God. To lift the heaviness of disappointed hopes and the difficult work of grief and forgiveness as many times as we need to and throw them back to the one who made us, the only one in whom our stories have a chance of making sense, the one who in his mercy, may remember us.

And through this practice we may come to see, however dimly, that it is on the edges where God makes himself known—on the edges of deep suffering and grace, of terrifying darkness and impossible light, of community and solitude, of words and silence—that we live our lives as those who trust, but know not, those who have grown so accustomed to throwing prayers that we believe in the strength it produces, over and over training deep in the very muscles of our bodies a yearning for God that will never die.

And what, is God’s response? His response is ever and always the same … he is silent, he is comfort, he is unfathomable in the pain of evil in this world, he is full of a love so beautiful it takes our breath away. We hold in our hands both grace and pain and cannot say at times which is the heavier. But whether our cup is full or whether our heart is broken, let us take them both as from God’s hand and throw our lives—every moment, every day, every act—as a prayer back to him.

Kaddish

2009-06-10T09:49:00.000-07:00

I have been learning about the Jewish prayer of mourner’s kaddish. This prayer is said by those who have lost a loved one and must be said in the presence of a minyan, or quorum of ten people. It is said daily anywhere from thirty days to eleven months. The theme of the text is the exaltation and eternal nature of God. Here is a translated excerpt:

May His great Name be blessed forever and to all eternity. Blessed and praised, glorified, exalted and extolled, honored, adored and lauded be the Name of the Holy One, blessed be He; and say, Amen.

Beyond all the blessings, hymns, praises and consolations that are uttered in the world; and say, Amen.

There are so many things I can learn from this about grieving. First, it is a healing ritual to repeat prayers in the presence of others. While so much of grief takes place privately, in tears cried in the dark night, the presence of others who care for the mourner is a way to honor and give voice to that grief, to reassure the person that not only are they not crazy for feeling it, but there are others who are willing to stand beside them and listen. The length of time given to these prayers also says that grief is not rushed, cannot be swept away as quickly as our western tradition seems to desire. There is length and space and community to give the mourner what The Message version of the psalms calls “wide open spaces for healing.”

Finally, the mourner’s kaddish focuses on exalting God. Beyond any consolation uttered in the world, beyond the searing pain of suffering and the impossibility of knowing how to go on, there is a God whose name and whose love goes on forever, who is to be praised and adored forever and all eternity. And say, Amen. Amen.

Breathing Holes

2009-06-01T08:37:00.000-07:00

Walking in our neighborhood park, I see again the signs of spring: there are plugs of dirt all over, aftereffects of aerating the soil. You have to loosen the dirt, to poke holes through the layers of thatch in order to keep the grass healthy and growing. Soil that is not properly aerated will not absorb water because it becomes too compacted. The thick dead grass weaves together over the surface and keeps the nourishing rain from reaching the roots.

In the fabric of our life together, we can become like compacted soil. We grow rigid with the passage of too much time and too settled habits, crushing underneath like cement the path of our routine. Our work is to make space for the water of life, to cut away all that has grown shallow and dead, and get beyond the choked-off surface of things.

It’s much easier to keep things as they are, to smile and float along on the surface of relationships without daring to go deeper. And yet without a conscious choice to do something about it, our church services and our interactions never get beyond that tight, shallow surface of dead grass. It takes honesty and authenticity to cut away the pretension and get deeper to the heart of things. Without this work, we will eventually die off, with no room to receive.

The work of Pentecost is the work of God’s Spirit coming to us, like wind, fire, or the sharp metal blades of an aerator, to move away what is killing us, to help us grow and somehow in the process of change, once again to let us breathe.

Things That Don't Go Together

2009-05-22T07:05:00.000-07:00

“… that they would seek God, perhaps grope for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.” —Acts 17:27

This past week I saw two things that didn’t seem to go together. One was a dusting of snow on our newly unfurled tree leaves. The other was a ridiculously active sloth at the zoo. Frozen spring leaves. A fast-moving sloth. Things that don’t go together. This got me thinking about other things that don’t go together, words that should never be in the same sentence like “child” and “cancer.” All of us, if we have our eyes open, will be called at some point to hold grace in one hand and pain in the other and wonder how we’re supposed to put them together.

The life of Christ perhaps best exemplified this holding of opposites, putting together things like “blessed” and “mourn,” “death” and “resurrection.” To ignore the places where these words clash together is to miss something fundamentally important about faith. And yet there are people who resolve the tension by choosing one side and ignoring the other; whose placid smiles choose grace and can’t really get their hands dirty on the pain side. The world needs more people who are willing to stand in that place of tension and be honest about pain, even the pain of holding on to faith in the midst of loss.

There are times we seek God with our minds and our rational beings and there are times when, failing everything else, we are left to grope in the dark. Times when there are no easy answers, when there are no answers at all. But we who are compelled to ask the questions stand there, hands open, looking now at grace and now at pain, and raising our hands in surrender to the one who reconciled opposites, who reconciled us, with his blood.

I'm Just Asking a Question

2009-05-08T08:25:00.000-07:00

“Jim, what are you doing?”
“I’m asking a question.”
—Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, on meeting “God”

“God may well slay me; I may have no hope. Yet I will argue my case before God.”
—Job 13:15

I’ve heard two people recently point to something good in their lives and give God thanks for it, along the lines of “God knew I needed this.” And while I am happy for their good fortune, I wonder if they have taken time to go the next step: if God knew they needed it, what does mean when someone else, someone equally loved and valued by God, does not receive the thing that is needed? God knew you needed it. Does God not know that she needs it too?

Even though I wish it were otherwise, a large part of me still believes the lie that God’s love is equal to God’s provision for me. God loves me, therefore good things happen to me. Bad things happen and I am thrown into doubt. God has not provided. I know the key to what we are promised is God’s presence with us, not abundance or smooth sailing or anything of the sort. “In this world you will have trouble.” That is what we are told.

But I want to ask God a question. I want to know how we are supposed to believe he is with us, trust that he has not forgotten us when all the evidence points to the contrary. I want to ask God: “Where are you? Where are you for all the voices that even this night are crying out for relief from sickness, sorrow, and suffering? Where are you? And why don’t you do something?”

I’m just asking a question. I am made bold by biblical companions like Job, the Talmudic tradition of arguing with God, and even the modern-day example of Captain Kirk. What am I doing? I am asking God a question. I don’t expect an answer. Just, for a while, to burn with the words I need to ask. And to hope, as a friend reminded me with a quote from Rainer Maria Rilke, that I am able to “love the questions themselves” and trust that one day I will “gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

The Cross, The Grave, The Skies

2009-04-15T20:43:00.000-07:00

Every Easter the song “Christ the Lord is Risen Today” gets me in some deep gut place and almost always causes me to cry. I’ve sung it after the deaths of people I love with triumphant expectation, I’ve sung it in the midst of sadness as a prayer for newness of life, and I’ve heard it sung by a child with enough heartache in his life to make his unabashed alleluia’s humble me into hope.

But this Easter what struck me most was the part that says “ours the cross, the grave, the skies.” We want the resurrection, the skies, the triumphal alleluia’s. But ours is also the cross and the grave. There are times for the hopeful ascension of the skies and there are times to identify with the sufferings of Christ and say, yes, there is a cross that is mine also. There are times for feeling the pain of the women who could not stay away, who needed to lay their hands on cold stone and do something to mark the place where their beloved died, times for feeling their pain and saying yes, in the grief of my heart this day, mine is also the grave.

I am praying for courage to embrace not only the alleluia’s but also the time for bearing crosses and the unflinching death of dreams. And to realize that even in those blackest of times, the disciples were not alone. They had each other as they walked to the stone and its finality; they had each other to listen and cry and hear the story as they asked for the thousandth time “Is he really gone?” They were not alone.

And I have learned that the promise of those who are with me in suffering is enough. It is enough to let me survive till that lovely “early in the morning” time and the whisper I’ve waited my whole life to hear from the one who holds it all—cross, grave, and skies—who knows my name, and says to me cutting through a thousand deaths with these words of promise:

“Woman, why are you weeping?”

Enchanted

2009-03-30T08:41:00.000-07:00

“The world is enchanted.

Lean closer to see it.”
—Aaron Niequist, “Enchanted”

I have been thinking a lot about imagination, and in particular finding extraordinary moments in the ordinary things of everyday life. I want to believe that just below the surface of things there is a glory, an enchanted beauty that sparks and flames if only I have eyes to see. Sometimes in the midst of routines, doing dishes, picking up laundry, and driving through the eternal mud of an Edmonton spring, I wonder about that. But if I can’t believe in that kind of everyday beauty, how can I believe in grace, in hope, in new life, in all the things that make my faith live?

So I decided to do a little experiment. To walk not more than 10 feet from my house and see if I could, by looking closer, find something glorious in the everyday sights of my front yard. And here are the results.

Tree with Berries

Muddy Road

Pine Tree

I think the world is enchanted. And if I lean closer to see it, I find God is everywhere. Even in the winter same-ness of my own front yard.

Saving Light

2009-03-08T18:43:00.000-07:00

I know that daylight savings has to do with getting as many hours of light possible during our waking hours. Originally it had something to do with farmers, I think. Today I watch the sun just beginning to set at 7pm and it feels wrong. It shouldn’t be this late yet. My body clock has not clued in to the new number on the time clock.

There are times my Christian life is the same: though I know in my head and my heart what the “time” is supposed to be, it just feels wrong somehow. And I am at odds with God, debating, suspicious, fighting hard to act obediently in spite of it all.

But there are other times when things seem to click; when the words match the inner sense of wholeness, when the light comes and goes with the right kind of regularity, and when I am most able to see the rhythms and patterns of God’s kingdom around me. And for those times, while I seem to have less to write about (!), I also have a deep and settled sense of gratitude and a desire to save that light against the next time I am out of sync with the things of the Spirit.

For now, I close my eyes and soak in the sun. And I say “thank you” in as many ways as I can. “In him was life, and that life was the light of all people.” (John 1:4)

In Praise of Boredom

2009-02-23T04:46:00.000-08:00

Sometimes it takes going away to get a new perspective on what you have. The very same house that might have seemed like the walls were closing in a week earlier suddenly is familiar and comforting after a brief absence.

My kids told me yesterday they are bored by church. And while part of me worries over this, wondering how to engage them authentically in things of faith, another part of me thinks boredom is okay. Because every week they hear the same words again, it’s like solid ground is growing beneath their feet, solid in the reliability of words that outlast the ages.

One day they will be away, and some great need will drive them to their knees. Their hands will reach to that ground and find that words that floated past them so many times, words like redemption and hope and sacrifice, will have grown heavy in their hands, with comfort and weight enough to sustain them through even the darkest night. And if that means now, for a time, they are bored? I’m willing to live with that.

Underneath It All

2009-01-27T15:39:00.000-08:00

My prayer life is nothing like it used to be. Whether that’s a function of our move and a total change in community or some move in my own spirit to a place of wilderness, the fact is I pray way less now than I used to. Sometimes I miss God, or miss the intensity of how I used to pray. I was sure of God listening and sure of him speaking to me. That was a green and growing time, one that I miss in the long dark dull of winter that I seem to be in now.

But today I am reminded that though all the world is covered with snow, there is still a certainty: I know where the ground is. And underneath it all is God. No matter if I pray for hours, minutes, or seconds. Underneath it all is God and his love for me goes on and his reaching to me does not depend on the duration or quality of my reaching to him.

Underneath it all is God and in the absence of so much else, I see in the endless blanket of white that there are dips and ridges and a thousand tiny intricacies. Though my mouth is silent, I could spend a lifetime uncovering the mysteries of one square foot of snow, running my hands along each gully and listening for the almost imperceptible sound of my hand brushing across. I thought because I had words to name that endless white of snow, I understood it. But in the silence there is so much mystery. And what surprises me most is there is also so much certainty: underneath it all is God. This much I know. Underneath it all is God.

Dwelling in Possibility

2009-01-06T17:13:00.000-08:00

“With God, all things are possible.”
—Matthew 19:26

If there is one gift I could ask for this coming year, I would ask for the gift of possibility. One of the things I love about working in a university is being surrounded by people for whom anything is still possible—not just as some far-off thought but something you could do now, this summer even!

It is much harder to believe in possibility as I get older. Habits are set, relationships settled, budgets are tight, and in all those things and more I realize what is not possible. As the years go by, I tick off the things that are no longer possible: I will never be an Olympic champion. I will not likely have any more babies. I will never know what it’s like to live in town with people I grew up with. I will never own two cars.

Not all of this recognition is bad. With the narrowing of possibilities also comes the ability to bring more intense focus to a few deeply loved things. There is a spiritual side to believing in possibility too. Because the minute I give up on possibility, I give up on the power of God to make all things new. There is a fine balance between cynicism, a Pollyanna-like naivete, and the life of faith, which holds both the knowledge of self that wisely says “this is not possible” and the hopefulness of the heart that so wants to believe “yes, it is, it still beautifully is possible.”

So if I have a resolution this new year, it’s to believe, a little more than I do now, that all things are possible with God. Even helping me to believe that is true.

When the Midnight Meets the Morning

2008-12-24T07:39:00.000-08:00

“When the midnight meets the morning, let me love you even more.”
—Jesus, Draw Me Ever Nearer

Having just passed the darkest days of the year, I know well how dark it must be at midnight. This time of year in Alberta it’s dark at 8:20am and dark again by 4:00pm. So by the time midnight rolls around, it’s good and night.

But at some point what happens is that the night ends and the dark begins to lighten. I imagine this like some kind of invisible tipping point. Though none of us could see it happen—the dark would still look just as dark—there is one crucial difference: from that point on, the darkness would be heading toward morning.

This Christmas Eve I remember that moment when the “midnight meets the morning” somewhere in the middle of a seemingly endless night. What we need at that moment is greater love. Because though the scales have tipped toward lightening, the midnight still surrounds us and we are tempted to fear.

When the midnight meets the morning, when I have all but given up hope of anything but shadow, when it’s the deepest point of night, let me love you even more. Let that love keep me from giving up on you when my heart is cold and let me believe that somewhere in the midst of that night, because of your love, the morning has already begun.

A Trustworthy Steward

2008-12-03T18:02:00.000-08:00

“This is how one should regard us… as stewards of the mysteries of God. Moreover, it is required of stewards that they be found trustworthy.”
—1 Corinthians 4:1-2 (ESV)

There is a park near our house where I take the dog for his walk and let him run free. The minute he feels that subtle “click” freeing him from the leash, he goes nuts. He runs like a drunk, weaving in and out following invisible tracks, sniffing as he goes. Sometimes he doubles back, retracing his steps to get a closer smell of something; other times he pauses thoughtfully, head cocked sideways as if asking himself a question. I watch all this random haphazard intensity and I think, Stupid dog.

But with even the tiniest dusting of snow on the ground, something miraculous happens. What looks like random wandering suddenly makes sense, as there in the snow I can see the evidence of what draws his interest. There are the footprints of a person and beside it, prints of a smaller dog. There is the slightest brush of a bird’s wing and tiny v’s where birds stood. There are the tracks of a rabbit. There is the place another dog rolled in the snow. He follows those tracings religiously from one to another, following the path however winding it goes. And all at once, my dog goes from being a joy-filled idiot to being a wise and prudent tracker. I trust him now.

Maybe one day God will sprinkle the earth with something like snow so all the invisible mysteries of God will be made plain. In that day we’ll understand why the track doubled back, why we had to pause in that place, what the purpose was of following an inexplicable winding path. Until then we’ll have to trust that those who are stewards of the mysteries of God have got a whiff of something holy when we see them running in circles. And we’ll have to have imagination enough to chase along with them, with or without the snow to make it plain.

God in the Little Things

2008-11-26T19:18:00.000-08:00

I think the Old Testament set me up for expecting God in big, flashy moments—the pillar of fire, the parting of water, the dramatic rescue from lions—all of it showing God’s presence writ large across the pages of human history. When I look for God to intervene in my life, there is part of me that hopes it will be just as dramatic; that I will see evidence of miraculous healings or water turned to wine or even a blinding light on a road.

But in the New Testament many of the interventions were quieter and (on the surface) very ordinary. There were people who talked together, walked from place to place, people who touched each other, people who asked questions and ate together, people who sometimes misunderstood each other and failed to see what was most needed at the time.

I wonder sometimes how I can wake up in a despairing mood, wondering why I can’t sense God’s presence when everywhere around me in the tiny, quiet moments, my life is screaming with evidence of his love: sunrise, sunset every single day again, and a bright blue sky overhead; friends to laugh with, chocolate to eat, hot tea to drink; dogs to pet and socks to put on. In a thousand tiny moments of predictable routine God undergirds my doubt with the quiet persistence of his promise.

Where was God today? Not in a booming voice from the sky or a dramatic conversion. God was in the shoes that protected my feet, in the faucet that gave me clean water, in the softness of late-evening light, and in a thousand seemingly little things that I easily could have missed.

Hibernation

2008-11-21T08:44:00.000-08:00

When the days grow short and the dark is long, there is something in our spirits that yearns to hibernate. Give up all pretense of moving on, getting through the day, and just wrap up with warm drinks and big blankets at home and go into a state of quiet rest. Lower the expectations, embrace the melancholy and the weariness, and just do the minimum to continue to exist.

What if the spiritual life necessitates this time in the dark, this time of quiet stasis, and we are killing ourselves by refusing to Sabbath, refusing to stop, refusing to be still? Are we too busy to embrace the gifts of hibernation?

The kingdom of heaven is like waking up after long sleep, like light after long dark, like activity after long rest. The kingdom of heaven is like an animal that comes out of the comfortable sameness of its winter den and finds stiff muscles grown strong again, finds the earth generous in new life, finds (after a time of nothing) the joy of every tiny something. What if the kingdom of heaven is waiting for us on the other side of the dark and we never get still enough to find it?

Proficiency in Believing

2008-11-10T21:51:00.000-08:00

Faith was then a task for a whole lifetime, because it was assumed that proficiency in believing is not acquired either in days or in weeks.
—Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

If I had more courage or discipline, perhaps it would be easier to feel I was becoming proficient in faith. For me it is as much of a struggle today as it ever was. My belief in progress and hard work tell me that it should be just like proficiency with a musical instrument or some other art form: the more you work at it, the better you get. But it’s not that way at all.

It may be that proficiency in believing comes not in working harder, but in working less; not in mastering something but being mastered by it. Because the more I think I’ve mastered belief, the more it slips through my fingers into the outstretched hands of children; children who have not worked at it but receive it easily because they know they need it and are certain they deserve it. Perhaps I should stop trying so hard and remember what it means to be like a child, remember that of all the things I was made for the most blessed one is surely learning to receive.

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A Lesson in Perspective

2008-10-21T18:43:00.000-07:00

I realize that often I weigh my life on an imaginary set of scales … on the one side is all that is good and restorative and life-giving; on the other side is all that is evil, painful, and broken. And my mental state depends on those scales coming out right. Too many bad things happen and the scales tip the wrong way. And in those moments I feel put upon, angry at the seeming injustice, wondering why God doesn’t throw more onto the “good” side to even things out a bit.

It strikes me that this mental picture is wrong. If it’s all about the scales, then I will never, ever catch up. I will forever doubt whether there is enough goodness in the world to even things out. I will perpetually be in need, waiting and wondering why things don’t seem to measure up fairly.

But what I have this completely wrong? What if grace is not something to add onto the scale, but instead the very air which surrounds the scale, the atoms that make up the scale, even the imagination that invents it? What if all the bad things that happen are not something to weigh out against the good, but simply one small blot in a universe of blessedness and love?

And what if it’s not a scale at all? What if I’m staring for all I’m worth at a crack and missing the point that the crack is but a tiny scar on a huge and lovely tree? A tree that for all the wailing in the world, will never, ever blow beyond the limits of the one who made the wind.

There's Sticks in My Manna and Other Discoveries

2008-10-15T18:42:00.000-07:00

“Now the manna was like coriander seed.”
—Numbers 11:7

This past weekend I did something I have never done before. Spending a day at the farm, I was faced with a mound of dried coriander plant. Still on the plant, the tiny balls had to be separated from the impossibly thin, dry stalks. In theory, this would leave you with a tidy bucket of coriander seeds to be ground and used as spice. What it left me with, however, was a bucket of dried leaves, sticks, and other sharp objects, sore hands, and a lot of little balls of coriander rolling all over the floor.

After this experience, I knew coriander in the biblical sense. I mean, I really knew coriander in a way that seeing it in a pristine glass jar with a green lid already ground up into a fine powder never, ever let me know it. Like most of the Christian faith, it’s not till we slow down and get our hands dirty that we figure anything out.

But even more amazing than my discovery of the truth about coriander was what I found that night when doing a casual search for the word “coriander” in the Bible. Coriander was MANNA. Or at least very close to it. And gone in an instant were my visions of perfect white flakes that people scooped up neatly into a bowl to be cooked. Instead, I pictured balls of manna running over the grass, getting mixed hopelessly with twigs, needing to be swept off the ground, poking people’s hands as they tried to separate it. God promises he will feed the people, but he doesn’t promise that it will be easy.

So to all of you whose coriander comes in pretty labeled jars, let give you two pieces of advice: 1. Look closely, look very closely at the picture of that little plant on the front and think just for a second about how it got from that plant into that jar, and thank God—I mean really, THANK God that there are farmers who know about these things. And 2: Realize that unless you’ve spent some time getting to know coriander, odds are very high you’re totally missing the point of manna.

The Music of Prayer

2008-10-08T13:18:00.000-07:00

“I called out to him with my mouth, my tongue shaped the sounds of music.”
—Psalm 66:17

“In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express.”
—Romans 8:26

As part of the choir I belong to, we often sing in other languages. In the past year, I have sung in Latin, Russian, Italian, and Spanish. One thing that has surprised me is how much singing in a foreign tongue changes the way I understand the song. Even though I sometimes I have no idea what the words mean, there is the music to help me along, to cue me to the emotion and story being told with the notes, and perhaps to understand it more fully than I would have if ordinary English words had gotten in the way.

I wonder if prayer is like that. I can pray, half in love with my own words even as I do it, marveling over a turn of phrase or even at the depths of my piety. And instantly despite my best efforts at humility, it’s more about my words than an honest expression of relationship. Last fall around this time, I attended the Intermission silent retreat run by Rev. Ron Klok. In my spiritual direction time, one thing we worked toward was getting to that point of honesty in prayer, beyond the words I thought I should say, the words that sounded pretty and impressed other people—to the music and the truth underneath being whispered by my deepest self. What is your soul saying? Ron asked me, a question I continue to ask myself on a regular basis. With that question, I go further to the place beyond and below words and resonate with something deeper. Something I too easily ignore, like the inside of an onion I consider too pretty and too much work to peel.

The place of the Spirit’s move in my prayers is the place when I fall out of love with my words, when I strip back the expectations and pretensions with which I approach God, and find myself catching hints of the music underneath. How does the Holy Spirit intercede with groans? Today it was in the moment I was caught unaware on my daily commute by the beauty of yellow leaves blowing across the road and felt in equal parts sorrow and delight. And it was also in the moment where my dog raced across a field of grass to scatter a flock of birds. His black fur was shining in the sun; the birds were silhouetted perfectly against the blue sky. Those moments moved me to tears, with prayers on my heart for which I could find no words, in equal parts both thanks and heartache. The Spirit groans, and I am silent in the music that is all around me. And from that place of stillness, perhaps I will one day learn to speak.

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He's God the Whole World in His Hands

2008-10-03T09:53:00.000-07:00

“I have written your name on the palm of my hands.”
—Isaiah 49:15, NLT

“Under the current system, a new species does not officially exist until the scientific report of its discovery appears in print.”
—“Biologists wrangle over how to name every living thing,” Edmonton Journal, September 7, 2008, E6

The world is teeming with life. There are millions of species that even today remain unnamed. Out there in the mud, in the desert, in forests, rivers, lakes, oceans, there are birds, plants, and microorganisms without a name. Millions of them. And even those that scientists want to name are deemed not to exist until a report appears in print. Adam surrounded by the animals might as well not have bothered doling out names (“You are antelope”; “You are giraffe”; “You are hedgehog”) because nothing was in print yet and therefore, did not exist.

But there is a different way of being in print that honors the complexity in the world we can only hint at. While we play at trying to name things, trying to categorize and list every living thing, God holds it all in his hands—literally. His hands are marked over with names. “I have written your name on the palm of my hands.” The names of his children Israel, the names of his beloved people, the names of every living thing—all find room enough to be remembered on the hands of God. He’s got the whole world in his hands. Room enough on those hands to write every maggot, every bird, every fern, every living thing. Yet even with all those millions of things, it never gets crowded. Because while all of us are written there, there is also only just me. Quiet enough for just me, cradled in the hand of a loving God who has always known my name. Written on the palm of God’s hands, I exist. Whether I am worthy to appear in a scientific journal or not.

Jesus Is (Not) My Friend

2008-09-23T21:33:00.000-07:00

“How long do we put up with this, God? Are you gone for good? … Where is the love you’re so famous for?”
—Psalm 89:46, 50, The Message

I hate it when he doesn’t talk to me. Especially when I feel like I’m dying for lack of a word from him. If I could just have a reminder of his love so I know he’s not walked off for good. But I get nothing. If I could see him, there are times I’d want to pound him with my fists and yell back into the quiet peace of his face: “Why don’t you just SAY SOMETHING!!”

Just as I am suspicious of people who too easily feel that Jesus is their friend—that he lives to make them content, that he can be summoned at a moment’s notice to bless their every want, speak to their every need and reply within seconds at their convenience, I am also suspicious of myself for thinking sometimes that Jesus is not my friend. “Who are you really mad at in that case?” a (real, live, here-on-earth) friend asked when we talked about that urge to shout back in Jesus’ invisible face.

Who indeed? Am I really mad at Jesus for not talking when I want to hear him most? Or am I mad at the same suffering and pain that caused Jesus to die for love of the ones who live through it? When I’m hurting, when I’m angry at the world, sometimes the last thing I want someone I love to do is put their hand on my shoulder in a wordless gesture of support. Buzz off, I want to say. Leave me alone and let me stew. Why do you show up now and not when I really needed you? There is a front of defensiveness I cling to stubbornly even when it takes all my energy to keep it going. But Jesus is like that friend who keeps his hand on my shoulder long enough for me to move past being angry and get to the place where realize that I am tired, tired, and what I really want more than anything is to let it all go and know that someone else is in charge, someone who has a plan, someone who will one day work things together for good. Do I believe that is true? Yes, I definitely do. Is it a comfort to me when I'm sick of the silence? Not much. But I do know that my faith often hangs in the split-second moment between being angry at the hand on my shoulder and then wanting to receive it.

What a friend we have in Jesus. If we could just learn to live with him …

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Made for the Sea

2008-09-21T20:05:00.000-07:00

“Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee.”
—St. Augustine

Even though I know there are all kinds of gulls, I am fascinated to spot what I still call seagulls in places very far from the sea. I often see them congregating in parking lots. Perhaps there is something in the long stretches of gray asphalt accented by white lines that brings to mind a vast and endless ocean and white-capped waves.

Perhaps I, too, was made for the water. And something restless in my soul calls from the wild places where the Spirit hovered in the beginning over the face of the deep. But I pull back, resist the lure of chaos and look instead for some artificial place of calm. I fly aimlessly over parking lots, hoping that rigid facsimile of the sea will keep things understandable.

In the end it never works. My heart is restless for the rhythmic persistence of the waves, for the place where all the crashing and foaming makes sense, speaks to some greater purpose, and tells me in wordless eloquence I am not alone. So why do I fight the sea? Why do I fear the ill-at-ease moments when all they say is I was made for something more? My heart is restless, restless. Spirit, sing your music and I’ll surrender to the sea.

Peace Be With You

2008-09-16T10:28:00.000-07:00

“Unless you become like a little child…” Matthew 18:3

“Peace be with you.” “And also with you.” We speak these words of blessing and response to one another in our church services. And there is wonder in that simple preposition, with. Peace be, not IN you, not FOR you, but WITH you. Peace not as a place we go or something we get, but a companion who is with us. Peace be with you.

And what would this companion Peace be? As otherworldly as a silent toddler, not whining when we fail to notice her, not kicking and crying when we don’t make space for her needs, but standing absolutely quiet with the patience of the ages, waiting, waiting, for our eyes to land on her long enough to notice the slight breeze that blows her hair, the translucent light that no amount of time on earth can shake from her skin, the ageless depths of her eyes, and the hint of smile we notice only after we keep gazing, the smile that comes to the corners of her mouth because she knows the secret things that only children know. Peace, peace, be with you.

For the Beauty of the Earth, Or: Vegetable Love

2008-09-08T19:22:00.000-07:00

This fall marks a first for my life: the first time I have been overcome on more than one occasion by the urge to photograph vegetables. I suspect it’s because I have a closer connection this time, having been part of the process of planting and harvesting on a farm, sharing tasks with three other families in the garden. To be honest, Will has done the lion’s share of the work this summer, but even though I but rarely got my hands dirty, there is something delightful about knowing where things started and then celebrating their end.

We bring home big baskets of produce and I enjoy how beautiful it all is. I line the various bundles up on the kitchen counter like distant relatives at a family reunion: a few potatoes, a bit of parsley, some broccoli peeking out, beans, carrots, lettuce, zucchini, and tomato. And I think, “How lovely you all look. So many different colors from the same dark dirt. Smile.”

But all-too-soon my celebration ends and I have a second “first” to add to my list: the first time I have felt oppressed by produce. There are mounds of peas that need to be shelled and beans to be blanched and frozen and tomatoes to be dried and sauced and zucchini to disguise in a hundred different dishes. There are more vegetables than I’ve ever had come to me at one time and I need new pots, new techniques, new recipes to deal with them all.

In this season of “firsts,” I thank God and the good earth for such loveliness. And I realize I don't mind feeling oppressed by vegetables because it leads me to newness and creativity in recipes, in how I spend my time, in what I eat, in how I live. And to think it all started with dirt ...

What But Thy Grace

2008-08-24T18:46:00.000-07:00

“What but thy grace can foil the tempter’s power?”
—“Abide with Me”

The words to this old hymn have been in my head a lot lately, in particular the words above. It seems to me there should be some kind of organized defense to “foil the tempter’s power.” We should have strategies and equipment to ward off attacks, including things like prayer, worship, and scriptural study. We do have these things, and they are very good. But somehow the phrase “what but thy grace” lands all of them flat and powerless. In the end it is not our programs, our spiritual disciplines, our plans or even our best intentions that foil the tempter’s power. When that “foiling” happens, it happens only by God’s grace.

I can’t get my head around that. I want to be able to do something. I want to be able to fight. And sometimes, in the seasons of endless battles, just sometimes, I want to win. But victory is seductive, leading me quickly to believe that it was my plan that brought us there, that each step of my strategy ought to be measured and repeated to achieve the same results again. Victory hides the true source of success. It was grace alone that foiled the tempter’s power. It was grace, and not the precision of my plans. Grace is generous but she is also shy, unwilling to be forced into the narrow confines of my expectation.

Where does this land me? Do I sit around all day doing nothing in the face of evil, waiting and hoping for grace to appear? No. But maybe also yes. I am called to participate, to act, to fight against injustice and all that mars God’s image in humankind. But on some deep level, it is not up to me. I am called to be an active agent of renewal, and I am also called to open my hands and wait for grace. It is a liminal place where my good actions disappear, where they are not a means to an end or a strategy to be measured by success or failure, but maybe, if I am lucky, they become an opening for God’s grace where a bit of foiling may at last occur.

Water in the Desert

2008-08-08T18:36:00.000-07:00

When you have less of something, you value it more. In desert places, water is guarded and conserved carefully as a precious natural resource. And the animals and plants that live there have to adapt to life with less water in order to survive.

For faith-seeking artists, the world can be a vast and dreadful desert, which is why my week at the Glen Workshop was for me a week of great worth, like water in a desert. And it strikes me how essential water is to that full and abundant life promised by Christ. I can go for years and years without it; I can pray for it, reminisce about it, dream about it, but eventually I have to be able to stick my face down and drink in order to remember who I am, in order to become who Christ tells me I am.

But there is an element of surprise to all of this—to water in the desert, which is so rare it almost shouldn’t be there; and to the long, deep satisfaction of communion, which is what I wrote about to begin with before I ever left for the workshop. The surprise is that no matter how many miles apart we are, we are also so close together, closer than I would have ever thought. Which makes me believe that water can show up anywhere. Even in the desert. And where there is water, there just might be flowers.

This is the Word

2008-07-26T20:14:00.000-07:00

“Open your ears and hear my prayer. Don’t pretend you don’t hear me knocking. Come close and whisper your answer. I really need you.”
—Psalm 55:1-2, The Message

There are times when we are, if not desperate, then at least fervently longing for some word of the Lord. There are things that happen that drain away all words, leaving you with a silence loud enough to make you shout back prayers all day and night to fill it, knocking, knocking at the gates of heaven. And that sense of need, of pleading, comes through in The Message translation of Psalm 55 in one honest statement: “I really need you.”

There are times when I am less desperate for an answer, but still want to know that there is some response to my questions of life. And for those times, I have the rather odd habit (though not that odd, I have discovered) of typing random things into Google: everything from “What should we have for supper tonight” to “Why are my kids acting crazy?” to the more philosophical “Why do people suffer?” And there is always, always, some word to be found. Sometimes it’s an informational web site with recipes or spiritual guidance, other times it’s just someone else’s blog complaining about unruly kids. There is always someone to answer back; there are always words in response.

It’s an odd impulse, but one that goes back to the very beginnings of creation. God speaks, and we are created. We speak back to God, to each other, and the dialogue continues. All of it reassuring us that we are not alone. And maybe that’s why I can’t abide the silence so well. With that kind of open-hearted vulnerability, “I really need you,” I would think anyone would be moved to respond. But so often there is only silence and a God seems to have closed his ears, pretending not to hear our desperate cries. The best we can do then is keep talking—keep telling ourselves the words that tell the stories of who we are … tell them to Google, to friends, to blogs, in sermons, emails, and phone calls. And in the practice of telling them, we may find at last that God is not in the answer, but in the very breath with which we are moved to ask the questions.

Dots

2008-07-15T19:01:00.000-07:00

“You may wonder where they have gone, those other dim dots that were you.”
—Annie Dillard, An American Childhood

Over the last weeks, I have done a lot of traveling back to places I used to live, rocketing through time quickly from the place I went to elementary school, to the place I went to college, and back to where I live now. I found this a very disorienting experience. Instead of telling a smooth story, tracing my life narrative from one place to the next, these visits made me wonder how many different places a person can spread their DNA without losing something of who they are each time. Where, in all of these places was home? Where, in all of those places, was me?

Was there some trace of me in the elementary school playground, in the red brick blockhouse where we’d come in with eyes squinting after being in the sun, smelling the stale milk, pushing into each other to go up the stairs more quickly? Could my voice or some tiny fleck of my skin still be present in the gray windows where we played “Squish, Squash, Out of the Box”? And if some trace of me was there, what about all the other places I have lived? How is it possible to leave bits of yourself in so many places and yet still have enough left to keep going? I find it harder as I get older to live with so many disconnected things. I resist this this scattering that seems to be spinning out farther and farther with every year I age. I live with what is bent, broken, and breaking down. And I am waiting, waiting, for things to be whole.

What hope I have now comes in a picture that might someday be true: A day when the breath of the Spirit will move across the surface of my soul, making all those disparate dots of dust spring to life and dance in the air, and the finger of God will trace through the light, joining together every speck into a story where there seemed to be none. There is a story that includes everything about me, a place where I can be at rest. This I believe. Lord, help my unbelief.

Spit Polish

2008-06-27T05:28:00.000-07:00

The phrase “spit polish” contains within it a striking contradiction. On the one hand, there is the sense of extreme perfection and dedication. You would do anything to attain the faultless radiance of a perfect polish, even use your own spit. But that is the stranger part—to get something brilliant and beautiful, you use something base and elemental … something that is not beautiful.

I enjoy a good polish as much as the next girl, but when you’re talking about holy things, I am deeply suspicious of that kind of shine. “Where’s the spit?” I want to ask. Evidence of spit would convince me that there was some cost here, that someone’s very essence went in to creating the illusion of spotless ease. Because for me, those rough edges are a clearer evidence of grace than all the polish in the world.

So when I see the gleam of perfect shine, I look closer, and ever closer, and hope with all my heart to find even the slightest trace of spit remaining somewhere on the surface.

Food

2008-06-13T11:15:00.000-07:00

“He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters.”
—Psalm 23

A sermon I heard last Sunday made me think differently about this psalm. I always pictured the green pastures and still waters like some kind of idyllic vacation spot for me to retreat to, a place of calm and rest to escape the hectic pace of my days. I would sit in a lawn chair, trail my hand on the cool grass, and stare at the peaceful water. It would restore my soul.

But this Sunday, the pastor said something that changed my mind. “It’s food.” Grass for sheep is not some far-off thing to dream about but never actually get. It’s food. As necessary for survival as oxygen.

So when I find myself swamped with stress, I think again how much I need food. I can’t put off the kind of rest I find in God’s green pastures and still waters anymore than I can put off my next meal. It’s food. And I’m starving.

The Simple Truth of Love

2008-06-08T20:13:00.000-07:00

“I wouldn’t give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity… but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes

I heard this quote for the first time in church today, and was also privileged to hear words of hope spoken by a woman from China who professed her faith and was baptized. For her, the message of the gospel was beautiful because it was so simple: Love God, love others, love your enemies. As she explained her pull to this faith as a 36-year-old woman and how compelling the story of that love was for her, I was moved to tears, as were many who listened.

I realized today that most of my tears about God come when I realize that he loves us after all. When we wander, when we curse his name, when we despair, his love is always there, always waiting. And isn’t that all any of us want? To know that someone cares after all, someone loves us and loves others in our pain, someone has always loved us and always will?

It is far beyond the simplicity of a fake smile and a placid reassurance: “Jesus loves you.” It is the simplicity on the other side of complexity for the drug addict, the whore, the psychotic, the housewife, the CEO, the murderer, and the child. It is simplicity earned only because it comes again after more darkness than we ever dreamed possible: “Jesus loves you.” Still. Whether you call him or not. Forever without end. He loves you. He does. And for a deep and soul-stilling understanding of that simplicity, I would gladly give my life. And my tears.

Wheels That Shout

2008-06-03T19:04:00.000-07:00

I think a greater measure of a community comes not through the words it speaks or even the rules it upholds, but through its actions. We can say all we want about caring for each other, about loving one another as Christ loved us. But the true test comes in what we do. Are we so worried about our own individual list of rules that we spend all our energy and time trying to fulfill them? Or do we live with a certain kind of open-handed generosity towards ourselves and others, trusting that if we live truthfully and sincerely within community, God can and will make himself known among us? And more than that, when God does make himself known, we will have the grace to recognize it?

This week as I am alone with the kids, our car decided to breathe its last breath. And even before I had time to think about what I was going to do, a string of people lined up to offer rides, cars, money. In a long line of cars at my front door, I see in a very real way the love of family and friends. And every evidence of that kind of love is evidence I use to construct a picture of the love of God, a picture that grows clearer and easier to trust with every act of grace I receive.

Actions definitely speak louder than words. And really, when you consider the truth of grace, the depths of love, why not take your actions and shout for all you’re worth?

Like a Weaned Child

2008-05-25T22:10:00.000-07:00

“But I have stilled and quieted my soul;
like a weaned child with its mother,
like a weaned child is my soul within me.”
—Psalm 131: 2

I have twice heard men preach on this verse and twice they have gotten it wrong. They take the image to be one of God’s nurturing care for us, and both used the metaphor of the nursing mother to talk about God’s provision for creation. But they missed the most important word in this verse, the word that any woman who has nursed a child would notice almost instantly—weaned.

A child that is weaned is no longer drinking at its mother’s breast. Unlike the nursing child, whose hunger becomes intensified, whose need is all-consuming the minute it detects its mother’s scent, the weaned child is still. The weaned child in its father’s arms is much as it ever was. The true test comes when the child is in its mother’s arms again—the place with primal associations for survival and sustenance, the place where longings have been met and needs satisfied. In that place, will all the old passions be stirred up, or will the child trust in its ability to find comfort elsewhere?

With God, I still and quiet my soul like a weaned child. Though the fretful infant within me cries out for God to end the pain of hunger, my soul is quiet like a weaned child, a child with safety and warmth enough to trust not in the breast or the milk that comes after, but the closeness, only the closeness, with the one who gave so much and in whose loving arms I have never stopped being held.

Staying By

2008-05-19T07:42:00.000-07:00

“Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.”
—James 1:4

Some translations use “patience” for this verse instead of “perseverance.” And though my working knowledge of Greek is fading fast, I looked up the word to see what the original says. And the word is a combination of two words, which together could mean something like “to stay by,” or “to remain under.”

So often I think it’s the great acts of selfless love or moments of pure faith that get God’s attention. But as much as that he may be simply wishing for me to stay by, to remain around him in and through the dullness and boredom as much as the moments of great passion and excitement.

It’s the consistent pressure of a light hand that changes the pot. Too much jabbing and the whole thing collapses. Not enough pressure and it stays exactly the same. So while I wish for dramatic evidence of God’s presence, I ask instead for perseverance to content myself with the everyday moments—talking with people, making dinner, doing laundry, feeding the dog, going for walks, praying with the same dull and ineffective repetition of words. To remain under the light touch of God’s hand and be changed by him. Hoping that in the determined effort of simply staying by God, I will come to realize the length of his efforts to stay by me.

Acclimation

2008-05-05T20:40:00.000-07:00

“Now the body is not made of one part, but many.” 1 Corinthians 12:14

We have a new fish tank at our house. Although adding to the ridiculously large number of pets we have was not my plan, I have nonetheless found them interesting to watch. The whole process of acclimating the fish to their new environment was carefully orchestrated: first their bags are placed (closed) into the new tank so the water temperature can equalize. Then the bags are opened (at the top only) so they can get used to the new air. And only after a good stretch of time has passed are they ready to have a bit of the new water added to the inside of their bags. Bit by bit, more new water is mixed in, until it’s about half old and half new. And at the end of this long process they are finally, finally dumped out into the tank.

It’s a community, the sales lady told us. Everything depends on everything else. These fish will bring their own bacteria (good and bad) to the tank and each plant and rock in the tank will also bring its own unique bacteria to this carefully balanced system. It’s not just about the individual fish—it’s about all of the fish interacting together, it’s about the air and the water and the plants and even the algae forming on the walls of the tank.

Maybe if I gave myself as much time for long and gradual adjustment as we gave our fish, I wouldn’t be so worn out by living in a new place. But after being scooped up and dumped out in one swift motion, I find one tank so different from another I scarcely know myself to be a fish anymore. And that is the danger point—forgetting who I am, and simply taking on all the characteristics of my new tank as if they were my own. Some of that is good, but it also means the new tank loses out on what is different about me. I need to know how to be who I am in a new place. And my new place needs to get used to a new fish.

Acclimation is not easy. It’s definitely not fast. And it may never be finished, because things are always changing. But still, we’re working on it. Because in a community, everything depends on everything else.

False and True

2008-04-24T17:38:00.000-07:00

“Nothing human’s not a broth of false and true.”
“All’s lost. All’s found.”
—Godric, Frederick Buechner

The world of the gospel is often one of contradictions—lose your life in order to save it; the greatest is the servant of all; blessed are the ones who mourn. To grow a faith that is complex enough to sustain impossible questions, I often find myself lingering in the place of these contradictions. Rejecting the black-and-white answers of extremes, but standing in that place where I hold both things in my hand and consider how they can both be true at once, I find a kind of energy in the creative tension that these opposites produce.

In the midst of sorrow, there is also joy. In the midst of despair, there is also hope. In the midst of brokenness, there is also reconciliation. All these things can be true in equal measure and often at the very same time. There are moments I am brought to my knees with the weight of loss, and in the very next moment I find myself laughing at the lighthearted teasing of a friend. Moments I am filled with the unassailable mystery of the silence of God, and then again I am so convinced of his care for me that I am reduced to tears of praise and the only words I can choke out are “thank you, thank you…” Moments I am filled with grief at what seems an unredeemable break, yet at the same time I am grateful for the person I no longer see.

To live in the midst of these contradictions is the essence of what it is to be human. Frederick Buechner’s old saint Godric sums it up in these words: “Nothing human’s not a broth of false and true.” We live in the place where sin and sickness are mixed up in equal measure with holiness and grace. And in the midst of realizing everything we’ve lost, we discover with the joyous surprise of grace, all that we have at once and forever found.

Healing ... Or Not

2008-04-13T20:40:00.000-07:00

“It felt like biting stones to learn that sometimes there’s no healing.”
—“Grace After Pressure,” Jaqueline McLeod Rogers

“Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then is there no healing for the wound of my people?”
—Jeremiah 8:22

It’s one thing to agree, in theory, that you believe in the reconciliation of opposites, that two seemingly contrary things can be true at the same time. But it’s another to really live out that belief in the gritty everyday-ness of your life. For me, I can state two seeming opposites that I hold with almost equal weight:

I believe prayer can heal.
I believe that sometimes there is no healing.

Maybe these aren’t as opposite as they may seem. Point 1 simply states a possibility for healing, not an inevitable and absolutely certain result. There is at least the possibility that healing prayer is not answered, and that finality is the place of point 2. You pray, and you are not healed. And you live with it.

My life was irrevocably changed through a time of healing and that happened almost entirely through prayer—both my own prayers and those of brothers and sisters offered on my behalf. It is no small exaggeration to say that those prayers and that period of time changed me, healed me, and renewed my faith in God as loving and good.

And yet. There is part of me that assumed the end of that time of healing would be the end of a certain kind of pain. That God, in his mercy, would simply lift that burden off me once and for all and I would know at last what it was like to be free, to be whole. But there are some wounds that don’t heal. And the recognition of that, alongside an ongoing belief in the certainty of a loving God, is like biting stones.

God loves me. Prayer heals … but not always. And I wonder: why not me? A process of change in my life (one that again is much easier to agree with in the abstract than to live out) has included a new appreciation of the suffering of Christ, and a willingness to live in and through my own suffering. To know there are things that will never fully be healed, to feel the pain of it again some days as sharp as though it just happened, and yet to go on believing is to put myself in a place where I may finally be open enough to see what faith really means, what life as a follower of Jesus may require: the willingness on the one hand to pray, believing that anything is possible, and on the other hand to be humble enough to eat stones if that “anything” never comes. And proclaim with voice firm (or wavering, but proclaiming it nonetheless): “Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him” (Job 13:15).

In Praise of the Back Burner

2008-04-10T18:07:00.000-07:00

“Be properly scared and go on doing what you have to do.”
—Flannery O’ Connor

I have no idea if my cat Zelda is scared, but I can think of lots of reasons she might be. She lives in the house with 4 other pets, including a large black dog who tries desperately to be her friend and a large pushy cat who does not want to be her friend and eats all the food before she can get to it. Besides all that, Zelda has lived in 4 different houses and moved with us 3 times, including a 4-day cross-country trek to Canada. By nature, she is not a super-friendly cat and we have to warn our guests not to get too close lest they be scratched. So I’m guessing all this stress has taken its toll.

But one thing she does know, and that’s how to take Flannery O’Connor’s advice and “be scared” but go on doing what she has to do. And one of the things she has to do is find heat wherever she can to warm her skinny little body. Sometimes that’s found in my lap, but often it’s found on the stove after we’ve cooked something in the oven. And when she finds that warmth, she stretches out, blinks her eyes with contentment, and soaks up whatever heat is left until it’s gone.

Like her, I also try keep going, to let myself be scared, but then put things on the “back burner” in order to go on doing what I have to do. The advantage of putting things on the back burner (even temporarily) is it gets you near the stove. And when you’re near the stove, you’re more likely to soak up a little excess heat. Which sometimes is precisely what it takes to let yourself be scared and precisely what you need to go on doing what you have to do.

Choosing the Hard Thing

2008-04-02T08:39:00.000-07:00

My son begged to get a “grow-your-own sea creatures” kit from his school book order. The tiny creatures are called triops, and they are some kind of tiny shrimp that date to prehistoric times. The thing is, they live only about 2 weeks. So my first reaction was NO WAY. Not only do we already have 5 pets in the house, but adding another batch that were likely to live only 2 weeks was to my mind not at all worth the fuss. Why would we want to go through that?

Well, my son’s enthusiasm and love for science won out and he convinced me to let him spend his money on this kit. “You know they only live 2 weeks, right?” I asked, checking that he understood what he was getting into. “Yes,” he said simply. “But Mom,” he said with shining eyes, “when else do you get the chance to see an actual, living prehistoric creature?!” The tiny creatures hatched and to my horror, my son began to name them. His attachment was deep and instant and I could see already how this would end … badly. Soon, the largest one had eaten all his siblings. He darted quickly around the tank, so he was named “Missile.” Jon checked on him every day, talked to him, fed him, and even made drawings and wrote observations on his behaviors like a true scientist.

Then, true to all advertised info, the little guy died after 2 1/2 weeks. Jon was sad. Very sad. But he talked about how much he learned, how beautiful Missile was, and how much he would love to do it again.

As a mom, I wanted to spare him the pain of death; I wanted to keep things stable and happy, which for me seemed a greater good. But as a child, he taught me how much I miss, how much it’s totally worth it to do the hard thing even if our hearts twist and our hands shake as we do it, because prehistoric creatures are so cool and even though you cry when they die it’s worth it because you got to SEE them!

Thank God for so much beauty and for the heart of child ready to risk pain in order to see it.

God of the Unexpected

2008-03-19T17:32:00.000-07:00

Holy week begins with the noise of a thousand “Hosannas!” ringing through the air. Jesus, riding on a donkey, says nothing. It is the throng of worshippers who are left to put words to this Christ they see before them. Words that change quickly from “Hosanna!” to “Crucify him!” How dare he not be who we expected.

Like that palm-strewn street, Jesus enters into our lives in ways comical and unexpected. And it is up to us to find the words, to translate into speech and action our response to Christ. When expectations are met, the words flow easier. But when we see the Messiah not in the strength of a political conqueror, but riding lopsided on a donkey, silent, looking for all the world like some kind of holy joke, we have two options: ignore what we see and shout “Hosanna!” anyhow, hoping that by our words we will remake Christ into who we want him to be; or, enter into the unexpected, embrace the Christ who is, and find in that moment both faith and joy.

Reinhold Niebuhr says: “Laughter is the beginning of prayer…. The intimate relation between humor and faith is derived from the fact that both deal with the incongruities of our existence.” Moments of comedy (described by Frederick Buechner in The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale) come from the unexpected moments, moments echoed through the life of Christ and the parables he spoke: the holy surprise of losers becoming winners, of outcasts being healed, the happy shock of lost coins found and sons welcomed home, of a shepherd who leaves 99 sheep to get one that has left, a boss who pays workers the same wage at the start of the day or end of the day, a God who waits in hope for all of us to come home again.

This easter, may the God of the unexpected find you in places you are most lost and delight you again with laughter and the improbable, unexpected, unfailing hope of the redeemed.

The Pursuit of Gentleness

2008-03-09T21:27:00.000-07:00

“… pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, and gentleness.”
—1 Timothy 6:11

It is far, far easier to withstand anger than gentleness. There is a kind of rage that feeds itself: when someone throws it at you, you build up an equal store to throw back; when the world is unjust, you give in to the easy energy of kicking back in protest. Anger is a self-perpetuating cycle because it demands every day again the very fuel it takes to fight it.

And then there is gentleness. When words like right and wrong cease to matter, when all the pent-up frustration of your fists is absorbed in the steady, solid chest of one who simply waits for you to finish.

That is gentleness, which rests as softly as new-fallen snow, perfectly balanced on the point of a pine needle, ready even in melting to slide off the morning frost and make everything smooth again.

Daily Bread

2008-03-02T18:53:00.000-08:00

“Loss is as daily as bread.”
—Robert Clark, In the Deep Midwinter

“We cannot make life safe nor God tame … what we can do is turn our faces to the light.”
—Barbara Brown Taylor, Home by Another Way

Give us this day our daily bread. When I pray for daily bread using the words of the Lord’s Prayer, I never actually expect to go hungry. I am usually thinking not of physical food, but of the kind of spiritual “bread” that sustains my soul and keeps me alive in hope. But there is another meaning, perhaps, that I am less likely to reach for. The bread we break during communion symbolizes the broken body of Christ. So when I pray, “Give me my daily bread,” I am also praying, “Give me the broken body of Christ. Give me my daily dose of loss. Give me closeness with all those who suffer.” I pray this not as some kind of masochistic ritual, but to remind me again of the great compassion of God, his presence with me in all of life, and my call to represent that broken body to a world in need.

And there is such need. I have lived and learned well the truth written above: Life is not safe and God is not tame. But I have also learned this: When any of us turn our faces away from deep darkness to the light, when we do whatever it takes to hold on to promises even in the face of unimaginable grief, when our unaccustomed eyes wince and squint in the bright of that light, we will not be disappointed. We may be surprised. We may be taught. We may be humbled. But we will not be disappointed. And for the daily-ness of that bread, I give thanks and praise to God.

Singing

2008-02-23T10:03:00.000-08:00

A tragedy happened on our campus this week. One of our students died Thursday from injuries sustained in a car accident. The day we found out, we gathered as a campus community to pray, to cry together, to speak words of lament and words of promise, and to sing together.

There is something about the sound of singing that is so gentle, and that gentleness stood in stark contrast to the raw and open wound of grief we felt at the same time. On the one hand, there are all the questions, not understanding why one so young had to die, why such random things happen at all, why God in his love could not have stopped this. On the other hand, there are the promises of God, which we were reminded, are for times exactly like this. Times when, despite all evidence to the contrary, we continue to believe, continue to hold on to hope, continue to trust that the one who promises to preserve our lives will do so even in the face of death.

Though it is complicated in ways I don’t understand, I find that it is only in the Christian faith I am able to hold such opposites together. In A Grace Disguised, Gerald Sittser talks about the loss of his wife, his mother, and four-year-old daughter in an accident. He says,

“Sorrow enlarges the soul until it is capable of mourning and rejoicing simultaneously, of feeling the world’s pain and hoping for the world’s healing at the same time” (p. 63).

In moments like this, we feel the world’s pain keenly. And as we walk through the darkness of grief, I pray that God would allow us the grace of holding alongside that grief the hope for healing at the same time. Hope for the day when the sound of singing will at last and forever drown out the sounds of crying and every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth will be together united in joy before the throne of the Lamb who is worthy, whose death forever makes us live.

True Religion

2008-02-11T17:00:00.000-08:00

“True religion is this: to look after widows and orphans in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”
—James 1:27

Seeing the picture above had the same kind of jarring effect I imagine the parables of Jesus had on those who heard them. “This is your true religion,” says the picture, and right away I recognize with shock that it is true. This is so far from the stories I want to name me, and yet this is where I have come. Maybe I’m not a jean hound or a shop-a-holic, but in so many other ways I have forsaken care of others in favor of my own faulty sense of what I need.

I slip into habits in my Christian walk as easily as I slip into a pair of jeans. I need a faith that is insistent, that cracks and crashes through the dullness of my self-centered living with a call to be more and better who Christ calls me to be. In Mystery and Manners, Flannery O’Connor says: “To the hard of hearing, you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”

So what is the job of the preacher, the writer, the theologian today? To shout, to draw large and startling figures in the hopes that people will at last understand, that with practice we will all learn to hear and to see … that one day, with the practiced discipline of sincerity, there is a grace that may become so much a part of us it seeps into our every action almost without thought. A grace that fits with the comfort and familiarity of an old pair of jeans.

Dancing

2008-02-06T19:54:00.000-08:00

“You have turned my mourning into joyful dancing.”
—Psalm 30:11 (NLT)

I asked God for joy this week. And he answered me with dancing.

I have a long history with dancing, and the saddest thing to me is how rarely I do it anymore. I definitely went through the ballerina phase as a young girl, and very often my sister and I would choreograph dramatic dance sequences (complete with costumes and props) in our living room. I know for a fact I danced in high school (I have a picture to prove it), and I still enjoyed letting loose every now and then at social dances during college.

At some point the dancing stopped, or at least got a lot less. There were so many reasons not to dance. I think it’s interesting that Psalm 30 does not say: “You turned my mourning into happiness.” The opposite of sadness is happiness. The opposite of the deep and endless dark of mourning has to be more than happiness, has to be something as wild and unpredictable as the journey of grief, has to be something like dancing.

This week, we got a dance game where you stomp a mat on the floor in time to music and the sequence of steps on the TV. I did it with my kids and I have not laughed so much in a long time. And I remember in the midst of sadness, there is always within me the potential for wildness. And I am so very glad that God wants me not to subdue that or be embarrassed by it or drown myself in self-consciousness, but to take that wildness and use it to put as much passion into celebration as I do to mourning. For now, I still dance in my living room. But maybe someday …

Sinking

2008-02-02T08:56:00.000-08:00

Make a careful exploration of who you are and the work you have been given, and then sink yourself into that. Don't be impressed with yourself. Don't compare yourself with others. Each of you must take responsibility for doing the creative best you can with your own life.
—Galatians 6:4–5

It has not gone the way I pictured it and at times has not been anything close to what I imagined. But whether my life bewilders me or causes me joy, the word today is “sink yourself into that.” Know who I am and how God made me and do my creative best to live life—this life, here, now.

There are so many things that still call to me from my old life in Grand Rapids—family and dear friends, successes, even something as simple as knowing what road goes to where. But I am no longer living there. And I realize there is no new life without great loss. Two dreams I’ve had recently involving dead or dying babies remind me the pain involved in shifting your attention from the life you expected to the life that is before you. At some point there has to be a letting go, there has to be an open and honest journey through sadness before there is a chance of starting again. And sometimes the biggest hurdle in getting through that sadness is anger and the persistent refrain: this isn’t what I wanted.

Sinking into the place and work I’ve been given will mean having to chop through layers of ice, thawing parts of my heart I’ve held back in reserve “just in case.” It also might mean deciding to stop using the reactions of others as a yardstick by which I measure my self-esteem. But to live creatively and responsibly means there will almost surely be beauty. Beauty and joy to outlast the loss, melt my sorrow and bring me home again to the life God has waiting, to the path right in front of my feet.

Wordless Story

2008-01-25T06:57:00.000-08:00

“Soon it became clear to us: you can’t teach disbelief
to a child,

only wonderful stories, and we hadn’t a story
nearly as good.”
—Stephen Dunn, “At the Smithville Methodist Church”

When I was little we were taught the story of Jesus through a “wordless book” that consisted of no words, just pages of solid colors meant to represent different things. For me the struggle to find words is still part of my faith walk. There are things I have come to believe, to know on some deep level they are true. And yet when I try to find words to explain or describe those experiences, they are always so inadequate.

Sarah Groves has a song (“This Peace”) in which she describes that feeling of belief as a “whisper in my ear, a shiver up my spine, the gratitude I feel for all that’s right, a mystery appeal that’s been granted me tonight.” Her words are true and also seem to get at the difficulty in describing the way God’s Spirit works in and through us. It is a whisper in my ear, it is that deep well of gratitude that sometimes overwhelms me, it is also a kind of giving up or letting go… like someone who keeps a stiff upper lip for a long time and then welcomes the relief and hope of knowing it is no longer necessary.

When I am most convinced God is real are the times I witness the depths of our human frailty and together with that the almost embarrassing persistence of hope. It is the strength of a story that 2,000 years and lots of quiet later that makes us keep going, makes us believe or at least want to believe. The strength of a story that continues despite all the embarrassing things people have done since in the name of religion. The truth of a story that has the power to change me every time I hear it again. Yes, I believe. And I ask God every time words fail me or my heart wavers to help, help, my unbelief. Because I haven’t another story nearly as good.

Why Yes

2008-01-18T19:02:00.000-08:00

This week we had a two-day interdisciplinary studies conference called “Thought for Food.” Along with reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, it has gotten me thinking a lot about food security, global food issues, and the everyday habits of putting food on the table for my family to eat. It’s great to be in a place where such important questions get asked, great to come home with my head buzzing so full of ideas I can hardly sleep. But making the leap from a lot of great ideas to something that gets put into action is a tough one. Is it even possible?

At the evening panel discussion, Cathy Campbell (one of the conference speakers and author of Stations of the Banquet) was talking about how often we get bogged down in all the reasons we can’t do something. Instead, she suggested, we should focus on the “why yes” list—all the reasons it’s the right thing to do, all the reasons it’s a meaningful and necessary thing to do—and that, perhaps, can get us past the line of rational and accusing reasons “why not.”

Is it possible to change something so huge and so deeply entrenched as our food system? Is it possible to keep working for change in this or any area without getting discouraged, defeated, exhausted? Is it possible for a person to change, for a community to change, for the world to change? Of all the words I heard this week, the two that stick in my mind are the two that best answer these questions and the two I will hold on to as I come against all pulls to the contrary.

Is it possible? Why, yes.

Wide-Open Spaces

2008-01-09T20:37:00.000-08:00

“Hurry and help me; I want some wide-open space in my life.”
—Psalm 38:22, The Message

“A religion without grace will wallop you with God’s image of the perfect human life; it will condemn you for not matching it in your own life. Religion clobbers you for your failures and sends you groveling in the sawdust of defeat. [Religion] tells us that we’re forever wrong unless we measure up to God’s ideal. … May grace come to convince you at the depths of your soul that it’s all right even though a lot is wrong with you.”
—Lewis Smedes, How Can It Be All Right When Everything Is All Wrong?

“Herein lies the core of my spiritual struggle: the struggle against self-rejection, self-contempt, and self-loathing.”
—Henri Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son

The thing about impossible standards is they take up way too much space. First, there is the space for all the lines, the exactingly detailed images of the way things should be. Then there is the space for the self-recriminations and helpless frustration when reality inevitably falls short of those ideals. And when God himself is added in the mix as one more person whose stance is one of regretful disappointment, there is no room for anything that might bring life.

It is often from closed-off places of claustrophobia that I cry out to God, much like the psalmist, for “wide-open spaces.” And the moment of grace is always the moment when something held tightly is released, when something closed off breaks open. It is a moment of realizing how completely I’ve blown it and also the moment of realizing how completely I am loved still. And the times when I really get this, I feel a deep inner sense of relief, a gratitude so deep it moves me to tears. But there are lots of times I don’t get it because I am so walled off with self-contempt there is no room to be open to grace.

Some friends and I decided that we would proclaim 2007 the “year of grace”. For us this meant we would stop endlessly blaming ourselves for things that went wrong, but would just acknowledge our failings, confess them to one another, and move on. We would give grace to ourselves as we all stood on the brink of major life changes and we would willingly embrace the moments we were most aware of our weakness.

At the start of 2008, we have just come to the end of our self-appointed “year of grace,” and right away my first thought is I need another one. And another one. And I realize it is not really about a year and it is not for any of us to proclaim. Though I still find myself crushed with self-loathing, grace is what allows me now and then to rise above it and what keeps me from being destroyed by it. Grace is God himself, come down to love me. Grace is abundant, free ... there for a year of days and all the days God grants me space to receive it.

Beauty and Grace

2007-12-29T17:43:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-21T08:40:00.000-08:00

“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

2007-12-19T23:40:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-16T18:43:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-09T13:38:00.000-08:00

“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

2007-12-01T10:02:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-28T20:52:00.000-08:00

“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

2007-11-26T18:55:00.000-08:00

“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

2007-11-24T06:45:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-20T20:00:00.000-08:00

“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

2007-11-12T09:38:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-04T19:20:00.000-08:00

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

2007-10-28T20:07:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-22T21:10:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-18T07:44:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-11T18:16:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-08T10:52:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-03T19:07:00.000-07:00

“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

2007-10-01T19:50:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-21T18:25:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-16T14:00:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-08T13:35:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-21T18:42:00.000-07:00

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.