What It Is to Be at Home

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dignity and Drawing Lines

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

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

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

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

Baptism Every Day

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

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

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

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

Tears, Part 2: At the Jail

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

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

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

Tears and the Last Person You'd Want

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

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

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

Holding on to Water

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

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

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



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

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

All We Have

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

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

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