Big Enough

There was a time when I could only read the Psalms. Not a week or two—over a year I deliberately avoided Paul, Moses, Jesus and John, among others. I went to church most of the time so I’m sure I heard the Christian Scriptures read aloud, printed on bulletins. But when my Bible cracked open, I could only find myself at home in the Psalms. In retrospect, it was a great mercy visited from outside myself that I managed to open a Bible at all. St. John of the Cross’ Dark Night of the Soul remained untouched on my bookshelf; the title description was apt enough to do me good without reading it.

These days every Sunday afternoon, a deacon stands in front of a gathered people of whom I am a part and says, “The Psalter is the prayer book of the Bible. Join me in praying responsively by half-verse Psalm fill-in-the-blank.” And then in stark contrast to the beautiful prayers I’ve begun to pray in the Book of Common Prayer, we together intone the most alarming words.

Why do you stand afar off, O Lord? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?

Your hand will find out all your enemies; your right hand will find out those who hate you.

O my God, I cry by day but you do not answer; and by night but I have no rest.

It doesn’t stop there with feelings of abandonment and hopelessness. A former colleague ridiculed me when I confessed that the imprecatory psalms bring me relief. I have seen injustice crack its rod on the bent backs of the oppressed, in Africa and America and I join the psalmist praying:

Requite them according to their work and according to the evil of their practices; Requite them according to the deeds of their hands; Repay them their recompense. Because they do not regard the works of the Lord nor the deeds of His hands, He will tear them down and not build them up.

I pray that not because I am vindictive or unmerciful (although I can be) but because voicing that plea gives me hope for the future without recklessly needing to force my own justice with these often misguided hands. I can plead with God for his good justice to come because I know my justice is as venal and oppressive as what I am watching unfold.

Real life surges through these songs and prayers. These words heave and pitch with raw pain, with the fragile, lacy foam of hope tipping the edges of harsh waves, with honest sparring with a God who seems to disappoint, even abandon. It isn’t a hatred of mercy that makes me find a home in these words but a love of honesty.

Betrayal. Sin. Depression. Loss. Grief. Lament. Abandonment. Joy. Confusion. Loneliness. If you have felt it or can name it, you will find it there: fully sanctioned by a holy and friendly God, inspired by his Spirit, ready for your hottest feelings to find a voice before him.

It can be a little embarrassing. In some way our honest calling, our pleas laced with anger, hurt, disappointment or our all-out, shaking-our-fists-skyward hollers for help find their way to this:

Call upon Me in the day of trouble; I shall rescue you and you will honor me.

God chooses to relate to me in a vastly different way than I relate to my own children. These prayers that are as likely to start with a complaint or question as with a word of praise are welcomed. There is no divine “If you don’t have anything nice to say, just say nothing” mandate apparent in the Psalms. His command to call to him isn’t limited to when we can call nicely; his promise to rescue us isn’t dependent on our humble and grateful praying life, if the Psalms are any indication. These prayers are what I don’t often pray: a conversation, an honest expression of self that remains grounded in the truth of God’s character, that doesn’t lose itself completely in the wretchedness of its overwhelming emotions, even when all hope seems lost.

The human desire to clean ourselves up and present ourselves to God and others on our own terms, hiding behind as many leaves as we can hold, remains. The honesty reflected in these pleas and prayers can make me shudder because they most honestly reflect me and the state of my heart. This me is not at all what I would like to show the world, less still the God who has the final say in my life. I prefer a little more control, a little less mess.

But in the Psalter I find with God’s people all of the mess. The shouts and silence, the joy and fear, the anger and sense of abandonment. And when I join my voice in these prayers uttered by saints through the ages, I find exactly what I need: the paradox that “the seeming absence of God could be countered by recognizing the actual presence of God in what [the psalmist] had experienced as God’s absence.” (Scot McKnight, Fasting, on Psalm 77, pg. 55)

The beautiful gift of God in the Psalms is the truth that he is big enough. For my grief and my sorrow. For my questions and my anger. For my loneliest sense of abandonment. For the dark nights of the soul. He is big enough to receive my song, to sanction these songs and give me voice.

Song: Five Minute Friday

It’s Friday again! Time to set the timer and see what happens. This one didn’t fly out of my fingers like normal so if it feels a little sloggy, it isn’t just you. It’s me.

The melody floated in the windows, soaring ahead of the dusty wind. In months of living in that neighborhood, with those friends, I had never heard it. The music was other. Different. Holy even. My husband nudged me and told me to go outside and see. The voices were female; his presence would silence them. I slid on a floor-length polyester slip and a large shawl to cover my hair, curly from the unlikely desert rain.

Mariam and two others were sitting on a poured concrete house foundation, with rebar sticking up and a variety of holes that made the platform slightly better than an obstacle course. They sang. They stopped a little with the sound of my metal door scraping across my tile entryway, then continued. I made my way down the dirty road a bit, hiked up my skirt and in truly American (read: extremely unladylike) fashion, took a seat with them.

What were they singing?

My question embarrassed them. A rain song. But one that was haram, forbidden. Although I don’t know much of orthodox Islam, my friends explained that their religion practiced correctly forbids music. They may chant, they can read their book, they can pray and call to prayer but no music. Not the music they were singing. Of course, they belong to a nation of poets and playwrights, of singers and songwriters. In this way, their faith does not enliven them but reduces them. This rain song—the most beautiful song I have ever heard—came from their inner most being, their very God-created hearts. I am certain of that.

I grieve for people who have lost their song.

I think of my own people: Western, modern or post-modern, Christianized. How we have lost our songs. How we allow Facebook and Spotify and iPods and someone else’s playlist drown out the music that is in our innermost being. How our discomfort with grief means that we have put away our dirges. How our inability to accept death means that we wash our hands and scurry away from the elderly who might teach us some new songs. I grieve for us, for myself, for the brokenness of this world that touches entire cultures, not just individuals. I grieve for people who have lost our song.

Comfort: Five Minute Friday

I’m writing with the encouraging group of writers at Five Minute Friday today. If you need an injection of creativity or reflection in your life, I invite you to join us!

I’m watching the string from my Venetian blinds blow in the cool morning breeze. The gaping, aching hole is still there this morning. My four year old says as I cuddle him, “It’s like we’re in a nightmare.” He doesn’t even know what he’s saying but he’s right. It is like a nightmare.

This neighbor that I knew well enough to wave but not well enough to sit down and drink tea with, the one I’ve watched dozens of times load her infant carrier in her car, whose husband I know well enough to stop and greet, whose little three year old boy makes me slow down as I turn by her house, she’s gone. Twenty-four hours ago she was here. By all accounts a beautiful, loving wife, mother, daughter, working with pregnant teenagers to find a way to enrich lives, theirs and their babies. Gone.

I decided a long time ago that no matter what medical scientists say, there is no such thing as instantaneous death. There must be a few seconds, maybe a few moments before the ambulances come, before the coroner arrives to pronounce death and I can’t even think of it. I just can’t. My mother’s heart aches and wishes I still had milk to share. That I knew them well enough to stop by and gather up dirty laundry. That I could do something. In that supposed instant she must have been thinking of them, crying out for the baby she would never nurse again, for the husband she would never kiss again, for the boy she would never tuck in again. And that instant has turned into a nightmare for those still living.

Last night I couldn’t speak for thinking of who would tuck that boy in. For what it would be like when she cried her infant cry for the mom that was her rock, her very life, giving her sustenance. So I pray and I weep and I hold my boys tight and I hug my husband as he leaves. And he says what I know our neighbor would have said if he had only known it was his last day to embrace his wife. But he didn’t. And now she’s gone.

The fundamental brokenness of this world creeps in slowly through cancer. It seeps down deep in our psyche as the foundations of our stability crumble in depression and mental illness. Sometimes it just sucker-punches a whole community as they gasp with the news that a woman was killed, no warning, no goodbyes, just gone.

The candles flicker at the prayer vigil. Voices break, sobs are muffled. We sit and kneel and cling to the altar. I look at the stained glass portrait of our God on the cross, intimately acquainted with suffering. I ask him if he can truly bear this load, if he can come in a way that will hold these children who miss their mother’s arms, if he can bring any comfort to this wound, this rending of a whole family, a whole town, a whole seminary community. My eyes flicker to the left, to the other image in stained glass, his hands are raised. Is he praying? Is he ascending? I’m not sure but those hands look strong to me in that instant, strong enough to hold the broken. To comfort the living.

I remember again that it is Ascension Day. I remembered this morning and promptly forgot; I’m only a fledgling Anglican, still learning the rhythm of liturgical living. I think of him, ascending to heaven in his resurrection body. That he knelt down from heaven yesterday to receive her soul out of her broken body but that her broken body is not the end of the story. That she will be raised in a resurrection body. That she will hold that child, that baby and that man again. I have no idea what their reunion will look like in many terms but I know it will happen. Yet here we live: in the in-between. Where, O death, is your sting? Today it is in the motherless children. Today it is in the driveway where only one car sits, not two. Today it is very real.

Comfort, Lord, comfort your people.

What About My Legs?

Today her face haunts my memories. Her face was peculiar, holding in tension age and innocence, experience and a mental disability that limited her experience. The desert sun had weathered her face to an appearance of elderliness even though she was probably much younger than my mother. Being set by family outside in a wheelchair to beg had weathered more than her skin. She now lived on the streets, meeting up with an unlikely family of street children and their mothers.

Every year it seemed an epidemic of eye infections hit the city. Local friends explained that it was the desert wind. I had to wonder whether it hadn’t reached epidemic proportions due to the tendency to wipe one’s eyes with the same cloth that had just wiped another set of pussy, infected eyes. At any rate, local hawkers sold massive numbers of sunglasses, I washed my eyes out with salt multiple times a day (I’m still convinced that’s what protected me) and friends without enough disposable income to purchase antibiotic eye drops came knocking. The eye medicine was inexpensive and I longed to do my part to help protect my city from any more oozing eyes than it already boasted.

One day at the height of eye infection week, I walked to the school where I trained local teachers. She waved me over to the shade next to the locked cage holding propane gas tanks for sale where she was seated in her wheelchair. Her eyes were obviously the next casualty of the desert wind-eye disease. Her disabilities rendered her speech a challenge to understand but I got the gist of it: she needed eye medicine. And I had what it took to get her some: a little money and an easy trip to the pharmacy on two healthy feet. Yes, I affirmed, next time I came to school, I would come bearing medicine.

I did. Knowing me, I probably bummed some off of a Western doctor friend for free (I don’t quite remember) but I got what she needed and remembered to bring it. In my second language I explained to her how often and how long to medicate her eyes. Did she understand? Yes, yes. But. But? Her hands rested on her knees, below them withered feet dangled on her wheelchair footrests. There was something more she wanted to say. She looked me full in the face and said, “But what about my legs?”

What about her legs? Those legs that hadn’t walked for years? Those legs that very well may have come into the world twisted and unusable? What about those legs? I have actually laughed uproariously when I’ve thought about this question. It was so stunning to me, I just stammered. I have no idea what I told her but I do know that I wished Jesus himself were walking around the Horn of Africa rather than me, a pitiful emissary. Because he could have (dare I say would have?) answered that question with a touch and a command and she would have walked. I retreated to the school’s office.

Even if it weren’t Jesus but Peter, I can hear him. “I don’t have silver or gold but what I do have I give to you: in the name of Jesus Christ the Nazarene—walk!” But it wasn’t Jesus or Peter, it was Elizabeth. I didn’t have silver or gold but US dollars and local francs and enough to provide eye drops. While I long to believe the words of Jesus that the one who believes in him will do greater works than he did, I just don’t see it in myself. Which is both a terror and a relief to admit. I don’t see it because she got some Western medicine that helped but no word of power that healed. What if she could have walked? What if God was prepared to heal her, had I asked? How did Peter do that? What I do have, I give to you.

I guess I did that too. I just wish that what I had were different.

At the end of today’s Gospel reading, Jesus says to those he is teaching to pray, a group I consider myself a part of, “How much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?” I ask, I plead on my knees. I don’t want to have only US dollars and local currencies to give. I want to give like Peter did, not so I can be accomplished or noticed or special but so that chains of brokenness fall away and captives walk free. So that men and women born lame walk. So that hungry people eat and hurting people are healed and weary people rest.

Come, Holy Spirit, come.

Brave: Five Minute Friday

I’m feeling brave to try to write a post after such little sleep but here goes.  Today I am writing with a great fun bunch of women at Five Minute Friday, hosted by Lisa Jo Baker.  For the rules, click here.

Today I celebrated these brave women who moved with their husbands to a new country and stood with them as they learned and studied and wrote and defended until there were finally more letters at the end of their names.  They moved from Nigeria and Korea and Tanzania and around the globe to a rural county in Kentucky where most residents aren’t what ESL teachers call “sympathetic interlocutors.”  They learned new ways of living and cleaning and cooking and greeting and speaking and loving and worshiping in this big act of bravery that almost no one sees.

They aren’t the ones who get the extra letters.  No new diploma will grace their walls.  They do not walk across a stage in velvety robes, declaring to the world that they have labored and pained over a graduate or post-graduate degree in a second language.  The receptions and parties and welcome homes shower gracefully over them too but they aren’t really the intended recipients.

So today in our ESL class we celebrated them.  With cake and fruit and candy and love.  With stories and learning and blessing and prayer.  Women who will leave us now, who have changed us, who have added new words to our lives, who have graced us with new ways of seeing.

Fourth Grade Flashbacks

Flashback to the fourth grade. The year that Mrs. Lucey died and Mrs. Dexter took her place but none of it mattered because I was in the tall and willowy Ms. Anthony’s class while my best friend learned down the hall. The year we had math together with Mrs. Gillis, a firecracker of a teacher who actually threw a wet sponge at a student and caught him—splosh—right in the face. I have no recollection of his trespass but I can’t forget the noise of that sponge making contact. The year I wrote my first book and mailed it off to an editor with Ms. Anthony’s help.

Laboring over that story of Mr. Merman and his friend Lobster (and yes, it was before Disney’s The Little Mermaid and a century and a half after Hans Christian Andersen’s original). Pecking away at the Apple IIGS keyboard in the corner of the guestroom. My mother helping me type. Printing from the dot matrix printer and tearing off the sides of the continuous feed paper. Addressing and sealing the manila envelope, headed straight from Small Town, Connecticut to New York, NY. The feelings are forgotten. Was I certain of my creative brilliance? Nervous about a response? Even aware of what it meant to submit a piece of writing?

The tender rejection letter was crafted carefully, with encouraging words, written by a kind editor who had mercy on a fourth-grader. Today I remember this because I just submitted a query for an article and I’m certain that while a rejection letter may follow, no tender editor will write me back. I’m no longer 9 and writing in blue ink on my dad’s dot matrix printer. Which translates to no kindness headed my way.

I know better now, what it means to bare my soul in writing. If the piece were in a manila envelope at the end of my driveway, I would have snatched it back already but I hit “send” and my options are gone. In all likelihood, I won’t hear anything and that wound smarts more than the rejection.

I don’t write to be published. I don’t write to be read. I write to write. May I remember that today.

Friend: Five Minute Friday

Writing on Fridays with Lisa Jo Baker and the great crew of writers at Five Minute Friday (join us? It’s so much fun and good for the soul!)

I spent the morning cleaning Aisle 6 (the pet food/cleaning supplies/greeting card aisle) of Fitch’s IGA in this tiny town. If I hadn’t done that, my thoughts on friendship would have poured out differently. I would have surely written about the friend I met when she was seventeen, whose phone number is ingrained so deeply that I’ve dialed it with ease from half a dozen countries, whose time is so precious that I pick up a call no matter what, no matter where, whose voice is so familiar it feels like home again. She called yesterday and I picked up despite crying children and a hungry husband and an imminent nap time. Because it was Ashley. My second son bears a part of her name. Her friendship is wrapped up in and through my life such that no amount of teasing could unweave that thread without leaving me in tatters.

But I did spend the morning cleaning the local grocery store. And these thoughts of friendship blossomed and expanded past the one to the many. To the new friend—my partner in cleaning, coaching me as I fumble to re-position the tall and ridiculously clattery Glade bottles of air freshener. This new friend who receives my ESL teacher input about her pronunciation as we share ideas of all that we are called to do on this planet. This new friend who makes my sons smile at lunch across the table at an institutional cafeteria.

The friend who is in Central Asia this week, experiencing all I’ve ever hoped for her to experience. The friend I’ve lost touch with, who taught me how to be relaxed and real and honest when someone tells you they’ve just signed themselves out of the mental hospital. The friend whose passport picture remains on my fridge, whose baby is named after me, who will never forget me–the oddball foreigner whom she nurtured into grown-up life in the Horn of Africa–the talking, the cooking, the cleaning, the water-jug filling–and I will never forget her. The friend I grew up with, the artist who was going to join the Peace Corps while I went to med school who graduated from Brown with her medical degree while I spent the better part of the last decade in humanitarian work in Africa.

These women who shaped me. These women have labored with me and helped me give birth to new sides of myself I didn’t even know would come. These friends I thought would be there forever and aren’t; the friend I thought was not for me who has been here forever now. Gifts through and through. Through pain and tears and laughter, I receive these gifts.

Jump: Five Minute Friday

Today is Friday: the day of writing to write, not to edit or analyze. I write with a great group of people at Five Minute Friday. Set the timer, write what comes to mind and join the stream-of-consciousness joy!

“They told me to jump and I understood them!” she shared with a flourish peculiar to young twenty-somethings from Los Angeles, California.

Her language learning had been stalled for months. The reasons manifold, the consequences disastrous. Blocked from the lived story unfolding around her, the wall of noise barricaded her from all that she thought she would experience. Suggestions abounded and flashcards were made. Dictionaries purchased and grammars poured over. Finally, finally, we met to talk about a new way. A way of language learning that went beyond language into the story.

I hate language learning. And I love language learning. Put me in a classroom and ask me to memorize, write out verb paradigms and translate texts and you will see a caged animal. I’ve done it plenty. My undergraduate degree is in ancient languages. My graduate degree is in teaching others to learn language. I’ve studied more languages than most Westerners: Latin, French, Greek, Swahili, Aramaic, Somali, Hebrew. But that whole classroom language learning thing—that isn’t what I love. My passion, now dormant in America, is to live into a whole new story—so to enter the narrative of another people that I see what they see, live what they live and say what they would say. To enter the story unfolding around me to the degree that I am participating, to the degree that there is no “us” and “them” but instead a “we.”

That kind of language learning ceases to be language learning and starts to be a way of life. A life of participation. A life that eschews the cultural anthropologist’s close-and-distant perspective of observer and dives in to the growing participation of a new member, an unfolding member, a gently nurtured member of a story.

On that day, after months of failure, isolation and discouragement, she got it. The rains had come; the desert ground rejected them, leaving us with rivers of water to jump over to get to our bus. She left her front door as she had hundreds of times and heard, instead of that wall of noise, a simple command from neighborhood children: “Jump!” “Bod!” She was only a minor character in the story of that people; two years later she left for good. But in those moments, she lived the most precious privilege offered to those of us living far from home: she found her place in another story and understood the words well enough to live her part.

Here: Five Minute Friday

On Fridays I write with these beautiful ladies at Five Minute Friday: no editing, no over-thinking, no major corrections, just writing because writing gives us life.

Just here.  With the yeasty dough smell wafting under the pantry door to my irritated nostrils as I boil water for my second cup of tea.  Here with cool spring air seeping through these drafty windows, beckoning my boys to stand at the door and plead to run free.  Here with an up-much-too-early toddler whose tired red eyes awaken compassion in me as his whiny tantrums make me want to run and hide.  Here is where my life is formed, my soul is changed.  Here is where I take shape.

John Ortberg writes in Leadership Journal what he hates about spiritual formation:

I hate how spiritual formation gets positioned as an optional pursuit for a small special interest group within the church. People think of it as an esoteric activity reserved for introverted Thomas-Merton-reading contemplatives. I hate that. Spiritual formation is for everyone. Just as there is an “outer you” that is being formed and shaped all the time, like it or not, by accident or on purpose, so there is an “inner you.” You have a spirit. And it’s constantly being shaped and tugged at: by what you hear and watch and say and read and think and experience. Everyone is being spiritually formed all the time. Whether they want to or not. Whether they’re Christian or not. The question isn’t if someone will sign up for spiritual formation; it’s just who and what our spirits will be formed by.

I hate that too, Mr. Ortberg.

Because here is the most forming moment I’ve ever faced.  Not there and not then.  I spent days in silence at a monastery before I was married.  Maybe I needed it then.  But in eight minutes with my children, bending low to look in needy eyes, holding tight to wriggling bodies, feeding open mouths: in these minutes I am more formed than days at a monastery, alone.

With one minute and twenty seconds left to write, a small hand grasps my arm and tells me that his little brother’s hand is stuck.  I want to write but I choose to pause my timer, only to find a tiny arm lodged in the shape sorter, attempting to wiggle free but only worsening his bondage.  So I don’t write as much as I want or as long as I want or as free as I want but I take new shape, shape that God is surely molding.

My husband tells me I write about being a mother too much.  I am slightly offended; he softens the comment by explaining that he likes my thoughts on so many topics and couldn’t I share about other things, too?  But it is here, in this motherhood monastery, the rhythm of life shared with littles, the finding of self while losing, here I take shape slowly.  I still lock the door and hide in the bathroom.  I settle them with Baby Einstein so I can write my five minutes.  I wait at the screen door in running shoes like an anxious dog, blowing past my husband before he can say hello as I ache for the freedom of wide open spaces ahead of me and no small pitter-patter behind me.  But here is a good place to be formed.  Right here.

Writing

To write for twenty minutes no matter how it feels, to write as discipline, to write the way I used to. This is pushing me hard past what I enjoy to what I need. I like writing when the prompt comes through email from Lisa Jo and I automatically know what I should write. The five minutes flow effortlessly and the post is done and it feels so good. But to be a real writer again means I have to write on the days when it spurts and spits and flowing can only describe the irritated words swimming in my mind and sometimes out of my mouth. To write for twenty minutes today when I drove for 13 hours yesterday home from the best wedding I’ve ever been to, arriving at a barren refrigerator and a bathroom that smells like a four year old boy has bad aim. To write when there are taxes to pay and laundry to fold and a kitchen table that looks like a cross between a dishwasher, a sporting goods store, a pharmacy and a Hot Wheels storage bin. To write while the children are asleep and to lay down my precious few minutes, the primary currency of my greed these days, to use it all up on this writing life. To write when no one will read it or see it. To write when the words don’t feel good. To write when I want to stop.

This is the writing life and is the only kind of writing that will make me a writer. If I only write when I want to, I will write the way I run: a few months out of the year with no right to claim the title runner. Let’s be honest: I’m a fair-weather jogger. I might achieve my dream of running a 5K but I still don’t even know my race pace so when my marathon-running, hardcore brother writes me letters about how to increase my speed, I realize I need to start by buying a watch. I’m never going to be a runner.

But I already was a writer. I cloaked myself in that identity for years and stowed it away quickly, thoughtlessly when I ran amok in fear. The rattling tin cans inside quieted down enough this year to hear that writer’s voice. Quieter than she used to be and definitely out of practice, she demanded a chance to write again. I had forgotten the disciplines of this kind of art. Writing is not for the good days or the inspired days or the beautiful days. It is for every day or I won’t grow. Most days I don’t even want to grow. I don’t publicize my blog; my poor mother doesn’t even know I’m writing again. But no matter how much I try to smother or stifle or lay a fat down pillow over her face, this writing voice is calling out, her echo bouncing around in my soul that it is time to write again. Twenty minutes a day, I’m getting back in shape, learning to listen to her, seeing the world again through words. Painting pictures in my mind of how I would describe that playground hazy with second-hand smoke in rural Tennessee, surrounded by parents who reveal far more tattoo ink than I’m accustomed to. Distractedly writing letters as I drive through the mountains. Trying on words like most women try on clothes and finding them wanting. By the end it starts to feel like I’m getting my feet under me and I know I can set the timer again tomorrow.