Post-election sermon

Today, I wanted to share (my best representation of) a sermon I had to give on November 10 at the women’s prison as part of a preaching class.

Half our students are women who live at the prison, half women enrolled at the divinity school. It has been an amazing experience to see how God's call to preach is at work in each of our lives...but that is a story for another day.

On November 9, I was alternating hour by hour between numbness and tears, and the prospect of speaking a word of God the next day, in this context, seemed almost impossible to me. At the eleventh hour, this word came to me by the Spirit and the love of my friends. I share it with you out of a sense that it’s still a relevant, though incomplete, word for our communal work and reflection in the coming days.

Photo by Gage Skidmore

Photo by Gage Skidmore

Today, I’m going to name that I’m standing here before you in grief and in heartbreak. There was an election this week and many are grieving. I don’t think I’ve seen an election in my lifetime where so many people were openly weeping. I have heard friends speak of fear for their own safety and the safety of their families, particularly immigrants, Muslims, LGBTQ people. I have heard friends speak of feelings of exclusion.

I also know this is not everyone reality this week, and may not be the reality of everyone sitting here. Some people in our nation today are feeling relieved, even joyful. Some feel that whatever the political realities may be, nothing much changes anyway for the sake of the oppressed. For example, it is true that our nation has been incarcerating beloved children of God and companies have been profiting from this captivity, and that really hasn’t changed over the past couple decades, no matter which party or person has been in power.

I name all this not to divide but because it’s the place in which the Word of God is encountering me today; it's the place from which I bring a testimony of God’s grace today. I hope that this will be a word for all of us, regardless of what is on each of our hearts.

//

John 13:1-5, 12-15, 34-35
Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from the world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas, son of Simon Iscariot, to betray him. And during supper Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him...

After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, "Do you know what I have done for you? You call me Teacher and Lord--and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you...I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."

What I find especially remarkable here about Jesus is that, though he knew catastrophe was upon him, though he knew that he was going to die very soon, thought he knew his own friend was going to betray him, he still acted as he did. He drew his own people close to him and loved them to the end.

This is remarkable because Jesus is like us in every respect, fully human. He couldn’t turn off his pain, or fear, or anger. And surely he felt all these. Pain, that this cross was the extent he would have to go to bring God’s love to the world. Fear, of that moment of abandonment coming on the cross. Anger, that his own friend—the one he loved so much taught so much, entrusted with his mission—could misunderstand so severely, and betray him. And yet, having loved his own in the world, he now loved them to the end.

I wonder if he cried as he let the water drip over their feet and wiped it tenderly away. I wonder if, as he scrubbed that dirt between Judas’ toes, he prayed for God to change his heart. I wonder if he was able to look any of them in the eye, knowing they’d soon leave him. Whatever he may have felt, he chose to love. He knew that is what we need, when we come to an end or to a time of testing—to keep serving, touching, loving fiercely, showing one another hospitality in hard times.

And then, he invited them to follow his example, to wash and serve and touch and love fiercely. Jesus says it’s a new commandment, but of course it’s not entirely new. From the earliest revelation of the Old Testament law, one of its cornerstones was to love your neighbor as yourself. Tonight, what’s new is that this love has been enacted before them, and not only in Jesus’ symbolic act of foot washing. Also in Jesus’ incarnation—embodying God for us, coming to be with us and to love us to the end. Also in Jesus’ impending death on the cross—living out the fullness of his love for them.

What he calls the disciples to do in this new commandment is to look to the love he has shown and simply love one another, care for one another.

Sometimes Christians forget to focus on this command, because it seems like love of a softer, easier kind. Jesus also called us to love our enemy. And some of us may be thinking about that now. Loving an enemy—loving one who voted differently, or one who said hateful things about women, perhaps—may seem impossible right now. Let’s hold this command lightly right now, though it is and will be so important in the coming days. Today, Jesus is asking us to love one another.

And then there’s the command to love our neighbor—to love the least of these among us. Some of us may be thinking of this, too. One of the things my husband and I have been particularly worried about for the future is that many of the immigrants in this country will be threatened. The first thing he said to me when we woke up yesterday morning and saw the news, was “We need to pray about what Jesus might call us to do in the next few years. If they start rounding people up, we might need to take someone in. We might need to love our neighbor in a risky way we haven’t done before.” This type of love, too, will be so important. The disciples later on would be called upon to go to jail and prison and be flogged and ridiculed for Jesus. But for today, let's give ourselves grace and time in figuring out what this kind of love will demand from us.

Of course, for some of us, these categories overlap. Loving our enemy may be loving a friend, as it was for Jesus, washing Judas’ feet. Loving the least of these in this time may overlap with loving one another, because surely there are those in our own communities right now who are scared or hurting.

But for a moment, today, let's focus particularly on Jesus command to love one another. Because loving our own community is not easy either, especially in a painful time. It would have been easy for Jesus to be angry and blame his disciples, as he approached his end. And when, two days later, Jesus’ body lay in the ground after a cataclysmic and traumatic 24 hours for the disciples, it would have been the most natural thing in the world for them to play the blame game, too. “Peter, you told those people you didn’t know him? You should’ve stood up for him!” “James, you ran away. You completely deserted him when he needed you!” “How could this even happen? Thomas, you shouldn’t have let us go back to Jerusalem! Why did you hop on board so quickly when he told us it was time to go back to Jerusalem. We could all still be together in Galilee now.”

But the nature of their community in the days following Jesus’ death suggests that they didn’t say these things. Even if they had, they would only each have been trying to cover their own guilty and fear, all the wouldas, couldas, and shouldas in their own minds. Instead, the day after Jesus died, they huddled together in the Upper Room to be with one another. I imagined they cried and told stories and prayed. They loved one another on that dark Saturday because that was what Jesus had commanded them to do. Because of Jesus, they knew the power of simple acts of kindness in dark days.

This is the love that we are called to today. I know, because I’ve been experiencing it. Yesterday, after I crawled out of bed on only a few fitful hours of sleep, tearful and exhausted into my day, I was given so many gifts of grace and hospitality and love. Someone brought donuts to class. Someone hugged me and cried. Someone dragged me to the chapel to pray when I didn’t know if I could. Some friends sat down and ate lunch and told stories. Other friends near and far reached out by phone or email or text. A teacher gave us a silence, and a chance to say simply what we were carrying with us.

The love I have been receiving from those around me has given me light and strength to share love in return, to call friends and family. And even, last night, to find great love in my heart for a person with whom I disagree deeply about this election.

I know that for all of us, no matter how we find ourselves today, there have been days and will be many days ahead where it will feel like an end, where we won’t know how to make sense of our world or step forward in faith. I hope that in these moments, we can learn from the example of Jesus who, at his own end, chose to show love and hospitality and grace to his friends.

Chaplains for the world

It’s been hard to know how to share with you all the wonderful, awful, exhausting, inspiring work that is chaplaincy—partly because it is a fearsome and impossible thing to express, partly out of concerns about privacy. This summer I served as a hospital chaplain and am still wrapping my mind and heart around how it changed me, and what it means to listen, love, and care for strangers.

Photo by Andrew Parnell

After my first overnight shift at the hospital this summer—after twenty-four hours, seventeen calls, eight deaths, $21.50 worth of cafeteria food, and four hours of sleep—I handed the clipboard to the Sunday chaplain, exhaled heavily, and hopped on my bike, speeding hastily away from the clinical halls and towards my church. I knew I needed hymns, prayer and the Communion meal. And then, most definitely, a long nap.

What I did not expect was that they were coming with me, as I pedaled up and down the hills. The one who lost her husband, and the one who’d lost her fiance before the marriage license came in. The one who wanted to tearfully tell her sister’s story, and one who just wanted to know the best donut place in town because it was one am and tomorrow would be even more exhausting than today. Young and old, religious and nonreligious, emotional and stoic, prepared and unprepared, planning to cremate and planning to bury.

They were coming with me. I imagined them now, waking up alone with dogs in an empty house, or spending an anniversary making funeral arrangements, or stopping at Monuts before making the long drive home. I prayed for them, hurt for them, longed to be with them. In moments, they are with me still.

*

The job of a chaplain is rather amorphous and vague. “Spiritual care” can mean a lot of things: compassionate listening, empathy, talking through tough decisions, validation of feelings, prayer or Scripture or rituals, a non-medical advocate, a hand to hold at end of life. When we introduced ourselves as chaplains, some people immediately asked for prayer. Some people cleaned up their language; others told us all their quibbles with God. Some clammed up completely and asked us to leave; others asked us to pull up a chair so they could start at the beginning.

It turned out that first overnight shift was one of my most intense days of the summer. After that, there were a lot fewer deaths. More often, at least on the cardiology floor, there were prayers with old ladies and smiles with old men. There were conversations about new treatment regimens. There were teary confessions of loneliness. There were cheery follow-ups after surgery.

And there was lots that was surprising. That people allowed a stranger into their rooms to listen to their life stories. That people wanted to talk twice as much about their gratitude as about their worries. That today I could feel I was becoming such a great chaplain, just in time to be completely stumped by a situation tomorrow. That the ducks in Duke gardens could bring me such comfort on the days when I needed a lunchtime walk to help me breathe again.

But most of all what surprised me was how many people’s concerns were completely unrelated to their hospital stay. A sick dog. A loss from ten years ago that still stings. A separation. A history of abuse. A distant child. A regret. A complicated and unresolved religious journey.

These people were carrying with them the burdens and bruises that come from living in the world, the kind of burdens and bruises we all carry, the kind that make us human, and make us need each other. And from some I got the sense that this surprise visit from the chaplain was one of the rarer moments in their lives, one of the moments they felt cared about, able to talk about all that was weighing them down.

And maybe it was just the vulnerability of being in the hospital that got them to the place of sharing, and maybe most of the time the tears are forced back down. But they have been carrying these burdens through all their house renovations and business deals, their lonely or sleepless nights at home and their Western movie marathons.

*

The morning after that first overnight shift, as I tried to bike away from it all, I needed a chaplain. Though I was not a hospital patient, though I was not sick, I needed someone to care for my spirit, to listen, to affirm, to care. I’m lucky that I had nine other chaplains as colleagues to care for me over the summer, to care for me still when I pass them in the hallways between classes. I have been carrying the pain of so many beautiful people, and carrying so much hope for them and for me.

But then, aren’t we all? In the grocery stores and on the highways and in class or precept or at work. And though it’s easier for all of us to pretend we have it all together when we’re not lying vulnerable and stripped of agency in a hospital bed, we never really do.

I’m intrigued by this idea that has been with me since the end of my time as a chaplain--the idea that there is a deep need for chaplains in the world, chaplains on every street and in every building. I don’t know what that means. I’m not generally in the practice of putting a hand on the shoulder of the person at the next table in the coffee shop and saying, “Hey, I noticed you’re staring into space, is everything okay?” Some people can do that; I don’t think I can. But I do think I, and all of us, can pay a little more attention, speak a little more gently, and maybe even, when the spirit prods, offer a kind hello. I do think we can imagine that the grocery clerk who’s bagging slowly might have something on her mind, and give her a smile. I do think we can invite the classmate who keeps to himself to sit at our table.

Several years back, stressed and overworked, I had a co-worker whom I saw primarily as a means to sharing my workload, as a means to accomplishing the task at hand. I would become frustrated with him when the task was not accomplished, or when I felt overwhelmed. One night, I had a melodramatic and wildly untrue dream--that he had experienced the tragic death of his soul mate and true love. From that day on I never saw him the same way again. From that day on, I felt the same aching empathy for him that characterized the mood of the dream. In a strange way I suddenly learned to love him.

I am sitting in the library now, rolling my eyes at the always-exasperated woman who seems to have such a sense of entitlement about using the computers here, even though she is a guest of the university, and I am the one paying for these services with my tuition dollars. But who is she, and why does she come here so often, and what is she carrying that makes her so easily frustrated? Could you or I offer her some kindness and compassion? There is always so much more to each of us, beneath the surface.

On our first day as chaplains, we were shown this lovely video. Watch it, and then imagine the stories of all the people around you, and then be kind. You may be needed to be a chaplain in the world.

Kiddos, aching souls, and the school-to-prison pipeline

Photo by Mike Mozart

I don’t make the connection until eight weeks into the summer.

“I really love what I’m doing with Reunion and Church of Christ, Right Now,” I keep telling friends, family, anyone on the street who will listen to me gush about my new love.

I feel moved when I go to jail. I feel deep meaning in the conversations and relationships and support groups with the ones coming home from jail, the ones long ago in jail and now leaders in the movement, the ones who’ve never been to jail and desperately don’t want their grandkids to go there. Jesus is in jail. The Spirit is in the vulnerability and open heartedness. The leaders of this movement are prophets and saints and I want to sit at their feet and soak up all their wisdom and commitment and love.

“On the other hand,” I shrug, “the after-school program stuff is fine—I just plan field trips and help out with a summer camp for kids. But I’ve been there before. I’ve taught reading before; I’ve worked in a summer daycare; I’ve written curriculum. I’m ready for something new. I’m ready to put my theology to use.”

Taking kindergarteners to the American Indian museum to build an igloo, after all, is not really theology. Right?

*

It is time to go on a trip with the middle school kids.

I squish into the van with them as we drive the twenty minutes to get downtown.

The three boys sitting on the seat next to me are bragging about how bad they are. “I’ve been expelled from three schools,” one says. “I’ve been expelled from one, but I have a feeling I’ll get kicked out of my new one,” another responds, trying to keep up. “My cousin got suspended,” says the goody-goody, bless his heart.

I want to roll my eyes. I am sure these kids are exaggerating. I keep listening.

“My dad has been in jail most of my life,” is where the conversation migrates. “Almost all my relatives have been in jail,” says another kid. “My brother had to go to juvy for stealing an iPhone from the store,” says another. “My teacher keeps telling me I’m gonna end up in juvy,” says the kid with the dad in jail. “You only get three strikes before you get locked up for good,” someone warns. “My cousin has four strikes though,” one protests.

And like that, the synapses meet, and my heart is weeping and praying for each of them by name.

These kids I work with in the mornings will become the incarcerated folks I work with in the afternoons.

It was only last night that our support group had a heart-wrenching conversation about belonging and love. So many aching souls in that room, confessing that they'd longed for more love from their mothers and fathers. They'd run away from home because of it. They'd ended up in juvy because of it. They'd sought love in all the wrong places, formed all the wrong kinds of relationships. Only to find now, at 28 or 37 or 59, that they are tired of the search. They are tired and they want to rest here in this community, in this place, where if they are brave enough to be themselves, there is love to be found.

And now, when these twelve- and thirteen-year-olds give their macho stories about their dads absent in jail, I know I am hearing the same story in a different tone of voice. In just a few short years, these boys are so likely to become the men in jail, wanting another way but not knowing how to repair relationships, how to break out of poverty without a little quick money on the side to get them started. They are so likely to become those tired men sitting around the table at support group. Because if it’s all they’ve ever seen from every man in their family, who can tell them there’s another way? I grew up without ever questioning if I’d go to college. Everyone in my family went to college. It was a given. What is the given for these kids?

For some of them—the troublemakers, the ones with a rebellious streak—the connection is not hard to visualize. But the little guy in the front row with the sideways baseball cap? The beautiful girl with a scowl who brightens as she comes up with the most thoughtful answer to every question? Surely not them, too?

And then my heart skips a beat, as I think of the sweet little kindergarteners I took to the museum yesterday. The tiny little girls and boys who hold hands and walk through the exhibits with their matching visors and garner the admiration of every stranger. The adorable little voices who chorus, “Thank you, Miss Katie,” and giggle so freely. The open hearts who stare in wide-eyed wonder at the whale hanging from the ceiling and exclaim, “Whoa!” every time I open the box to show them a new type of rock.

It is one thing for the moody, exasperating middle-schoolers to grow up to be incarcerated. But who will these kindergarterners grow up to be?

Lord, have mercy. May it not be so.

*

For the last two weeks, I want to soak up all the love and open-heartedness I can from the re-entry program, from the beautiful spirits of the men and women coming home from prison.

And then I want to take and fling it with all my strength into the hearts of the kids in the summer program, whether by presence or by conversation or, simply and desperately, by prayer.

Because my work is not divided this summer into two unrelated ministries. It is one. The love we share in the support group is the same love needed by the kids. If they can receive love now, perhaps they won’t smoke and drink to escape it all. If they can be wrapped in the grace and protection of the spirit now, perhaps they will find a different way than their fathers.

And for me--if this daily breaking of my heart can be captured and bathed in the Spirit, perhaps something beautiful becomes of me, too.

The kind of unity I hope for

Photo by Vinoth Chandar

She is the one who brings it up, cautiously and a little abruptly. “For a long time I’ve been meaning to talk to you about…”

It is a controversial, hot-button issue, rife with capacity to divide us,  make us angry, make us misunderstand. We love each other but we know we will disagree.

“Okay,” I say, “let’s go. Let’s do this.”

We speak earnest and thoughtful and slow. I say my piece. She says hers.

We are both a little disappointed, that we cannot be fully united in this.

We are both a little grateful, that we can have this conversation in love and mutual respect.

*

Later that evening I think how much I admire her and the way she spoke. I think, what if everyone could speak about these things with such grace, such compassion, such genuine love. How would the world be different then.

Perhaps it would be different in Washington. Different in our family. Different on Sunday morning. Different in blogs and twitter feeds and internet rants. Different, even, in Gaza.

It would not be perfect. I would still be angry at the fracking, you would be angry about the children at the border. Someone would still be crying over the Israeli who lost her only son, someone else over the boy on the beach in Gaza, someone else over the sister who was raped, someone else over the light of the unborn child put out.

But if we could talk, perhaps we could share. Weep with those who weep. Perhaps, with our hushed tones, and chances to listen, and sighing rather than raging at the imperfection of our understanding of the world and each other, we could be friends.

The holdup, maybe, is that you are wounded. You cannot hear my piece without hearing the tone of those who have hurt you before. Maybe you are thick-skinned from all the yelling and you cannot soften the body to listen. Maybe you are scared of losing your place at the table, or furious that you’ve never had a place. Maybe we are, all of us, all of these things. Maybe we just need to remember we’re not the only one.

Telling and listening to the real talk is not easy. It requires us to gently cup the pain in the soul, in the body, and bear it to someone else. I don’t know much about pain, except that some people are very brave, to tell and listen openly, holding their pain like a sacred temple.

*

There are many paths that would have been easier. Not being friends, for example. Or being the kind that don’t talk about those things. Or talking louder and more sarcastic and exasperated.

But then if that were the case, I think how much I would be missing, how much less I would be, how empty my inner sanctuary would be—that place where I hold my passion and pain and the soft-intoned stories of all the people who are really, when we get down to it, a lot like me.

I want so many things.

I want so many things.

Why do I want so many things?

I love people. I want to listen to them, cry with them, teach them, inspire them to be the selves they were created to be. I want to feed them and free them from prison and sing with them and help them find wholeness. I want to love them, to love them in North Carolina and Maryland and Minnesota and Gaza and Bangladesh and Tanzania. I want to reconcile us all with each other—the women and men, the liberal and conservative, the rich and poor, the young and old, the black and white and native and Latino and Asian and Arab and Jewish and everyone in between.

I love the arts. I want to write beauty and vulnerability and redemption. I want to sing with the spirit, to play the melodies and harmonies of hope.

I love this earth, this creation. I want to run and hike and swim and climb. I want to learn and teach us all to eat the fruit of the land rather than the factory, to find goodness and simplicity in the everyday processes of growing and eating and coming and going and waking and sleeping.

I love the church: its babies and nonagenarians, its liturgy and communion and song and scripture, its touchy-feely sharing and tearful prayers and most of all the God who is creating and recreating us all. I want to see the church willing to die and come alive anew.

I want so many things.

I cannot have or do all. This life, this in-breaking kingdom of God is too rich for me to drink it all in. And if I am to give myself fully to this world, I will have to choose: between the piano and the garden or between Maryland and Tanzania or between the incarcerated and the nonagenarians.

What I mean is that I have this one fleeting chance, as we all do, to run at the world holding all the love I can.

And when I choose where, specifically, to run, I will choose also where not to run. I will lose pieces. I will let go of the other dream, the other country, the other song. I will release them into the air and pray one day they come back and find me further on the journey.

I suppose in all truth, it is a good problem to have: the desire to love and create and heal more than is humanly possible. A heart too full to narrow itself to one passion.

The fullness in this heart, though—I just want to bring it to the right place.

I want so many things.

The freshman fifteen and the art of imagining other people

Photo by Jennie Faber

The girl who wrote the freshman-fifteen “contract” penned it on colored paper in swirly writing. The rest of us sat around the dorm room and gave suggestions. Mainly our goal was to limit intake of the tempting cafeteria treats: two desserts per week at maximum seemed reasonable. We discussed whether a bowl of sugary cereal at night was permissible, and whether the morning muffins should be considered cupcakes. We made silly exceptions for having just finished a paper or being on your period. We composed the whole thing in awkwardly pretentious language, and called the freshman fifteen something like the “score less five of our inaugural year.”

I was giggling. We were in our second week of college, and I was already beginning to feel that I had friends. The freshman fifteen was of no major concern to me—I viewed myself as thin enough and had somehow made it through high school without much insecurity regarding my body. The whole affair, for me, was a light-hearted attempt to forge sisterhood with those girls on my hall.

It was only later, much later, that I looked back in regret, realizing how some of those present struggled with disordered eating habits or body image issues. They must have felt so self-conscious. How silly and insensitive it was to joke about something that weighs so heavily on many.

*

I try to be more aware, now. When I speak, I consider the possible life stories of those in the room.

On mother’s day, for example, there may be someone present who is estranged from her mother, or someone who just lost hers, or someone who has been trying for years to have a child, or someone who was too young when she became a mother.

In any party or church lobby gab session, there may be someone in the circle who is an alcoholic, or someone whose brother committed suicide, or someone who does poorly in school, or someone whose child/uncle/best friend is gay, or someone who can’t afford the vacations everyone else is bragging about.

Being aware and sensitive doesn’t mean being unwilling to engage controversial topics directly and honestly. I am happy to take the time to sit down and talk about my experiences or my political or religious views. I am happy to lay it all out and be challenged.

But I try not to make assumptions. I avoid off-handed comments that could hurt someone. I don’t make a “your mom” joke when there might be someone without a mother. I don’t complain about gaining weight when there might be someone around with an eating disorder or a thyroid condition. I skip the snarky comments about the military when there might be someone around whose child is in a combat zone.

I fail half the time, of course, and put my foot in my mouth.

After all, there is no end to the lists we might make, the possible life experiences held compositely by our circle of acquaintances. I can’t walk around on tiptoes all the time, second-guessing my every remark.

But I can carry language delicately, knowing it is both an artist’s tool and a sometimes weapon. I can speak plainly and with authenticity. I can avoid sarcasm and flippancy. And I can continue listening to people’s stories, because as I listen, the stories slowly lodge in my heart, and I begin to imagine what it would be like to be someone besides myself. I grow in awareness and empathy and love.

My sister

i.

The loneliness was beginning to press in hard. I was twenty-two; I’d been in Tanzania a few months teaching English, and local friends were hard to come by.

Esther was nineteen, and living with her brother. The second time we met, I spent the weekend at her house. We hauled well-water and cooked on charcoal and cleaned the floor and slept under the same mosquito net. On Saturday afternoon when the chores were done, she connected the cassette player to an old car battery—the only electricity in the tiny concrete house—and cranked up the volume on the Tanzanian gospel music. Neighboring children heard the call and came running onto the newly mopped floor. We shoved the chairs and table aside and turned the living room/dining room/kitchen/guest room into a dance studio. I watched her and moved my hips, my arms, my head.

In the middle of the third song, I stepped back to take a breath and wipe away the sweat. I was laughing harder than I had in months. As I sipped my water bottle and watched, what I saw was a friend; what I saw an invitation to belong.

ii.

A week later, I haltingly told her, “I need a new place to stay next month. Can I live with you?”

I was lucky for the code Tanzanian hospitality, which I think consists of one rule: never say no.

In exchange, I said I would pay for her to go back to school, which was her dream.

What was hard was that she (along with her brother, sister-in-law, sister, niece, and nephew) shared with me everything she had, and I couldn’t give back in proportion. I could buy flour at the market, bring home a treat of fruit every day, even help with school fees and business capital when it seemed appropriate. But even then I was always holding something back: something of myself and the stories that had shaped me, which she couldn’t understand, something of my resources and education and social capital, which were infinitely greater than she could imagine.

What was lovely were the trips to the market together, the pilgrimage to her village home, the way she took care of me when I got malaria, the sisterhood. We told stories by kerosene lantern at night, brushed our teeth under the stars, woke at six a.m. for the womanly duty of making the morning chai.

I lived there four months, and I loved her.

iii.

The first time I felt cheated was not her fault. In my American naiveté, I had paid the whole years’ worth tuition for Esther’s school, and we soon discovered they had no teachers, just someone who came in the morning to write some notes on the board for the students to copy. It was a money-making scheme and the headmaster refused to refund my money. “We are getting more teachers,” he assured me. Months later when the school year ended and I was gone, it turned out that since Esther had already failed the ninth-grade national exam twice, she couldn’t sit for it again.

The second time I felt cheated was near the end of my stay. I can hardly remember the details, filtered as the story was through the animated Swahili of Esther’s sister and sister-in-law, who sat me down one afternoon and told me that Esther had been two-timing all of us. In addition to her fiancé John, she was dating another man who had been giving her money and jewelry and nice things, paying for lunches I thought I had been paying for.

I confronted Esther and she assured me it was not as they said. She had an explanation for all of it, which I didn’t fully understand or believe. But she was like a sister to me. I forgave her.

iv.

The last few days, before I was to leave for America, Esther and I took nostalgic walks. We walked to the store, to the well, to the market, if only for a place to stand in the late-afternoon sun and look at each other and realize there was no way to put into words our sentiments.

I had mixed feelings, of course. I was ready for sandwiches and close friends and my own space, ready to be free of the constant trapped feeling, ready for some distance from a sister I loved so much but couldn’t fully trust.

On those walks, she gave me the kindest farewell I have ever received. She wished me the best in every dream I had ever told her. She gave me specific greetings and messages for every friend and family member I had ever mentioned. She shared what she loved about me and said that we should pray for each other always.

v.

I left Tanzania five years ago now. My Swahili got rustier, and my phone calls with Esther sparser. I promised to help her get licensed as a nursery school teacher, and for a while our calls were mostly at the beginning of the school year, regarding Western Union transfers.

She married John, and according to the Tanzanian tradition I sent money to help with the cost of the wedding, only to hear from her brother later that there was no wedding. Maybe they got married but hosted no fancy wedding. It is never clear. They are certainly married now.

vi.

A few months ago, John lost his job. The calls for help started coming more frequently then. I found out Esther is pregnant. She is due this week, and lately the texts say they are three months behind on their rent and about to be evicted. The dollar amount she claims she needs to cover the rent is almost certainly a lie.

I could give her the exaggerated figure, which is less than $200. But I can’t keep paying her rent forever. I don’t want to be her social safety net, though in Tanzania that is maybe not so different than to be her sister.

I sent her a message saying that I can’t help, mainly because I didn't think a few months’ rent is going to solve her problems, and I want her and John to find their own way out. Regardless of her past manipulations, could it be right to deny rent to a nine-months-pregnant Tanzanian woman whose husband is out of work? So a few days later, we reverse course and send more than they asked for, hopefully for a down payment to build a house, or start a business.

vii.

This is what it means to me to say Esther. To say Tanzania. The love and freedom so deep and the greatest sense of welcome I've ever known. The hazy confusion of stories filtered through a half-known language and culture. The desperate sense that I am never quite doing the right thing, or maybe that there is no right thing.

I would not trade my Tanzanian experience, my Tanzanian family, for a million nights of guiltless sleep. It is right that I should wrestle with the inequality and sorrow of the world. It is right that this wrestling should be with real, broken people whom I dearly love and forgive. It is right that because of them, I can never be complacent. It is right that I can’t find a way to end this story, because it is not simple, and it is not resolved, and love is never tidy in this wild world.

When words build walls

Photo by The Delicious Life

We are sitting in a diner, the twilight sun of a beautiful day shining across our plates as we talk, as we catch up. I am telling her about my current quest to discern where I will fit as a pastor—in which brand of church. I smile and stutter quickly past the main options, knowing all of them will be more liberal than the churches in which she finds herself at home.

She was my Christian buddy at public high school. In between the singing in choir and eating chocolate and walking to the creek to test the water for our science project, I would cling to her and ask, “what have you been reading about in the Bible lately?” and “can you pray for me?”

Now, as we are sitting eating spinach salads and basking in this first warm spring day, I notice that I feel self-conscious about my career path and my church journey. She hasn't said anything to suggest judgment, but even still, I worry that somehow the new trajectory makes me less Christian in her eyes.

In order to justify myself, I resort awkwardly to the old language. “I’m sure God will lead me to the right place,” I say, though the truth is I feel more vulnerable than sure, and I can’t wrap it up so neatly, and I’m not sure these days how exactly providence does its work.

*

In certain company, I have started to feel defensive about my faith. I feel the need to throw in phrases like, “praying about it” and “God is calling me”—whether or not I’m praying about it, whether it’s God’s voice or my best approximation that I am pursuing.

I’m not sure when it started, but I think it has to do with two litmus-test items in conservative Christianity. I am a woman who decided to become a pastor. And, worse, I came out as a supporter of gay marriage. By simply being who I believe I am called to be, I worry that I have become controversial, maybe heretical to them. They are my friends. I still look up to them in so many ways. They aren't stereotypes (unloving w/ heads in the sand), just as I am not a stereotype (unwilling to take the Bible seriously or sacrifice for faith). I want to stay connected, keep the conversation going. So I feel the need to show them that my faith is still vibrant, real, spirit-filled.

I suspect it is mostly in my perception. There really is no need to be defensive, to throw in the language I usually don’t use anymore because I have become more careful about words and their theological implications. Maybe it is really I who judge myself: I think of how me of five years ago would have looked at me now and wondered about her devotion. Or maybe I am afraid that if I no longer speak my friends’ language, or what I think is their language, we will no longer understand each other. Maybe I am grasping at straws because if I have come to this, there are definitely some ways in which we no longer understand each other, or no longer give each other the chance to sit down late at night and explain where our paths have taken us.

I worry that if I have to prove myself still Christian enough to use those words, maybe I am insecure about something deeper, about my own connection to the source and the ways in which it has become difficult to pray, difficult to hear God’s voice. Maybe that difficulty exists because I am in some kind of wilderness, or because by my pride I have put a wall there, or because I am not trying hard enough, or simply because I am in a spiritual middle where some forms and rituals have to die in order to spring forth again in new life.

I am tempted to end this post by some beautiful description of a transcendent experience in which I show that I am still Christian enough, in which I make you see that I am deeply connected to God, that I am in fact actually more Christian than I was when I used all the lingo without second thought.

But that is not true. We’re on a journey. You, me, the feminists and the LGBT advocates, the ones who have strong convictions against women pastors and the ones who have strong convictions against gay marriage, the ones who believe in hell, the ones who don’t, the ones who don’t know, the ones who are hurting and lonely, the ones who feel like they can touch God when they pray, the ones whose faith is simple and unassuming and matter-of fact. All of us. I have been in different places on this journey, forward and backward and sideways, and I am here now, and maybe we are in the same place or maybe we are in different places, but we are together on this journey. And God is still working, molding us.

So today, it turns out, is really about confession. 

I have not been completely honest. I sometimes use words as walls. I am sorry. 

As our paths diverge and twist and then meet again, I want to give you myself as I am: plain clothes and plain words, weaknesses and deep convictions and wobbly steps towards a kingdom. I hope you will understand and love me that way. I want to share this journey with you, to see you and understand you and love you, just as you are.

Letting Awa in

Today I am delighted to share a heart-wrenching story written by a friend of mine who was a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa and has continued to live and work in West Africa since 2009. The names of both women have been changed to protect their privacy.

Possible trigger warning: mentions of rape and abuse.

She was supposed to be my (host) mother in the West African village, but she was only a few years older than me, so from the beginning I called her Awa.

Awa welcomed me warmly to the place I would live for two years. She introduced me to relatives; she patiently taught me the local language; she explained the village politics; she told me how to eat and what to wear and how much money to give during special ceremonies; and, making use of one of the few English phrases she knew, she often exclaimed, “You have a big butt!”

No matter how much time we spent together, though, there was a certain level of distance between us.  Most of the time I attributed it to language and cultural differences. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t put myself in her shoes. But I also – intentionally and unintentionally – maintained walls. I didn’t want to get too close, be too vulnerable, give too much.

After two years in the village, I got ready to move a few hours away to continue my work in the capital. The night before I was to leave, Awa lay distraught on my bed, crying her eyes out.  How could I be leaving her? I told her I’d visit and call.  I knew I would miss my village, but I was excited to have my own apartment, running water and a fridge, a 9-5 job, and an internet connection. I was ready to separate from her a little more, and especially from her abusive husband.

Over the next couple years, I called and visited and even sent money to cover school fees and supplies for her two boys, or to pay for medicine when someone was sick. Then Awa started calling regularly for money to see the doctor or buy medicine.  After a little probing, I found out she was having reproductive health problems. I did some research, then called Awa and invited her to come to the capital to see a recommended doctor here. I’ll cover all the expenses, I said.

She got approval from her husband and told me she’d call me when she arrived in the city to get directions to my house.

Directions to my house? Wait, you’re going to stay with me?

I was not prepared for this. This was crossing the line. I would go with her to see the doctor, give money, make phone calls – but not let her stay with me, not open my life completely to her.

But didn’t I just open up my house and bed to you a few weeks ago when you were here in the village, she reminded me. And so I gave in.

When she arrived late in the evening, I showed her how to flush my toilet, turn the hot water heater on, take a shower, and light the stove. I was worried more about her breaking something in my apartment then about her exhaustion and sickness.

We saw the doctor the next day, and he ordered several tests to check for STIs. He told us we would have to wait 3-5 days for the results and in the meantime she was not to have sex with her husband, who also happened to be in the city, or she might contract another STI.

Maybe you should just go to your relatives’ house for a few days? I suggested to Awa.

If I go to their house, my husband will go there and want to see me, to be with me, she said. 

But doesn’t he know why you’re here? That if he is with you, it could wreck your treatment? I said, appalled.

Yes, but you know him.

I did. I knew his temper and his ability to manipulate people and his tendency to beat Awa and force her to be with him even if she didn’t want it. So she stayed. A couple days turned into several days. Several days turned into two weeks.

I felt sick and confused and helpless. Every moment I spent with her was a reminder of this painful, disgusting, unsolvable situation.

Every night we had pillow talk. Only instead of silly gossip, she told me about all the pain she had experienced because of her husband. How she had been barely 13 years old when her father had arranged her marriage, how she had cried and begged her mom to not let her go. How her first night with her husband was like a semi-truck barging through the door to a hut. How she had been sick for weeks afterward, couldn’t even eat, had to go to the hospital. How, during the years that he was a senator and had money, he would sleep with prostitutes in nearby villages and then return home late, expecting her to sleep with him, too. 

Finally one night, she couldn’t hold it in anymore.  She sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.  My heart hurts, Ndeye, she cried to me. Ndeye, my heart hurts so badly.

All I could do was plead desperately with God. I prayed and I prayed as I rubbed her back, her shoulders shaking with sob after sob. Lord, do something for her!  Give her a way out.  I can’t handle this anymore.  LORD, do something!

A couple days later, I sat down with Awa and her husband and explained that Awa had an STI, so both of them needed to take medicine. I also brought up the issues of mistreatment, both with Awa and with their kids. I was cautious, but when he said that the problems always stem from Awa, I had to be firm. This was my opportunity to stand up for Awa, but I was also afraid for her. What would happen when they both returned to the village?

Later that evening, Awa left to return to the village. Her husband is still in the capital for political meetings. I’m hopeful that she’s healing physically. But I’m still unsure about her emotionally and psychologically.  She is suffering.

Somewhat reluctantly, I let her in close, and now I feel a portion of her pain.  I have never felt such pain before; I want it to stop. I want to pull back, to stop calling, to stop sending money, to forget all of it. But I can’t. I made a choice to let her in, and I’m not going back no matter how much it hurts. It’s a process, but I’m learning to open myself up, to love, and to be loved.

This post is a the final installment of my Women’s History Month project, “Honoring Women’s Stories.” You can read more about the project and see other women’s stories here.

One Small Change: Encountering New Neighbors [with Addie Zierman]

I am beyond honored today to be sharing a story over at Addie Zierman's blog as a part of her series, "One Small Change." Addie is an beautiful and compassionate writer, and if you haven't been on her blog or read her critically-acclaimed 2013 book, When We Were on Fire, you are missing out!

Today I'm taking a break from the women's history month project, writing about the getting to know people who are different from me, and how it has opened up new worlds. Here's how it starts:

Photo by Paul Sableman

“We’re gonna search their bags for weapons, drugs, and secular music,” my co-counselor Tanya told me as she selected one of her Christian hip hop CDs as a welcome soundtrack. “I’ve been doing it all summer so I’ll be in the cabin unpacking their bags; you’ll be outside greeting them.”

I nodded, trying to look as unalarmed as possible. I’d elected to stay this last week of summer camp because it seemed like it would be a good experience after a summer of suburban white girls. I was nineteen, and I knew I was too quiet, introverted, and sheltered to have any idea how to relate to these urban youth who were about to pull up. I would do whatever Tanya said. She’d just arrived from an inner city kids camp, plus she was urban herself, which maybe this week was a euphemism for black.

A few minutes later, the first van pulled in. I threw on a polka-dot dress and a purple wig and started jumping up and down, plastering a smile onto my face and opening my arms to these children from Richmond and DC and Pittsburgh, these children who’d seen more violence and discrimination and poverty in their lives than I’d ever seen on TV...

Read the rest over at Addie's blog.

Seeing her beautiful

On this day, I have been given an invitation. Today I open a box in my memory, dig through the clutter, and find her somewhere in the corner. I find the girl I once was, bring her out into the light. She is like a precious stone, and in the light I turn her and turn her, noting the shimmer and sparkle on each side, the light reflected in different hues, complex and deep and lovely.

I am not accustomed to seeing her this way. I rather think of her as scuffed up, gaudy, trying too hard, awkward, showy. But this month I honor myself too, and I try to see her beautiful.

Photo by TVZ Design

*

At age five, she came home from school and pronounced, “There is a writing contest and I am going to win.” She shoveled in her spaghetti at the dinner table and assured her parents, “I am the best on my soccer team.” She sang solos at church and at school without a waver in her voice.

She became student council president in sixth grade. By this time she was beginning to notice other girls getting big-chested, getting boyfriends, shaving their legs. Hers legs were still hairy and her clothes were still hand-me-downs. Her social confidence was beginning to fade. But she didn’t let it stop her. She ran for president, and she won.

That Christmas, she received from her grandmother a small wooden gavel, which was inscribed, “President Katie.” It was reason enough to declare, for the rest of that year, that she was going to be the first woman president of the United States.

I cannot deny that she has a bit of ego, a love for power. But today I look beyond it and see more in her. I see the confidence and joy and courage that comes from being loved, and being unafraid. I see independence and creativity and unselfconsciousness about sharing her gifts.

*

She lay on the floor next to a stack of Sweet Valley Twins books, with her ear pressed to the small clock radio and the volume way down. It was past her bedtime, but she had to catch the “Hot 9 at 9” which she recorded in her book almost every night, to stay up with the latest music.

Lately, though, she liked country music, the sad twangy love songs about loneliness. They were great for belting in the shower. To cover this embarrassing musical interest, she made up white lies about the CDs she was receiving for Christmas, insisting there was some Backstreet Boys and Will Smith among them.

On her school notebooks she had scribbled, “I <3 Lance Bass” in unnaturally floofy letters. When she wrote notes to stick into the vents in her friends’ lockers, she wrote her “e’s” like backwards threes because she’d noticed other girls doing it that way.

I usually see that girl and wince at how hard she tried, for how very long, to fit into a crowd. Today I notice also her longing to be relevant, her ability to observe and adapt to a culture, the real connections that she forged. I notice that some of the floofy-lettered notes were about God, some were attempts to reconcile friends, and some were written to the unpopular, overweight girl in her homeroom.

*

It was lunchtime at the high school, and she was sitting at the table, slowly picking each item out of her lunchbox, as the usual dialogue played out in her head.

- Fold your hands and pray, you can do it.

- No, it will only make them uncomfortable.

- Don’t be ashamed of your faith.

- They are going to think I’m so weird. They don’t understand.

She was in the school library at seven-thirty, showered and changed after morning swim practice. She sat with her friends at the table, studying. The Bible was in her backpack, and she willed herself to take it out—a bold witness, a display of unashamed faith. If only it was easier to be a Christian in this world. One day she drummed up her courage, and took it out of the backpack, and opened it, there on the table in full view. But of course she didn’t read it, only glanced around for ten minutes at all the other students in the library, sure they must be watching, waiting to pounce.

I know better now, that it’s not a war, that we are all really on the same side, trying to figure life out, trying to find grace in this world. The girl I was then thought this was a battle, and she wasn’t prepared to fight it. I am glad she wasn’t prepared, because maybe then she’d still be fighting, fighting when it is better to sing, and hold hands. Looking at her now, I see that despite her fears, she was singing and holding hands, and she must have done something right, because girls from that time are still some of her closest friends.

*

Today I turn her and turn her in the light. I see her and love her.

And I see also this: gratitude for the processes that formed her. For the love and opportunities that made her fearless and confident; for the family that encouraged her to notice the unpopular girl in homeroom and the hungry people in the world; for the loneliness that gave her compassion and cultivated her spirit. There are many girls who never get that love, who are never told they could be president, or who never believe it.

She is one lucky girl.

--

This post was written with inspiration from the Story Sessions prompt for international women’s day. This was a fun one to write about. You can find more stories like this or write your own over at the link-up by clicking here.

Visit my “Honoring Women’s stories” project for more stories of different women.

On saving the world

You are seventeen and you hear your godmother talking about her job coordinating aid to refugees, and you hear your parents talking about their new Burundian friend and the problems she faced in her homeland, and you take environmental science at school and you realize the world is bigger than you knew and that you are going to be a part of saving it.

You are nineteen and you are trying to convince your parents that there is nothing to worry about, that these protests they are talking about in Bangladesh are going to be fine, that your month-long study abroad trip is going to be safe and healthy and beautiful, that you are not going to pierce your nose out of solidarity with the Bangladeshi women like the student they read about in the brochure. Deep down, though, you are terrified, and you are terrified as you step off the plane and smell the garbage and feel the hot, thick air and see the beggars outside the gate. You are terrified when you wake up in the hotel room a few days later and read the newspaper slid under your door, which tells you that extremists in the city are bombing tourist hotels. You are terrified as you speed down the road to the village in a bus, amidst taxis and horses and rickshaws and bicycles, passing on the right and narrowly avoiding collisions.

But you reach the village, and the sun is warm and red in the sky in the evening, and the children are tugging at your shalwar kameez and following at your heels as you walk between the huts and past the mustard fields. You hold their hands and let them teach you how to say “beautiful” and “coconut” in their language as you walk, on your way to meet your farmers each day, to ask them questions about their families and fertilizers and crops and toilets.

Each night with your professors, you discuss how to save the world, and then afterwards you and your friends complain about the fact that the teachers are asking you to how to save the world, because how can you, an American student in her first trip abroad, even pretend to know? By the end of the month, though, you sit on the roof of the hostel looking out at the mustard fields, hearing the children laughing and envisioning the tears of the widow whose roof you patched. You feel like you’ve got it, the answer to all of this, which is so refreshingly simple. The answer is love, and your task of saving the world has become so clear: just love each other.

You are twenty-one and you have completely and utterly fallen in love with Africa. You are in love with the way the Swahili words roll of your tongue as you stun the locals in the minibus with your vocabulary; you are in love with your host family’s maid who has taught you the words and poured out her life story; you are in love with the rolling green hills and the familiar feel of the local market and the walking everywhere and living out of a suitcase. You are in love with the stars of the southern hemisphere and with the other American student who sits down to gaze at them with you, who will one day become your husband. You know now that saving the world is complicated and you believe that Africa has given you much more than you have given it, but you are determined to come back after you graduate.

You come back. The ground seems more dusty and your host family’s maid is living with her brother now, where you are feasted on by mosquitoes the night you stay with her, and your bubbly friend is being beaten by her husband. And you are lonely, because while it is not hard to inspire pick-up lines from every man you meet, it is incredibly hard to make friends without a built-in host family or university classes or American compatriots. But you start singing with the Maasai girls in the evenings, and you move in with a new friend, and you share the humdrum, complicated, beautiful life of a regular Tanzanian family, one that doesn’t have a maid, one that makes you share a bed and wake up in the morning to make the chai, and tag along to herd the goats.

The months are passing by and you are still lonely or bored or frustrated at times. But you are also “getting fat,” according to giggling Tanzanian women. As best you can understand it, when they say fat what they really mean is that you are glowing, that you are at home and fitting in and flourishing. Your students are starting to learn English—some of them enough to ask questions about the time zones or about how why Americans have chosen an African as their president—but really you haven’t accomplished much. It’s who you’ve become that matters. The sun is setting and you carefully take the laundry down from the clothesline and go with the children to carry water from the well, and you realize you will never be able to enter this life again, once you have left it. Even if you return, you will be older and maybe married and have a real job, and you will never again be able to blend this closely into their lives. Your heart aches as you say goodbye.

You are almost twenty-eight, and to be honest these days you find yourself forgetting whether you’re twenty-six or seven or eight, because it is all starting to blend together. You are making a difference in America now, educating high-school dropouts and planning to become a pastor. You are getting ready to go to seminary and then afterwards you will get a real full-time job. You have a kitchen full of dishes and pots and pans and closets full of papers and games and gadgets that might be useful one day. You have furniture. You feel the weight of all the stuff, how it means that you will have to rent a moving truck this summer for the first time in your life, how it holds you to the ground sometimes and makes the idea of running off to Africa seem more difficult. You dread calling your friend in Tanzania, because your Swahili has gotten terrible and you can never understand half the things she says, and yet you know every time that the gist is she is asking your for money, and you are tired of taking wads of cash to Western Union for another computer course that won’t really lead her to a job. You want to visit Africa again, most days, but the price of a plane ticket seems so high in terms of rent and grad school savings.

You wonder, sometimes, if you have lost the idealism and the energy that you once had. You wonder if you have become cynical and hardened and lazy and complacent—all those adjectives you once used to describe older people. You wonder if you are still willing to deny yourself and take up your cross and follow Jesus. Some days it is like you are looking at yourself from the perspective of the nineteen-year-old you, and you barely recognize yourself.

*

In the telling of the story, you see it. You have grown, and deepened. You are wiser.

You have learned to love better, not just the beautiful, exotic people whose culture intoxicates you, but also the people who are infuriatingly similar, who frustrate and try your patience and fail to come through sometimes when you need them.  You have learned to wait, to empathize, to listen.

You have seen that there are plenty of people in your own country who are maybe even worse off than some of your friends in Africa—because they are starving not only for food but for families that aren’t so broken, for community.  You have learned that the greatest power you have to help people in Africa may be the power of your dollar, and you are trying to be more careful about the foods you eat and the companies you buy from.

You have found out more about yourself, and you have truly and deeply come to believe that it is through the path of Christian ministry that you can exercise all your gifts. You are planning to pray with people who are grateful and sit quietly with people who are grieving—but also to mobilize more support for Tanzanian girls who are being sold in marriage or Bangladeshi widows who are being conned or simple farmers all over the world who just need more rain.

You are learning how to live into that word you once pronounced as the answer to all the world’s problems; you are learning how to love.

*

Still, looking back, you miss some of the conviction you once had. The way you gave half your things away when you returned from Tanzania. The way you were ready to put everything on hold for a chance to serve abroad. The impulse you had to sacrifice your own desires for the path of service. The freedom you felt living that way.

So in honor to yourself at nineteen, you pledge to think creatively about how to do more for the world than give some pocket change to Kiva and World Vision; to write the stories of others; to keep your ears and eyes open to opportunities to love.

And you pledge to do something radical this year: one act of love that will really require you to give something up.