Best of 2015

Well, 2015 whizzed by. I'm now halfway done with seminary, pushing thirty, and getting settled in Durham NC. It’s the time to celebrate some of my favorite things of the year.

Books: (Only three; I didn’t read enough non-school books this year)

3. Wearing God by Lauren Winner: Fantastic exploration of different images for God in the Bible. You know, Christians like to call God creator and king, but God is also described as clothing, fire, pregnant woman, friend, bread, wine, aroma. These chapters expanded my spiritual imagination and invited me to celebrate a God who is beyond my limited conception.

2. Lila by Marilynne Robinson: This deals with the same characters, and some of the same events, as her two earlier novels Gilead and Home, but from a much different (fascinating) perspective. Robinson doesn’t write page-turners, and her books don’t follow a typical plot, but the writing and characters are impeccable, and the themes are rich with human questions. What is it that defines our souls, our capacity for good or ill, our relationships and our loneliness? Lila asks questions especially about the feral and gentle within us, about how early experiences shape us, about how spirituality is relevant to those for whom the main question is survival.

1. Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson: I’ve been recommending this one to everybody. Stevenson’s book reads as part memoir, part documentary, part true crime. You’ll be flipping pages to find out what happens to Walter, a man on death row who swears he’s innocent, and meanwhile you’ll be confronting our justice system, the depths of brokenness within all of us, and the persistence of hope and redemption.

Media and Arts:

3. Most of my TV and movies you've all already seen. Probably my two favorite movies were Boyhood and The Theory of Everything (and yes, I also enjoyed Star Wars.) 

2. Much better than staring at a screen is experiencing art in reality. I saw Swan Lake by the Carolina Ballet in Raleigh last spring and it was lovely.

1. While visiting the Getty Museum in LA last March, I was drawn to a painting in a way I’ve never before been drawn to art: “Mary Magdalene at the Sepulchre” by Girolomo Savoldo. I see myself in it, I suppose. And I see the most perfect, realistic-but-hopeful balance of darkness and light. It's not the same on a screen, but:

            

Best things:

4. Preaching: Sometimes a class becomes a community; sometimes an education becomes real life. My preaching class this fall was perfect. We were creative together, we helped each other grow, we laughed, we learned what it is to occupy this space of being called to share the gospel of God. I’m thankful for reminders that this path I’m walking into is one that fits.

3. Trips:  California (lovely former roomie plus meeting the life goal of peeing in all 3 oceans that aren’t at Arctic Temperatures plus riding a bus with some silly college choir kids plus biking across the Golden Gate); Minnesota (spirit home plus two of my dear college friends marrying each other!); Western Massachusetts (friends’ wedding plus camping and napping under trees).

2. Presbyterians: I’m working at a Presbyterian Church right now, loving especially the honor of listening to people’s stories and grateful to be mentored by a wonderful pastor. And since September, I’ve been officially on the list as an “inquirer” to become a pastor in the Presbyterian Church. This basically means I’ve passed the first of three steps in discerning and becoming certified as a pastor. It’s getting real, y’all.

1. Reunion: If you read any of my pieces this summer, you know that I had a beautiful and possibly life-changing experience with Church of the Saviour this summer, especially the time I spent learning from the people at Reunion, seeing both the heartbreaking reality of the prison pipeline and the redemptive possibilities of community. I’m so grateful for the servant leaders of that community, for the men and women coming home from prison, for the encouragement to be authentic across lines of race and class, for a place which nurtured my spirit so.

What’s ahead:
3. Durham, NC: In one of the harder decisions we’ve had to make since our marriage, John and I decided to turn down a job offer he had received in DC, since it would have started this summer and necessitated us spending a year apart (it also wasn’t his dream job). I love DC so it was sad to say, “not now.” But John graduates in May and we’re looking forward to staying here in NC like for a few more years. I won’t say I don’t have second thoughts when I visit home and reunite with all the wonderful people there, but it’s nice to be putting down roots and slowly building community here in Durham.

2. Being able to walk! After lots of biking and running this summer, I started noticing minor foot pain. It took four months of no running or biking, five weeks on crutches, two X-rays and one MRI to finally figure out what it was—irritation and inflammation of the sesamoid bones, which are on the bottom of the foot near the big toe. I’m now mostly recovered and in physical therapy, looking forward to being active again, not depending on people for rides, hiking the Grand Canyon in May and maybe running a half marathon later this year.

1. Writing again: It’s been a draining semester, and I didn’t write a blog post from July until now. I’m not sure what the future holds, but I do know I’ve signed up for a non-credit journaling group this semester. I’m hoping that will get the creative juices, the truth-telling juices, flowing again.

What I'd give for a cup of coffee

Photo by Chichacha

I visit Grandma in the nursing home where she is rehabbing from pneumonia. It is a lovely, mild summer day, and I wheel her out into the garden. We sit on a bench and talk. She asks about my job situation, and I launch into it all. I am renewing my contract to teach adult literacy and I enjoy it and it is stressful and not forever and it is good experience and helps my resume and I am learning and I love working with low-income and marginalized people and I am somehow not using all my gifts and I want to work in an area more basic and physical and human.

“You think very deeply about your career,” she says when I finally stop to take a breath. “I’ve never been so deep and thoughtful as you.” I start to protest but she keeps going. “I am sure you will be wonderful at whatever you do.”

*

We are standing around her bed in the ICU. We have just made the decision to pull the feeding tube and the oxygen, because we have all, in the last week, slowly come to terms with the fact that this stroke was fatal, that even if she were to wake up she would not be herself, that this is not another cancer she is going to fight off or another bout with pneumonia that she will come through. This is the time to say goodbye.

The doctors say after they pull the oxygen, it will be a matter of hours. We gather and call in her pastor, and we begin to pray and sing hymns. Our family is founded on music, so in four-part harmony, we sing her favorite songs from the Presbyterian hymnal. The words to the hymns have never meant so much. This is grief, this is letting go, this is worship. The pastor brings our singing to a close with a liturgy for the dying. We unclasp our hands, touch our faces to her still-warm body, and exhale, surrendering to the blips on the monitor.

At one a.m. we are still sitting there, blinking to stay awake, alternating laughs and tears, waiting for her to go. We are her children, all, and this grief has brought us together, and we have never been so certain of our calling as this moment, in which are called to be with her, to be a family, to fill this room with love.

On Friday afternoon when it is finally over, I go home and write three poems for her and then I cry and fall asleep.

*

I write a thank you note to her pastor, enclosing the generous donation of my friends. I say, You will probably never know how meaningful your presence was, how life-changing those days were for me, learning to lean into the loss and celebrate the life and release her into resurrection. I think, what meaningful work it is to be a pastor, to be with people in those crucial moments, to offer a prayer and a liturgy in which they can pour out their goodbye in the presence of God. I think, I would love a job where I could be with people in that basic, human way.

*

Now, four years have passed, and I have enrolled in seminary, and this summer as a pastoral intern in the country, I visit lovely old ladies in homes and nursing homes and hospitals. There is one ninety-something firecracker who is organizing a Fourth-of-July parade; she shows me the archives of photos for the last eight parades. There is another ninety-something who is thoughtful and kind and wants to hear about my life even though her hearing impairment prevents understanding most of it.

There is a little bit of Grandma in both of these women, and I think of her often this summer.

*

I am waiting in an airport when the desire hits me strong—for just a cup of coffee and a couple hours to catch up.

I would tell her about my new path, seminary, the road to becoming a pastor or chaplain or minister of some sort. She would ask me how I came to this path, and whether I mind public speaking. The idea of me as a minister would make her happy, I think, and over it she would speak a word of encouragement and acceptance and love. 

Long-distance marriage

Photo by David Cea

We are in transition. Neither of us are living in our apartment this summer. We are packing suitcases or boxes and running around the state and shaking new hands.

We are each beginning our education. I am preaching on Sundays and he is presenting on Mondays. My introduction comes in backyard barbecues and small-town parades and nursing home hallways. His is an immersion into finance and spreadsheets and marketing yourself. He sleeps in a tiny sublet room.

His new friends at business school want to meet me. They wonder if I really exist. My church members often forget I’m married, or else they never knew, because he’s only been to church  with me twice.

We are not accompanying each other on trips this summer. I flew alone to a wedding in Minnesota and he will go to Miami; he has been home to his family and I will go to mine in a few weeks.

He is in a minor accident and he goes out of the country the next day and I drive back to our apartment to deal with the insurance and get the car in the body shop. He comes back from his travels and the car is still not ready and I drive out to help and we have a slumber party on sleeping bags in the living room because the bedding is already packed.

We are both busy, and we don’t begrudge each other this fact.

People raise their eyebrows when I describe it all, and they lament his absence or ask me if I miss him. “Well,” I tease, “to tell the truth it’s kinda nice.” That isn’t entirely untrue; I am a happy introvert caught up in the introspective beginning of a new journey. I am also happy that we are both encountering new life.

There is an open-heartedness that has struck me somehow this North Carolina summer, leaking deep gladness into my listening and playing and being. I feel it is leaking into marriage, too, or at least for this I pray.

This week, we both drive three hours round-trip to meet for a dinner of Vietnamese pho, to sit in a restaurant for two hours and talk. There is so much to say and listen and we look in each other’s eyes and keep talking when the waiter comes to refill the water and I think it is almost like a first date, getting to know each other again.

The intimacy beneath the conversation betrays it is not a first date. We have now what’s almost our own language. We have now seven years’ shared experiences to draw from, so that when I say a friend’s name, he feels and knows all the story in that one word; when he says “too sad,” we are both lamenting Gaza.

We have now something else, too, something remarkably strong and new: we have now the comfort and security and affirmation of nearly two years of marriage, two years of resting in the knowledge that this is how it will be, till death. I am only slightly surprised to notice this, that the last two years have blunted our sharp edges and cleared our eyes of a little debris. In retrospect, our clouded vision and sharp edges of two years ago stand in stark contrast to what we are today. I find we have been sewn together stitch by stitch. We are fitfully on our way to becoming one flesh.

This is yet another confirmation that my time has not been wasted. All this while, we have been unknowingly going about the work of marriage. I am not afraid of the next challenge.

So yes, church people, and family, and old friends and new friends, I do miss him.

But long-distance marriage this summer is kind of nice. It helps me see how much we have become and are becoming and will become.

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.

Life her own way

The first tears I shed after John proposed to me came about an hour later, as we started to dream of our wedding day, at the thought that Grandma wouldn’t be there. I had so wanted her to be there for that shining moment, to hold my hand for a photo, to give me a kiss as I waited to walk down the aisle, to make a wisecrack about our awkward first dance, to enjoy the company.

Better than her being there, though, were all the jokes and glances and secrets and dessert we shared over the years.

Better still was the impact of her life on mine, and that in the end we both knew how very much we loved each other.

*

Grandma’s life story is one of quietly defying conventions, and succeeding at almost everything by her wit and grace. She grew up in the Midwest during the twenties and the Great Depression. She was a precocious child and her mother was ready to get her out of the house, so she was sent to school a year early. She skipped another grade later and graduated from high school before her sixteenth birthday.

Apparently her only options in college (as a woman) were to study Home Economics or Sciences. Like my mother and me, she was really more of an arts-and-humanities kind of gal, but there was no way she was going to college for Home Ec, so bacteriology it was.

I will say that if she had majored in Home Ec, she would have completely dominated it, as she had the magic touch in home décor and in the kitchen. Her homemade spaghetti sauce was our Christmas Eve staple, and her Easter dinners of roast beef and twice-baked potatoes and jello were always flavorful and served in china and crystal. When I was a child, I admit that an overnight at Grandma’s excited me as much for the twenty-one types of cereal I would get to pick from as for the perfectly-timed dinners, but gradually I began to see the virtues of her more refined recipes. Now, I wish I had spent more time as an apprentice in her kitchen.

After college, Grandma moved to Washington and worked at NIH for several years before starting a family.  She met my grandpa through his sister, who was a friend in the local alumni sorority group, but the story goes that she continued dating other men until the day he asked her to marry him. When he asked, she said yes, and then added, “But I’m still planning to go on this date I have planned for Saturday.”

They must have worked through that, because they were happily and lovingly married for 49 years until he died in 1997.

Later on, when her kids were grown, she got a real estate license and worked thirty years as an agent, helping each person she worked with find a good home, insisting that all people, regardless of race or background, should be able to buy a home in a decent neighborhood, treating all her clients with thoughtfulness and care. She never retired. She sold her last house at age 86, two years before she died.

*

These are the outlines of her life, the facts that make it in an overview, a humorous summary. But there is so much more nuance inside the lines. Some of the details, the depths, the fullness of her person, I discovered in her dying, and in her death.

Grandma carried her sharp wit, intelligence and competence with her even into her final weeks, when her body was beginning to go, racked with pneumonia and too weak to walk without assistance. Even then, when she wasn’t loopy on meds or low on oxygen from the pneumonia, her mind was with us 100%, and for that I will be forever grateful.

For ten months, she was in and out of hospitals and rehab and then home with my mom or my uncle until she fell or caught pneumonia again. I knew it was a gift when I went to visit her every week, when I lay next to her in a hospital bed watching Jeopardy or took her outside for a walk, when she asked me to share my latest thoughts on career and life plans and then listened intently and thoughtfully as I spit out confused thoughts on jobs and relationships. I knew it was a gift that last Saturday we spent in the bright living room at my mother’s house, plunking out favorites from the Presbyterian hymnal and flipping through a book of Chopin preludes.

Grandma was a devout Presbyterian, one of the founding members of her church. After she died, my mother found a document she had written for church, describing her faith. In lovely prose, she wrote of her almost constant conversation with God throughout every day, and of the peace her faith had given her when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in her fifties.

The perpetual spiritual awareness was a part of her life she hadn’t talked about much. And yet I had always known by the way she lived.

We gathered for her funeral and the sympathy cards poured in, and one cousin wrote, The summer I spent at Aunt Ariel’s house is the summer I learned about acceptance. Others remembered her frequently opening her home for dinner parties or bridge games. My mom recalled her love of hosting foreign exchange students.

I thought of the way she was always reaching out to people—her interest in the life story of her Latina cleaning lady or the new Ethiopian woman at church; her insistence that we walk around the nursing home with the apple pie I had just brought, giving pieces to her new friends; her mission to get me to play the piano in the nursing home dining room—though she could barely hear by then—because she knew it would please old Mr. Baer, who never smiled.

I know that she made me feel adored, with her valentines and attendance at all my concerts and chats over coffee. She didn’t always have to say it—like her faith it was bubbling up under the surface in the way she looked at me and pried about my love interests and begrudged me to spoon feed her at the end when she wasn’t eating. I always knew that I was one of her most special people.

And she will always be one of mine.

This post is a part 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.

Dream of a daughter

Photo by Robert Howington

The other night I had a dream. In the dream I gave birth to a beautiful daughter, and she was whisked away by family members and friends who wanted to hold her, and in all the rush I forgot to give her a name.

Next thing I knew, I was holding her in the lobby at church. It was time to go in to the service, but everyone was stopping to say hello to my daughter. I heard them call her Katie, and I thought vaguely that something was wrong, that I hadn’t meant to name her after myself, that I had meant to name her Carrie or perhaps Elise. But the name had stuck, and as I looked at her, she was the spitting image of me as a child—crazy curly ringlets, blue eyes, a bright face. It was as though before this moment I hadn’t really seen her or felt the impact of her presence. But now, looking at her, I loved her in a way I had never loved anyone before. I adored the beauty of her face, the music of her laughter, the warmth and lightness of her body in my arms.

I brought her in to the bright sanctuary, and by this time she had gotten heavier; she had grown into a toddler, perhaps two years old. She was good and smart and fun to talk to, and as the hymn began she danced along.  In the middle of the song she told me she was thirsty. So we left the service and walked back into the kitchen, and I searched through cupboards for a cup I could use to give her a drink. All I could find in the cupboards were construction paper cups, like a child’s art project, and some extremely nice ceramic pottery cups that were labeled for sale. I kept searching but some kitchen ladies were standing in the way, and I couldn’t find anything else.

As I waited for them to move from in front of the cupboards she chatted and giggled with the kitchen ladies, thinking I love her so much, I have never felt anything like this before. I will make sure she has everything she needs, and I will never let anything come between us. I wanted to rush home or wherever John was and tell him how much I loved our daughter.

I caved and pulled out a lovely ceramic mug, and gave her a drink, and as we were walking back to the service, I woke up.

*

Very rarely do I have a dream that leaves me with such intense joy. Perhaps once every couple of years, I wake up with this kind of contentment, love, an awe or longing for beauty that remains even in the waking world.

I opened my eyes, and Sunday morning light was streaming gently in, and I stared at the ceiling, going back over the beautiful moments of the dream.

My first thought was that I already love my future daughter, that much, that this dream was some kind of foretaste of the intensity of a mother’s love.

But I don’t know for sure if I will ever have a daughter. Certainly not anytime soon.

This baby girl was named Katie and looked exactly like me.

Perhaps it wasn’t a dream about my future motherhood.

Perhaps it was a tiny glimpse of what my mother felt, and still feels, for me. Why her face is radiant in the just-home-from-the-hospital pictures. Why she still reads every blog entry and memorizes every friend’s name and visits no matter where I live.

Or perhaps it is a glimpse of another Divine Parent’s unconditional love for me. Adoring, protecting, rejoicing, aching for me to be safe and good and whole.

Could a dream have somehow given me a way to see myself from the outside? Could I really be so beautiful and beloved? Could I? Could you?

--

Linking up again with Kirsten Oliphant and others this week on the theme of “love.”

Cigarettes and chocolate chips

Three of my four grandparents died in the fall. This year, my first without any of them present, it seems an appropriate time to remember each of them and their gifts to my life. My piece about Papa was posted earlier this week. Today, I remember my Grandmother.

Photo credit

My memories of Grandmother are few. She was generous and fashionable and bought me my favorite dresses. Her Jacksonville drawl I did not much understand. When she visited us in Maryland, she would take frequent smoke breaks; when we visited her, she would watch TV in her den, cigarettes in hand. I came home from fourth grade one afternoon to find that my father was on his way to North Carolina because she had been taken by an acute form of leukemia and was not expected to live out the month. I did not cry then, nor when she died, nor at the funeral. We scattered her ashes in the garden at her church. The photos from that day are gray with strained faces, for her death was early and sudden.

I have learned, in the years since Grandmother died, to celebrate the connections I have to her. She left me some small things: my thick, curly hair and a pearl necklace and the small diamonds that now sit in my engagement ring.

Also, a painting. Grandmother was an artist and recently (after Grandfather died), I got to choose one of her paintings to hang in my apartment. I picked a beautiful oil still-life of cut flowers. The painting is bright with yellow and green and hope and light. Her life was not much these colors. Grandmother battled depression most of her life. Though I have never been clinically depressed, when I hear these stories I feel connected to her. I am certainly more like her than I am like my Grandfather, with his winning charm and his calm, loving approach to every situation. I have been broken and angry and sometimes wondered if I could dig myself out from darkness and apathy.

*

I was thirteen and summer whiled away. Camp and swim team were over and I was home in my room, writing in my journal. And in the August humidity I came upon the meaninglessness of life: how alone we are in our thoughts and desires, how futile the day-to-day can be. I wrote through it, hoping it would go away when school started, when I saw my friends again. But hugs were scarce and the Backstreet Boys could not give the right words to define my thoughts. There was a hurricane and I was at home in the gloomy dark in my room and the rain and the thunder and the tasks of life were gray and heavy on me. Homework, check, piano, check, soccer, cancelled. And no one to explain it to, and no way to explain it.

I was twenty and my head was swirling with images of small huts and banana trees and beautiful brown-skinned children; my head was swirling with the philosophy and science and scholarship that seemed to tear down my faith; my heart swirling with first love and first heartbreak and jealousy and anger and fear of the future. I collapsed into it, and for a year I was lost and alone and tearful, staying in on the weekends and skipping meals and sitting idly in front of the computer.

I was twenty-six and married and in a new place and I felt like I had left everything behind and I was alone on a couch with a subscription to Netflix and bags and bags of chocolate chips.

*

I don’t know the details about Grandmother’s depression, when it began, how bad it got, if it was precipitated by specific experiences. And I don't really compare myself to her. I have been graced to escape the brunt of darkness—for me there has always been sun and laughter. My strand of melancholy has probably just been about average. It gives me a little empathy, and a little extra passion to play deep melodies on the piano and write things raw when I can. 

But since I was nine when she died, that connection is what I have, along with the ring on my finger that reminds me of how Grandfather never stopped loving her, never lost respect for her, even with all she went through, even though he couldn’t understand it.

For Papa

Three of my four grandparents died in the fall. This year, my first without any of them present, it seems an appropriate time to remember each of them and their gifts to my life. Today’s post is one I wrote about three years ago, for Howard Biggs.

I’m twenty-four now and I’ve never learned to play Clair de Lune properly. I’ve mostly dropped piano, but I played through Debussy’s lullaby today thinking of you. There in your living room, “resting your eyes” as I played Bach and Mozart, were you listening? I was so young, I never knew what was beneath those eyes. At the end you’d always ask “Have you learned Clair de Lune?”
 

At eighty you were still strong enough to mow the church lawn; at eighty-five you kept the smile on your warm face, jovial and generous as Santa Claus. After all, it was your handwriting every year: Dear Katie and Michael, Thank you for the milk and cookies. Ho ho ho. You sat in your chair holding your “King of the Remote” pillow and patted us our heads when we performed our original plays for you. Michael was your little buddy; I, your soccer star.

I didn’t miss you so much, being too young to know you. I read from Matthew at your memorial service and watched them place your ashes in a box in the sanctuary wall, to remain in God’s house. Eleven years old, I joined in extolling with the multitudes your faithfulness to God and community. Then Michael and I fashioned Halloween costumes from your closet (“old man” and “old woman”) and went trick-or-treating in your neighborhood.

The next summer at camp, my friend Kim’s grandma died, and everyone started crying about their own losses. I lay in my bed for an hour at rest period, working myself into tears over you because I wanted to be part of the crowd, to be comforted. After rest period one girl came and asked me what was wrong. I’m sorry I used you.

Grandma tells me stories over sandwiches at Panera now, stories of college during World War II or the racial sentiments in 1920s small-town Nebraska. I’d like to eat a sandwich with you, to learn what was beneath your accepting smile. I’d like to know more about the faith at the source of the prayer you always spoke before Grandma’s roast beef dinner--“Bless these gifts to us and us to Thy service, and may we ever be mindful of the blessings Thou has bestowed upon us.” Most of all, I’d like to play for you a little Debussy.

Labels schmabels

I hear lots of things about what it takes to be a real man. Most of them I don't believe, whether it's about specific roles or violence and power or emotional expression.

Growing up I never really understood any of them, because they didn't seem to apply to my dad.

Since my childhood he's always been a role model, someone who stood up for the things that were important without violence, who understood that the real conflict takes place within. Regarding decisions on whether I could go out with my friends or whether my brother could get a video game system or whether we could play sports on Sundays, all decisions were handed down from a united congress, so I never got the sense that one of my parents was more a decision-maker than the other, or that one had more authority.

Furthermore, my dad doesn't like violence and sex in movies; he watches the occasional chick flick with my mom. He watches basketball but not football. He likes both Tolstoy and Jane Austen. When he and my mom had a career change, he started doing more cooking and grocery shopping. He writes in a prayer journal every day. None of this has ever made him seem less of a man.

So whatever people say about grilling and hunting and fixing cars and watching football never made sense to me.

But here's what does make sense about what makes a man:

A few years ago, my dad quit his stable job to follow his calling and start a nonprofit. He gave up benefits and retirement for a new adventure. An adventure that's still unfolding. I'm sure many days he is still waiting to see if it will last. But he keeps on tutoring kids, training parents, and writing one fundraising letter at a time.

And that is the best example of a real man I know.

Happy Father's Day!

Resurrection day

Gordon Cosby, who was minister of a church  in Washington DC called Church of the Savior, died this spring, just before Easter. A few days ago, I started watching a DVD of Gordon's memorial service. One story, told by Killian Noe, stuck with me: When Gordon was an army chaplain in World War II, he saw many die. One day he found himself staring down at the dead body of his best friend, Tom. Gordon recounted, "At first I was overcome with despair and the senseless waste of my friend's life. Suddenly something exhilarating broke into that darkness and the atmosphere around us seemed charged with life. I felt excitement and sensed limitlessness. I knew I had touched that eternal realm of divine love into which my friend had fully entered, and in that moment I envied him."

The first time I heard a Gordon Cosby sermon, his voice reminded me a little of my grandfather's. Like Gordon, Grandfather grew up in the south. Grandfather's faith, too, was shaped by the war. Grandfather never seemed to worry or carry anxiety, but in my experience lived in a constant state of gratitude, joy, and trust. He was the most generous person I've ever met. He reveled in the good things in life, singing and dancing and playing tennis and walking until near the end. He had no fear of death, no desire to prolong his life past when it was time to go.

After a few months of sickness and a general slowing down, last week it became clear to us that Grandfather was nearing his end. He passed in and out of consciousness and after Tuesday evening, he could not eat. His heart and kidneys were failing and he was in some pain.

This morning I woke up at 9:30am. I felt that I needed to pray for Grandfather to go and be with God. Around 10 am I sat down and prayed for several minutes. Then I went on to church with John. I was giving the children's sermon, based on "rejoicing in the Lord." "Even when sad things happen to us," I told the kids, "there are always good things from God, reasons to rejoice." We practiced naming good gifts. I almost said, "for example, my grandfather is very sick right now, and it is sad. but I am so joyful and thankful for his life, and that he will soon get to be with God." I decided against it, thinking maybe it was too heavy for a 3-minute children's moment. When I returned to my seat, I checked my phone. I had one voice mail. I was pretty sure I knew what it was. I left the service to listen to the message, which was from my dad. Grandfather had died just before 11:00am. I returned to the service feeling a fullness--it was fitting that he should go right at the time of day he had always gone to worship the Lord on Sundays.

The church service went on and at the end, we shared communion together. Honestly, communion is this weird thing that I've never really understood, where Christians eat bread and drink wine and somehow mystically share in the body and blood of Jesus, which he gave up for us to have life. It is also a symbol of unity, because as we eat and drink we are united in the body of Christ with all believers past and present and future. Today as I took my bread and wine I knew I was sharing in the love of God with Grandfather, Grandma, and so many others who have gone before. We were all celebrating together, in that realm of divine love. It moved me to tears, and people came to comfort me. But they were tears of joy.

Thank you notes

I finally just finished writing all the thank you notes from my wedding gifts. Although it gets tedious, and although it probably didn't need to take me two and a half months, I was trying to remember with each sentence, each card, each envelope, that it is truly a blessing to have had so many wonderful people in my life that it takes me ten weeks to thank all of them.

Everyone's gifts, from handmade and heartfelt to generously-given cash and gift cards, were beautiful.

But there were two gifts touched me in particular. Both were from old friends of my mother who I've not seen in years. Neither of them were invited to the wedding.

One was from a family who took care of me in the 1980s. In the letter, they explained that they took me home on Sunday mornings after the early church service and took care of me while my mother played the organ and my father sang in the choir. My mother says they never let her pay them for babysitting. Apparently they would often make waffles for Sunday brunch, and were amazed at the amount that I, as a two-year-old, could eat. I have no memory of any of this, and I've only seen them a handful of times since we moved in 1989. But when they heard that I was getting married, they all decided I should have my own waffle iron complete with their long-tested waffle recipe.

The other was a simple gift of an apron and dish cloths from an old French couple who befriended my mother when she was a college student studying in Aix-en-Provence, in southern France. She has stayed in touch with them since the 1970s, and when our family lived in Paris for a year from 1989-1990, we visited them often in their country home. Over the years, their grandchildren would come to stay with us for a couple months in the summer, and a few years ago my brother stayed with them to practice his French. I myself never went, though our family returned to France and visited their home in 1996.

I was happy and touched to receive their gift in the mail a few weeks before the wedding. Then the day before the wedding, in the middle of a crazy day of assembling flowers and putting together lunch for the 15 people who were at our house helping/visiting, the phone rang. I answered. It was Charles, the old man. He told me in a mixture of French and English, how happy he was for me and that he wished me the greatest joy and blessings on my wedding day, that he was praying for us, that he knew God's love would sustain us. I bumbled some thank-yous, understanding his French but unable to respond, and returned to the kitchen where my bridesmaids had finished making lunch. As I sat down at the kitchen table, I couldn't stop crying. I was very emotional that day for many reasons, but nonetheless I was completely surprised at my own reaction to a man I hadn't seen in fifteen years and didn't know very well. I didn't know why his call had touched me so.

At some point in the midst of all these thank-you notes, it clicked.. I have been blessed by the love of many wonderful people throughout my life. There are many special people who have been in my life since childhood, or high school, or college. Hopefully they'll be in my life a long time. But the blessings started before that. There are people who've been in my mother's life for decades. And people who have loved her since 1972 love me, too. At my birth I was already surrounded by the love that my parents had cultivated and given throughout their lives. It's an ever-expanding, international community of friendship and generosity and love, and I was overcome by it.