Digging deeper

Photo by ScaarAT

During my senior year of college, I wrote a short story about a twenty-something wanderer trying to come to terms with losing his faith and disappointing his missionary father. In the last scene, he had a mystical experience in a church building and decided to go home.

My professor read it and told me to chop the last two pages. “I don’t buy the ending,” she said simply.

My stomach churned. I was reeling from my own crisis of faith; I needed to believe that the world still operated with logic and meaning, with a pattern of redemption. If I couldn’t write this into a story, did I really believe it?

“If I just leave it hanging, the story will be so depressing,” I protested.

“Life is depressing,” she answered.

With her help, I wrote a second draft, and a third, and a fourth, because I couldn’t just leave the story bleak—I needed to scratch my way toward a real experience of hope. In the final draft, I cut the mystical church scene, and ended instead with a subtle moment of reconnection to his childhood. My professor loved it.

*

Most of the time in life, there is no revelation in a church or on a mountain or while watching a sunset. Most of the time, our moments of redemption are only temporary, until we relapse back into the mess.

On the other hand, I believe people change. Inch by inch, and never linear. So that you barely notice until fifteen years have passed, and you are no longer the socially insecure and moderately self-righteous girl you once were.

It is hard to write this in a short story, or a blog-length piece, because you can only show an inch. The balance is tricky. One day I let the pendulum swing too far and I have shown a mile of change, and it can’t be believed. The next time, I forego any kind of change or deeper awareness, and it is like a mirror in the dark.

The art of writing redemption takes many drafts.

*

When I began my more purposeful approach to the blog last fall, I wrote many drafts. These days, I have sometimes been coming to the blank page hours before I hit the publish button. I think you know this.

It’s okay. Blogging is a discipline as much as an art, so sometimes I will publish something less inspired.

I want to dig deeper, though, to go beyond easy resolution or depressing reality, to find the seed of change and the kernel of truth beneath it all. That is what makes writing worthwhile: not the audience, not the affirmation, but that long, hard reach for hope and understanding.

I am working full-time this summer, and I don’t always have time for drafts and digging. I’d rather sacrifice quantity than quality. I won’t be writing quite as often in the coming weeks, but I will be trying to deepen my reflections: a process which is so difficult and gratifying.

Early spring and seeds of hope

Photo by Jack Pearce

This is my favorite time of year. The daffodils have struggled up through the frosty ground and survived the March snowstorm. They are yellow, warm, like the sun.

Today, uncharacteristically, I wake up early enough to go for a run. I am ambitious this morning and make my way up the Blue Ridge Parkway until I can see a panorama view of the Smokies. The lushness of the foliage has not yet appeared, and the mountains appear brown, empty. To the careless eye, we are still in the stark winter. The trees are covered with barely discernible buds. If I squint, I can see the palest of green and pink and orange on the branches.

In the early light, the sky is tinged with rose.

*

The tiny buds reach into my heart, every year, without fail. I love these first weeks of spring, I think, because this moment of budding hope is the spiritual reality of most of my days. There is an inkling of aliveness, something new stirring beneath the surface, a tiny growth that can only be seen by the watchful eye.

Like the broken life I live, waiting for the in-breaking of the kingdom of God.

As a perfectionist, and a bleeding heart, I am always noticing the broken, wintry scars on our world. Some days (read: yesterday) I fail to go running and fail to write and fail to call the friend I promised to call, and instead I take a nap for two hours. I use words to tear down those I love. And the wintry scars are my own unrealized dreams, my failure to live up to the me I want to be.

On my better days, I listen to someone's brave story, or pray deep in my soul for healing, or sing for peace . I give everything I can give to a student, tell her she's smart, talk about dreams and careers, and then leave knowing she still won't go to college. The scars then are the cold hearts and the unjust systems and the emptiness of our efforts.

*

But here's the thing: underneath the coat of snow, there are seeds germinating, life flowing into the branches, love returning to paint the sky red, and it is my whole life's hope, and I am fearfully joyful: terrified and amazed all at once. This daffodil opening, this pastel green tide spreading, this tiny orange bud appearing--it is early spring in the world. It is a kind word from a friend on a teary day, it is a home opened to a stranger, it is a woman healing from abuse, it is a chance to start again, it is God, it is new creation, it is transformation, it is resurrection.

Can it really be here, squirming to emerge?

*

I leave you with my very favorite story in the whole world, which is a story of a tiny bud of fearful hope in early spring:

Very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, the women went to the tomb...They saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. But he said to them, "Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised, he is not here..."

So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. (from Mark 16)

And a prayer for spring: May we not be afraid to hope for all things alive, all things new.

Waiting for the light

It is December 14 and for the second time in three weeks, I am trying to make the nine-hour drive home for the holidays. For the second time in three weeks, there is bad weather. Last time I decided to drive overnight to beat the snow, and I was miserably tired, taking naps in truck stops and force-feeding myself eggs at 4 am with one cheek resting on the table at Cracker Barrel. All night, I was waiting desperately for the morning, for rejuvenation from the sun. But I swore I’d never drive overnight again, and so during this week’s “wintry mix” I drive by day, taking the eastern route to avoid the mountains and the snow.

I turn on the radio. On NPR, everything is about Sandy Hook, because it is the anniversary of the Newtown shooting. My eyes are brimming with tears as I hear one story of little Ana who was so full of life until her life was taken, as I hear of how her mother has been trying to transcend the tragedy and build a world of more compassion. I think of the slideshow of all those children, how unjust that their beauty should be cut short. I think how even worse is that there are many youth killed every week in our cities, and we haven’t properly grieved them. The news switches to Syria, and I start thinking about the hundreds of Syrian children who have died in the civil war, for whom we have no slide shows to look at. Most of the time I put all of this out of my mind, but today I don’t avoid it.

Vigil from VA Tech, 2007.  Photo by Ben Townsend

It feels dark, this time of year, this time in the world. It feels like there is the possibility of something more, but that we are always bogged down and still waiting for what it could be. What we could be.

The season of Advent, this time of waiting for the light of Christ, has always been one of my favorite times of the year. I need this time of year—I think because it resembles how life is. We are stuck in the brokenness of it all, but we are longing and trusting and knowing that hope is coming. Even when days are short and the air is cold. Even when the radio is heavy with the deaths of children in Connecticut and New Orleans and Syria.

I read these words of Johann Christoph Arnold in an Advent devotional: The only way to truly overcome our fear of death is to live life in such a way that its meaning cannot be taken away by death.

As we wait, the real challenge is to wait well, to wait with meaning, with a hope deeper than cookies and carols. It is, of course, much easier to slog through the days. My brother, who has this waiting thing down better than me, calls and asks if I want to help him with a “generosity project” for church. I say yes. We spend a couple hours on December 16 biking around downtown Baltimore, bringing salami sandwiches and fritos and hot coffee to guys standing on street corners. It is a small thing. They need a lot more than a cup of hot coffee. But although I wouldn’t have done it on my own, it feels like the right thing to do in Advent, while we are waiting for the light, waiting for healing and justice to come in a bigger way.

If only I could learn to do one small thing like this each day. I think of a three people who died this year, three people who lived in such a way that death could not extinguish their legacy—Nelson Mandela, and my Grandfather, and Gordon Cosby. Their lives were marked mostly small things, the daily resolution to forgive, to be thankful, to pray, to be open to love. They did not give an answer to injustice or fear or death. But they waited and watched productively, hopefully. And by their love they drew others along with them into the hope of something better.

Which is why Advent is a communal experience. We don’t wait alone. So sometimes—like on December 14 when I finally arrive in Maryland just before dark—we find ourselves among friends and warmth and laughter, and we are deeply thankful. And then for a moment, we catch a glimpse of the love and light that is what we were made for, the love and light that is coming our way again this season, through Christ the babe.

It might be hope

A little while ago, a friend and I were talking about a band we like, called The Innocence Mission. 

"Their lyrics are great," he said. "They're just so--"

"--hopeful!" I finished.

"Really?" he asked. "I was going to say dark, and sad."

Sometimes hope is a sudden joy, a spark of light, a new friend, a new opportunity.

But sometimes hope is dark, and sad. 

*

All weekend you were moved to tears. Watching a friend leave home just like you did a few months ago. Watching another friend say I do and embark on something beautiful and impossible, loving another person just as he is, forever. Watching the church come to communion together and feeling how inadequately we share ourselves and how deeply we need each other.

So today, on your 8-hour drive from what used to be home to what still doesn't feel like home, you play one song on repeat and just cry. Again and again. Because feeling your wounds might just mean you believe healing could come. Today, it's okay to just feel the loneliness. No disclaimers. You don't have to apologize to your single friends for feeling lonely even though you're married, and you don't have to apologize to your busy friends for feeling anxious even though you have lots of free time. You don't have to apologize on behalf of Christians everywhere for not always feeling joy and resurrection, and you don't have to apologize to your blog readers for not always believing the things you write, which you write because you want to believe them and because somewhere down in there you do. You don't plan out the eight thousand things you're going to change about your life when you get home this time, which you have never really changed.

You just let the tears come, and know that it might be hope of the best kind.