Essays
The Maternal Winter Olympics ( Right Now in a Town Near You)
(This morning I escorted four children over sheets of snow, sleet and ice so that two of them could attend school since it just happened to NOT BE CANCELED for once. When I got back home, I felt like I deserved a medal and . . . thus was born the concept of The Maternal Winter Olympics.)
There are young, svelte athletes who train their whole lives for the Olympics and then, there’s the rest of us.
While a small minority of the world’s population participates, spectates and protests the Winter Olympics this year, there’s no need to feel left out. Every mother of young children can have the Olympic experience by participating in what I’m calling, “The Maternal Winter Olympics.”
What is this, you ask? Here’s a sampling of the Events likely to appear in this year’s extravaganza:
(The completion of these events is made more remarkable by the participants’ total lack of stomach muscles due to multiple gestations and a general lack of exercise. This condition requires that all maneuvers to be completed using only the muscles in the lower back. Unfortunately, due to this factor, the incidence of injury among Maternal Athletes is quite high. DO NOT attempt these feats on your own unless you are a similarly untrained mother of young and/or school age children.)
Slalom Descent: While Slalom skiing has been a long-standing event at the traditional winter Olympics, the addition of Slalom Snowboarding and the new Slopestyle events in which participants race down a slippery hill while attempting to avoid and/or perform stunts on obstacles has created quite a buzz. In light of this, the Maternal Olympics will include a Slalom descent in which the participant can receive a score based on a combination of speed, weight carried and stunts.
The course is set up to run on an open wooden staircase with participants starting at the top. Participants then race down the coarse which may be littered with such obstacles as shoes, toys, and slippery rolling devices. Extra points will be earned for near-falls, twists, turns and the ability to carry one or two small people while completing the course. Needless to say, these races will be held in the middle of the night or early morning hours when participants are still groggy and without the benefit of caffeine.
(She’s Lost Her) Figure Skating: This event takes place in three stages and is most loved by audiences because of the difficulty of the routines, the elaborate costumes and the likelihood of dangerous falls.
Stage 1: The Excursion Participants, dressed in stunning combinations of pajama bottoms and their husband’s old winter coats, emerge breathless onto the rink. The artistry of their appearance is accentuated by uncombed hair and wild-eyes. During this stage, participants must navigate over an ice covered sidewalk and street to fetch a van which has been strategically parked in a huge snowy, icy pile. Gunning the engine forward and back, the participant then slips and slides the vehicle to the sidewalk where it will be strategically placed for the next stage of the event.
Stage 2: Partners The participant now welcomes, one-by-one, several small skating partners into the event. One at a time, she escorts them across the rink and into the waiting vehicle. (Participants have been known to work with up to four partners for one event.) Partners vary from actively resisting, to swan diving off of the porch.
Stage 3: Cognition Once in the van, the participant has the option of earning additional points IF she can remember that today is the day her five-year-old child is supposed to bring snack for his entire Kindergarten class. Upon remembrance, the participant may then make one final life-threatening trek across the ice to fetch the nearly-forgotten snack.
Luge: As in the traditional Olympics, this event focuses on speed. Participants are timed as they maneuver a van with poor tires down a slippery slope toward a distant elementary school. Focus and determination are required as passengers planted within the vehicle are likely to attempt to distract by dropping favorite toys into unreachable places, claiming to have forgotten their mittens and general whining and/or fussiness. Those who reach the school in a timely manner are rewarded with the opportunity to disembark one or more of their passengers before starting off on the return course.
A Word Concerning Sponsors and Medals:
Maternal Olympics participants are NOT awarded medals. They are, however, occasionally allowed to go out in the evening to get groceries unaccompanied or to stay up late binging on episodes of Call the Midwife. Being a Maternal Athlete is considered to be its own reward.
The Maternal Olympics are proudly sponsored by:
1. Anything with Caffeine in it.
2. Anything chocolate.
3. Three bites of dry toast and a sip of lukewarm coffee, which is also known by Maternal Athletes everywhere as the “Breakfast of Champions.”
What Event would you add?
The Last Few Bees (the one-hundred-thousandth snow day)
In the morning, after the twins chug their milk and the
heavy wet diapers of the night before are deposited in the already overflowing
trash, I sit in the corner of the couch with Isaiah to look at a book. We flip through the pages of a National
Geographic pointing out choo-choos,
ho-hees and brooommmm-vrmmms.
Just about the time he decides it’s safe to sink from his perch on the far edge of one knee into the middle of
my lap, Levi climbs up, shouting in his little mega-phone voice. Then the competition begins, with shouts and gestures, to see who will be first to name
and claim the trains and horses, houses and cars on each and every page.
Their older brother appears on the stairs, sniffly and sleepy. He bursts into tears after blowing his nose because he doesn’t want to be sick and I carry him off to the living room where he too wants to look at a book. The twins, dispersed by the sudden appearance of their crying brother, now flock back, climbing on.
Then, in that moment, I am done, already, surrounded and sinking among a swarming mass of need and desire.
I saw a picture recently of the man who holds the world record for wearing the most bees at once and I feel like I imagine that man must feel as they’re putting on the last few bees – frozen, pushing down the panic, hoping to make it through until they can get. them. off.
The pictures capture the way a moment feels sometimes, stretched wide and deep. The bees gathered clinging, swarming for the time it took to capture them on film and then, I imagine, they were gone. Time paused, like a butterfly alighting on a flower, long enough for the man to practice some deep breathing, long enough to feel the full weight of that particular moment.
It’s so much the same with these little bees of mine who climb and cling just long enough for the stress to rise, long enough for me to practice some deep breathing before they too are on their way – off and running, climbing, soaring. So I take picture after picture, I inhale and exhale and each moment opens, one-by-one.
I surrender to what is right here, right now on what feels like the one-hundred-thousandth snow day because this moment too will pass as each one before and after does until all that remains is the memory of this humming hive.
This post is linked with Playdates With God.
This Great Tenderness
We didn’t get around to Christmas cards this year, but come
January, when the real depth and breadth of winter set it, I started making
paper Cardinals. They made me happy in
the same tangible, heart-happy way playing the Ukulele does. The crimson card stock, the white on black on
red, the candy-cane striped twine tied just so – all of these fed my soul, fed
my hope as I cut and pasted.
I built the birds in batches and sent them out in flocks,
tucked into brown envelopes the color of sandpaper. I imagined them winging
their way through town, across state lines and landing, breathless and bright
on the doorsteps of those my heart carries.
I took one, by hand, to a friend who suffered a traumatic
loss this past week. Walking through her
door I remembered that I am a Pastor to her.
I was her Pastor, for a brief year or so, but then I left the
ministry to be home with my young sons and she and her husband left the
church.
Walking in to her house, though, I felt it, that she is still one of my
flock.
I spread my arms like wings and gathered her in, I sat and drank, listened and prayed, and did my best to provide a shelter for the darkness she is bearing.
//
I have been through a few months of darkness now, months of
the deep pain of unknowing, the frightening disorientation of walking in the
dark. During prayer awhile back the word
“brooding” arose within me. Later I looked the
word up in an online dictionary and found, among others, the following
definitions:
brooding v.
1. to protect (young) by or as if by covering with wings
2. to
hover envelopingly; loom.
I began to
wonder whether the darkness I felt had something to do with the spirit of God
brooding within me. Maybe the darkness I was
experiencing was not the distance of God, but rather the nearness – the
overshadowing – of God.
//
This week I came across the phrase “brooding tenderness” in
a collection of writings by Howard Thurman.
Writing about his sense of being surrounded by the love of God, Thurman
describes the brooding tenderness out of which all things arise.
The more I make my home in this spacious place beneath God’s
wide, warm wings, the more I feel my own wings stretched open wide. The more I rest in this brooding tenderness,
the more I feel a depth of tenderness being born in me. Resting
here in the darkness of waiting, I also become a place of rest for those who wait.
This post is linked with Playdates with God and Concrete Words.
When Love Visits
He stood on one side of the wide doorway, between the cafeteria and cafe, and I sat on the other with my twin boys. An old man, he was drawn in by my little boys’ antics, “Sweet,” he called them.
Right there he opened the story of his life, his love, to me.
“I can remember it like it was yesterday,” he said.
And it was.
It was yesterday and it was 1948 when they first met and then also 1950 when she held his hand and said, “I love you so.” It was all of those moments at once because that’s the way it is with love.
Love opens itself to us and, entering in, we embrace the moment and in it all of the moments of our lives.
I listened, wide-eyed and smiling, because that’s what you do when love shows up.
My boys must have felt it too, because after he left, they leaned into me pleading with great earnestness, “Me hug, me hug?”
I gave my approval and one ran to the man, grasping his legs from behind in a bear-hug that I feared would topple them both. The other clung to my hand, flirting, before diving in too.
Because that’s what you do when love arrives, you run, arms open wide to embrace it, you flirt before diving in too, embracing that moment that holds all moments as one.
This post is linked with Five Minute Friday.
Obedience? (Wow Stars, Paint and Billy Joel)
“Only the good die
young . . .” – Billy Joel
That song by Billy Joel always irked me, catchy though it
is, because I was one of the good girls, always.
//
“I’m tired of following the rules all the time,” I told my
husband, standing in the kitchen on a Saturday morning.
We were procrastinating taking down the Christmas decorations,
the sparkling green tree, the glitter garland, nativity and cheery red and
green nativity pockets. I was dreading a
return to plain white walls, stretching out in every direction, dreading the long
stretch of winter inside, cold and bare.
That’s when it struck me, “Why not paint a wall, just one?”
I asked.
The lease says no painting, no hanging things on the wall
and for six months now we’ve endured with a few pictures leaning back on
shelves, with pictures and sayings I’ve drawn and cut out, permanent markers on
clear contact paper.
More than that, though, we’ve waited, it seems, with our
bags packed for that glory train to arrive, the one that lifts out of here to
the happy ever after, but despite the sound in the distance, despite the lone
whistle in the night, the sighting of puffs of steam on the horizon, our deliverance
has yet to arrive.
So I wanted to paint a wall, to break a rule in a symbolic
way, because I know the way color can give me life and at this point we’re
clutching at life in all its forms, wherever we can find it.
//
My daughter danced her way out of kindergarten most days to
report a double or triple Wow Star day, clutching a cheap, but carefully chosen
prize in her little hand. She was
renowned among the kindergarten crowd – nobody got as many Wow Stars as
Sophia. No One.
I congratulated her, proud, but I wondered about the weight
of all those stars.
I joked about her getting Stop Signs and one day the
conversation turned serious.
“Mommy, what would you do if I got a stop sign?” she asked.
“Well,” I replied, “I’d probably be a little relieved. No one can be good all of the time and
getting a stop sign isn’t the end of the world.”
Later, it came out that she did get a stop sign one day for
some minor infraction, but she wasn’t eager to share the information,
especially not in front of her young brother.
“It’s ok,” I said, “It’s not a big deal.”
//
Brennan Manning writes in his memoir, “All is Grace,” about
his decision to become a good boy. The
task, he writes, required embracing an imposter, shutting off his own wants and
needs to maintain a facade. Summarizing
his childhood, Manning says,
I wish I could share more specific memories like this from
my early childhood, but I can’t. . . .
As I said, the decision to become a good boy effectively cut me off at the
roots . . . (74)
//
All of my life I’ve wanted to be “good enough,” but it
occurred to me one year during Advent that few of the individuals involved in the
story of the nativity shared my concerns.
The things they did, the choices Mary, Joseph and the Wise Men made were
maybe on the surface good, but deeper than that, they were courageous, bold,
flying in the face of conformity.
And maybe that’s the problem.
Goodness, obedience, when looked at through the lens of
conformity is a dangerous thing.
There’s a whiff of conformity in all of those Wow Stars, a
hint of crowd control. When I really
read scripture, casting off the gold-leafing added through hours of Sunday
school lessons that also bear the scent of conformity, I see a community of
individuals who were not always so good on the surface; Jesus wasn’t crucified
because he went around collecting Wow Stars, no, he was crucified because he
refused to conform to the established norm.
//
I can’t write about obedience though, apart from the context
of parenting – I am after all mother to four young children and instilling
obedience at this stage of life is high priority. Richard Rohr has an excellent discussion of
this in his book, “Falling Upward,” where he addresses the need for two-halves
of life – one in which we learn obedience within safe, sound and predictable
structures (first half) and a second within which we learn to “hear and obey”
the “deeper voice of God.” This voice, Rohr suggests will sound an “awful lot
like the voices of risk, of trust, of surrender . . . (48)”
Rohr believes that we’re failing to do either half of life well
in modern American culture and, more specifically says, “very few Christians
have been taught how to live both law and freedom at the same time (36).”
//
Freedom, for most of us, is a scary concept and the
invitation to move beyond conformity to cultural norms of the “good” boy or
girl, the “good” mother, the “good” father may seem to our wary ears to run the
risk of too much subjectivity, too much individualism – too much, “what’s good
for me is good.”
I want to suggest, though, that this need not be the
case.
What Rohr is talking about, what I’m talking about, is an
obedience that stems from a deeper place – a place of deep knowing, submission
and unity with God, so that our outward actions conform to the will and movement
of the spirit within us.
One might think, for example, of Rosa Parks whose civil disobedience
came from a deeper place within – her decision was neither subjective nor
individualistic. By listening to the
leading within, she acted in alignment with the deeper movement of God already
at work in the world around her – by listening to the movement of the Kingdom
of God within herself and acting in obedience to ITS dictates, Parks sparked a
deeper awareness in those around her of the movement of God’s Kingdom.
//
There’s a time, I guess for Wow Stars, a time for sheer
obedience, for obedience’s sake.
But there’s a time also for honing one’s ear to the sounds
of a deeper voice.
I suspect the lyrics to Billy Joel’s song bothered me
because they hinted at what I feared, that by being the “good girl” I was
missing out on life, that maybe my own obedience was motivated more by fear
than by love.
Either way, I’m grown now, a girl no more, and my husband
went to the hardware store last night to pick up a gallon of paint in the shade
of “moss.” He said he thought for sure our landlord was going
to come walking into Lowes while he stood there, red handed, with a gallon of
paint in hand.
This afternoon while
the kids were out, we painted two arched walls the shade of new leaves and
spring. We’ll paint it back to white, a
clean slate, when we move. But for now,
we’ve planted one more stake in the ground, one more reminder of our belief
that this winter, too, shall pass.
This post is linked with Diana’s Q and A on the topic, “Obedience.” Stop over to read her take and others on the topic of obedience.
On Our Anniversary (Let’s Dance)
I’ve seen better days, dripping down your face. We don’t have to talk, let’s dance.
– Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros
We’re fourteen years in – seven years without kids and seven years with – so it feels like we’re tipping the scale now toward the rest of our lives. This was a year of cracking-open; a long, gray winter followed by the blooming hope of spring.
In April we sat, eyes sparkling, over an Italian meal, unpacking our dreams like a sigh, so much air held in after too many years playing the steady to other people’s lives. It was like standing beside an open window in spring, the fresh air wafting over us like Life itself. Looking ahead, we clasped our hands together and jumped.
Only, it wasn’t quite like that, not really.
It was more like a lot of work to get a house ready to sell while four small kids ran in circles around us. Then, after the sale, it was waiting and wondering, a rollercoaster of hope and despair as we were chauffeured from house to house in the back seat of our realtor’s car.
And now it’s still this: Waiting.
But there’s another word that stands out from this past year, which is this one: Together.
Waiting. Together.
See how the one softens, even just a little, when placed beside the other?
Yes, that’s how it’s been.
We’ve been like that couple in the Christmas tale – the one where she sells her hair to buy him a chain for his watch and he sells his watch to buy her a comb for her hair. You were willing to give up the land that made you smile so that I could feel at home and, when that fell through, I was willing to give up the writing and retreat space I so desperately need, just for the joy of seeing you astride one of those tractors you’re always looking at on Craigslist.
But God kept us from foolish sacrifices and here we are still, Waiting Together.
Here we stand, facing forward, hand in hand, looking for that open window, ready to jump again.
In the meantime, though, we don’t have to talk, let’s dance.
Love that Carries (a Sketch)
He looks tall, to me, and burly, like someone who played football in high school. Gray-haired, with some extra weight around the middle, he carries his daughter to school every day through the long winter months, wrapped in a blanket.
I saw him this morning, as I do most mornings, walking back toward home as I waited in line with my van-full of kids. He walked down the sidewalk toward me with the now empty blanket draped casually over his shoulders. It looked to be a quilt made of the sort of colors that bring to mind a Winnie the Pooh motif, a baby blanket, maybe.
Most days I’ve noticed him and most days I’ve thought, “Really, you carry her?” There’s part of me that still thinks it’s a bit much – his daughter’s in first grade at least – but today I saw it differently.
Today I recognized the value – the depth – of a love that carries.
Grown men don’t often walk around with baby quilts draped over their shoulders, but this one does, and as I write I’m reminded of those pictures of Christ the good shepherd walking with a lamb draped over his shoulders. In those pictures that lamb is you, is me, is us – we who’re being carried, wrapped in those incarnate arms of love.
I often wonder whether she’ll even remember the way
she was carried each frosty, breath-catching morning. Maybe she won’t and certainly a day will come when she says, “No more.” But slow-dancing in the kitchen with one of my bitty-boys on my hip, his head tucked into my shoulder, I know the truth, that being held, being carried, shapes us deep within in ways that can never, ever, be forgotten.
This post is linked with #Tellhisstory.
Simplicity of Speech
” . . . out of the overflow of his heart his mouth speaks.” Luke 6:45
Standing near the kitchen counter in the morning, Levi grabs a sippy-cup of warm milk and hands it to Isaiah.
“Air, Yay-yah,” he says, holding out the cup. He does this to make sure he gets the cup HE prefers, but still, the sounds are sweet.
Taking the cup, Isaiah offers a sincere, “Tank-ooo,” before waddling off for his morning diaper change.
//
They talk to each other now – these two boys who shared a womb in near-silence for close to nine months. They call each other by poorly pronounced names and share a common code of words – a language only I and a few closest to them can decipher.
I adore their speech, the accuracy with which they mimic the tone and shape of the things we say, the way they shush, chide and encourage each other. Most of all, though, I love the way their hearts shine through each syllable. They haven’t yet learned to guard their tongues, from good or bad, so a purity of emotion simmers under every word, unhindered.
I wonder if this isn’t somehow close to what the Quakers are trying to get at with the idea of simplicity of speech – speech that rises from and flows out of the deepest truths of our lives. It’s a language I’m learning to embrace again now as an adult as I clear away the clutter and make room for those simple, shining words that rise and bless.
//
The other day, Isaiah with his lovely, round, shining eyes and big-toothed grin, his double-dimpled smile flashing, made a proclamation,
“Berry happy, me!”
It bubbled up out of him, like steam from a boiling kettle, a pure and shining declaration of joy that lay over me like a blessing pronounced.
This post is linked with Playdates with God.
Seeing in the Dark
“When you turn to the right or when you turn to the left, your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, “This is the way, walk in it.” Isaiah 30:20
I’m thinking of the wee,
tiny cubs, born
blind and helpless
in the dark
den of winter.
How is it that
they travel,
unseeing,
toward the
life-giving teet
in that small,
dark space?
What I mean
is that there
must be other
ways of seeing,
of being led
in the darkness –
maybe scent or
some deeper intuition.
But there must
be something
that tells
the lone cicada
to dig upward,
not down,
something that
whispers to the child
in the womb
when the time
has come.
Maybe it is
the voice
that comes
from behind,
as the Prophet says,
whispering
in one’s ear,
“This,
is the way
walk in it.”
Whatever it is,
I’m looking now
for that leading.
Now that the lights
are out,
I’m developing
every one
of my senses.
This post is linked with Five Minute Friday.
Maybe
Does the Cardinal
know his own colors –
the spark
he creates by
simply being?
Maybe you
also are a bird
of brilliant hue,
long sought
by weary eyes
in a landscape,
barren.
Photo source HERE.
Linking with dVerse Poet’s Pub. Click over to read more poems.
Cheek to Cheek (Bruises, Curses and Kisses)
The cheeks of a two-year-old are delightfully irresistible, which is why I kiss them as often as I can. This morning, in fact, I leaned over and planted one on Levi’s tender cheek for a reason I cannot remember, but he quickly pulled back in pain.
Yesterday he fell while standing on a sideways can of chicken broth that lay on the dining room floor. He whacked his soft cheek hard on a sturdy wooden chair and came up screaming, red faced. Today he sports a deep blue bruise that runs like war paint across the most sensitive part of his face.
“No,” he said, pointing to his cheek after my ill-placed kiss, “boo-boo.”
Then he turned his head and offered me the other.
I kissed it too.
//
It was so gray this morning. This Monday, this second try at getting the kids back to school after a snow day kept them home last week and a two-hour delay threw schedules into havoc again today. Yesterday was filled with freezing rain and ice and I had hoped, just maybe, we might get one of those clear crystalline mornings out of it all, when the world is dressed in icy diamonds with sun glittering down. But, no, wet slush and gray cloud-filled skies cast shadows over us all and I found myself standing crying over the dishes in the sink while my children bickered and fussed, swirling in layers of need and want, heavy like those clouds.
I went to the attic, flash light in hand, and dug out Brennan Manning’s book, Ruthless Trust, and yet another floor lamp, hoping both would shed some light. But our outlets are all full and the lamp stood dim in a dimmer corner.
Finally I went to the window, the one that looks out on all of the ugly, pulled back the curtain and cursed the sky.
“This is such an ugly day,” I said while my children watched, gathered at the dining room table. My words struck the sky, heaven’s tender cheek.
Those words hurled in front of my kids felt like blasphemy to me. Then my daughter followed and peering out confirmed, “Yes, it is ugly.”
//
Later, standing in the laundry room which is really a walled-in porch I felt the sun lay warm across my cheek and paused under its caress. That room’s usually half-frozen and I rush about in it wrestling icy cold clothes from washer to dryer.
But on sunny days, it’s one of the only rooms in this whole cave, where the light pours in, abundant. On those days the sun warms it like a spa and the windows fog with moisture.
Icy winds blew in this morning, breaking clouds, shaking branches, causing the twins and I to bustle as we trotted through frozen parking lots. “Run, run, run,” we sang, “Don’t slip! Don’t fall!”
Then Isaiah fell and I almost did too, but the sun kept up its peaking.
By the time I went to check on the laundry the back room was lit like a flash bulb, bright and I was blinded like someone emerging from a cave. I suppose that was why I felt it and paused there by the window soaking in the warm kiss of the sun on the most sensitive part of my face.
//
The boys woke up crying from their naps and things were touch and go for awhile. So I sat on the old wooden floor in the kitchen while they clustered nearby with snacks and juice.
Levi turned to me red faced and sleepy eyed and I said, grinning, “I’m gonna eat your cheeks.”
Then both boys turned, as if on cue, and started stalking their way toward me, hands raised and growling. Two sock-footed, fleecey-pants-wearing, sweaty-headed bears with round mouths open wide.
“Eat Mama!” they taunted, leaning in with gaping jaws. They planted wide, wet circles on my cheeks, each standing on either side and we laughed and giggled and I covered them both, cheek to cheek, with kisses.
This post is linked with Playdates With God.
Bittersweet (the end of Christmas Vacation)
She stands at the top of the stairs in her soft pink and green pajamas – the ones with the ruffles on the ends of each sleeve. Her long blond hair is tousled and tumbling, fresh from a shower the night before. Lit by the light of the Christmas tree, she smiles, holding something in her hand.
“My tooth came out,” she says, smiling still, “the one that wasn’t very loose.”
Curled on the couch, I tip my head up to her, drink her in, this vision of seven poised at the top of the stairs. I smile wide, exaggerating my excitement so it carries across the distance between us.
“How?” I ask in a stage whisper, because the boys are sleeping still, and, “Do you need anything?”
Her reply is long and complicated, filled with unnecessary detail, like every story she tells, exact.
“Wow,” I offer, not sure what she needs from me. The first tooth, last April, was a song and dance, picture-taking occasion, but we’re a good ways in to this new season now.
She lingers, eyes twinkling in the light.
“Is it bleeding? Do you need some tissue?”
“I’m going to rinse my mouth,” she says, turning.
//
This is my daughter who lost her first tooth in the night sometime last year and didn’t bother waking us, who dealt with the blood herself and told us, triumphant, the following morning.
This is the morning they return to school and I feel it again, the pang of grief and loss at yet another vacation spent – too little quiet, too little time, too few moments with this oldest child.
The night before, after prayers and a song, she said for the first time that she didn’t want to go back to school. She was hanging from my neck, half smiling and I like to think she was ‘playing’ the moment, but maybe she feels it too, the pain of these moments turning us away from each other.
//
She stands at the top of the stairs, beautiful, like the star shining light on top of the Christmas tree that stands between us. I sit on the couch, lit by the same light, warm and sleepy-headed still with my journal and coffee in hand.
She turns toward the bathroom and I hear the water running as she rinses and spits out the blood of her loss. I turn toward my journal and another sip of darkness, grateful for the moment, grateful to have seen her there, softly lit, standing at the top of the stairs.
Linking with Imperfect Prose.
An Introvert’s One Word Post (363 days late)
Last year was my first year blogging through the New Year and the first time I was exposed to OneWord365. Alece Ronzino came up with the concept of praying for One Word that encapsulates what God might be inviting you into in the year ahead and a whole community has blossomed around it (Claire DeBoer has written a great introduction into the concept over at SheLoves Magazine).
It seemed like everyone I followed online had a Word and not just any word, mind you, but a Good and Meaningful word. Not only did they have a word, they were writing about it, blogging about it and what it might mean for the year ahead.
So I started looking for my word in a rather anxious way, as in, “I’d better hurry up and get a #$@^ing word, so I can write about it and get in on the trend.”
(ok, so maybe there wasn’t any swearing involved, but I did feel a lot of pressure.)
I’d just recently read, The Wisdom Way of Knowing, by Cynthia Bourgeault and was fascinated by her ideas around the embodiment of spirituality, how our outward postures can both reflect and shape our inward experience and expressions of spirituality. The more I thought about it, the more I felt my word might be “embodied.”
Pretty quickly I had a word or at least the idea of a word, but I was hesitant, it seemed like a big deal – One Word, for the whole year. What if I messed up? Was this THE word? How was I to know? So I tucked it away, in true introvert fashion, and kept on waiting and listening to see if anything else would turn up.
I told a friend about the Word situation over breakfast a few weeks later. My voice rose with anxiety as I spoke about the stress of not having a Word. It was all so random and I was only venting, really, but as I spoke, her face lit up and she said, “I know what your word is!”
She had recently watched one of the Nanny McPhee movies where Nanny pins a word on each of the members of a family. Coming to the mother, Nanny McPhee pins the words, “Leap of Faith” onto her lapel. Watching the movie, my friend thought “That’s Kelly!”
Well, I think you have to take a word when it comes at you like that, right?
So there I was, a little way into 2013 with FOUR words: “Embodied” and “Leap of Faith.”
In the beginning I thought of them as separate ideas, parallel, but unconnected roads leading into the New Year.
It wasn’t until after we sold our house, failed to find a new home to buy and moved into a month-to-month rental that I thought of reading those words all together as one sentence, “Embodied leap of faith.”
So that’s what we did, looking back, though I wouldn’t have called it that at the time – we took an embodied leap of faith. It’s funny, we ended up renting about two blocks from our old home which may not seem like much of a leap to some, but a leap of faith may not always be accurately measured by visible bounds. Maybe a better measure might be the stretch and lurch induced in that strange muscle known as the human heart.
Those four little words, that one act, has shaped so much of my writing over
the past year. I wrote about Hope, and Trust, Waiting and Surrender as
we worked our way toward and eventually over the edge of our little nest
out into the wide unknown (you can read a number of these posts by clicking HERE).
Here we are, though, twelve months later, still winding our way through the air, waiting to land, waiting, again, for another Word (or Four).
Will you participate in OneWord365? What will your word be?
One of the Cherubim
Walking with my family,
I am like one of the
four living creatures
“full of eyes
in front and behind;”
two pairs at my head,
two at my waist,
and two at my knees.
Together we spot
the monarch caterpillar
green and yellow
stretched-out along
a blade of grass,
the cicada half out
of its shell, suspended
on the side of a tree
and, like the angels,
I am filled with praise.
This is Our Story (Bearing the Light)
This is a reading I wrote for the Christmas Eve service at our church a few years back. Merry Christmas to you and yours and may you be blessed by the Light that shines!
In the beginning was the Word
and the word was with God,
and the word was God.
Genesis tells us that the first thing God made was light.
The first thing Jesus – the Word who was with God – made, was light.
“Let there be light” said the Word.
And there was light.
God saw that the light was good;
and God separated the light from the darkness.
“Let us make humans in our image,” said the Word.
And life was brought into being.
Humans were made in the image of God,
in the image of light,
in the image of the life that was the light of all people.
The first thing God made was light,
but the first thing we chose was darkness.
We chose darkness and it welcomed us,
with promises to hide our need and nakedness,
with promises to bring us life.
Our eyes became dim and we learned to flee the light.
The darkness wrapped us with itself,
we became prisoners and captives
and the light that smoldered within us went dark.
We walked in darkness
and lived in the land of the shadow of death.
God looked down and saw our darkness.
The Word said, “I am the Light of the world. Let me go to them.”
And he came.
The people who lived in the land of deep darkness saw a great light.
Like the coming of the dawn.
Like the sun in all its glory.
And the angels sang, “Arise, shine, for your light has come.”
But we didn’t know him for who he was.
We knew darkness. We knew captivity.
The light was painful and we clung to the darkness.
But some remembered how it felt to live in light and love.
They squinted and stared, even though it caused great pain,
even though his light exposed their darkness.
They welcomed the light
and the light within them flickered and grew.
Then they too became light
and the light spread,
like a fire that burns and never goes out.
The light shines in the darkness
and the darkness has not overcome it.
And now Christ comes
in every person who will welcome him,
in every one who will bear the light.
We Are Held in the Dark
“. . . and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by . . .” Exodus 33:22
My twin boys travel the steep wooden stairs, short legs stretching with a two-year-old’s unique combination of purpose-filled distraction. They run through the house on winged feet, blinded with joy and speed. They climb – oh how they climb – improvising foot-holds as little arms reach and stubby fingers grab for that which is too hot, too fragile, too dangerous for them to have.
To be two is to live life perpetually on the edge – the fall is nearly inevitable.
Sometimes it’s an accident of their own making – the lean that goes too far, the stumble – but other times the world gives way beneath them, that which they trusted is not what it seems and at this their eyes widen, betrayed by unforeseen pain.
The worst falls are followed by a long, slow intake of air. Alerted by the sound of their impact, it’s my turn to fly, up or down the stairs, across the long pine floor boards in search of the injured one.
The first wail erupts, twisting his little face, causing his eyes to half-shut as all of that breath drawn-in now comes rushing out. Screaming, he rises and staggers toward me, reaching, half-blind, for comfort.
Looking for wounds – for blood, for bruises or the tell-tale red, puffy skin of a cheek or forehead – I gather him in like a hen with her chicks. My long arms twine tight knowing by instinct that the press of flesh on flesh will bring consolation.
Then I rise because there’s comfort for them still in being lifted, in being held. Perched on my left arm, short legs wrap around my waist and I reach up instinctively with my right hand, cupping the back of a silken-haired head.
The wailing continues in my ear now as he leans back time and again to fill his lungs and all of the pain comes pouring out dressed in a vivid cloak of sound. Finally, when the sound has been let, I gently press his face into the intersection of my neck and shoulder, that dark corner of mother-scented skin. Holding him there, his face buried, he gentles, calming as the tension eases and he melts into me.
Standing there, swaying, with my head crooked to the side to close him in, my hand still covering the back of his head, I hear the words of an old familiar hymn in a new light,
He hideth my soul in the cleft of the rock
That shadows a dry, thirsty land;
He hideth my life with the depths of His love,
And covers me there with His hand,
And covers me there with His hand.
(Fanny Crosby)
Then it dawns on me, maybe the darkness I so often feel is not a sign of God’s absence, but rather a sign of God’s intimate presence.
Maybe when the eye of my spirit grows dim and darkness descends all around, it is simply because I am being held, steadied, in the cleft of the Rock, covered by a soft and sturdy hand. Breathing in with my eyes shut I can almost feel the press of God-scented skin, the presence of the One who holds, who hides, who covers us all.
This post is linked with #TellHisStory and Imperfect Prose.
If you liked this post, you may also like Remembering (We Are Held) “God waits like a hammock swinging in the
breeze, like a mother’s lap that sways full of life and breath and song.”
Breathing (in Advent)
“I told you about this, right?” he asks, “About how I don’t breathe?”
He said it casually as we stood together washing and cooking in the kitchen.
“No,” I said, with a rueful smile, “you didn’t tell me you stopped breathing.”
But then I added, with seriousness, “I know.”
* * *
“I can’t feel my face,” I’d gasped on the way to the hospital, “it’s all numb and tingly.”
Our van flew North along the highway and my husband, driving as fast and carefully as he could, kept glancing over to where I sat in the passenger seat, encouraging me to breathe through wave after wave of contractions.
We hadn’t practiced breathing this time around, hadn’t practiced anything really. My previous labor lasted a few brief hours and aside from panting to keep from pushing as my friend sped us across town, there hadn’t been time for breathing.
This time, though, we were driving to the big city hospital with the level one NICU to deliver twins, one of whom was breech, and we were hoping to get there in time. Recalling a breathing pattern from a lamaze class years ago, my husband coached me over the miles, though he told me later he was making himself dizzy in the process.
I was nearing panic as we pulled off the exit ramp into the downtown streets that were mercifully empty. We parked in the emergency entrance and an angel with a walkie-talkie found a wheel-chair and whisked us away in the freight elevator, directly into the maternity unit.
As soon as we were assigned a nurse, we explained my tingling face and hands.
“That’s because you’re not breathing right,” she replied.
Before signing off of her shift for the evening, she educated us both in a pattern of “ha”s and “hoos” that would carry us through the rest of labor and delivery. She spent a total of fifteen minutes with us, but she turned the tide of delivery by helping me figure out how to breathe.
* * *
We’re trying to learn to breathe again, my husband and I, here in this season of Advent; here in the waiting and in-between, when each breath matters more than we can tell. Caught in the middle between two houses for five months
now, we’ve both been holding our breath out of habit as we wait through wave after wave of hope and discouragement.
Lying in bed at night, side by side, we take deep breaths and the blankets rise and fall with each inhale and exhale.
Watching the children gathered on the carpet, still and expectant for one brief pause as they wait for an Advent treat, we draw the moment in, through eyes and ears and nostrils, before exhaling into the chaos of wrappers and chocolate that ensues.
We are learning to breathe as though each breath is a doorway, an invitation and each breath deeply drawn, holds within it the foretaste of that for which we wait.
This post is linked with Playdates With God.
Biding the Shadows of Advent
I am still running from that knowledge, that eye, that love from which there is no refuge. For you meant only love, and love, and I felt only fear, and pain. So once in Israel love came to us incarnate, stood in the doorway between two worlds, and we were all afraid.
– Annie Dillard in Teaching a Stone to Speak
My emotions rise as we settle into church and I excuse myself to get a cup of tea. He catches me as the water pours, hot, into a thin paper cup. The tea bag leeches black and one innocuous question is enough to break my thin veil of composure.
I mumble something, voice breaking and the oceans that spring from my eyes speak their own words without words and this man doesn’t turn away or try to cover over the awkwardness of the moment, but instead leans in.
We stand talking in the middle of the refreshments, my friend and I, and it’s not the words that matter, but the fact that he doesn’t turn from my tears, doesn’t deny the reality of the pain I feel over what should be such a simple thing. When the service breaks, my husband joins us and the pain pours out yet again, welling up around us as we three tread water in its depths.
The prophet Isaiah describes the coming Christ as “a man of sorrows
and acquainted with grief” and the tiny babe born on a starry night grew into a man who drew the weak, weary and heavy-laden to
himself, attracting those whose lives contained enough tears to wash his
very feet.
It should be no wonder then, when in the midst of our waiting, we feel the dark corners of our own hidden grief beginning to come undone. As we approach the light to come, our sense of the shadows both within and without, deepens.
The only way I know to move through this pain is to look it in the eye,
to drink the cup of sorrow and swallow it down whole or, as my friend
would say, “to get down and roll around in the mud with it.” In his
book, Let Your Life Speak, Parker Palmer says “the only way out
is in and through,” and here I am taking the dark and long road down and
through these oceans depths of grief that are at once both old and new.
But it is here in the darkness, also, that voice of the angel comes, always – “Do not be afraid.”
Do not be afraid.
Do not be afraid.
Here in deep shadows, spread wide like the velvety night
sky, this is where the angel greets us who dare to tarry awhile, this is where the Christ child is born.
(For another reflection on the presence of grief during Advent, visit Laura Boggess’ post at The High Calling The Bread of Tears, “The season is bittersweet for some. Hearts are cognizant of empty
places: loved ones departed, emotional estrangement, abandoned dreams,
disappointments, and fears. Absence creates a presence that we carry
with us as we rush to and fro during Advent. And we ask ourselves, how
can a season of such joy also spark this kindred sorrow?”)
Scattered Gifts (Exchanging Memos With God)
A few weeks ago a dear friend gave us a computer – out of the blue.
We really needed a second computer, but couldn’t begin to figure out how we could buy one. Then, BAM, just like that, before we’d hardly wrapped our minds around it, the problem was solved.
A few days later, another couple we barely know stopped by with a brand new vacuum.
Ours was broken and we’d put the word out that we were in the market for a used or hand-me-down machine. But here it was, NEW, in the box, with a bow on top. I sat the box in the living room and watched the children dance around it in excitement when they got home from school.
Then, when I was off writing at Panera on a Saturday afternoon, my husband found a drafting table set out for free on the curb, just down the road from our house. Exactly the kind of table I’ve always loved, exactly the kind of desk I’ve always wanted.
This was shortly after we put in the verbal offer on the farm house of our dreams – the “long-shot” offer that fell short of the negotiating table and we were discouraged.
“Do you realize,” I said to my husband one evening, “that in just a little over a week we’ve been given a computer, a vacuum, and a table? It’s crazy, isn’t it?”
“You’re right,” he said, “I hadn’t really thought about it that way.”
“I can’t feel it, though,” I added, “It’s like, I should feel something, but I can’t.”
It was right around the week of Thanksgiving and I was writing and speaking about gratitude, but I couldn’t feel it, because all I wanted to do was send God a little memo that said something like:
Dear God:
Thanks for the computer, and vacuum and table,
but what we really need is a house.
Maybe you could just try to focus on that??
Thanks.
My guess is that God gets quite a few letters like that. Maybe you’ve sent one too?
I didn’t mean to be ungrateful, but my eyes were stuck somewhere in the distance, scanning the horizon, so much so that I almost missed the gifts of Presence scattered at my feet.
Because what I want, truly, is to know that God is with us. I can wait for a house, if I can be certain that God is in the waiting too.
Shifting my focus, I saw those gifts – the computer, the vacuum, the table – as so many memos, straight from the hand of God and they read something like this:
Dear Kelly:
I see you.
I know your needs.
I love you.
And, yo, chill about this house deal,
I’m workin’ on it.
Peace.
Waiting Together (Cut Flowers For Advent)
I finally made it up to the attic this morning to dig out my advent books, among them, Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas, a book of essays and sermons by a wide variety of authors. My on-going favorite is one by Henri Nouwen entitled, “Waiting for God.”
Nouwen skillfully explores the fear and anxiety of waiting while highlighting the fact that all of the characters in Luke’s gospel are waiting for something that has already been promised to them. The spiritual life, according to Nouwen, is “one in which we wait,” but our waiting is done best when we wait together.
Observing the interaction between Mary and her cousin Elizabeth, Nouwen writes,
These two women created space for each other to wait. They affirmed
for each other that something was happening that was worth waiting for.
Then he adds,
. . . The whole meaning of the Christian community lies in offering a space
in which we wait for that which we have already seen. Christian community
is the place where we keep the flame alive among us and take it seriously,
so that it can grow and become stronger among us. In this way we can live
in courage, trusting that there is a spiritual power in us that allows us to live in
this world without ebbing seduced constantly by despair, lostness and darkness.
That is how we dare to say that God is a God of love even when we see
hatred all around us. That is why we can claim that God is a God of life even
when we see death and destruction and agony all around us.
We say it together.
Waiting together, nurturing what has already begun, expecting its fulfillment –
that is the meaning of marriage, friendship, community and the Christian life.
What can I say but that I’m so grateful to be able to share some links with you, to help you gather together with those who are making spaces all across the web where we can wait together. Take a few minutes to check them out. Maybe you will find a new friend, a companion for the journey, or maybe even just a word to carry you like a light through the season ahead.
Diana Trautwein, a retired pastor and active Spiritual Director is writing daily reflections on scripture over at her blog, Just Wondering. Diana’s bold voice and captivating use of images will draw you in.
John D. Blase is a poet, editor and former pastor who writes at The Beautiful Due. His poem, Walk Straight, has been my theme this advent season and he just posted a new reflection on the song, Silent Night, that will simply knock your socks off.
John Blase is joining with Winn Collier to write weekly reflections on a lectionary reading for advent every Monday. Winn’s is one of my never-miss blogs, one I’m sure to click on, and I can’t think of anyone better gifted to explore the mingling of human and divine made evident in the stories of the nativity.
I’ve also been following Christie Purifoy’s blog There Is A River, where she’s offering brief daily poems, prayers and reflections.
Are you or someone you know writing your way through the season? I’d love to hear about it, feel free to add your own favorite links in the comments section below. Enjoy!
Books
Between Heaven and Earth (poems)
Prayer can easily become an afterthought, a hasty sentence, a laundry list of all the things we want. But what if prayer is a time to find out what God wants for us–and for our world? What does it mean to pray that the kingdom would come here and now as it is in heaven? Explore these questions in this study, and learn prayer practices that nurture intimacy with God and sensitivity to God’s dream for the world.
Follow this writer, spiritual director, and mother of four as she dives into the deep end of chicken farming and wrestles with the risks and rewards of living a life she loves. At turns hilarious, thoughtful, and always compassionate, Chicken Scratch will change the way you see the mess and chaos involved in living life to its fullest.
