Essays
Leaving the Nest
In the spring of the year, nest-building is upper-most in a bird’s mind: it is the most important thing there is. If she picks a good place, she stands a good chance of hatching her eggs and rearing her young. If she picks a poor place, she may fail to raise a family. The female swan knew this; she knew the decision she was making was extremely important. – in The Trumpet of the Swan
Morning sun climbs the valley cut between two houses and pours through filmy finger-printed windows leaving whole hands outlined with gold. Common sense would shut the blinds, savoring the cool darkness but, like the plants lined up along the window-shelf, I am drinking in this light, soaking up this morning, our second to last in this house.
We have drunk this light for nearly ten years now, every morning and I wonder aloud how my plants will survive the move, but really I’m thinking of myself. The windows in the apartment we will rent are skinny, facing only North and South, so we’ll miss the cheerful toast of sunlight greeting the sky each morning and the fond kisses farewell as she sinks off to sleep each night.
The boards of this house, the scarred sub-floor we refinished, wail and moan as we cross them; every step a conversation. Rocking our babies to sleep at night meant tip-toeing a well-worn path once they drifted off. Place one foot here, lean, step carefully, and a second there, all to avoid the sounds that might lead to the need for more rocking.
This house, these windows and floors, what can I say, but that they’ve held us, like a nest and we have flourished in their confines.
Friends, we are MOVING this Saturday, and we would love your prayers and encouragement as we continue to wait for a new “forever” home. Thanks!
That Which Remains
. . . I return again to a remarkable story by Isak Dinesen form her years spent in Africa. One day, out in the bush, she came upon a beautiful snake, its skin glistening with subtle, variegated colors. She raved so much about that snakeskin that one of her servants killed the snake, skinned it, and made it into a belt for her. To her great dismay, that once glistening skin was now just dull and gray. For all along the beauty had lain not in the physical skin but in the quality of its aliveness. – Cynthia Bourgeault in The Wisdom Way of Knowing
A thick and wrinkled stack of papers sits just the way I remembered it, tucked into a nearly opaque plastic shopping bag. I’d looked through three thumb drives and a backup hard drive before plowing through the filing cabinets tucked into an upstairs crawl space. I was looking for a certain sermon from my days as a Chaplain at Hershey Medical Center and finally found it in a box full of files in a second crawl space. The dull green folders slumped lifelessly together, with the last few still wrapped in that old grocery bag I used to carry them home.
The contents of our crawl spaces document every vocational chapter of my life. The seminary years are tucked neatly into still-bright primary-colored folders – so many accolades and so much potential filed for now. Then there are the teaching files, twenty-four at least, folders filled with lectures and outlines, presentations I knit together to survive semester after semester of not really knowing what I was supposed to be doing. There are church files too, from my year as a pastor, sermons in every shape and style as I did the difficult work of figuring out how to be with people from the pulpit.
It was unsettling, all of that searching through former lives and in the end probably not worth it for the few lines of text I was seeking which didn’t glimmer nearly so well on the paper in my hand as they had in my memory. It was as though the life had gone out of them the moment they left my lips.
I have a hard time shaking the feeling that something of me is left in all of those files, all of those letters lined up so neatly on a page, something intangible that may well be lost if I don’t somehow keep them along with me through thick and thin.
So the files continue to sit there like the skins of my former selves, surrounded by bin after bin of clothing for my children who continue to shed their skins too, shape-shifting from soft sweetness to gawky bundles of energy.
I wonder, what is it that remains once all of this is shed – the roles and titles, that so easily come and go? And how do I even now attend to that thing which lies behind and beneath every other thing, that which Jesus once described as the only necessary thing?
Origami
I slide carefully crafted prayers
under heaven’s door –
reasonable requests plainly scrawled
on flat, white sheets of paper.
These, God takes and turns,
fold by fold,
into something new,
sending them back in the strangest of guises –
a flitting bird, a bouncing frog –
fullness of life
where I only thought
to ask for provision.
This post is linked with Five Minute Friday on the prompt, “Present.”
Morning Prayers (Another Way to Pray)
Anxiety hit at the same time consciousness did, dense and heavy, suffocating. Raising my head a few inches from my crumpled pillow, I reached with blind hands toward the snooze button in an effort to beat back the day. Almost simultaneously, reflexively, as my fingers found the alarm, I threw out an old and familiar prayer, “God, please be with me. Jesus, be with me.” I waved the words like an amulet, to ward off the lost and sinking feelings.
I’ve spent years telling God what to do. At first I was quite specific, ticking off requests like an eternal “to-do” list that I might helpfully hang on God’s refrigerator door. Later, I settled for the more general command in which I simply asked God to “be with” me or she or whomever the situation demanded. It was as though I was acquiescing in some way, trying not to be such a nag and all – “Ok, God, so I know you’re not necessarily going to do what I want, but could you at least not abandon me?”
Today though, as soon as that prayer was flung, it was followed by the awareness that God is always with me and I felt the invitation to pray again a new and challenging prayer, “God, open me to your presence.”
It wasn’t what I wanted – I wanted escape, resolution to the questions at hand – but that prayer shifted me. In that moment of surrender, something inside me split open just a crack and some of the darkness lifted; almost as though I had been the one holding onto it all along.
Taking out the Trash (an invitation to Love)
“If what you see from the eye doesn’t please you, then close your eyes and see from the heart.” – Anonymous
I watch as the tall white plastic container slowly fills throughout
the day. By evening it’s reached maximum
capacity and I do a high-step, stomping it down with my foot before scraping in
the leftovers from six dinner plates.
The following morning, as I throw in the twins’ diapers from
the night before, the situation is nearing a crisis – the trash can is full,
overflowing, and my husband has already left for work.
I feel a flash of anger as my fingers delicately search for
the red plastic drawstrings and pull up on the hefty bag. I tie the strings in a tight double-knot, drag
the bag to the back door, and toss it outside where it sits smoldering in the
sun all day long, blocking the entrance to our house. I leave it there, stinking, like a quickly scrawled
note of reproach that greets my husband the minute he returns from work.
My husband and I take a tag-team approach to nearly
everything it takes to run a household of six, but last I checked taking out
the trash is still his job. He mostly
neglects this responsibility, though, except for Sundays, when the weekly trash
collection is imminent.
I try everything from arguments and accusations to
passive-aggressive humor in my attempts to wrestle him into compliance. I explain how it hinders my day, how the whole
house gets backed-up when we don’t keep up with the trash. But I don’t explain how it feels like a
personal affront to me, which is where, I suspect, the anger really comes from. I also neglect to mention how I’ve allowed
this little failure to come to symbolize a lack in his love for me.
I can see I’m being irrational, but I
can’t seem to let it go.
Then, one day, as I bend again to lift that heavy, reeking
load, I feel the invitation to view that neglected bag as a symbol of all that my
husband does do for me and for our
family.
The truth is that he neglects the trash, in part, because
he’s busy showing his love in a hundred other ways, both big and small. Arriving home from work, he looks past the
trash and toddlers, his wide smile seeking me out as he pulls me into his arms
to ask about my day. He helps with baths
and bedtime and encourages me to take the evening off and head out with friends
when the going gets tough and I need a break.
The truth is I am loved.
So for now on, as I bend and stomp and lift and tote, I’ll use it all,
every motion, as a reminder of his love for me.
Because love is patient and love is kind, but nowhere does it say, “Love
is taking out the trash.”
(photo credit here)
This post is linked with Playdates With God and Hear it on Sunday, Use it on Monday.
The ‘Mind Vice’ (Recovering the Faculties of Faith)
I believe that when you have a problem, you talk it over with your priest, or your tailor, or the mute elevator porter at your men’s club, and you take that problem and crush it with your mind vice. But for lesser beings like curly-haired men and people who need glasses, therapy can help. – Jack Donaghy on 30 Rock
Eight, nine, ten times a day I’m checking the realtor.com listings in our area. Adjusting the search settings one-by-one, tweaking location, price and size. Despite the responsibility of four kids seven and under and the ever present demands of laundry and dinner, blogging and LIFE, I’ve spent endless hours trolling the web. It’s not healthy, I know, and when I step away from the screen, back into the reality of actual physical life, my eyes are glazed and dim, my mind in a perpetual state of distraction.
Later in the day as I stand at the sink with the dishes, running water and soap wiping away the grime of another meal, I recognize in an instant an old, familiar pattern. The phrase “mind-vice” sums it up as I remember an episode from 30 Rock where Jack advises Liz to crush her relational problems in her “mind-vice” thereby circumventing icky things like feelings.
Somehow I keep thinking if I sit and search long enough I can crush this house-hunting problem in my “mind vice.”
Standing at the sink, though, I reminded of how we started this whole process, how my husband and I both felt an invitation into a dream born somewhere deeper inside the body that had little to do with the mind and its linear logic.
The mind is good for some things, but not all things. Cynthia Bourgeault puts it this way,
The intellectual center carries the “denying force;” it’s natural aptitude is for reasoning, doubting and making fine discriminations. In their own right, these discriminatory skills are legitimate and profoundly necessary, built into the structure of the human mind itself. But in terms of the spiritual journey, trying to find faith with the intellectual center is like trying to play a violin with a saw: it’s simply the wrong tool for the job. This is one reason why all religious traditions have universally insisted that religious life cannot be done with the mind alone; that is the biggest single impediment to spiritual becoming. “The Wisdom Way of Knowing,” 31
There are so many things the mind is good for and, then again, so many things it isn’t – like Love and Hope, Joy and Surrender.
I can keep hunting, keep searching obsessively, but something tells me my mind is on a false trail, barking up the wrong tree, if you will, and though the hunt gives me the illusion of productivity and control, it also keeps me from the fullness of life in the present – it’s terrifying uncertainty, it’s open-ended possibilities.
Receiving a dream isn’t like solving a math problem and, as Bourgeault says, “the spiritual life cannot be done with the mind alone.”
Like the sunflower turning it’s face toward the sun, I feel the invitiation to return to faith that’s guided by someting deeper than mere sight.
Laying on the floor, I feel the ground, solid benath me and I’m reminded again of that Love that holds my family and I.
I listen for bird song everywhere and smile as it floats in through the open transom lighter than the sunshine filtering through closed blinds.
I watch the robin, plump and happy who’s so taken with our back yard.
I listen and look and watch and wait and as I exercise these other faculties, I feel it growing, this seed of hope, though my mind sees no reason for it.
This post is linked with Playdates with God.
Underwear (or is it, Under-where??!!)
It dawns on me three loads in that nowhere in the jumble of Daddy’s t-shirts and sister’s skirts, and oodles of onesies and shorts, have I seen a single pair of underwear for my oldest son. Granted, we all know about boys and their underwear, how getting them to shed that layer on a daily basis is like skinning a cat, but the absence of ANY underwear in all that wash, got me wondering.
I made my way from the laundry room to the check the bathroom drawer which was empty save for a pair of too-small Thomas the Train “tighty-whities” shoved in the back. Growing curiouser by the minute, I checked the pj and sock drawer in his room, and the swimwear and sheets drawer too, only to come up emtpy-handed.
Bemused and confused, I marched out to the living room where my son lay sprawled on the couch, his legs flailing in the air like an up-side-down beetle. “Solomon,” I asked in a voice filled with incredulity, “where are all of your underwear?”
“I don’t know,” he says, unconcerned and more than a little delighted.
This is how it’s been, you see, ever since we put the house up for sale and I cleverly hid all sorts of things in all sorts of places. I can’t find my t-shirts and John and I both swear up and down that there must be a whole basket of missing laundry SOMEWHERE.
As we prepare to move into temporary housing in the next couple of weeks, still waiting for the right house to come onto the market, I can only imagine it getting worse. Who knows what will go missing next?
“Oh, well,” I think to myself, as we settle in to watch TV after a long night of house-hunting followed by more frantic apartment-hunting, “I guess we’re going to just ‘free-ball’ it,” and I immediately smile at the thought which so aptly describes our situation in both the literal and the figurative sense.
This post is linked with Five Minute Friday on the topic “In-Between.”
All There Is
The ruddy Cardinal
perched in the barren peach tree
and the Robin who wings
from branch to fence
by way of the garden,
these and more
who fill the air each day,
pose a persistent question:
When will you realize?
The song your heart sings
is enough;
that song is all there is.
(photo source: here)
This poem is linked with dVerse Poets Pub.
What Trust Looks Like
I led
them with cords of human kindness, with ties of love. To them I was like one who lifts a little
child to the cheek, and I bent down to feed them. Hosea 11:3-4
I stand in the doorway of my older son’s preschool. Holding it open with one hip, I hunch
toward the ground with my arms outstretched on either side.
“Hold hands, hold hands,” I chant in a sing-song voice and
immediately my one-year-old twins turn and raise their hands. Plump fingers twine themselves around
my index fingers on either side, like vines growing up a trellis.
“Good hands, good job.
Big boys, holding hands,” I chirp as we step out into the wide expanse
of a parking lot, traveling the world with our hands woven together. They toddle along, three steps to my one and
I rub the back of their hands, the skin soft and warm, like round buttered
biscuits, two smooth stones I hold so dear.
* * *
In the morning, we stand groggily in the kitchen as wakefulness
makes its slow path across our faces.
They’re waiting, desperate, for precious sippy-cups of milk being warmed
in the microwave and I’m clutching, just as desperately, my precious cup of
coffee.
When the timer dings, they reach with thirsty hands that
clutch the cups, then turn and trot, prize in hand, to the living room, their
soggy morning diapers wagging like little tails as they lead the way. Chugging milk, Levi stops at the couch and
pats it demandingly with his open hand as if to say, “Here, Mama. You sit
here.”
Settling into the familiar corner as the sun rises through
wide-paned windows, I part with my cup as Levi makes his home on my left
thigh. Isaiah, busy at the book basket,
finds a favorite and makes his way to the couch. Turning
at the last moment, he backs toward me in a move that reminds me of a tractor trailer easing
its way up to a loading dock. He stands
there, his back exposed, his hands filled with good things and waits, trusting
completely that I know what comes next.
Leaning forward so that Levi tips precariously, I hook my
hands under Isaiah’s arms and curl my hearty maternal biceps, lifting him like
a crane and landing him gently on my right thigh. Home at last, they settle back into my chest,
thrusting the book into my waiting hands and lifting their cups in a warm,
milky celebration of contentment.
* * *
Standing on the edge of the pool this past summer, my older
two flung themselves heartily out into space again and again. They relished the flight and giddy peals of
laughter flew off like sparks as they landed like spider monkeys, clinging to
my head and neck with arms and legs entwined.
They don’t look to see if I’m watching before they leap and I dare not turn
my head – all of me is trained on catching them and so they leap, secure in the
knowledge.
My children trust me so, lifting hands without looking,
feeling the security of a mother’s heart that extends all the way from her
wide, soft chest to the tips of her fingers.
Every time they back up to me I recognize it, this posture of trust that
captures the heart of a child. Every
time they lift their hands, every time they leap, they embody trust in a way
that will hold their hearts in the years to come.
They model a willingness to stand exposed, vulnerable before
love, a willingness to be led and lifted, to lean into need and desire without
anxiety or fear. In the face of this trust, these gestures and postures, I’m
learning – these children are teaching me – and I find, again, a prayer forming
on my lips.
Restore in me, oh God,
the heart of a child. Form in me, a fearless
heart that leans, forever positioning itself on the edge of life if only to
feel again and again the joy of flight, the wonder of being caught and lifted
by your great arms of love.
This post is linked with Playdates With God
On Being the “Bigger” Person
When the long-awaited email arrived it was filled with phrases like, we’ll “take care of the rest at our leisure” and “at the end of the day it’s only $150 more for them, but saves me a lot of hassle.”
Having asked the buyers of our home to split the cost of
Radon mitigation fifty-fifty, we were surprised
and disappointed at their reply suggesting we pay for the first part of the
process, which more than likely would leave them paying nothing.
I wished the realtor hadn’t forwarded the buyer’s actual email, because something about her easy-breezy attitude set me off. Beyond being irked at the
possibility of more money out of pocket, I had a strong desire to “set things
straight” with this twenty-something who I felt was whining her way through the
privilege of planning a wedding and honeymoon while buying a new house.
Overall, we felt our offer was reasonable, but I kept
getting snagged by the emotions of it all and spent a day or more stomping
through the house rehearsing indignant phrases in my head –
Well, if she thinks
buying a house is a hassle, then just imagine moving with four kids in
tow.
Think money’s tight
with a wedding to plan? Try feeding a family of six. and
Boy, if planning a
week-long honeymoon cruise is too much of a hassle, then give it to me – I’ll
take it.
(I also practiced these lines on my husband and a few
unsuspecting bystanders.)
My husband agreed that the tone of the email was annoying and that
our original offer was reasonable, but we were anxious to move forward and it
was hard to know how to respond. Neither
of us wanted to be stubborn, but it just
didn’t feel right to have to spend the money.
Eventually, as I stewed my way through the living room
picking up after the kids, I found myself praying, “God, help me to be the
bigger person.”
I wanted to be the person who could swallow such a situation
whole without hesitation, downing the hurt and frustration like a Big Mac and pushing
back from the table with ease. But as
soon as the prayer was formed, I heard in my mind the words of John the Baptist,
He must become
greater, I must become less. John 3:30
Being the “bigger person” involves holding on to the hurt
yourself, absorbing it like a sponge and carrying it with you in a way that
lets you show it off like a battle wound; being
the “bigger person” may involve giving in, but it isn’t the same as letting go.
I knew then that if we agreed to the buyer’s demands, I
would need to do so in a way that embodied surrender. Because who wants to
carry around, forever, the words of a silly young girl who’s stressed about
planning some of the biggest events of her life?
In the end, we held our ground and the buyers dropped the
issue all together, so all’s well that ends well. In the process, though, I learned how
deceptive the human heart can be – how I wanted to believe that giving the
appearance of surrender might somehow buy me the true freedom that comes only
with letting go.
Once again I was confronted by the curious math of God’s Kingdom whereby Christ takes on the weight of what we could never bear so that we could be not bigger, but free.
These Flowers
All four kids piled onto the red metal handcart, two in
front and two in the back balanced on top of two bags of mulch. I pulled them carefully, slowly, through the
lawn and garden section of Lowes, like one of those grand Belgian draft horses
you sometimes see in parades. We marched
down the rows of overpriced annuals and trees, past the perky daisies and
black-eyed susans. Strangers waved,
calling out questions about the twins and I called back that I’d found them all
in the clearance section where children were on “special” two for one.
For years now I’ve scanned the clearance section at Lowes, bringing home sad and droopy perennials to fill the beds that surround our small house. But this year I passed them buy, it just doesn’t seem worth it to plant flowers when you won’t be around to see them grow. Instead, we were buying mulch to fill in the two muddy moats my
children dug out beneath the swingset in our yard – I couldn’t stand the mud any longer.
When we got home, I rushed inside to make
lunch while the kids swarmed the yard, drawn like Dirt Addicts to the messiest,
muddiest patches available. I served up a lunch al fresco and felt like the Good Mother for
once as I stepped out into the sunshine carrying a Real Meal – mini-pizzas (not burnt!) accompanied by
cucumbers, celery and black olives. The
sun beat down, fierce, on our old gray picnic table and the kids lined up on
the benches like turtles on a log, squinting into the sun with upturned and
expectant faces.
I sat with Isaiah while the other three fought over the
smallest spot of shade on the opposite bench. As I rubbed his back, he
looked up at me with a grin and patted his chubby hand on my chest
affectionately before wiping his other hand, the one coated with pizza sauce, on my
(thankfully) brown skirt.
We ate there on the paint-chipped picnic table, with the
kids sitting on rotting boards and a huge pile of dirt lay just inches from my
plate. Looking a little to the right, I
could see the glass jar that held the now-dead American Toads the kids gave me
as a get-well present the other day. They
seem to be mummified and I was relieved I’d remembered to tell the kids to take
them outside before the bank appraiser arrived.
We’d made it through the appraisal that morning, “tucking up
our bottoms” one last time and we were all letting down now; down into the dirty,
sandy, gritty life of a family of six. Sitting
there eating, I thought of all the work we’ve done on this house and the
flowers we’ve planted, the vegetable garden, all of these things we’ll leave
behind we we move in a few short weeks.
Looking at my children sitting like so many flowers in the sun, I felt so blessed, so grateful for
the suprises that come, unbidden, grateful for these flowers I’ll be taking with me, mud and
mess and all.
This post is linked with Playdates with God.
For the Fathers
“Sometimes the bravest and most important thing you can do is just show up.” Brene Brown
Sometime in the land before time, by which I mean the time before I was, my older brother woke in the middle of the night to the low rolling growl of a thunder storm. Like any young boy boasting a reasonable level of common sense and a less reasonable level of imagination, the house-shaking rumbles and shadow-casting flashes of light scared him witless.
My father, a young man then, got him out of bed and they stumbled together to sit in the stairwell where they could easily watch the storm as it rolled across the night sky. They sat side-by-side on the stairs, a large and solid body next to a thin and quaking one and the story goes that as they watched the storm, my Dad explained the science behind it all. This, I’m sure, helped with the reasonable part of my brother’s brain, but I have a feeling that it wasn’t what my father said that night that made a difference in the stormy nights to come, but rather his presence.
When fathers show up, it isn’t the knowledge they bring or the tools or (a-hem) cold hard cash that makes the difference. Every child is grateful, always, for the part of a father that fixes a problem, but what we need, what the world needs, is men who will continue to show up and be present even when they’re certain they lack the appropriate tool for the job, even when their hands are empty.
A friend of mine recently posted a quote from Jean Vanier, the founder of the L’Arche communities all over the world,
“We have to remind ourselves constantly that we are not saviours. We are simply a tiny sign, among thousands of others, that love is possible.”
So this one’s for the fathers, including my own. Thank you for all the many, many times you showed up with and without a solution to the problem at hand. Thank you for being willing to be one more “tiny sign . . . that love is possible.”
Happy Father’s Day, Dad! I love you!
The Distance Between Branch and Ground
“Of course, there’s the coming-down too. Backwards.”
And then he said:
“Which would be difficult . . .”
“Unless one fell . . .”
“When it would be . . .”
“EASY.”
– from In Which Tiggers Don’t Climb Trees
* * *
At five years old, he’s all skin and bones with straw-colored
hair that sticks out in every direction.
In loose-fitting “crogs,” as we call them (Crocs to most others) he
positions one foot in the crook of the Red Bud tree that stands on the slope of
our small front lawn. Reaching with
wirey arms, he pulls and pushes himself up into the tree, then continues
climbing, no longer the tentative four-year-old of last summer, but eager and
confident as he explores the higher branches that until this year were his
sister’s domain.
Once he reaches his roost, he stands there waiting. Waiting for her to come home or for the
neighbor boy to come out or a stranger to walk by, because, apparently it isn’t
climbing if no one’s watching.
I squat weeding the flower beds a good ten feet away, obeying his command to “Look,
look!” and keeping a wary eye on the distance between boy and sidewalk. Where he only sees height, I see the distance
to the ground.
* * *
It seems to me that the process of growing up has a lot to do with comprehending the distance between branch and ground and maybe, just maybe, the second half of life has to do with regaining the joy of ascent even while armed with the knowledge of the fall.
*This post was written for Five Minute Friday in which the rules are to simply write for five minutes on the prompt. The body of this post was written in five minutes last Friday, but I needed to let it sit for awhile and I added the quote and final sentence today.
Where the Wild Things Are
The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God . . . John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. Mark 1:1-4 adapted
I met my friend in the wilderness the other night. Well, it wasn’t exactly the wilderness, but it was a bar of sorts, which for me still qualifies as a real and somewhat alarming wilderness, being the good Christian girl I was raised to be. She was late and I sat there in the dim light trying to appear busy on my phone and constructing to-do lists on the white placemat in front of me.
She arrived full of unnecessary apologizes which I quickly brushed aside and we dove in head first. Between us there’s little need for small talk and right there in the middle of that noisy wilderness we each pulled open the layers of our lives and sat back, listening through tears as our hearts talked for awhile.
This is the friend who tells me how her marriage really is, tenuous and struggling, and shares how she slapped her son in a moment of exasperated rage that has melted now into a messy pile of regret. She is the one I can tell how I yelled at my own son, threw a royal tantrum of rage that scared him and me and how we all ended up on the couch in tears trying to figure out how that day could be redeemed.
* * *
I have to admit that I never really liked Maurice Sendak’s book, Where the Wild Things Are. I tend to like books that are warm and pretty, books that affirm my need for a world that’s safe, orderly, and predictable. But, it’s possible that the fact that I don’t particularly like the book is an indication that I do get it, a little bit at least. What I do understand is that Max is struggling with the wilderness, with all that is wild and untamed both inside and outside of himself.
Something about the unrelenting, all-humbling job of parenting leaves me too familiar with this wilderness. If my life were a children’s book, then one might notice a forest of sorts growing in my house most days right around four pm or any other time that happens to be about an hour before my husband is due home and a half-hour before I lose it.
Too often by that point the day is been played out – patience is gone. I’m wresting dinner onto the table while kids are whining, fighting, hanging and swinging off of my legs like the little wild things they are. By then we’re all wearing our wolf suits and if the windows are open the whole neighborhood can hear the roaring, gnashing of teeth and rumpus that ensues.
As a parent, as a human, I’m well acquainted with wilderness and wild things, within and without, but it doesn’t mean I like it.
* * *
It’s significant that the gospel of Mark places the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ right smack in the middle of the wilderness. This gospel has no time for angels, places no stock in genealogies or other such small-talk as a means of introducing the striking, challenging figure of Christ who emerges in the pages that follows. Mark begins like my friend and I do, by peeling back the layers and starting not in the skies full of stars and angel choirs, but on the bare, dusty, rocky ground of the wilderness.
Something about this gives me heart, gives me hope. Something about it resonates with the prophecies of Christ and the prophets who spoke them, those craggy ill-kept men and women who lived on the edges of civilized life and thereby lived and spoke that much closer to the heart of things.
The good news begins in the wilderness. What a challenge, what a hope.
* * *
The friend I met with told me how she’d shared with her counselor that she has few real, close relationships, few relationships where anything beyond the bright cheery small-talk of this season might be appropriate. Her counselor said, “Yes, but what about this Kelly? It seems like you have a real relationship with her, why do you think that is?”
My friend, God bless her, said, “Kelly’s real. I mean, she told me shethrew an apple peel at her children, for goodness sake, so I feel like I can be my real self with her.”
After telling this story she looked at me with tears in her eyes and said, “Why is it so hard to believe that our humanity is what’s most attractive about us?”
* * *
Oh, my friends. How deep and wild is the wilderness within you? Who do you have who’s willing to meet you there?
* * *
This is the beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ – the One who came and dwelt among us, who meets us in the fullness of humanity. Christ, who “sailed off through night and day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year” to meet us here, “where the wild things are.”
I’m so grateful for my friend who gave me permission to share from our conversation – she’s one of the flowers in this beautiful field.
Reposting this from December in honor of Maurice Sendak’s 85th birthday and is linked with Playdates with God and Hear it on Sunday, Use it on Monday.
MEGA-CART (Five Minute Friday: Imagine)
A five-year-old and two two-year-old’s in a single shopping cart fight like three cats in a burlap bag. So, lately, on trips to Target or Aldi with all three boys in tow, I grab not one cart, but two, loading a toddler into each and allowing the oldest to ride on the side like a garbage collector, hoping on and off at will.
I push the carts side-by-side, holding them together at the seam while Solomon clings to the bow, facing me and grinning with boyish excitement. We barrel down the aisle, a true double-wide as I announce in the sort of gravelly voice you might hear over the loud speaker at a monster truck rally, “It’s MEGA-CART!” Then, adding for effect, my own version of head-banging, heavy-metal music.
The bad guys are never far behind and it’s often necessary to launch into turbo gear as we pass by cases of diet coke stacked like an armory. In narrow spaces or rounding a bend, we break formation, transforming into a more stream-lined design, moving and shifting as the space demands, rearranging ourselves like a flock of geese.
These boys and I glide through the store, soaring on the wings of imagination and we’re so busy playing that we forget, for once, to fight.
Lisa-Jo Baker hosts Five Minute Friday. Last week’s theme was imagination. Click on the link to read more posts on the topic.
From Grace to Grace
It started
with a lean and reach until both hands grasped the first metal bar, then the
long, lean body followed, swinging to build momentum, spindly legs pumping as
though wading through the air. Every day
of kindergarten my daughter practiced the monkey bars with a focus that bordered
on obsession. Fifteen minutes of recess, twice a day, found
her crisscrossing the bars over and over again, walking back and forth through
the air on calloused hands. Reaching the
end, she would turn without stopping and repeat or simply swing backwards
toward the platform.
I wrote last
summer about Monkey Bar Living and how life can feel so
precarious sometimes. I was facing summer at home alone
with four young children, two crawling with focused determination and two exploring
the world with boundless enthusiasm. I
felt fearful and anxious as we swung wildly into a new phase of life.
But we
survived and thrived and I started this blog and got some good stories out of it
all and here we are now again, swinging toward summer with less than three days
of school left. Those two crawlers are
toddling now, head-strong and top-heavy and the
bathroom closet is stocked with four boxes of band aids because I feel it in my
bones that this will be the summer of skinned knees and maybe even broken bones
as the older two strap on roller skates and learn to ride on two-wheels. Then, also,
there’s the little matter of having sold our house with no idea of where we’ll live in two months time.
We’re again in
motion, letting go and reaching, swinging forward with one hand
stretched open, the callouses growing as we practice this way of life, this faith lived-out. And I wonder
how long it will take for me to be able to cross these bars with ease, to move
from “grace to grace” as the beloved disciple says* with the same sort of
confidence and assurance that radiates from my daughter’s capable limbs?
Author,
Cynthia Bourgeault suggests in her book, The Wisdom Way of Knowing, that the spiritual life is composed of a series of
embodied gestures, the chief of which is surrender. These gestures or postures, as Bourgeault
describes them, aren’t primarily learned through the mind, but through the body
and through a great deal of repetitive practice. So we sit and pray, we kneel and bow with
open hands all the while practicing this act of trust that seems so
counter intuitive, so difficult to wrap our grasping minds around. Or, we swing, leaning, and reaching like my daughter does, allowing a deeper sense of focus that resides deep within the body and extends outward all the way to the tips of our fingers, to guide us.
Over time we
realize that our sitting, our kneeling, our open hands are as much the prayer
as any petitions that manage to pass our stumbling, mumbling lips. The act of letting go, the act of moving from grace to grace is the prayer. In the end, we are silenced, as our prayer is transformed from words to being and we find ourselves home at last where we always have been – “in him.”**
So, that’s
where you’ll find me this summer, practicing again and again the art of letting
go, in grocery stores and swimming pools and wherever the adventures of summer
lead us. And maybe, just maybe, my
husband and I will turn into some sort of spiritual Tarzan and Jane as we learn
to swing our way through life, letting go to receive, moving, as always, from
grace to grace.
*John 1:16 **Acts 17:28
This post is linked with Playdates with God and Tell His Story.
Image credit here.
A Tree Speaks
I left the house in a huff of
anger and frustration, pulling away from the curb without a plan. I wanted quiet and space and a place to use
my computer and phone, but beyond all of that I needed to be near water.
I needed to sit and watch it
moving, to allow its gentle current to move me back into the larger stream of
life, a place more hopeful and healing than the dark corner I’d backed myself
into. So I headed to a park a few miles
out of town, a small strip of land bordering a creek that boasts a walking
trail with heavy, old picnic tables dotting the water’s edge.
It took me awhile to settle in,
I paced talking and texting on my phone, moving from table to table to avoid
the noise and dust of an industrial sized mower that seemed intent on following
me. I fidgeted and fussed, like a bird
looking for the perfect place to land.
Settling at last at a picnic
table in the shade near the water’s edge, I watched the water and the insect
world at my feet; the ants that ran in a fury and a caterpillar making its deliberate
way across the ground. As I watched, I
felt myself being slowed to the pace of the world’s breathing.
I suppose the tree was watching the
entire time. Observing the texting, the
talking, the hopping from table to table and then finally, the slowing, sinking
into time and space. She watched
waiting, reading me and holding her silence, like the wisest among us often do,
until the moment was right.
She spoke while I was praying,
in a voice that sounded, at first, like a cry.
I turned at the sound and there
she stood, just a few feet behind me, a statuesque sycamore. Her trunk was bent, jutting out like a woman’s
hip does when carrying a young child. Her
arms and shoulders lifted at an angle as though she had thrown her hands up in
the air at some point long ago. She wore
the beauty of her leaves like a giant head-dress that fell around her neck in a
waterfall of shaking, shimmering green light.
I wondered how long she’d stood there
watching the slow movement of the murky water, the endless turning of the world
and how much she knew of the fallen branches and logs, the trees now dead on
the opposite bank, bleached white like bones in the sun.
Despite her cry, she looked
happy to me, standing with her splotchy bark peeled white in some places, her
branches humming with the singing vibration of cicadas.
I noticed she was smiling and as
I sat, listening, she spoke again as if answering my unspoken question.
“I have deep roots,” she
said. “Besides, who do you think gave me
this voice? And who gave you
yours?”
Her face softened then with
compassion, “Don’t be afraid to use it, to lift your voice and your arms and
cry out like so many before you, ‘Lord, don’t you care?!’”
She paused, as if to let this
sink in.
Then she said, “Watch the water and
grow deep roots. The deeper your roots,
the louder your cry and the further your arms will reach until they’re knocking
on the very doors of heaven. Then you’ll
know that this is what you were made for; to stand here, with your gnarled roots
pressing down into the cool darkness, your weathered arms raised and shaking in
the wind, crying out, until you are reached and known by the One who gave you
this voice.”
I wrote quickly, listening to
the voice that came from without and within, all around, until she grew silent
again and still.
Looking back I can see how that
tree, so at home in her body and being, rooted deep by the water’s edge, was
calling me home. Speaking to my heart,
she bypassed my fear and anxiety, my questions and calculations, reiterating
the truth that this, indeed, is what I was made for.
This post is linked with Imperfect Prose (click on the button to the right to read more links).
Like the Sun on a Cloudy Day
“Where there’s surrender, synchoronicity tends to follow . . .” Cynthia Bourgeault
After binge-cleaning and crashing with an episode of Glee late the night before, we woke to the sound of the twins hooting and hollering in their cribs and the anxious chatter of the to-do lists in our heads. Isaiah woke up grumpy and soggy, like a little polar bear fresh out of hibernation and the twins, my husband and I all stumbled down stairs, a whole parade of sleepy-headed grizzlies.
It was Sophia’s birthday and we were scheduled to get pictures taken of our house for posting it for sale online and Solomon also needed a chaperon for his end-of-the-year field day. In other words, it was “go time” and my husband was taking the morning off from work so we could have all hands on deck.
Solomon wandered out, obviously dragging and stated that he might not go to school after all. But then the birthday girl came out and the sun shone in the windows, bright and the kids settled into reading with Daddy on the couch and it started to feel like our cobbled together plan for the day might just work.
It wasn’t long, though, before we fell behind schedule because once you’ve started reading about the plagues in Egypt, you can’t just stop in the middle and then the rushing began. I thawed out pancakes for Sophia and used some painter’s tape as a ribbon for her morning present and John headed out with all four kids and 24 sparkly butterfly cupcakes for the morning round of drop-offs and I set to work.
When John returned we both set into cleaning with a fury while the twins tore through the house like locusts, methodically undoing all the work I’d already accomplished. Emptying the back pantry, they built pyramids out of bottles of juice, cans of coffee and diet coke. They clanged and banged their way through the kitchen, dragging out pots and pans until Levi pinched his finger in a cupboard door and dissolved into a puddle of screaming and tears.
As the tension mounted and time slipped through our fingers like sand, the clouds rolled in, literally, and what had started as a sunny morning turned heavy, dark and gray. We had delayed listing our home by several days because of the forecast, hoping for a sunny day to get the best pictures possible, and here we were, listing late on a cloudy day.
Despair seeped in and I told my husband we should just give up and leave the house as it was, but we still didn’t know whether we needed to be home to let the photographer in, so we slugged it out, tag-teaming the twins and chaos.
There was just so much I couldn’t control – the weather, the twins – so I started praying that the sun would come out, because I really wanted it to, but I also let go a little and the thought came to me, maybe there’ll be a rainbow just as the photographer arrives. This was enough to cause a little seed of hope to take root and my heart and hands opened a little further as I found compassion for my tired self and for those two little boys who were wondering where I’d hidden all of their toys.
Then I started thinking, maybe the photographer will buy the house and we won’t even have to go through showings, or maybe someone out there needs to see a house on a cloudy day with just a smattering of food on the kitchen counter, or a pink plastic calculator laying in the corner of an otherwise spotless living room. Somehow my heart turned the corner to surrender as I realized again that what I do not know and cannot control is not always a bad thing; there’s always so much more to life than the very small and finite piece of the puzzle that I can see and shape.
By eleven, my husband left for work and I took the twins to pick up Solomon and they sky was still filled with smokey gray clouds, the worst we’d seen in weeks. After pick-up I drove back home to let the photographer in and as we sat waiting in the van I said, “Let’s pray that the sun comes out,” and we did.
Not five minutes later, just as the photographer pulled up, the sun came out and I shouted to Solomon, “Look,” before leaping out of the van to unlock the front door. I was so relieved, ecstatic, but I still couldn’t keep from saying, “You’d better go ahead and get that outside picture while the sun’s out.” The clouds were there still, rolling across the sky and I guess I still believed that such grace is fleeting, like the sun on a cloudy day.
If I gain anything from this whole process of house selling and buying, I hope it’s a deeper sense of this grace that permeates life, this sun that shines endlessly, faithfully, whether we have the eyes to see it or not.
This post is linked with Hear it on Sunday, Use it on Monday and Playdates With God.
For Sale: Five Tips For Showing a House With Young Children
I heard a thump as the van rounded the corner and looked up
to see Jack and Annie slide down the windshield landing tucked behind the wiper
blades. They were followed shortly by
Ivy + Bean as I slammed on the brakes and leapt out of the driver’s seat. The library books, eight in all, were strewn
across the roof of the van, the street and the windshield. I’d placed them on top of the van as I buckled
the twins in preparation for the morning round of drop-offs.
We’ve had twelve showings in one week and, clearly, it’s
taking a toll on me. My brain is on over-drive
and as I focus on clean counters and toilet seats a number of other things are
falling through the cracks. Every
showing requires detailed timing and a master plan and I envision myself being
something like Ben Affleck’s character in Argo
as I scheme up a way to get six people out without a trace. The whole house must be well-disguised, transformed from “launch-pad for a family of six” to “house beautiful” in a matter of hours.The beds are made, the floors are spotless and specially purchased throw-pillows lay at just the right angle on every seating space.
Like every masquerade, though, it comes at a cost. There are simply too many things for me to keep track of as
I field phone calls and schedule showings with my calendar inconveniently
tucked away along with all of our other personal items. I’ve developed a habit of “stashing” things
during the pre-showing frenzy, hiding my sandals in the laundry basket or my
husband’s shoes in the attic with the rest of the folded, but not yet put away
laundry.
The other day I caught myself preparing to
dump the cheese packet for mac and cheese directly into the boiling water. On another afternoon I
slammed the van into park before actually stopping in the school pick-up line. This spring, instead of feeling guilty for missing snack bear and being lax in my
sun-screen application, I’m feeling relieved that everyone’s still alive.
To top it all off, I can’t really seem to
find the mental time or space to write anything substantial. However, in sync with traditional writers’ advice, I can
“write what I know” so, without further ado, I present to you my:
Top Five Tips for
Showing a House With Young Children.
1. Your mission is to get
everyone out of your house without leaving a trace and if you’re really good at
what you do, no one will ever guess that four messy, stinky little people have
been holed up in here with you day in and day out. Your success will depend
completely on three key elements: impeccable timing, absolute authority and the
ability to bribe young children with a wide variety of food items and/or adventures.
2. Plan to live in your van for,
well . . . a long time. Now that you’re a nomad with
showings scheduled at 11 and 5 every day, your van is your new home, go ahead and buy a welcome mat
for the driver’s side door. Stock it
with every possible necessity and be ready to roll on a moment’s notice. You
will eat in the van, sleep in the van and dress your children in the van
(sponge-baths in the van are acceptable and may be necessary, but are not
recommended).
3. Plan to transfer the typical
messiness of your house into said van for the entire period in which you are
showing your house. This is a basic principal of home economics:
“Every spotless space maintained results in an
equal and opposite messy space.”
Given this basic principle, plan
for all of the messiness removed from your house to reemerge in your vehicle.
4. Hide things. Since you can’t
really be expected to keep an immaculate home with young children underfoot and
since not having enough closet and/or storage space is probably one of the
reasons you’re moving, you will inevitably end up hiding things in order to
achieve that “House Beautiful” look. The first few times you hide
your sandals or your husband’s clunky work shoes in the laundry basket or hall
closet, you’ll feel unbearably clever. But, later, when you forget about the
pineapple you stuffed under the kitchen sink and the potato’s hiding in the
basement, you’ll likely make an even bigger mess of your home trying to find
the source of the awful stink that’s suddenly emerged.
5. Read story books about trolls who live in caves and
dungeons to your children and encourage them to act them out – under their beds – then buy a
cute bed skirt to hide the mess; in fact, you should probably only allow them to play under their beds from now until closing. Or, tell
your kids that the “bad guys” will get them if they make a mess. (You
may want to set aside a cool fifty in a special savings account for future
therapy for every time you use this technique but once you’ve picked up the
Legos/board books/shell collection for the third time in one day, it may seem
like a worthwhile investment.)
Bonus Tip: You will be irrationally irritable, so plan to
burn a few beach-scented candles to cover the scent of stress that sits like a
heavy cloud over your immaculate home.
Phew . . . I’m thinking, as soon as we settle on an offer, I’m gonna have to let the kids run through the sprinkler in the back yard and then play in the sandbox until they’re thoroughly breaded and send them inside to eat cherry popsicles and Cheetos while drinking grape juice, you know, just to get things back to normal as quickly as possible. . .
Deer Paths and the Distance Between Body and Soul
My participation in Oasis’ Journey into Silence began with two
days and nights of prayer, silence and solitude spent journaling, wandering
and re-collecting myself. Then I returned
home to the ocean of intensity, chaos and noise that typifies life with four
young children.
I jumped in
at the deep end and came up paddling hard like an Olympic swimmer. My husband I stayed afloat by
working side by side or in shifts as the
weeks and days rolled over us like crashing waves. There were bouts of strep-throat for the
older two, a sinus infection for another and, later a sinus infection for
me. Bone-rattling coughs shook the house
and breathing treatments were doled out morning, noon and night. There was a camping trip, preaching, writing
and field trips and my husband finally had his wisdom teeth removed.
My bags sat unpacked, my notebooks unopened and when the
time came for the following months’ retreat I felt unprepared and guilty for
having gotten so wrapped up in the demands of day-to-day life. I’d read only a few chapters of the assigned
book, my papers were out of order,
scattered, and I’d missed one assigned reading altogether.
I ran through the house the morning of looking for books and
scanning the few chapters I had read hoping to have something to add to the
discussion. I riffled through the jumble
of clothes in my dresser looking for anything clean enough to wear that might also
help me feel like I was anything more than the disheveled, exhausted mother I
felt myself to be.
* * * *
As I settled into the stillness and quiet that morning, I
wondered what on earth I was doing there, how I could seek and find silence in
a life stage that seemed so far removed from the contemplative. As I wondered the following true story was
shared . . .
There once were two neighbors who owned two plots of land
that converged in the woods that spread across their two properties without
concern for boundary lines. Both men loved
their land, but they loved it in different ways.
The one, I’ll call him the man who prayed, had a vision for
his land to become a place for people to gather and be fed spiritually. He built a small retreat center made of
re-purposed lumber and found objects and he filled the woods around it with
wandering trails for contemplation that led slowly, gradually down to the
waters’ edge; the water that, like the woods, flowed past both properties,
paying no heed to the surveyor’s red flags.
The other man, I’ll call him the man who hunted, also loved
his land, but had a different vision for it. It would be a place
for family to gather, children and grandchildren hunting, fishing, and playing
together. So he slowly and carefully built
his way toward his vision too which also included paths that wound their way through
the woods.
The man who prayed and the man who hunted had their
differences. Occasionally the man who
hunted shot at a duck or some other animal which irked the man who prayed and
on occasion visitors to the retreat center wandered, uninvited, onto the
neighbors land which irked the man who hunted.
Mostly, though, they got along and their two separate visions
flourished.
Then one day the man who prayed had the idea that they might
join together the trails that crisscrossed the two properties. He approached the man who hunted and made his
proposal and though the exchange was friendly, there was no reply and the issue
lay unresolved for quite some time. He
assumed the answer was no and time flowed on like the water in the creek and
the changing of seasons.
Then, one day, the man who prayed was out in his yard, down
by the water’s edge, when he heard his neighbor calling out to him through the
woods. “Yes?” he replied.
“Well, our paths are joined,” the neighbor said. Then, after a pause, he added, “The deer did it
for us.”
* * * *
Later in the morning we were asked to share what we were
leaving behind in order to attend the day’s retreat. When my turn came I blurted, almost without
thinking, “Incessant work.” Then the tears came and my voice choked as I added,
“I’m so exhausted.” It came out like a
confession or, perhaps, a repentance and the silence of the room, the eyes that
watched and witnessed, the ears that heard the break in my voice, all of these
absorbed and stood with me silently in my relinquishment.
Then came a time of prayer and as I sat with my eyes closed
it came to me all at once, a memory from earlier in the week when I’d stood in
our dinning room that glowed with the waning afternoon sun. I froze in mid-motion, between cleaning and
carrying and cutting bits of food for the twins, fetching drinks and silverware
and refills for everyone. Having reached
my limit I stopped and turned toward my husband, my hands and my voice
automatically raised for emphasis as I proclaimed, “Just once, I would like to
have a meal where I’m not getting up and down ten times. Do you know how long it’s been since I had
that?!”
I sat in the stillness of the retreat and tears began to run
down my cheeks as I remembered that in just a few short, quiet hours I would be
eating a meal that was prepared for us, for me, by the owner of the retreat
center. I would sit in silence looking
out over the water, watching the falling leaves, tasting my food and rising
only when I was ready. I hadn’t known
that my outburst in the kitchen was a prayer, but here it was, already, answered.
Oh my, did I relish that lunch (which I also wrote about HERE). We ate in a lovely windowed porch area
overlooking the sunlit stream, watching as leaves fell from the trees, then
continued their journey on the surface of the water. I savored it all – the salad coated in a
creamy peanut butter dressing and topped with crunchy nuts, the perfectly
creamy squash soup that warmed my bowl and hands and body inside and out, and
the apple pear cobbler topped with a crunchy topping and whipped cream. And when I saw the slices of bread already
buttered, I wanted to cry, to get down on my knees and say, “Thank you, thank
you, thank you.”
* * * *
What am I trying to say here? I’m almost not sure myself, except that I’d
slipped back into believing the old, old myth that life in the world has nothing
to do with the life of the spirit. It
was as though I’d begun to believe that the body and spirit are two parcels of
land that sit side-by-side, but whose paths never meet.
But the meal, the silence, and the beauty of the woods in
the dying-off of fall reminded me that the life of the spirit IS the life of
the body, the two are one and the same and for this we might all fall to our
knees saying, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” For we are bodily beings and we live in a world
filled with physical demands on our time and space and energy and if we have no
hope of finding God there, in the midst of our working, breathing, laying down
to sleep lives, then we have so little hope.
The life of the body and the life of the spirit may indeed
be two plots of land that lay side-by-side and goodness knows they get out of
balance from time to time, but the truth is they are connected. The grace that surprised me so on that
morning was the way that God wove the two together into one for me without my even knowing it, like the deer wove those two trails
together, like the woods that grew unhindered between the two properties, like
the creek that nourished the roots of both without distinction.
If you liked this post, you may also like They Are Eating My Prayers.
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.
