Where does it hurt?

My son has been complaining of persistent headaches.  The headaches don't affect his ability to eat, do homework, play, laugh, watch TV.  I thought when he got glasses, the headaches would fade, but they haven't.   The headaches don't respond to tylenol, ibuprofen or children's zytrec.  I wonder if the headaches are psychosomatic - he has gone through some big life changes this year and likely doesn't have the language to express all his emotions.  I wonder if the headaches are a brain tumor - it's THAT week in November, so I'm more prone to suspect the worst.  Mostly, I hurt because he is hurting, angry at the ache that he feels constantly.  I want to fix it, and it seems unfixable.

In the midst of all the anger and confusion in the world, this small poem came across my newsfeed: 

I am shaken by these simple words, the image of a hand hovering over the world and the world trembling with pain.  A world, like my son, that constantly hurts.  

We hurt here, in America.  We send our young to war and then mistreat them when they are home.  Judges sell our children into prisons.  We fight tooth and nail against justice.  Our states dry up, our forests burn, we gnash our teeth at the state of politics.  

It hurts, it hurts, it hurts.

But this simple poem keeps me from believing that our pain is the only pain.  It dares me to look out into the world and see the wounds out there as well: war and rumours of war, natural disasters, broken families, terror, loss, the hurt a pulsing ache in every city of the world. 

The world hurts, it hurts, it hurts.

I am convicted by this pain, because of the most popular Bible verse in the world: "For God So Loved the world...."  The world is hurting, the world that God loves.  People are hurting, the people that God loves.  Most look nothing like me.  Many are of different faiths.  Most speak a different language.  Many expect the worst of me because my country has a terrible history of demonizing the other.  But the world is hurting and God loves it fiercely, and haven't I claimed to be loyal to God's kingdom?  This whole bleeding earth and all that is in it belongs to God, an earth I must be a better steward of.

Many of us are spending these days yelling; we are afraid, we are angry, we are confused, we are hopeless, we are desperate, we are ashamed, we are haunted by guilt.  But what would it look like, if instead of yelling at one another, if we turned to our world and whispered: "where does it hurt?"

To Syrian refugees, fleeing from the destruction of everything they knew, "Where does it hurt?"

To Parisian victims, reeling from terror, "Where does it hurt?"

To the Lebanese bombing survivors, mourning their loss, "Where does it hurt?"

To the Russian families, left behind after their loved ones were killed, "Where does it hurt?"

To African American students on college campuses, angry in the face of institutional racism, ""Where does it hurt?"

What if we asked "Where does it hurt?", and then dedicated all of our resources to healing?  You know, like Jesus taught us to.

Do you hear the world, my friends?  It's in pain.  And we have much work to do. To repent of our sin that caused the pain.  To set aside our resources to assuage it.  To humble ourselves to see it in the first place.  Join me.  It's time we listened.

A Letter to My Son

Sweet Boy,

Tragedy didn't used to make me feel so fragile.  Before you were born, my universe was tightly knit up within my own body.  But you exist, a vibrant chaotic life outside of the confines of my arms, and tragedy always makes me zero in on you.  When Russian planes crash, I am breathless at the thought of parents and children separated from each other forever.  When bombs explode, I think of the funerals marked with tiny coffins.  When Twitter (it was a thing when you were little) explodes in the aftermath of terrorist attacks, my overactive imagination creates nightmare scenarios flavored by current events.  What if, while we were getting ice cream, while we were at an arena, while we were walking as a family, the worst happened?

And then, I feel the guilt of a voyeur because my panic and imagined grief are pale shadows to the real loss that thousands and thousands of families are actually living through.  You are alive, sleeping safely in your bed, dutifully doing your homework.  Too often grownups use the tragedies of other people to soothe ourselves, so we can say "I'm so thankful we AREN'T....".  I'm sorry for that.

I think this is the most difficult part of being your mom: I am audaciously aware of how tenuous our lives truly are.  I have a duty to raise you into the reality of this world, but the temptation is so great to shield you from the evil of humankind.  I could so easily turn your attention away from the struggles of nations, the moral bankruptcy of politicians, the blind xenophobia that creates categories of "us" and "them".  I could distract you with the sugary, sparkly, and easy parts of our world, try to convince you that they are all that truly is.  But then, I'd be failing you.  I must help you confront the terrors of this life with integrity and seriousness.  Sometimes, the people we trust never deserved it.  Sometimes the future we wanted cannot be ours.  Sometimes, evil seems to win.  This is real.  This is our world.

I would also be failing you by only telling you stories of failure, pain and bloodshed.  It would be a sin for me to constantly turn your eyes towards abuses of power, of exclusion, of loss and pettiness.  For every story of evil, there are stories of sacrifice, of love that blots out hate, of justice where only injustice was before.  The world we live in is full of people so good that they change the fate of nations.  You can be one of them.  I believe it.

So, I hope that you'll forgive me if in-between practicing your sight words, I slip in quick lessons about how we should love one another.  I hope you'll give me grace when, on rides to school, I speak with you seriously about how sometimes, not even policemen do the right thing.  I hope you'll be patient with me when I cry about the deaths of people I do not know and try to teach you why the lives of people we've never met matter so much.    I hope that one day, when you're confronted by socially acceptable diet-racism, you'll remember that time when I taught you it was Christian to say #BlackLivesMatter.

Soon I will pick you up from school, and you will regale me with stories of recess and lunchtime and your friend Miranda who alternately is very awesome and very naughty in class.  For now, you know very little of the brokenness of all things.  But I promise, my funny boy, that I'm going to do my best by you.  You deserve it.  And so does the world that you can help heal.

Love,
Mommy

The Many Faces of Farewell

One of the many privileges of my position is that I get to teach people about the Bible.  It's fun to introduce folks to stories they've never heard, but it is infinitely more rewarding to illuminate an old story in a new way.  At my first call, I did a long running Bible Study series called "The Women of the Bible", wherein I took the least known (and eventually the best known) women of Scripture and presented with fresh eyes.  To this day, Hagar is my favorite woman to bring to a group.  She gets so little attention, and her story is so deeply, painfully tragic.

Hagar had the unfortunate luck to be Sarah's handmaiden when Sarah and Abraham took their fertility struggles in their own hands.  Sarah offered up Hagar as a womb for the filling and Abraham took her up on the offer.  Hagar eventually got pregnant but then ended up running away, preferring to die in the desert rather than be abused by Sarah anymore.  In time she goes back to Abraham's camp and raises her son Ishmael with him, but then she and Ishmael are turned out when her son was only 13.  Sarah had Isaac by then and would brook no competition, even if it was a competition that SHE HAD CREATED.  So Hagar and her son are forced away from the camp, out in the desert to die.  They don't, but only because God intervenes.  

Like I said, it's tough.  Hagar is truly a victim,  Ishmael is abandoned, Abraham is mindlessly guided by his genitals and Sarah appears to be an abusive, manipulative wretch.

One of the ways I like to examine stories like these is with art; paintings, sculpture, song, movies, etc., are all at their essence acts of interpretation.  By examining artistic representations of scriptural stories, we can gain a window into how these stories have impacted their listeners, how generations of people have parsed out the heroes, villains and themes of a story.  This is no less true with the story of Hagar.

The sculpture below is a giant piece called "Abraham's Farewell to Ishmael" by George Segal.  All those figures are human sized, and the sculpture changes as you move around it.  From one perspective, Sarah is a hidden hooded figure out of sight.  In another, she is merely in the background, coldly looking upon the banishment of her handmaiden and her husband's older son.  Hagar, though, from any perspective is vulnerably alone.  She cannot look at her child and his father saying goodbye, she does not face her abuser, she merely clutches herself tightly and gazes away towards what she can only assume is her death.

The sculpture is breathtaking.

"Abraham's Farewell to Ishmael" is a study in how we say goodbye, how we take leave of former lives.  Some of us clutch tightly to those we leave behind, unready for separation.  Some of us merely observe the breaking of our families, emotionally removed from the pain of others.  Still more of us stand alone in the crowds, just trying to hold ourselves in one piece while we grapple with our fear and loss.

Perhaps I am so moved by this sculpture because I see the goodbyes of my life within it's boundaries. My life, a sculpture to study, my path observable from whatever perspective you choose.

• I was desperate, clinging to Cliff before the truth of his betrayal was made clear.  Ishmael & Abraham.
• I was raw and afraid, clutching myself tightly as I faced a cruel and unexpected future alone with my son.  Hagar.
• I am removed, remote from every goodbye my son must make to his father.  Sarah.

But maybe I am deeply impacted by Segal's masterpiece because it reminds me that to truly understand someone's story takes a commitment to see the whole tableau of their life.  That to truly be understood is to stand vulnerable before another and let yourself be wholly seen.  I am out of sight now, but a step to the left will show you my face.  It happens so rarely that we meet someone with whom we can lay ourselves bare.

This is the dangerous and beautiful and tragic task of Christian living: allowing ourselves to be seen and choosing to see the fullness of others.  Every angle, every ugliness, every transcendent kindness.  We are known and we know and we are loved no matter the perspective by which we are perceived.  That is my definition of grace. This is also the desperate hope and mystery implicit when we take the risk to love another: Do you see me now? Oh no, you see me now!  Please, see me always.

I pray for you, my friends, that one day you will stand revealed before another.  You will be as beautiful as a Segal, I promise.

West Texas Skies

Last weekend I drove 900 miles: Houston to Dallas, Dallas to Abilene, Abilene to Dallas, Dallas to Houston.  None of that drive is particularly inspiring, mostly just quiet lane passing as semis and other drivers make their way somewhere else.  I listened to podcasts while I drove, I listened to music while I drove, I drove in silence as my son (and dog) slept.  Mostly, I just wished that I was wherever I needed to be.  Does anyone like driving?  It just makes my butt hurt.  Even the most beautiful of landscapes grow boring once you've looked at them for 3 hours.

But the sky?  Well, I'd forgotten about West Texas sky.

Houston has no mountains, so the sky in West Texas and the sky down here on the coast should be the same.  But they aren't.  West Texas sky seems bigger than sky anywhere else; it stretches on in endless periphery, so high you feel like it will soon tip over and fall upon you.  It's the kind of sky that you lay on blankets and watch clouds under; it's sky worth stopping for.  In some way, it seems fitting that this will always be the sky over my grandmother's grave.

Whenever I officiate funerals, I always acknowledge absence; usually I say "it is difficult to know how to live in a world where your loved one does not."  It has always been true when I said it; I was never glib or dismissive.  But it has also been 8 years since I attended the funeral of a family member, so I had forgotten the visceral ache of that absence.  This vast world of billions of people is missing someone;  I could search the great West Texas sky and never find her again.

How could that be?

When Cliff first went to jail, the pain of his absence was tied to his complicity for his relocation.  He SHOULD have been with me, but was elsewhere.  Grandma's death is different; her death was "natural", her absence final.  My faith informs me that "in the great by and by" we will be reunited in a common resurrection.  But the Kingdom to Come is still the Kingdom Not Here, and death does sting.  It cuts you wide open so your soul is like the endless horizon of the sky near Abilene.

I was not the only one mourning on Saturday; other families in other places met, mourned and made last goodbyes to their beloved ones.  Death was also not the only story on Saturday; other families in other places greeted newborn babies, welcomed in adopted children.  Under endless skies all over the world, we made space for new people and marked the absence of others.  I know this, the push and pull of existence that spins you from one high to a low without a pause for breath.

I know this.

But as I drove home to kiss my husband and hold my son tightly to me, as I made plans to meet my friend's newborn baby, I drove under the West Texas skies.  And at that moment, it seemed barely big enough for my grief.

Her Hands

Today was my grandmother's funeral, so I read this during the time for memories.

----

I remember her hands as she deftly sliced peaches for our vanilla ice cream.

I remember her hands cracking the pecans that our small tribe of grandchildren had collected from beneath her giant pecan tree.  

I remember her hands as she expertly guided fabric on the ends of crochet needles that summer she taught me how to crochet.  

I remember her hands when they held me close right before we left her for the long journey home.  

I remember her hands when she lifted the ever-present carton of rainbow sherbet out of her freezer to portion out to suddenly ravenous children.  

I remember her hands: 

    at bath-time wrapping me in a towel, 

    in the summer lifting us from the kiddie pool,

    during prayer while we sang before dinner

    when she signed my ordination certificate.  

I remember her hands.

 

She was more than just hands, of course.  She was wholly herself, hands and feet and beauty and brains and laughter and tears, my grandma, your mother, your wife, your friend.  She was more than the sum of her parts, either visible or invisible. She was more.  But today, I remember her hands, the hands that loved and guided and chastised and provided and encouraged and prayed and typed and quilted.  We are gathered together in this place to remember her, to rejoice in her resurrection, to grieve her loss.  But mostly, today, I remember her hands: wishing I had held them one more time, thankful I was able to hold them at all, humbled by all the good they did for God.  

Deuteronomy says “The LORD your God has blessed you in all the work of your hands.”  Today, I am quite sure he was speaking of my grandma because all I can remember is the work of her hands.

 

Lessons from Sand Worms

Chances are pretty good that I'm the only minister in Texas who has used (multiple times) the "Litany Against Fear" from Dune during a sermon.  If you're not familiar with it, the main character recites this Litany during a time when his life is at risk: "I will not fear.  Fear is the mind-killer.  Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.  I will face my fear.  I will permit it to pass over me and through me.  And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.  Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.  Only I will remain."

Don't Mess With Shai-Hulud

Fear as the mind-killer has resonated with me since the first time I encountered the phrase.  When I was young it was merely powerful prose, but as I've gotten older it has become enshrined in my heart as universal truth.  Fear, at its most powerful, obliterates your mind.

But when you ask a nerd about fear, they are much more likely to quote Star Wars before Paul Atreides.  You probably know this one, a meditation on fear by Jedi Master Yoda: "Fear is the path to the dark side.  Fear leads to anger.  Anger leads to hate.  Hate leads to suffering."  Again, it was merely pithy when I was younger.  Today?  Well, I live in America and suffer through an endless election cycle.  Yoda is a prophet, man.

The Kwisatz Haderach and Master Yoda were both right: fear destroys your ability to think, it feeds anger, it is the root of suffering.  Fear guides our political rhetoric, fear seeps into religious life, fear haunts even benign holidays like Halloween when FB posts warn you to watch out for razors in your child's candy.  Fear is the root and anger is the bitter fruit that we all seem to be feasting upon lately.  At the end of last year, Slate published an "Outrage Calendar" that listed every topic we yelled about on Social Media by the day.  It was a telling reveal, that our public discourse has become dominated by what is wrong, broken, unfit, paltry, contemptible.  I have to search news with a fine toothed comb to find a semblance of "good" news.  We are all so angry; we are all so afraid.

Part of me wonders if our fear is healthy; life is actually quite fragile and often the worst amongst us have the most power.  But part of me also acknowledges that fear (and its child, anger) grow out from a shattering of expectation.  Maybe Americans are so angry lately because we're finally having to let go of the myth of our national exceptionalism.  Maybe Progressives are angry because the long arc of justice is TOO long and all this work is exhausting.  Maybe conservatives are angry because they feel the tide of the culture war turning against them and they don't know their next move.  Maybe.  Whatever the anger is about, though, I turn my eyes back to the Jedi and the Fremen and remember that our anger is ultimately rooted in our fear about the future.  And that fear?  It's killing us.  It's sapping our ability to think critically.  It's driving us apart from each other.  For God's sake, fear caused the people of Houston to vote AGAINST an Equal Rights ordinance that would have protected religious folk, veterans and the disabled.

Fear leads to suffering.  Fear is also not an appropriate response for Christians.  Over and over again, Jesus told his disciples, "Do Not be Afraid."  Or like the writer of 2 Timothy said: "For God has not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind."  We are called to something more: trust beyond fear, hope beyond anger, love beyond hate.  It's harder this way, but its vastly better than the mind obliteration that is our only other option.

Join me my friends.  Clear your thoughts and let your fear pass over you.  Let outrage leach out from your soul, like the poison it often becomes.  Let's discover together what life can be like when we aren't angry all the time.

Of Suns and Trust

Advent is swiftly approaching, the time of anticipation when we Christians prepare our souls and lives for the birth of Jesus.  Traditionally, each week is associated with a different word: Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love.  Of the three, Joy is the hardest to parse out because our culture doesn’t seem to know how to explain it apart from happiness.  English is a fine language; it is elastic, evolving and eccentric.  But very often, it fails us in the sense that it tries to pack too much meaning into one word; or it makes synonyms of words that demand more differentiation.  As best as I can figure, we English speakers lazily explain that “Joy” is happiness on a deeper level and quickly change the subject when pushed.  I have struggled in many a children sermon on the 3^rd Sunday of Advent when I needed to explain what joy was, but not because I did not know the difference between joy and happiness.  I knew it, but to define it was to reveal too much of myself.

I remember when my son’s head crowned the day he was born, the shocking feeling of his sudden existence apart from my own.  I remember when my husband told me he loved me for the first time, the overwhelming relief of emotion separate from my years of pain.  I remember when my family, friends and colleagues laid their hands upon me at my ordination, the hope of long years birthed under their fingertips.  Those moments were not happy moments, in the sense that happiness is the emotional equivalent of a burst of color and light and trumpeting sound.   They were moments where fear, anticipation, delight, wonder and grace swirled together in a hue of color rarely seen.     These flashes of life (a child born, words whispered, hands resting upon each other), they are my best definition of joy.

Joy is not a feeling in as much as it is a belief in goodness beyond suffering.  Joy is the laughter of memories shared at a funeral, joy is the hope waiting at the opening of a tomb, joy is waking in a hospital room to see your friend sleeping in a chair next to you.  For Christians, joy is trusting that God can mold and shape the clay of this oft wretched world into something beautiful.  Perhaps joy is like happiness, in the same way that the sun is a light.  But who amongst us would truly draw comparison between the churning depths of fire and heat and power that make up our sun to the flickering bulbs that inhabit our ceilings?

I presided over the funeral of a good man last Friday, and I encouraged the assembly to remember that our grief had to be mingled with the joy we shared in his resurrection.  Saturday, I will struggle to believe that as I stand to share my memories of my grandmother.   I will not be happy; there is no happiness to be found in the loss of a woman such as her.  But I will reach deep into the wellspring that God tends within my soul, I will reach deep and swim in the memories of her laughter and her hands and her breath and I believe I will find joy.   Joy that I had the chance to be shaped by her love; Joy that my very life I owe to her own.

Victor Hugo said, “Joy's smile is much closer to tears than laughter.”  What a gift.  

Where is your joy, my friends?

To Sleep on Cold Novembers

If I were to be honest, I'd tell you that I don't much care for "modern" art.  I can appreciate it, it's provocative transgression, the way modern artists subvert medium and expectation to evoke emotion. But "modern" pieces don't elicit  much from me, not the way that realism does.  My taste in art runs quite opposite than my taste in fiction; when I read I desire grand space operas, but when I go to museums I desire pieces anchored firmly in this world.

I was introduced to the Wyeth family of artists my sophomore year in high school, when I had to do an oral analysis of "The Green Knight Preparing to Battle Sir Beaumains", an illustration done by N.C Wyeth in Thomas Malory's "The Boy's King Arthur."  N.C, was skilled at the subtle conveyance of what I interpreted to be melancholy and silence, a skill that he managed to pass on to his son Andrew.  I like the work of N.C, but Andrew speaks to me on a much deeper level.  His beautiful work with his muse Helga makes me proud to have a rounded woman's body; his haunting pieces of winter amongst wooden buildings and dying field grass quiet my soul and make me listen for racing wind.

But today, I remembered this picture, called "Master Bedroom":

The beauty of art is that much of the meaning of a piece comes from the experience of the one who sees it.  Till today, I had always seen this picture to be one of comfort and tranquility.  I had imagined it was a cool fall day, and that the faithful hound in question was merely napping before the master returned.  But today?  Today, it occurs to me that perhaps the master will not be returning.  

My grandmother died this morning.  She had a catastrophic stroke on Saturday the 24th, and died this morning about 4am.  She would have been 84 this month, had been married to my grandfather for 63 years, and today she died. Now, all I can see in this picture is a dog waiting for their master to return, a master who will not return.  What is happening in the world beyond that window frame?  Is it the family gathered around a tombstone?  Or has time passed so that tumbled leaves dance across chiseled letters that read "Beloved Friend"?   Does the dog yet know its loss or does it knowingly return to the place of the one he loved to draw comfort from memory? 

The answer, of course, is that the painting is all of that and none of that; it is what I need it to be, it evokes the grief I need to express.  This is the power of art, that it is all at once mirror, opponent, chaplain, and critic.  Wyeth did not paint for me, but his creation lives beyond its original setting, stretching in purpose for each of its viewers.  In this sense, art is transcendent (even if it’s not by Gignoux).  Wyeth’s art helps me to run backwards in my memory and forwards into my future and to linger in my present, to contemplate all the cold Novembers which have hurt me as well as given me rest. 

Soon I will travel to my grandmother’s funeral, to stand with family and friends as we sing and cry and remember the woman we loved.  We will wonder together how to continue in a world where she is absent.  Then I will return home, and wrap the quilt my grandma made for me around my body; I will wrap it around me and sleep while fall winds knock against my windows.   Because sometimes, life imitates art.

Worlds of Meaning

I read quite a lot, and very little of it is considered "scholarly" or "Christian."  My old standbys are either:
a) full of wizards and magic
b) full of spaceships and future-tech.

Almost none of my favorite stories are based on this planet; I prefer to imagine worlds beyond this one.  Probably the best illustration of this penchant of mine is my shelf of books by Jack L. Chalker.  The Well World books by Chalker center on an artificial planet with 1500 constructed hexagonal biospheres, all wildly different from each other.  Some contain carbon based life forms, some life forms are sentient noble gasses.  The civilization that created these biospheres would eventually transplant the lifeforms from their hexagon to a planet terraformed to match.  

I first read these books when I was a teenager, and I was stunned by the imaginative possibilities.  More than that, however, I was challenged by the implicit moral of these tales: life does not have to look like you to be valuable.  Sci-fi repeats this story often; Star Trek:TNG did it in "Home Soil", and Battlestar Galactica explored this with the conflict between Humans and Cylons.  Jack L. Chalker and his Well World books are probably the reason why I firmly believe that the universe is full of other planets that contain living creatures.  I just don't think that any of them will look like us, act like us, communicate like us, or experience reality like us.  Why should they?  

Of course, what any good science fiction story does is to eventually turn your eyes from the heavens back towards this earthly existence.  I, as of yet, do not have to grapple with the differing lives of aliens.  What I do have to grapple with is a world full of humans whose lives are categorically different than my own.  Sometimes this difference is about preference: I just don’t get the obsession with or enjoyment of baseball.  I’m not opposed or derogatory, I just don’t care.  Sometimes this difference is about privilege: the social power I have as a white, cis-gendered woman creates an entirely different reality than one experienced by a trans-person of color.  We live on the same planet, but our lives are so different they might as well be biospheres on Well World. 

The work of Chalker and Asimov and Roddenberry and Herbert and LeGuin, push me to the edges of my hexagon of existence and force me to look over.  Sometimes, they even hand me a sledgehammer and command me to break down that which separates me from my neighbor.  But they are not the only voices that remind me: Life doesn’t have to look like you to have value.  God, in scripture, sings the same song to me:   “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.  Welcome the stranger, for you too were once a stranger in a strange land.”

This business of life seems to be one long awakening to the intricacies and difficulties of all the worlds within this one world I live upon.  I have always been treading in and out of alien places, I just didn’t realize that it was happening every time I held out my hand and engaged the stranger in front of me.  To quote Jean-Luc Picard, perhaps this is the goal of every life, the purpose of all our days: to explore strange new places, new civilizations.  Except we don’t need spaceships to do it; we just need eyes open to the people around us, hearts tender to the differences between us, soul awakened to our common human bonds. 

What worlds surround you?  What life have you forgotten to value?  What will you discover tomorrow?  Happy voyage, my friend, whether you head to the stars or merely your neighbors’ front door.