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.

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.

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.