Love and Bridges

Saturday night I closed my eyes to doze a bit while my husband, Derek, drove us home from a family gathering in Gainesville. I had been deep inside my mind, working on my sermon for the following morning. My brain was starting to quiet when I found myself suddenly singing, quietly at first then building. I couldn’t remember the name of the song nor who recorded it, but the words flowed out from some deep recess inside of me. I sat up in my seat and watched the familiar roads and signs of 365 slide by, the words of the song coming to me more quickly.

I smiled and remembered learning to play the tune on the piano as a young teenager. “I haven’t heard this song in a long time. I had forgotten all about it,” I said to Derek.

He replied, “Well, it hasn’t forgotten you.” It most certainly had not.

The DJ filled in the missing details, “That was ‘Love can build a bridge’ by The Judds.” Of course. How could I forget.

I hope you remember this song as well. The refrain says,
“Love can build a bridge
Between your heart and mine
Love can build a bridge
Don't you think it's time?
Don't you think it's time?”

Generally, I love the arrival of fall. I can’t wait for cool nights and open windows, the proliferation of pumpkins and spiderwebs. But my enthusiasm is dampened this year. It’s midterm election season, one that typically is contentious but feels more so this year than at any other time I remember. The promise of fall as the gateway to holidays entirely about love and thanksgiving starkly stands juxtaposed against the vitriol, hatred, and division championed by the campaigning happening all around us.

I cannot speak to the reasons behind our current love affair with division but I do know that I cannot believe it is of God. In our sinfulness, we have come to prize conflict and aggression. Scarcely do we meet a new person before we assess if they are “with us or against us,” that is, if they agree with our views and ideologies or are a part of the irredeemable other party.

The temptation of division is nothing new. The earliest Christian communities tried to divide themselves as well. The apostle Paul struggled to help the Roman community set aside their obsession with separating the Jews from the Gentiles among them. He wrote to the Romans, encouraging them to set aside their selfish resentments and delineations in favor of working together in kingdom building, rooted in the love of Christ.

To live in a community of love is not to agree with one another all the time or have the same vision for the specifics of the work we should commit ourselves to do together. Indeed, conflict and disagreement are inherent to any relationship. The test of our discipleship is in our ability to stay together as brother and sister and strive to do the will of God regardless of our differences. In fact, our strength can be found in those very differences. They are the things that enrich our community and our corporate understanding of God.

The Judds go on to sing in their song,
“I would whisper love so loudly, every heart could understand
Love and only love can join the tribes of man not trials
I would give my heart's desire so that you might see
The first step is to realize that it all begins with you and me...

When we stand together, it's our finest hour
We can do anything, anything
We're believing in the power”

Despite the animosity that pervades our society, I still hold onto hope. We are resurrection people after all, aren’t we? Imagine if our conversations began rooted in love rather than hatred? What if we started from a desire to understand rather than a desire to debate? I still believe deeply in the power of love to transform us and our community, our world.

On that drive home, my mind and spirit compelled my body to sing out words I had long forgotten and it came as a balm to my soul. May the Spirit move us to reach deep inside to find more messages of hope, connection, love, and redemption, rather than the easily accessed hatred and selfish conceit that fills the air around us. If only we would begin with love, rather than division, even if it starts as a mere whisper.

FICTION: What would I take?

Preface Note: Recently I had the pleasure of spending the weekend with my writing teacher and a group of marvelous women writers. While we were tucked into the mountains, our brothers and sisters in the Carolinas were preparing for hurricane Florence to make landfall. Our writing instructor asked us to connect with those fleeing the path of the storm by considering what one thing we would take with us if we had to leave home in a hurry. The following is my imagining of being forced to consider what I would feel had to leave home with me and my family.
I can tell you that this exercise was a prayer for all of us. More than a few of the writers shed tears as they shared their reflections. This prompt from our teacher gave us a way to access the compassion and heartache we were, and are, feeling for our neighbors to the East.
I know I haven't shared fiction before, but I was encouraged to make and exception for this one. May it kindle prayers for those who are and will be returning home to flooded homes and communities.

Derek runs out in the rain, carrying William and yelling at the girls to hurry as they trail behind him. He grabbed the baby portraits and the only photos we have of his father, dead these past eighteen years. My life already is in the car, all that I hold precious to me, in those four souls. I’ve never been sentimental about things because all is illusion except the desperate love that pours out of me towards the car that now shields all that is important in my life.
I turn back to look at the house, frantic to consider last things. What do I take? What would break me to leave behind? I run back in, hoping those quick steps will spur my heart to yearn for something tangible.
I pass through the front door, glancing at my daughter’s room then up the stairs. No, nothing there will matter in the end. No books or clothes or even photos will change the reality of what is to come. I round the corner into living room, already mourning the loss of our favorite evenings spent curled by the fire. We filled this space with our favorite things and bought furniture and art to match our lives rather than any fad or fashion. If I could box up a room, I would take this one.
My eyes look across the room to my beautiful table, a gift from Derek to me and I to him when we married. We knew then that friends, food, and family would be fundamental to our life together.
Behind it, I eye the item I would grab had I the room and the strength: the cupboard made by my grandfather’s strong hands. He was a barrel of a man who built furniture to match his boxey and burly frame. It sat in my grandmother’s dining area in their small home then waited in storage for Derek and me after she departed this earth. The cupboard is hulking, imperfect, wholly unique. The china and crystal it holds is nothing compared to my memories tucked into the corners and drawers. My life and my heritage reflect back at me in the crude doors with their glass panes. One grandparent made it, but within the grains of wood I have tucked every one of my ancestors, my German, Scottish, and British bloodlines painted in the red of the stained wood.
No. I cannot take it with me. It too will have to disappear like the people before it.
I force myself to pass through the kitchen. This is my room, my refuge, my identity, yet I’ve cooked in enough kitchens to know that I can make a home in any one of them. I’m tempted to grab the vegetable cleaver Derek gave me this past Christmas. I love the feel of the wooden handle and the heft of the blade as it slices with ease through round butternuts and beautiful onions bursting with sulphur. To hold and wield this knife is to hold my husband himself, his dichotomy of rough and smooth, strength and ease magnificently manifest in it.
But I move, instead, to the wall at my left and take down my massive cast iron skillet. The survivor in me knows that this is the thing that must travel with us when all else cannot. It is not a family heirloom - it was a gift from Derek the year of our iron anniversary - but my women have used skillets with these same deep walls and sound metal to survive for hundreds of years.
I know that in it, I can make home anywhere for my family. I can feed them, keep them alive, keep them healthy, kindle their souls, and bring them comfort, all through the magic of this pan. Out of its round blackness, the skillet will conjure the memories of generations of our people, something no other item in our lives can do. It will teach my children that out of the blackest of moments, the depth of an iron pot grabbed in desperation, out of darkness can come survival, then memory, then beauty, then newness. It can bear our tears, collecting them for a balm rendered out of that salty broth only our pain can offer.
The weight of the skillet in my hand moves me from desperation to power, not to hope, but to confidence, not that all will be well, but that I will not be broken by this moment and neither will my family.

The Stewardship of Words

I spent my weekend with words. My writing teacher is a beautiful, eighty-something Greek woman who lives with a fire in her belly and a passion for words. Twice a year, a small group of dedicated women gather at Valle Cruces Conference Center to spend the weekend under her tutelage. She give us prompts then sends us out for thirty or forty-five minutes to see what we might be inspired to write. We return and share with one another our vignettes, poetry, short stories, and essays that have tumbled out and onto the page unexpectedly.

She left us with one last prompt: What are your words worth?

My initial thought was, “nothing.” I had some sentimental thought about how my words are freely given and released into the world without a price or value, save that which will be placed upon them by any heart who receives them. I write and preach because I have to and I love to, not with any concept of value or merit.

But, then, the apostle James shows up in this Sunday’s readings for the church and, with a booming voice and priceless words, castigates me for my feigned naivete, 

“How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And the tongue is a fire. The tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of nature, and is itself set on fire by hell. For every species of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by the human species, but no one can tame the tongue-- a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing.” (James 3:5-9)

“Unbridled words.” This idea storms in my mind and I sigh. We live in a society that values unbridled words wielded like guns and fired like canons. Words have become blades, not for vanquishing some evil foe, but for slicing through the humanity of others. Compulsively we draw and fire our weapons of words, long before we have any clear target in sight. The speed of fingers on a keyboard hammer out the steel of our best and worst thoughts made manifest on the screen. With no effort, we press a button, click a mouse, and in silence our daggers fly across the world in mere seconds.

There’s no small irony in the nostalgia and admiration we hold for the letter writers of the Civil War. Notes sent home by the most ordinary of men jerk our modern sensibilities because of their beauty and craftsmanship. The language of their era, set with intention and deliberacy to paper, confounds us in our era of compulsion and impulse. When paper was scarce and ink was hard to come by, the writer took more time than just that of putting hand to pen to paper. They understood the value and power of their words and did not want to cheapen or waste them in haste.

The apostle James commands us to “be doers of the word and not hearers only.” James 1:22 Alongside breathing and blood pulsing through our veins, words flow over and through every moment of our lives. When we wake, words fill our minds to answer the questions that come with every awakening: ideas of where we are, what the day holds, and reverberations from the dreams that may have passed in the night. Long before a single syllable journeys through our throats and across our lips, our minds have been a thunderhead of words firing off and lighting the cavern of our skulls. All day we grasp for our tools of words to make order out of chaos so that we can think, speak, plan, and execute. Then, as night falls and the energy of the day drains away from us, the words are there to sweep and mop the floors of our minds and tidy the shelves of ideas that have been in heavy usage over the course of the day. Even as we drift off, the words are there to convert conscious to subconscious, lining up the letters and syllables that will give meaning to the images our brains will paint in the dreams of our sleep.

How can we live with ourselves for cheapening the very thing that holds our sanity together? How can we forgive ourselves our carelessness and gluttony? Words may be in infinite supply but they are precious and powerful. We should weep over the fields littered with bloodied and dying words, thrown out with no regard for the value of their lives.

Perhaps our most powerful testimony as people of faith is to be found in our reclamation of the sanctity and sacrament of language. If we are to witness, let us first witness to the power of words, not just of those that speak of the Word made flesh in Jesus Christ, but of the power of every word we produce. Let us pound the swords of cheapened words into the plowshares of speech that once again cultivates compassion, beauty, and grace. Let us bridle our tongues with the depth of appreciation and respect our words deserve.

Marking an Anniversary with Honesty: 9/11

All day I have felt depressed and have lacked motivation. I’ve accomplished most of my chores on this, my day off, but it has taken me three times as long and has required plenty of breaks for some mindless tv watching. There are plenty of other ways I should have spent that extra time but I just didn’t have it in me today.

Derek came home after his last class to change clothes before going to football practice. I asked him how he was doing and he said he had felt off all day, like something wasn’t quite right. I shared with him that I had felt the same all day. He listed the various things that had bothered him today and then he offhandedly said, “And tomorrow’s 9/11.”

It took him saying it for me to realize why I have felt lousy all day. Even now, the kids are in the living room with me, wanting my attention for math homework and to share articles in the magazine they are reading, but I don’t have the heart to give them much of my attention. I’m trying hard to give them my patience. It’s not their fault I’m in a foul mood or that I dread this anniversary every year. It’s merely a typical Monday evening for them.

I can’t claim that the anniversary has somehow snuck up on me. People started talking about it well over a week ago and I agreed to say a few words about 9/11 to my middle school students tomorrow during their convocation. But I had boxed up the emotions of the anniversary and set them on a shelf, willfully denying they would have any effect on me this year.

And yet, here I sit, the night before the anniversary and I am all kinds of sideways. I’m cranky and feel like crying. I have a deep sense of isolation. I want to vent my depression, frustration, and memories but there’s no one to call or text who understands and Derek has dorm duty tonight, putting him in the dorms until well after 11. I pray I’ll be sound asleep by then and away from these feelings.

Tomorrow I’ll share some of my story of living in New York City on 9/11. I volunteered to be available to the teachers to talk to the kids because I want to help them understand what it’s like to live through an event like that. But now, I’m regretting telling anyone, much less volunteering. I rarely tell people that I was in the city on that day because it feels like a strange sort of bragging and I don’t want to have to answer too many questions. But I also feel the burden of responsibility because I know people are interested and need to know.

So, this evening, I sit in our living room with the kids chattering around me and I feel nauseous. Deep in my belly is a sense of foreboding and dread. Thankfully, I don’t have to turn on the television tomorrow and I can choose not to read the news. Every channel will rush to cover the anniversary, their particular focus will be in the service of using the events of 9/11 to further their agenda. The abuse of the memory of that day brings an acrid taste to my mouth as my stomach roils with disgust. I have to brace myself for the annual sentimentalization and politicization of the 9/11 tragedy.

I also live with the shame of leaving. A few days after the terrorists ripped a hole in our city, I left for home and didn’t look back. I had been planning on leaving after the first of the year but the discomfort and dis-ease that filled the city hastened my departure. My parents, in their love and concern for their baby girl, drove all night to meet me in New Jersey when I told them I wanted to come home.

The summer leading up to 9/11, I had worked as a hospital chaplain and been part of a peer group to do the challenging work of self-exploration. It had been a wonderful yet exhausting summer full of deep dives into my identity and personality. I returned to seminary with no reserves, nothing left to give anyone who may need me. Once the planes hit the twin towers and the city froze in terror, I knew I would have to leave for my own wellbeing. I had nothing to give any effort to help minister to a city in need.

Even though I did what I had to for my own wellness and health, I still carry the guilt and shame of a person who left when there was trouble. I lost relationships and friendships were broken. I became someone that they used to know. Others were weakened to the point that today we only exist in each other’s lives as online acquaintances. I left because I had to, it was my first act of self-care and taught me a valuable lesson that has saved me from burnout and emotional exhaustion as a minister. But, in leaving, I also became a deserter. I abandoned my community and nothing will change that.

It’s been seventeen years but the wound isn’t healed. Every year, it gets a little better, though some years hit me harder than others. The saccharine remembrances and anniversary specials knock the scab off and, for twenty-four hours or so, I’m left to fester, again.

There is nothing redeeming about 9/11 for me. I’m broken hearted that people would board planes with the sole purpose of bringing them down to destroy as many lives as possible. I’m broken hearted by the decades of events that preceded and caused the 9/11 tragedy, for the ways our country and the world failed to look after one another as a community because of our xenophobia and fear. I’m broken hearted by the ways the events of that day are twisted by some false sense of sanctity that wreaks of sanctimoniousness and artificial sentimentalism. I’m broken hearted that we don’t seem to learn our lessons and tragedies like 9/11 are happening around our world all the time but we don’t seem to care because the violence is perpetrated against black and brown people in neighborhoods and countries too insignificant to garner our attention.

I share this confession because I believe we all need to do a better job sharing with one another when we’re not at our best. We need to see each other at our weakest moments, not just when we’re thriving. I share with you because you are friends and you are family, you are brothers and sisters who suffer from the same human condition and I need you to know that I hurt as well. We are never alone in our pain, which I am reminding myself of now, even as I sit in my sense of isolation thanks to the burden of my memories.

I share because I want you to have a reference point when you slip into your own times of alienation or pain. My reference point is the cross. I know I’m never alone in moments like these because there’s nothing I can suffer that Christ hasn’t already. He waits for us wherever we go, even in the deepest recesses of our minds and at the end of our roads of denial. And he has excellent company, a communion of saints who are our brothers and sisters, everyone who has ever sat with this same sense of foreboding and nausea. We never journey a path that someone hasn’t already traveled.

By now, my kids have finished their work and have migrated downstairs. I hear their shouts from the basement as they challenge each other in their video games. Only the dog is left to occupy this space with me and she demands nothing but my presence. My kids don’t have a sense for what I’m feeling or why. But someday, they will. They will survive their own 9/11s and, when they do, I hope they can remember their mother survived something similar.

Friends, lift a prayer of remembrance; lift a prayer for broken hearts; lift a prayer for lost lives and lost opportunities; lift a prayer of confession for our continued failings; lift a prayer that we can honor without trivializing or abusing our collective memory; and lift a prayer of hope that our world can be reformed, that we can set aside our evil and nasty ways in favor of a way of being that shows real concern and love for one another.

Hoping for all of you that your 9/11 be one of reflection, introspection, prayer, and peace.

Symmetry and the Siren's Call

What if we got what we really wanted? What if perfection were attainable to a universal standard? What if there was one correct and perfect way to decorate your home, dress, raise your children, behave in a marriage, cook a meal, paint a portrait, write a story, breathe? And what if you managed to meet all of those demands, standing high above on the pedestal of perfection, what then?
Millenia ago we, as a human race, constructed a concept of “perfection.” We created a standard for existence by which to measure one another’s success and failures; actually, more for measuring failures. We all bought into the myth that if one worked hard enough, practiced long enough, spent enough money, gave or sacrificed “enough,” then somehow we would become the absolute best human being possible. We collectively decided on the standard for “perfection” and have been grasping for or racing after it ever since.
Or have we?
Could it be that our supposed lust for perfection is, in fact, the biggest shell game in human history? Could it be the best example of herd mentality that ever existed?
Stop for a moment to clearly define, “perfection.” What does it mean? What are the standards for perfection? Go ahead. List them in your mind or visualize a person you think best exemplifies perfection.
Do you actually agree with that idea of perfection? What about that person isn’t perfect? What must be sacrificed in the name of these standards of perfection?
Now, the essential question, “Who handed you those standards?” Another way to say this might be, “Whom did you allow to define perfection for you?” Spend some time considering these questions and be critical. Do you agree with these definitions? Our understanding of perfection seeps into our psyche without our being much aware to its arrival and formation. We see others point to a person and say, “She’s beautiful,” or point to a work of art and say, “”That is absolutely brilliant.” Step back for a moment and consider whether or not you agree with their assessment.
Think for a moment about the people and things you appreciate and admire. What do you find truly perfect? What is perfection for you in your life?
I’m in love with the August 27, 2018, cover of Time magazine. On it, tennis legend Serena Williams stands boldly, confidently, and comfortably behind a quote from her interview that reads, “Nothing about me right now is perfect. But I’m perfectly Serena.”
I think she and this cover are perfectly wonderful.
We say we want perfection and symmetry but, the truth is, we don’t. Not deep down. In fact, truly perfect and symmetrical things disturb us. In Madeleine L’Engle’s Wrinkle in Time, it is the perfect synchronicity of the children’s bouncing balls that clues the reader into the evil that rules the world of IT. The mothers call the children in perfect time to come into their perfect homes for, an assumedly, perfect dinner. Our instincts tell us there is something profoundly wrong with actualized perfection.
We claim to want perfection but also criticize individuals who appear to be perfect, saying they are “fake.” Truthfully, we crave asymmetry and imperfections because they testify to authenticity and integrity. We may place seemingly perfect people on a pedestal but it is the survivor we seek when we need someone to trust, someone who bears her battle scars with pride and who isn’t afraid to show her wounds. Fundamentally we need people who have lived to tell the tale, who are relatable and genuine. In other words, we want to admire people who are perfect but need people who are, instead, just like us in their imperfections and weaknesses.
Serena defiantly declaring the power of her imperfection seems to be essential and necessary medicine for a culture that has grown sick on its airbrushed and photoshopped regular diet. For the sake of our collective health, we need a dose reality as a seemingly perfect specimen of a woman and an athlete standing before the world - one quick to criticize her body, her blackness, her confidence, and her charisma - claiming her generally accepted imperfection in favor of a perfection that is more personal, more honest, and more real.
T. S. Eliot gives us a character who is paralyzed by his imperfections and his lack of confidence in the poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” The character can’t move beyond “watching with women come and go,” because he has played out every scenario in his mind and has predetermined he is doomed to fail. Pitifully, he decides he is too insignificant even to star in the drama of his own life, relegating his role to
an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
Friends, let us not play the fool in our own lives. Let us not believe the immense corpus of perfection mythology and, instead, dare ourselves into lives of asymmetry, one’s full of life and imperfection. In doing so, we will be perfectly ourselves, enjoying days basking in authenticity.