journal entry for today

homely mysteries

The gospel of grace calls us to sing of the everyday mystery of intimacy with God instead of always seeking for miracles or visions.  It calls us to sing of the spiritual roots of such commonplace experiences as falling in love, telling the truth, raising a child, teaching a class, forgiving each other after we have hurt each other, standing together in the bad weather of life, of surprise and sexuality, and the radiance of existence.  Of such is the kingdom of heaven, and of such homely mysteries is genuine religion made...Grace abounds and walks around the edges of our everyday experience.

                                                             --Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel

fellow travelers

I don't know how to express what I experience on Sunday mornings at the church I now attend.  Sometimes I feel completely overtaken and I cannot find any words.  Sometimes I'm afraid that if I try to put it in words, the depth of the experience and the meaningfulness might be lost.  But I sit through the services with tears dripping, dripping...I can't explain why, except that all that is burdensome wells up and floats away and all that is good washes in and over and so the tears drip.

I enter the building like everyone else.  I bring with me the cares and concerns of the week like everyone else.  We sit in gray, padded folding chairs from Costco.  Most often there are lit candles and there is a warmth and comfort in the way the people gather.  I look around and see gray-haired seniors, teens, parents with little ones, middle-aged adults...an assorted and mixed bag of travelers. 

Sometimes it's the very small things...the way the pastor stands with his back to us when he prays over the communion table.  He stands as one of us while he prays, not apart from us, not grander than us, but with us. It's that the seniors seem ok with the teens being there and the middle-aged adults seem ok with the couples being there with their infants and the fact that the teens want to be there at all.  Sometimes it's the simplicity of the services and the worship and even the building...it doesn't feel like a show.  Maybe that's why the tears come...I feel a part, I feel at home...it's not a show, it's a band of followers showing up together and remembering what we have in common...our great need and God's great provision.

Then there is the explicitly expressed reassurance from the pastor that there is room in this church for introverts.   Really?  Have a ever heard this in church anywhere?  In a culture that applauds the go-getter, the confident, the out-spoken?  Do I really not have to convince you of my spirituality by being outwardly demonstrative in worship and the first to smile and greet strangers?

Sometimes you don't even know how heavy your burdens are until someone lifts them from you and you find yourself in tears because of the wave of relief that washes over you.

It has also been the absence of expectations...no need to apologize for life, the associate pastor told us when we tried to explain why we didn't show up for his mid-week group.  It was that the entire church was invited to a baby shower for a pregnant teen in the youth group with no need to mention how she might have ended up in her circumstances, just that she was in need and that was all that mattered.  It was when a new round of small groups started up and all were invited to a potluck meal on Wednesday nights and it was also announced that if you weren't in a small group and just wanted to come eat, you were also welcome, and, in fact,the pastor announced, if you're just too tired after work to fix dinner, come join us...no need to stay for the group.  You're welcome here...just as you are...just join us, won't you?

It has been the messages on Sundays that remind us that what the people around us really need is genuine friendship (and that includes ourselves), that connecting with others over a meal is a form of worship, that a couple raising two autistic children is supported and is as respected for their calling in life as the couple who has decided to be missionaries overseas; it's that the pastor often explains that there are questions that he simply does not know the answers to, it's the respect for and valuing of people in real-life jobs (divinely appointed, says the pastor) as teachers and waitresses and government workers and university professors and stay-at-home moms where they live out their faith and values and sow peace like flower seed on the rocky roads we're all traveling together.

It's the raw honesty of the youth pastor who can get up in front of the congregation and say he's wondered if God was really real or not, how he's been in a valley so low he's written his resignation letter, that he's felt abandoned and alone while in church and on staff, that some of the most biting criticisms have come from people he least expected it from and yet he still has hope.

Anne Lamott says the greatest sermon of all is, "Me too."  I've felt for a long time that the church could learn a lot from the lowliest of twelve step groups...groups where the emphasis is not on our differences but on what we have in common, where it's assumed that God can speak to any of us through any means at anytime, where great courage is sometimes found in just getting out of bed the next morning and being willing to try again.  The vast majority of people will never be applauded for their greatest sacrifices, but it's a great comfort to find myself among so many of them on a Sunday morning in my town, in my corner of the world.  So I'll keep showing up and if the tears keep dripping that's ok with me...the experience makes life rich and deep and meaningful and allows me the chance to touch those thin places--the places where heaven and earth meet.  I'm pretty sure that's what church is meant to be.  And so I sing along with the other travelers...

Earth has no sorrow
That heaven can’t heal...

So lay down your burdens
Lay down your shame
All who are broken
Lift up your face...

So lay down your hurt
Lay down your heart
Come as you are

show me the currents that carry the sea

As I grow older, I continue to face challenges to my thinking and to my faith.  I must continually ask myself when I feel intense anxiety over faith issues or life's disappointments, "Is God bigger than this?"  The challenges of my earlier years were very different...not less than...just very different.  The challenges of these later years are broader.  The questions seem to cover more ground.  The answers have to cover more ground too. Shallow answers do not suffice.  Answers that bubble on the surface are not enough.  Give me the rivers that well up from the depths.  Show me the currents that carry the sea.

strangers and friends

Thy will be done.

We sat in an Al-Anon meeting in a rented room at the Episcopalian church with strangers all sitting in folding metal chairs sharing their heartbreak and struggles. They had all had to let go of someone. One young man toward the end of the meeting shared that he was the one who had to be let go. His father sat beside him. He went on to say to us all that there is hope for us all because he was living proof. If God could turn his life around like He had, He could turn your loved one's life around too, he said.

When our allotted time for the evening was up, we all stood and held each others hands standing in a big circle, all of us strangers and friends at the same time. We stood their holding each others hands--touching each other--and we recited the Lord's Prayer together...Thy will be done. God, you get to be God in all Your indescribable power--this is beyond us to solve. And forgive us, give us, don't test us, deliver us-- without you we are nothing and can do nothing.

Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done.  In me. In all of us who stand before You yearning for heaven and wholeness.

I felt like I had just been to church.

a voice

And just when you think all is lost and that there is no possible way to move forward, a door quietly swings open.  It swings open and suddenly after having run down dark hallways desperately trying locked doors, one gently swings open seemingly on its own accord and you find yourself standing in a doorway flooded with quiet light and you hear a voice say...this is the way, walk in it.

God moves.  God lifts the veil, floods in like a river, swings open the door you could never find, much less open, and there you stand in hope and light. 

I can't prove it--but I know it.  It's happened too many times in my life to be random, too often to be coincidence, enough times for me to come to believe that there is Someone who hears me.  Someone who intervenes.

It's not enough to eradicate all doubt because there have also been many, many times when doors did not swing open and only the tightest and darkest of rat holes was provided as the way out...but even then, a way was provided. 

Too many times to be coincidence, too many times for me to not believe and hope, too many times for me to not pray...not enough times to erase all doubt.  Not enough times to make me think I have this under control.  Not enough times to make me think I can do this alone.

When darkness veils His lovely face, 

I rest on His unchanging grace;

In every high and stormy gale, 

My anchor holds within the veil.

sleep...He is awake

I can't even remember right now what all has happened over the past month--but I can tell you that I feel like I've been crawling through a mine field on my belly wondering at what moment I was either going to implode upon myself or explode into a thousand psychological and emotional fragments.  This period of my life is certainly among the top three most prolonged stressful times of my adult life.

This morning as I sat in my reading chair, the house tranquil and silent in the early morning hours, I read...have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones, and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace.  God is awake.   (Victor Hugo)

If you can believe those words--and I do--there is a sweeping, swelling, all-encompassing peace that comes.

He is awake...

unexpected

A few years ago Ruben and I attended the morning mass at a local Catholic church.  I think its only the second time I've been to a mass except for a recent Catholic funeral I attended. We were between church homes and looking for places to connect with God and for some reason, Ruben had told me the night before that he wanted to attend a nearby Catholic church, maybe because it was reminiscent of his childhood days in church, I don't know.

I know that over time all of us can and do succumb to apathy and boredom with certain rituals and habits, and I think it is often most evident in our religious practices, and I also come from a church background that doesn't have much of an appreciation for the Catholic church.  But what is old hat to one person and an over-familiar ritual can be the newest and freshest of experiences to another. 

For me, the service with its rituals and ceremonial rites conveyed a sense of reverance and awe that I have missed in the churches I have attended all my life.  It was a service rich in symbols--holy water, a golden crucifix held high and leading the silent parade of the priest and attendants as they entered, the ritual prayers, kneeling in unison, prayers recited together, moments set aside for silence, a message spoken with gentleness and firmness about attending to others with love, and the most reverant of all--the holy eucharist taken together in solemn procession and silence except for the priest's blessing spoken over each of us as the wafer was laid on our lips and as we drank from the chalice. This was holy ground.

And one last unexpected gesture has lingered with me...after an hour and a half of reverant and solemn assembly and ceremony beneath a stained glass window the height of two stories, with the priest in his stately robes and with candles and altar attendants surrounding him, he stood at the doors as we left the service, greeting his parishoners, and when he saw Ruben in front of me, he broke into a broad smile and gave him a warm and affectionate swat on the shoulder as though they were old friends and at the same time reached for my hand and said with a broad and hearty smile, "Good to see you this morning!" and it sounded like he meant it.

I left feeling like I had really gone to church.  Somehow it made the rest of the day more meaningful and satisfying and remembering that unexpected and warm gesture even now fills an empty place inside of me.  

I can think of a few friends and family members who would be surprised and skeptical of any attempt to find God in a Catholic church mass, but there He was in rich and meaningful and delightfully loving expressions.

The gate may be narrow, but the meadow on the other side is expansive and rich and full of life and there is room for many.  Makes me feel like there is room for me too.

the sea is still deeper

In so many ways the world seems to be getting smaller and smaller and with technology and the media and the constant feed of information from around the world, it feels like everything is happening in my own backyard.  The weight of the world starts pressing in on me, suffocating me if I let it. 

Taking in the expanse of the sea lifts that weight.  Did you make the sea? God asks me. Do you keep the gulls in the air?  Do you send the storms and waves to carve out the caves and rocks that, to you, have been here for eons and eons?  All those problems you hear about have been going on for millenia and all the while these ancient bastions of rock and sea have been keeping vigil, unmoved by the problems of the world.  Does the world seem to be falling apart to you?  It has fallen apart before in the eyes of men and women whose only perspective is from their narrow fleeting view from their own lives.  

But I live on, God says.  I live on and it's not over until I say it's over.  Look up!  The sea is still deeper than any man has seen, the sky is still wider than any man can take in at one time, the trees are still older than any one man's lifetime, the rocks will still be here even if the entire world economy fails because I live on and nothing will bring me down.  It's not over until I say it's over.

in the middle of a war

When you're in the middle of a war, you cannot see the ultimate outcome, only the mud beneath your feet and the treacherous minefield that lay before you.  Sometimes when you look back at previous battles, at defining moments of your life when you were fighting for something, you can see that if you had given up at the moments when you were filled with hopelessness, you would have lost the war.  So in retrospect, those defining moments become your great acts of courage, the acts that won the war. But in the moment without the glow and warmth of having triumphed, there is only the mud beneath your feet and the crawling forward on your belly when you have little hope of ever making it through to the other side.

Only when the smoke and gunfire are over do we really know which of our acts turned the tide for victory or for failure.  Only the end will tell us which moments were the defining moments, the moments that changed our lives and the lives around us for good or for ill. 

While the mud sucks at our every step, we wonder...is this a war I will eventually lose?  will I battle but not live to see the victory?  should I give up now and move on?  will I ever see the victory and freedom I'm longing for?  what if the tide turns today and tomorrow I find myself standing with arms outstretched in the light of victory?

Seven years ago I was in a war.  I fought heaven and earth, but no one else really knows.  It was not a visible war.  No one saw me charging with my bayonet or crawling through the brush to ambush the enemy.  No one saw me wiping the blood off the wounded in the middle of the night. I still don't really know how much my fighting determined the outcome, but I know that I fought and that the war was eventually won.

I'm in a different battle these days and I don't know what the final outcome will be. But when faced with the choice now to give up the fight or to keep marching through the sucking mud, I sometimes hear a voice challenging me...what if the next moment wins the war?  what if tomorrow the bloodshed ends?  can you afford to give up now?

tidal wave

I am growing older and can't stop it.  I feel more and more helpless, more and more overwhelmed by life, by the 6:00 news, by noise and clutter and flashing lights and honking horns, by the Internet, by too many choices and decisions, by the clamoring of my own inner needs.  I am only in my fifties.  If I'm feeling this now, what on earth is it going to be like in my sixties? seventies? eighties?  Will I even still be here?  It all gives new meaning to what it means to be "out of control."  I'm realizing that its not just other family members who are beyond my control, or their choices, or co-workers or finances--it's every tiny parcel of every day.  I do not know what is coming today or the next hour or the next minute.  How do you stay open hearted and exposed to the good and the beautiful when you're startling and flinching whenever there is a sudden noise or that unexpected phone call or that physical sensation that you're trying to manage? 

Late in the morning I felt hungry and I was out running errands and decided to get one of my favorite meals.  I stood in line pretending that my whole life was in order, not letting on that I felt weak as a kitten and vulnerable as a naked baby bird.  I bought my meal...have a nice day, the girl behind the counter said.  I needed quiet, so I drove to the river and sat in the car and watched as people here and there fed the geese and pigeons. 

I took a bite of my food and watched a man and a woman and three young girls set their picnic out on the picnic table.  The girls threw bread crumbs to the birds.  I chewed my food but felt a tidal wave of grief welling up and out of my soul.  Stay with it, I told myself.  Look at it.  Feel it. I stopped chewing and stared at my food and let it come, swelling up and up like water filling a cavern, rising and suddenly spilling over the top until the tears were dripping down and I had to gasp to breathe. 

It was my daughter and all that's been lost, it was my oldest's suffering I had recently witnessed,  it was about my brother being gone--we are not five anymore, we are four--no more chances with him.  He's gone. It was about the stress and relentless strain of the last three years. It was about aging and about loneliness--these moments that are lived out of the deep wells of our lives are always lived out alone.  They can't be shared.  The depth and breadth and the waves and currents are too much to get out in words. 

I listened to the music playing on my car stereo.  I listened to one song over and over.  I pressed the replay button--three times, five times, ten times, and let the grief spill out.  I listened and watched the three girls feed the geese and then the gulls--the gulls riding and sailing the wind, spiraling up, riding silently down, now this way, now that, a mass of gray and white living leaves riding the wind.  I let what was sealed up inside come to the surface and gasp. 

Having time alone and having the quiet and giving myself space and privacy to let the waters well up and spill out was what I needed. When the waters rise, the leaves and debris float on the surface and finally are washed out when the waters spill over the top.  It leaves the basin cleaner.  A clean basin is easier to manage--less debris. 

It doesn't change any of the circumstances that cause me grief but it does allow me to accept them and make room for them without trying to control them.  It allows for the co-existence of pain and peace.  It takes that festering wound, sealed over with taut, red and swollen skin that's too tender to touch and brings it into the healing air, let's it begin to heal.

more sure than ever before

"Life is complex...But if I tell you that when I lost my way, I found it again by following the moss growing on the north side of trees, I will almost certainly have to warn you that in the redwood forests there are many trees covered with moss on all sides...I hope you will abandon the urge to simplify everything...[and] appreciate the fact that life is complex."

                                                             --M. Scott Peck, M.D., Further Along the Road Less Traveled

During the final years of my first marriage, which ultimately died and ended in divorce, one of the most difficult things I had to face in myself was the fact that I had for so long made excuses, rationalized, provided (weak) explanations, covered up, and in many other ways pretended...until I couldn't hold the facade together anymore.  It was a shock to me when, unable to hold the mask up any longer, I began to tell the truth, and then discovered how many people had seen the truth long before I did.

The fact that I could not or would not face the truth and, therefore, could not or would not see the truth, shook me to the core and still affects me today.  It shook my confidence in my ability to see things as they really are.  Life has become much more complex to me since my divorce and since I've gotten older.  I am less sure of more things...more sure of a few things.

There have been too many times in my life now when I have made judgements about others only to discover how terribly misguided my judgements were.  There have been too many times in my life now when I was positive I was seeing clearly, only to discover I wasn't seeing clearly at all.  There have been too many times now in my life when I've lost hope, only to see the impossible happen right before my eyes.  I've been dogmatic about beliefs that now 20...30...40 years later, I've given up altogether.

Now in my fifties, dealing with new challenges...aging, relationships that I thought would last forever, now gone...I am less sure about many, many things...and yet, more sure about a few things than ever before.

burying my brother

On Saturday, December 15, 2012, ten days before Christmas, my family and I buried my brother.  I had been contemplating more and more as I got older what it was going to be like to have to lose my parents.  I was not thinking that I might lose my brother before that.

I received the call from my sister while I was standing outside of the bank with my husband...just standing there in the parking lot about to get in the car and the call came.  He was gone.  He had fallen after dinner, maybe his heart, I don't know, but he was gone, she said.  I wailed, "No! No! No!", but it didn't make any difference.  I clung to the phone that night crying and listening to my parents and my sister crying...we hung on the phone and cried together, several thousand miles apart.

We flew to Texas the next day and by that night I was wrapping my arms around my little mother saying, "I'm sorry...I'm sorry, Mom...I'm so sorry!"  What else is there to say?  The next four days were filled with decisions and planning, sometimes heartlessly demanding.  My mother never looked as small as she did the day I saw her standing in a room full of caskets, nodding her head at one, pain etched across her face in silence, tears running down her cheeks.

I stood at the podium in the chapel, unable to stop shaking, unable to steady my voice, barely able to read the words on my pieces of paper.  All so surreal.  I saw his body and knew it was him, but asked myself silently, "Is it really him?  Why do his hands look so old?"

We buried him on my parents' land, there near the road, there where Mom could watch over him and know that there would be no more suffering, just the absence that we will all have to live with and the loss of all that could have been.  The next morning while it was still dark, I walked outside wearing Mom's winter coat that she has hanging by the back door.  I stood there by the mound of dirt and told him I was sorry and late that afternoon Mom and I planted bluebonnet seeds across the soil and watered them hoping they will come to life in the spring.

You never know what's coming.  One of the hardest things about life is keeping an open, receptive heart when you know full well that tomorrow could bring the shock of loss or betrayal or death...with no second chances.  I've lost my brother.  I know where he is...he is on the other side of that river and I will see him again one day, but today...he is gone and there is a grief that fills that emptiness. 

so stop pretending and tell the truth

You know how when someone is talking to you and they're working from behind a facade and you can sense the pretending?  You know how you feel when they tell you things that you know for a fact are not true and they're trying to paint a different picture?  Maybe they're embarrassed and so they won't get real about stuff.  Maybe they're arrogant and won't face the truth about themselves or others or things in general.  Maybe they're inviting you to their house for an evening and you know they're involved in a pyramid scheme and just want to get you on board with their efforts to make themselves some money.  They come across like the salesperson that knocks on your door in the evening when you're tired from working all day and they force you to be rude because they just won't take no for an answer.  They're not really talking to you, they're trying to make you do something.

I think God probably feels the same feelings a lot.  Sometimes I think He's listening to us and thinking, "You know, just stop the talk and just tell me the truth."  God isn't offended by our honesty, no matter how virulent.  It's what He wants.  So stop the pretending and tell the truth.

in the canned vegetable aisle

I was on a cleaning binge recently.  I had started early in the morning and the more I cleaned the better I felt.  I can be really losing it emotionally and sometimes the fastest cure is cleaning the bathrooms and mopping the kitchen floor.  So I was cleaning and couldn't stop, even though Ruben and I had planned to run some errands.  Just a little more, I kept telling him. 

Finally, we left on our errands and at our first stop, I caught sight of an old friend across the store.  We had been friends over a decade before and had drifted apart, our lives going in very different directions.  We hadn't talked in years.  Besides that, she had been struggling in her marriage back then and I had tried to encourage her in it, but it had been me that ended up divorced, and I had never known what she thought of me after that.  I wasn't sure I wanted to find out now and so I hid in the canned vegetable aisle.

But a few minutes later, I came around a corner and nearly ran into her and when I said her name, she looked up and seemed genuinely glad to see me.  After exchanging brief generic greetings, I found out that she lived overseas now and that she was actually flying back the next day and only happened to be in the store looking for some last minute items before she finished packing for the flight.  I asked her how she was...how are you really, I asked.  She looked back at me as if to see if I really meant it and then the tears filled her eyes and she began to pour it out.  I stood there feeling like I was on holy ground...be quiet, I thought, this is grief and great hardship.   She described the barreness in her marriage, that she didn't think she could last more than a few more months, she spoke of the tremendous difficulties of her day-to-day life in another country and culture.  She told me she was a failure.

Whatever I have imagined that people have thought of me because of my divorce, one thing I discovered that I had not anticipated was that there was a great mercy...even for me.  I touched my friend's arm and told her that I had worried about what she thought of me because my marriage failed, that I felt like a failure too, but that I had discovered that there is a great, great mercy for those of us who fail.  There is mercy for you, too, I told her.  Lots and lots of mercy to make up for all the failures and sorrows and grief.  She asked me if I would pray for her whenever she came to mind.  She asked me to remember her email address and if I ever felt prompted to write her, it would be greatly appreciated she said.  I knew she had to go, she had a trip to pack for and a plane to catch.  So we hugged and said good bye and she was gone.

As we drove away, I told Ruben what had happened while I stood in the canned vegetable aisle.  I told him that it seemed to me to be a divine encounter.  There was a reason why I was driven to keep cleaning and cleaning this morning.  There was a ten-minute window in time when two lives living on two different continents would bump into each other in a store and an appointment was being orchestrated, an appointment where failures could be spoken out and mercy shared to cover them.  May God bless my friend, wherever she is right now.