Why I Go on ASP

If you already know me, you know that I am a high school teacher and that this past school year was...not easy. If ever there was a year to take the summer completely off and stare into space for ten weeks, it was this year. But on July 4th, I found myself--once again--in a big white van full of teenagers on the way to Kentucky. The first time I made such a journey was when I was 14 years old, and since then, I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve gone back on ASP. These days, I sit up by the steering wheel with a GPS soundtrack instead of jammed into the furthest back row with three good friends and a pile of pillows and cassette tapes of REM and The Cure, but the essentials are the same. ASP isn’t easy, but there are reasons why I keep going, and the apostle Peter and Julie want me to give you an account for what it is that keeps bringing me back. This morning, I’d like to share why I keep going back to ASP.

The first reason is that it’s always an adventure. This year we had the new struggle of trying to follow Covid procedures and figuring out how to navigate the logistics of the center, which meant that the females in the group were staying in a place accessible only by van, separate from the men and the campus where dinner and evening gatherings were. And devotions and materials were somewhere else. And breakfast was in town. The first two days had an additional layer of “Where should I be right now? And where should the van be? And how can we supervise all of these different areas with at least two adults in each one? ...Where should I be right now?” But along with that adventure came the moment that made me laugh harder than I had in quite a while. After unloading Rick and AJ and the tools Rick would need to do an extra water-pipe repair after dinner, the girls and I drove the van part way up the mountain to the female living quarters. We were going to be last in line for our showers and we were hungry and tired and wet from a sudden rainstorm that had taken us by surprise at the work site. “Go fast!” the girls said. But as I started up the incline, we heard the big cooler of ice water slosh and tip over. I couldn’t look back, but Eve and Aubrey and Leah could. They screamed. Eve unbuckled and catapulted over the seat into the back of the van. “What?! What’s happening?” I asked, as I slowed down. “Don’t STOP!!” yelled Eve, as the wave of ice water she had been trying to hold back with her arms overtook her as I decelerated. Everything we had in the van, including Eve, was drenched. The sight of the ice and water bursting from the back of the van when I opened the doors combined with the fatigue of the day set me off into fits of laughter. It still makes me smile.

The second reason involves a little snapshot into the life of our homeowner. Debbie (name changed) worked for a Title I preschool 45 minutes from her house (in good weather,) making not quite enough money to make ends meet. Her husband, a former big rig driver, claimed to be either really lucky or really unlucky--he’d been struck by lightning three times. I’m not sure if repeated electrocution was the cause of his illness, but he is not well and needs a wheelchair along with other medical care. He can no longer work. One day Debbie came home to find her husband had fallen out of his wheelchair and had drifted in and out of consciousness on the floor all day long. She worried about leaving him alone and decided that when the school year ended, she would retire. Then her car broke down. She had to decide to fix the car or fix her house or keep leaving her husband unattended. In the winter, her uninsulated house was so cold that when she opened her kitchen cabinets, it felt like opening the freezer, but she had to fix the car and she had to retire to care for her husband. And so, she told us many times, we were the actual real-life answer to her prayers. She had been praying for months, asking God what she should do, and God sent us. 

To have someone say, “I asked for a miracle, and God sent you” and to know that (a) I was part of God’s response to one of his beloved and (b) I could have chosen not to be is a realization that really gives me pause. Over the course of seven weeks, 40-some people agreed to be the hands, feet, tape measures, saws, and hammers of God in answer to Debbie’s prayers, and I got to be one of them. It’s quite a privilege.

And I’d like to explain one more reason I keep going on ASP. ASP doesn’t just give Debbie and the other homeowners hope, it provides a much-needed booster to those of us who are really just there to supervise and empower our youth to be the answer to prayers. If you haven’t seen a teenage girl become the master of the circular saw, you’ve missed a great joy in life. Watching a group of high school students work together, cheer each other on, try out new skills and power tools, make calculations, remind each other to hydrate, hold the ladder or climb the ladder, show their peers and elders grace and a sense of humor in the presence of the inevitable but frustrating errors and ice water mishaps is a major source of hope for me. 

God doesn’t promise that you’ll never need to utter a desperate prayer, and God knows many of us did so during the last year, but the Bible does tell us stories of people whose desperate prayers were answered in unexpected ways. So if this year, more than others, made me want to do nothing, this year, more than others, I needed ASP to show me that the kids are OK, that there is still goodness and selflessness and laughter in the world. I saw it in Bell County, KY, and it came home with me and lives here too. We are the answer to each other’s prayers.

“So let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at harvest time, if we do not give up.” --Galatians 6:9

Waiting in Line at the DMV on Good Friday in a Pandemic

When I arrive, 30 minutes before opening,

the line, everyone six feet separate,

stretches past an ice cream shop and a donut shop

through an empty lot of lifeless weeds.

By 7:30 a.m., the line extends

down a side street, and people have brought lawn chairs.

The sun has risen, but the air is 22 degrees, 

and my toes hurt. One must suffer, 

one way or another, at the DMV.

We pilgrims are silent.

The man two people behind me tries three times

to get the man between us to admit his humanity

to chuckle, to confess, to agree,

but the man only grunts. He knows the rules: 

it may be a sunny morning, 

and Christ might have died for us,

but we are in line at the DMV.

As I planned my mission,

my husband asked me, “Can you imagine

working every day for forty years

at the DMV? Wouldn’t you hate people too?”

But a woman in a Carhartt coat 

and warm, sturdy boots works the line.

She holds the book I brought about the Little Rock Nine

but am too frozen-fingered to open

as I check that I have the right paperwork.

She calls me honey, like I’m her beloved

niece and not some 46-year-old woman shivering

in the bright morning sun in an empty lot

on the morning of Good Friday.

I AM the Beloved 

she serves at the DMV.

 

When God Provides a Worm

Yesterday, Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. It felt like just one thing too many to handle. I never met her, but I almost believed in her the way you believe in a Bible character (I read Notorious RBG but also knew her to be heroically serving the country for the good of us all in spite of multiple rounds of cancer and the fact that she was a frail 87.) Her death felt like the worst kind of blow. How can we survive her loss in the midst of everything else? It was too much.  

I had been on a long walk with colleagues, talking about the dismal state of educators and education when the news broke, and I was cold. I decided to take a hot bath and read the book of Job. Job loses everything. And yet, he somehow manages to still bless God, to say, “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” And when things get worse still, and even his wife says, “Why don’t you just curse God and die?” he tells her that if we are going to accept blessings why should we not also accept hardship? It’s oddly helpful stuff. 

Before I got to Job, though, I finished the book of Jonah, which I had started the night before. Jonah feels familiar. We were both called to serve people who we sometimes think maybe don’t deserve us. We both tried to run away from the call. We both eventually gave in and did what God wanted. And then the people who we thought would certainly not hear us, oddly... do. Here I am, doing a job I didn’t plan to do and was weirdly called into doing--twice. And now, again, I’m being called into teaching in an impossible situation for a community this is being vocally disrespectful and mean. And then kids email me from last year and say mine was their favorite class, and could I please write a letter of recommendation? And what can I do with that except sigh, cancel a few more hours of sleep, and write the letter? And then the kids who are currently failing suddenly turn in all of the things from the last month with a sweet email saying they are sorry it’s all so late, but it’s finally done. Sometimes I just want to walk out of the city of Nineveh and lie down in the blazing sun. I get it, Jonah. I get it.

I had gotten so far in the story on Thursday night and stopped because that was the part that I had really needed. I figured, “Why not finish the last chapter before moving on to Job?” 

In Jonah 4, God provides a great plant to grow up over Jonah and shade him from the sun, and Jonah is very happy about the plant. But the next day God PROVIDES a worm that chews the plant and makes it wither. Then God PROVIDES a scorching wind. It made me pause, this repetition of the word “provides.” Like it’s a gift? Like it’s something Jonah needs? Jonah, still angry that he has successfully saved the unworthy-now-worthy Ninevites is angry. So angry, he wishes to die. And God says, “You have been concerned about this plant, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. And should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left—and also many animals?” 

The end. 

Seriously. The book ends there.

I must have known that. I’ve read Jonah many times before. But I still felt shocked. 

All along, I’ve been thinking about the story of Jonah as our (his and my) story: we get called, we resist, we get called again and again, we obey. The Ninevites hear, repent, and live. Jonah might be a jerk, but he saves them. I never thought the book was about the Ninevites. I thought it was about getting called until you cannot resist, about how we can choose to ignore God, but eventually God can be really really persuasive. I had not really thought about what it means that after Jonah obeys, after the Ninevites are saved, God provides a worm. Even after Nineveh and the 120,000 people and also many animals are spared, God is still saving Jonah from himself. 

The story is God’s. The people and animals are God’s. The plant is God’s. The worm is God’s. He will save us from ourselves, whether it takes a storm, a fish, an asshole prophet, or a pestilent worm. 

The book of Jonah ends with the words of God, as it certainly should, but that means we don’t know how Jonah responds. Maybe, for once, he doesn’t talk back. Or maybe it’s because the story is as unfinished as it feels. Fish, worms, winds, pandemics, political chaos: God provides. 

Cain Removes His Mask in Public

When we first decided to stay in our homes in order to protect each other from the unmitigated spread of Covid19, there was a sense of solidarity, a sense each and every one of us carried some of the responsibility of keeping each other safe. We were—briefly--like a big, global family. There were, of course, outliers (the toddlers of the family) who didn’t quite seem to understand the basic principles behind the stay-at-home orders, but for the most part, that came across as whiny and lacking self-discipline or as a lack of understanding and access to reliable information.


Two months later, the atmosphere has changed, but, given that over 88,000 people have died of Covid19 as of May 15, not in the way that I would have predicted. Two months ago, 88,000 deaths and counting would have scared the shit out of almost everyone. We’re still losing 1,500 Americans every day to the virus, but the prevailing attitude is not one of fear and caution but of belligerence.


Before I go further, I should acknowledge that I am speaking from a position of safety and privilege. Yes, I am working many hours a day in front of a computer doing a fairly frustrating, nebulous task. But I am doing it from a comfortable home in which each of the four of us who live here can be in a separate room. We each have devices that connect to the internet, which falters surprisingly infrequently given its heavy use. We have enough food. We have paychecks and health insurance. We are fine.


That said, most of the people in my immediate daily circle who are complaining about being “done” with this for a variety of reasons also live in comfortable homes with internet and food and one or two paychecks. People are just growing anxious about the uncertainty, about the inconvenience, about the stress of seeing the same people constantly for two months. We miss our luxuries, our routines, our friends and our families. I get that.


What I do NOT get is that we seem to have shifted from a society that was collectively alarmed at the prospect of 100,000 deaths (almost a certainty at this point) and resolute in its determination to keep that number as low as possible to a society that is angry that it is being asked to save each other’s lives. People are showing anger that in order to get back the things they miss—opening the shops, visiting friends and family, getting back to the business of daily life—they will have to wear masks. They are furious that the government suggests that we could return to a more normal and productive version of society if people agree to be tested for a potentially lethal illness, have their movements tracked and then agree not to spread a potentially deadly disease if they have been exposed to it. People are waving guns at the people trying to make sure as many of us live through this as possible. It’s weird. They’re posting false news articles about the government stealing children away from parents and about masks causing carbon-dioxide poisoning. They’re taking assault rifles into government buildings. They’re hero-worshipping those who actively flaunt recommendations for NOT KILLING people. Why? Because they are being asked to stand six feet away from each other and wear masks to save others’ lives, and they are disgusted with this mandate to really try not to kill each other. THAT I do not understand.


In thinking about this shift in attitude, I suddenly thought about the story of Cain and Abel and Cain’s question to God: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Essentially, that’s what people are asking now, the Biblical question “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Is it MY job to keep HIM safe?


The context of this question in its original story, though, provides the answer. When Cain asks this question of God, it isn’t a lament. It’s a response to God asking him about Abel, which was an invitation to confess and beg forgiveness. It’s a response uttered even though Cain knew he’d killed Abel. He knew God knew he’d killed Abel, and he knew God knew he knew God knew. In essence, it was a ridiculous, peevish, childish, selfish, unGodly thing to say. Not only does the context imply that yes, at the very least you ARE responsible for not killing your brother, it points out that even asking the question is a decidedly jerky move.


We could, of course, follow the line of questions and answers into the New Testament. Well, who is my neighbor that I’m supposed to “love?” I’m sure Jesus doesn’t roll his eyes any more than God does in the Old Testament, but his answer also makes clear that the question itself is absurd. Answer: even the people you don’t like, even your “enemies.” Everyone. You don’t get to only love the people you already love. And then there’s the rich young man who asks what else he can do, thinking he’s done it all, but walks away sad when Jesus tells him to sell everything he has, give the profits to the poor, and follow Jesus. The answer is always going to be to wear a face covering if that will save someone else’s life.

We can hide behind our cries of “freedom” and “rights” and “not my problem,” but somehow I’m pretty sure that if I can see that these lines are petty, childish cries of “but I shouldn’t have to not kill my brother! You’re violating my freedom to kill my brother!” then God isn’t fooled either, as God never has been.

The magnificence of small

I had a low-electronics high-outside weekend. It meant I had to stay up to midnight last night getting things ready for this morning and that I woke up with a decent (but subsiding, so no worries) headache. I actually feel really good about how much better I've gotten over the past six weeks at riding the waves of living. Granted, the waves right now are small in my little world. Manageable. There are really big tsunami-sized waves in the bigger world that aren't really my job other than to be ready to deal with the impact when/if they arrive in my own little life. But learning to accept my little waves is a good start at being ready for any waves, right?

 

I was thinking, on a bike ride, about how when I was young, I assumed my life was going to be big. I guess I thought I would be "important" in one way or another. Then the reality is that while I am very important to a smallish number of people in a local sort of way, you could also turn that around and say that I'm just your ordinary suburban English teacher--sort of a nobody from nowhere.

 

And then I look at trees budding and ride my bike in the slanting late afternoon sunshine and notice the day on which both the spring frogs and the summer frogs are making their music. There is a moment when my daughter panics because Mother's Day is so close and a moment when my son waits for everyone to finish their s'mores before he goes inside to retrieve a sweatshirt so that he can put away the marshmallows at the same time. 

 

I reworded my vision for myself this weekend. My life might be smaller than I thought it would be, but it's also more precise. The moments are tiny, but they are like those teeny pictures painted on grains of rice or like snowflakes or butterfly wings when you magnify them: small enough to throw away, to miss entirely but, if you look closely, every bit as beautiful and miraculous as anything else in the world.

 

Small, I decided, is also OK. No, more than that. Small is also valuable. Worth slowing down to look at closely. Worthy of reverence and gratitude and awe. My existence looks and feels smaller than I had dreamed, but if examined carefully, if magnified and admired with a sense of appreciation for the endless capacity for life to be more and more magnificent and complex the closer one gets to the details that make up reality, scale reveals itself as irrelevant. 

 

I was reminded of an idea I read in an L. M. Montgomery book (I believe it’s Rilla of Ingleside, if you’re looking for a good piece of historical fiction): in order to be infinitely great, God must also be infinitely small. A God that sees only mountains and celebrities is limited. A truly infinitely large, omnipresent God must also know the microscopic organisms that live in streams, must see the trajectory of every single rain drop, must care as deeply for a fragile baby (even one born in a barn, an expendable subject in a mighty empire?) as for world leaders and sports stars. A truly infinite God must, it seems, care deeply about even the small ripples of my life. And so shall I.

Teaching Poetry and Learning Grace

My creative writing class. They are a sentence unto themselves and then some. And yet, just as a colleague promised, for the very reasons that they make me crazy, they will also be a class I remember for a long time and maybe even miss. In almost every sense of the typical use of the phrase, they are not my best students, but they are making me a better teacher.

Last week we worked on meter and rhyme. It was a struggle. A struggle that sort of defies description. Even so, yesterday we carried on with a really cool villanelle lesson that a colleague designed in which every student writes a single line in iambic pentameter with a few assigned end rhymes and then posts the line on a padlet that everyone can see. Then the homework was to cut and paste those lines into a villanelle template. Today’s plan was to look at how those same lines took on different meaning when used in different places in the villanelle: the point being that form affects meaning. Of course, today’s plan was entirely contingent on at least SOME students having turned in a sample villanelle. ONE person did. ONE.

I put a bunch of zeros in the gradebook. I showed up to class ready to lay into them. Why? Why couldn’t they do this super easy task? Why did they sign up for creative writing if they couldn’t write this one pre-made poem? I literally cannot make these people learn. I literally cannot make an assignment easy enough that they will even attempt to do it. Despair and frustration overtook my ability to make a new lesson plan. My colleague’s wise advice was to shame them by showing them that LITERALLY I was just asking them to cut and paste, that they could have done their homework in five minutes. Then make them do the assignment in five minutes and carry on with the lesson as planned. When the bell rang and they didn’t sit down and begin the Tuesday check-in, I stormed into the middle of the room and told them that I was already feeling low on grace due to having to change my lesson plans because noone did their homework and could they PLEASE just do the Tuesday check-in on classroom.

And then maybe because of the nature of grace, because it comes when we need it and not when we earn it, I was given grace.

One of my students raised his hand and said that the Tuesday check-in wasn’t showing up on classroom. I apologized and said I’d go post it. As I was posting it, I overheard what my students were chattering about: poetry. My posse of students, more than half of whom are failing CREATIVE WRITING (!) as well as multiple other classes, most of whom have experienced some version of being kicked out of their houses or lost parents because of the actions of those parents, most of whom struggle just to show up on a regular basis, many of whom see their deans more than their classroom teachers, some of whom speak English as a second language, were talking about how they like poetry. (“Then why the hell didn’t you do the poetry homework?” I thought.) The rest of them were talking about the fact that I am their only teacher who does a check-in. They wanted to know why and if I use the information for planning. I told them that I don’t necessarily use it for planning, but I like to know about them, and some people will tell me things when asked that they wouldn’t initiate on their own. I want to be here if anyone needs me. “That’s nice,” said a very uber-cool young man. “I like that you do this.” And so, because of the nature of grace, instead of shaming or blaming or accusing, something moved me to say instead, “What’s going on? My lesson plan was to look at how lines take on different meanings in a bunch of different villanelles, but I didn’t get a bunch of villanelles, and so today might not be as good as I meant it to be. Why did this happen?”

Three people said they wrote their poems on paper and didn’t know they had to be turned in electronically. “OK,” I said. “Maybe we can still work with that. Let me think about that. Get them out.” Everyone else started to babble about how they just didn’t get it. “Didn’t get what?” I asked. “Tell me where the confusion starts.” About ten people raised their hands. After everyone had spoken once or twice, I said that I was hearing two possible places of confusion. One was that they didn’t understand what a villanelle does, and the other was that they didn’t see how to make sense of a bunch of random lines that didn’t necessarily go together. Most students said it was the second problem. The problem, dear teacher, was that my students want their poems to make sense. They didn’t want to write just anything and turn it in. Oh.

And then more grace happened. To show them that the point of the assignment was to help them see how form can help MAKE meaning, I pulled up the one poem that had been turned in. It was from a student who has not turned in anything else. She is from Colombia and struggles with English in addition to having the usual (in this class) list of personal issues. I had thought it odd that the handful of people who always turn in their work had not but that she had. With her permission, I projected her poem on the board and read it out loud. I read it with my most expressive awe-filled voice. I paused after a couple of the stanzas and pointed out something beautiful that had happened because of the form. When I finished reading, there was a moment of silence. “Wasn’t that beautiful?” I asked. “Didn’t she make something meaningful out of the lines that originally had nothing to do with each other?” The whole class nodded, unusually silent. I looked over at the poet, and she had her head down with her hood pulled up. I told her I didn’t mean to embarrass her but to show everyone what the villanelle form can do. She sat up, and tears were running down her face. Her friend, another native Spanish speaker, but one more adept at speaking in English, said, “No miss. She isn’t embarrassed. She’s...how do you say this? She wrote that for someone in particular. It’s emotional for her.” And then the class began to reread the poem and murmur about how beautiful it really was. They literally patted her on the back. They told her it was her best writing so far, and it was.

I held my breath. My lungs were filled with grace.

“Do you see how the form can help you write something beautiful?” I asked.

The class nodded.

“Do you want to try again?”

The class nodded.

“Do you want to just use your own rhymes and go it alone already?”

The class exhaled in relief and asked for me to post the template back on the board and a new assignment on classroom. One girl moved to her focus spot at a table by herself. Other people pulled up websites with rhymes. People started counting syllables on their fingers. Five hands went up: could I check this line? Did it have the right number of syllables? Did it make sense?

I ran around for about ten minutes posting things on classroom, answering questions, suggesting rhyme options. Then I stood still and looked at my room full of poets. They were learning. So was I.

The Badness Makes Friday Good

This year is the first time I have seen any sense in calling Good Friday “good.” Of course Good Friday isn’t good without Easter, but this year I see that Easter would not be the good news it really is without Good Friday.  I used to think Jesus could still die for us and arise from the grave if we did not kill him, and I suppose this is true, but the fact that the people Jesus loved were so bad is the reason Good Friday is so good.

The Good Friday sermon this year was arguably one of the best sermons I’ve ever heard. It rocked my theological world. It was a sermon designed for a literature nerd, making connections between all sorts of verses from all over the Bible, but the part that really has changed my thinking is the translation of Jesus’ last words, “It is finished,” followed by his last action, “He gave up his spirit.” According to Pastor Darr, “It is finished” is not a phrase of despair; it’s not what you say when you throw in the towel and admit defeat. It’s not what you say when your team is eliminated from the end-of-year tournament. The three words are a translation of one word that is the kind of word you would say when you cross the finish line of a marathon, the kind of word you would use when you defend your doctoral dissertation, the kind of word you use when you finish grading 110 final exams and leave for the summer. It’s a word that means, “Yes! I did it!” In the context of the crucifixion, it means that Jesus has accomplished his mission.  And what is his mission? To reveal to humanity the extent of God’s love. Then, “he gave up his spirit” translates more like “he handed over his spirit.” It wasn’t defeat; it was choice.  If it had been Jesus’ will to overpower the soldiers, he tells his disciples, he could have called down an army of angels.  No, he accomplishes his mission through his death on the cross.  I never left a Good Friday service feeling so beloved and hopeful, but it was the next night and on Easter morning that the full impact of Good Friday hit me.

Saturday night we were dealing with the very eleven-year-old-boyness of our eleven-year-old boy. My sister reminded me today that he is a wonderful person, and I do know this, but yesterday he was doing his very best to be as maximally annoying and difficult as he could, and he’s pretty good at being annoying and difficult. By dinnertime, even his extremely patient father had had enough and sent him up to his room during dinner. I believe in dinner together, so although I went along with the punishment for a while, I wanted reconciliation to happen while we were still around the table. I went up to his room to talk to him. The first thing out of my mouth, by the grace of God, was, “I love you. There’s not much you could do to make me not love you because you are my boy.” My point was going to be that his behavior isn’t about me but about who he intends to be and how he intends to interact with the rest of the world, but as the words came out of my mouth, they started to vibrate the Good Friday strings that had recently been plucked.

The following morning, Easter morning, is usually my favorite morning of the year. This year, though, I was grumpy because our house, even at its best, is never picked up. I sometimes think I should quit my job so I can stay home while everyone is gone and throw away all of their stuff. I am angry pretty much every moment I spend at home and not either sleeping or eating. I feel, consequently, like a terrible parent and spouse. This morning our Easter egg hunt, inside because of the weather, started in the living room. While the kids were ecstatically finding eggs, I was busy being angry that the telescope the kids received for CHRISTMAS was still in the LIVING ROOM. Lord help me, that seemed like the worst thing in the world this morning, especially when combined with all the piles of stuff we don’t need that have become the constant state of our dining room and the piles of Christmas and birthday presents in our family room.  It was Easter morning, and I was angry, as I am always angry lately. Then I was angry at myself for being angry on Easter and for being angry so often and not being a joyful mother or person. Ugh. To intensify my lack of joy, I decided, as I often do, that I am a horrible person and not worthy of anyone’s love. Fortunately for me, my son displayed a bit of annoying and selfish behavior, and when I flashed back to our conversation the night before, suddenly the pieces fell into place. Easter means that even when I am angry, petty, stupid, negative, and self-centered, God will still come back. Every Easter. Every day. There is nothing I can say or do or be that will make God not love me. I could torture and kill him, and he would love me. It is finished. Jesus showed me that before I said, “I love you. There’s not much you could do to make me not love you because you are my boy,” God had said that to me. My behavior might affect how I feel and how I get along with others, but there is no amount of grumpiness or perfectionism or pettiness that will drive away God.

That is the good news of Easter. It’s not just about conquering death. Jesus could have accidentally fallen off a cliff and conquered death. Jesus could have been hunted down by the Roman army while all of his friends and fellow Jews fought to the death to defend him; Jesus could then have defeated death in a triumphant in-your-face sort of act, but that is not how it happened. Instead, his religious leaders resented him, his followers betrayed and denied him, and his people told Pilate that they did not call him their king and wanted Barabas released instead of Jesus. Jesus didn’t come to defeat the Romans; he came to prove God’s undefeatable love for us. The good news of Jesus is not that he came back from death; it’s that he came back from death to us, the angry, the resentful, the petty, the selfish, the annoying, the stubborn, the weak, the frightened, and the stupid. In the last few months of his life, he saw the very worst that humanity has to offer, and he managed to hand over his spirit and say, “It is finished”--I did it. I have shown them that God loves them no matter what. Now they will know that there is nothing they can do that could make me not love them. Bam.

If humans can kill Jesus on a cross, and he will still come back and love and comfort them, surely he forgives me for all of the darkness in my heart too. It is proven. It is finished. Amen. Hallelujah. Good.

31What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? 32He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? 33Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. 34Who then is the one who condemns? No one. Christ Jesus who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. 35Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? 36As it is written:

“For your sake we face death all day long;
we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.” 

37No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:31-39.)

Running into the Sun

My son is sick. I'm not sure what he has, but since he's already on antibiotics from the ear infection he had last week, I'm going to guess it's a virus and we just need to wait it out. He missed his wax museum performance. Poor kid. After he was sent home on Tuesday with a fever and sore throat, I put in for a sub on Wednesday and stayed home with him. Staying home with a feverish Adam is not a hard task, and, as a bonus, it meant that I could run at 6am with the sunrise. As I was running up a hill on a grass trail with the sun directly in front of my face at the top of the hill, it seemed like life was just about perfect. 

But life isn't perfect--mine or anyone else's. I was there because my kid was sick. That's not perfect. I can no longer run as much or as fast as I want to, and I'm facing the fact that this is a permanent condition. I have degenerating vertebrae, and they aren't going to grow back. I'm only going to get older. Older, if my grandmothers are any example, means dementia and total loss of mobility. Then there are other things about life that aren't perfect. I have students with unpleasant attitudes and even worse home lives. I have more to do than I could possibly accomplish even if I didn't sleep at all for the next three weeks. But at least I have my job. I know people who have lost their jobs and people who can't get jobs in the first place. There are people who have lost their homes to debt or disaster. There are people born with physical deformities and mental disabilities. There are people with terminal illnesses and people who are paralyzed in car crashes. There are people who lose their children in tragic accidents or from horrible childhood diseases. I could list thousands of horrible things that people endure, but the short version of what occurred to me as I was running down the other side of the hill is that every morning when you wake up, you have no idea what is going to happen. Is this the day you lose your job, lose your beloved, make a bad decision, survive a tornado, die in a car crash, or suffer a stroke or a freak heart attack? It seems like the list of terrible things that might come out of nowhere is greater than the list of wonderful things. And yet, I thought, as I rounded the corner to overlook a small lake, I am happy to be alive and to see what I can see. 

I am willing to wake up every morning, even knowing that anything could happen. At the very least, life is pretty interesting. And so in spite of all of the ugliness and pettiness and brokenness one is sure to encounter sooner and later, it still seems worth the risk to get up every day and keep an eye out for the beauty. Just in case. 

And then, a good 250 yards from the lake, I started running through piles of fish. I'll just leave that there.

Fat Tuesday, but only technically

 

I don't think I've ever in my life been ready for Lent, and I suppose in some sense that is not surprising. Who can keep up with God? But this year it did at least occur to me a day in advance. I woke up this morning knowing it was Fat Tuesday. I had actually already thought about feasting on fat things; however, I spent most of yesterday in narcotics withdrawal, and I didn't think eating crazy amounts of chocolate or even a meal with meat was a good idea on an uncertain stomach. I had a cookie or two that a friend had brought me. To splurge and celebrate my new-found ability to sit in the car for ten minutes, we ate out. I had a vegetable stir fry: broccoli, carrots, peppers and rice. Living large, I am. We thought about going out for dessert afterwards, but it was cold out and the only dessert places around served ice cream, so I came home and made brownies. Then I ate one. Yes, that is how I live it up around here, one week post-surgery.

More to the point, I have actually been thinking about Lent and how I should observe it before it begins. The trouble is, nothing traditional feels right. In past years, I've given up chocolate, and I suppose I could do that again. Last year I fasted between breakfast and dinner one day a week, which turned out to be a difficult discipline for me, and meaningful, but since I am deep in the throes of some heavy healing, that doesn't seem like a brilliant idea.

What feels right to me is if the last six weeks could happen in the next six weeks instead. During the seasons of Christmas and Epiphany, I was going through my own Lent. I was thinking about this yesterday as I was walking in circles in my house during one of my assigned ten-minute walks. Now that the narcotics are out of my system, and now that all of my concentration need not be focussed on surviving great pain from moment to moment, I was startled to think of life going on. I am not allowed to do anything, really, yet. I can walk 10 minutes every two hours. I can sit for up to 15 minutes. But it increasingly looks like some time in the next months I will return to some acceptable level of function, and the thought is completely bewildering to me. What will I do? Who will be my friends? What will I do? What will I DO? I feel as if I have spent the last seven weeks being stripped of everything that might have been used to define me. I not only stopped running, which I hadn't done for months anyway, but I stopped any form of exercise whatsoever. Moving myself from the couch to the bed at the end of the day wore me out. Standing long enough to eat a meal was more than I could handle. I stopped cleaning my house. By the end, I wasn't even able to cook. I quit my job. I quit the band. I quit the choir. I stopped going to church. I never left the house at all, in fact. I haven't seen anyone but medical staff, family and one friend since before Christmas. I need assistance to shower and to put on my own socks and shoes. If the purpose of Lent is to strip away all that comes between me and my God, the last seven weeks have done about as good a job as anything can.

One of the ways I got through endless days of shooting, burning pain was to bless it, to make it something holy from God. When things got beyond the point where narcotics could help, I would force myself to become very very still except for my breath, and I would imagine that my pain was sentient, something like an angel, not a friend, exactly--it was too fierce for friendship--but something that was intentionally purifying. I imagined God with me in my pain. The pain and God blended, and I felt a presence with me. Not an easy, happy presence, but not a dark or cruel one either. Something powerful and ultimately to be trusted with what little I had left. I do not believe that God sits in heaven thinking of ways to torture us children into obedience, but in a more abstract way, I believed myself and my companion pain to be held right in the middle of God's will. And I found peace there. I even, as strange as this sounds in this day and age, was grateful for my pain, for my prolonged stretch of being stripped down and without pride or purpose. I found a sort of comfort in the knowledge that at my most unpleasant, my most unattractive, my most useless, I was still something beloved and cared for. I was grateful, most of the time, to lie still and have my pain erase everything in the world that was not my most basic me and my most elemental God.

It all sounds like one of the ancient mystic saints, doesn't it? I don't mean to come off as someone born again into a life of unshakable faith. I'm sure I'm not. And I'm almost as certain that I'm not crazy. But I do feel as if, for the first time in my life, I really really experienced Lent this year. I don't think I have the self-discipline, or the faith, for that matter, to wear a hair shirt and self-flagellate and fast to the point of suffering. But I see why people of great faith might do so. I am amazed to have found myself, several times, at the point of true surrender, and to have found something greater than anything I could produce by my own actions or will still holding me together, still calling me by name, still willing me to live. I can attest that it's worth a great deal of pain and disability to feel oneself nakedly in the presence of the holy. It is awe-ful. The word has been misspelled.

Which brings me back to tomorrow, Ash Wednesday, the observed beginning of Lent. Where do I go from where I have been? Lent is approximately six weeks long; my expected recovery time, the time it will take me to get back to where I can even begin to get back to "normal," is six weeks. It will be months and months before I can be athletic and before I can truly put this injury behind me, if it is to be my fate that I do ever recover fully. That six weeks feels like it has some significance though.

In an attempt to come up with a plan, I poked around on a few websites to see what exactly the significance of Lent is supposed to be. Wikipedia, the source of profound truths, says Lent is meant to prepare the believer. It didn't, however, say what the believer is to be prepared for. Alas. A Catholic website claimed that Lent is about conversion. It's not about giving up some indulgence for six weeks but of learning to let go of an old life and embrace new life. That wording works for me this year. I once had a certain life--not all good, not all bad, very very human--and circumstances beyond my control gave me a chance to see myself without any of the trappings of that old life. I was allowed to let go of everything for a little while. It seems to be my fate and fortune, however, that I should, now, reenter life. It isn't true to say that I get a fresh start. I will, gradually, resume most of the same responsibilities I once managed. I will reenter many of the same communities of which I was once part. To the rest of the world, I had a spine injury and surgery and recovery period. I will pick up where I left off some time ago. For me, though, coming out of my own wilderness of pain and mandatory idleness, it feels like starting over, like learning how to live again. If Lent is the period between the old life and the new, then my Lent has already happened.

And so for me this year, it feels right to find a discipline that will teach me to enter new life with the assurances I found in the midst of the in-between place. How can I re-enter the chores, the little competitions, the insecurities, and the politics of a busy modern life and remember what was so clear when I was naked of all of anything that might claim to lend me worth? I must learn to live with the idea that nothing I do can make me more worthy of the love of the Divine. The temptation of the new life will be to forget how to be humble enough to find holiness.

All I Can Do Is Walk Him to the Bus Stop

My son is eight. He is, for the most part, a calm and responsible boy. He can get carried away with silliness. He sometimes cries about ridiculous things, like the need to wear jeans to school when it is 20 degrees outside. But I trust him as much as I would trust any eight year old. Even so, I have taken to walking him to the bus stop most mornings. I do this partly for him because he is the only one at the bus stop in the mornings. But if I examine my motives carefully, I realize I don't think that being alone at a bus stop is such a terrible thing. The ability to be alone is quite valuable, in fact, and alone for two minutes while waiting for a bus filled with peers is probably not entirely a bad thing. So I have come to realize that, mostly, I am walking Adam to the bus for myself.

I walk my son to the bus because if I don't, I stand at the front door and watch him cross the street and then walk away, out of sight. He walks confidently but without deliberation, as though this is what he does on a normal day, as though there never was any question of him walking down the sidewalk to the bus stop, getting on a bus driven by a stranger (granted, it's the same stranger every day,) and then spending the bulk of his day somewhere other than home with me. As he walks, I see double: I see my dependable and intelligent "big boy" going off to be dependable and intelligent where all the other kids his age are; but I also see my baby, my toddler, my preschooler, and he is walking away, going off without me, leaving me. Both sights are irrefutably true. I must let my child go out into the world because I want him to learn to be independent and to learn about the magic of words and numbers and the stories of our history and the marvels we think we know through science. But I must also accept that my baby is just walking away. My toddler is leaving. He is going off into a life that will be his and not mine, that he will control and I will, decreasingly, only influence. He doesn't need my hands to hold him up any more, and he isn't afraid to stand on a corner by himself and then get on a bus and not look back at his mother, standing alone and watching.

Today a broken and bent man went into a school full of children like my son, children whose parents scolded themselves for being silly enough to almost weep every morning when their brave dependable children walked out into the world, and did the worst thing I can imagine a human doing. There, but for the grace of God, go I. And one can't help but know that even with the grace of God, people are there already. I can't imagine there is a parent in America today who isn't wearing the clothes of the parents in Connecticut, who isn't completely undone by empathic pain, who doesn't look at the school pictures of their children hanging in the hall or at the top of the stairs and HURT to the point of near-paralysis, and who isn't thinking of how a person could, before she even knew what was happening, lose everything. How can any of us ever be brave enough to let our children go out into the world? I really don't know.

And yet, I also know that I must. If I love my children--and I do--I will eventually have to let them cross the street by themselves, even if there are reckless drivers in the world, because I want their world to be larger than my modest suburban house and yard. I will have to let them get on the school bus and spend a day at school because I want them to be able to understand the marvelous world they live in and the mostly marvelous people who share it with them. The horrible horrible truth is that I can walk my son to his bus stop every morning, but unless I am willing to force him to grow up in fear, unless I am willing to sacrifice all of the brilliant things he might become and the fantastic journeys he might take during the life ahead of him, I have to let him get on the bus by himself.

Those of us who are in the season of advent have an uncomfortable mingling of Good Friday and Christmas today. Our streets are lined with lights and wreaths, preparing a path, lighting the way, and yet we watch our brothers and sisters as they hang on their crosses and ask how God can allow such pain. My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? And yet, since I became a mother, since I felt my son's presence in my womb, for me, Christmas and Easter have become inseparable. Yes, I await that moment of pure joy Christmas Eve when "Silent Night" becomes "Joy to the World," that moment when I transcend hope and actually believe that God is with us, that the kingdom is near, that swords will be beat into plowshares, that "they shall never harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain." But I also think of Mary giving birth alone, save for a man she had only recently married. I think of Mary loving her baby and then watching him grow up and then.... And I think of God, who knew humanity pretty well by then and still let his whole heart be born flesh--the kind of flesh that is first a helpless and dependent baby, the kind of flesh that must be never out of reach of Mama and then eventually learns to walk on his own, the kind of flesh that eventually must go out into the world if He is to experience life in its abundance, if He is to make a difference on this unreliable planet among broken, bent, and hurting humans.

If you've ever watched a beloved child walk down the street to a bus stop, Christmas is equal parts wonder and terror. He will get hurt. He will be grieved, perhaps even unto death.

Lord, have mercy on us.

Then Simeon blessed them and said to his mother Mary, "This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed--and a sword will pierce your own soul too." --Luke 2:34-35

Holy Week: The Music

A friend asked me a couple of weeks ago if I would still believe in God if it wasn't for music. I'm not sure if he meant it as a serious question or a teasing question, but it felt serious internally. Would I? Hmm. Maybe not. And if not, is that entirely bad? Is it wrong that the way I physically experience the divine is through an art form? I rather think not.

Last night I stayed after the Good Friday service for choir rehearsal and after rehearsal to hear what my dad is singing at the early service on Easter. Sitting in the sanctuary at that time, I was privy to a conversation between Bill, the senior pastor, and Scott, the director of music, about the choir processing in at the beginning of the 9am service on Easter morning. This, I know, means that we will not be in the sanctuary for Widor's Toccata. It wasn't my place, of course, to mess with the high-church plans the staff was making for EASTER SUNDAY. Plus, I'm all for pulling out all of the stops on Easter. Give me Handel's "Hallelujah" chorus. Give me a trumpet fanfare on "Christ the Lord is Risen Today." Fill the sanctuary with so many flowers their scent wafts out into the street. Let's have everyone wear their very best clothes and hats with ribbons and shiny new shoes. Let's eat chocolate while we worship! Let's clap and cheer and weep and throw streamers and hug and kiss and slap each other's backs and butts and hands. Let's take buckets of sidewalk chalk and hundreds of balloons and festoon every block of the downtown with color. So yes, by all means, let's have the choir wear robes and process. But, as I told Scott, half seriously, I will QUIT CHOIR if being in the choir means I miss the Toccata.

At first, I had a hard time believing the Good Friday service last night. My mind kept going elsewhere.  I was fully present at the Maundy Thursday service, but it took a long time for me to get to Good Friday. The Bible readings helped, of course, but what really moved me to grief was the "Agnus Dei" Scott had written. I was blessed to get to sing the solo descant, and by the end, I was singing it for the death of my best friend, for the loss of all hope in a new world. Afterwards, there was darkness. There was regret. There was sorrow. And then on the last verse of the last hymn, Scott did something with the organ that made my heart break. I was crying, nearly weeping. I am a word person. I love the Bible. But music. Music. Music expresses what words cannot come anywhere near. Of all of the people in my church who have contributed to what faith I have, Scott probably has the single largest share. There maybe are not words enough make Good Friday real again, 2000 years later, on the other side of the globe, in a different culture. But there certainly are organ pipes enough. There are a capella choir pieces. I cannot fully describe a broken heart, but Scott can break your heart for you, make you feel it all over again.

Likewise, Widor's Toccata, for me, is Easter. It is the mystery and anticipation of seeing the stone rolled away, a high and quick obbligato. Then, underneath that racing heartbeat, it is a joyful proclamation, heard over and over and over. Surely the voice of an angel would replay in one's mind endlessly: “He is not here; He is risen!” Those two things: physical response and exclamation, right hand and left hand.  It lifts the heart, or swells it. It quickens the pulse. And then.... Oh, the pedal tones! You can feel them in your rib cage and the soles of your feet. They shake the church. They are the sudden understanding of what all this means. Not a quick exuberant joy, not a sharp in-your-face kind of victory, but a dawning realization that the very foundations of civilization have been rolled away with that one tomb boulder. Oh, we had lost hope, but it is possible that Jesus was right all along, that his way is the way, and that you can't kill that kind of love with weapons or betrayal or armies or governments. God is bigger than that.  Big enough to shatter buildings and institutions with the vibration of his voice and big enough and loving enough not to do so but rather to starve in the wilderness with us, to carry a cross with us, to drink defeat, to wear humiliation, to weep, to die and then still to live. I cannot describe the power of that emotion with words—certainly not better than the authors of the Bible and the thousands of saints and scholars who have written since—but I feel it in my body and my soul when I hear Widor's Toccata.  For a few short minutes a year on Easter morning, I hear the voice of God, and God says “I AM.”  Or, rather, God sings: this.  This! Believe. Rejoice. Carry on.

Would I still believe if there was no music? Lord, I hope never to find out.

Holy Week

April and her four kids were here from Monday evening to Wednesday afternoon. Oh, it's wonderful to be with April. Even after not seeing her for months and months and not talking all that much either, there is no period of reacquaintance. The time and space that have been between us are immediately irrelevant. Although she is rarely a part of my daily life, I feel most myself when I am with her. There is never any question that I'm not going to be good enough in any way. I already am. And this is not because she only sees me at my best. She knows some of the messy little corners of my life. She has seen me sick and tired and discouraged and pregnant and hungry and indecisive. If April's love was ever a thing that I needed to earn, somehow I earned it long long ago. More likely, though, I think that I never earned it. It just flows from her generous and loving heart. It took no effort or decision. I don't believe it was earned or that it will be revoked.

Being around April makes me a better person. It never crosses my mind to do anything just to impress her, but without meaning to I strive to do things she would approve of or admire. When I do something well as a parent and April comments upon it, I want to be a good parent all of the time. April said once that she thinks I am brave, and so when my courage fails, I remember that, and I am brave. April thinks my house is lovely and clean, and when I remember that, I clean my house with a happier heart. April admires my cooking, and I wish that I could cook for her more often. April thinks I am smart and helpful and caring, and so I am, and so I wish to be. Not because April will love me more but because I wish to live up to the love I already have. I do not want to disappoint April or to make her sad. And yet, I trust her with my weaknesses, knowing that she carries my hurts with her but will never use them against me. They will never make her love me less.

It occurs to me, as I write about April, that this sort of love sounds strangely familiar. April is not God. She is not perfect. I do not mean to imply that she is or to burder her with such a comparison. But because of her, I begin to see how God might be.

Tomorrow is Good Friday. Sunday is Easter. It's a baffling time of year to be a Christian. Why must Christ be killed? I don't quite buy any of the major atonement theories. I don't like the picture they paint of God. But if I think of Jesus as a friend like April, someone whose love is absolutely certain, whose judgment is more like compassion than verdict, who has endless hope in me and in my capacity to be someone truly wonderful regardless of the confused and flawed human I have been and still am, who would look upon my worst crimes not with condemnation but with agony over the gap between the faith she has in me and my behavior, I begin to understand. God is that kind of love. The life of Jesus says to us that that kind of love is what changes the world, not with demands or punishments or threats or force, but one friend at a time, one day at a time. Good Friday and Easter Sunday promise us that it's a love so powerful I cannot kill it. I cannot ruin it. I can refuse to interact with it; I can forget to spend time on it; I could probably even ask it to leave me alone, but it will still be there year after year after year. It's always exactly what I need. Even if I lose faith in that kind of love, it still has faith in me.

How can I not go forth in confidence having experienced that kind of love? How can I want less than to show that kind of love in return? How can greed or hate or selfishness or even apathy ever triumph in the end if everyone lives with that kind of love? It cannot. It does not.

Holy week.



John 13:34
"I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.  Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another."

First Fast

In the midst

I think that if John Wesley had the job of planning a menu, grocery shopping, preparing meals and then cleaning up after them, and if, during the rest of the day he was taking care of a preschooler and being repeatedly asked to play rabbits or to provide snacks, he might have found fasting less of a prayerful activity.  At least, that’s how I find it. 

Perhaps I am just a wimp.  I ate breakfast only seven hours ago.  I had a cup of chai with soy milk mid-morning.  I’ll eat a later-than-usual dinner with my family.  I’ll get in maybe ten hours at most.  I’m not even doing a full grown-up fast, but my head feels funny already, and I am very hungry.  That sounds silly to say while fasting, but there it is.  I am aware, though, that the reason my body feels so very hungry is that it is used to being fed constantly.  If I did this more often, or if I was actually, out of need, starving, seven hours since my last meal would not be such a big deal.  I am spoiled and soft and self-centered.  A wimp.

But I am not a wimp.  Four days ago I ran a marathon.  More to the point, I ran those last six miles when every cell in my body was asking to please please please stop.  I did not run them quickly, but I was still running when I crossed the finish line.  Perhaps I should have run them more prayerfully.  And surely I ought to be fasting more prayerfully as well. 

It just doesn’t feel holy.  Or maybe it just doesn’t feel holy yet.  It feels hard.  I am in the habit of eating rather constantly.  It was hard not to grab handful of almonds as I was preparing lunch or putting away groceries or cleaning dishes.  When a dribble of applesauce stood on the lip of the jar, my instinct was to scoop it up with a finger and eat it.  Packing (and unpacking) carrots for Adam’s lunch, my hand could almost not help picking one up and popping it in my mouth.  And a little voice in my head kept telling me that those little crumbs of food wouldn’t count.  I would still be fasting.  And it’s at least true that I would still have been hungry.  But just being hungry isn’t the point.

My woozy head, then, is asking, “Well, what is the point?”  Why am I doing this?

The wrong (but also true) answers are that I am fasting because it is part of my religious tradition, because I have never done it, and because I am afraid of it.  Isaiah writes about fasting (that you shouldn’t just do it because of tradition.)  Jesus fasts (for forty days!!)  Jesus tells his disciples how to go about fasting (not in public—so should I not post this?)  Saints are infamous for fasting.  John Wesley fasted.  We talk about fasting in my covenant group and, oh yeah, it’s in our covenant.  We talked about it at the retreat I helped plan.  Apparently, fasting is a way to draw closer to God.  But aside from the time about a year ago when I had to fast for the 12 hours prior to my surgery, I have never tried to fast.  I’ve given up chocolate.  I’ve given up dessert altogether.  But I’ve never given up food.  I am wildly dependent on food.  I’ve seen me without food (for, oh, a couple of hours at times,) and it’s a frightening thing.  My mind refuses to focus, and my memories of these times are like memories of dreams.  Lights are too harsh and my perception of distance is skewed.  My speech slows down and my movements falter a bit.  I stumble rather than flit.  The world and my place in it become so heavy and desperate: no way I can possibly endure another minute of whatever benign activity is annoying me.  And then my husband says to me, “You need to eat.”  I will continue, with slow and slurred speech, to insist that whatever situation I am bemoaning is the real cause of my misery.  My husband will not respond with anything other than, “I think you need to eat.”  Generally about half an hour after I’ve had a good meal, everything is better.  Magic.  Food.  I am afraid of intentionally getting really really hungry if accidental hunger can have those effects.  A part of me wants to try to fast just to face down the fear, to show myself that I do not need to be afraid, which is perhaps to some a noble reason, but it’s not a Godly one, I don’t think.

I should be fasting as prayer.  I might be fasting in solidarity.  I should be fasting as a reminder of what I have and from whom all blessings flow.  I am fasting as self-discipline.

Honestly, when it comes to appreciating my blessings, I think I’m above average.  Above average is not the goal, of course.  Complete and utter humility and constant gratitude are the goal.  Without God, I would have nothing and be nothing, and this is a taste (pardon the pun) of that.  So I guess this is supposed to be teaching me my complete reliance on God. Is it?  Maybe.  We’ll see where I am in a couple of hours. 

I’m not all that bad at self-discipline either.  I regularly get up well before dawn to run interval or hill repeats.  I sometimes get in nine miles before breakfast.  I run when I don’t feel like running, sometimes even when it hurts.  I like meat but haven’t eaten any in over a year, even right after a marathon when we were in a little blue-collar town with only meat-based restaurants.

I’m not sure I’m getting the prayer thing.  But then, I’m a novice pray-er.  I was sort of hoping that fasting would make prayer easy, like music does for me, but I suspect that fasting as a form of prayer is an advanced technique.  If anything, the hunger and the discipline, the not putting the handful of food in my mouth, is a reminder that is a day set apart for something different.  If I am not constantly communing with God, at least I am behaving in a way that makes me remember some aspect of God.  How many people in my church have brought up that the true order of faith is “behave, belong, believe.”  So I behave.  Well, in this small thing I do.

The solidarity thing makes sense to me.  It reverberates within and sets to singing my decision not to eat meat.  I abstain from meat because if everyone ate meat, there would not be enough earth to feed earth’s people.  Already, there is not food to feed earth’s people.  I cannot solve that problem, but I want to acknowledge it constantly.  I want not to contribute to it.  I want to stand as witness to the fact that we can live another way.  Heck, we can run marathons another way!  Of course, I still eat plenty.  I might even eat too much on a regular basis.  The fact that I am, with a lifestyle choice, acknowledging the issue of hunger is, to me, a matter of holiness, but how much more holy to actually be hungry as well once in a while.  Ah, now there we are starting to pluck some of my heartstrings, to get my soul into the song.  Perhaps is it just my brand of faith that I would rather do something for other humans than for God?  Perhaps Jesus and Isaiah would be OK with that sort of religiosity?

Day after: Reflection

The afternoon and evening went well.  I took Adam to his basketball practice, and while I was interacting with some other moms there, people I have come to consider friends, the hunger didn’t bother me.  It was still there, of course, but it was just there.  It wasn’t eating at me.  It was just sitting there with me.  I didn’t mind.  I even, in a way, liked it.  I liked that on the outside I looked normal (I hope) but had something different going on inside, a little secret between me and God.  Interesting that Jesus admonishes his followers not to fast in public.  I understand his point.  I would not want my fasting to become a topic of conversation in that setting.  I’m certain it would have made the fasting about me: how religious I am (I have nothing against being religious, but that label always feels false to me,) how hungry I must be, how hard it would be, etc.  Ick.  That certainly would have made the hunger less holy and more disturbing. 

We had left-overs for dinner, and although I had intended all along to break my fast at dinnertime, and I did, I felt like somehow staying in the spirit of the fast.  So I served everyone else first, and I ate the half-serving of sweet potato chili that was left.  I had some broccoli and a few crackers.  It was a meal, but it wasn’t nearly enough to satisfy my hunger.  It wasn’t even as much as I would ordinarily eat after eating all day.  I did not have my usual post-meal piece of chocolate.  I went to choir still hungry.  I went to bed still hungry, something I rarely do.

I am very aware of the fact that as fasts go, mine was very small, but it was a beginning.  It was an attempt.  In looking back at why I did it, and thinking back about what I got out of it, I think it is an exercising worth repeating. 

I believe it did make me more aware of the plenty around me.  It made me conscious of how easy it is to pop something healthy and sustaining in my mouth without thought.   Yes, we say grace before meals, but I do I say grace while I am making my son’s lunch and sample the sunbutter?  Do I give thanks for the left-over popcorn I munch while I’m cleaning up the kitchen?  Do I remember that every mid-day handful of almonds is a great bounty of nutrients and therefore a blessing?  No.  Today I will, I hope.

It was also, I think, a sort of prayer.  It wasn’t always an uplifting prayer.  It wasn’t a prayer with words or a clear direction.  But it was a way of reminding myself that I am trying to be with God, and I am pretty sure that God gives partial credit for effort.  Paul tells us, “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words” (Romans 8:26). Hopefully the Spirit did something with the fast, small though it was.

The most profound affect it had on me, however, was one that I originally thought was not a holy one: I faced down a fear.  When I wrote that yesterday, it seemed a very secular reason to do something.  It is true that a person not seeking God might undertake some adventure simply to face down a fear.  But, as I realized yesterday, the process of releasing a fear is also a holy one.  For me, it was the most holy result of my fast. 

I realized with a start last night that fear is a thing that ties us to this world.  This time last week I was afraid of the marathon.  I was afraid of disappointment.  I was afraid of pain.  I was afraid of despair.  And yes, this time yesterday, I was afraid of hunger.  I was afraid of what these things would do to me and what I, in turn, would do.  But in the last week I have been in pain.  I have been tired to the point of tears.  I have felt despair at ever finishing the last three miles of a marathon.  I have been hungry.  And I have come out the other side.  These things are not exactly pleasant, but there is great value in knowing for certain that if they are demanded of me, I can do them.  I need not turn down a call, should one come, because I am a slave to fear.  The Bible says that perfect love casts out fear, but I suspect that, to some extent, fear also prevents perfect love.  If I am afraid of discomfort, I am living for myself.  If I am living in fear, I am tied to my security.  I am tethered to food.  I am tethered to pride.  I must think first of avoiding my fears rather than thinking first of living fully.  If I am about food, I am not about the life that food enables.  I do not believe that God wants me to be hungry, but I also do not think that God wants my life to be about not being hungry.  As for pain, humiliation, and despair, Psalms 51:17 says, “The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.”  God is not looking for perfection and complete competence.  God is looking for us to be willing to walk into whatever lies ahead of us and not think first about whether or not we have packed enough snacks.