DAYS OF MUD

Most days I feel completely unequipped to be a parent. The nurses in the hospital told me, Don’t worry, you’ll know what to do. It’s instinct. And for a while they were right – but now, most days, I am way over my head. Instinct has been tackled by impulse. I can’t get in front of the ball. And time is running out – these days of mud, when I have lives in my hands to shape and to mould, are drying out and sliding through glass.

I have a daughter who watches me – observes, takes it in, notices everything. I have learned so much truth from her, about myself. I don’t look attractive when my hair is wet. I do strange things with my hands when I drink my coffee. I am not quick enough to count my blessings. I gossip. I want to say to her, Baby, we are not all models.

On days like this I think of Mary – mother to son of God, mother to son of Man. I wonder if her children watched her, and if they noticed with their child eyes all the odd and the out of place. I wonder if she had to re-evaluate her beliefs about what constitutes sin.

Jesus, where on earth have you been? We’ve been sick with worry, looking everywhere for you. You aren’t old enough to be on your own – there are sick people in the world, and there are a million strange people running around this city. Anything might have happened to you. Do you have any idea what you’ve put me through? I told you we were getting ready to leave – why can’t you ever just pay attention??

C’mon, Mom. You know me. Didn’t you know I would be in my Father’s house?

Don’t you talk back to me. I AM YOUR MOTHER.

Maybe not. Maybe Mary and God had some good, long conversations about parenting, and Mary knew to look at the heart. Maybe she knew enough not to guilt. Maybe she knew enough not to worry. Maybe she knew that whatever befell, her children were in God’s hands.

But I know for certain that she was not perfect. I wonder if being a mother brought out every weak and faulty thing inside her. I wonder if she watched her pure little babies while they slept and worried about wrecking them. I wonder if those innocent eyes soaking her up ever made her want to crawl out of her skin, and if she ever dreamed of running away – getting a job working the counter at a coffee shop in Mississippi, squishing mud between her toes on the banks of a foreign river, smoking crawdads by the shore, no modelling, no responsibility, no refiner’s fire.

I wonder if she felt the grace pouring out of her children the way that I do. I wonder if she learned from her children, the way I learn from mine, what unconditional love looks like. I wonder if she took Jesus’ precious hands in hers and said, I’m so sorry, Jesus. I should not have yelled – and if she felt the God-love fill her when he kissed her and said, I’m sorry I wasn’t paying attention.

MIRROR, MIRROR - Reflections on Leviticus 19

I believe a lot in ineffable. That God is beyond words. That you can hardly say anything about God at all without running the risk of being out of the ball-park wrong – and that even when you’re right, God still isn’t all that excited about being explained. Whenever I have a temptation to say God is____, I get the fear. No eye has seen, no ear has heard – Do not say what I will or will not do. You do not know Who I am or what I am capable of.

I sometimes hear people worry about idolatry, and they try to toss out things that they think they maybe worship, like television or food or Facebook. Like other gods is simply a metaphor for anything that takes too much of our attention, or gives us too much flesh pleasure, or that we turn habitually to rather than prayer or Bible reading or worship. Like the Holy One might actually become jealous of a sandwich. When I hear people conjuring this way, I start imagining God in front of an enormous, bedazzled mirror, gazing at the Divine Image, insecure. There is something fairer than Thou, Fairest Lord Jesus.

I try hard to picture the God above all other gods feeling wounded, or lonely, or mad, or just tapping the foot waiting for me to stop doing whatever it is I’m doing that isn’t productive or disciplined or healthy, or isn’t giving the Lord of lords my undivided attention. But when I do this, God starts to sound less to me like my immortal beloved, the lover of my soul, and a lot more like an abusive boyfriend. I try to imagine God mouthing the words, I can’t believe you chose a sandwich over Me. What is it with you emotional eaters, anyway?  You’re never satisfied.  Sometimes I get guilt and I do say, Ok, God, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry I wasn’t paying enough attention to You. I need You. Really. Look at me, I’m putting all that away. Taste and see that the Lord is good – I get it. Now, what was it You wanted to say?

But I happen to think that idolatry is really more insidious than all of that. I actually think idolatry is very serious. It has to be, because I don’t at all believe God is petty or insecure and because it’s on a shortlist of things that Yahweh God is said to get very, very upset about.

It isn’t just graven images of other gods Yahweh doesn’t like – He doesn’t want carved out statues of Himself either. Not of anything in the heavens, or of anything under the heavens, or of anything in the oceans under the earth. Pretty much no images. I don’t believe it’s that God hates art, and think it is deeper than just that God doesn’t want to be defined. I don’t think God enjoys us holding up little pictures of Unknowable to each other and saying, This is who He is – No, this is who She is. I suspect God isn’t crazy for boxes. But I really don’t imagine that Holy God has more vanity than Snow White’s stepmother, that God is in any way offended by our small imaginings of the Divine, or that God cannot empathize with our deep, deep longing to grasp for that which we are simply not skilled to understand. We’ve been doing it since the beginning – God knows what to anticipate.

I think part of the thing so offensive about idolatry is that it feeds our temptation to want to make God not be other. It fuels our temptation to possess and control the Divine relationship we deeply love. It separates God into compartments based on function, as they relate to our own favourite needs. It puts God into a role. It filters out all the things that we don’t like or need or believe, and leaves us with a smaller, more manageable being that shares our values, who’s actions we can predict, who’s tone we understand. A God who responds to and reflects back to us all the qualities we like best about our own selves. A God a little in our own image.

In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott writes, You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

I know I’m shaping God in my own image when God starts exhibiting signs of Oppositional Defiance Disorder. Do not blaspheme My Name – do not say that I will do things that I would never do. Do not try to invoke Me, like I Am a genie in a bottle. Do not tell Me what I can and cannot do. You are not Me – I am Other.

Do not quench the Spirit. I Am. I will be Who I will be. But still I will draw you a picture – I will carve words for you on stone. I will knit you an image of blood and bone, and make the words live. Word made flesh – nothing lost in translation. Behold the face of Peace. Behold the face of Love and Wholeness, Wisdom and Truth, Honour, Mercy, Grace, Strength and Sacrifice.

This is what I meant, back when I said ‘Thou Shalt Not’.

Do not worship splinters – love the whole of Me with all that you are, as I love the whole of you with all that I Am. Do not form any image of Me – you are My image, My Own reflection in the mirror. I am One and you are many – though the mirror shatters, My image cannot be shattered.

Do not distort My image by lying and stealing and cheating and wounding and gossiping and hoarding and self-preserving and coveting, because these are things I would never do. But be patient, be kind, be generous, bring healing, show mercy, pour out grace, touch the untouchable, lift the fallen, cover the naked, defend those unjustly treated, release the captives, guard the truth, strengthen the weak, walk humbly, love – because you are My people made in My Own image, and because that is Who I Am.

I crafted you from mud, in the beginning. With My hands I moulded you, and with My breath I blew life into you. I created you in My Own image.

From the beginning you are the metaphor.

 

But we all, with unveiled face beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit. ~ 2 Corinthians 3:18

FORGIVENESS - Part II

I struggle with forgiveness sometimes. It’s strange to me – how I can pour it out lavishly, as Jesus taught me, over the big things but in the scratches and the bumps I am so prone to keep accounts. I hold onto words – I get spiteful over the silent treatment. I listen to my children say, Now you know how it feels, and I know they are sampling revenge. They don’t see me modeling forgiveness.

I think about Jesus’ debtor’s story of The Unforgiving Servant in Matthew 18, and I ask myself why did that man have such a hard time forgiving another, after he himself had been unburdened of so very, very much? The one who is forgiven much loves much – but it does not always stand to reason that the one who is forgiven much forgives much.  

Life has been teaching me over and over again that being forgiven of a debt does not necessarily leave you without need. Forgiveness isn’t money in the bank – it is only a release from what is owed. The King did not say to his servant, I forgive you of your debt – and here’s a little something extra to get you back on your feet again, and a budget so this doesn’t happen again. In Jesus’ story, the servant left the King in virtually the same condition he went in to him – with empty pockets.  

Free indeed but with nothing stored up, empty of currency, and not yet any wiser. Fear can stick its foot in. And the surprising thing – the thing you would never expect – is that mercy can sit sour in your belly when you have had too much of it to drink. You can resent to your core the pain of ever having needed it at all.

When you have known burden, when you’ve felt it lifted, you don’t ever want to feel it again. I can imagine the liberated servant dancing out of the King’s presence singing freedom songs – As God is my witness, I’ll never need mercy again. But I know how pride and fear can tempt to self-preserve. You never forget the taste of dust. You can begin to take notice of people who bump you and stir up feelings of heavy. You can become accutely aware of people who took from you when were already barely holding on. You can start making mental notes of those to whom you once gave out of your excess. You can shovel out a pile of blame – why you ended up on your knees, in the hole.

Jesus’ story is really, really not about an imaginary thing like money. It is about real taken things like trust, childhood, reputation, dignity, pride, self-worth, a sense of personal safety, faith in humanity, boundaries, family, innocence, and sleep – things that we sometimes lose to one another in the normal course of life, which we need and to which we are sincerely attached. It can be hard to release those kinds of debts, though we know even as we write them down that there is seldom any way that they can ever, ever be repaid to us.

The Greek word for forgive is aphiemi – to send forth, to lay aside, to let go. It is not apokathistemi – to restore. It is not epilanthanomai – to lose out of mind, to forget. It is not a lot of other words that mean things like, it didn’t happen, it doesn’t hurt, it wasn’t wrong, one more chance, don’t call the police, don’t talk about it, just be grateful it wasn’t something worse, God is gonna get ‘em in the end. There are other words for those things, but none of them mean forgive.

Forgiveness means you choose not to count your debtor as a resource to draw from. Forgiveness means, I don’t need back from you what you took from me.

Forgiveness can be painfully costly – but I have learned a very great secret. Forgiving a debt is a whole lot easier when you’ve still got lots.

Sometimes I think we don’t want to say it – but we believe that God gives mercy because God can afford to forgive. We believe that God gives and forgives without partiality because of the generosity that comes from abundance, not because of God commandments like grace or compassion or love. We think, but don’t say out loud, It’s not like God is losing anything. God has more where that came from. Of course God forgives – God is good. It’s expected. Because when God asks us to do the same, we believe that God has not fully considered the nature of poverty – what it means to be way beyond empty. We feel that sometimes we simply cannot afford to forgive what is owed, because we still happen to need it.

I believe in love your neighbour as yourself. I really, really believe in love always forgives. But I have triggers. When I feel the unforgiving spirit well up in me, I know what it is because I start to feel mean. I start to feel spiteful. I start to want people to know. But I am starting to learn to say to myself – what is it that is making you so greedy? What is it that you are so very attached to, or that you think you don’t have enough of?  

I pray to remember that God has lots – more than I could hope, think or imagine – and to never forget the words, All I have is yours.  

For this reason, I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man; so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God. Ephesians 3:14-19

FORGIVENESS - Part I

I remember the first time God said to me, Do you want to be well? I was in church and the pastor was preaching from John 5 – Jesus at the pool of Bethesda. God doesn’t reach out and touch me a lot but I felt the hand of God on me then, like a slap upside the head. Jesus spoke, do you want to be well, and I felt it. I was nineteen years old and feet first, nose deep in a quagmire of losses and pain – my brother’s sudden death, my first broken heart, my parents’ crumbled marriage, the giving up of my virginity for the wrong reasons at the wrong time to the wrong person, and a drunken without malice rape – small words for giant things that tore my soul and bled me. I made a lot of very wrong choices, and I made them completely without style. I caused wounds and racked up debts that I cannot repay. But God started talking to me out loud in bathroom stalls saying words like, I love you. I’m not leaving you. I’m still here. Then one day Jesus came really close up and said right into my ear, I can make you whole. I can. If that is what you want. Right then, in the unlikeliest of places – a church pew – God said to me, Decide.

Whole is very different than healed – whole doesn’t say anything about what came before. Whole doesn’t have a story.

Decide. Decide to hold on to comfort thoughts like not my fault, not my choice, I was a victim, it was out of my control – passive words that justified, framing all my own choices around a picture of hurt, circumstance and other peoples decisions – or decide to accept a new truth. Whole. Intact. Fully functional. Healthy. Decide to refuse to let my life be determined by anything but my own choices, and to begin the difficult, painful, often embarrassing work of taking personal responsibility at every turn for where I was, what I did and who I was going to be. Learning to trust again, learning to move, learning new words, new reactions, new thought patterns – to choose to stop begging life for mercy, and to start standing and carrying and tripping and dropping and bumping and falling head first into coffee tables while I learned how to walk in well.

I chose whole, and began a loud journey into forgiveness.

THANKSGIVING

I have a good husband who takes me dancing, and says things to me like, I don’t love you for what you do. He says, We notice when you clean, we don’t notice when you don’t. He kisses me deep, buys the groceries and irons his own shirts.

I have healthy, alive children who don’t stay in their beds, who draw on mirrors and have fights and laugh, and wrap their arms around me every day. They make me coffee, remind me to buy dish soap and say things to me like, You are more special than Minecraft.

I have a room all my own, just for writing. It has a window to the sky and a door that locks. It has a closet filled with good memories and with things I like to hide. It is a serious luxury, and I am all the appropriate amounts of grateful.

I am blessed – bountifully blessed.

I think of friends who squeeze all their family into two rooms, and who don’t have a yard. I think of friends who can’t choose what they want because they are one, not two – so they choose juggle and provide and not sleep. I think of friends whose husbands push them into walls, and of friends who have kissed their babies and tasted gone.

I am blessed – bountifully blessed.

Why is gratitude so hard to remember? It is so easy to stop and list blessings – to think of things like soap and water, light and heat, pen and paper, kindness and acceptance, space, time – and to know that these things are wealth beyond measure. A fly lands on my child’s face and nobody ever thinks, Take a picture. This is blessing. This is abundance. There is never ingratitude for this. But blessings carry weight of their own and, when your hands are full, sometimes you long to just take some things for granted.

I don’t think it is any kind of accident that the Hebrew word for Spirit is the same word that is used for wind and for the exhaling of breath. The invisible, moving force that surrounds us, that fills us, that sustains our lives, that breathes into us and blows out of us without thought, while we are asleep, without ever once asking for grateful – this is the way of God. God is everywhere – in all things, around all things. In God we live and move and have our being. God does not have ego, that we are required to see or know or say, Thank you.

I remind myself that a grateful heart is not for God’s benefit, but for mine. I give thanks to God so that I do not ever lose sight of what matters – what I have, not what I have not. I give thanks to God so that I can drink from the wellspring of peace and contentment – because nothing in the world poisons like ungrateful. I give thanks to God because it reminds me that precious things have been entrusted to me, that they are not mine, and that I must remember to share them and to treat them with care. I give thanks to Spirit so that I can remember to hold joy and pain loosely, with open hands, knowing that for life to sustain there must be breath – that the force of all things that live requires both ebb and flow.

TRAINING UP A CHILD

I know a lot about sin – where the seeds are, how they root and grow into underground webbings, making beanstalks overnight. I have Master’s Class experience. Since I became a mother, I don’t let myself get quite so buried under rocks about it. I haven’t scratched the surface on holy, but I sure understand mistakes better.

I have an alphabet and a label maker for spelling out soul struggles like separation anxiety, obsessive compulsive, attention deficit and inadequate impulse control. I have a lot of people – some professional, some not so much – advising me all the time what and what not to do. In the midst of that I try to laugh and be wise, and not exhibit signs of oppositional defiance disorder. I monitor the level of my outside voice, and I try not to let aggression turn passive. I try not to quench the spirit. I dodge prescriptions. I study DaVinci and Martha Stewart and Simon foot-in-mouth Peter. I look for precious gifts to polish – for anything true, excellent, worthy of praise. I see, clear as a glass house, how frustration can wear a spirit down. Try this, maybe that, persistent, consistent, don’t blink, don’t sweat, don’t ever drop the ball. I give thanks to God that I already know how to sweep to the corners of error. I give deep thanks to God for swimming in grace.

I do not want my children to hurt.

But sometimes they will hurt. Sometimes they will hurt other people. From my side of it, some days I’m not sure which of those is harder. I put tape over the mouths of old-time voices in my head that lob guilt bombs. Didn’t your mother teach you NOT to – crumple your homework, colour on walls, kick off your shoes, leave the house without socks, gossip, yell, wipe your mouth on your sleeve, hammer nails in your dresser, say f**k, punch people? There are an awful lot of don’ts to remember, in between Family History forms and permission slips and reading and math and World Peace. Sometimes I just want a t-shirt that reads, Don’t tell me what to do.

Few people really like error. It is offensive. It is annoying. It is distracting. It is wounding. It is hurtful. It is messy. It is damaging to relationships. It is very, very time-consuming. It is better not to make mistakes – so you have life, time, money, energy, limbs and relationship for all the right choices you want to make. If I could take mistakes away, I would. Maybe.

The truth is, I believe Jesus when he says, The one who is forgiven much, loves much. And I so badly want my children to love much. I so badly want them to grasp and wield the unsurpassed power of forgiveness and to build their lives on a foundation of grace. I don’t want them to ever think to paint white.

But I still let them peek at what the paint looks like, and I show them how to hold the brush. I tell them all the rules. I speak the words, Be good, as they go out the door and I hear God say to me, sharp, urgent, with the outside voice. Stop, My child. Stop. That is not how I have taught you.   

 Just as I am. I have to get brave to tell my children what I know – all the priceless that God has shown me through the pining of my sin and error. Do justly, love mercy, walk humbly with God. Do not be afraid of pain. Do not fall into sin – do whatever you do on purpose. Own your choices, and learn from them. If it’s a mistake, then it’s a mistake. Tell the truth to yourself and to God – God will speak Truth to you. God is Grace. All is grace.

AT THE POOL

My grandfather had a work ethic. He would say, God helps those who help themselves. But he liked to be wise and at the dinner table, passing food around, he would puzzle out loud, Help yourself? What does that even mean, help yourself?  If you needed help in the first place, how could you be the one to give it to yourself? My grandpa never saw Jerry McGuire kicking the bathroom wall, pulling his hair, desperately pleading, Help Me. Help Me help you. I wonder what he would have thought of that.

One of my favorite Bible passages is in John 5, where John records the story of Jesus with the man at the pool of Bethesda:

Some time later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish festivals. Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades. Here a great number of disabled people used to lie – the blind, the lame, the paralyzed. One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, “Do you want to get well?” “Sir,” the invalid replied, “I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me.” Then Jesus said to him, “Get up! Pick up your mat and walk.” At once the man was cured; he picked up his mat and walked. (NIV)

Thirty-eight years – that’s a lot of years of hurting and waiting and trying. That’s longer than Tom Hanks was Castaway. That’s almost enough years for a mid-life crisis. You have to imagine that he would have, at some point in those thirty-eight years, spent a lot of time just teetering on the ledge of that stagnant pool, perched, listening for the sounds of rustling feathers, ready to roll – begging a stranger, When I say go, just give me a really hard push. How many times did his heart, pounding hot with adrenaline, pump false hope through his blood while his brain screamed at his legs to just move, dammit, move. But when Jesus came along, singled him out of the crowd and asked him if he wanted to be well, he never answered, Yes.

What does it matter anymore what I want? I can’t do it on my own. I have tried, but it’s impossible. And I want you to know that over and over and over again, I have had to lie here, helpless, and watch someone else receive what I need.

I know that in life you can sometimes lose the use of parts of yourself. You can take a hard, hard hit to the soul and survive, but part of you is left weakened to the point of withered. You can end up in a poverty of spirit, and be impoverished for so long that you forget what the currency is. You can grow so skilled at the art of survival that you are completely confused by words like live life to the fullest. You stop being desperate, and start to get sentimental about wholeness. It’s something for other people – people who have more strength, more will, more helpful friends. You can start to take a lot of pride in your ability to endure all things.

Sometimes I have to be really truthful with God when I’m asked and say, No, honestly, I think I’ve lost the will to be well. Maybe if you had asked me before – years ago, when I was really, really hungry for it – but I think I am comfortable here now. At least I have learned how to do this and, God, I just absolutely cannot survive any more disappointment.

And this is one of the things that make me more than a little in love with Jesus – he didn’t at all need that man to say, Yes. He wasn’t listening for a Lord, help me. He didn’t say, Man, I want to help you. I need you to help me. Help me help you. He did not say that. What he did say was, Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

MIDLIFE CRISIS - Part I

I was once the prodigal, a long time ago. I used to pull off my dress and splash neck deep in grace. I was really wasteful with it. I used to know ocean. I understood boundless. I used to believe it will never run out. But I, like a great many prodigals, have long since become the Father’s prudent daughter. I have learned to sit respectfully at the table and drink God’s sufficient for all my needs grace from a cup. Life is filled with should and, unless I am having a really bad day or I didn’t sleep very well, I usually do. I have grown responsible. I have gained strength. I have become mature. I rarely make mistakes on purpose, tallying risk and reward before jumping brazenly into wrong. I have the beginnings of wisdom. I have faith more than enough to please God. I think, sometimes, maybe I might hear, Well done.

Except lately, that’s not been entirely true. I’m not really that crazy to hear, Well done. Honestly, I’m just not. Lately, it feels like too little, too late, and I don’t feel like it fits. I’ve been licking the skin of my teeth and thinking, Well – in is still in, is still in. Lately, I’ve been making mistakes on purpose.

The truth is that I’m just plain old weary of well-doing. I am exhausted from bearing all things and from overcoming evil with good. I have post-traumatic stress disorder from all the error I’ve had to put in the ground. I have all the symptoms of someone who’s been in the trenches. I’m thinking a lot about how evil you will have with you always – and how life just plain hurts no matter what you do.

I’ve been listening to Jesus, how he wants me to notice that the same sweet rain falls on the just and the unjust, and I’m answering him with anti-Christ words like, I don’t think that’s really fair. I don’t remember anymore what it means when the Father says, All I have is yours already. I want to say, Oh really? Well, what exactly do You have? Because if there’s something I’ve missed, I’ll write it down. I’m taking inventory.

Lately I’ve been taking bigger and bigger swigs of that cup of grace at the table, and looking God Father square in the eyes. Irreverent. He keeps full the cup in front of me – a bottomless, spilling out, running over measure – but it’s still measured. My daily portion. Sufficient for all my needs. I am expected to be mature. And lately He’s been eyeballing me. He knows I’m getting itchy feet.

I say, God, You know all things. I’m still here – I’m not going to run from You, even though I want to. Even though I’m crawling to get out of my own skin. Even though I’m sick in my belly from drinking that cup. But I’m so broken and so bored and I don’t remember what it feels like to choose.

His eyes blink ocean water, and His words to me are raw and warm like blood – All I have is yours. He loves me. Oh, how He loves me. He pushes away from the table – slips out of His shoes and pulls His shirt up over His head. He looks at that spilling over cup of grace and says, Ok, so We’ll be wanting more than that.

SWEET BABY JAMES: Mary's Song II

My soul is magnified within me. I see what has been veiled – a secret thing untold by angels – how love can grow and stretch you after you thought you had been filled to overflowing.

I see you – swaddled in the smells of home and innocence, wrapped up in my mother’s shawl, enfolded by her arms, all voices low, whispering a son is given.

I see you – fully man, fierce like a lion tracking the truth, pacing slow in shadows cast by the light.

I see you – how hard it is for you to wear your name after he has gone before you, and all that you have yet to bear because of him.

I see you – how you have mimicked holy ghosts, not knowing who you might have been if not for him – not knowing if, broken and spilled out, your offering will ever equal his.

You are the image of your father.

I am telling you the truth. Only God is good. Do not let the fear of being less than him stop you from being who you were made to be.

I am the lap where God knit you together. You are one of the blessed.

No – maybe angels did not sing when you were born. But I did.

FOR MARTHA

What she said was, Lord, tell her to help me – but what she meant was, God, could you just look at me once? Not at her, adoring, draped in her hair and a reckless perfume that expunges, with one tilt of her hand, the redolent tang of salt herring with soft roes, that I soaked overnight, skinned and filleted; the fat smell of the lamb I roasted with sweet paprika, juniper berries and dill; the sharp note of spring onions, that I trimmed and finely chopped; the pressed out aromas of garlic, olive oil and freshly ground pepper; cabbage leaves that I blanched; radishes, that I peeled and grated; cracked wheat, that I washed and soaked overnight; cinnamon quills; honey; cloves; pomegranate syrup; lemon rind, that I grated; almonds, pistachios, hazelnuts, that I roasted, broke, crushed for you.

Tell her to tie up her hair. Come tell me all the things that you are telling her now – here, where I am standing, where you should expect to find me in my mother’s house. Here where I’ll be long hours after you’re gone, caressing the pot in my hand. Not your flesh, but a bowl of clay made to be filled and emptied and washed for you. Jesus, we are not all unbridled. Don’t you see that what I now do, I do for you? Pouring out costly oil where there is no witness, here, in the kitchen – washing your plate, not your feet. Catching at words through the doorway as they fall from your lips to the floor where she sits. Come, Lord Jesus. Come. Put your hands in the warm, soapy water next to mine and make my sacrifice holy.

ON THE MERITS OF CLEAN FLOORS

Every once in a while someone will refer to me as a Mary. I’m never entirely sure, but I do suspect it has more to do with the state of my house than with the condition of my heart. The conversation usually goes something like this:

You’re such a Mary. I wish I could be more like that, sitting at the feet of Jesus, listening for what He has to say. I’m always just so busy. I have to be serving. I love doing for others. I wash my floors every day, do you? I just need to have a clean house. I don’t ever seem to have enough hours for just sitting and spending time with Jesus.

Something like that – with the special emphasis on the sitting. Generally, when people say things like this to me I think, I would like to see inside your medicine cabinet.

But it’s true that I do spend a lot of time thinking. It is also true that I don’t get terribly worked up about dirty laundry. I like a little advance notice before people come to my door. I need a lot of closets. I feel a lot of empathy for Martha.  

I am sure that if Jesus, and maybe some of his friends, dropped in at my house unexpectedly for coffee and conversation, I would look a lot like I was worried. I would make myself very busy shoving things behind doors, and muttering words like, Where is my broom?, and There is toilet paper on my stairs!, and Who shoved Christmas oranges into the air vent? I know I would. I would probably think frantically about how I should clear a spot on the counter, and quickly wash my big, green Tupperware bowl, and maybe try to mix up a box of Duncan Hines brownies. I would probably say rude, completely unnecessary words inside my head like, CRAP. Jesus is in my living room, and I am out of oil – OF ALL THINGS. I might wish I had washed my hair and that I had done all of this before. I might go a little Martha.

Perhaps – and I don’t know this for sure – but perhaps Mary was just a little more organized. Maybe she didn’t get so easily distracted in her day to day with things like finding great quotes about forgiveness, and observing how changing light affects the colour on a paint chip, and looking for a sharp pencil. It is possible that she just wasn’t the type to shove things into closets for later. Maybe she got up early every morning and washed her hair and her floors, made her bed, emptied her trash, glossed her lips and drove to Safeway – so that when Jesus came to her house she was the ready virgin with oil and brownies, and something hearty and nutritious to pack along with him for the road.

It is possible. I think the important thing to remember is that Jesus loved them both. Also, that clean floors really do make for less distraction if you plan on sitting at His feet.

FORTY-TWO

I do not sit on different couches, or put on hats, or paint Quiet Passion on my walls. I do not clip magazines, or cut my hair, or imagine thin.

I try on different sounds – roll letters in my mouth like marbles. I taste their smoothness, feel the way they puff my cheeks. I parrot, biting words like crackers, repeating.

I search for voice – creator voice. I am no longer content with void.

I know who I am. I know Who I believe. I ask myself, What do you want?

I do not ignore.

I pay someone else to wash my floors.

I dance. I laugh. I open. I loosen my hold on good and blessings.

I say yes and no, and mean it.

I talk to strangers who are not angels. I confess the truth. I’m not one either.

I do not judge.

I take Jesus at his word. I forgive – seventy, times eight – and learn wipe the slate clean.

I imagine I am a painting – I strip back layers, slowly, with love, with alcohol and Q-tips. It is pain staking, removing what has been added – but there is something precious underneath.

I stand naked in front of the mirror. I give thanks for stretch and scar and time – proof of covenant. These are blessings that are fixed. They cannot be taken back.

WRESTLING WITH GOD

It looks like spiritual seizure, soul flailing at the immortal, invisible God only wise. It looks like wrangling mud – boxing wind. People who love me say out loud, God does not need touch.

You’re wasting your breath. That energy could be spent on the poor – looking for lost coins, feeding lambs, pulling logs out of your eye, stock-piling oil for your lamp.

I call Job to my mind, blood boiling, grappling Spirit. I will not let You go until You answer me.

I read, Rachel, weeping for her children – refusing to be comforted.

I see Jacob, head on stone, not climbing stairs – wrestling for blessing that is not stolen.

I pretend Sarah sitting on the altar – wrapping soul around God, no ropes around her son. I think words she does not say. No, that is not who You are. I will not move. Explain Yourself to me. I imagine God saying, Well done, and putting the ram away.

I paint a permission for myself.  A carpenter grips a fisherman across the chest, swings a leg behind his knees, rolls him in the dust – before the foot washing.

Struggle is intimate – soul and Spirit. There is no space between for truth-tellers or intercessors or defenders of the faith or the blessed wounds of friends.

There is a covenant. There are expectations – not to be ignored. Not to be left lying desperate on a floor itchy with yesterday’s crumbs. Not to be left searching endlessly through heart-sized boxes for the roots of wicked ways asking, WHAT is going ON?  Not to hear silence.

This is not me resting head on lap, batting eyes, while Son speaks cryptic and in metaphor. I am not at peace, puzzled, asking, Are you talking about me, Lord?

I can’t get close enough. I want nearer, my God, to Thee. I want answer. I want comfort. I want blessing. I want the Everlasting Arms’ grip around me. I want to feel Spirit breath on my neck. I don’t need to see the face – I only ask for Present. Accounted for. Invested in the outcome. I lean. I call on reserves of strength. My mind rewinds to everything I have learned of God – how Spirit works and moves and holds. I suspend all need for personal space. My air goes in and out in rhythm. Deliberate. Counting.

I hurt. My hand is over my mouth.

Emmanuel.

I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear; but now my eye sees Thee.  ~ Job 42:5

CONFESSIONS

In the car, half-way home, my ten year old asks, So, what does ‘living your life for God’ even mean? Do you know? Can you explain that to me? I pounce on teachable moments. She holds the words hot in her mouth like steeped tea. My ears try to cup them as they slide over her lips onto the dashboard – she is telling. She loves to hear her voice, feel her tongue chiselling out the sounds that give form and shape to the invisible – removing everything that isn’t what should be. She’s a sculptor of words – a preacher from a zigzagged line of preachers. She knows nothing of millstones.

Talking about God is more difficult for me. I was taught the fear – I have learned to filter. My soul remembers ineffable. Syllables chant an old cradle song in my head – invisible, unknowable, unfathomable. I pick my words like raspberries, careful not to bruise. I feel brazen.

God loves me. I hear it from a stranger at my door, and I hear myself answering back Jesus like a secret code. I watch his words drop like blocks in front of me – but do I believe in God, but do I know God, but do I KNOW God as my SAVIOUR. He is building a wall. I think to say words like I’m already washed in the blood of the Lamb. My name is in The Book. I tell which on the list of approved churches I go to. I pray to shut the door – to remember don’t talk to strangers, instead of thinking about children listening and cups of cold water and about angels in disguise.

He doesn’t tell about the spill-over measures of joy like a fountain, peace like a river, love like an ocean. His words say nothing of the smoggy, enflamed, brambly, black nights of the soul.

He is asking if I am literate. But do I know my alphabet. But have I actually read a book. But do I read with comprehension.

I bite on my tongue. I want to say, Yes, brother. Yes. Yes. Yes. But you are qualifying the ineffable. You are quantifying the immeasurable. I want to say, I know what the word love means.

TELLING TALES

Since making the rookie mistake of saying out loud to people that I am writing a novel, I generally get asked one of two questions – each entirely predictable and without answer. What is it about? How far along are you?  I don’t know how to satisfy these questions. It’s not a baby – girl or boy, how many weeks? I don’t know what it’s about – I haven’t written it yet. I don’t know how far along I am – but I’m a very, very long way from done. I just want it to be healthy.

If I am feeling safe or risky or pressured, I will sometimes offer, It’s about Sarah. Blank stare. You know – Sarah? Yawn. Tucked between crisp paper sheets, back at the beginning of The Book, in a dead sleep. Abraham’s wife. Isaac’s mother. When your story is 127 years from beginning to end, I do think there is something faulty about not being identifiable by much more than that.

There are a lot of things that frustrate me about Sarah, and about the way we tend to read her story. I have yet to resolve for myself whether or not I even like her. I don’t know that I’m supposed to like her. Honestly, I kind of don’t. It’s difficult to write that. It’s difficult to say out loud, I’d rather be on an episode of ‘Cops’ than model my life after a woman like that.

 She must have been impressive. She’s the CHOSEN. The MATRIARCH. Overlooking a few notable very bad decisions and one cynical laugh, she’s a perfect example of that most definable and desirous of creatures – the Godly woman. She’s a living sacrifice, a testament to faith. She’s beautiful. She whips up a feast fit for angels on a moment’s notice. She’s the Tammy Wynette of Genesis – the emblematic long-suffering wife doing all the wrong things for all the right reasons, and standing by her man. He, in turn, gives her a very expensive funeral.

Sometimes I want to skim over her. Make justification for how she used and abused her handmaid, Hagar. Not think too long and hard about how she tossed Ishmael – her own son, for all intents and purposes – into the desert to die once she’d birthed another on her own. Not consider why she did not rip Abraham apart with her hands, after he had tied up their child and tried to light him on fire. After that episode I would have put the God-covenant in a pitched basket and sent it down the river for someone else to find. I would have rolled that old man up in a carpet and hammered a peg through his temple while he slept. No. More. God. Encounters.

But I’ve been conditioned. I want Sarah to be holier than me. I want her to be devout, full of faith, relentless in her chasing after righteousness, courageous and indomitable, dignified. I want her to be always only a woman seeking after, and submissive to, God’s heart. I want her to be character flawed. A weaker vessel. A little cracked. I want to be able to read her story and press my hand to my forehead, and say wistfully, Oh, IF ONLY. If only you had just trusted God a little more, a little longer, you would have had everything you ever wanted. And how the world would be different now! I want it to just be a story.

God forbid Sarah should think and feel and behave like a real person. Nobody wants her to actually be a broken thing – shattered, spilled out, making a mess all over the floor, stinging our noses. It feels so wasteful.

If Sarah wrapped those crisp, white sheets around herself and crawled out from between the black covers, and spoke, I think she would be terrifying. She might float out over my bed at night, like Fruma Sarah from Fiddler on the Roof, and with musty burial wraps billowing around her she’d screech at me, How do you like me now?!

I ask God for the courage not to reach out and try to soothe her.

I pray to remember that God more than loves the mistake-makers. God chooses them. God goes galaxies out of the way to seek them out and to find them. God locks eyes and heart on the broken, the poor in spirit, the damaged, the beyond repair. God lays claim to their lives, and repurposes them. God writes the whole entire Story around them.

TRUTH TELLING

Some stories are true that never happened. ~ Elie Wiesel

I have some literal thinkers in my house. I gave birth to a fledgling fundamentalist. Black and white. Right and wrong. Justice. Truth. Rules. She’s beautiful in her way – baby, she was absolutely born that way. However, this does present challenges for a slightly more grace hungry, both-sides-now thinker who likes to say things using expressions and metaphors and sarcasm, especially if that person is the parent. It can make for some very intense conversations about nuanced things like time frames and sleeping in and hell. I get stumped a lot.

I like to talk about gray things – questions that don’t have answers, the weather in London, the elephant in the room – but children are rarely equipped for this.

What is truth?

The Bible is full of people who ask some pretty fantastic questions, but I love this question. Pilate asks it of Jesus, after Jesus' arrest. He takes a lot of heat for asking it – and, ok, perhaps it was his tone – but I think it’s a monster sized question.

“Jesus answered, ‘You say correctly that I am a king. For this I have been born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice.” Pilate said to Him, ‘What is truth?’”  John 18:37-8

WHAT is truth? What IS truth? What is TRUTH? Well, it’s true that sometimes we wouldn’t know Truth if it was staring us in the face.

When my children ask me if the story of Adam and Eve is a true story, I know what they are asking me. They are asking me, Did that really happen? They want to know, is the God Story the same kind of story as Santa and Little Red Riding Hood and the Tooth Fairy – something to keep them good, out of dark woods and asleep on time. They ask as though true and actually happened were interchangeable. They ask as though actually happened is more meaningful than Story. I understand why they ask this, but I don’t think it’s the right question.

You have to know that as soon as Jesus finished telling the story of The Prodigal Son, some kid in the front put up his hand and asked, Did that really happen? You know someone did.

What makes a story a true story?

IN THE RYE

I’ve been channeling Holden Caulfield lately, looking at life through borrowed eyes. Having and ending one-sided relationships with strangers in my head. Fantasizing about jamming toothbrushes down people’s throats. Hanging out with a bloodied face, saying deep things like, If I do, I will, if I don’t, I won’t, and  I’m not in the mood right now. Very close to snapping. Is this what 42 is supposed to be for a woman? Channeling a 16 year old boy on the verge of being institutionalized? Is everything suddenly coming into hyper-focus, or is it time for a prescription lens? Is this me being more aware of my surroundings than I’ve ever been before, or am I days away from twirling blindly over the edge in a field of rye? I’m doing things I wouldn’t categorize as sane. I’m not questioning my judgment. Oh, I’m with you, Holden – I, also, am SO tired of fake.

Starting this blog has been an exercise in courage. I have an imposter complex and a fear of disappointing. I am always afraid of getting in trouble. I have spent the largest chunks of my life trying to please God and man, and child and parent and boss and teacher and pastor and crossing-guard. Like a lot of people I know, I rarely ask myself what I want – and want is such a tricky trickster. Want likes you to believe that it is the opposite of have.

Sometimes I do enjoy the wanting a lot more than I enjoy the having. Want is self-indulgent. It masquerades as abstinence – a waiting, a preservation of self, a dedication to prudence. It’s controlled. It doesn’t hurt anybody, or make them think less of you. It’s long-suffering. It paces patiently at the precipice. It’s safe. It catches you in the rye, stops you from losing your footing, going over the edge, falling.

What I think I am realizing is that want has been a dead thing eating a hole in my brain. Want is apathy resurrected and turned violent. Sometimes, to get where you need to in life, you just have to make a run for it – over the edge. Sometimes a free-fall over the precipice is the only way of escaping the zombie in the rye.

THE WORD

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. I wonder how many times John wrote and rewrote those words, shuffled them around, scratched them out and started over, banged his head on the table, read them aloud to himself, second guessed, edited and re-edited to get it just right. He was inspired, there’s not a doubt in my mind about that. Those words are solid rock Truth.

Words are big. They’re the stuff of beginnings. They fall firmly into the realm of stuff God does - parting waters, making the sun stand still, burning bushes, casting words across the universe. Even before nothing formed into something, God had voice and God was speaking.

I wonder if God feels the acid in the belly after the words are out there. I wonder if the Godhead ever reflects, Wow, We know so many different kinds of people, and they all know different parts of Us. There are a lot of people We really care about who actually have no idea who We even are. What We really want to say is going to seriously affect the way they think about Us, and they might not even get it. Let Us choose Our words very, very carefully. Nobody writes a story like God does, yet even God only got six chapters in before being flooded with a desire to bury the whole sorry thing under a 40 day avalanche of rain.

I feel my own words in my belly, in the back of my throat, behind my knees. I shape them carefully, I wrestle with them and yet they still come out wrong. They burn my lips and I vomit them onto strangers.

Writing is riskier than a tattoo. When you tell people you want to write, they should caution you. They should say, “Imagine you at 90. Are you going to be able to live with those words you write 50 years from now when your mind is shrivelled? When some stranger is giving you a bath in a care home, how will you feel about the written word then?” If you’re going to write something down, you have to be sure that it’s what you really want to say, that you could say it out loud to your husband or your mother or a stranger and it would still be true, and that you will still be glad you wrote it how you did even if it disappoints – even if it twists and sags and morphs over time.