On sleepless nights and courage

I have woken up the last few nights at 3:16 am.

Seeing the same time three nights in a row made me think of the Fred Roger's documentary I saw recently. He weighed 143 lbs. most of his adult life and every time he saw the scale he would recall the phrase "I love you" -- I (1) Love (4) You (3). He saw this as a reminder of God's love.


When I once again saw 3:16 flashing at me it reminded me of the ubiquitous verse from John:


For God so Love the World that God gave God's only begotten son.


I find in interesting that Fred Rogers looked and found signs for God's accompaniment in mundane signs. What would it mean for me to be more attentive to God's words of comfort and presence breaking in all around me? Would it do me some good as I lay awake: fearful of the darkness of the world and of my own life to turn to these words from John? The words echo strong and familiar always in my memory in the King James Version: only begotten, whosoever, believeth, shall not perish...

I confess that I don't spend a lot of time thinking about "everlasting life." I do spend a lot of time thinking about God's love and what it means to be held by God's love. I believe very fervently in love's redeeming power and that love is able to make a way where there is no way. And it is not that I don't believe in "life eternal." I just don't think about it that much. But maybe I should more. Christianity isn't just a big bag of metaphors. If it is going to matter for my dark nights or anyone's dark night it needs to offer more than just vague promises of community and toothless moralism. Everything that is really, truly worth loving is worth dying for. . . and since that cost is so searing and final there really does need to be more on offer than what this life can give.


And so today I will be praying for the doctors, nurses, hospital cleaning staff, people at the checkouts of grocery stores and pharmacies who are putting their health and lives on the line for other people.

We owe so much to those people who are willing to transcend self-interest and at times like these we are reminded that there can be no morality or goodness or truth without courage.

And I will try to be a bit more brave for my children and for other people who need me to be brave.

And I will look for for cracks in the universe where God might be trying to whisper words of direction and comfort to me.

And yet....

One thing that I keep thinking about that story of Fred Rogers is that there had to have been a day when the scales stopped reading 143. When his cancer advanced...

as he neared death...

When there were no comforting signs in the world around.

And so..

If you can't see God anywhere in any of this... that is okay too.

For right now, I am trying to rest in God's promise in John 3:16

God will be with us beyond the end.

A Crossroads

"Jodie, how many times have I told you.  I don't want to go to church."  These were the words of my Mother the last time she left the family home.  We were taking her to the hospital, but in her confusion she reached for the one place I was always trying to force her towards. It was Boxing Day.  Alongside her dementia she had a severe kidney infection.  My Dad, had called, late on Christmas Day to say that he couldn't care for my Mom anymore.  In the next week, we would discover that Dad needed a quadruple bypass.

That January the health of my parents ebbed and flowed.  I thought at times that I would lose them both.  By the end of January my Mom was gone and my Dad was recovering, ever so tentatively, from his surgery.  

It was at my Mother's bedside, in those critical weeks, that I would first hear the adult version of my call to the ministry.  

When I was a young girl I heard God's call, but I also heard the voice of the minister at my summer camp telling me that God would not call a women.

This calling at my Mother's bedside was different. More a statement of identity than of aspiration.  I was a mediator, a priest.  This was not a job to pursue, this was  a way of being--an orientation that I couldn't escape.

The first 20 years of my life.... I worked so hard to balance commitments that felt at times impossible to reconcile.  My parents--who I loved so deeply--who wanted nothing to do with the church AND my own deep, crazy and passionate love of Jesus.  

Both my parents are gone now.  

Another cold and dark January brings me to another crossroads--a juncture where I feel an excruciating heartbrokenness regarding the church.

The church was always a place of solace and safety for me.  

And yet, at times, I also felt like the church, which would glibly say that my parents were eternally damned, demanded that I abandon and forsake my deepest loves.

What the church offered instead was its claim to righteousness and justice.

And at the time, I was willing to surrender everything for a taste of this other world of God's reign within this world.

............ 

My Dad was never lauded as some holy man.   He made many mistakes in his life.  Yet, for ten years he gently, conscientiously, carefully cared for my Mother.  Comforting her fearful nights, filling her days with pleasant diversions, defending her when people belittled her  --noting that "she was the smartest woman he had ever known and she would be treated with respect." 

------------

The church has demanded much from me-- using the words of Jesus.  Asking me to abandon kith and kin.

AND

I love the church, but not more than vulnerable love.

I love the church,  but not more than the truth

I love the church, but not more than the severe and tireless love of self sacrifice and courage.

And so I sit at this crossroads: 

Knowing that the truth lies somewhere betwixt and between 

more, perhaps,  in the Gospel preached by my parent's broken faithful love than in the glib promises of a church that refuses to lay down its own life and its own reputation.

And I am bereft.

Grief--some reflections

How to measure my 40 years?  January 30th marks the 8th anniversary of my Mom's death. This year the shadow of my Dad's death eclipsed my yearly remembrance.  This year has been one of almost wordless grief.  I spoke haltingly of the love that bound my Mom and Dad together.  Of the way in which they were able to make a crooked little farm on the backroads of Buckley, MI a place of grace.

How to speak meaningfully about any of this?    When my Mom died... . it was like the universe spoke to me everywhere I turned.  She was gone and yet I saw her everywhere.  Inflected through the poetry of my own heart.... and sinew;  She was there is my own sense of beauty and goodness and justice.  Now that my Dad is gone it is just this ever-expanding distance....  I feel like I am hurtling through time and space--the distance between us grows deeper each day.  I don't know why these experiences of loss are so different.  

In my dreams my Dad would come to me and tell me that I needed to fix the house.  A few nights ago I had a dream so overwhelming real of meeting my Dad in the living room of the house in Buckley that it cast a glow over my entire day.

Our love was a love of few words and little philosophy.  It is hard to imagine what it means to go on without his body, without his voice....  

It is hard to know how to go on without the little everyday sacraments he was always providing.  In my cupboard I still have a "just add water" Mocha that he bought me a month before he died.  He knew I didn't like the instant Maxwell House coffee he made every morning and he wanted to find something that I would like....  

Indeed, when he came to our house the Christmas before last he bought us a new coffee makersbecause ours had gone caput.  I still have one brown mug left that he bought me three Christmases ago.  I don't know if I should use this mug or put it away.   What will I do when the coffee maker he bought breaks down?  It is a stunning thought!  

(I can imagine that there are poets who are skillful enough to help me understand what it will mean when that little electric heart in my kitchen stops beating.  For now, I cannot bear the thought.)

For most of my life, I have tried to live into my Mom's world--it was a world of words (I didn't understand), her almost mystical depths of illness and brilliance.  Certainly her world was resistant to me;  I cannot encompass what her life meant--and yet, I could gesture towards a meaning.  And now, here I stand-- trying to comprehend the world my Dad loved-- and it remains a bit out of my reach.  What meaning is this?  Meaning that is caught up in rightly placed nails, in webs of loves spoken through anxiety, in a joyful over-acceptance of the physical, and practical, and day-to-day.   

I suppose it might all boil down to this: when I was a baby it was my Father who would wake in the middle of the night to feed me.  My Mom had told him about her post-partum psychosis (with previous pregnancies) and so my Dad took up the long and lonely task of comforting me in the middle of the night.  I only learned this when I was in college and it helped to explain a theretofore unexplainable mystery.  I noticed when I doodled--in the margins of my notebook--or wherever--that I would mindlessly write "Jodie is a good, good girl."  This was the cause of a kind of fervent sheepishness for me.  That is... until, just after Johanna was born.  When my Dad first met Johanna he took her into his arm and began to sing to her:  "Johanna is a good, good girl;  good good girl; good good girl;  Johanna is a good good girl" (to the tune of Mary had a little Lamb.) 

So here was the  source of the words that lie deepest in my sub-conscious.  

How do we cope with the loss of the ground of our being?  Not the ultimate ground, but certainly the proximate one?

There are only so many ways to speak about our lives--say that it is a journey and that we must leave behind our fellow travelers on the way.  Say that it is a trial...  Say that this sojourn doesn't count  in the ultimate scheme of things.   And yet, there simply aren't words powerful enough to encapsulate what one life means to another. ... and certainly words cannot describe what it means for one life to be held and sustained in its first darknesses by another.  Word simply fail us.  

This silence.  This silence that renders me speechless-- speaks --I suppose-- to that love that I can't name because it precedes me--forming my form, identifying my identity.  It is no wonder that in grieving its loss that I feel like I just might be undone.  

Christmas

I have never before had such a broken heart at Christmas.

I tend to look forward to Christmas all year long.  When I am dealing with hard life stuff in--let's say in late August--I often look forward to Advent.  In the last several years as I have dealt with grief over the loss of my vocation, or the death of my Mother, or a general sense of malaise--I have looked forward to these weeks in December.

This year Christmas keeps ripping the scab off of my soul.

When I was a child,  I never experienced big family Christmases.  My Grandparents were all gone.  My parents were estranged from their brothers and sisters or geographically removed.  My half siblings never came for Christmas Day.

Christmas was about my Mom, Dad, me, and for many years my brother Blake.

When I was young there was almost a ghastly amount of presents.  My Mom was poor as child and my Dad always tried to make it up to her at Christmas.

My Dad's love language was "gift giving."  I know, I know, consumerism is one of the many vices of Christmas, but my Dad made gift giving ebullient.  He would buy so many presents that the bottom of the tree would become invisible. We wouldn't be able to use the front door.  My Mom would receive this packaged love with all the delight of a child.  She would  wake us up at the crack of dawn with a cow bell to open our presents.  She would delight in the jewelry, the art supplies, the underwear.

There were always presents  from Santa, and the cats Fats and Skinny, and from Mom and Dad.
.
Three of the last four years my Dad has spent Christmas with us.  Last year it was all sort of desultory.  We were struggling a bit with money.  We were overwhelmed a little by all the new demands of the pastorate.

But, all-in-all, these years were magical--especially Christmas four years ago when my Dad arrived to Chicago by train.  He was in such good spirits!  When he arrived the toddler Sam guided him to the Christmas Tree and he remained for 10 days, making pies, preparing roast beef, shopping for presents, watching endless re-runs of Gilligan's Island and Matlock with Simeon.  It was all so utterly beautiful. Last year had its hiccups, but it ended with a lovely drive along Lake Huron where we made plans to spend the night in Marine City the following Christmas.  There was a little theatre downtown playing "Its a Wonderful Life" and a ferry to Canada.

I can hardly put words to my sense of loss this Christmas!

Earlier this week I attended the funeral of the ideal Mennonite man and Father.  It was beautiful.  He was exemplary.  Yet, in the context of my faith community, I keep struggling for words to describe my Father.   I keep struggling to find a way to describe how loved he always made me feel, how safe!  I struggle to find words to describe how much he loved my Mother.  How his faithful love allowed her to live with a terrifying mental illness.  I struggle to find words to describe the quality of delight that he took--in stories, presents, exploration and novelty.  I have been trained in my faith community to see the love my Dad provide as so fleeting--so many trinkets and baubles, at best as a kind of holding it together despite bad circumstances.  

I would not be able to claim him as the upstanding Gentleman so revered.   Somehow this just makes the grief worse.  I was able to find the words to affirm aggressively what my Mother meant to me--some how I cannot find the right words for my Father.

I do not know how to speak adequately of either my love or my grief.

I enter his Advent genuinely needing something that I cannot provide for myself.  Needing something that I am not entirely sure that my heart can bear.

Holy Saturday (10/15/2017)

I walked the trail by my house
on the day between being with you
and returning to you.

It began to rain and the gaps
between the trees were wide
It was early Spring 

And so I was startled by
a wild turkey. 
To come so near
this skittish creature.

You always delighted to see them in the fields 
you always spotted them before me.

Did this mean something
or nothing?
I don’t remember 
Though it stared back at me like
a prophet.

I came upon
a non-Evergreen tree filled with
Christmas ornaments

 I plucked one 
holding the points against the tenderness
of my palm
anticipating Christmas coming
without you.

When I arrived at church
I served myself communion
having missed Good Friday
traveling from you.

It was quiet in the church and empty.
But it was not cold.

and I am the only one left

Almost 40 years ago--to the day--my Mom and Dad drove a moving van filled with furniture and
chickens out to a small, blue farm house on 10 acres in Buckley, Michigan.  My Dad was almost 50 with two failed marriages and a drinking problem.  My Mom had only left the mental hospital a year before.  I was weeks old.   In the earliest pictures I was red and enraged.  Sometime during that first Spring and Summer on that little farm I would grow improbably plump and blond.

There is a place in the narrative of the book of Job where, after the destruction, three servants come to tell Job of all that has been destroyed and in sequence they proclaim "and I am the only one left."

People age and die and so I am not experiencing a general cataclysm, but that feeling of being one of the  last witnesses has echoed in my head these last few weeks as I contemplate my parents' death.

Sometime in the first years my Mom wrote the following poem:



THE MADONNA OF THE BACKYARD

The blue and white chipped
                     madonna.
Stood erect, but meek.

Enclosed in an aging bush.
    Green grass at her feet.

She seemed so out of place there,

 But then I had to pause

Love is everywhere. . . .
         And backyards can be the
                                                 Holiest of all.

Somehow on that simple farm, love brought life to barrenness--love shifting, moving, turning over, and making fallow.

When Doug held me in the room where my Father died he whispered in my ear "you were redemption's child."

This had turned out to be an identity as weighty and overwhelming as it sounds.

At times impossible to bear, really, as it is an identity that is made possible by the unreform(able)ed past.  Yet, it seems to me a betrayal not to continue to witness to that love.

I remember my Mom telling me her favorite book of the bible was Ruth.  At the time it irritated my evangelical sensibilities.  My Mom would pick the most boring book in the Bible-seemingly so devoid of God's definitive action in history.

Hesed is often translated as "steadfast, loving kindness"  it is redemptive and transformative love, and it is distinctively divine love.  And while Boaz becomes "the kinsman redeemer" in the story of Ruth and Naomi, it is Ruth, the Moabite stranger, that becomes the agent of redemption.   It is Ruth, the Moabite stranger, that demands that love is enacted through justice for her Mother-in-law; it is Ruth who bring forth new life for the bitter Naomi making impossible possibilities possible.

You can imagine the story of Ruth and Naomi occurring in dust bowl America, or almost any Refugee camp in the world. As such its placement in Holy Scripture should reminds us that divine love sanctifies those little human redemptions that are made possible through everyday faithfulness and love. We all know that real life is filled with impossible situations.  It is astonishing grace when things are set to rights.

Sometimes backyards are the holiest places of all.  

Pete Seeger and Vocation

I don't know when I first heard the name Pete Seeger.  I suspect he was mentioned on Family Ties.  Seeger, like everything loved by Elise and Michael Keaton was made to seem a tad quaint. The Keaton's 60's radicalism was to be taken alongside a bracing dose of (materialism) Mallory, (capitalism) Alex, and sports (Jennifer.)

Anyway, about 10 years ago I watched a PBS documentary on Seeger and determined afterwards that I wanted a vocation like Pete's. I certainly didn't mean that I was going to become a protest singer or learn the five string banjo.

But, there were several things about the life that Pete lived that I find exemplary:

(1)  His profoundly democratizing vision of his art. This is a self-evident claim --folk music as an art  is axiomatically democratic.  Yet,  he lived this impulse out in so many profound ways--I think of his work with the Highland School which was so connected to the Freedom Schools, union organizing, and the creation of a vision of grassroots organizing;  however, the most stunning and perpetual sign of this democratizing vision was his capacity to get people to sing whether the stage was small or the stage was large.

Studs Terkel expressed it better than I am able to:

 Before we hoist one for Pete, let's also remember that he's one of the best choirmasters in the country. He may not have the technique of Robert Shaw, but the result is just as explosive. Imagine an audience of thousands as Pete sings, say, "Wimoweh." As Pete waves his arms gently, the audience reacts as a professional choir might. I've seen a wizened little man, who obviously is somebody's bookkeeper, at the command of Pete become a basso profundo, reaching two octaves lower than Chaliapin. This is the nature of Pete Seeger, who reaches out toward the further shores more effectively and more exhilaratedly than anyone I've ever run into


(2) His Earnestness:  I have come to realize that what distinguishes earnestness from sentimentalism is faithfulness.  A sentiment is fleeting.  It is easy to be patronizing towards sentiments, but people who live lives of deep fidelity to their sentiments become beyond disdain.  Fred Rogers proved this--his show would be little but feel good rot if he hadn't embodied those values daily.  Peter Seeger lived out a fidelity to his sentiments for 94 years.

(3)His Faithfulness:  He didn't just add the "shall" to "We Shall Overcome," he was there singing the song faithfully at Highlander School when MLK was there. And, more to the point, he was there singing the song as a dirge when the bodies of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were discovered in Mississippi.

(4) His Courage:  It wasn't for no reason that the FBI tracked  him or that J. Edgar hounded. He was willing to risk tangibly for truth and democratic values.  He realized that these values don't demand some sort of "once-and for-all"  sacrifice, but a daily fidelity to the hard work of letting every voice be heard, of listening to the some times strange songs that other people sing, and training others to not only listen closely, but also to sing out boldly.