Practicing Resurrection in Grave-clothes

After almost fifteen years of skirting around seminaries, Masters of Divinity programs, or counseling programs, I finally landed on a program that mixed my deep gladness and the world’s great hunger (Beuchner). I began the program in August and it has been a steady stream of Dallas Willard, James K.A. Smith, Wendell Berry, Ignatian spirituality, and more. My theology and brain are being stretched, as is my schedule. I tend toward deep work instead of broad work, meaning I function best when I can start and finish the same book without picking up another, but that isn’t an option these days. Instead, I find myself asking the Holy Spirit often: help me retain this content in a formational way instead of merely an informational way.

One of our texts is a book I have had on my shelves for several years, one I’ve picked up intermittently but not given myself fully to yet. It’s called The Critical Journey, and if you’re at all familiar with stage theory from the field of psychology, parts of the book may feel familiar or foundational. It’s not necessarily new information for the widely read person, but depending on when you read it, it may resonate with you differently. The authors make the case that there are generally six stages to our faith journey.

1. The recognition of God

2. The life of discipleship

3. The productive life

4. The journey inward

   The wall

5. The journey outward

6. The life of love

If you’re a self-aware person, you can probably pinpoint where along that spectrum your spiritual journey is currently. If you’re like a sponge right now, drinking up everything and learning a lot, probably stage 2. If you’re wringing yourself out, though, producing much and seeing much fruit, you’re probably around stage 3, and so on. The authors also offer that many believers are “caged” at specific stages, too, meaning they haven’t learned to trust God with the next stage enough to move through and risk what might be lost and so what was good about their specific stage, now turns sour.

This idea of “caged stages” in our spiritual life is a really interesting one to me. Some of the most frustrating times in my spiritual life have been when I have felt stuck or when those I’m around seem stuck. There seems to be an unwillingness to learn, grow, change, or experience different or new ways of seeing God or ourselves. And usually that unwillingness is rooted in a fear of losing control. Losing control of ourselves, losing control of our environment or institution or vocation, or losing control of how others perceive us. What this reveals is that, in some way, we found our identity in this stage and not in God himself. We found a niche in being the person who was always learning or always producing or always deconstructing, etc., and we became afraid that if we moved into a new or different space, that our worth would be lost.

When I began reading, I was able to mark specific years of my life and which stage I was in during those years. Someone else’s life may not mirror the stages as the authors laid them out (and they make allowance for that), but mine mostly have. When I came to stage 4 (the journey inward), I was able to see myself clearly there right now. But when I came to The Wall (a subset of stage 4), I knew that’s exactly where I was. This line captured it for me precisely: 

“We must come to terms with ourselves and face to face with God, no matter how differently God emerges in comparison to our expectations and teachings. This comes as a very humbling experience. It is difficult for spiritual leaders to become that vulnerable and face it. Spiritual pride is difficult to face, especially when in a position to lead others.”

I have almost in a detached way, observed the spaces I’ve inhabited vocationally over the past ten years become spaces I no longer want to inhabit, including, in some ways Sayable. I know enough about myself to not immediately go and delete twenty years of writing in this space, but I have watched myself growing more detached from it. I don’t find my identity in it—or writing—anymore. The truth is that I have had a lot of spiritual pride in my vocation and writing. Part of recognizing that and repenting for it, has meant I don’t want to lead others with my writing or voice much anymore. I don’t trust my voice in a way I have in the past.

Part of that is good because my voice was never as trustworthy as God is.

Part of that isn’t good because like it or not, writing is what God has called me to and trusting my voice is a part of that vocation.

A few years ago, as I was wresting with some Big Theological Conundrums and whether or not to write about them, my friend Seth Haines encouraged me to bring my readers along on that journey with me instead of dropping huge changes upon them all at once. That seemed to me really good advice and also really scary advice. It meant trusting three entities.

I had to trust you, my readers, that you wouldn’t think I’d lost my marbles and gone rogue.

I had to trust myself, that this journey was going somewhere, and not just swirling around a drain.

And ultimately, I had to trust God, that he would bring me through. That there would be another side to this wrestling and that other side could actually be a space of blessing and not the cursing I imagined.

I am 100% convinced that the church needs more people who actively wrestle publicly. All three of those words are important and none are less important that the others. Actively, meaning it is not passive or indifferent, but it is worked through, always moving toward something. Wrestle, meaning it is not clean or pretty or polished or without pain. And public, meaning it is not always hidden. There is a space for wrestling in the dark, as Jacob did with the angel of God. But there is also a need for public witness of not only what God has done, but what he is doing and what he has not done yet. All three of those are scary spaces to inhabit. To wrestle actively means to invite pain, to wrestle publicly means to invite critique—and to receive critique while also in pain can be a bewildering experience. It has been for me.

I’ve lost a lot the past few years, as I’ve been slowly trying to bring readers along as God brings me along. Nate described it to me last year as a sort of changing of the guard. I am not a numbers girl anymore, but when I had to check analytics for book proposal purposes, I saw a very steady decline of readers and followers aligning precisely with moments when I said not this but that. I’m not saying that to gain pity at all, but to simply say there is a cost for actively wrestling publicly and I haven’t always wanted to risk it. I still don’t. 

But what The Critical Journey is helping me realize is that unless I move through this stage, I will remain caged in it. Unless I risk the humiliation of my spiritual pride—pride in what I knew or what I could do—I will only keep my eyes fixed on me and not God. I will always be afraid of what I’m going to lose instead of looking toward how God redeems. Two of my spiritual heroes both penned the words “Practice resurrection” (Wendell Berry and Eugene Peterson), and I don’t suppose there’s any hope of resurrection without some death first. 

What does that mean for me here in this space or other spaces or in my own life? I honestly don’t know. I’m not fooling you reader, pulling you along for some gotcha moment. I truly don’t know. But outside it is raining and the autumn chill is settling into our bones, the leaves are falling as steady as the rain, and winter is coming. It always feels like a risk, doesn’t it? Winter? As if the death will never end.

But what is practicing resurrection if not faith in what we know but what is still unseen?

The World, as Best as I can Remember It

One of the advantages (or disadvantages, depending on your view) of having moved across the country so many times, is whenever we want to visit another one of those places and we don’t want to fly, the drive is long. I have traveled north to south, east to west, and back again untold times. I know my favorite routes, but sometimes I change it up to see middle America or an art installation in the middle of nowhere Texas or to cross the bridge into Cincinnati from the south, because it’s just prettier that way.

Before I was married, these cross-country roadtrips were accompanied by the sound of Rich Mullins. Always Rich Mullins. In my doubt, Rich. In my faith, Rich. In my joy, Rich. In my soul, Rich. Since the age of 16 he has been the minstrel for my journeys. In one of his tunes, Jacob and Two Women, Rich takes poetic license (as all artists do) with the story of Jacob, Leah, and Rachel. The refrain is, “This is the world as best as I can remember it.”

It chokes me up a bit to hear that song these days because I never really understood it before recent years. It’s not just a retelling of a biblical narrative. It’s a reminder of how traumatic those events must have been for everyone involved. Go read it now and think about it in light of what we know about trauma, abuse, healing, disappointment, and pain. If you can, place yourself in any one of their shoes: Jacob, the swindled. Leah, the ugly. Rachel, the barren.

When we experience brokenness in our lives, because we are thinking, feeling, and ordering beings, we reorient stories so they don’t hurt us as bad. We tell a better story because we’re not ready to deal with the pain of the reality. Or we tell a worse story because the pain is too compounded in us to see a situation as it truly is. We’re all telling the story as best as we can remember it, imperfectly and true, but also true to who we are.

Jesus wants to heal all these stories, but he hasn’t yet, not fully (and anyone who doesn’t admit to carrying the fragments of their own broken story along with them is lying—don’t believe them). We’re still reading the future through the past and reading the past through the past and reorganizing today through the past we remember and the future we envision. None of us are getting that right, not entirely.

. . .

After Nate and I married, and he committed the cardinal sin of making fun of one of Rich’s songs (Don’t worry, we’ve made up.), we switched to audio books on our cross-country treks. In those books, we’ve traveled to other worlds, planets, post-apocalyptic America, and WWII prisons.

One book in particular was one we had to listen to in fits and starts. It begins with a traumatic story almost identical to a story from my own upbringing, and then the book is littered with dozens more similarities. I have never felt so described as I did reading her account. She didn’t have a birth certificate, I didn’t have a social security number. She had welts from the belt, so did I. She arrived at college with no knowledge of the Holocaust, I arrived with no knowledge of the Civil Rights Movement. Her father was paranoid about the government and preparing for the end of the world, instilling fear in her about it, and so was mine.

One of my favorite things about the book, though, is how often she caveated to her readers that her story was told as best as she could remember it. The implication was, "This might not be exactly as it happened, but it's as exact to my memory as I can write it.”

I’ve thought about that for years now because one of my brothers insists that we did learn about the Civil Rights movement, and three of my brothers have no memory of not having a social security number, and half of my brothers never got chased around the house with a wooden spoon or belt. They, very literally, grew up in a different house and different family from me. Their childhood traumas were different than mine, caught between embittered parents in a custody war and more stories not mine to tell. But we’re all remembering the world as best as we can remember it.

We all remember the story as it imprinted on our brain, on top of all the other stories we lived up until that point, and then filtered through every story we will live for the rest of our lives.

What I mean is that something can be true and we can not remember it.

Something can also be not true and yet we remember it explicitly.

And some things are true and we remember them truly but someone else tries to convince us they’re not true and we’re not being truthful.

Truth is a complicated thing. Some people would like to say there is only one truth, but what they mean is that what they believe is true is the one truth and heaven help anyone who disagrees.

I do not believe that truth is relative and I do believe there is actually only one real truth, and I also believe that apart from Jesus Christ being the way, truth, and life, all of the other things we remember are held in dimly lit glasses.

. . .

A few weeks ago I was wrestling with an aspect of coming home for me which is that who I was when I left here eleven years ago is mightily different than who I am today. I was weak, insecure, fearful, timid, boundary-less, and more back them. I am still all of those things, but with one Main Thing different: I see the world through a redemptive lens. And so when others here try to hold a mirror up to my face and say, “This is who you are. Look at it. Look at how bad you are,” I know, to the core of who I am, that that is not who I am. That is who they would like me to be. That is who they remember me to be. That is who they project me to be. But, by God’s grace, some years of therapy, some emotional growth, healing, and spiritual formation, that is not who I am. Not anymore.

Memory is a strange thing and people far wiser and more learned than me have done much more work on it than I. But these days I am reminded often that one of the best ways we can heal our memories is to be honest about them as they are and not as we wish they were or as someone else wishes they were. That’s an uncomfortable feeling, trust me, I know—especially when our own selves or others critique us for not getting it right as it seems to them or us. But I also know it’s the only way to heal.

God cannot do anything with our false selves. It would be like holding out a perfectly good arm and asking him to heal it while holding a compound fracture behind our back. It doesn’t do any good to pretend we are what we wish we were, or what others wish we were, or what we might someday be again. I can only pull that fractured memory from behind my back and ask him to hold and heal any and all harm done against me. Even the harm I’ve done against myself.

I have to offer him the world as best as I can remember it and not as best as I wish it was.

THE BLACKBIRD LETTERS #6: WRITING AS PROTEST

Inspired by Wallace Stevens’ poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” writer-friends Lore Ferguson Wilbert and Aarik Danielsen write The Blackbird Letters. This series of letters, penned to each other but opened for anyone to read, will look at thirteen aims or angles of writing. Letters will appear every other week, alternating between Lore and Aarik’s websites. This is the sixth dispatch.

Dear Aarik,

I have been thinking a lot about what you wrote last time, on writing as self-awareness: Writers go on endlessly about their voice; all I really know is, if you write long enough, at some point you can’t shake the sound that emerges.

It is a thing, as the kids say, writers going on endlessly about their voices. I spoke with a few writer friends this week and one common theme emerges: how do we keep our integrity in a world that needs us to constantly push the boundaries of our conviction and comfort in order to stay relevant?

You and I have talked before about how slow our feet have dragged toward publishing books (my first last year and yours still yet to come and both of us now in our 41st year). I think part of that is encapsulated in your observation, writing long enough means you can’t shake who you are and—I’ll add—you’re much less likely to keep on bending, bending until you break to become what you aren’t. I’m much less likely to bend at 40 than I was at 35 or 30 or 25, and I’d venture much more likely to bend than I’ll be at 50 or 55. As much as I disliked the idea five or ten years ago that age and suffering and maturity grounds us, mostly because I needed more of it, I’m coming into the sound that’s emerging.

Ah, there I am.

And who I am has turned into a surprise, if I’m honest.

Recently I was faced with some emotional manipulation from someone in an emotional moment, and everything in me protested against my own self in response. On the surface I wanted to capitulate to their plea, to soothe and solve with promises I didn’t mean and humming noises at intermittent moments. But I didn’t. Because deeper down in me there was this louder voice saying, “No. Oh no you don’t.”

There I am.

Writing has helped me to separate and differentiate and split and slice and see so many layers of injustice, not just in the world, but in me. I have always said that writing is sanctifying, if we’ll let it have its work in us. If we write long enough it’s not just our voice that emerges, it’s what we will and won’t stand for, it’s what is wrong and right, it’s what we will protest against or capitulate to—these all emerge. Some of what we believe becomes more black and white and some becomes more gray, which is the beginning of the word gracious, which I choose to believe is a grace.

Writing as a form of protest is not just the prophets and seers and sayers all pounding out their treatises upon keyboards in whatever opportune moments they find (which, in these days, is every moment). It is, at its core, a protest against very our own selves, a protest against our laziness and fear and envy and avarice. It is a choice to say that we won't let the unsaid win. We won’t let the nebulous fears that tighten our chests and lumpen our throats to have the last word. We won’t let the insidious greed and envy and comparison eat us alive, churn us into nimble little monsters who won’t let anyone go in front of us. Writing as protest is the art of learning to say, “No,” and namely to our own selves.

Eventually it may carry into the public no, the noes we say to image bearers who twist what they bear, the noes we say to corporations and churches leaders and conventions that circumvent the grace and goodness of God in people’s lives, the noes we say to injustice. But it sure has to start with me. And it has to start with the me I am and not just the me I wish I was or want to be.

I have learned before I write yet another protest against another, it had better begin with a protest against my own flesh. This is what Jesus meant about the speck and the log, I’d venture, but from which we’ve wandered an awful long way.

Tell me, I want to say to my fellow writers, tell me of your inner demons, tell me of your flesh. I want to hear the war that waged within you as you navigated complex stories and spaces. I want to know how hard you fought and how much you wept and how little you prayed. Tell it honest, tell it slant, tell it however you want to, but tell the truth because the truth is ten thousand little protests that got you where you are and every one of them matters to God and to me and even to you because there you are and there you were all along.

I think I forgot I was writing this to you, Aarik, friend. I think I started to preach a little to myself and to our writer friends. I just see so many voices trying to jump over the bars that keep getting raised around their heads and I just want to hold their feet to the ground for a minute, to remind them that it’s not the bar that determines their worth as a writer, but the words themselves and the work they do with them.

Write your hearts out, I want to say. Wring them out. Protest too much. Say what you want to say. Do the work. Stop doing the work the algorithms and acquisition editors and sales teams want you to do. It will all work out in the end. Sure, it might mean your first book comes when you’re 40 or 50 and not 30, but it will be a better work because you will be a more sanctified you. You will have learned all the giant protests in the world don’t work if every little protester himself doesn’t submit himself to the slow and tedious and wondrous work of change, one moment after another.

I think you’d agree, friend.

Love,

L

What the Body Positivity Movement Gets Wrong

The grass has turned a brilliant shade of green, the birds are aflutter outside my window, and the bathing suit ads are proliferating my social media timelines. Some viral Instagram post is circulating showing a mom and her 2.5 kids wading knee deep in the ocean, Mom’s love handles spilling slightly over her bikini bottom, her breasts rounding out her top, and the silver threads of stretched skin across her belly. “This body has birthed 2.5 kids and that’s what makes it so beautiful!” she’s saying in her caption. 

In mommy blogs and other online spaces, we see similar trends and conversations. In a post from Risen Motherhood on the beauty of a woman’s postpartum body, Lauren Washer writes, “The changes in our bodies after having babies may make us feel physically broken and undesirable.” Blogger Tim Challies responded to the piece by writing, “A loving husband gazes at his wife’s body and sees reminders of their shared life—reminders that only her body has recorded.” Challies' point is that the story of making and then birthing babies together makes his wife’s body more beautiful to him. 

He’s right: We were not made to live lives independent of others. “It is not good,” God said, “for man to be alone” (Gen. 2:18). The physical scars that come from those shared lives are worth celebrating, and the body positivity movement reminds us of that simple truth. As the sweet church ladies say, “God didn’t make no junk.” But as someone who was unmarried until age 34 and who’s had numerous pregnancy losses since then, I worry about the implication that motherhood or marriage—or at the very least, being found attractive by men—is what gives a woman’s body value. 

I worry even more that we’re finding consolation with our bodies mostly if they have borne babies or been unified with a spouse or undergone some transformative experience that deems our bodies as good. In other words, the body positivity movement leans too often on women’s extrinsic value and not on their intrinsic value. Even in spaces where non-moms are celebrating their bodies, they seem to be celebrating them because they’re #fatpositive or Before and Afters of extreme weight loss due to exercise or diet. Regardless, rather than finding our worth in God’s love, we look to external voices or experiences to validate these earthen vessels (2 Cor. 4:7). 

External voices and experiences do form us as humans. All around us, we see women whose bodies have faced trauma and suffering for a whole host of reasons. There are those who were abandoned or abused whose bodies bear the scars of personal wars; those who fell victim to dieting from a young age whose bodies bear evidence of too many gains and losses; those who lost pregnancy after pregnancy whose bodies bears hormonal brokenness; those who are the descendants of slaves who still carry the altered genetics of that trauma; and those whose bodies simply grow old and frail without the love of a partner.  

These women and so many more may have what the poet Jane Kenyon called “a difficult friendship” with their physical selves. Most of us do. From Genesis 3 on, we’ve been ashamed of our nakedness, the marks we bear on our bodies, and the features we cannot control. But the body of a man or a woman can not be beautiful because of what they have done or left undone with it. All bodies are aging, failing, faltering, and breaking; that’s what happens to all created matter. We bear on our bodies the marks of all our yesterdays, and no one comes out unscathed.  

In that context, there must be something more profound happening that makes us beautiful or valuable than the story we have lived or the story that’s been thrust on us. It must be more than having had babies or sharing a story with a spouse. It must be more than the sum of our experiences—even the non-maternal ones. What is it, then?  

Before Adam and Eve covered themselves with flora and foliage, before they tasted the fruit that started the fall, they were created by God and blessed with the very first, “Very good” (Gen. 1:31). Everything else God made was simply good, but for man and woman he said “very good.” This was before our first parents shared a story, before any children had been born to them, before they had received the creation mandate, or named the animals, or had a vocation. Just as they were, God found them to be good.

This is what made the first human bodies beautiful: God’s love for his creation. In the popular Jesus Storybook Bible, Sally Lloyd Jones writes of Adam and Eve, “They were lovely because [God] loved them.” This is what the body positivity movement or mom-bod posts can get wrong. We are not lovely because of what we’ve done with our bodies but because of who made our bodies. 

Sadly we live in a post-Christian world where God’s love is no longer central to most people’s lives. And because many do not know or feel the love of God, but still know and feel an intrinsic need for goodness, we view our bodies as replacements for our souls. In other words—we think of our core identities too strictly in terms of our physical experiences, and suddenly self-determination becomes the definition by which we measure ourselves. What good have I produced? What fruit have I borne? What is my legacy? What am I leaving behind me? How will I be remembered?  

It's common in many of the social media posts I cite above to see comments like, “I want to be remembered as the mom who had fun this summer.” This is the heart of this misguided message: because we do not see our bodies with intrinsic worth because of who made them and who loves them, we measure our bodies by who sees them and how.  

This is not a new problem, though the Body Positivity may be a new iteration of it. Immediately after tasting the fruit that would render death for the human race, the nakedness of Adam and Eve was revealed to them and they hid. They sensed with alarming clarity that something was amiss with their bodies now and God would now see them differently.  

The struggle for the Christian today is the same: does God still love us, marred as we are by the weights and sin that so easily entangle us? Does he still find value and beauty in a crumbling creation? We know the answer is yes, but we’re still grasping at fig leaves to cover and defend the nakedness we feel. Perhaps we’re not covering our actual nakedness, but we are covering our vulnerable spaces, excusing our stretch marks and soft skin by the proof of children, proving the worth of our bodies by their societal acceptance or the Before and After photo we keep on our fridge. But God doesn’t need our excuses and he’s doesn’t want them. He wants us to simply say, “I am afraid and so I keep on hiding.”

 Maybe we’re not hiding our bikini clad body, but we’re still hiding behind the story of the babies it grew or the husband who loves it. Or we’re hiding behind the story we’ve lived with our bodies, hoping to be found worthy within them. We’re still looking for reasons to be loved and found lovely.

 All of our bodies are crumbling, they’re just taking different routes to get there. But all our bodies are good, beautiful, and valuable, because God made them. “We are lovely because God loves us,” that’s it. That’s the truest and most positive message for all our bodies.  

Liars, Forgiveness, Motherhood, and Celebrity Crushes

The last time I shared a round-up of links I’d saved was a month and a half ago. I’d just finished writing Part One of the three part book I’m working on, and so it feels good to say that today, as I offer you another round-up, I’ve just finished Part Two. One more (the longest part) to go.

Writing is, by necessity, a solitary occupation. For the full-time writer, we do not generally have co-workers or cube-mates, so it can be a bit of a lonely occupation at times. Especially in a year like the one we’ve just had, the aloneness can mount and with it comes the existential questions like, “What am I doing here? Does this work matter? Am I living the work or just writing it?”

Our work, in those moments, is to press through the questions, write through them, not around them, until we arrive in some space of certainty again. This is the work for the writer, I think. Our work is to take what is nebulous and spacey and a bit out there and bring it home for the reader. To take the feelings people feel and put a shirt on them, to take grief and give it pants, to take joy and give it shoes. But to do that means putting shirts and pants and shoes on our own feelings of grief and joy and whatever else. It means naming our own junk, just for ourselves, not even for the public.

Otherwise we’re just liars who can spin a phrase.

Here are some words from others

• I read this this morning from Tim Keller. He is saying exactly the things I’ve been thinking about and feeling and didn’t have words for. On the disappearance of forgiveness. Note that he’s writing a book on forgiveness and so this won’t be his final word on it and shouldn’t be read as such.

• Here’s a piece on motherhood and Madeleine L’Engle, whose reflections on mothering and marriage in the Crosswick Journals have always been some of my favorites.

• I shared on my Substack this week a bit about my journey on gender roles and Tish Harrison Warren has been alit on Twitter on Women’s Ordination this week. I appreciated her piece in Christianity Today on it.

• Here is a piece from Esau McCaulley on how Maundy Thursday was part of his conversion to Anglicanism. I loved it because my first Tenebrae service so captivated me eight years ago, it was part of what began drawing me toward Anglicanism.

• This is a beautiful poem about grief.

Listening

I don’t love listening to music while I’m writing much anymore. Since the shooting five years ago I’ve realized my capacity for more than one sound around me puts me in a pretty tightly wound space. Right now my soundtrack is the hum of the fridge and the Canadian geese on the river and some faint notes of a neighbor’s lawnmower. But occasionally I’ve been using these playlists on Youtube that play continuously for three hours and they seem to do the trick too.

Reading

• I have been slowly working through Winn Collier’s biography of Eugene Peterson the past few weeks. Slowly because I want to savor it. It would be an easy book to read quickly, but I want to learn from the man and doing things slowly was a mark of his.

• Monty Don (whom we affectionately call my celebrity crush in this house) released his giant Complete Gardener a few days back and it landed on my steps the day of. Gardener’s World saved my year in more ways than I can count, and his book is even better than I hoped. If you’re just starting out or just want to learn from one of the best, I highly recommend it. Best read with a slight British accent.

• I told my friend Emily Freeman that I’ve recommended her book, The Next Right Thing, more this past year than any book ever. It is so immensely practical and so deeply spiritual at the same time, that it can hardly not help a reader do whatever is next, or at least not do it until they know it’s right. I recommend also reading it slowly because her prompts are some of the best parts and those take time.

Tweets

• Sometimes Twitter is a giant bonfire (and not the good kind) and sometimes it is a place full of wisdom and insight. I’ve worked hard to curate a timeline that looks like more of the latter instead of the former, and I feel pretty good about it right now. This recent thread from Barry Jones was excellent.

• I loved this Tweet from my friend Aarik Danielsen.

The best gift you can give a writer today: Read their work.

Some write or promote themselves for the sake of platform or influence. (Lord knows my motives aren't always entirely pure.)

But most write to understand themselves, to be known—and to know you through your response.

— Aarik Danielsen (@aarikdanielsen) May 6, 2021

I hope this smattering of links delights you or makes you think or helps you process. And I hope your coming weekend is beautiful and good in every way. I am enjoying being out in the new gardens we’ve made and also discovering all the old perennials planted around the house by some yesteryear gardener.

The Blackbird Letters #4: Writing as Discontent

Inspired by Wallace Stevens’ poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” writer-friends Lore Ferguson Wilbert and Aarik Danielsen write The Blackbird Letters. This series of letters, penned to each other but opened for anyone to read, will look at thirteen aims or angles of writing. Letters will appear every other week, alternating between Lore and Aarik’s websites. This is the fourth dispatch.

Dear friend,

I’m glad you wrote about observation last time because I feel like I’ve been too busy noticing to even think about writing about it. I’m going to try to not let our yard become a trope, but it’s May 5th in upstate New York and our blank slate of a yard is filling in. Spring has sprung and everywhere around us it’s springing still. All the perennials are popping up and I’ve thrown an annual or two around, hoping they take. The weather app says it’s clear sailing from here on out, but the Farmer’s Almanac says wait until Mother’s Day or May 15th. I may be tempting fate a bit to dig a few holes and plant a few plants, but I like to live life on the edge.

Just kidding. I like to do the very opposite of living life on the edge.

I think of observation as a virtue, the art of seeing, noticing, paying attention, as you wrote. But observation is also, I think, a form of discontent. Or rather, the fruit of a kind of discontent. The sort that says, “I am not all there is in the world and I know there must be more.”

You and I have talked about imposter syndrome before, the sense that we’re faking it until we make it all the while knowing that there is no single solitary island of being made to be found. It is the Ponce de Leon’s Fountain of Youth, it is Atlantis, it is the Bermuda Triangle, is the fruit that promises being like God. It’s all an illusion born out of a sense of “This can’t be it. There must be more.”

Observation is what we do when what we see is no longer enough. Discontent is what powers it.

So, writing as a form of discontent? What were we thinking when we suggested this one? I think it was you, which wouldn’t surprise me, since it’s a constant theme in your writing. You have clearly done more thinking about it than I have. Discontent turns me inward, but you have learned to turn it outward. When I am discontent, I hide, become invisible, small and small-minded.

I think I used to write more from a sense of discontent, back when I was braver, more courageous, when life hadn’t battered me about, and when vulnerability didn’t bite me in the backside as often as it does now. I wrote about dreams I had, hopes and plans, wishes and thoughts about the future. I wrote about what I wanted instead of what just was. I wrote about the ideal and now I feel like I mostly just write about what happens when the ideal doesn’t happen.

What I mean to say is that when we’re young, discontent leads us to think there is more, and as we grow older, discontent becomes almost dangerous. We watch too many of our peers fail in their marriages, in their ministries, in their vocations and parenthood, because of discontent. We have seen the myriad of empty ways our own discontent has led to downfall, brokenness, division. If not immediately, then one, two, three steps removed. Almost everything I have done that was born out of discontent has led nowhere good.

But (and this is why I think we may have chosen this one) there have been a few things in life, very few mind you, that borne as they were in discontent, still turned out okay—even good. Writing was one of them for me and perhaps for you too.

As much as imposter syndrome has plagued me every step of the way (Is it my thorn? My personality?), I have still sat down in the chair, placed my fingers on the keyboard, and let them dance. They know the steps by heart, their chemistry is undeniable, these fingers belong on keys. My discontent in life has turned, for better or worse, into my vocation, my livelihood.

Now it occurs to me that almost everything good we do may actually be borne of discontent, a sense that something isn’t just right as it is, even if is. It’s the painting we never quite finish, the piece we never quite leave alone, the yard I’ll never stop planting in. We keep coming back to make and remake and remake again, because, in some ways, our discontent is holy isn’t it? It’s what we were put on earth to do, care for and cultivate what is there, plant and supplant what is not, bear fruit in multiples. It’s never, never, never enough.

This is why we write but it’s also why we keep writing. Why we’re writing these letters to one another, even. Because no matter how much has been said, perhaps we still need to keep on saying.

In discontent,

Lore

A Woman's Highest Calling

The Bible is the big and comprehensive story of God and his people, containing characters who—in vastly different ways—live the story of brokenness, repentance, delight, forgiveness, redemption, and fullness.

There is no one way to be a woman or wife or a mother or a man or husband or father. There is no one occupation or vocation that is the highest call on a man or woman's life. There is no way of raising children who turn out well or alright or good enough or perfect. There is no one way of finding a spouse that is without risk or trust. The Bible is full of farmers and Pharisees, prophets and poets, thieves and murderers, apostles and apostates, the greedy and the impoverished, the healers and the healed—all navigating the story God gave them to live so that his glory would be made manifest in their particular life.

If you're a part of any institution (church, seminary, school, family or community) that promotes one way to bring glory to God and uses a few verses from Scripture to defend that position, and it feels suffocating to you, your gifts, the life God has given to you, I just want to say to you that it doesn't have to be that way.

The highest call for your life is to live the story he's giving you to live today, to navigate it with a particular grace and trust he gives to you for the day.

I share this because for most of my childhood and into my twenties I thought the only way to bring glory to God was as a wife and mother, and that just wasn't the gift God gave to me. But my greater mistake was believing that Scripture was clear about this and so I believed I was defective for not having that portion, that I wouldn't ever be as valuable to God or the church unless I was married or a mother. I believed that a few Bible verses about mothering were more important to God than the rest of Scripture where God used women in a myriad of ways. But when I started reading the whole of Scripture, and seeing the whole picture, I realized I wasn't defective, I just had a different story that God wanted to bring his glory through.

One of the lessons for my life, knowing my propensity to hear how one person lived and absorb it as prescriptive for my life (which may not have been their point), was to keep an eye out when leaders used the same Bible verses over and over again, or taught on the same passages again and again. If all I thought about women was that they were to be "keepers of the home," it's no wonder that's all I thought women were good for.

"All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work" (II Tim. 3:16-17).

One of the enemy’s tactics to keep us bound up is to keep us from reading the whole of Scripture for ourselves. Instead we attend endless Bible studies, listen to sermons, follow people on social media, and subscribe to a myriad of words about the Bible. But you can read it for yourself. Believe me. For whatever reason, for a long, long time, I didn't believe I was capable of reading and understanding more about Scripture than what I heard from leaders. But all of the Bible is for all people. It's God's message to the whole of us for the wholeness of us.

The next time you hear someone offer a prescriptive way of living, go get your Bible and look up the operative word of their prescription (wife, mother, father, shepherd, pastor, money, marriage, children, etc.). Read every verse on it just so you can see the array of stories God's people lived out. It doesn't mean you will live like them, but it will mean you have a more informed view on the kind of people God loves and uses.

God's plans for you aren't limited to the plans he had for someone else.

THE BLACKBIRD LETTERS #2: WRITING AS IMITATION of GOD

Inspired by Wallace Stevens’ poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” writer-friends Lore Ferguson Wilbert and Aarik Danielsen write The Blackbird Letters. This series of letters, penned to each other but opened for anyone to read, will look at thirteen aims or angles of writing. Letters will appear every other week, alternating between Lore and Aarik’s websites. This is the second dispatch.

Dear Aarik, 

Last week was Holy Week, and while the world heaved and groaned, and echoed the halls of hallowed places with shouts of “He is risen,” and “Indeed,” Nate and I hauled wood posts and pierced our hands with an acre of wire fencing. Our Easter best was sweat and grime and we have the scars to prove it. It felt hollow, in some ways, to spend the whole weekend outside, building a fence. But there is holy in the ordinary, too, I know you know this. 

I am tasked with penning this letter to you about writing as imitation of God, as in the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. It is one thing to come and another to become. A coming king doesn’t change who he is, he shouts it. He proclaims it. He sends a dispatch throughout the kingdom so the people can prepare. Not Jesus though, Jesus became. Made like us, as we were once made like him. No hurrah, no fanfare, no royal proclamations. 

The essential work of the writer, I think, is to become. It is not to announce or to proclaim or to even convince. It is to settle down in sameness, to put on the flesh of the reader, hear with their ears, see with their eyes, to take on the weights that bear them down, and suffer with them in their sadness and grief. It is incarnate work, putting flesh on syllables and grammar and words with very little meaning on their own.

You know our home is on a river and because of the layout of our land, our front yard is essentially the front yard of two of our neighbors, too. I’ve been fussing and fretting for months now that once we put this fence in, we’d be obstructing their view.

Our work is two-fold: one, to care for our neighbors, and two, to live on the land we own, to work within its boundaries, establish it, tend it, and cause it to flourish. And these two aims seem in direct conflict with one another. Leaving our land untouched keeps the neighbors’ view unobstructed. Planting or tilling or fencing it at all obstructs their view by degrees.

In Wendell Berry’s poem titled, How to be a Poet, he penned the words, “Stay away from anything / that obscures the place it is in.” This is the incarnational work of the writer. And, as it turns out, the landowner.

Our work, if we will accept it and all it brings, is to so fully vest ourselves into the work that when it is finished, we, the writer, become nearly invisible. The work is the art, not the artist. Jesus did this when he took on flesh and became like us. Only three years of public ministry on earth and then he left, leaving the Church to continue the work he began. He, the whole point of the gospel, did not obscure the place he came to. He enhanced it. He made it better. He began its work to completion. It would not have worked without him, he was and is essential to it, but the real work is the work of love: Creation imitating God with love, God loving creation, an endless cycle of love on display. Real artistry. Real art.

My great hope for our yard is to plant river birches and red twig dogwoods, a few low-lying evergreens, tall grasses, and wild bursts of perennials all season long. Climbing roses on the trellises and perhaps a swing from one of the giant willows along the riverside. My aim is to frame the view beyond our yard with structure from our yard. This is me imitating Jesus who came incarnate into the world and left it better than he found it.

This is the work of the writer, too, when we come to a blank page or open assignment, to ask the question: How do I become not the one the world needs to see, but the one who makes a way for them to see something greater than I’ll ever be? You do this every Friday when you share your Friday Five when you share beauty with your readers. Or every time a new column goes up on Fathom or elsewhere. You become invisible, the writing almost effortless, so easy to read, so full of taste and rhythm and cadence, the reader can’t help but be compelled by what you say. But then you get out of the way of the work, so that the real glory can be experienced. You know that it’s not about you, not ultimately, but about the reader and the world and God and creation and love.

I’m glad we’re doing this, friend. I need regular reminders of why we do what we do and this helps.

Talk soon,

Lore

Visual Learners

I am halfway through writing the manuscript for my second book, posting biweekly (or thereabouts) on my paid subscription space, keeping The Blackbird Letters near the front of my mind, and feel as though I’m a bit neglectful of this space recently. There was a time when I posted almost daily on Sayable and that time is not now. I recognize the amount of content in the world has increased, and therefore the amount of content jealous for your time, eyes, and brain space has increased. I don’t ever want to add to the clamor, but do find a lot of joy in continuing to show up here, whether or not you can or do as well.

When weighing the cost of “giving up” something for Lent in February, I declined. Everyone has an opinion on whether that’s the right opinion, but after a year of social distancing, moving cross-country, renovating a house, not feeling settled or at home in church, and our first long winter back in the northeast, I just felt like giving up one more thing might break me. And maybe that’s the point of fasting during Lent—to share in the sufferings of Christ, to taste the cup of his sorrows. But I am human and this year has been one long drink from the cup of sorrows. Giving up my one teaspoon of sugar in my daily tea or forty days of British gardeners and stand-up comedy just seemed cruel. So I didn’t. I did, however, log off social media for the past week, continuing through Easter Sunday.

I have long had a love hate relationship with social media. It feels like a necessary evil for any writer in the world today, publishers care too much about promotion and readers can’t read what they haven’t discovered. Getting discovered through a retweet or share or like is the hope, but it sure does eke my creative energy. Some folks feel energized by it, but it often just feels like I am paying my dues to continue taking up space in other writing environments. It feels like we’re all doing the same things over and over again in different ways to keep the interest of others or at least keep them from going elsewhere. I hate to love social media and I love to hate it and sometimes I just need a break from it.

I did however, take a gander at my husband’s Instagram this morning to view some images he’s been talking about for the past twenty-four hours. It reminded me of another one of my favorite people on social media, Russ Ramsey, who fills his feed almost entirely with art. This time of year it’s art depicting Holy Week, so I spent a little time this morning looking at each image.

I’ve been thinking a lot about James K.A. Smith’s piece that I shared with you last month, about not being able to think our way out of the mess we’re in. For the past few years my most faithful writing allies and friends have been coming to these same conclusions, which we share with one another in our better moments. Of the making of Christian books there is no end, of the thought-leaders and recycled thoughts, there is no end. This refrain is on repeat even as I pen yet another manuscript dealing with issues of faith, doubt, curiosity, and questions. I’m asking the question, “What am I saying that hasn’t been said before a thousand times?” Publishers are looking for content that capitalizes on a moment in history, but we all know history repeats itself, and so too do the capitalized moments. I can’t say anything that hasn’t been said before a thousand times.

Art is the same though, look through those images for a moment, see how they all depict the same man, the same group of people, the same moments, and look again at how they all do it spectacularly differently. Each one is a masterpiece in its own right.

So perhaps, I wonder, the point isn’t to make new art, but to keep recycling the old art with as much faithfulness as we can endeavor. Perhaps our work as Christian artists is to ward off the cynicism that says, “Been there, done that, never want to repeat it,” and instead to repeat it but better. Perhaps our work is to fight back the jadedness that leads to hopelessness and to crush the envy that leads to anemic art, and to continue to create, continue to cultivate, continue to make and make new. Isn’t that the point of resurrection? Isn’t that the point of creation? Isn’t that the whole point of our entire faith? To uproot the bad and cause the good to flourish?

Wesley Hill has a piece in CT this week about what he calls “Text Playlists” and being equipped to preach the gospel. There are piles and piles of beauty that belong in my text playlists, most of which I just keep trying to regurgitate in my own way in my work and writing. This image would go in mine. I bookmarked it a few weeks ago and keep going back to zoom all the way in and look at it. I can’t stop. I won’t stop. It’s minutia like this that keeps me always fascinated by art: the cracks, the crevices, the lumps, the complete absence of pure white or pure black.

My mother taught us to love art and history and literature, but we also grew up in a post-Catholic family, so our art was more historical depictions than Christocentric. My grandmother has a host of crucifixes in her home and a bowl of the host in her china hutch (over which I nearly lost my head as a seven year old when I asked her if I should throw out the stale cracker I found while dusting said hutch). We regularly prayed that Gramma would get saved. I did not have an appreciation for depictions of Christ or the Holy Week or the cross, even into my adulthood. The reason given (and unquestioningly received by me) was that Christ rose from the dead so why would we focus on the suffering that happened before? Empty crosses are for the Christian, full ones are for those whose faith is weak and anemic or in need of something more than Christ’s resurrection. We pray for those people to get saved.

But now I am in my midlife and my body creaks and groans, my shoulders bear the weight of the sofa we hoisted into the loft last Saturday, my eyes grow increasingly in need of supplemental help above my contacts. When I was young and my body invincible, the empty cross made sense. Why would I dwell on the death when my whole life was in front of me? Some might say that my faith is weaker than theirs, that the rhythms of liturgy and the paintings of Holy Week and recitations of the creeds aren’t necessary for faith like theirs, where the empty cross carries them through a whole year. And I get that. I have also been there and anticipate being there again. But I am not there now. Not this year.

This year I need to see the gaunt curves of a Savior’s hipbone in the artist’s depiction. I need the downcast eyes of a Son who feels rejected by his Father (and brave enough to say it in front of those he led). I need the variety of skin colors on Christ followers through the ages, reminding me that this white evangelical situation we’re in today isn’t even a smidgen of the cloud of witnesses we’ll be among someday. I need the women being the first to see and believe and preach the gospel of the risen Christ. And, as always, I need the vividness of Thomas’s hands reaching toward the holes in Christ’s body.

I used to believe icons were idols, but I see now they’re visual stories made by human hands for human eyes and human hearts, to help us turn our gaze upon Jesus, to see full in his wonderful face, so these things of earth grow slowly and strangely dim in the light of his glory and full on abounding grace.

Make more art, friends. More and more and more. Make it of what has been made before and what will be made again. Say it again, that which has been said a thousand ways and a thousand times before. Fill it out and flesh it in and set it before the readers and viewers and seers and needers. Making art is like waking from a dream and trying to reconstruct it for your friend or neighbor, what is so alive and real to you will still fall flat to them, but it helps. Just a little bit more, it helps. We still have some time to go before we see Him face to face without all the mess of this place crowding it out and we need to remember again what every Christian before us has tried to remember: this happened, this crucifixion, this resurrection, this rising to new life, this eternity starting now.

Toward a More Curious Faith

The river rose yesterday in less than an hour, lifting from shallow glass with a barely detectable current to rushing over our dock poles, curbing debris into our cove, whitecaps by afternoon. We pull on our boots and raincoats and drive to the falls a few miles upriver, where they lift the dam on the water a few times in the spring before the regular summer releases. We hike and pause, hike and pause. It is so green, so brown, so rushing, so earthy. The composted dirt thick with pine needles, moss carpets curved over fallen trees. A few months ago Nate wrote a poem called the Ecology of Tolerance (one of my favorites of his) and I can’t help but think of the cathedral of nature, man’s first sanctuary, the grace of this space.

When we were forced to dream, less than a year into our marriage, of the place we wanted to grow old since the place we’d planned on growing old was no longer habitable for us, we gave a weighted value to six things. In no order with no pertinent value to you they were: four seasons, near to nature, dechurched or post-Christian, a university town, ability to find and keep employment, and access to airports/trains. We knew we could find a community anywhere and join a church, even if it didn’t tick all our boxes (do they ever?), and put down roots. But these were the values we wanted to invest in for life. It took us several moves across several states, and several fits and starts, but we have landed in a place where almost all those values weigh with equality.

We thought, too, the community would come easily, but moving cross-country during a pandemic, especially one as politically fraught as this one in a year as politically fraught as this one, has meant the community isn’t what we thought and, yet, somehow is better than we thought. What I mean by that is it is slower than we thought. It is having to be built from the ground up, layered over, like compost, with rubbish and rejects and reforms. I don’t mean the people are rubbish and rejects and reforms, just that our ideals are or have been shown to be, and that many of us find ourselves not where we thought we would be right now. It is having to be built without the cliques that exists already or the habits of community we come into. For us, it is tabula rasa, a blank slate.

A few years ago I would have judged me, but life has not been kind to me in the past few years and so I have learned to be kind to me, and to others, far more than I used to be. Tolerance—even for our own selves—is built by keeping company with those like we used to be and those like we would like to be and not thinking too highly of who we are right now. It is the space to rise and fall, layer and build, the welcome of a river’s edges, the roll of a fallen log, the carpet of pine needles beneath our feet. It the understanding that we are one ripple in a rising river, here now and gone in seconds.

I have fewer sacred cows these days, fewer buttons to push, fewer one-issue ideals, and am slower to make anything a “gospel issue” (mostly because everything is). But my faith is deeper than it ever has been before, even as a chronic doubter I can say that with confidence. There is an unshakeableness to my faith and belief in what actually matters to God (Namely faith, hope, and love. The greatest of these, as we know, is love.).

I am less interested in commentary on much of anything unless it’s the words of Jesus himself, or the Spirit through him. I eat the word of God more than podcasts and articles and pundits. I am more interested in what the birds are saying about God, from the river willows in front of our house and in the geese flying in vees above me. I am interested in what the spring green buds on the lilacs are saying about creation and what the earthworm is thinking. I’m frustrated as hell about the sugar ants crawling along the edge of my counters, but I’m also interested in what they’re doing there to begin with and impressed with their invincibility. I’m curious about the curves of the river and the depths of it and what was manmade and what was made by the hand of God. I’m curious about why some people don’t want me in their life and why I don’t want some people in mine. I’m wondering about how the church has changed over centuries and the canon of Scripture and what is manmade and what is made by God. And still my faith in the unseeable God grows because I see him here, too. I see him in what he has made and what he loves and what he is redeeming even now.

PS. My friend Aarik Danielsen and I are beginning a project called The Blackbird Letters, wherein we write letters to one another over the next several months and share them with you. In the theme of Wallace Steven’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, we will be looking at 13 ways we think about writing. You can read Aarik’s inaugural post here, and look for my response next week right here on Sayable.

Jesus Wants to Eat With You

My friend’s words come to mind again this morning, about writing during times of adversity or comfort, and I am coming to learn almost everything actionable in my life happens during times of comfort.

I am not by nature an actionable person, unless the action is inaction. I stall, fumble, caveat, circle around, and bypass difficult things by nature, which is why I suppose God has had to foisted many difficulties upon me. I wouldn’t choose them for myself ever. I think that by staying still, like Jonah, sleeping in the hull of a ship during a storm or resting beneath a plant in a desert, I can avoid the things that sanctify, when the truth is God sanctifies, whether we sign up for it or not.

But still, comfort is where I see the growth that happened or is happening or can happen. In a space of relative ease, when the churning around me and within me stops for a moment, I begin to see clearly again.

At the end of the year we bought an armchair and a rocker for our sunroom and here we perch every morning, with our respective hot drinks (locally roasted coffee for him, Yorkshire Gold for me), and the news of the day on our phones, and our Bibles. He begins his day when it is still dark with his Bible and I open mine after he heads to his desk to begin the workday. This is the routine that works for us.

(I feel pangs of guilt sometimes, talking about routines and comfort in these mid-life days, because nearly every one of my friends is followed about by toddlers or teenagers and the mental-emotional-spiritual-physical load of both. But we did not choose our childlessness (and it would have been okay if we did). This is our portion and I have to learn to not apologize for it, which is my natural inclination. “Oh, I’m sorry we don’t have kids and can read our Bibles and drink our coffee in peace. I’m sorry we won’t have the joy of seeing children take first steps or graduate or marry. Or the comfort of grandchildren in our empty nest days. Or the security of children in our old age who care when we’ve fallen down or become sick.” That sounds sarcastic but these are the thoughts that pulse through me nearly every day. I have to take comfort in our morning routines of peace because sometimes it feels like all we have.)

When in my life I have found myself in space long enough to form a routine (which is difficult because I’ve lived in nine states and 25 homes in 20 years), I find my approach to scripture reading changes with the chair in which I sit. In some homes it has been a chair where knowledge was absorbed but my heart wasn’t changed. In other chairs it has been a place where the smallest morsels of God’s word have kept me alive day by day, a sort of manna in a wilderness. In other chairs, I’ve been surrounded by notebooks and commentaries, pen and papers, study-Bibles and podcasts. And in others, the sweet comfort of reading the same book of the Bible repeatedly for a year (I did this with the book of Psalms one difficult year, just shoved off the shame of not reading the words of Paul or Jesus or the prophets of old, just steeped myself in the honest words of minstrels and sinful sons of God). I have spent whole years in the NASB, the ESV, the CSB, and the NIV.

This year I am reading from The Message and I am reading just the New Testament and reading it chronologically. These first few months of the year I’ve paged between the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, sometimes reading about the same moment in the life of Christ four different ways in a week. My plan has me reading just one chapter a day. It takes less than five minutes to read and then another twenty to meditate on the words. And it is bringing me joy, the unapologetic kind, the kind I haven’t had in reading God’s word in a long time.

I think for a long time I felt compelled to make something of my time in God’s word, produce sometimes, prove I’d learned something, or changed something. That I was different because of my time in God’s word, changed from the inside out. Measurably. Quantifiably. As though my time in God’s word was like a laundry cycle, go in dirty, get roughed up a bit, and come out fresh.

But the past few months I’ve just felt, well, comforted. Wrapped in the presence of Christ’s enough-ness for my too-much-ness. Held in the knowledge that he knows me, even if I still don’t know him like I want to. Kept in the surety of his love, as I keep approaching the table of his words, eating them, digesting them, being fortified by them.

And the more I eat these simple words, just one chapter a day from The Message Bible, the Scribe version, the less I have an appetite for what everyone else wants to offer me. And the less I want to offer it to others. I feel a growing distaste for what passes as encouragement these days. The temptation to offer only quips instead of a feast, mere sharables instead of a smorgasbord, is strong within us. It’s been an exhausting year and our brains don’t have the capacity to remember or think or work deeply in the way they did before March of 2020. We’re living on crumbs, not because we don’t want more, but because we don’t think our stomachs can handle more.

But we do want more. I do. You do. We were made to want more. Sometimes, though, more is less.

This is what I’m learning in these first months of 2021: I want more, but more—right now—is less. It is taking a bite instead of shaming myself for not setting a feast. It is tasting a morsel instead of making myself eat more. It is sitting down, getting comfortable, and reading one chapter from one gospel from the whole Bible a day. And in that, I am meeting Jesus, knowing him and being known by him, loving him more and feeling his love more. That’s it.

Jesus doesn’t want us to scrape ourselves down, clean ourselves up, get our “quiet time” right before we approach him, he wants us to know we’re safe, not condemned, and kept by him as we approach him and his words (John 8:1-11). Jesus is more concerned with our safety than our surety. Jesus is more concerned about his approachability than our approach. Jesus cares more about his trust in the Father than our trust in him.

I hope and pray that you are in a place where God’s word feels as safe and good as it is, where the Spirit seems as good and present as He is, where the Savior’s promise to save is as real to you as it is, and where the love of the Father is as true to you as it is. And, if not, I think that’s okay. I think somewhere God has a chair waiting for you where he wants to share how good and kind and gentle and faithful and loving he is, and wants to commune with you through his words. He wants to eat with you.

A Room, Some Words, and Hearing From You

A friend of mine wrote recently that for some authors, adversity is the impetus for creativity, but for him it has always been comfort. I resonate with the sentiment. After four cross-country moves since 2015, having a “room of one’s own” has been the most welcome place for me. I flourish within boundaries and here, in this 900 square foot home, in this 8x20 sunroom, I have been flourishing vocationally.

Yesterday I finished the first part of a three part book I’m working on, twelve chapters thus far, each little morsel has felt sweet to write and to dream of serving up to others. And I have this room, this home, this chair, this space to thank for that in some ways. Writing in 2020 felt like trying to pull liquid gold from a glacier, which is to say impossible. It wasn’t just the difficult of the words, it was also the difficulty of the circumstances. I felt like nothing I could say was right and everyone was getting offended whether I said nothing or everything.

A few events converged upon one another in December and January, and a recalibration of sorts occurred. I was imbued with courage and hope, and began to write again. I re-membered myself, putting these disparate parts together again with the help of God and Nate, and a few dear friends. I suppose, in a way, I came home to the security and certainty of who I am as a writer and a child of God. And within those boundaries, too, I flourish.

Words from others

• My friend John Starke expounded here on a Twitter thread he wrote last week on speaking the truth and speaking with love.

• In a near perfect coupling, James K.A. Smith shared this long-form piece about moving through a world where truth reigned to a world where love is the most important thing. I’ve read it twice now and I know I’ll read it again.

• I hope you saw that video circulating a few weeks back about the butterfly migration. It was just stunning. Here’s an article from The New Yorker on it.

• My aforementioned friend from above has a piece on the shrinking soul and the collective ache of it.

• Here is a piece from Michael Pollan on The Washington Post about the food system and what the pandemic revealed about it.

Listen

As a prayer, a hope, and a promise of what's to come (and perhaps a bit of the late February blues), I made a Spring playlist. So many of you followed along and loved The First Winter playlist I made for our first winter at The Little River Cottage, so I thought you’d enjoy another. Here’s a link to follow and listen too.

Books

Along with writing a lot less in 2020, I also read and reviewed fewer books. Perhaps it was the pandemic or the move and renovation, I don’t know. In 2019 I had come to the realization that I was reading far too many books because they were being sent to me and I felt compelled to, or because everyone else was reading them, and I felt as though I needed to keep up. The past year I’ve just read what I liked and recommended them if I liked them, with less concern about whether someone else liked them or wanted me to like them.

• I’ve been reading Emily P. Freeman’s book, The Next Right Thing, and I’ve just really enjoyed it. I’m reading just one or two chapters a week, not rushing, and it’s a good pace for that book.

• I also finally began Tish Harrison Warren’s book Prayer in the Night, and it’s just beautiful. Her story in the first chapter mirrored mine in many ways and it was both heartbreaking and healing to read it.

• I finished Wintering by Katherine May in the dead of January. I liked it. It was equal parts delightful and heavy, the way winter is. There were some specific difficult circumstances in my January that this book seemed perfectly fit for, so I was grateful for it.

• Jen Pollock Michel’s new book A Habit Called Faith just released and, as with all of Jen’s books, it’s destined to land on my “accessible” shelf (this is the shelf where my favorite books go, so I can grab them quickly when I need to remember a thought or point they made).

Podcasts

In a strange turn of events, after years and years of struggling to listen to podcasts, I decided to mine the proliferation of them, and listen to more this year.

• This conversation between Pastor Thabiti and Preston Sprinkle had me in tears by the end.

• I have been in search of elders the past few years, real seasoned men and women who are writing, speaking, and acting on their faith in public spaces. Parker Palmer is one of them. I loved this conversation with Krista Tippet OnBeing.

To Watch

• This conversation between a Jewish pro-choice professor and a Catholic pro-life professor brought me a lot of hope and joy this week for a few reasons. One of which is that after I watched it, I emailed them both to thank them. The pro-choice one responded with these words, “Our ongoing conversation and deepening friendship are two of the most important things in my life these days.” It brought tears to my eyes because lives are changed for good through faithful engagement with one another, not through talking heads on news programs or pundits on social media.

• Below is a short video of everyone’s favorite Wendell Berry poem, The Peace of the Wild Things.

And now a word from you

I thought it would be nice to sometimes share some words from a few of you on the end of these link sharing posts. You are such an important part of this relationship and you matter to me. I read everything you write to me, even if I can’t respond. It helps me to love you with my words a bit better. I’m sharing these with just the first initial so privacy is assured.

• “I wanted to take this opportunity to thank you for your book “Handle with Care”. Unlike most people for whom the pandemic has been a huge year of loss, if not in terms of health and income, then in terms of community and relationships, for a variety of reasons (too many moves being but one) my pandemic year is an extension of years that preceded it. Yet the communal grief of lack of community has awakened in me the grief I carry that this has been true for me for so long. And your book, which I read at the start of 2020, helped crack open things I intellectually knew to be true but were not evidenced in my life. In a way it gave me permission to say that I want my life to look different. While we wait to return home and truly make a home somewhere, your wider writings give hope that it is possible.” —S

• “As I read your post all I could think of was how sometimes action, sometimes speaking, is a direct manifestation of faith. That that is where our faith is put into action. Sometimes saying is action, is faith. As long as we hold our feelings and thoughts inside, they are only ours. But it is an act of faith to release them into the world, where we no longer have control.” —L

Behavior Modification Stinks

Somewhere in my youth or childhood I must have done something bad. Really bad. Honestly, almost every day in my youth and childhood I did something bad. I constantly lied or bent the truth. I stole sweets and treasures. I was envious of siblings who were treated differently. I lusted after things that weren’t mine. I was a bad kid. The family joke was that more wooden spoons were broken over my behind or knuckles than any of the other kids. I spent a cumulative year grounded to my bedroom from ages 10-14. I’m not overstating my badness, it was to the bone.

Somewhere around 15 I absorbed the message that cleaning myself up on the outside would result in goodness inside. I don’t know if the lesson was explicit or implicit, though I have plenty of evidence for it being explicit in the books that circulated our circles, the conferences we all attended, and the company we kept. I began trying to be good. I mean really, really trying. Real white knuckled, sackcloth and ashes, head coverings and homemade dresses, courtship and chastity, prudishness and pride kind of good. I did this for the next fifteen years in various forms.

Various forms is the operative phrase there because, like all white-washed tombs, I would eventually begin to stink inside and would begin another round of reinvention of my goodness. Each time I failed, I’d try, try again. Each time my goodness was unsustainable for longer than a year or two, I’d try another method of winning God’s approval, his love, or even just his like. I’d have settled for his like. I’d have been okay with not really feeling like I mattered much to him, but at least he wasn’t still spanking me with any tool available.

But the spankings continued in various forms, so much so that by the time I was 29, I was done. I was just done. I’ve shared the story of my crisis of faith before and won’t rehash it here, but it was less a crisis of faith, and more a realization that I had no faith in the true God because I didn’t know who the true God was. That’s not what I want to talk about today. What I want to talk about today is sin.

Yesterday I shared a series of images on social media where I talked about the effects of “unhealed and unresolved brokenness,” and in an ensuing conversation on one medium, a commenter said she didn’t think of unhealed and unresolved brokenness as akin to sin.

Ten years ago I heard the phrase, “The heart of the problem is a problem of the heart,” and something clicked for me in a way it never had before. Before I thought the principal thing about sin was the naming of it and the eradicating of it. For example, if one uses pornography or one gossips, the most important first step is to stop using pornography or stop gossiping. After the badness is done away with, then working on the heart can begin. But after hearing that phrase and walking through a discipleship course where its focus is the problem of the heart, I began to think of sin differently.

In Matthew 15:18-20, Jesus says to his disciples, “But the things that come out of a person’s mouth come from the heart, and these defile them. For out of the heart come evil thoughts—murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. These are what defile a person; but eating with unwashed hands does not defile them.”

Jesus is saying that what actually defiles, what stinks about a tomb, is what’s on the inside, what’s in the heart. He’s saying that no matter what a person does, in the depth of him (his heart) there is something much more broken. Jesus is principally concerned with the heart being changed, more than the behavior being changed.

This realization might be pedestrian to a lot of folks but it was shocking for me. I felt like an evangelist for it for a few years there because, I mean, can you believe this?! It’s not that Jesus doesn’t care about my actions, but it’s that he cares more about my heart. This changed everything for me and that’s not an exaggeration. It toppled my complete understanding of God’s character, his intention for the world, his love for me, my love for my neighbor, everything. Nothing was left untouched by this. It helped me realize that no matter how much the pornographer or the gossiper cleans up their actions on the outside, if their hearts aren’t radically changed by the goodness, grace, and love of God, they are still not walking in wholeness with him.

Fast-forward a few years and some spiritual formation later, and I began to realize that the problems of the heart are just as important to God in all their complexity as the heart itself.

Here’s what I mean by that. Using the example of pornography or gossip again, the why of the pornography use is what God wants to heal. The why of the gossiping is what God wants to heal. Perhaps someone uses pornography because they want to feel in control, and they want to feel in control because somewhere along the way, their autonomy was infringed upon and something was stolen from them. Left unhealed, that wound festers and grows and morphs into a grasping, angry, objectification of all human bodies made in the image of God and the quick, temporary release of orgasm. For the one who gossips, perhaps somewhere along the way someone was left out, excluded, or made to feel small. Left unresolved, that wound of being overlooked becomes a habit of talking about others in derisive ways to make the gossiper feel bigger, stronger, sovereign, and superior to others.

The problem of the heart is that God wants to heal the heart. He doesn’t just want to bandage it up so it stops sinning. He wants to be unified with it, he wants to be reconciled with it, he wants it to know it is loved and seen and cherished and desired.

Seeing this has changed everything for me again. I mean, there is literally no place in my life, politics, church involvement, Bible reading, writing, marriage, friendships, etc., where this realization has not affected it (I’ll be writing about how over on my Substack). If I see people not primarily as sinners who need to get their junk together, but humans made in the image of God desperately trying to do their best living in a broken world with broken hearts, it changes everything.

I’m going to be a more tender listener, a more gracious voter, a more grounded Christian, a more circumspect thinker, a more discerning writer, and on and on it goes. But more than all of that, I’m going to be able to look at my own sin and say, “What is this broken behavior I’m exhibiting trying to show me about what God wants to heal in me?” When I snap at my husband or resent a friend or am lazy with chores or feel angry about the government or any other sideways thought or action I have, there is something God wants to call attention to in my heart that needs his love, grace, forgiveness, purpose, gentleness, kindness, and healing attention.

This is why I talk about sin in terms of unhealed or unresolved brokenness. Not because I don’t take sin seriously, but because I take it so seriously I don’t think a changed behavior is enough. It’s just not enough. I promise you, it’s not. Whatever regular whitewashing you’re doing to a tomb, it’s not going to change the stinking, rotting corpse inside. Only God can do that. And God wants to do it. He wants to do it now.

Okay, but how?

I don’t know how he’ll do it for you. For me it was a combination of taking a specific inventory of spaces where I had guilt, shame, anger, abuse, and passivity. Each of those spaces pointed directly to something God wanted to heal in me. And in none of those spaces did the guilt, shame, anger, abuse, or passivity disappear until I did the work.

I’m still doing the work. Therapy helps me. Regular confession helps me. Letting people ask probing questions helps me. Answering them honestly helps me. The bread and wine helps me. God isn’t wasting anything in my work to give him my whole heart to heal and love.

And he wants to do that for all of us, starting in our very own heart.

A Friendship, a Ritual, a Conversation, and an Offer

This small space is smelling of sore neglect these days, but only because I’m eyeball deep in a book manuscript and working on a side project as well. More details about the side project below, but first here are some tidbits from around the world wide web that delighted or stirred me.

Becoming Authentically Human, “It has started to dawn on me that John only became more completely his confrontational, unshaven, locust-eating self in Jesus’ presence. John actually became Johnier and Johnier—but now all of him was pointing to Jesus. He was authentically holy, but in an authentically John the Baptist sort of way.”

I first heard this story at a Behold the Lamb concert several years ago and it still delights me today. The Friendship Files.

This conversation on rituals from Dr. Dru Johnson was a godsend. You’ll have to subscribe to Mars Hill Audio Journal to listen to it, but I promise you won’t regret it. I love these short conversations with brilliant people.

One of my commitments for 2021 is to listen to more podcasts. Cultivated from Mike Cosper is one of my favorites and this conversation with Tish Harrison Warren on her new book was no exception.

Murmurations never cease to astound me. I am mesmerized by them.

Murmurations tonight. Breathtaking. pic.twitter.com/kpMRGhQSvu

— Maud (@Blahranger) February 10, 2021

Speaking of Tish, this piece is from five years ago and I recently resurrected it for a reread. It bears reading, even if you’ve already done so or are poised to disagree. “The brokenness we find in sexism, abuse, and the marginalization of women comes not so much from our stated positions on gender but from our failure to love our neighbor, to take seriously God's call to mutual submission, and the ways these deeply embedded sins play out in systems, cultures, and patterns over generations. Therefore, each of us is called to be part of God’s redemption and restoration of the full human dignity of women.”

Shall I share about my side project now?

I have a longer post here with details here, but in short, I have determined that in order for me to be my most Lore-ee self (a la, Carolyn Arend’s article above), I need to have a space with readers who are physically invested in the journey alongside me. More and more I am uncomfortable with the amount of free content writers churn out and, because it’s free for the reader, the reader feels free to denigrate the writer at will. Praise God that happens minimally for me, though make no mistake, it happens with regularity. Because of this, I have been trying to consider a way to practice good boundaries as a vocational writer.

This is my job, it’s not a hobby. Some people use their blogs or social media as hobbies, and that’s okay of course. But that’s not how I use these spaces. These are the spaces I show up to in some form every single day, it’s the work I do to contribute to our family’s needs and goals and giving, it’s the work I know God has given to me and I want to do it well. But, as with any job, there need to be clear job descriptions and co-workers and benefits.

I have decided to begin a secondary space for paying subscribers only. I will continue to share free content on Sayable here, but for paying (i.e. invested) readers, I will be offering more in-depth thoughts on politics, gender, poetry, the Church, faith, doubt, the book I’m working on, the books I’m reading, my marriage, my discontent with social media, and more. I have so many thoughts about all of these things and I rarely voice them in these spaces because trolls, bullies, dissenters, and partisans exist, and it zaps my energy and joy to have to sort through their nastiness.

Lecrae tweeted recently, “Don’t give your best energy responding to naysayers, critics, and trolls who are bent on misunderstanding you. I’ve learned I’m not accountable to people who do not know me. The arguments are irrelevant when the lights are off and my loved ones see the real me.” And, well, I love that.

I am not promising greater accountability to those who pay to subscribe to this new space. I have close, godly, faithful accountability in my life, and I do not believe that paying someone for their work means they’re accountable to you in all matters. What I am promising is to bring you along on a more intimate journey with me as I work through the intricacies of working my thoughts out in public.

If you’d like to join in, read this post for the why and this post for the how. If not, no harm! None at all. Continue showing up here on Sayable for free content. I’m grateful for your presence!

With peace,

Lore

A Shared Experience is Not the Same Experience

A decade ago, in a memoir or a book on writing memoir, I read that no two children grow up in the same family. I am interested in this thought because there is a fifteen to twenty year gap between my youngest siblings and me.

I grew up in the northern suburbs of Philadelphia, in a two-parent household with parents at odds. My youngest siblings grew up in single parent households in New York and Florida. I grew up steeped in conservative fundamentalism, without a social security number, job, drivers license, the option of college, with whole decades where courtship, modesty, full-quiver theology, and fear of government overreach drove our lives. They grew up in public school, with the option of college, dating (and for two of them marrying their high school sweethearts), the option of drivers licenses and paying jobs. I grew up in one house until my late teens and flew in an airplane for the first time at 22. They grew up in multiple homes over multiple states, flying cross-country from a young age.

But more than all of those differences, I grew up with parents who were twenty years younger, twenty years less healed, twenty years more naive and immature. This says nothing about their character as individuals. We are all on a trajectory toward maturity and growth, healing and, hopefully, wholeness. At 40 today, I am twenty years removed from my 20 years in 2001. The reality that my siblings and I grew up in different families is just a reality, not a judgement.

There’s another side to that quote, thought, and this is that two of us may incubate in nearly the same circumstances, and still experience something differently. We may have belonged to the same church, which I loved and you hated. We may have gone to the same school, which I regard with suspicion and you with trust. We may have voted for the same person for president, and one may carry regrets and the other none. We may have been a part of the same circle of friends, and you may have felt loved, seen, cherished, and safe, where I did not. We may know the same person and one of us carries wounds from them and the other none.

Humility is recognizing that where you may have experienced good, someone else experienced bad. Where you experienced health, someone else experienced harm. Where you experienced healing, someone else experienced a wound. No one person or entity or organization or church or leader or teacher or writer or business is all good or all bad. We, from the first breaths we take, are in the world doing both good and bad, harm and healing, sin and righteousness. And most of us, to varying degrees, are doing what seems best to us in any single moment (Heb. 12).

We do not come into environments blank, tabula rasa, a clean slate. We come in marked by all the experiences we have had in all of our lives (and if the neuroscience is true—and I believe it is—marked by the experiences our parents and grandparents had, too), and every new experience builds on the old. This is part of why you may love a church and someone else may despise it. Or why you may think your family is the best and a sibling finds them intolerable. Or why you suffered in school while another excelled. And humility means being able to say, right out loud, that in the absence of a universal experience, difference experiences are a universal truth.

I just spent a few days with my oldest friend. We grew up neighbors with enough overlap in the stories of our families that when we met as young teens, we experienced the mysterious “Me too!” that brings all friends together. Almost every formative experience of our lives was shared in some way. We share many of the same memories, the same friends, the same cross-cultural experiences. But a few years ago we had a series of deep and good conversations where we both had to admit, our circumstances may have been the similar, but our experiences of those circumstances couldn’t have been more different. This realization was deeply painful for us because it meant facing that what seemed sweet to one, was bitter to the other, and what was a blip on the radar for one, was catastrophic for the other. Having these conversations was necessary, though, because otherwise we would engage as caricatures—distorted forms of the other with our own projections on them—and not as our true selves.

Jesus wants our true selves, the real us. He wants us to not pretend we made it through our lives unscathed by a specific brokenness and sadness and heartbreak and abuse. He wants us to bring the cocktail the enemy meant to drown us in, the whole story. Even if someone else had a different cocktail of experiences, it doesn’t mean ours don’t matter to him just as they are, in their wholeness.

Why? Because he wants to heal the real us, not the false us, not the mask we front to the world, the image of holding it together in devastating experiences or difficult environments. He wants the deepest parts of us, the core, our hearts. And he can’t do that if we pretend we’re just like everyone else or everyone else should see it just like us.

The gospel levels the ground on which we walk with Jesus, but it does not omit the story that brought us to him. The gospel is for everyone, but the route we take to it looks different for everyone. We who are in Him need to be able to say, “We may have shared an experience, but we do not share the same story. By God’s grace, one of us came through more healed and the other will find healing and wholeness through some other measure of God’s faithfulness in their life. But by his grace, he’ll do the work, so we can just take our hands off controlling the experiences of others, and let him do it.”

And then we step back and watch, knowing it says nothing about us, but everything about God’s completing work.

My Bean and me: twenty-five years of sharing life together, with all different experiences of life together.