Rooted Aliens and Settled Strangers

I have always admired those who don’t find it difficult to stake their ground and lay claim to a belief or path or purpose. My beliefs and paths and purposes have felt more like a long meander through a vast wilderness than a settled and rooted life. I do not romanticize the long meander, though, as some do. Sometimes I want nothing more than to be so utterly convinced of the rightness of just one thing that I care little who disagrees. This can take its form in issues of justice or politics, religion or vocation, but it is usually rooted in a deep and unshakable sense that what one is doing is the right thing to do. Vote this way, attend this church, raise children this way, be a friend that way—ultimately we are all doing what seems right in our own eyes, even if we convinced we’re the ones with the eyes of God.

What I mean when I say I admire those who think that way is that there is a constant churning within me that sees the merits of many different views, that can appreciate those who vote one way or those who vote the other, that can see the goodness of being in one church or another. It is not that I think that truth itself is relative, it is that I think people themselves are fallible. We’re all doing our best, according to our experiences, beliefs, practices, parentage, and historical, geographical, and social location. But we all see through a glass darkly and we ought to beware those who pretend to not. We ought to do what seems right, but not pretend it is perfect.

Quilts, Carroll Cloar, 1963

One reason I think it’s helpful to understand our specific personalities is because it’s going to inform the way we absorb information and then disperse it again. Some absorb information and use it to help others. Some absorb and use it to correct injustice. Others absorb and use it to prevent dangerous situations. Still others use it to try to understand the world in a more exacting way. None of those are necessarily better or worse than the others, and each of them are necessary in order for our world to be healthy and whole. Paul said as much to the Corinthians, “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I don’t need you!’ And the head cannot say to the feet, ‘I don’t need you!’…Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.”

My specific personality tends to see all parts of the body as both equally and unequivocally necessary. I don’t find more virtue in a hand than in an eye than in a foot or a neck. It is difficult for me to see how even a hand that has been used to harm isn’t still capable of healing. Ronald Rolheiser wrote, “We are better persons when we carry tension, as opposed to always looking for its easy resolution.” It is easier to resolve the tension wherever we find it, to reduce, distill, and refine—all of which are another way of saying “to make smaller.” But it is better, I think, to stay in it.

I am still thinking about Lewis’s words that I shared a few weeks back, “Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil but from other good.” This is what Paul was saying, I think: hands and eyes and feet and necks are all completely distinct from one another, and no one would confuse one with the other, but they are still all good and the moment we forget that, we leave the tension necessary for our growth and our worlds good.

And yet I persist in thinking and acting like, if for instance, I am a left shoulder, the hands are better and more right than me, or if I am a right knee, the left elbow has more purpose than me. Even though I believe we are all needed and necessary in order for the world to move increasingly toward the coming King, I still can’t help but worry that my particular place in the world is somehow left better rendered invisible. It is the settlers who build and the rooted who have a home, it is the cities that rule and the capitals that make law, the societies that influence and the medias that inform—these are the spaces of real change, real action. Yet, in my soul, I agree with Peterson that “the pastoral itch to be where the action is should be resisted.”

Note in Blue and Opal the Sun Cloud, James Abbott Mcneill (whistler)

Much of the last few months have been me relearning to hear and value my own voice. Some of you might blanche at that, whisper among yourselves, “Is this the start of her mytruthing all over everything? Is this how it begins?” To that I say, Lord, no. What I mean is that I can so admire those entities above for what they do in our world, how they inform, rule, build, and root, that I can forget there is value too in the strangers among us, the exiles, the wanderers, the outsiders, the marginalized, and immigrants. And not just in the very real sense of the marginalized and immigrants, but in the spiritual sense as well because I believe if we’re followers of Jesus, we’re all exiles and immigrants and aliens in this world.

So the hand of a Christian looks very different than the hand of an unbeliever, and what it does in the world looks different too. It is sometimes willing to act like a foot or a head or diminish itself to a pinky finger. The body of a believer does not always look like the body of an unbeliever, but sometimes it does not even look like the bodies of other believers. (You should be carrying Paul’s allegory of the body forward with us here because of course all hands look more or less alike.)

Returning to the beginning, I admire the sure and certain, but I have found that admiration to actually be a downfall of mine, and this time of hunkering down and retreating back has reminded me of that. I find myself jarred now when I encounter people shoulding all over everyone else now because my ears have been tuning themselves into the still small voice of God in my own life and work, and I feel more purpose around my own work.

As I consider entering back into the fray of work, emails, media, interviews, writing, and releasing a book, I’m asking the Lord to keep my ears tuned continually to him and not to culture wars and performative allyship and click baits and marketing means and whatever words are being used to grab the attention of passers-by. I’m too easily convinced that what happens in the cities of our world matters more than what happens in the gardens. And if the past few months have taught me anything, they’ve taught me the very great value of a quiet and hidden and dying seed in a scape of skyscrapers.

I Was Wrong and I'm Sorry

Some liberating lines I am learning to add to regular conversations:

I have been a part of the problem.

I don’t have an answer to that.

I haven’t learned that yet.

I thought I was doing the right thing then, but now I wish I had known better.

I see now that my own unresolved sin, trauma, and story informed how I engaged this situation.

I have no words, but can I sit with you for a while?

I should have learned more about other perspectives before forming such a hard stance on this issue.

I’m here to just listen.

I was wrong.

Even though we disagree, I can see how important this is to you and I want to understand all the reasons why. Can you help me?

I value this entity, doctrine, local church, denomination, or leader dearly, but I can also see how you have been harmed by it/them and so I want to evaluate what I value and why.

It’s okay if our relationship needs to change.

I haven’t seen what you’ve seen but I believe your experience caused you pain.

I’m so sorry.

Here is some soup or tea, and here is a chair, and you are welcome here, just as you are today.

I wish all of these statements and questions were always a part of my vernacular, just as I wish many of them were a part of the conversations many have had with me over the years. These are things I needed to hear and things I needed to say, but many of them I just hadn’t learned yet. Another thing I’m learning is that that’s okay. “Things take the time they take,” Nate reminded me last night, quoting Mary Oliver. “How many roads did Saint Augustine take before he became Saint Augustine?” I finished for him.

Saint Augustine of Hippo, purchase here

We don’t know what we don’t know until we know it. And then once we know it, it takes a long time to get it in our guts deep enough that it becomes a part of who we are, and not just what we know. In the meantime, though, we’re a lot like the kid in that movie with the tattoo emblazoned across his clavicle, reading, “No Ragrets,” thinking we’re getting it right while all the while our indiscretions are obvious to anyone who really has already gotten it.

What is to be done, though, with the space between the not having learned it yet and the learning of it and then the second nature of it? There is so much space there and we are all in it together, at varying markers along the way, each of us interacting with all the others as if we’re at the same place, having learned the same thing, and having very little patience for those who aren’t or haven’t.

I thought, as I drifted to sleep last night, about all those roads Saint Augustine took before he became Saint Augustine. James K.A. Smith, writes in On the Road With Saint Augustine, “When you've realized that you don't even know yourself, that you're an enigma to yourself, and when you keep looking inward only to find an unplumbable depth of mystery and secrets and parts of yourself that are loathsome, then Scripture isn't received as a list of commands: instead, it breaks into your life as a light from outside that shows you the infinite God who loves you at the bottom of the abyss.”

The infinite God who loves you at the bottom of the abyss.

It seems to me that being able to say any of those above statements and meaning them truly and deeply, means we have taken all those other routes that seemed to make sense and have finally encountered that God at the bottom of the abyss. We have truly encountered a God whose love for us frees us to be wrong, to say “I don’t know,” to wish we had done something better or differently, to listen without defending ourselves. We know the only way through is not clawing at the clay on the sides of the abyss, desperately trying to get ourselves back on solid ground, but by standing on the back of Christ, love himself, and being lifted out through no power of our own.

Dallas Willard said, “We need teaching that will keep people remembering such things as: I'm not righteous because I do this. I'm not earning points. And when I fail, at whatever—solitude, fasting—I have not sinned.” I appreciate that because we are not sinning, at least not intentionally, if we don’t say those statements above or if we haven’t learned them yet. Those are statements that take discipline to say and to mean. We have to practice them, and we have to remember that the saying of them doesn’t make us righteous, they don’t give us points in the kingdom of God. The only thing they do is remind us of our own abyss, Christ’s back, and the love of God.

Saint Augustine took a lot of roads before he became Saint Augustine. He got it wrong again and again and again and again. But eventually that restlessness found its home in the love of God. Did he have regrets? I don’t know. But I hope not. I hope he can rest easy knowing that his myriad of roads have shown us it’s okay to not have learned something yet and that, once having learned it, the journey is still a hard one to take before it gets all the way into us.

But perhaps today one of us can start with this, “I am loved by God, held secure in him, known, cared for, and kept by him. I am freed from needing to feel like God or be like him, and so I am freed to confess I don’t know everything yet. But I want to learn. I want to learn.” Perhaps that is the road you or I will take today, on our way to become whatever God is making of each of us.

The Hiddenness of Goodness or the Goodness of Hiddenness

I’ve been watching a pile of wood debris break free from the ice all morning. The water has begun its rush down from the melting mountains and is flowing visibly again, bringing with it all the downed branches from the winter.

Last summer we arrived home from a sudden and sad trip to Florida, and found our neighbor lost three trees in a wind storm that took some real beauts down around our neighborhood. The wind roared down the river and his home took its landfall brunt. I have sometimes lamented that our home was built tucked in the corner of our property, when the better river view is less than thirty feet away, but its builders were wiser than I, going more for stability in a storm than a pretty view.

Across the river from our home, if you know to look for it, you can see how the wind storm took a whole swath of trees down in its way, most of them broken in a singular point along the horizon, thirty feet in the air. I know a healthy forest will do its own maintenance by adapting, creating mulch, and feeding its offspring with their ancestor’s decomposing matter. There is indeed a secret life to these trees and what looks like destruction to my human eyes is still very much a part of a healthy and whole life.

I read this from C.S. Lewis in The Great Divorce last week:

“We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the center: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork you must make a decision. Even on the biological level life is not like a river but like a tree. It does not move towards unity but away from it and the creatures grow further apart as they increase in perfection. Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil but from other good”

This seems to me to be a perfect paragraph and one I won’t forget. I have wrestled mightily in the past few years with goodness and unity and uniformity and evil. This morning the New York Times opined that we are in the beginning years of World War III and though their writers can sometimes be given to hyperbole, I wonder if there’s truth to that particular opinion. War isn’t just happening in the Ukraine, it is happening on Facebook with our neighbors. I know this because for a brief moment I had to log onto Facebook yesterday and download a few photos. I scrolled my timeline for less than ten seconds and the war du jour was over a recent Pixar Film. No fewer than six of my Facebook friends were postulating one way or the other. You may think I need new friends but I think it’s more likely that I just need to get off Facebook in a more permanent way. Maybe we all do.

If good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil, but also from other good, I have to ask myself often if there is a better way to go about making good in the world than signaling to others of my particular lines in the sand. Is there a hiddenness to our good? Perhaps a secret-ness? Is it hiddenness that contributes to our making good? (Yes, reader, I understand the irony of writing these thoughts publicly. This is not a new conundrum to me.)

Dallas Willard writes that “the discipline of secrecy will help us break the grip of human opinion over our souls and our actions…we are liberated from slavery to eyes, and then it does not matter whether people know or not…Whatever our position in life, if our lives and works are to be of the kingdom of God, we must not have human approval as a primary or even major aim. We must loving allow people to think whatever they will. We may, if it seems right, occasionally try to help them understand us and appreciate what we are doing. That could be an act of life. But in any case we can only serve them by serving the Lord only.”

Nikita Fedosov, Landscape in April

Nate and I have been working slowly through the Netflix series Chef’s Table, and last night he starts an episode called Jeong Kwag. If you’re unfamiliar with Chef’s Table, its normal fare is to craft a story from the life and work of famous chefs. Most of them are chefs at multiple Michelin star kitchens, world-renown artists whose restaurants fill the best lists of the world. This episode, though, is on the life of a Buddhist nun called Jeong Kwan, who has lived and worked at a monastery in South Korea for fifty years. The recipients of her artistry are her fellow nuns and novices, and occasional visitors to the cloister. She works in relative secret. She does not use onions or garlic or leeks. Her main ingredient, one critic says, is time.

She uses soy sauce that has been passed down for generations and ferments vegetables long past a normal fermentation process. She methodically plates the meals she serves her fellow sister monks with as much care as the plates she serves to Michelin star chefs who come to visit. One chef says, “Jeong Kwan has no ego,” and Jeong Kwan herself says, “Creativity and ego cannot go together. If you free yourself from the competing and jealous mind, your creativity opens up endlessly. Just as water springs from a fountain, creativity springs from every moment. You must not be your own obstacle. You must not be owned by the environment you’re in.” Working with food, it is obvious, is an act of worship for her.

I am not a Buddhist and believe there is more to being truly free than an open mind, but it seems to me that a prerequisite for believing the gospel of Jesus Christ is an open mind. And the way of the gospel is an open heart. Not so open that it catches every little wind of doctrine that blows past, but open enough to fully receive and live in the freedom for which we have been set free. As a Christian I cannot stake my life on the freedom we have in Christ and then live in such a way that my rigidity and surety in every single thing communicates to others that this freedom ain’t actually free. This is a space of tension, I know (I hear you naysayers but-but-but-ing already…), but I think Lewis is onto something when he says for goodness to be truly good it must be discernible from other goodness. In other words, Ben and Jerry’s Mint Cookie Crumble might be delicious and fresh squeezed orange juice might be sublime, but nobody in their right mind would mix them together and call it good. In other words, freedom in Christ means we will live equally good though drastically different lives.

Gustave Baumann, Aspen Thicket

The wood debris has broken free of its ice obstacle and begun its float downstream, by early afternoon it will crest the falls in town and probably break free from one another then. Who knows where it will go then. Perhaps to the seaway and then even to the gulf of St. Lawrence and perhaps even the Atlantic Ocean. I doubt it will all make it that far, but even if it just catches on a shoreline somewhere, it becomes an essential part of this living environment. Even in its death, it gives life to other living things.

I wonder sometimes if true freedom in Christ is incompatible with the current environment in which we live, where our every thought and experience has the opportunity for display and therefore, whether we intend for it or not, creates a pressure for others to meet our idea of what is uniformly good instead of a diversity of good. Perhaps it is possible to cultivate a kingdom kind of goodness by in fact going the way that seems best to us in the moment, having cultivated an interior life that is strong and vibrant and full of the Holy Spirit, so much so that two of us can choose different or opposite things for our lives without either of us making a moral judgement on the other.

Perhaps we do this for a long period of time, perhaps looking seemingly dead and untended to the naked eye, and yet cultivating a whole forest beneath our roots. Perhaps. I don’t know. I suspect though.

The Surety of Every Living Thing

In the warmer weather I work from our sunporch, facing the river from my desk or chair through a wall of windows, but in the winter I gravitate to our living room, which is warmer but also lighter, catching the low and slow southern sun throughout most of the day. I will know it is time to migrate back to the sunporch when a little patch of snowdrops out the living room window make their appearance. “Here we are,” they seem to say, “Here we were all along just waiting.”

My mother-in-law sent us a photo of her standing in the blushy blooms of a Japanese Magnolia she planted on the family land 25 years ago and it was my first reminder of the season that elsewhere spring has already begun to inch her way into the northern hemisphere. I read a piece on winter last month from which a line repeats often in my head now: “It really is quite hard to sustain the illusion that there is anything good about winter after the hundredth day or so of temperatures below freezing.” The writer continues with a thoughtful meander through the virtues and curses of living in a less than temperate climate.

Hoffman’s Mill, Peter Hurd

Our dainty pup has a bit of a seemingly irrational fear of water, including puddles, which means that as the snow melts, she fences herself into a smaller and smaller arena to do her business on the leftover snow. She does not dare to venture into the scary, scary possibility that the inch deep puddles surrounding the grey patch of snow might be fathoms deep. I wish I didn’t understand her irrational fears (although she would say they’re quite rational as twice she’s fallen into a swimming pool), but the truth is, I do.

In A Curious Faith I wrote a chapter on the question Jesus asks his disciples in the boat during the storm: Where is your faith? I teased out the truth that nearly one hundred percent of the time, our faith is in the rational things. We trust that cars go on green and stop on red. We trust that if it rains we will get wet and if the sun is shining we will stay dry. We trust in our tastebuds and in our hearing or our sight. We are very rational creatures with finely tuned instincts for survival. And so when Jesus asks that question during a storm in which these seasoned fishermen know could be deadly for them, I guess I understand the object of their faith in that moment: it’s in what they know to be true about the world. I’m like that too.

Even if we trust in what is not seen (like the snowdrops that are right now beginning their process of waking up), we derive that trust from what “we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched.” Even the disciple whom Jesus loved put his faith in what he could see and touch. Even Thomas needed to thrust his hand into Jesus side and inspect the wounds in his hands.

Kerosene Tank, Franz De Merlier

Christianity seems irrational to many folks and if it’s simply understood as a pie in the sky, ethereal trust in some cosmic being, I can understand why. God did not create us to believe in the unbelievable. He made us rational and so he made himself available in human form, the Word made flesh. This is why I am suspect of people who talk endlessly about having faith and praying for more of it without the constant coupling of it with the life of Jesus himself. I think God wants to give us proof. I think he scatters it liberally around the world and gleefully waits for us to see it. And I think he is patient with us when we don’t.

I think he is proving it in the snowdrops and in the Japanese Magnolia and in the puddles surrounding the snow and in the snow itself and he is proving it in my pup and in the ways I will help her see that this water is not as scary as she thinks it is. And I think he wants to prove it to you too.

An Invitation to Desire

I didn’t quite intend to start writing more regularly here on Sayable during this sabbatical. In fact, my intention was simply to write if the muse visited and to not think of it otherwise. But it seems the muse has come around a bit more since the avoidance of my email, social media, phone, and all the various conversations that couple being present to those entities. This should surprise no one. I read a piece this week on the inefficiency of the efficiency culture and found the naming of it all helpful. I didn’t enter this sabbatical in despair about technology, but I knew it would come for me soon enough if I didn’t take a break.

Everyone I do talk to asks me, “How is your sabbatical going?” to which I usually say something short like, “Great!” and that’s pretty much it. I’m resisting the urge to produce a measurable or quantifiable outcome from this time, proof that I did the work or the work did me. Most days I’m simply paying attention to whatever invitation God offers to me in the moment and then showing up to that invitation. I am learning to not reward my work with play or numb my desires until they’re ravenously hungry, but to let desire and play and joy be the steed upon which I explore the terrain of this time. Some of you may gasp at the hedonism of that statement, but I suspect most of us in the midlife of our faith-journey understand its necessity and I also suspect that those who gasp do so because underneath it all they need to feed the God-given gift of desire too.

The Homecoming, N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945)

March has come in, as she does, all liony and loud, dumping another six or eight inches of snow on newly shoveled paths and making the house sing with blinding sunshine. I love the brightness but I’m counting on the lamb-like end of March as the outdoor projects mount (a garden bed I want to ready for planting later in the spring, an overhaul of our garage that has never functioned for us, the finishing of our front porch, etc.). Instead I try to appreciate these lingering temperatures and finish all the indoor projects still to be done, like painting our downstairs wardrobe Scandinavian Pink (Will she regret it? I don’t know, we’ll have to see.).

As I anticipate the work ahead, I am asking myself, “What makes the difference between work that is anticipated and work that isn’t?” Anticipation can’t be the only thing that sets them apart, right? Why do I look forward to pulling every single item out of our garage, building shelves, hanging hooks, and putting it all back in again, but I don’t look forward to painting our stairway steps and trim? The first is clearly more work, more labor, more money and the second is less of all three.

I think there is something about outcomes that are a bit essential to our work and its anticipation or lack of. I know that painting our stairway is going to mean we have to carry Harper up and down it until it seals properly and even then, it’s a high traffic space that will chip and dirty quickly. It may be a different color after I paint it, but it will still be the same space with the same issues. Whereas the garage will feel entirely new (In my head at least. Realistically, there’s only so much difference lipstick on a pig makes, no matter how rosy.) when we finish its cleanup. And the garden bed we lay will be entirely new, as will the porch it borders.

Ah, I realize, it is the sense of newness that sets the work apart. The creation of something that was never there before. G.K. Chesterton wrote, “Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground,” and I wonder if that is because a garden, even with all its tasks, is essentially a place of creativity—making it whatever we want it to be—while the playground of heaven is the place where everything good already exists? We image God on earth by playing, by creating and recreating, making and remaking, all of it a dress rehearsal for the ultimate delight to come.

The Colza (Harvesting Rapeseed), Jules Breton (1860)

This is what I mean about letting desire and joy and play invite me into whatever God has next for me in this time, and it’s a quality I hope I can carry with me after.

For reasons I don’t need to share here, I learned to despise play as a child and the memories that come directly to mind around play are not pleasant ones. And then my early twenties, while my peers were spreading their wings and enjoying all that life suddenly offered them, were wrought with grief over my brother’s death, my parent’s divorce, my siblings’ custody battles, poverty, court appearances, and more. While my friends navigated college and dating and wilderness expeditions, I put my nose to the ground in a very serious way, worked twelve different jobs—some of them three at a time, put myself through a four year degree in three years, and still ended my twenties almost penniless. I did not ever learn that play and delight and desire could be a good thing because I didn’t have the margin to let it be a good thing.

Play is a bit of a luxury, but desire is given to everyone. I wish I had known that I had the option to explore those desires as I grew up instead of viewing all desire as either sinful or inaccessible to me, only for my more privileged peers with stable families and solid provision. I wonder what I would have discovered if I had rejected some expectations on me and moved toward the good gifts God was holding out to me? I wonder what newness might have been found if I’d followed those gifts?

I feel I am learning some of these things too late, now into my forties. But I also know that we all learn something when it feels too late. A friend of mine is learning to be quiet and another friend is learning to be restrained and another friend is learning to trust. We all come into the world into a story that is already unfolding. We don’t ask to join that story, we simply take our place in it, dress the part of our character, act the script we’re given, and it’s a different one for all of us.

This is mine. Yours is different. The question for us all is the same though: What goodness is God inviting me into today?

The Hospitable God

On the window ledge above our sink, leaning against a tiny beeswax candle, is a notecard on which is written some notes I scrawled down during a weekend retreat at Laity Lodge many years ago. The guest lecturer that week was Duke theology professor, Norman Wirzba. You may know Wirzba from his books Food & Faith or The Living Sabbath, or you may not know him at all. He is the sort of writer who spends more time on his craft than on the selling of his craft. His newest book, This Sacred Life, a Christmas gift from Nate, is sitting on another window ledge near me, waiting until I finish Eula Bliss’s Having and Being Had. The quote above the sink is not a direct one from one of his books, but has elements of all of them, in particular Way of Love—which, if a theological tome is not your cup of tea, you might start reading there.

The tiny letters on the tiny notecard read like this:

H O S P I T A L I T Y

Making room for the other.
Welcoming the other into your life.
Nurturing the life of the other.
Liberating the other into their life.

Those words have spent the last five years making their home in my heart. As we opened our doors to friends in our small group or for premarital counseling or to fill our two extra bedrooms or to simply sit on our couch to cry or pray, those words would prepare my heart for the work of hospitality. I love beauty and will never turn down the chance to set a beautiful meal, well-crafted and aesthetically pleasing, before another human. But at the heart of hospitality is not visual beauty but spiritual beauty. These reminders from Wirzba have become that for me: a beautiful spiritual truth of how to practice the Jesus-way in hospitality. Namely, it’s not about how I feel about opening our doors, it’s about what the other knows as they leave our doors.

I could write copious words about this (though why would I when Wirzba already has and so you should read him, not me), but what I have never thought much of until recent months is that in order to do any of the above, one has fully enter into that same hospitality offered by Jesus for themselves. This should not shock me and yet it does. Every single time I’ve caught an upward glance at that notecard the last two months, I think to myself: How do I see the Spirit practicing this with me?

One of the Family, Frederick George Cotman, 1880

Last year’s most read article in the NY Times was “There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling: It’s Called Languishing.” The piece made the rounds thousands of times and it was the shot heard round the collectively sad world. We finally had a word for this general malaise we all shared: languishing. Whenever anyone would ask me how I was doing after that, the word came to mind whether I used it or not and we commiserated together. Naming is power and sharing that power with our neighbors is even more powerful. Fortunately for us, the NY Times gave us something to do with all that newly discovered pent up power: “The Other Side of Languishing is Flourishing. Here’s How to Get There,” followed by “seven simple steps to get you thriving again.”

Who knew it would be so simple? Seven easy steps to stop feeling like a beached whale on a deserted arctic island in the middle of the coldest winter in a thousand years? Sign me up.

. . .

Before I stepped over the threshold into my forties, here were the things I thought would be difficult about my second half of life: aging, menopause, childlessness. I believed the most difficult things would be my changing body and our unchanging family.

What I did not expect to be so difficult in my forties was friendships. I have always made friends easily and found them even more easily. I tend to hold my cards close and take a bit of time to warm up to others enough to share my own vulnerability, but making space for theirs has hardly ever been difficult for me. But turning 40 in the Year of The Pandemic after a cross-country move in a fraught political climate without the mixed blessings of playdates and parental commiseration has been a gutting realization that friendships do not come easily any longer. I’m afraid to mention most of what I care about to new friends—and even some of our olds ones—because even deep friendships have broken over less in recent years. I don’t know if that’s what languishing looks like for you, but that’s what it’s looked like for me.

It’s felt like holding my breath for two whole years.

Francis Feeds the Birds, Brian Wildsmith

Over the past few months, I’ve been asking myself one fairly simple question: What do you want to do?

It seems that somewhere along the way, whether in my attempt to show hospitality to others or desire to build friendships or fear of languishing, I didn’t only stop doing what I wanted to do, I became almost afraid of it. Maybe that sounds silly to many of you, especially those of you more given to indulgence than asceticism, but that’s my struggle. I choose complete inertia over movement toward joy or despair. To feel one or the other feels dangerous to me, as though to dip my toe in either is to give myself over to it entirely.

What I am learning, though, is that I have not entered into the hospitality of Jesus toward me. I have not stepped into the room he has made for me, allowed myself to feel the welcome of being in his abundant life, let myself be nurtured by him, and then released into living the life he has for me, even if it is a different life than the one he has for another.

Sometimes Jesus welcomes me to despair because he knows I will find my only good in him. Sometimes he welcomes me to joy because he knows he is its only source. Sometimes he nurtures me in one friendship and not another. Sometimes he releases me into something someone else would never choose for themselves. Sometimes he withholds what I would choose for myself because he has something different, not necessarily better, but just different.

What does it mean to liberated into my life? This life? Not the life I would have chosen for myself fifteen or twenty years ago, or even five or two years ago? What does it mean to stand in the way of his joy for me today, not the joy I once wished it would be or might wish again for it to be? What does it mean to bring all my sadness to him, even the sadness I can barely give words to? What does it mean that what feels like languishing to me is merely more space for companionship with him?

In my pre-pandemic, pre-cross-country move, pre-fraught-election year self, our door was always open and the sound of people at our table was common. I always cooked more than enough and our candles burned down low often. I miss those days. I’m not complaining. I’m simply stating the fact of what is. But in these days, whenever I glance at that notecard, I think of Jesus doing that for me and it helps. It helps.

Ground, Dan Hillier, 2021

Mommy Guilt and the Childless

The opening lines of a Mary Oliver poem are on my mind today, “Hello, sun on my face. Hello, you who make morning and spread it over the fields.” The chickadees are whistling their greeting this morning too, that two-note repetition from just outside my window. I never get tired of watching them flit across the bare branches of the lilac tree, their black and yellow and blue heads atop their cotton ball body, their kind eyes, their busy feet. It seems we are all ready to wake up to spring soon.

I have too much to do this week to be writing, final page proofs due back for A Curious Faith, school-work and studies, and some additional work for a not-ready-to-be-named project. I knew there would be a few weeks during this sabbatical where I would need to put back on my work hat and slay the beast, and this week is one of them. I’m grateful for the work, but I do wonder if a complete sabbath is ever possible in this hurried world in which we live.

I have been reading voraciously through this time, mostly books for school, but another stack of fiction and non-fiction and poetry as well. Akiko Busch’s How to Disappear, Elisabeth Tova Bailey’s Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, James Nestor’s Breath, Brian Zahnd’s When Everything’s on Fire, Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project, Daniel Bowman’s On the Spectrum, Katherine May’s The Electricity of Every Living Thing, Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, James K.A. Smith’s On the Road With Saint Augustine, Eula Bliss’s Having and Being Had, Ronald Rolheiser’s The Domestic Monastery, and that’s just the non-fiction. It has been so good to read guilt-free.

“Guilt-free? Whatever does she mean? Why would one feel guilty for reading?” Good question, dear reader. It seems I have been saddled with a sticky sort of companion the past five or six years: non-mommy guilt. You’ve heard of Mommy Guilt, I suppose, the feeling that accompanies the array of opinions on breastfeeding, attachment parenting, co-sleeping, homeschooling, vaccinating, masking, et cetera et cetera et cetera. It’s nearly impossible to avoid as long as anyone anywhere has an opinion about how to raise one’s child. I have friends who are nearly paralyzed by it. It turns out, though, that there is a non-mommy-guilt as well, and this is what I have been stricken with.

It is the sense that because we do not have children, our lives are being wasted or the times we get uninterrupted sleep is something for which we need to apologize or our quiet mornings cannot be talked of without mentioning in the same breath those who do not have the blessing of them. It is the sense that in the absence of children, we have to make up other excuses for why we’re tired or why our bodies hurt or why my pelvic floor has issues or why sex is hard or why it’s difficult to make friendships. The normal excuse for all those things is the children, the children, of course, but what if it’s not of course? Do bodies still age and break down and stretch and groan and wrestle with insomnia and anxiety even without the children? Are we allowed to talk about that as a real thing without someone rolling their eyes because how could we ever know how much harder it is with babies?

Yesterday Nate and I drove into the hills to wander a bookstore and clear our heads. On the drive we listened to a sermon in which one of the wisest preachers of our day said, “I’m convinced there is nothing in the world that can help us grow more selfless than being a parent.” Nate made a wise remark after we finished listening, something to the effect of, “I suppose that’s true for some people, that they need the impetus of children to reveal and root out their selfishness, but I have to believe that God is going to use whatever he wants to reveal and root out our selfishness.”

Just as I cannot know what it is like to be a parent, saddled with the responsibilities and bodies and schedules that parents have, I suspect the opposite is true for them. They cannot know what it is like to move through their 40s childless, to experience different responsibilities and bodies and schedules. But because their stories are the more commonly heard ones, sometimes I feel the need to stick my head up through all that mom-guilt and say, “Hey, you don’t get to keep all that hardship for yourself, I’ve got it bad here too.” So do some of my still unmarried friends whose bodies are also changing, whose sleep is also lacking, whose schedules are also fit to bursting. Different stories doesn’t mean lesser ones.

(I’m saying that more for myself than for you, reader.)

Grandma Moses

This time away from work has been me asking myself the question: what have I set aside because I felt it was only legitimate if I had kids to legitimize it? Some of the answers to that question are private and painful, not for public fodder. But some of the answers are that I would play with paper and scissors and glue more, that I would read more books that I just enjoy not because I feel the need to regurgitate their content for readers, that I would have more fun. I feel that I need to apologize for having fun whenever I mention it because fun for a childless person is imagined to be enviable and perfect, and fun for a parent is Christmas morning and Disney vacations and seeing their toddler take their first steps—all of which is tinged with a bit of bittersweetness. The thing is, our fun is too. It’s just a different kind of bittersweetness. But it still matters just as much to God.

I think being single for so long prepared me for childlessness in marriage. I learned to lean into the lack and see what God wanted to teach me in it. But I also learned how he wanted to love me in it, and not just a lackluster love, lavishing it on my married friends along with their super-sanctifying seasons of life, but a real full-bellied love, withholding no good thing and also no hard thing.

I’m trying to pay attention to that non-mommy-guilt wherever it creeps up. And then I’m just doing the thing. Touring virtual museums, cutting out paper and gluing it on pages, calling the doctor, inviting a friend into a private struggle, rereading that YA novel I love, and more. And slowly, slowly, I find the guilt dissipating.

Dallas Willard wrote, “We dishonor God as much by fearing and avoiding pleasure as we do by dependence upon it or living for it.” The old proverb says, “Moderation in all things.” I tend toward a poverty of all that’s good or pleasurable because I feel I have to justify its presence. But what if its presence, like love or grace or the mercy of God, is just there to show us a small glimpse of his full goodness to come? What if it is like the chickadees on the bare branches of my lilacs, singing their two-tone hymn, “Spring soon. Spring soon?” What if the answer to my guilt is not more shame heaped on me but, just as it is for those with children, a full-throated lament of what we do not have, a robust enjoyment of what we do have, and a willingness to become more like God in every way in the space between?

Beauty in the Threshold

A year ago this month, James K.A. Smith shared a piece on Christian Century that I’ve reread no fewer than ten times since then. His title and thesis is, “I’m a philosopher. We can’t think our way out of this mess.” Smith makes the argument that it is beauty that will save the world, not critique, and I’m inclined to agree. The question for the thinking person, though, is how does one turn down the volume on thinking and turn up the simple appreciation and cultivation of creativity? There are so many bad arguments being made and so much terrible formation taking place, both within and without the church. Simply setting a piece of art in front of someone and asking them to meditate on it surely can’t be the answer.

Or can it?

This is what I’ve been thinking about all year.

Ida Binney, Monday Ritual

Part of my aim for this work sabbatical has been to meditate during the times in which I would normally be working. That has taken the shape of prayer and scripture reading, of course. But mostly it has taken the shape of art appreciation, poetry reading, working with my hands, and even sorting out closets and cabinets to not simply make them more functional, but more beautiful. The question I’m asking myself is not “Can beauty save the world?” but “Can beauty save me?”

“Save her from what? Surely she’s not talking about her salvation?” you might ask yourself, conditioned as we are to spiritualize everything. No, friend, I’m not talking about my salvation. But also, I am, in a sense. Not to get too theological, but I do believe that salvation once had cannot be lost. But I also believe there is an ongoing work of our salvation, that is that we are saved and also we are being saved. It is a matter of degrees, I think, not over the threshold of heaven or in the number of jewels in one’s crown, but instead the degrees to which we see God while we’re still looking through a dim glass. In other words: can beauty scrub a little bit more of the grunge from the glass through which we see God?

I’m inclined to agree with Dostoyevsky and Smith and more learned philosophers than me, that beauty can save the world, and in fact, may be the only thing that will save the world.

While I agree with that ideally, I still have to ask myself, though, what it means for the writers whose vocation it is to think and then make thoughts sayable? These were the questions I was wrestling with in my previous post. Do we just stop thinking out loud? Critiquing the terrible? Sharing the good? Is making art the only way forward? Smith writes, “If love alone is credible, literature is truer than philosophy . . . In the spirit of tikkun olam, Judaism’s endeavor to repair the world, I’m throwing in my lot with the poets and painters, the novelists and songwriters.”

A Pastoral Visit, Richard Norris Brooke

Friends of mine who previously haunted the halls of Christian think pieces have been throwing in their lots with the poets and painters, the novelists and songwriters, too. They’re writing beautiful novels and gripping poetry and poignant songs. They’re abandoning places that reward the cheap thrills of viral posts and tiny hearts and numbers that passive-aggressively tout one’s worth to the world. They’re seeing through the thin theological arguments we make for continuing to inhabit them.

I fear, though, that leaving the spaces where beauty is made accessible to all means creating silos of elitism. There have almost always been artists and writers guilds, spaces where creators come to mingle and share and spur one another on to better work. But if beauty is to save the world, the world has to not only be invited, but know they’re invited.

I am wondering if the Christian’s call in this world is mainly to be people who stand in between. That may be the most enneagram nine thing I’ve ever written, but more and more, when I consider where the world is most hungry, it is for those who will stand in the liminal spaces, the thresholds between two disparate things, even two competing things. And when I consider where my joy is most full, it is with my back to neither, but my shoulders spanning across the two. Isn’t that what Jesus did as he hung bleeding on the cross? Made a way for a thief and a pharisee and a centurion and a little child?

I wish I could be a person who throws my lot in with one or the other. But because I’m convinced (today at least) that beauty will save the world, I have to believe beauty has to come to the world as she is and not just as we wish she was. In other words, we can’t always exist in the ideal, sometimes we just have to move a little bit more toward it every day. Perhaps by reading a poem each day and sharing it. Perhaps by going to a museum. Perhaps by washing a window clean or by making a closet beautiful. Perhaps abandonment of the less than ideal isn’t the answer and instead it is simply to fill one more corner of our home and hearts with something well and truly good.

This is what Richard Wilbur is talking about in his poem Love Calls Us to the Things of This World,
“Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”

And what William Morris meant when he wrote, “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”

And what Saint Augustine meant when he said, “Love, and do what you like.”

And what Paul meant when he wrote, “If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.” In other words, if we’re making the most beautiful arguments or stunning art in the world, but doing it without love for the world, we’re just making ugly noise and someone is right to tell us to stop.

Beauty does save the world, but maybe not the beauty we think. Maybe it is the rosy hands of the launderer or the poet who erases the same line so many times it wears a hole in his paper or the mother who scrapes together a lunch for her kid every day or the mindful social media user or the one who lights a candle each morning before the house alights with noise or it is the clothes hung up in the closet or the scent of a boxed cake baking in a kitchen or the words, “I love you,” said just before the lights go out at night. Maybe this is the beauty that will save your world. I know it is saving mine.

The Gleaners, Jean-François Millet, 1855

Who We Are Without Applause

It’s been nearly a month since I’ve shared a single word on social media. A friend asked last week what I have noticed in that time. It was a good question and I allowed myself a minute to mull before answering. There are many things, I told her, but the one that feels the sweetest is the lack of affirmation. I have always (Well, maybe not always, but at least for as long as I’ve been noticing how corrosive it is to the human soul to be commented on constantly or graded on for validity by a number of followers or ‘likes.’) been a bit uncomfortable with the metrics side of my work.

Every vocation has metrics, though. Reviews on a plumber’s service or ratings for a restaurant or numbers of data points entered or websites designed. Metrics help us to know whether we’re doing a good job or not. What they don’t always tell us, though, is whether we’re doing good work. Most work is good work in that God has put us here to be fruitful and multiply, to care and cultivate. But there is a nuance to work that gets a little bit sticky at times.

Most of what I know about goodness and work, I’ve learned at the feet of Wendell Berry (his Art of the Commonplace has schooled me more than any other). For instance, while it may be that the work a burger flipper does is good because they work hard at it and provide for their family, it is also not without complication because of the messiness of factory farming, animal cruelty, land abuse, and more. At some point the good work we do here finds its roots in some bad work along the way.

But it’s also true that all bad work has its roots in good work gone awry. This is sin, after all, right? And sin’s effect on all of creation. Our work as Christians is try and redeem each bit of that (literal) food chain until the good works meet one another in the middle. In other words, until there is no room for bad work sandwiched between the goodness of Eden and the goodness of God’s kingdom established on earth.

All that to say, for me, the metrics of being a writer fall in the bad but still redeemable work for me. I don’t like that they exist, I don’t like what they do to the human soul, and I hope we’re moving toward a world where those numbers and hearts and likes no longer say much about the work within. But I also recognize that we can’t redeem what’s not great without stepping into the space a bit.

In answer to my friend’s question, it has been the sweet absence of affirmation that has been so good about the past month. It has reminded me that I write more and better when I don’t have the applause from last time ringing in my ears and running into the applause from this time. Applause is nice, but after a while it becomes just noise.

But it’s also been the lack of affirmation that comes from constant commenting on or with others. I am all for good conversation and great dialogue on all manner of subjects, but pressing back against the inclination in myself to comment on everyone else’s comment or to engage every little iota of disagreement among reasonable and thinking people, has been great for me. I don’t miss Twitter a single bit and miss Facebook even less. There’s a sick sort of savior mentality that creeps around a lot of us in those spaces that manifests as “Just wanted to share a thought…,” but is really masking “If I don’t say it, who will!?”

I guess I don’t have the answer to that question. If all the thinkers and writers and sayers leave the spaces where they think and write and say publicly, I don’t know that that’s a good alternative either. (I haven’t quite figured all of this out yet, in case you couldn’t tell.) What I do know, though, is that regular breaks are better for us than we probably can imagine and we all probably need better disciplines around the ole social media.

I know that I don’t miss the chatter. I don’t miss the sense of always being slightly ahead or slightly behind whatever Big Deal is proliferating the timelines. I don’t miss feeling graded on my thoughts or photos or writings or ramblings. I don’t miss wanting to share an article but wondering if I’m going to get bullied or shamed or applauded for it.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, did it still live a good and noble life worthy of the joy of the hiker or the home of its inhabitants or the nourishment its roots gave to other roots? That is, can a thing still be well and truly good, without being shared by the masses? Without the whole world weighing in on its goodness and merits?

Am I still a good writer and thinker, even if no one reads? Concretely: is what I’m writing right now any good, even if not a single one of you reads it all the way through? I have always known the answer to that is yes because what the work is doing in me is good, and that makes it good whether anyone reads it or not. It is me inhabiting my humanness and the image of God and that is always good.

The better question I’m asking these days is, “Am I loved by the God of the universe, even if no one notices my existence?” The answer to that is yes, but convincing me of it is a bit more complex. That is part of why we take sabbaticals. Not to vacate from our lives but to shrink back to a human size, to pinch our skin and ask if we are still us after the bloat goes down.

Turns out, friends, of course I am. And I am better for it. And this, more than anything is what makes work good: that when we live as we are and not as our metrics tells we are or ought to be, we’re all a little more healthy, a little more whole, a little more human.

Carroll Clore, Wild Okra

We Sing of Snow

Donald Hall, poet, editor of The Paris Review, and author of the children’s book, The Ox-Cart Man, wrote that “Winter is always again,” and also that, “We sing of snow to brag of pain.” I read his introduction to A Mind of Winter: Poems for a Snowy Season aloud to Nate the other morning and we chuckled at the truth of the line. It occurred to me that only the night before, when my classmates had compared the temperatures around these United States from a Zoom call, I piped up that it was -25 and we had a foot of snow outside. Last night, though a bit warmer at 9 degrees, I wrapped myself in one of our many wool blankets while we met again. My feet are always cold at the end of class, untucked as they are away from the piles of wool blankets Nate stacks every time he comes down from the loft and asks, “Are you warm enough?”

Yesterday I dropped off a pile of meals for a friend who is about to have a baby and we talked (as if to prove Hall’s point of bragging about the cold) of proper winter gear being the secret to making it through these cold January days and nights. She spoke about her lamb’s wool cardigan, stretching over the baby soon to come earthside, and I talked about Blundstones and Darn Tough socks and warm feet. (I’m saying an awful lot about my feet, I know, but every northerner knows to keep their feet warm and the rest will follow.)

Sometimes someone from the south will ask me, “How do you make it through the winter there?” and I guess I think to myself then, “If ‘making it through’ was how I saw it, I don’t think I would. I think I’d move again.”

The truth is I like the winter and I always have. I like the snow. I like the changing light and monochromatic landscapes. I recognize the privilege in being able to like it all, but I spent enough years here in near poverty, wearing thin cotton cardigans because I couldn’t afford wool, and argyle socks because I didn’t know that one pair of Smart Wool could carry me through a whole winter. Driving our Subaru on these snowy roads can’t compare one bit to the years I spent sliding off roads in my Honda Civic, loading down my backseat with sandbags and learning to pump the breaks. One learns to drive in the snow through trial and error. Or they can afford to buy a stable vehicle with good tires which will do half the work for them. If I’m honest, I think one of the reasons I moved south all those years ago was because I couldn’t afford the seasonal life and all the layers each one required in order to truly enjoy it and not just “make it through.”

But we can afford it now, as the snowshoes leaning against the porch wall and the kayaks in the garage and the Subaru in the drive and the sheer amount of wool everything in our house will attest. We stay warm, mostly. We stay cozy. Even when outside, we stay dry and know our limits.

I will never forget the time a friend and I were driving home from another state amidst a blizzard and my Honda broke down on the side of the highway, hours from home. We pulled every scrap of fabric out of our suitcases, piled them on, and hunkered down for a long, cold night. A state trooper stopped then and made us leave, leaving us in a McDonalds, and we slept all night on benches, waiting until help came in the morning. I don’t know if I would feel so grateful for these warm feet today if I hadn’t lived through experiences like that and more.

. . .

A few weeks ago, a friend shared that many art museums have virtual tours and since then I’ve visited the Louvre and the Met and Brandywine and a few more. I am determined that neither the season nor the pandemic are going to keep me from beauty like this from Camille Pissarro, titled Morning Sunlight on the Snow.

Camille Pissarro, Morning Sunlight on the Snow

I also somehow found this video blog from an artist in northern Sweden who documents cold swimming, short nights, and the winter sun of the great north.

Living with the Dark Winters in Sweden | Midnight sun & Polar night from Jonna Jinton

And then, because I was helpless against the algorithm, I found this snow art from Simon Beck and National Geographic.

Snow art from Simon Beck

One thing that always helps me in winter, both in the south and now back up north, is planting some paperwhite narcissus and some amaryllis. I know some people like to plant them so they bloom in time for Christmas, but I’ve always liked the idea of planting them on Solstice and watching them bloom through January. Our paperwhites have been open for a few weeks now and the amaryllis is still closed, but reaching higher and higher toward the sun every day.

Speaking of the sun—because in winter we are always speaking of the sun—I pay close attention to its movements, incrementally higher each day, casting shadows with a minute variation every morning, noon, and night. By mid summer it will be rising and setting in entirely different windows than it is right now and I love that change. And I love that it is always changing, no two days are alike.

The sun—because we are always talking about the sun—makes such a difference for me and my mental health in the winter, so I try to follow the light wherever it is in the house. If it is cloudy, and it often is, I light a candle or two and it helps. I feel good about doubling up my vitamin D every day and take my antidepressant each morning without shame.

“Winter is always again,” Hall wrote, and, as I wrote last week, “It will end and something else will begin. And then begin again. And again. And again.” And with every again, we learn a little more about how to live it well. Not that fabric, but this one. Not that meal, but this one. Not that shovel, but this one.

Something about beginning my fifth decade in this world has me thinking a lot about all the spaces I wish I’d done differently or better in my life. Conversations I wish I’d had and others I wish I hadn’t had. Interactions I wish had gone differently or environments I wish hadn’t taken me so long to leave. I feel like there is a soul inventory taking place in me these years. I don’t feel surprised by it, we have always known that midlife is a time of reevaluation. For some that reevaluation leads them to throw off the constraints of years past and others the reevaluation is simply recalibration, shifts by degrees, like the sun’s moving light.

Winter, in particular, has me thinking about what I’ve learned and what I wish I’d learned sooner. It also has me growing in grace for the girl I was and the woman I became and the people others were and became around me. We learn by experience, by embodied practices, by doing and undoing and doing again and again. We don’t know what we don’t know and sometimes, even if we do know, we don’t have the margin or the funds or the resources to do what we know we should do. And in those moments, I’m learning, what I want is grace and what I need is love, and what I want to give is both and a lot of them to everyone I meet.

Always We Begin Again

It seems cliche to write about the weather since small talk is not the normal fare of this space, but I don’t know how to talk about this without mentioning the weather.

It has been a full and bright moon here this week, which means it has also been a full and bright moon wherever you are too. But perhaps you do not have snow there, where you are, and something you should know is that when there is snow on the ground, it reflects any light in the sky and makes the inside of your home much brighter. This goes for the daytime too—right now the sun is staring me straight in the face (I like it this way) and our home is flooded with its warmth.

I am grateful for its warmth, though, because the temperatures have been below zero for the past week and a half. Sometimes they’re rising above that fat O but not for long. On Saturday, it was negative 17, but with a clear blue sky and brilliant sun, so we strapped on our new snowshoes and walked on the river for a while. It’s the first time I’ve been out on the river not in my kayak and even having my head a mere three or so feet up higher gave me such a different vantage point of the land around us and her inhabitants.

After more than a decade of living in a place where the seasons all felt different by the slightest degrees, it has been an adjustment being back in a place where every season is full of itself. When it is spring, it is muddy and light green and yellow buds popping out of bare branches with late April snow flurries. When it is summer it is pinks and yellows and greens and tomatoes and strawberries and kicking off your sheets at night to feel the occasional breeze of the oscillating fan on your hot legs. When it is autumn, it is golds and burnt oranges, the scent of leaves and the slightest chill in the air, putting on a sweater in the morning and shedding it by afternoon. And when it is winter, it is soups and chilis and long underwear and Darn Tough socks and tubes of chapstick and hand lotion. Every season is just full of what it is.

In 2020, our first year back in New York, I was so excited for winter, I pulled out the flannel sheets in October and my wool sweaters then too. I starting making warming soups and pulled my boots out. I glued myself to the windows waiting for the first snow and then tromped out in it whenever I could. But by the beginning of February, I was ready for spring. I kept looking and waiting and watching for the slightest sign of winter’s loosening grip. By March I put away my sweaters in an act of defiance and by April I was tempted to put some seedlings in the ground too early.

Last fall, though, on the autumn equinox, I realized something: Winter doesn’t officially begin until the end of the year, the 21st of December, a mere ten days before the start of the new year. The bulk of winter is at the beginning of the year, not the end. And I wondered to myself, why is it that when we name the seasons, we always start with spring? Is it because it is the time of new beginnings and everything feels possible and permissible? Because we would rather believe that newness begins when we can see it, rather than when it is dormant and covered over and seems like death?

Winter begins on the darkest day at the end of the year but she spends her bulk growing lighter and lighter through the newest days of the year. Winter is the real beginning, not spring.

I suppose that’s what someone who has just begun their 42nd year of life would say, rolling her eyes at those in the springs and summers of life when I have barely just begun my autumn. And maybe the analogy breaks down here somewhere. But a few weeks ago, when someone asked me to envision my life like a field—was it harvest time? Fallow? Dead or rocky? Planting time?—I said I felt plowed through, soil amended, and awaiting the farmer’s seeds. I felt fresh and possible. But not yet ready for sprouted greens to press their way through, not even ready for the seed to go into the soil and die its necessary death. I just felt dormant, but, like, in a good way. Like in a snow-covered field way.

In December we changed the way we spoke of the weather, stopped calling it winter, even when it grew chilly, even when the first dusting of snow came. And winter, when she came, as she always does, on that darkest day at the end of the year, felt like a new beginning again. In mid-March, when we have that one perfectly warm day and we go outside and breathe the air knowing spring is coming but not here yet, perhaps we won’t grumble as much when we put back on our sweater because it will still be winter for a little while longer.

Maybe this little adjustment doesn’t help you like it helps me, but it does help me. It reminds me that I am not in my end and that I am, as Saint Benedict of Nursia said, “Always beginning again.”* While it is true that the springs of our lives are full of promise and possibility, and the summers are full of bounty and lush with growth, perhaps it is the autumns and winters of our lives where the real growth—and by that, I mean of course, death—happens. And perhaps those deaths, as numerous as they are, are not the end of good things but the finalizing of finished things.

What I meant when I said I felt plowed and amended was that I feel emptied out of the pesky weeds that ate up much of my twenties and thirties. I no longer feel fueled by anger as much as by empathy (including, surprisingly, for myself). I no longer feel driven by success as by faithfulness. I no longer feel beholden to doing things because I feel guilty for not doing them, but instead as though being compelled by pure joy is a possibility in my future. I no longer put insane pressure on myself to please my perfectionism and the perfectionism I think everyone else has for me. I no longer feel like I’m missing out on something if someone important or someone I like or someone I don’t even like but feel like I should like does something without me. I no longer feel stolen from, but given to.

I know that all of those weeds and seasons were in some ways necessary for me, just as spring and summer are necessary to fall and winter. I don’t begrudge them, nor do I begrudge those still in those seasons. I’ve been there before and I know they will come through. That is the nature of a season. It doesn’t last forever. It doesn’t even last longer than the one before. It will end, and something else will begin. And then begin again. And again. And again. Because that is the way God made the world. And the way he made you and me and everyone we know.

*Technically he said, “Always we begin again.”

The Transforming Pause: a sabbatical

Winter finally came to The Little River Cottage this morning, five inches of snow overnight and another few predicted. We haven’t yet opened the two pairs of snowshoes under the tree, perhaps because the ground was bare but also perhaps just because we’ve just been extending out the days of Christmas through to the fifth of January. A book here and a new pair of slippers there, a thrifted wool blanket here and wooden art from a local artist there. Christmas without children is different but it does not have to be without mystery and magic all the same. Perhaps we will open the snowshoes today and christen them with a tromp in the snow.

I have been preparing our home and my heart for a sabbatical. I’ve never taken one and perhaps it doesn’t make much sense to have one smack in the middle of graduate school and birthing another book into the world. But as I looked ahead at the next few years, it seemed that if I waited to take one, I’d enter it on empty instead of on full, and I wanted to enter a sabbatical on full. I’ve had plenty of years of doubt and times of breaking and now is not one of those times. There has been grief this past year, sure, piles of it. But my heart is in a good and healthy place with the Lord, and I wanted joy to be the path of this journey instead of obligation and burnout.

I don’t plan on talking or writing much about my sabbatical plan either now or later, nor do I plan on talking or writing much through it either. When I asked a few people about their experiences, there was a general consensus that holding what God does in those quiet hours and days close was a good thing. Those whose work can carry the whiff of performance in that it is done in the public eye—even if the heart is not bent toward performance—said part of the discipline and the goodness of the time away was to not come back with stories of what God did but instead just let what God does make its home in me. I resonate already with this counsel and so I don’t plan on offering much in the way of how-to-do-one or how-mine-went.

"Sabbath is not simply the pause that refreshes. It is the pause that transforms. " 

- Walter Brueggemann.

I will say this, though:

A friend suggested working through The Artist’s Way and I plan on doing that.

Open Air, a spiritual formation non-profit, crafted a sabbatical plan for me and will be coaching me through it.

I will not be on social media or in my general email inbox or text messages during this time. I have few commitments for which I’ll need to keep showing up, but generally I will not be reachable during this space of time. My plan is to have long periods where my phone is off and then have do-not-disturb on for all but a very few people, namely my husband and a few other purposeful individuals. My main objective for this sabbatical is to quiet the voices of others and tune into the voice of the Spirit who lives inside me.

I debated about whether I wanted to stay away from Sayable during this time and have gone back and forth in my spirit about it. So what I’ve decided is that, in the spirit of paying attention to the Spirit, I’m going to led Him direct that. If I feel like showing up here and writing, I will. If not, I won’t.

2022 and 2023 are going to be very full years for me. Between graduate school, the release of A Curious Faith, the writing of another book, a few exciting trips (one of which you may be invited along on ;) ), and more, I feel a sense of joy and stability in my vocation. I have worked for a very long time, over 20 years now, to do what I get to do full-time, and I’m grateful to God for every bit of that labor and the harvest season I get to be in now. There have been years of quiet, fallow seasons, and years of fighting tooth and nail to wrangle the things in my heart and head, and years of famine and blight where it seemed all had died, and there have been years where the vocational goodness feels too good to be true. That’s a gift and it all belongs to him, not me. Sabbatical is my way of reminding myself that I belong to him and not to me.

"Sabbath is that uncluttered time and space in which we can distance ourselves from our own activities enough to see what God is doing."    

- Eugene Peterson.

My plan is to begin on January 6th, Epiphany, and go through April 17, Easter. If you’d like to pray or support me through this, I would deeply love the company of your prayers. Here’s what I know to ask prayer for:

1. That I would endure. In the absence of a lot to produce, I can tend toward numbing behavior. Shelly Miller, who left this earth far too soon, wrote, “Extravagant wastefulness in time might prove the most productive thing you choose for yourself,” and I find this such a helpful mindset going into this time. Please pray that I stay present in the quiet and solitude, and don’t drift toward unhelpful crutches.

2. That I would rekindle a joy of making. Creating things and working with my hands has always been a place of deep rest for me, but I haven’t done much of it during the mind-heavy work of my vocation. Abraham Heschel wrote that, “If you work with your hands, sabbath with your mind. And if you work with your mind, sabbath with your hands,” and I plan on taking this advice to heart. Please pray I would find a lot of joy in the art of making.

3. That I would appreciate beauty for beauty’s sake.

4. That my time with the Lord would both reveal and confirm, that there would be an ebb and flow of both relinquishing myself and receiving from him.

5. That the times I need to be checked in to schoolwork or work for the publishing of A Curious Faith, I would be able to do it mindfully and swiftly, in and out.

Thank you, friends. Truly, thank you.

P.S. A Curious Faith is 40% off at Baker Book House for preorders. It’s $11 bucks instead of $18! I would love for you to support them by preordering there, if you can!

The Little River Cottage this morning, in the first snow of Winter 2022.

A Childless Couple at Christmas

We do not keep our grief from one another and it is not a constant one. A friend once said of her singleness, “It hits but doesn’t haunt,” and I’ve found that an apt way to describe unplanned childlessness for us too. It hits at times, but doesn’t haunt always. It hits on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day and when we hold a friend’s baby or when we open Christmas cards of growing families with growing children.

All the traditions we knew as children ourselves are hard to implement in a home where there are no children to replicate them. Stocking stuffers are lackluster, the magic of cookies and milk falls flat, there are no prebedtime jitters or early morning wake ups, no wrapping paper spread hither and yon. There is only a quiet and ordinary series of mornings, with quiet and ordinary cups of coffee and tea, and quiet and ordinary comments and conversations. We have to invent the traditions that cultivate joy for us in the absence of sharing in our children’s joy.

I recognize that our commercials and stores and social media is full, brimming over with ways to make your children’s holiday special, but I also recognize many are without children (and not without hope for them still), and may want to cultivate joy-filled practices still. While everyone else is running around like crazy, trying to figure out how to slow down, you may have the opposite problem. It might feel so empty and slow that it leaves almost too much space for ruminating on your current childlessness. I believe that grief is good and needs time and space to be processed and prayed through, but when that processing turns to wallowing, we may just need something to DO with our time.

Here are a few ways we’ve learned to inhabit the season and imbue it with meaning:

• Nate and I began a new tradition of choosing four of our favorite novels each for the other to read over the winter. We decided a page count of 1600 total was reasonable for the amount of fiction reading time we each have, and the other day we both finished our first book from the other. I read The Sparrow and he read Gilead. Next up for him is The Heart of the Matter and for me is The Sympathizer.

• As I mentioned recently, we also do an Advent reading together. While our friends with kids might find it difficult to wrangle everyone together or try to eke cheerfulness and joy from their kids for daily readings, we don’t have the problem. We just need to bring our road-worn selves to the couch, light the candles, read the book, briefly discuss, pray, and move on.

• In the past we had a four gift “rule.” I put quotes around rule because I always broke that rule but my ever-disciplined husband has always done a better job of keeping it. Something to wear, something to read, something we want, something we need. This year, though, we’ve decided to spread out our gift-giving to the twelve days of Christmas, one gift a day. Some gifts are larger, like snowshoes of our own, and some are small, like beard balm or a bath bomb. My aim is always for something that is useful or beautiful (a la William Morris). Married couples with multiple children may limit their gifts for one another, electing to give more to their kids. And that’s fine! But they have the gift of children and we don’t, so we don’t act like we have to celebrate in the same way.

• We choose one new ornament for our tree each year that signifies something of meaning to us. We have a little puppy for the year we got Harper, a pair of turtledoves for the year we married, a hand-painted clay orb from the year we went to Santa Fe, and more. Each one of them tells a small story from our year. Our tree is not as decked out with childish crafts and low-hanging ornaments, but it’s still a meaningful tree to us.

• We make a bunch of baked goods and deliver them to our neighbors. One year it was cookies, another year it was soup, last year it was strawberry-rhubarb crisp. I have my eye on a cinnamon roll recipe for this year. We see our neighbors pretty regularly, but it’s just one small way to touch base with them and tell them we love them and see them. We deliver them on Christmas Eve.

• Speaking of Christmas Eve, we don’t sweat it. We usually go to church and in years past have either been working or serving at church on CE, but we don’t sweat the photos and clothing etc.. If we feel like it, we might snap a selfie, but we don’t feel pressured to get gussied up and have someone take our photo. Sometimes—not always, but sometimes—seeing those pics of family after family come across our timeline or in the mail can be a bit of painful reminder each time. That doesn’t mean we don’t LOVE to see them, it just means if we don’t ask God to guard our hearts, they can haunt our season more than we’d like them to. Seeing yet another photo of just us again can also contribute to that haunting. We much prefer to snap a candid shot while kayaking or doing something we love together on not Christmas.

• We boot up and bundle up and go for a walk or hike. I don’t think we planned this to be a Christmas Day tradition, but it’s become one the past several years. It’s good to move our bodies and breathe the air and enjoy the quiet Christmassy world.

• We don’t do a big meal on Christmas Day. In years when we’ve had lots of unmarried folks for Christmas, we would just do a big charcuterie spread together and that tradition has carried over to these quieter days. We make a two-person spread and turn on a holiday movie we love (The Family Stone or Little Women or Elf or queue up an epic series) and just enjoy a quiet day together. It is not the same as the ruckus that’s happening in other homes, but it doesn’t mean it isn’t as beautiful or important. It is. It’s just a different beautiful.

• For almost a decade we’ve been answering the same set of questions each New Year’s Day. We spend a whole day and sometimes two on the questions, taking our time, staying in our sweats, drinking tea and listening to music. We don’t rush ourselves or one another. When we’ve both finished, we review last year’s questions together and then share our answers to this year’s. It has been such a helpful and hopeful exercise for both of us. Yes, a family with kids might find the time to do this difficult, but we have the space and so we can.

It’s been said that comparison is the thief of joy, and so whenever we notice comparison sneaking in, we want to note it, ask God to heal whatever’s happening there, and then move through it. But I find comparison in this area of having children/childlessness (as well as marriage/singleness) particularly invasive for our souls. If we have children, we can lament the time and space those without have. If we don’t, we can lament the craziness and joy those families have.

One of the ways I’ve learned and am learning to press back comparison and enter into the joy God has for me and my house, is to lean into the gift he has given instead of the gift he hasn’t. He has given us time, space, and resources. That is the gift we have in the lack of the gift of children. It is not a better gift or a worse gift or a more sanctifying gift or a more difficult gift. It’s just another and different gift. And I want to receive it with joy. I don’t always. But I want to. These practices help me. Maybe they’ll help you, too.

A Smattering for your Advent and January

Perhaps it is the post-book-writing slump or perhaps the stacks of books to read and papers to be written for graduate school or perhaps it is the anti-anxiety/depression medication I began in the summer, but whatever the reason, I know it has meant I am showing up in this space less and less. It has not been a purposeful action, though. I think Sayable has felt like an afterthought, or perhaps not an afterthought in the traditional sense, but a thought which is at the very back of my mind, behind all the other thoughts. I don’t know. I do know, though, that I see your messages telling me that you miss these words in your inboxes and how much you are happy when they come. And that makes me glad that we have this rapport, we two.

I have saved a few things over the past few weeks and perhaps months, and maybe they will bless you along your way today.

This by Michael Wright was for the first week of Advent, but I read it this week and it resonated. “He's basically naming the burden of what all our common clichés tell us: live in the moment, live your dream, speak your truth, etc. And I wonder if this mental burden not only tries to replace community but also keeps us isolated from it. Like an isolating feedback loop where we're “free” to live as we want but constantly bombarded with companies trying to sell us the good life we're imagining.”

This is an older piece from Aarik Danielsen that I had opportunity to reread and it’s just as stunning a second time. “It might feel as if hardness will stave off the end of the world, but what would that world be worth? The world may be a terrible place but, as Frederick Buechner famously said, don’t be afraid. Acknowledging that I am dependent, that I will die defenseless—that we all will—grants me the freedom not to let this world get to me. We are free to do the work of hope. Tough work, but not hard.”

This from Russell Moore has been helpful to keep in the back of my mind with all the recent talk about deconstruction. “But to you—to us—I would counsel: Let’s believe in Jesus enough to bear patiently with those who are hurt, especially those hurt by the church. Let’s not assume that, in every case, those disappointed or angry or at the verge of walking away are doing so because they hold a deficient worldview or because they want to chase immorality. There are some people for whom that is true, in every age. But many, maybe most of them, are not Judas seeking to flee by night but are instead Simon Peter on the seashore, asking, “To whom shall we go?” (John 6:68).”

And this from Tish Harrison Warren on the need for silence. “The literature scholar Alan Jacobs argues that we need to embrace ‘not a permanent silence, but a refusal to speak at the frantic pace set by social media.” He calls silence “the first option — the preferential option for the poor in spirit, you might say; silence as a form of patience, a form of reflection, a form of prayer.’”

. . .

As I mentioned in my last post, we are holding a slower Advent in our home this year. Instead of the traditional evening lighting of the candles and reading, we have been doing it together in the morning. We are reading Tsh Oxenreider’s book Shadow and Light and I love the simple rhythm it’s giving us. (By the way, if you’re a planner, she has a companion book for Lent and Easter called Bitter and Sweet which you can preorder here.) I have loved this morning rhythm so much that I hope she writes a book for each part of the church calendar year.

If you follow me on Instagram, you know that I have been on the hunt for years now, for a candle that delights the senses and doesn’t make me nauseated or give me a headache. I think I have found it! And best yet, it’s the kind of scent that works for summer and winter alike, Balsam Fir. I bought them from Downeast Doodle Candle Company, a small business located in Maine. If you’re sensitive to scents and still love them, perhaps try one of theirs.

Now is a good time to think about the rhythms and rights you want to set to the coming year.

For me, I’m considering some ways to welcome another season of book marketing (my least favorite part of being an author). I usually try to take the month of January off of social media, but I am considering taking the first few months of the year off, perhaps through March. I appreciate a good reset, but I think a good and hard reset may be helpful at times.

I also usually take the month of January to consider what newsletters I subscribe to. I ask myself:

Is this bringing me joy to read?

Am I excited to read it when it comes? Or does it sit in my inbox far too long unread?

How does this writer’s work bear on my life in actual ways? In other words, I am just reading for information or am I reading for formation?

Depending on the answers to those questions, I unsubscribe from a lot of newsletters in January. I will always have my few staple favorites, but I’ve learned to be okay saying, “Their words are important, but they don’t have to be important for my life right now.”

In that vein, too, I reconsider who I follow on social media. I taper down my follows early in the year and somewhere around the fall I find I’ve ratcheted right back up to the same old number. When I ask myself why that happens, I’m never completely satisfied with the answer. Often times the answer is because of some kind of fear or scarcity mindset in me. I want people to like me (who doesn’t?) and fear that if I don’t follow them back they won’t like me. Or I fear if they don’t know my heart than they’ll take my words out of context when they see them. Or if they don’t see me following them, that I will lose value in their life. Whatever the reasons, when I sit down in January and take stock, I usually come up wanting. The mute button is a beautiful opportunity to take a break without the awkward dance of unfollowing and then regretting it.

I do not find it helpful to start or commit to starting a lot of things in January. In fact, I find the opposite more helpful for me. What can I stop or commit to stopping? Perhaps it’s a way of thinking that is no longer serving my spirit in helpful ways. Or perhaps it is a rhythm I’ve picked up along the way that isn’t blessing our home. Or perhaps it’s a relationship that God is asking me to relinquish to him for the time being. Maybe it is a program or class or group that was once a source of joy but has now become a space of obligation. Maybe it’s a way of eating that feels suffocating or unhealthy. It could be a lot of things. I don’t know why the idea of stopping is more helpful to me than starting, but it is. Maybe it will be helpful for you too.

Another thing I’ve been really leaning into this year is the seasons. Being back in the north over a year now, I’ve realized something: no matter where we live, it’s always tempting to rush ahead to the next season. In Texas I couldn’t WAIT for fall every year, for the summer heat to break. But last winter I realized I was approaching spring in the same way. So beginning in the spring I decided that I was really going to live into the whole three months of a particular season. I wasn’t going to call it autumn until September 20, even if the leaves were beginning to change. I wasn’t going to claim winter before December 20, even if there was snow on the ground. I am determined to live in the fullness of what this season is, even as it bleeds into the next with a seeming prematureness. Living within the Church calendar is helping me with this too. I feel less rushed to be celebrating or mourning what has passed or what is coming, and more content to just be in today. Perhaps you may find this print helpful if this resonates with you.

Lastly, if you don’t follow me on social media (and it’s totally okay if not!), I announced last week that A Curious Faith is now ready for preorder. I love this book, I hope it’s okay for me to say that. I don’t know if I’ve ever made something before that I earnestly couldn’t wait to give it to people, but I made this for you and I hope you like it.

The Darkness of December

December has always been difficult for me, for many reasons and for many years. For most of my life I felt like an onlooker, a bystander on the outside of the mirth and light that seemed to fill the hearts and homes of other families. I came to believe that something was intrinsically wrong with me, that I was marred in some deep way so I couldn't muster up joy if I tried.

Once I tried to explain this to a mentor and I remember that instead of being heard, I was put to shame for not entering into the joy of the season. They said that the darkness and heaviness I felt every December was evidence of a dark and heavy heart that only repentance could cure. Repentance, they said, was to enter into that joy, wrap the gifts in merry colors, light the tree, sing the carols—enact until the action took root and my heart was changed.

I tried this. At the end of every November, I put up a tree, I made lists and checked them twice, I played the carols, I went to the parties, I pretended a joy I did not feel. And every December 26th, once the gifts were unwrapped and the food was eaten and I felt free to take the tree down, I breathed deep and felt again free.

I thought this was because it meant January was on the horizon, a time to do-over, begin again, or begin again again. I have always loved beginnings and do-overs and a chance to make a change. But as every year as that sigh grew deeper and the palpable light felt brighter, I knew something else, something almost spiritual, almost transcendental was happening in my soul. Something I needed to pay attention to.

I grew up like many nominal Christians and Evangelicals, with a nominal understanding of Advent, relegated mostly to wreaths and chocolate calendars. But the waiting always felt, I don't know, a put on of sorts. The lights were lit, the tree was bursting with ornaments and gifts, the songs incessant, and the parties in plenty. It felt like we were pretending to be waiting but in actuality, the wait was too hard and so we spiritualized the rush, coating it in words like Joy and Light. But how does light break through unless there are shadows all around it?

This dissonance in my soul was trying to tell me something. It was trying to tell me that we cannot pretend our way into joy or hope or light or love. That trees and gifts and carols are not a means to an end, but a feast after the end has been made clear. The people around me wanted to celebrate Christmas all season long and then pack it away neatly. But what if it was meant to be the other way around? What if the slow crawl toward the coming light was meant to be slow, even agonizing, dark and growing darker? What if the heaviness I felt was pregnant with expectation and not the birthday of the King, not yet? What if knowing that the light has come and is coming again, frees us to intentionally enter into the shadows for a short time, to feel what our brothers and sisters of old felt, and what we still feel as we wait—again—for the coming of our King?

I finally came to understand that the heaviness I felt in December—and still feel—was nothing to be ashamed of, and instead of being evidence of a dark heart was instead proof of a soft heart. My soul is tender to spiritual realities and I'm no longer ashamed of that, nor do I see it as a fatal flaw. My spirit feels what Christians for ages and ages and ages have been doing every December. I am not a bystander into the merry celebrations of others, I am a participant and witness with the Church for most of history.

Advent feels dark because it is dark. It feels heavy because it is heavy. If your soul and spirit feel a dissonance this month, at odds with friends and neighbors and family, instead of trying to enact your way into a changed heart, instead thank your heart and the Spirit of God inside of you for making you tender and aware of this spiritual reality. The King has come but he has also not yet come, and we wait, with hope, in dim light for his coming again.

This Advent I am going to be reading Flemming Rutledge’s excellent book of short sermons: Advent.

I will also be going through Tish Oxenreider’s book Shadow and Light.

As always, accompanied by Malcolm Guite’s Waiting on the Word and poetry readings on his website.

I’ve also compiled more than 24 hours of Advent songs in a playlist called The Second Advent here.

Hope these all help with your dark December days.