Tag Archives: Jesus

Remembering

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If I’m honest, I have felt still—too still—the last few years. My life has been full of abundance: a job I love, many good friends, settling back into the neighborhood I grew up in, a sweet church full of creative people, so much travel to beautiful and beloved places. Yet I’ve been irked by the sense throughout that I, as a person, am stagnant, that I’ve stopped growing, that I’ll never feel changed or fresh again. In many ways I think this feeling is born out of my loss of desire to write, the fact that ideas no longer seem to come when I want them, or that when they do I don’t find them interesting. This loss makes me afraid.

The best spiritual antidote I have for this is to follow one of the few commands in scripture which I feel I’m naturally good at: I remember. I remember that the Lord led his people like a flock through the parted sea. I remember the woman who touched the edge of his garment. I remember Saul on the road to Damascus and Gladys Aylward on the train to China and Flannery just sitting there writing about her peacocks. I remember these things because I have read them and heard them, but perhaps even more pressingly, I remember the Pieta in St. Peter’s when I was seventeen, and the silent snow in Grove City when I was twenty, and the bursting red tomato on the nearly-dead vine in my parents’ garden when I was twenty-three, and the August smoke in the Vancouver sky when I was twenty-six, and the shared champagne on the beach at Spanish Banks when I was twenty-nine. I remember that I neither expected nor asked for any of these things, but that they came upon me like a warm summer storm. I hope that this can happen again.

But sometimes my remembering is not enough, because the questions nag at me: That is all well and good, but what if it’s all in the past? What if the summer rains are over and what if they never come again? What good does just thinking about them do? And the answer to all the fear at the heart of this is that while my remembering God has value, what has infinitely more value is his remembering me. And he promises that he does. In Matthew, we are told of the attention he pays to the smallest sparrow and to each hair on our heads. And then Jesus says wryly (I love when Jesus is wry), “Do not be afraid. You are worth more than many sparrows.” Because of course all those warm moments I habitually remember which feel like warm thunder in my hands occurred because he remembered me first. He always remembers me first. I am, in fact, always only echoing his remembrance. This practice of remembering between myself and God is not reciprocal—it is wildly imbalanced. He has engraved me on the palms of his hands.

For Love of America

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Over spring break a friend and I went on a road trip through the American midwest and my mom gave me a portable sundial to take along. This country has a huge number of paths and byways—roads and porches and on-ramps and off-ramps and faces peering through windows. It was nine days and eight nights of good weather and three different rental cars and many different friendly faces and nine different states. The first evening we ate a Hawaiian pizza off the hood of a flashy white Genesis in a parking lot in Atchison, Kansas, the origin point for the Santa Fe railroad line and stayed the night in Leavenworth, down the road from a clean, symmetrical Neoclassical federal prison. 

The next morning I sat on that Kansas balcony just past dawn and thought about spring—the cruel aching of its becoming. The day before we had seen fields and fields of purple where later in the year, wheat will grow. At first I thought it was clover, but a little research let me know that it was a lowly little weed called henbit. The midwest has been lodged somewhere beneath my breastbone since birth, but I’ve rarely—if ever—seen it in the springtime, so the unexpectedness of that constant purple in my periphery gave me fresh eyes for everything.

My main quiet goal of the Missouri day was to see the house that used to be my grandparents’ and to go by their graves. In my eagerness to get there, I kept trying to turn off of US-35 too early and having to embarrassingly reverse course. Everything looked like Highway F to me, like the road that would take me home, but eventually, as always happens, the right road was the right road. We saw the lake, which had risen all the way to the top of the spillway, and then we walked up to the cemetery on a hill.

Car trouble sent us out of our way to St Louis and we eventually crossed the Mississippi at eleven pm near Alton, Illinois, north of the city. The river was only a yawning black expanse at that hour, but we wound along beside it for a while anyway. And there was good morning light the next day at our AirBnB in the heartland of Illinois for writing and for filming (though I found myself baffled by the sundial, for the time being.)

And then Chicago was a quick succession of glassy, shining Navy Pier, families of Hasidic Jews lining up to ride the ferris wheel, turning in a lost iphone found mysteriously on the ground, and then Lou Malnati’s for dinner. The next morning I bathed in a family friend’s apartment in her deep, square bathtub with water the psychedelic color of ancient minerals. Chicago runs its roots deep.

At midday we left and drove up to Madison where my insides turned all to mush. That year I lived there was hard and I was unhappy, but the place itself—the people and Dunn’s Marsh and even the strange traffic patterns to merge onto the beltline—were all kind to me, soft when I was not always able to be. This was my first time back since I moved away, and I missed my client Bonnie who died in spring of 2023. She was Madison to me—she was its parks, its newspapers, its hospitals, its markets, its lakes—and now she is gone. The city itself misses her, even in spring.

The next morning we left before eight and drove north, slowly, through country, to a two-day-a-week mechanic and lawnmower shop and along two lane roads where Amish buggies occasionally rattled past us, then up further north of that, where most of the signs advertised upcoming shops with the simple statement, “CHEESE.”

The Upper Peninsula reaching out over Lake Michigan was grey and open and quiet, as if it knew it was April, but wasn’t ready to talk about it just yet. Shunted backward in time and season, we wandered on a beach in the chill. I flew for a moment on a metal swingset that sang shrilly in the wind and followed two geese out across the sandbar. Spring had arrived on other shores, full of blooms and thawing laughter, but not here, not yet. The only thing that place could do was trust the earth in its turning. That night we stayed in a warm cabin with a Mennonite family down the way. The garbage man waved to me in the morning.

Good Friday brought us to Detroit where my uncle’s tenant let us into his house and we loaded up my grandma’s big table from which I ate so many summer Sunday dinners growing up, and then I sat on the dining room floor and crumpled old Parade magazines to pack bubble glass into boxes. I wrote about Detroit here almost a decade ago and the city has sat up and stuck its chin out since I was there last. It’s dusted off its shoulders and smiled and you can feel it. I stayed in that evening, but Tze went into the city and made friends every which way—on parking decks and sidewalks and in restaurant kitchens. The next morning, Saturday, his friend and her husband walked us through the open air Eastern Market with its thick carpets of flowers laid out in plastic flats, waiting to be planted in earth.

At midday we drove down through the plains to Defiance, Ohio and Abby met us there to putter around a Goodwill. She and I looked for sparkling things, like shoes and dresses, and also for tops because I was running out of clothes. From there we headed straight on to my friend Laura’s family outside Cleveland, and when her six-year-old shrewdly asked me if this was our “first stop with kids” I realized that it sure enough was. So there were books to read aloud and treasure discovered in the backyard dirt pile to admire, because children bring spring in with them from the outdoors. 

And then came Easter Sunday morning, so we drove though idyllic green valleys, where the homes nodded politely to each other all interspersed with churches, to hear a sermon about John chapter twenty, when Mary doesn’t recognize her risen Lord until he speaks her name. He knows her, and through his knowing she knows him: “Rabboni!” she says. After cinnamon rolls and omelets and watching blonde children chase down plastic eggs we drove south through wavering, warming hills on roads nestled into their sides, and found the World’s Largest Cuckoo Clock in a very quiet Sunday town.

Our last night we stayed on Main Street in Charleston, West Virginia. At fifty thousand people, it’s the biggest city in an achingly mountainous and forested and impoverished state. The porches on those neighborhood blocks were full of people who glanced at us with quiet suspicion—girls still in their Easter dresses and boys lingering barefoot along the curbs and folks crouched on stoops and a big sign on a bedsheet that said, “Welcome Home, Old Man!”

On our last day, just south of Charleston, our route crossed New River Gorge again and again. It’s a huge, old seam in the earth’s crust that busted open so many eons ago and has managed, with time, to heal itself over with spit and sweat and gumption and growing things, into a great, green scar. As we wound down through the mountains of Virginia towards Greensboro, I thought of resurrection and again, of Christ stepping out of his tomb, and then, merely by speaking her name, calling Mary out of hers.

All these places we had passed through in this shaken, stubborn country I had been before, and yet seeing them in their states of spring—expecting and tender and face-up-to-the-light and Hopkins’ “dearest freshness deep down things”—I understood how much I did not know about hope.  I see it running in veins through the treetops and the concrete and the backs of people’s hands. There is a mystery that abides. We will not know, not really know, the glory of the resurrected Son until he calls us by name, face to face. Until then, like Mary, we usually only see a gardener and a garden. That will have to do for now.

Journey in Poetry

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Back in October, I gave you a little collection of poems that were perhaps talking to one another, and I’m doing the same today, just to remind both myself and you that though it is the end of February, we can remain confident that we will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. All our running in circles will not bring us either farther from or closer to him. If we are in him, he is with us. So here’s Walt Whitman (who did not know any of that), a draft-poem of mine called “The New Lazarus” which feels perpetually unfinished, and the middle passage of Psalm 139, which has been stuck pleasantly in my throat lately.

From Whitman:

Facing west from California’s shores,
Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound,
I, a child, very old, over waves, towards the house of maternity, the land of migrations, look afar,
Look off the shores of my Western sea, the circle almost circled;
For starting westward from Hindustan, from the vales of Kashmere,
From Asia, from the north, from the God, the sage, and the hero,
From the south, from the flowery peninsulas and the spice islands,
Long having wander’d since, round the earth having wander’d,
Now I face home again, very pleas’d and joyous,
(But where is what I started for so long ago? And why is it yet unfound?)

“The New Lazarus”:

Come along out! I want you out in the light.
You think it’s you alone, but we are many,
We mothers of our own exile,
Our teeming selves, but worse,
Imprisoning lightning behind our breast-bones, 
In our wrist joints, at the base of our skulls
Where it sears us, marks us.

Show me those well-documented failures.
Come out in your grave clothes,
Your skin pale in brazen light,
Show me the hilly scar,
The busted ear, the lips chewed to silence,
The huddled back, the head so wrapped in refuse
It thinks you can’t be made new.

Now, tell him, go ahead and tell him,
Tell the good doctor:
“Lord, the one you love is sick.”

Psalm 139:7-12:

Where can I go from Your Spirit?
Or where can I flee from Your presence?
If I ascend into heaven, You are there;
If I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there.
If I take the wings of the morning,
And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
Even there Your hand shall lead me,
And Your right hand shall hold me.
If I say, “Surely the darkness shall fall on me,”
Even the night shall be light about me;
Indeed, the darkness shall not hide from You,
But the night shines as the day;
The darkness and the light are both alike to You.

Christmas in London

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On the Friday before Christmas, I oversaw a bunch of teenagers decorating a gingerbread house while wearing my Christmas tree dress, then went home and changed into corduroys and a big sweater and got a ride to the airport from a friend. My first flight was delayed, then when we did board the pilot had us waiting on the tarmac before take-off for fifteen minutes “because we would make up time in the air,” and then after we landed there was no gate for us for some reason so we waited on that tarmac for about twenty minutes, and I was so convinced that I would miss my second flight and have to wait to travel till the next day that I’d already texted my family and said as much, but when I got off the plane I ran to the other gate anyway in an act of good faith. Another man ran along with me, though perhaps not for the same flight, and more than once we got stuck behind people on the people movers who did not really seem to want to move, but then I made it to the gate, and it was still open and I boarded and sat in my seat and it was a miracle.

This Christmas was a miracle, the kind I often forget to expect.

I landed in London the next morning, and then serendipitously ran into my own brother at Southall Station as if we have spent all our lives living around the block from each other in a small town (which we have not).

The next week-and-change was rich. I wore my sister’s sweaters almost every day. Time passed in a whirl of poems, and foggy Hampstead, and unusual non-perishable food stuffs gifted by my Uncle Jon, and hauling huge pots of paneer and rice to the church, and Christmas carols in the living room, and Asian aunties, and a Christmas group chat with my dad wearing a wig as the icon, and a fourteenth century pub on Christmas Eve, and getting motion-sick on the tube, and walks in Osterley Park (give me a path to tramp across a British field every day for the rest of my life, please), and a brewery in Bermondsey, and dishes done by our friend Zack, and a shop for Christmas dinner at Mary’s big Tesco, and a nativity play with lopsided head-dresses and clear-spoken lines, and the shoulder-to-shoulder crowds at Piccadilly, and egg-white dosas with peanut chutney, and straining cranberry sauce that was much more trouble that I intended, and cream tea at the V&A, and seven adults in a Honda Jazz, and learning that William Buckland once ate the heart of a king, and a clothes dryer piled with all the Christmas goodies like my grandma’s breezeway used to be back in 2003.

I will tell you something: I am unsure if my family has Christmas traditions anymore. Every Christmas of my adult life has been different, this one especially, full of small revelations to bask in. We followed Mary in her hat with its orange bobble through a crowded Covent Garden to track down a Christmas market that had disappeared in the night. My dad sat cheerful and quiet next to an auntie just arrived from India who speaks only Telugu and is hesitant to wear socks. George laughed a lot—often at his own jokes—and rigged up the curtain of saris for the Christmas Mela. My mom bought a floral velvet dress at Harvey Nichols where all of the dresses were very beautiful (except for one which was very ugly). And it was easy to invite in people we haven’t always had with us—my mom’s younger brother and my parents’ student this time. They too can cook and laugh and walk and sing carols and sit on strangers’ couches and hear the good news.

Because every year that news is new, every year we are children again, every year we wait to see what the miracle can possibly be. On Christmas day this year we read Tennyson: “Ring in the valiant man and free, / The larger heart, the kindlier hand; / Ring out the darkness of the land, / Ring in the Christ that is to be.” How much we still have to learn of Him, year after year.

Late September

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The waters are still high in the mountains right now. In all the pictures I’ve ever seen of this or any flood the water is a creamy brown—dull, unassuming, lethal only in the way it wraps itself around the waists and necks of buildings, carries in its depths the shards of bridges it has washed out and whole shells of cars and porches.

I’ve had an unplanned long weekend down here in the low hills, since school was canceled on Friday. I read a novel set in Seoul, as well as Ephesians, did some laundry, waited out a power outage on Friday then helped put on an event at church. I walked to the corner farmer’s market in the sunshine on Saturday. Tonight I’m bringing shortbread and roasted veggies to contribute to dinner at community group, and I’ve gained a tiny, stinging blister on my finger from peeling rutabagas.

In the meantime, folks evacuate homes or drive up into the mountains themselves, toward that softly ugly water, to search out family they haven’t heard from since the storm came.

Tomorrow for me is work and Arabian Nights and Wordsworth and grading and leftovers for lunch in a classroom that’s just slightly on this side of too warm and coming home rightly tired at the end of the afternoon.

All these are the facts of the matter, and I balk at the task of ripping the threads of meaning from their core and arranging them before your eyes. You can see them well enough yourself. 

It’s late September. The sun is golden warm, knives are busy in four p.m. kitchens, and He holds our lives in his hands.

The Summer of the Project

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This has been the summer of the project for me. Said projects have included sorting through all my papers stretching back to childhood, painting the bathroom dark purple, beginning the application process to do respite foster care, cleaning beneath the sink where for a few dreadful months a legion of mice took up residence, organizing students to come into school on their summer break so I can interview them on camera for a larger undertaking, painting the kitchen cabinets dark teal, listening to all of Narnia on audiobook, making lists of things to read and places to clean and food to cook, emailing with a travel agent about the course I’m leading to London with a teacher-friend next summer, hanging curtains in my living room that actually block light, finishing the non-fiction piece I started last summer about my endless adventure on Amtrak, and coming across a bag of cut-up t-shirts and deciding to make a quilt, though Lord only knows when that will happen.

All these things are for more than keeping myself busy. I paint because it improves my home, and therefore, by gentle degrees, my life. I plan to foster so that I can share that gently improved life with others. I take on creativity of various kinds to give myself a stable basis for joy.

I suppose on a larger scale, projects in general are all part of the good life, perhaps most of all in their unfinished state—when we are in the midst of the doing, the nailing the roof tiles, the writing the chorus of the song, the signing of the umpteenth form. Because we were designed to try. We are the strivers, the dreamers, the sweat-ers, the laughers, the wanderers and the wonderers, and the pursuers of goodness.

And the best of it is that though in our bones we are tryers, we do not finish the good work. The Lord is the one who brings it completion, who perfects our faith. That truth makes trying much easier, the burden of it light. His promise that he will finish the project that is us, the project that is all creation, his promise that he has already done it, means that we are free to try our best and understand just how little that is, to receive participation trophies in the form of abundant grace, to be prodigal children stumbling home reciting our apology speeches as our father crosses the finish line to meet us, to become transformed children of God waking up with paint still staining our nail beds to each fresh morning in which we can do it all again.

Remaking with Layers

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We’re starting again before the planned six months’ hiatus is up, stepping gentle back into this space.

There is not much new to tell you except that all things are being made new. This is hard to remember because usually newness comes in layers, like pale watercolor seeped over paper again and again or translucent fabric laid over and over itself, until what was sheer becomes solid, vibrant, real. This imperceptible, unhurried layering is how relationships form roots, how children grow, how people are transformed. 

The last few weeks my classroom has held more tears than usual: over Henry V, over test grades, over The Velveteen Rabbit, over friendships, over Dickinson poems, over endings, over everyday—which is to say eternal—pains and joys.

None of these tears have been mine—teenagers’ emotions have the volume turned up on them—but I have been grateful for them each time because they’ve reminded me of the becoming that’s happening before my often-short sighted eyes. On one hand these are just kids, but on the other, no one is just anything. Their tears, their laughter, even those occasional holy mixtures of the two are another sheer layer of film, another millimeter’s thickness in the story God is telling. We forget too often.

But sometimes we’re reminded. Thursday night was the much-beloved Senior Recognition ceremony at Caldwell and as each of the students—some of whom I frankly struggled to teach last year—rose in turn to be spoken to by their teachers, I thought that though they stood quiet, they were loud in feeling. So many of them looked raw, just-hatched, shining, frightened, hopeful, transformed. For a moment, I could see all their layers at once.

I was struck by the same changed look on their faces, the different angle to their shoulders, the next evening at their graduation. This newness was a wild mystery, and it brought home to me my own ineptitude. After, I drove from the graduation venue to school to see the newly-minted seniors paint the rock—their rightful territory—for the first time. But the whole drive, I couldn’t stop thinking about the kids I’d left behind, whether I had taught them well enough, whether I had loved them well enough, how badly I had failed them, and most, beyond my own sometimes-misguided efforts, what a strange, unknowable work God was doing and would continue to do in their young souls and frames, what he was building with a thousand repeated whispers.

And then, as I stood at ten p.m. in the parking lot of what was my high school and is now my vocation, watching students chase each other to slap wet pink handprints on their friends’ arms and legs, the mystery of divine remaking sat heavy on my shoulders. They blasted country music from one speaker and then another and I wondered whether these kids could understand the color, the wholeness, what the Lord wanted to build within them.

I suspect the answer is no, they do not comprehend, just as I do not comprehend. We will none of us understand what it means to be real, saturated purple and gold people, to step fully into the presence of the God we were made to image until we reach that other shore. But I am glad that these kids can weep with remorse when they have hurt someone and shriek with joy at a song they love, that they can abandon self-consciousness, tilt their faces to the sky, and let God get down to the slow and certain work remaking his people, his world.

2023 Retrospective

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My 2023 started with a walk with my friend Heather, visiting from New England. That evening we sat in my warm living room across from each other and wrote poems about the year and other stuff we’d seen. Then those first few days brought some difficult things at work—quiet things, heavy things, which in retrospect I may have mishandled in many ways. An inauspicious start, but I’m not grading this year on my own performance.

In very rough chronological order, this is what followed:

I took a cold little hike out in Rockingham with Karen and CJ and a hundred strangers. I read a lot and chatted with my coworkers even more in the quiet cracks of planning periods. I got more colds than usual and collected and organized all the digital curriculum guides in the two upper schools.

I had a writer’s retreat in the grey winter hills of the Piedmont where I wrote a bit and took more baths than there were days. I covered the walls of my bedroom in curtain rods, so I could hang my clothes from hooks like garlands. I let students read my novel in bits and pieces, and while waiting for planes and trains I made use of long layovers the best way I know how: talking to friends and walking to see the art.

I flew to Jolene’s wedding and let the Vancouver drizzle permeate my skin. I wrote postcards for my students before their AP exam, and spent two months preparing in excess for a half-hour chapel talk for the high school. Now that I have a place of my own I discovered that I am sometimes unsure of what to do with myself when I am in it—I rattle and chafe—but at school a coworker friend bought a TENS unit so the kids could simulate period pain, and I knew the best response to that was laughter.

Over spring break I went to Tennessee with my mom and, with my aunt, we walked around Cheekwood and saw model trains and spring blooms and paneled libraries. My freshmen illustrated Dante’s circles of hell (and added Where’s Waldo to many of them), I went to a Kentucky Derby party for the first time since childhood, and while on my way to a sweet and full family reunion in the brown and green mountains of Colorado I received news that my client Bonnie, who took up most of my working hours when I lived in Wisconsin, had died.

I went blonde, later covered that in henna, then a few months later chopped it all off, because changing my hair has always been a reliable constant. I took a long train journey for all of July, leaving my life behind to take up temporary residence in the lives of half a dozen friends: attending the birthday party of a little girl I’d only barely met, watching Survivor, chatting with the neighbor kids, and peering up at fireworks from beneath an umbrella. Then I came home in August and killed a couple house plants through well-intended negligence.

I watched Love Island with friends, because you can’t be teachers all the time, and waited six months to get my car repaired after running into a tree. I purloined a couch from storage at school for my classroom, was immediately asked to return it, and then, in perhaps the greatest miracle of the decade, was gifted an armchair and ottoman. My sister came home for a few months, taking lots of walks and visiting every thrift store and church she could find. I made new friends here and there, but struggled to maintain the friendships I already had as I sank into fall. Regardless, I watched people’s dogs for them and cleaned out my gutters.

I went to Charleston with my family where we ate at The Obstinate Daughter and played trivia, and I discovered that I do, after all, like the beach. A student cried over a test I wrote for the first time in years, and I planned trips to London and maybe to Tahoe for next year. I went to the zoo with a friend and her kids, and was asked to write two essays for church, one of which led to me teaching a George Herbert poem around a campfire to a bunch of open-faced grown women. And despite my own grown-ness, I found myself more and more often the recipient of generosity from those around me—rides and patience and time.

God has been just as good to me this year as he is every year, and many of the gifts enumerated above echo his long goodness, but I’ve felt myself straining to keep afloat, despite all that. I know this primarily because writing—which used to be so full of joy, like stepping into sunlight—has become stale, difficult, full of grey sand. I’ve posted here every month since I was eighteen—more than thirteen years—but I’m going to take a sabbatical now. I’m working only within the framework of my own rules, but those rules have often been fairly definite things, so I need a fancy word to feel as if this is allowed. Sabbatical it is. I will return to this space—I think—in six months.

The fact is, I’ve felt both older and younger—more squinting, childlike, and lost—recently, and I might as well dwell in that, holding my empty hands out and taking what others have to offer. Last week, my friend Katie gave me a basic lesson in watercolor and told me she was going to start at the beginning, like I knew nothing, and, sitting at her kitchen table with the paint brush I wasn’t sure how to hold, I said that made sense. Wendell Berry wrote that “when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work,” and he may be right. Yesterday was Christmas. I sat with my family for nearly two hours opening the presents that were piled under the tree. It was a very good day, and I thought of Mary two thousand years ago, picturing her as the song does: “not used to the light, but having to squint her eyes in the sunshine,” yet chosen and beloved by God, nonetheless.

The day school let out a week or so ago, my siblings came over in the evening. I was very tired, so they heated up dinner and we ate together. After, as we were cleaning up, my sister asked for a container for the little bit of peas that were left. I reached into the cabinet and pulled out a tiny container the size of two bottle caps stacked on one another, and held it out to her, giggling hysterically. In the space of about five seconds my laughter dissolved into tears. Mary took the container from me, told me to sit down, and began to rummage in the cupboard herself. So there you have it—I don’t always know what to make of things anymore, or what to say about or do about them. But I will treasure them all up, and ponder them in my heart.

Boxes of Glory

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In my bedroom, there’s a box on the low shelf next to the armchair that’s usually piled with the clothes I think I may wear the next day. And in that box is everything: every bulletin I came home with from a church service, every pamphlet from a historical house I toured, every name tag from every retreat weekend and every map of every camp I’ll probably never go back to. That box contains the last few years of life: sparkly leis, birthday cards, notes from students, lists of my own hopes and dreams when I was feeling low, and lists of chores on Saturdays. 

I don’t forget that the box is there—I’m always stuffing more things into it every few days, every time I tidy, but I do forget that what it holds is so good. The conventional wisdom says that to remember is to feel melancholy, to compare what we have now to what we had then, and wallow in a sort of gentle sadness, to miss what we once were and now lack. But I’ve never really thought that argument held much water. It never made sense to me.

Yesterday a friend texted me to ask if I could find a page of Christmas songs from the year before, so I pulled out the box and disemboweled it on my lap and across my bed. And there were all the good things—joyful, painful, unremarkable, and otherwise—of the last three or four years in pink and yellow and scrawling pen. As I unfolded creased papers and spread open folders, I was aware that remembering these things, these past realities, makes me just as happy as I was the day each of them originally arrived in my hands—often happier, because I’ve wised up to their significance. In fact, upon reflection, these paper and ink memories often reappear from the box infused with a divine purpose, a little extra glow that I couldn’t understand when I first received them. “Oh,” I think as I flip through one by one, “Of course! God was doing that, and that, and that all along.” Their small, matter-of-fact glories don’t fade, but become brighter every year.

So sadness, even the gentle kind, doesn’t come into the equation for me. I sat in church this morning wondering why that was as the preacher read from Isaiah: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in the land of the shadow of death, upon them a light has shined.” And when those words found their home burning warm in my chest, just as they have the hundreds of times I’ve heard them before, just as they have in the chests of all the children of God through the millenia, I remembered. I remembered that to recall the Lord’s blessings is to recall that he is capable of blessing, that he desires to bless, and that he promises that he will again. The fact is, in the kingdom God is building, every ordinary glory is the harbinger of a splendor even greater.

Because the beginning shall remind us of the end

And the first coming of the second coming.

-T.S. Eliot

A Thanksgiving Blessing for My Students

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Your dreams will change one day. They will be less ideal, less monetary, less shiny. The chrome will wear off. I suspect you will dream of reasonable estimates on car repairs. Of a comfortable afternoon sat on a friend’s couch or porch, of the far-scattered people you love all together in a room for once, of keeping the sticky fingerprints off the glass of your storm door.

I can’t tell you much more than that—only that you will change and your dreams along with you. What I can tell you is that I have dreams for you, hopes for you, blessings I want to lay across your shoulders like an ancient robe. There are already too many of them to count and I am sure they’ll only multiply with time, but they begin like this:

May your fingers and toes stay warm in bed and may you laugh so loudly for joy that it startles the birds out of the trees. May you wander to the far ends of the earth, but never be gone from home too long. May you gain calluses from chopping wood or making music or knitting very small hats, or any number of the good tasks hands are for. May reading fill you rather than drain you. May everything you cook make the kitchen smell good. May you learn to love The Wind in the Willows and may you own at least one truly comfortable chair. May you treat both your grades and your bank account with the dispassionate responsibility which is all that ephemeral numbers deserve, and may you, at least once or twice, need to wait for the city bus.

May you learn the strange wisdom of both patience and action. May you always sing out. May you resist resentment and get good sleep and may memorized scripture run through your mind when you least expect it. May you sometimes stand alone in the stillness of the woods. 

May you never assign a number or a letter or any pronouncement from human lips to your worth, but instead consign your worth to Love. May you weep most often for others and laugh most often at yourself.

May your bar for those you allow to be in community with you be as low as the wide threshold of your front door. May it admit the weak, the wounded, the weird, the sick, the sore, the huddled masses who have very little in common with you beyond the hearts in their chests which are twisted into the same tight knot. 

And may your bar for kindness be high. May you be quick to listen, slow to speak, and quickest of all to forget yourself. May you be like my grandpa Billy, so certain in the knowledge that Jesus is his friend and that his life is greatly blessed through no particular wise act of his own, that you regularly allow those around you to take advantage of your gentleness and generosity, because what are those blessings of your life for, if not sharing.

May you do the work that falls to your lot and ask for help when you need it. May truth always be more important than success. May you remember that, like every person around you, you carry great power to both heal and destroy, and that you will rarely know when you are wielding it. Step softly and don’t worry so much about the big stick.

May your life, over its many years, become a map of the many things that both you and those around you may have intended for evil, but which God intended for good. May wildflowers burst forth from cracked pavement and fresh springs from dry ground. At each turn, may you raise an ebenezer to remember what he has done. May you carve it into your heart as eternal blessing and pray its words over your children and all that fall into your care. May you not be shy in thanking the Lord for his gifts.