life | Michael Valliant

cataloging gratitude: half dirge, half disco

“Unabashed” is a word we might get to know better. It’s defined different places as “not embarrassed, disconcerted, or ashamed,” and “undisguised, unapologetic.” It’s a word that is tough to live into for thoughtful, humble people who are concerned how people might take what they think or feel. Unfortunately, the flipside is that there are plenty of thoughtless people for whom being unabashed comes easily.

I am grateful when I get reminders to pick up favorite books of my shelf and re-read them. Dorchester County Public Library gave me my most recent reminder when they promoted a program for Ross Gay’s book “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude” (really such a great title, without even reading the book).

DCPL is working with the National Endowment for the Arts #BigRead program for an event at the Dorchester Center for the Arts on Tuesday, July 18 at 6:00pm. Here’s the blurb for “Catalog” that they pulled from Google Books:

“Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude is a sustained meditation on that which goes away—loved ones, the seasons, the earth as we know it—that tries to find solace in the processes of the garden and the orchard. That is, this is a book that studies the wisdom of the garden and orchard, those places where all—death, sorrow, loss—is converted into what might, with patience, nourish us.”

A community orchard in Bloomington, Indiana, informs Gay’s take on gratitude, together with his experience gardening.

“…In this neck of the woods you have to prune
a peach tree if you don’t want the fruit to rot, if you don’t want
all that fragrant grandstanding to be for naught.”

He mourns the life cycle and necessary work to a tree in his poem “the opening” and continues:

“…This is how, every spring,
I promise the fruit will swell with sugar: by bringing in the air and light–
until, like the old-timers say, the tree is open enough
for a bird to fly through.”

And he talks about two cardinals and a blue jay flying through and a little grayish bird that sings a song “half dirge, half disco.” There is maybe one of the best and most memorable descriptions for a life fully felt and fully lived, “half dirge, half disco.”

I’m a fan of sunrises and sunsets. I will stop what I am doing, turn away from a conversation (though generally I am still listening) to take in those fleeting moments. The fact that they are only there for a few minutes is what makes them beautiful. You have to catch them as they happen–you can’t tell a sunset you’ll get back to it, or ask it to hold on. You’ve got to give it your full attention. Appreciate the whole scene and everything going on around it. Drink it in.

Life is that way. It is full of moments and if we want to live it to the fullest, we have to pay attention to all the moments we can.

In the title poem, “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude,” Gay says:

“Thank you to the woman barefoot in a gaudy dress
for stopping her car in the middle of the road
and the tractor trailer behind her, and the van behind it,
whisking a turtle off the road.”

And I think of so many of my friends who do that and fill the social media feed with turtle rescue photos and every single one of them gives me a little hope for humanity. Even though after we stopped to move a turtle on the way to Hoopers Island a couple weeks ago, the truck going by didn’t much appreciate the effort. It’s all part of it.

I have so many lines and parts and images from Gay’s catalog underlined and tucked into my heart, I hardly know what to share. But I like this notion of community:

“we dreamt an orchard that way,
furrowing our brows,
and hauling our wheelbarrows,
and sweating through our shirts,
and less than a year later there was a party
at which trees were sunk into the well-fed earth”

Dreaming together, thinking together, cultivating together, working together, celebrating together. I just finished re-reading Gay’s catalog. If you want to get a different, deeper, more inclusive picture of what we can be grateful for, give it a read. DCPL can help you to that end. And maybe come out for the program at the Dorchester Center for the Arts–I have found that my appreciation and perspective for every book I have read and been moved by has deepened from discussing and sharing and listening to what others have taken from the same book.

In the meantime, I am going to pick back up Gay’s “Book of Delights,” his record of small joys that are so easy for us to overlook. And I’m going to continue to try to bring gratitude to each day, unabashedly, sharing as much as I can, one sunset, one moment, at a time.

Some prayers

Dear God,

Some prayers move, they wander, they surf like a skateboard, they stop to look at birds or sit under a tree. Some prayers stop to pick up a six pack. Some prayers start while reading and writing next to the river and keep going sitting in a salon where my daughter is getting box braids in her hair to get ready for surgery on Monday.

U2’s “Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” plays from the speakers, which makes me smile because a couple days ago Ava mentioned having that song on her playlist.

My prayer reads Brenda Miller’s “The Shape of Emptiness “ where a creative writing student whose mother had just died passes out Playdough to the class and has them squeeze it in their hands and then puts all their “hands” on a table at the front of the classroom. Miller says, “He made visible the air we never see.” And then:

“When he finishes reading he gathers our hands and gives them back to us one by one. We take them from him carefully so we can carry our emptiness into the day. We compare them, showing off the shape of our grasping. Curved like prayers. Like anger. Like love.”

God, maybe our prayers are like those hands, our grasping to fill emptiness, trying to bridge the distance between us. Sometimes that distance is wide and tough to cross. Other days we are sitting next to each other by the river smiling the same smile, thinking the same thoughts.

Lord, my prayer is written on my heart and it is for Ava on Monday and the next couple weeks, that all goes well and the surgeons and neurologists and medical team find what they need to know and that their knowledge brings hope.

Some prayers last for a couple days and have more silence in them than words. I know you appreciate the silence, Lord, because sometimes the world is too noisy. And silence speaks louder.

My prayer, God, is about love and right now love is sitting in a salon and being so full that words either pour out or nothing will come. Right now, love looks like box braids and someone taking the time and care to help my daughter so she doesn’t have to have her head shaved.

Some prayers take weeks, months, years. Some prayers run out of ink as I write them, run out of words as I speak them, and take an entire life to say what I need to say and listen for what I need to hear.

Some prayers are to be continued. Just like our love. Just like your love. And all of them are written on our hearts and with our lives, which belong to you.

Amen.

Meeting in the Mess and the Mystery

There is something about this time of year. As Fr. Bill Ortt points out, the word “Lent” comes from an Old English word that means “lengthen”—for the days getting longer. It’s not the spring is here yet, but we are moving in that direction. The magnolia tree in our front yard attests to that (as do the neighbors saying, “there he is in the yard staring at and taking pictures of the tree again…”).

This week we end a long study of Paul’s Letter to the Romans. And we start both Zoom and in-person studies of Debie Thomas’s “Into the Mess & Other Jesus Stories.”

Talking about Romans, Rev. Jay Sidebotham in his book, “Conversations with Scripture: Romans” writes:

“Paul offers specific examples of what a community transformed by grace looks like. It is a community of righteousness, a matter of being in right relationship with each other. That community will be marked by a willingness to forgo one’s own agenda for the better of another, most definitely a countercultural thing to do… The Christian community is to be marked by a spirit that honors the other.”

For Paul, it was the impossible task of unifying the Jewish believers in Christ with the Gentiles–something that had never been done. It’s telling that we have had more than 2,000 years to work at this, but we seem to have taken steps backwards at welcoming and honoring the outsider, the other. That is something to think about and pray on during Lent (and beyond).

In society today, we’ve decided that faith is a personal/individual thing, it’s between us and God. But I wonder what happens if we poke our individual faith with a stick.

In the first essay in “Into the Mess,” Thomas looks at Luke’s Gospel, (1:26-38) where the angel Gabriel tells Mary what’s going on with her and how God is calling her. Thomas talks about what a shocking and impossible reality was being opened up for Mary. And after the angel leaves:

“(Mary) has to consent to evolve. To wonder. To stretch. She has to learn that faith and doubt are not opposites–that beyond all easy platitudes and pieties of religion, we serve a God who dwells in mystery. If we agree to embark on a journey with this God, we will face periods of bewilderment… (leading to) it’s when our inherited beliefs collide with the messy circumstances of our lives that we go from a two-dimensional faith to one that is vibrant and textured.”

For both Mary and Paul, when they said yes to their callings/journeys with God, their lives got more difficult, harder to bear, not easier. For some of us, that kind of poking may be uncomfortable. It’s meant to be.

Thomas goes on to talk about the cost of loving, “to love anyone in this broken world takes tenacity and grit, long-suffering and great strength.” She goes from talking about Mary, to talking about us:

“The particularities of our own stories might differ from Mary’s, but the weight and cost of ‘bearing’ remain the same–and so does the grace. When we consent to bear the unbearable, we learn a new kind of hope. A hope set free from expectation and frenzy. A resurrected hope that doesn’t need or want easy answers. A hope that accepts the grayness of things and leaves room for mystery.”

Bearing the love for another in the world has its cost and its grace. Bearing the love of Christ in the world–being those who love God, welcome and love the outsider/other, those who feed the poor, heal the sick, or simply those who try to understand and love those who are difficult for us to understand or love–has its cost and its grace.

Faith isn’t an individual matter of being rescued from the mess, it is a choice to meet God in the mess, where He is, and we are, needed.

At Christ Church Easton, Fr. Bill has declared this Lent to be a season of healing, a time of sharing our stories and listening to others; of helping to find and spark hope for each other.

Tell us your story about where God entered your life and did something unexpected and remarkable. Share your story of healing.

The days are getting longer. We have a season where creation around us is going green and things are starting to blossom. We can use this season to draw closer to God and to encourage each other. We can bear the love of Christ into the world and in the process expand our faith into something vibrant and textured that embraces the messiness and mystery of life.

Sitting by the river

Solitude is a gift.

Silence is a gift.

Sunlight is a gift.

Sitting by the river with a strong breeze moving the water and blowing against one side of my face while the sun warms the other.

I woke up in a warm house, while it was still dark and made coffee. Made a to-go breakfast for my older daughter for her drive to work. I laughed with my younger daughter taking her to school.

Now I am sitting in the sun and the wind by the water praying, reading, writing, listening, smiling.

Behind me is a cemetery where my grandparents, family members, and friends rest peacefully. Memories and love dance between us and connect us.

The books in front of me are titled “Pilgrim” and “Gold.”

Talking to God, Rumi writes:

“Today you arrived beaming with laughter–
that swinging key that unlocks prison doors.

You are hope’s beating heart.
You are a doorway to the sun.
You are the one I seek and the one who seeks me.
Beginning and end.

You greet need with generous hands.
You flood us with spirit,

ringing from the heart,
lifting thought.”

Reading this, he and I say it together. I like to think God smiles in the sunlight.

Across the cove the sun and the wind dress a weeping willow tree. Geese float tucked away from the tide.

When I am fully here, in this moment, with a full heart and an open mind, and time alone with God, what more can I ask for? I am not alone.

Thank you for this view.
Thank you for this day.
Thank you for this life.
Thank you for your love.

Amen.

* My practice/devotion for Lent this year is to write a “proem” (prayer-poem-prose) in the spirit of Brian Doyle each day of the season. I will share some of them. This is day #3.

To be a human being among human beings

Life has felt large and open and raw of late, where prayers, feelings, experiences and thoughts are all super charged.

There are plenty of reasons: Ava’s stereotactic neurosurgery is on Monday; Anna turns 21 on Tuesday and Ava turns 18 in mid-February; we’ve past the half-way point in our Romans Bible studies; seminary is stirring good things up and Kelsey Spiker and I just became postulants, the next designation in the path to ordination to the priesthood; even occasional preaching is a full-body experience; gearing up for Lent small groups; and the girls had their first ever snow skiing experiences, which was a trip with Holly and her kids as well as many teen and twenty-something friends.

Life has an open feeling, which is both filling and fulfilling and taxing and shaky sometimes.

Studying for a Saturday seminary day retreat, Rev. Susie Leight has us reading and thinking about the spirituality of the priesthood, which included excerpts from Barbara Brown Taylor’s “The Preaching Life” and Gordon W. Lathrop’s “The Pastor: A Spirituality.” Lathrop recalls an experience in a Swiss airport where he read a quote on a poster from Antoine de Saint-Exupery, written in French. Lathrop translated it literally to say:

“As a profound thirst: the desire to be a human being among human beings.”

A deep and profound desire to be a human being–someone who lives and feels, who is flawed and who needs others–among human beings. To be in community and to be allowed to be fully ourselves. This is what it is to be open, to be honest, to be vulnerable, which is not instantly a comfortable place to be.

Thursday we had a class discussing Tracy K. Smith’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Life on Mars,” which is one of my favorite books. The discussion was about space and time, love, loss, grief, dancing, intimacy, language–it was flung like stars around the minds and hearts of those there. The last poem read was titled, “The Weather in Space”–

Is God being or pure force? The wind

Or what commands it? When our lives slow

And we can hold all that we love, it sprawls

In our laps like a gangly doll. When the storm

Kicks up and nothing is ours, we go chasing

After all we’re certain to lose, so alive–

Faces radiant with panic.

That is part of the challenge of being human, loss and fear are always in the mix with us. It’s a lot and sometimes we want to–I want to–shut the faucet off. But that’s not why we’re here. That’s not why I am here.

On Tuesday morning, I was thinking ahead to this weekend’s Gospel reading, which is Matthew 5:1-12, commonly known as the Beatitudes:

When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain, and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. And he began to speak and taught them, saying:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
“Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
“Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
“Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.“

I’ve been in a habit of looking to see if Debie Thomas has anything to say about a particular Bible passage in her book “Into the Mess & Other Jesus Stories.” And reading her take on the Beatitudes, it hit me that her book would make an incredible Lent study, looking at and discussing different aspects of Jesus’s life. Here is a bit of her take on the reading:

“What Jesus bears witness to in the Beatitudes is God’s unwavering proximity to pain, suffering, sorrow, and loss. God is nearest to those who are lowly, oppressed, unwanted and broken. God isn’t obsessed with the shiny and the impressive; God is too busy sticking close to what’s messy, chaotic, unruly, and unattractive.”

She goes further:

“I think what Jesus is saying in the Beatitudes is that I have something to learn about discipleship that my privileged life circumstances will not teach me. Something to grasp about the beauty, glory, and freedom of the Christian life that I will never grasp until God becomes my all, my go-to, my starting and ending place. Something to recognize about the radical counter-intuitiveness of God’s priorities and promises. Something to notice about the obfuscating power of plenty to blind me to my own emptiness. Something to gain from the humility that says, ‘The people I think I am superior to have everything to teach me. Maybe it’s time to pay attention.'”

If I want to be a human being among human beings, I have to be open to, to learn from, to love, those whom God loves: everyone. More than that, if as followers of Christ, we look to do God’s work in the world, we have to be, we have to show, we have to act out in faith the love that God makes real here and now, especially to those who feel alienated or shut off from it.

In teaching the Beatitudes, Jesus is turning the world and what we think we know about it, on its head. This is something he does frequently in his teachings and his parables. We should ask why.

Next week we will discuss poet Joy Harjo’s book “Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings.” In “Talking with the Sun,” she writes:

After dancing all night in a circle we realize that we are a
part of a larger sense of stars and planets dancing with us
overhead.
When the sun rises at the apex of the ceremony, we are
renewed.
There is no mistaking this connection, though Walmart
might be just down the road.
Humans are vulnerable and rely on the kindnesses of the
earth and the sun; we exist together in a sacred field of
meaning.

To be a human being among human beings is also to be human in and as a part of God’s Creation. Which He asks us to be stewards of, to take care of.

Humans are vulnerable and rely on kindnesses. When I try to live with my heart open, I have a greater sense of, and gratitude for these kindnesses–kindnesses that can come from anywhere and anyone. Any one of us. Even me.

The world we return to

Thankfully, life rarely comes down to desert island preferences. You know the scenarios: if you were stranded on a desert island and could only have five albums, or if you could only eat one kind of food, or if you had to watch one movie, and on and on. But they make for great conversation scenarios. You get to know someone by cutting through all the white noise and cocktail party chatter and learn something about what is important to that person. And those questions often circle back to things like music, food, books–things that open up something about what we love.

Here is one for me: if I could only read one genre of writing for the rest of my life, it would be poetry. I don’t have to think about it, I don’t need the Final Jeopardy music playing, I can say that instantly. Poetry fills my soul, speaks to my heart, and expands my mind in ways that no other kind of writing can.

This time last year, John Miller and I led a course through Chesapeake Forum: An Academy for Lifelong Learning, on how poetry connected us to and helped us understand what it is to be human. The class was held on Zoom, had close to 30 participants from multiple states including Georgia and Florida, and it was a fantastic experience, with insightful and searching questions and comments from those taking the class. I wrote about our time together in Tidewater Times Magazine.

When John and I thought about what poets to discuss for that class, we went with some of the well-known writers; it’s maybe a stretch to say that a poet other than Shakespeare can be a household name, but Milton, Blake, and Wordsworth are close. Talking about a class for this winter and what poets read and talk about, we had a different approach.

Poetry often seems to be the realm of old, dead white guys. What if for a follow up, we let people know that poetry is as meaningful, powerful, and relevant today, that poetry matters and has a much broader range of accomplished writers than those from the past. Let’s look at three living women of color who are carrying on the mantel.

Tracy K. Smith, Joy Harjo, and Rita Dove have won Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards, and just about any other recognition you can think of for their writing. And they have each served as Poet Laureates of the United States.

Smith’s book, “Life on Mars,” Harjo’s “Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings,” and Dove’s “Playlist for the Apocalypse,” have come out in 2011, 2015, and 2022: they are recent, relevant, and are evidence that these writers, these women, are wrestling with and trying to make sense out of life, experience, and so many of the alienating forces at work in the world. These are writers, and books, that belong on our bookshelves and in our hearts and minds as we try to walk through life doing the same.

Our class, “Poetry Matters!” will meet on Zoom, Thursdays January 26, February 2, and February 9, from 10:00 to 11:30am. If it sounds like something you are interested in, you can register by clicking on the link.

I go back to Robin Williams’ line from the movie Dead Poets Society frequently because I think it says it so powerfully:

“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”

Or maybe we give the floor to Tracy K. Smith, the first poet we will read and discuss in our class. “Life on Mars” is a book that took a hold of me from the first time I picked it up. Smith’s father was an engineer on the Hubble Telescope, which is something that comes out in her searching and brilliant poem, “My God, It’s Full of Stars.” You can read more about Smith and hear her read from that poem at the link.

Smith talks about why she loves poetry:

That’s a lofty but worthwhile goal. It’s part of the hope of a class like this: that the world we return to after reading and discussing Smith, Harjo, and Dove might seem fuller and more comprehensible as a result.

Let Love Become a Reality

This week, I was asked to lead our Wednesday morning healing prayer service. It’s a small, wonderful, heartfelt and Spirit-led service, which is held every Wednesday at 10:00am. The Gospel reading for the morning was Matthew 22:34-40, which is Jesus answering the question, which is the greatest commandment. I’m including the reading below and then the homily I gave in response to it:

Matthew 22:34-40 NRSV

When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

“Let Love Become a Reality”

I love when people asked Jesus questions. Depending on who was asking, they didn’t always love his responses, or the questions he asked back to them.

But I think Jesus also had in mind the spirit in which the questions were asked. Thinking of John’s Gospel—both Nikodemus and the woman at the well were trying to understand. And Jesus encouraged them. Here and elsewhere, when the Pharisees, Sadducees, and lawyers asked questions, it was often to try to trip him up, to trick him into saying the wrong thing so they could discredit him or have him arrested.

Here we have an expert in the law asking him which commandment is the greatest?

So Jesus goes to Scripture, he pulls from Deuteronomy 6:5, part of the Shema, the creed of Judaism, for “Love the Lord your God,” and to Leviticus 19:18 for “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

On these two commandments, hang all the Law and the Prophets. He’s given a perfect legal answer. And he’s done something even more to confound the law expert.

Michael Green in his book “The Message of Matthew,” points out that “For people who, like this expert in the law, were strong on ethics and weak on relationships, this strongly relational teaching was a revealing mirror of the heart.”

Strong on ethics, weak on relationships. A mirror of the heart. When I think about a lot of people today—we are strong on ideas, maybe strong on convictions, but not so great on relationships. We want to label people as different from us and say therefore they are wrong. Our tendency is to distance ourselves rather than drawing closer, rather than trying to understand or to love.

When we think of God and our neighbors in terms of relationships, in terms of beings who we are called to love, we have to get off of our high horses. If we try to love God with everything we have, we also have to love his creation, and the people he created.

Green writes:

“If there is real love for God, there will inevitably be real love for neighbor; God’s overflowing love is infectious. The criterion of whether love for God is real is whether or not it is reflected in our relationships with others. And it will not do to say, as many do, ‘I don’t do any harm to anyone.’ That is not only negative, but it neglects the first and great commandment, to put God as number one in our lives. With God first and neighbor second, all else in the law is commentary.”

To make a go at loving, we have to have softer hearts, our hearts need to be renewed—we can’t just be following orders (the law).

How do we do this? It doesn’t happen all at once. It takes time.

Our friend and brother John Coleman points out that as a police officer, he responds differently to situations today than he did 25 years ago. He always did his job and responded according to law, but now his first response is based much more in love and understanding, then when he was newer at the job. He credits both God and time with working on him.

I can tell you from my own experience that I think and feel and respond differently now to things than I did five years ago. And that has been five years of studying Scripture, of prayer and worship, of spiritual friendships and encouragement. When we use the term Christian formation, we are hoping, working to be formed in a more Christ-like way.

I hope I continue to grow and learn and improve how I love God and love my neighbor.

Reflecting on this passage in Matthew, N.T. Wright (in his book “Matthew for Everyone”) says:

“The heart doesn’t seem to get renewed all in one go. Many, many bits of darkness and impurity still lurk in its depths, and sometimes take a lot of work, prayer, and counsel to dig out and replace with the love which we all agree should really be there.”

I’m thinking of Paul writing in Romans where he says, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing that I hate.” I think we all can relate to Paul’s dilemma sometimes.

Given the fact that we are standing here together at a healing service on Wednesday morning, I think we all know it is right and a good thing to love God and love our neighbor. We can agree both that that is what we are supposed to do and that it is what we are commanded to do.

But it has to be more than a command, it has to be more than instructions to follow.

Wright says:

Commandments “come into their own when they are seen not as orders to be obeyed in our own strength, but as invitations and promises to a new way of life in which, bit by bit, hatred and pride can be left behind and love can become a reality.”

There it is: an invitation, a promise to a new way of life where we leave behind hatred and pride and love becomes our reality. Let’s make that our prayer, let’s make that our guiding star.

If we go back to the scene, this encounter that Matthew gives us: Jesus is answering the question posed to him by a legal expert, and he gives a brilliant answer.

If we love God with all our heart, mind, and soul—we’re not going to put idols above him, we’re not going to have other gods before him, we’re not going to take his name in vain, and on down the list.

And if we truly love our neighbor as ourselves, that should take care of murder, stealing, coveting, adultery, bearing false witness.

Jesus gives us the Cliff Notes, the summary, the thing we can memorize or a cheat sheet we can put in our pockets and refer to when we need it—you know, for when we don’t have our Bibles with us or don’t have the time to look up the answers about the law.

But it’s so much more than that. It can be a basis for a new way of life, a better way of life.

The poet Pablo Neruda wrote in his love sonnets:

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.”

What if we think about knowing and loving God that intimately. What if we have God’s love so much in our hearts and in our lives that we become that love when we think, when we feel, when we pray, and when we act. What if we know no other way of loving, than as God loves.

What if it didn’t matter that love was a commandment, because love was simply our reality.

Amen.

*Graphic at the top from Scripture Type, Treasure the Word.

It never doesn’t take a village: an Ava update

The expression, “It takes a village to raise a child” is incomplete. The thing is, as we go through life, it never doesn’t take a village. The more I have opened myself up, welcomed friendships, been with family, worked at the church–there is never an age we don’t need a village around us. We lose people we love, we go through illnesses, life gives us things we don’t expect and aren’t ready for, and we need people. And we can be there for people.

One of the places I have seen that most clearly in my life is with our daughter Ava. I have written about her story here and there (this Tidewater Times story is maybe the best summary), Ava developing epilepsy at age 10 after brain swelling has become a defining part of her life in a way no one wants.

The village around us has included people from the Oxford Community Center and Oxford Fire Department, people from Christ Church Easton, people from Caroline and Talbot County Schools, family, friends, churches, social media, prayer lists, and goes further than I came name or be grateful enough for.

As we enter into a next phase of Ava’s care and world, I want to give an update and background for those newer to the village.

Since 2014, a range of medications have not been able to control her seizures in a way that doctors, Ava, or any of us are good with. But since moving her care to Nemours A.I. DuPont Hospital a few years back, there has been progress and some hope.

Late this past fall, we found out that Ava is a strong candidate for epilepsy ( resective brain) surgery. It comes down to what part of her brain is causing her seizures and what other cognitive functions that part of the brain is responsible for. After a number of tests, it seems likely that the seizures are coming from her left temporal lobe. They were originally worried that they were coming from her frontal lobe, which would have ruled out surgery.

The goal is for her not to have seizures any more, or total seizure freedom as the neurologists like to say. Given Ava’s case and how things have progressed, resective surgery is the best chance for her not to have any more seizures. But there are other options if that isn’t a possibility. Her neurosurgeon told us that from where Ava is right now based on test results, studies, etc., 95 percent of patients have some form of surgery available to them.

In December and January she had a contrast MRI and an angiogram, both of which are to help map where important things are so that on January 30 they can do a “stereotactic implantation of depth electrodes” to then do a long-term monitor of her seizures. Simply put, they are going to drill small holes through her skull and put monitors on her brain, then pull back her medicine and watch her having seizures.

Her neurosurgeon gave a solid analogy: when they monitor seizures on the outside of her skull, it’s like listening to a conversation through a wall; they need to step into the same room to really hear what’s being said. Because they need to know exactly where her seizures are happening and what part of her brain it is to know whether they can remove it.

This is incredibly exciting and hopeful news. It is not experimental surgery, it is something neurologists have been doing and feel is her best chance to live without seizures. And we know a young man in our community who has had the surgery and has been seizure free and thriving since.

It’s also a lot to take in, process, and sit with, both as a parent and for Ava. Excited, hopeful, nervous, and scared are all words that are tossed around regularly.

For Ava’s part, she is a rock star. She knows what she wants and she sits through medical procedures like she is eating lunch. This past year, a tattoo artist friend was ready to do a big cherry blossom tattoo on her shoulder. He asked how she did with pain/needles. She didn’t flinch or seem at all bothered through two-plus hours of drawing, coloring, and shading.

As a parent, and as a family, there are small things that make you sad. We will be in the hospital for Anna’s 21st birthday, and depending on how long they keep her (one to two weeks), Ava may be in the hospital for her 18th birthday.

If she is a candidate for resective surgery, recovery would be three to six months. Ava is scheduled to graduate from high school in the spring and is especially looking forward to senior week after graduation. So surgery would be in the middle of the summer.

But one procedure at a time, one day at a time. January 30 and the stereotactic testing is coming up. Before that, and before having to be in the hospital for two weeks, both Ava and Anna will try skiing for the first time. There are experiences to be had and memories to be made every day.

“Thank you” isn’t enough for all the love, all the prayers, all the reaching out, all the positive energy, all the good vibes and thoughts, that have come from so many people. I am, we are, so grateful.

At no point in life does it ever not take a village surrounding any of us to get us through.

Faith, Life, and Messiness

Faith, like life, is messy. This has been on my mind a lot, after thinking about Matthew’s Gospel (1:18-25) where he talks about Joseph and the birth of Jesus. Fr. Bill Ortt’s sermon stirred me up and Debie Thomas‘s essay on the same passage in her book, “Into the Mess & Other Jesus Stories” sent me into overdrive.

In the Gospel, Joseph finds out his fiancé Mary is pregnant, not with his child, and plans to send her away quietly. What the law required is that he should publicly shame her and that she might be stoned to death. But Joseph’s heart demanded something different of him. Send her away quietly.

And then, in a dream, an angel tells Joseph not to worry, to stay with Mary, whose child was conceived by the Holy Spirit, and to help raise her son, who they are to name Jesus. He learned this in a dream.

Fr. Bill, describing what Joseph decided to do said, “Instead of following the letter of the law, displayed the heart of God.”

And there is the thing–look at the “law” over centuries–the law changes with the times. The loving heart of God is unchanging, constant, eternal. But that doesn’t make it easy to follow or live into.

Debie Thomas in her essay, “Into the Mess,” says:

“It is the humble carpenter’s willingness to abandon his notions of holiness and embrace the scandalous that allows the miracle of Christ’s arrival to unfold.”

This is not to dismiss Mary’s role and the need for her willingness to be the mother of Jesus. Luke’s Gospel looks at the birth story from Mary’s perspective, and has an angel speaking to Mary. Matthew looks at Joseph.

Saying yes was the first step, the same as it is with us today. But this is going to lead for an entirely different life for Joseph than he could have possibly pictured for himself. He has to let go of everything. Thomas writes:

“In choosing Joseph to be Jesus’s earthly father, God leads a righteous man with an impeccable reputation straight into doubt, shame, scandal, and controversy. God’s call requires Joseph to reorder everything he thinks he knows about fairness, justice, goodness, and purity.”

Think about that. Based on a dream, would you say yes to God’s calling in that situation? Joseph had to let go of his notion of all these things, to live a completely different life than he dreamed for himself–saying yes to God had a cost for him. It also had a reward, but in order to see it, he had to let go of what he thought he knew.

Fr. Bill, in thinking about the character of Joseph, said he must have been a young man. Why?

“The young dream, the old remember.”

As we get older, we are less likely to listen to our dreams. We are more inclined to look back and discern things by comparison, by whatever logic we can discern from our lives; we are less open to the new and the strange.

What if we could stay open? What if we could continue to dream as we get older? What if we could find a way to keep or develop soft hearts?

Fr. Bill picked up another thread in his sermon that I want to weave in here. In talking about Christ’s birth, he said, “God himself became vulnerably present in the world.”

God as vulnerable. Both in the person of Jesus, but also in the way he deals with us. He asks, we can say yes or no. And this comes back to the idea of God as Love.

I recently picked up C.S. Lewis’s “The Four Loves” from my bookshelf and started reading it, based on coming across this quote online:

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”

To love is to be vulnerable. What normally happens to us as we get older, in response to the pain, suffering, and heartbreak that happens by living, we seal ourselves off. We harden. We build walls in self-defense. And this is what the world has largely come to look and feel like.

But we can choose a different way to be. It takes courage, it takes heart, it takes being vulnerable.

In his book “Consolations,” David Whyte writes about “Touch.” He says:

“Touch is what we desire in one form or another, even if we find it through being alone, through the agency of silence or through the felt need to walk at a distance: the meeting with something or someone other than ourselves, the light brush of grass on the skin, the ruffling breeze, the actual touch of another’s hand; even the gentle first touch of an understanding, which, until now, we were formerly afraid to hold.”

Even the most introverted want to feel deeply. We want to experience connection. We want to touch and be touched. To touch, to feel, we have to be open. And being open isn’t just to the good stuff, the stuff we want, but also to that which can wreck us. Whyte continues:

“Being alive in the world means being found by [the] world and sometimes touched to the core in ways we would rather not experience.”

Maybe that is along the lines of what Joseph experienced before his dream. This isn’t what he had signed up for. This isn’t the life he had mapped out. But he was open. And through and after his dream, he said yes to a life, a calling, that none of us can fathom.

Because he was open. Because he was willing to let go of what he thought he wanted. Because he said yes.

Whyte finishes his thoughts on touch looking at being untouchable:

“To forge an untouchable, invulnerable identity is actually a sign of retreat from this world; of weakness; a sign of fear rather than of strength, and betrays a strange misunderstanding of an abiding, foundational, and necessary reality: that untouched, we disappear.”

To wall up and go numb is a cop out. It deprives us of really living.

Life, like faith, is messy. In order to experience those things we all want–love, joy, happiness–we have to open and vulnerable to those things we want with everything to avoid, heartbreak, pain, suffering. That’s the mess of it.

Joseph and Mary became the earth parents of Jesus. Their saying yes changed everything for all of us. We don’t hear much more about Joseph in the story–it wasn’t about him, ultimately. And Mary watched Jesus being killed. Again with the mess.

Scripture tells us, Jesus tells us, God tells us, it’s worth it. Love is worth it. Life is worth it. The mess is part of it. And not just part of it, but an important part of it.

I love how Debie Thomas thinks about the mess. And invites us to do the same:

“Do not be afraid of the mess. Embrace it. The mess is where God enters the world.”

To live, to love, to be open. To have the heart of God and to become vulnerably present in the world.

Amen.

What should a king know?

If you had a chance to educate a future king (or queen), what would you want him/her to know? Let’s say that key things we would want them to have include kindness, justice, empathy, humility, compassion, courage, love. I mean, if we have a chance to help form someone to rule the right way, wouldn’t we want to go all in?

In T.H. White’s novel, “The Once and Future King,” we meet the character who is to become King Arthur, first as a boy, who knows nothing about his parents, who has been taken in by a kind nobleman, Sir Ector, and raised side-by-side with Ector’s son Kay. It is expected that Kay will grow up to be a knight, and Arthur, who everyone knows as “Wart,” will be his squire/servant.

The Wart believes himself to be of lowly, common descent. He feels like a second-rate citizen without much control over his own destiny. Out on an adventure, Wart meets the wizard Merlyn, who becomes his tutor. Merlyn lives forwards and backwards in time and knows who Arthur is and that he will be the King of England. Merlyn does not tell the boy this and as he directs his education, one of the bits of learning Wart likes best is when Merlyn turns him into different creatures–a fish, a hawk, an ant, a goose, a badger–and the boy has to talk to others of the species and experience life from their perspective.

This is empathy in action and not just with humanity. With all of Creation.

In broader form, Arthur experiences moments. And not just moments, but moments as other creatures.

Here he takes flight with other geese in the reverie of flying at first light:

“The dawn, the sea-dawn and the mastery of ordered flight, were of such intense beauty that the boy was moved to sing. He wanted to cry a chorus to life, and since a thousand geese were on the wing about him, he had not long to wait. The lines of these creatures, wavering like smoke upon the sky as they breasted the sunrise, were all at once in music and in laughter. Each squadron of them was in different voice, some larking, some triumphant, some in sentiment or glee. The vault of daybreak filled itself with heralds…”
T. H. White, “The Once and Future King”

Imagine experiencing (and thus acknowledging) epiphanies, transcendent moments from other, non-human viewpoints. Of course Wart/Arthur and any of us would have to relate it from our own vocabulary and ways of thinking. But imagine people in power making decisions who consider the wider world, not just our human interests. Because if we don’t consider the wider world, we won’t have anywhere left for our human interests.

There are other things that are critical to Arthur’s ongoing education, had by different adventures, experiences, and learning, but I want to stick to these moments as that is the thread that started my mind moving.

Moments give our own lives meaning.

Red-Breasted Nuthatch in Worchester County, 2016. Photo by Bill Hubick at Maryland Biodiversity Project.

The magnolia tree in my front yard has become a home and stomping grounds for nuthatches. Lately when I fill my birdfeeders, they come visit and chat. Saturday afternoon, Holly and I stood and watched a few feet from four Red-Breasted Nuthatches circling from branches to cylinder feeder, in chirp-and-song conversation, sounding precisely like a group of Woodstocks from Peanuts/Charlie Brown. They didn’t mind that we were there and they let us into a frenzy that I can still glimpse in my mind, something bigger than me or us, something we were able to be a part of.

It’s not like Wart’s experience of being among geese flying at dawn, but at the same time, it lights up that these experiences are out there to be had, to be a part of, in a way that connects us to Creation.

Later, as Saturday moved into evening, I was walking from the parking lot behind Christ Church Easton to go to our Saturday worship service. The sun was beginning to set and was casting an incredible light on the steeple of the church and as I watched a “V” of Canadian Geese flying in formation flew over, like the light was shining specifically on them, and the low point of the V came directly overtop the point of the steeple. It was another transcendent moment, there for only a few seconds, but showing something so much more.

All it took to experience these two separate moments, in one afternoon, was to pay attention.

I was looking through photos on my phone, in search of moments. It seems natural to try to capture and share the moments we have. I couldn’t catch either of them from Saturday with a picture, so I try to communicate them in words, in a similar way to White in his novel.

Bubbles and sunsets.

A few years back we were at The Claggett Center on an Alpha Retreat. A handful of us were coming back from a walk through the woods and there was a woman blowing huge bubbles that had the youth group mesmerized. Our friend Dave, who might be the most youthful person you will ever meet, jumped in with the kids chasing bubbles around the yard. It was a happened-upon moment, easy enough just to walk right by, but seizing it, embracing it, enjoying it, colored everything in a way that could have been missed.

Going back further, an evening we were at the yacht club in Oxford for dinner and my daughter Ava, my father and I walked out onto the dock as the sun was setting. I remember it being a beautiful scene, but I can’t tell you anything about that particular sunset. What I remember, what the moment was for me, was looking over and seeing my Dad trying to catch it, trying to capture something of what he saw. In addition to being an accountant, my Dad has always taken pictures–from getting slides developed when my sister and I were little, of ice storms and sailboats, to grandkids’ sports games in the digital camera era, to now having our cameras on our phones; looking over to see my father pulled into a moment was my moment.

These moments, by themselves, don’t make for a complete education. But without moments that make life, that give life depth and feeling, what good is an education?

There is a scene in “The Once and Future King” where the young Arthur first encounters the sword that he will pull out of the stone, which will show him to be the king. Upon touching the sword, he sees more deeply into life:

“I feel strange when I have hold of this sword, and I notice everything much more clearly. Look at the beautiful gargoyles of the church, and of the monastery which it belongs to. See how splendidly all the famous banners in the aisle are waving. How nobly that yew holds up the red flakes on its timbers to worship God. How clean the snow is. I can smell something like fetherfew and sweet briar–and is it music that I hear?”

Arthur’s adventures and experiences, his being changed and living in different perspectives, has given him a deeper soul to experience this moment of his destiny.

He is not able to pull the sword out of the stone immediately. But because he is intimately connected with so much of Creation, something happens:

“All round the churchyard there were hundreds of old friends. They rose over the church wall all together… there were badgers and nightingales and vulgar crows and hares and wild geese and falcons and fishes and dogs and dainty unicorns and solitary wasps and corkindrills and hedgehogs and griffins and the thousand other animals he had met. They loomed round the church wall, the lovers and helpers of the Wart, and they all spoke solemnly in turn. Some of them had come from the banners in the church, where they were painted in heraldry, some from the waters and the sky and the fields about–but all, down to the smallest shrew mouse, had come to help on account of love. Wart felt his power grow.”

There it is. Part of Arthur’s education was to gain insight and understanding and appreciation for creatures and history and all of Creation. And what happened in turn is that Creation embraced and had a love for Arthur.

That isn’t all we might want a king to know in order to rule justly and compassionately. But it’s certainly something we would want on the list.

When we can experience and appreciate moments; when we can see that life and the world is bigger than we are; when we can acknowledge and understand that other people are open to experience these transcendent moments just like we are; when we can learn that every living thing can be part of the moments that we have; when we can look into the eyes of someone or something and see something reflected back to us that causes love to grow in us, for others and for all Creation… those are things that would make a king, and a kingdom, worthwhile.