tiny hand

I’m so spent. I turned on the tv after work and pulled my girls onto my lap. It’s the height of what parenting I can give right now. Lulu’s little hand slid across me into Valentine’s. Valentine looked at me with a huge grin and big eyes - surprised with the trust of her little sister. We sat so for the longest measurable unit of toddler time - minutes.
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The chemistry of grief and love and hope washed through my brain. This brew is complicated and true.
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What parent hasn’t considered unfathomable loss, even if only for the briefest moments, this week. It feels so much better to give opinions, to engage the emotions of power than love in fear and empathy.
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My self defense mechanisms want to engage in politics and power and opinions and battles. Draw lines, wound those who disagree with my version of what’s best. It’s literally, chemically addictive.
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Let’s not. Let’s slide a hopeful hand to a comforting love, and spread comfort. What I mean is, I don’t want to live on the inside of my wounds and miss reaching out for comfort, casting out comfort, sitting in complexity, stumbling through complexity.
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I want to learn from my littles and my betters and my elders and my ghosts and ancestors. I want to mourn. I want to hope.

Remembering Orlando

A speech in memory of the victims of Orlando, compiled from this moment, and too many other reactions to other moments of violence.

the memorial I designed: meant to move, and to move us

each name of the known lost victims

To My LGBTQ Family:

This memorial isn’t honest without acknowledging our LGBTQ family. Humans died. We’re all human. We all mourn. But our brothers and sisters here were targeted. In their safe space. Because of who they are. They live with the same grief I have, but complicated by fear, and a burden to continue living against the grain of long held biases, myths, lies, judgments and institutionalized languages and structures of exclusion.

To you, my family: You’re tired. I know it. I felt the wind go out of the earth when you sighed, and many of you mourned from the safety of your beds. You’re overstretched. You’re suffering. You’re trying to live your life, but also having to fight to do so. Taking the time to confront your reactions - to lean into your mourning - with the added burden of doing it publicly and representatively adds an exhausting layer of complexity to your grief.

Let me carry this burden with you. Teach me how to pick up the hammer that dismantles the words and institutions putting you outside the family and leaving you vulnerable. Forgive me for perpetuating brokenness, for cowardice in your cause, for not asking you sooner for this education.

To all of us – I have a reminder in the weakness of grief and pain:

Our society doesn't prepare us to live in the weakness of the time for mourning. We act. We opine. We argue... We escape. We make decisions without the wisdom of deep experience. We deny our suffering, bending our impaired hearts and minds toward superficial interpretations. Rhetoric and arguments lend us a false sense of control and power in the relative helplessness of suffering.

But, by refusing the journey of grief, we stave off healing.

Our task for this time is to mourn. To weep. To grieve. To be present to our suffering. To select symbols that remind us why our hearts feel burdened even in times of levity. To connect. To validate the weeping and grieving of our neighbors.

We mine the depth of our brokenness over the loss of these people. 

We reject the tendency to let fear drive us to positions of power, anger, violence, judgment, and war.

Instead, we choose presence. It takes courage to face the darkness of these nights and acts. It takes community and intimacy and love to overpower them. 

Reach out. Bring in. Blend. Open.

Take comfort in knowing this time belongs to itself. The time of laughter will follow. That time is not our concern. Live this moment, now. It enriches and informs the time to come. 

May we aspire to a love that sows words and behaviors of peace and connectedness – a love of self-giving and self-sacrifice. May we love lavishly, and be willing to share our power with those more in need. May honesty in failing and suffering and loving and living knit our world more closely together, and create a safer space for us all.

Closet Full of Shoes (an update)

Remember when I told ya'll I was waiting for more shoes to drop (in a post cleverly title The Other Shoe, read here)? After the toddler's hand got burned, and the husband lost his job, the MINI got sold, etc ?

Yeah, we got a whole closet full of shoes now.

The next week Valentine developed double ear infections, days of fever, and tantrums that shook my confidence in this whole parenting gig. Who'm I kidding? They convinced me I couldn't parent. Jason got intensely sick, and we lost opportunities to take short term work... yada, yada, yada (even I'm getting bored with calamity).

The thing is: I wouldn't take a single day of this back. Even though the daughter is sick again, and we are dealing with some significant criticism.

Because, through all these experiences, we found the depth of our community's capacity to love and support to be endless.

Our small group elected to sit in concerned silence as I told them of my heartache, then we all laughed over silly things. Members of our church text us, just to check in. Friends send encouraging emails, or stop in parking lots and on porches for extended chats. My counselor smiled gently and listened hard. My mother took the baby for a night when I was hysterical and running on four days of sleeplessness. My family planned a night away for all us grown-ups to celebrate my dad, and just be together.

I always struggled with needing people. Hated it, really. I believed if I needed things, then people couldn't, or wouldn't, love me. Such faithlessness... These last couple of weeks have converted me to humans.

I know we're still capable of terrible, horrendous, destructive evil. But, in our situation, Jason and I have been slathered in the simplest, most wholesome, selfless good. And, I found myself actively thinking of how to be transparent about our needs during this time. As we work to build real relationships with our friends, I wanted to tell them specifically how we craved their love and support. 

So, it's Ash Wednesday. As I prepared to speak the introduction to our service, I stumbled across a photo of me receiving the imposition of ashes last year. It dawned on me that my new faith experienced a sort of birth in those ashes. I felt the stirring of my need. Need for community. For love. For faith. For the Jesus I'm still learning about.

I also encountered beautiful reflections on what this holy day can mean from my brother (see below), mother, a local minister (see below), a distant priest, friends. It struck me that Ash Wednesday and Lent are inextricably connected to our humanity. Not in a shameful, or guilt-ridden way. Just an honest evaluation of what it means to be human. We are mortal. We are temporal. We are broken at times, and at times we do the breaking.  We need.

We need the receiving and giving of love.
We need the receiving and giving of forgiveness.
We need the receiving and giving of God's grace.

We spend so much time running from this humanity, covering it with impenetrable shields of religion, or defense mechanisms, knowledge, apathy. We deny our needs.

When we take on the ashes, we wear our shared humanity on our face. We wear our need on our face. We wear our imperfection on our face. We wear it together, each facing the acknowledged humanity of our God-family.

These last 2.5 weeks have been serious wind up for the brutal honesty of Ash Wednesday. I had to wear my humanity in full view. My need. My agony. My joy in being loved. My craving for hope and appropriate moans of sympathy and empathy from trusted friends. My confusion about the role of God in all these circumstances.

The grace, and forgiveness, and human depth all this taught me makes every single moment of struggle valuable. It turns out, in facing my humanity, my need, and being met with the loving, if imperfect humanity, of others, a whole lot of God showed up.  I'm still working out how that happens, and will probably write through the discovery process.

Also, I really like shoes anyway, and we have a pretty serious collection started...

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Reflections on Ash Wednesday

My brother George:

"In the hubbub where the pitiful congregate" - Jeff Tweedy
One of my favorite songwriters (probably unintentionally) doing ecclesial theology. Ash Wednesday may be one of the more readily identifiable times that we have set aside to acknowledge that when we congregate, we do so as pitiful creatures. Strivings for wholeness and impenetrability burn away, leaving ashes and dust. O, the beautiful hubbub that ensues when we admit this together.

From Mike DeMoss, a Methodist pastor in my town:

Ever since I knelt before 10 year old Emily several years ago, she tracing a cross on my forehead with her ashen tinged finger and tender mercy, words like repentance, discipline, and renewal, now speak to me, in a deeply personal way, of a grace peculiar to Ash Wednesday. It is the grace of the possibility of a different direction, a new path, or perhaps, an old path recognized with new clarity. It is perhaps for this reason - the beckoning of that new way - the Ash Wednesday service is not among the most well attended. And yet...could it be possible that, as these ashes, still warm from this morning's burning of last year's palms, burn a mark on our hearts that will last long after the dust has settled?

My (abbreviated) intro to services tonight:
...And at the end of this solemn season of self-reflection and honesty we are faced with the ultimate hope: Our God is a God of life. Our God makes all things new and creates new paths. Resurrection is coming.

By participating in this season of Lent the sweetness, the joy found in the work of Jesus is all the more powerful.

Our Parent, Who Art in Heaven...

Only photo from that year I could find.
Four generations of Valentine women.

It's 8th grade. With braces, shoulder length hair, and a budding sense of fashion, I exist in that invisible social strata, sandwiched between the kids who attract most of the ridicule, and the kids who attract none of it. What happens in the classroom, like Vegas, stays there. The real jungle is the cafeteria. That cute guy who talked to you in class won't see you in the lunch line, and certainly never offer you a seat at his table.

The group I sit with at lunch has slipped a multi-colored, tightly folded note into my locker. "I really like you, but one of us thinks you laugh too loud, and wants me to tell you not to sit with us anymore."

... (breathe) ...

Open letter to Like A Child

 This is an open letter to likeachildscience.blogspot.com. Her blogs are so beautifully honest and rich. Stop by her place, and see what I mean.

Dear Like a Child,

I don't even know how to subject this email. Sometimes things resonate too deeply for pithy titles. After you joined my blog, I started reading yours, and even your "About me" almost brought me to tears. I know that heart-aching loneliness that comes from leaving the exclusive teachings you grew up with. With no "church body" around to tell you that you're ok, your teaching rears its ugly head, and says you most certainly are not ok, you are "backslidden," or "out of God's will." Or maybe not "saved" at all. Not only does your fate hang in the balance, the fates of all the people you aren't impacting for the Lord hinge on your disobedience. It's crushing. Maybe, like me, you've even tried to convince yourself to just quit and conform. This liberty I've found offers none of the security of the boxes of the past, and at times, I wonder if I'll drown in it.

I'm beyond the panic attacks. Although, going to church, depending on the church, can wind me up so tight it takes all day to calm down. And I finally found the courage to approach a new church, lay my current "condition" on the line, and let the chips fall. Trying to hide this new evolution of me and faith bothers me most. Because so many people I love and admire still live in that old world, I try to protect them. And, while I am getting to the place where I think this journey is a good and meaningful one, I don't wish it on anyone else. It felt so violent to wake up in the middle of this doubt storm. And life keeps going. You have children needing you, regardless of your condition. I have patients needing me. Like you, I don't think we'll ever go back. It's never going to be the same "faith" for us. But I don't believe that was pure faith back then. Not enough doubt. Living honestly brings its own reward, and I find the molecules of faith that remain mean so much more.

I'm going to follow your journey. Lately, I have been collecting a small coterie of individuals facing their doubts and on this continuum of faith. Each of us different, but believing we all belong. We do need community. I'm glad you're in mine.

Thanks,
chesha in motion