I have slept until at least 10 every day, am reading two books for sheer pleasure.  With friends, I have made a gingerbread house with friend Jenn and a stenciled t-shirt.  I have watched seven (count them, seven) movies.  I have made peppermint mochas, peppermint hot chocolates, and three batches of Chex Mix.  Friend Bonnie and I have trolled around thrift stores, eaten at the Peruvian rotisserie, sat on the floor of a Barnes & Noble and helped a friend choose the perfect poetry anthology, watched Love Actually with popcorn on the couch, and wrapped and served heaps of Chinese dumplings with mulled soy sauce (anise, brown sugar, ginger, etc.).  Friend Sean has made multiple cups of delicious hot chocolate with cinnamon and regaled us with stories.  I have played three games of Yahtzee with Josh and many songs on the keyboard.  Josh & I have put up our Christmas tree and listened to Christmas music and lit the candles on our Advent wreath, one by one, while praying our Advent prayers each day.

Sometimes, you just have to grit your teeth and keep going.  And sometimes, the only response is to throw back your head and laugh and wonder at how much joy is in the world.

When life gives you a spare room and no patio, put your cute little patio set in the spare room.

When life gives you a keyboard but no keyboard stand, put your keyboard on the patio set.

More apartment-related minutiae to follow soon.

INTO THE LIGHT

If there’s one lesson I’ve learned in the last month, it’s this: You never know what’s behind your furniture.

As some of you know, my husband and I moved across town a couple weeks ago. But before we could start our life in our new apartment, there was one small obstacle: cleaning the old one.

I thought it would be a quick job. A sweep of the broom here, a swipe of the counter there, and we would be done.

Until we moved the furniture.

And lurking behind where the bedside table had been, there it was. A giant patch of mildew, no less than two feet long, right there on my wall. The closer I looked, the more was there. And not just the mildew either. Dust. Stains. Ugly black scuffs everywhere.

So I did what any normal person would do. I panicked.

Where had all this dirt and grime come from? Why had I not noticed this and cleaned it before?

I clean my house as much as the next person. At least enough to keep giant patches of mildew from erupting on my wall.

But as I looked around at my bare house, I knew why. Because you can’t clean something you can’t see. And you can’t see something until it’s brought into the light.

(Pause)

As children, one of our first things we’re afraid of is the darkness. Under every bed, there might be a monster waiting. In every closet, there might be a boogeyman. The only thing that will help us drift off to sleep is turning on the light.

When we grow up, there are still things under our beds and behind our closet doors. But unlike monsters and boogeymen, these things don’t flee when the light is turned on. Maybe we have forgotten about them. Maybe we are oblivious to the ugly secrets in our lives. And maybe, just maybe, we would rather leave them in the darkness.

Frederick Buechner writes, “If there is a terror about darkness because we cannot see, there is also a terror about light because we can see. Much of what we see in the light about ourselves and our world, we would rather not see and we would rather not have others see.”

—————————-

In our Scripture reading today, we read about King David’s encounter with a prophet who refuses to leave ugly things in the darkness.

The passage shocks us. It doesn’t seem right. Because if there is anyone who has a clean soul, it’s David, right?

David. The shepherd boy with enough faith and courage to defeat a giant. David. The one who danced for all his might in worship to the Lord. David. The one who refused to kill Saul when he had the chance — even though Saul had tried to kill him. David. The one who was called the “man after God’s own heart.”

We’re used to David the hero. The David that can do no wrong.

But this is a different David. And now, the man who wrote how much he loved God’s commandments has broken three pretty big ones: do not covet, do not murder, and do not commit adultery.

We don’t know very much about what David is thinking. Maybe he’s been corrupted by his power. Maybe he thinks, like Richard Nixon, that it’s “not illegal if the king does it.”

But whatever David is thinking, God is not pleased. So the Scripture tells us that the LORD sends the prophet Nathan to David, to let him know his sin.

So Nathan does a clever thing. He tells a story. And if there’s anything that can get people on your side, it’s a story.

“Once upon a time,” Nathan says, “there was a poor man with a sheep. One sheep, his only one that he loves more than anything in the world. And there was a rich man, with everything he could ever need. The rich man has a visitor one day, someone he wants to impress. But instead of slaughtering one of his own animals to feed the guest, he takes the poor man’s one and only lamb.”

David gets angry. You can see his face grow red, his fists clench. “Kill that man!” he screams.

And then it happens. Nathan’s face changes. He grows deadly serious. And then he points his finger right in the king’s face: “You are the man.”

It’s a crazy thing to do, something crazy enough that only God could have told him to do it. David could easily have him killed.

But Nathan continues. David’s sin is especially shameful because of all God has done for him. He was once a scrawny kid in the field with the sheep, but now, he rules over all Israel and Judah. He was chased by King Saul, but now he has Saul’s throne and Saul’s daughter in marriage. After all God has graciously given him, David has chosen to take what he cannot have.

Finally, Nathan finishes his sermon. We can imagine it: one of those pauses that seem to last for years.

And he waits. What will David do? What will David do, now that the truth of God has shone on him?

It’s easy for us to be horrified at David’s story. But when we step back, we realize something. We are David, and this is our story. When we point our finger at David, we are pointing our finger at ourselves.

Friends, the question that faces us is the same one that faced David: What will we do when that moment comes? When the light of truth shines on us and shows all the things we would rather hide?

It might not be adultery and murder, but it separates us from God all the same. And God probably won’t send us our own personal prophet, but he still shines his light of truth into our hearts today.

That truth shines in different ways on each one of us.

The truth shines on us in the faces of our spouse and children, when we hurt them with our angry words.

It shines on us in the honest words of a friend, when they show us that we need to forgive someone we’ve held a grudge against for years.

The truth shines on us as we look at ourselves in the mirror and we realize that who we are in public is not who we are when no one’s around.

It shines on us as we see a picture of a starving child on TV. And we wonder, have we ever given so much that it really cost us something?

And the truth shines on us in the still, small voice who gently shows us our lies…our selfishness…our bitterness…our sin…

They are hard words to hear. They are hard words for me to speak. And maybe most of all, I’m preaching to myself. But sometimes, we have to hear the bad news of our own sinfulness before we can truly understand the good news of God’s grace.

(Pause)

I remember the moment the light shone on me this past year. It was a busy weekend. I had books to read and papers to write. And because I’m actually a crazy person, I decided to throw a party for fifteen of my friends.

But there was a hitch in my plans. An man within the community had been kicked out of his home and needed some help. So he asked our family if we could help him.

When I got the phone call from my husband, I groaned inside. Not now.

This is the worst time, I thought. Who knows what he’s wasted his money on? Who knows what trouble he’s gotten into?

I agreed to help the man. Kind of. But I helped him in a way that didn’t require anything of me other than a little bit of cash. It didn’t interrupt my plans, and I didn’t have to let him into my safe bubble.

Like David, for a while, I felt fine. “I’m just looking after my needs, after all.” I thought. “I’ve got things to do, places to be.”

But later on, before I drifted off to sleep, I couldn’t help remembering Jesus’ words to feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, clothe the naked, and visit the sick and those in prison. “Whatever you have done for the least of these, you have done unto me.”

(Pause)

I couldn’t help but think that Jesus had come to me asking for help, and I had gotten rid of him as quick as I could.

And I realized that knowing that we have sinned against God and against our brother or sister is one of the hardest places to be.

(Pause)

But, fortunately, we don’t have to stay in that place of sin and guilt.

Because what does David do? He confesses. When the light shines on his sin, he is cut to the heart. He makes no excuses. He simply says, “I have sinned against the Lord.”

It’s a short sentence. Only six words long. But it speaks volumes.

In Psalm 51, our psalm reading for today, we see David’s beautiful prayer of confession. When he is confronted with the truth, David turns immediately back to God.

David’s words can be a model for us. They show us the way forward after we sin against God.

First, the psalmist expresses sorrow for his sin. Listen to verses 2-4: “For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. Against you, you alone, have I sinned, and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are justified in your sentence and blameless when you pass judgment. Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me.”

For us as Christians, guilt is a good thing. It shows us we need God’s forgiveness. It leads us back to God. But God isn’t sitting around, wanting us to feel guilty and miserable. God wants to cleanse us and make us new. God wants us to have a fresh start.

We see this in our psalm, too. The psalmist expresses his guilt, but he isn’t stuck there. He asks for God to forgive him, and he knows that God will: “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.”

And he can even look ahead to a time when God, in his mercy, will use this evil for good.

Listen to what he writes: “Then I will teach transgressors your ways, and sinners will return to you. Deliver me from bloodshed, O God, O God of my salvation, and my tongue will sing aloud of your deliverance. O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise.”

Where he once sinned, now he leads sinners back to God’s way. He sings the praises of the God who had mercy on him.

It’s not just the psalmist that God wants to change. God is waiting to change each one of us. He wants to create in us a new heart to love and follow him. And He wants to turn us from sinners into prophets. From sinful Davids to Nathans who help speak the truth to others.

God is always creating beautiful things out of our sin. And maybe there’s no finer example than King David.

You see, this isn’t the end of the story of David and Bathsheba.

David’s story isn’t really finished until hundreds of years later. Because David and Bathsheba pop up again in the most unexpected place: the very first chapter of Matthew, at the very beginning of the New Testament.

The genealogy of Jesus. Let’s be honest — we’ve all skipped over it on our way to the Christmas story. It lists, generation by generation, every person from Abraham to Christ.

For an entire chapter, Matthew lists name after name. “Abraham was the father of Isaac, Isaac was the father of Jacob…” The list goes on and on.

But the pattern changes, ever so slightly, when it comes to David. “David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah,” Matthew writes. The author of the gospel could have just said, “David was the father of Solomon,” and left it at that, just like most of the other names. But he doesn’t.

Why? Why refer to the ugliest part of King David’s life? Why bring all that dirty laundry back into the open?

You see, Solomon, the second child born to David and Bathsheba, is the ancestor of Jesus. If you trace Jesus’ family history back, it stops here. With lust. Murder. Adultery. And lies.

If we were writing the family history of the Messiah, we would clean it up a bit. We wouldn’t say that Jesus’ ancestor was an adulterer, a deceiver, and a murderer.

If we were God, we wouldn’t let the Messiah be descended from this messed-up marriage.

But I think that even here, in the unlikeliest of places, God is whispering to us.

I think God is telling us this: Your sin is ugly, but I am not afraid of it. There is nothing so sinful that you’ve done that I cannot redeem it. There is nothing so broken that I cannot make it beautiful.

This adulterer, this liar, this murderer, is the ancestor of the only sinless one our world has even known. And it is in Jesus, the Son of David, that all of us broken, sinful people find our hope.

Jesus was rich, but for our sakes, he became poor. He was hated, but he showed perfect love. He was pure, but he dared to hang out with outcasts. He was sinless, but he took our sin upon him.

He was the hero that David could not be. David “took” Bathsheba and used her, but Jesus showed women that they were children of God. David abused his power, but Jesus gave up his power. David deceived, but Jesus spoke the truth. David killed to preserve himself. But Jesus gave his life away. And even as they put him to death, he prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

There is something so beautiful about Christ, that we decide that we will give up everything to follow. Even if it means acknowledging our sin. Even if it means giving up what we want to do and submitting to what God wants us to do. Even if it means admitting just who we really are and letting God make us clean.

————————-

And so we return to the question. Friends, what will we do when the moment comes? When the truth of God shines on us and our sin?

My prayer today is that we will do what David did.

I pray that God will give us the courage to see ourselves as we really are.

I pray that we will realize the depth of our sin and the depth of God’s mercy.

I pray that we will confess our sins to the one who is waiting to forgive us.

And I pray that we will watch in awe as God takes our sin and makes it into something beautiful.

But I will post soon.  I promise.  About Our New Apartment, Creativity and Cultivation, My Call To Ministry, and other things that are exciting enough (at least to me) to be capitalized.

Love to all.

Sermons are such an exhilirating and terrifying and joyful thing, aren’t they?  I hope to be able to get better at them but am enjoying the process.

HEALED AND HEALERS

Twelve years.

Twelve years is how long she had been sick. Her body that was meant to bring life into the world instead brought constant pain. It wasn’t a dramatic illness, not one that you could even see if you looked at her. It wasn’t one that would get you a stream of “get well” cards or a bouquet of flowers.

But every day, she woke up, feeling like her body was at war against itself. Every day, she felt a little more hopeless.

It wasn’t just the physical pain, either. According to the law of Moses in the book of Leviticus, any woman was ritually unclean during her time of menstruation. It was a time in which the woman was set apart from the community, usually for seven days. After that, she would purify herself and return to her everyday life.

But her seven days had dragged on for twelve years. No husband could lie in bed with her. No one could sit on a chair after she had sat there. No one could touch her without being made unclean. She couldn’t even enter the temple or the synagogue to pray. We can only imagine the loneliness and isolation she felt.

She had tried everything. “Here’s a miracle cure!” the doctors had promised. But as she gave them her money, she only grew poorer and sicker. As she made her way down the dusty roads of Galilee, I can only imagine that she was thinking about those twelve years. About all she had lost. About whether she was even worth healing. And about how this prophet and teacher, this Jesus, was her last hope.

—————

For many of us, it may feel like we’re thousands of miles away from our Scripture reading on this beautiful June morning. Earlier in the service, we rejoiced with George and Brenda in their legal adoption of Feleasha. It’s a joyful season. We have soccer games and barbeques and trips to the beach on our calendars. We are welcomed with peppers and squash from the garden. It’s a season in which blessings seem to overflow.

But I’m guessing that if we’re not there now, most or all of us have been to the place where this anonymous woman is.

If I could trace my call to ministry back to a specific point, it would be a place not too far from where this woman stands in our reading today.

For most of my life, faith seemed pretty simple. I grew up in a small suburb in the rolling hills of West Virginia. Every Sunday, from before my feet could even touch the floor while sitting in the pews, we drove to the First Church of the Nazarene. It was the joke that my mom would somehow be at the church (and drag US to the church) every time the doors were opened and wouldn’t leave until the pastor was turning the lights off and locking up the doors.

But I loved church. Through church, Bible study, and youth group, I learned to love God with all my heart, soul, and mind. I never remember a time in my life in which I somehow wasn’t aware of God’s love for me. And though my life wasn’t perfect, I believed that if I kept serving God, my life would be good.

But in the spring of my senior year of high school, my father started having headaches and sleeping longer and longer each night. As he went in for tests, the doctor diagnosed him with a rare kind of brain tumor.

All I could think of was the eighteen years with my dad. The beach vacations we had taken together. Sitting on the couch, eating ice cream and watching NASCAR races. The corny jokes he always made. His six AM Krispy Kreme donut runs.

My dad was 45 at the time, with my mom, me, and my sixteen-year-old brother at home. He decided to fight and began experimental treatment right away.

And I prayed almost constantly. God was the same God who had had healed this sick woman. He could heal my father, too. Our entire church prayed in faith for healing for six months.

But day after day, I watched my dad slowly lose his ability to walk, to sit up, to speak, and finally even swallow his own food.

And then the Monday after Thanksgiving, he went to be with the Lord.

I felt like I was standing there with Jesus there on that dusty Galilee road, reaching out to touch Jesus’ garment, but instead, I was swept away by the crowd. I felt like I couldn’t reach him. Or he had ignored me and passed right on.

I wondered what we all wonder in these situations. Why? Why is there pain at what are supposed to be the happiest times in our lives?

I was faced with the same question a few years later, in 2007. Josh had proposed on Easter Sunday. We were looking forward to a late summer wedding. But five days after we got engaged, we were in the hospital listening to another cancer diagnosis. Josh’s dad was in the end stages of kidney cancer.

And again we prayed for healing. We trusted. We believed.

But just four days before our wedding date, Josh’s dad was rushed to the hospital and passed away before Josh could see him. On the same day that we were supposed to be married, I sat with Josh’s family on the front pew of a church as they laid his dad to rest.

————–

For many of us, it may be difficult to hear the words of Mark’s gospel today. Haven’t many of us stood in this same situation? Some of us have stories of powerful physical healing that God has given us in our lives. But some of us wonder — does God still heal today?

Maybe it has been a chronic illness, the sickness or death of a loved one, the loss of a job, a financial crisis. Maybe it has been a problem with the law, mental illness, or a loved one who just will not stop hurting us.

Sometimes we wonder, don’t we, where is our healing?

When we look at Mark’s story, I think that we can see that there are many different types of healing. Mark tells us that the woman comes to Jesus anonymously. She grabs a hold of his garment and attempts to slip out into the crowd when she feels her body healed.

But Jesus stops in his tracks. “Who touched me?” he asks the crowd.

The woman steps forward, trembling. Jesus or the crowd has the right to rebuke her. She has touched him — and made him unclean. He doesn’t rebuke her for touching him. He doesn’t tell her that he is on a schedule. There is a dying girl to save, so please step aside.

Our Scripture says that she falls at Jesus’ feet and tells him “the whole truth.” We don’t know what this is. But I imagine that she poured out her soul that day. That she told Jesus about her pain and her condition, how she had felt so alone for so many years, so abandoned by God. How she knows she shouldn’t have touched him and bothered him but that she was so desperate. I imagine that she told him about the sins she had committed in her life and the things she had done. And then, Jesus looks at her and says, “Daughter, your faith has made you well. Go in peace.”

In her healing, it is not just her body that is restored. Being healed from her condition means that she is free to become a part of her community again. She can worship in the Temple and the synagogue. She can touch and be touched again.

But the most powerful healing she experiences is in her relationship with Jesus.

How must it have felt for this woman to hear that word, “Daughter”? After years of feeling invisible — untouchable — ignored. She hears the Son of God call her “Daughter.”

“Daughter, your faith has made you well.”

The Greek word used to refer to the woman being “made well” literally means to “save” or to “deliver.” It is the same word the Bible uses to talk about our salvation from sin and death. “Your faith has saved you,” Jesus says.

She is not just healed. She is at peace — with her body, with the community, and with God.

She had a miracle in mind, but she got so much more than that. She got a relationship with God. She got salvation.

—–

In the difficult experiences of my life, it’s often hard to see God at work. But gradually, my eyes are opened, and I began to see glimpses of healing along the way.

I think of my father. At the end of his life, he realized that he had never really known Jesus. But he believed and was baptized, and I know that he is with God today. This is the healing power of God.

I think of friends during my dad’s illness who reminded us that we were not alone. Our church brought meals to us every day for a solid month. My pastor and his wife sat for four hours with me and my brother in an intensive care unit. Because they were with us, we could believe that God was with us. This is the healing power of God.

I think of Josh’s family. After a painful divorce and remarriage, they had so much conflict over the years. But through hard conversations, he and his stepmother finally came to understand each other a little bit better and see that each of them loved his dad. This is the healing power of God.

I think of Josh’s dad. When he was undergoing cancer treatment, he was worried about his family and what would happen to them. In the middle of an anxious dream, he was suddenly surrounded by light. He said later that he felt the peace and love of God almost tangibly. He said the only words he could use to describe it were Jesus’ words: “Peace I leave with you; My peace I give to you.” He felt God calling to him, telling him that he was loved and was not alone and that his family would be taken care of. This carried him through the last months of his illness. This is the healing power of God.

When any of us are given the faith to look past our circumstances and choose to trust in God despite what we feel, this is the healing power of God.

Friends, there are many things I don’t know. But I do know one thing: that we do not know how God will heal or on what timetable he will do it. But we know that he will.

Our God is a God who creates out of nothing, and he can’t help but put his hands on our most desperate situations, turning evil into good.

That healing may take different forms. To some, it may be physical healing. To others, it may be emotional. To others, it may be the healing of broken relationships.

For all of us who are call ourselves “Christians,” we have stood in this woman’s shoes. We were bleeding with sin and despair, with the things that we thought would fill us up but only made us more empty. And then, somehow, we summoned up enough faith to touch his garment and fall at his feet in humility. We told him the whole truth: of all the things we have done. And then we heard his voice say to us, “Son…Daughter…your faith has saved you. Go in peace.”

The most powerful healing we know is the healing of our own souls.

And in the mercy and grace of God, he does not leave us there. He sends us out to heal others, to lead them to the saving power of God.

At the end of Mark’s Gospel, after the resurrection, Jesus tells his apostles that he is sending them out to do exactly the work that he did. He tells them to go out into all the world, to make disciples and teach them Jesus’ message. He gives them power to heal and drive out demons. He tells them that they have power and authority — if they handle snakes, they won’t harm them, and if they drink poison, it will have no effect on them at all.

Now, I don’t think anyone is rushing out to pick up snakes with their bare hands or drink poison. (And if you do, please don’t tell someone that the intern told you to do it!)

But the point is clear: Through Jesus, we have power over the world. The power of the Holy Spirit which dwells in us is the same power that flowed through Jesus into that desperate, hurting woman and made her clean. What an amazing thought! We are given a task to do for God, but we are given the power to do it.

And this is why I’m here this morning friends, here at Duke Divinity School and here this summer at Salem United Methodist Church.

————

My pastor met with my family to pray with us after my dad’s death. I can’t remember the exact words he said, but I’ll always remember the message our pastor shared with my family that day.

He read a short passage of Scripture that I’d like to share with you. It comes from 2 Corinthians 1:3-4: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all consolation, who consoles us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to console those who are in any affliction with the consolation with which we ourselves are consoled by God.”

My pastor told us, “You are hurting now. Right now, you need to rest and let God heal you. But there is a time in the future when your hurt will be healed. God doesn’t cause your pain. But God is not going to waste your pain. He is going to use your experience to comfort and heal other people.”

It was eight years ago when he spoke those words to us. But in the past eight years, there has rarely been a week in which I haven’t remembered them.

Over the years, in college and in missions in China, God has allowed me to walk beside people who were feeling abandoned. One young woman in my dorm confessed to me that she had cut herself in the past and was having thoughts of suicide. Another talked about how lonely she felt — being in the United States after living on the mission field all her life. Some talked about feeling like a failure to their parents or the pain of relationships.

I was amazed at the power of listening to them tell the whole truth about their lives. And then reminding them that they were daughters and sons of God and that they were loved.

And so, in the spring of 2008, I took a step. I didn’t know where I was going — I only knew that God was calling me to work with those who were hurting and suffering, whether in churches or hospitals or on the streets. After having lunch with my pastor one day, she put into words the feelings that I couldn’t, “Do you think you have a call?”

In the past year at Duke, I have come to believe that I do have a call. I don’t know now where it will lead: maybe chaplaincy, counseling, or being a pastor in a local church. I want to walk with others in their time of need. I want to help them to learn and love the Scriptures and speak to God in prayer. And I want, most of all, to guide others toward the God who loves them so dearly and wants to save them.

Brothers and sisters, even when we feel like we have nothing to offer and are nothing special, God reminds us that it is not about any of us anyway. It is about God and his power to save and heal the world. And yet, by the grace of God, all of us are invited to share in his work. We are the hands and feet of Jesus on earth.

And so we will go out of this sanctuary, to heal. For each of us, this will look different. It may be befriending someone in our community who doesn’t look like us or think like us and showing them the love of Jesus. It may be extending a word of forgiveness to someone who has wronged us or saying sorry to someone we have wronged. It may be through acts of compassion to someone who is sick, or in prison, or homeless, or hungry.

All of us are sent to share the good news of Jesus. The good news is not just that he healed a bleeding woman or a dead little girl 2000 years ago. It’s that that he himself rose up to life, and suddenly we all have hope. The hope of new life on earth and resurrection in the life to come.

I’d like to finish with reading you a quote from Teresa of Avila, a woman who lived over 500 years ago. And though the words are old, I believe that she speaks to us here in at Salem today:

“Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks with
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands with which he blesses all the world.”

Be healed, friends. And be healers. Amen.

I haven’t done much creative writing, of late, but made a birthday resolution to try to write a bit every day.  This blog helps.  But I’m hoping to get back into the swing of writing fiction and creative nonfiction, maybe even starting the novel that’s been bumping around in my head for about five years.

I wrote this piece for my Writing about Spiritual Experience class and later read it for my senior writers’ workshop reading.  It was published in a tinytinytiny online journal called Stonework, also based out of Houghton College, which I will of course credit here.

I enjoy reading back on it now, seeing how far I’ve come from that place and also how near to it I feel.  And also to recount the beginnings of my then-budding relationship with Josh, who supposedly was then just a friend and carpool buddy.

Silent Incarnation

Lo, in the silent night
A child to God is born
And all is brought again
That ere was lost or lorn.
Could but thy soul, O child,
Become a silent night!
God would be born in thee
And set all things aright.
-15th century carol

I can hear the creak of the floorboards. Each time my mother stays out late like this, I grow nervous in the silence. I have been watching television for two hours, the sound echoing through the empty house, but the laugh tracks and forced humor have made me anxious, and I have turned off the set. Now, alone in the living room, staring at the blank screen, I realize that the television sits in the same spot where my father’s hospice bed sat three years ago.

When I was a child, whenever I found myself unexpectedly alone at home, I was afraid that Jesus had whisked the rest of my family away to heaven in some secret Rapture. He had forgotten me, or he was getting back at me for not talking to the girls at church with greasy hair and dirty sweat pants.

As the chiming clock in the living room strikes twelve, my old fears are back, not that Jesus has raptured my mother away but that he’s harmed her, by a car accident or some perverted janitor that has seen her light on during the night rounds at her university office building and decided to take advantage of the situation.

I like to have sound. Whenever I have music playing, I sing. I take comfort even in the vapid church praise tunes that I refer to as the “Jesus-is-my-boyfriend-songs.” Singing the songs, I praise a good God. Saying the creeds, I praise a good God. Listening to the preaching, even though it sometimes winds around like a dog chasing its tail, I praise a good God. But as the clock dongs and the floorboards creak and my heart throbs and I remember my father lying in the bed in the living room, I feel the mound of faith that I’ve buried myself in beginning to blow away in the wind. In the absence of singing, God does not seem good.

I dial my mother’s office number.

“Hello?” She sounds weary. I can almost see her sitting in her office, typing on the computer, her desk littered with coffee mugs, student papers, and Bible meditations. She is wearing a pantsuit, and her short hair is probably by now tousled and cowlicked like a little boy’s. She has been working overtime this year to grade papers, finish her dissertation, and distract herself from thinking about my grandmother, who passed away a month ago.

I sigh. “Mom.”

She sighs back. “I know, I need to leave. I just have a couple more of these things to grade.” I hear music in the background at her office. Like me, she likes noise and activity.

“Come home soon,” I tell her, and I place the phone back on its cradle. She works to forget, to avoid the silence. The garage door will grind open in an hour or two, and she will come into the house to fall into bed, rising the next morning to do it all again. It is hard for her to be still with moments steeped in memory.

* * * * *
I sit in the halfhearted woods and listen, the wind rustling the branches and blowing against my face. This is a strange place, a clearing in a patch of woods in middle-of-nowhere New York, next to a two-lane highway.

I am here for a retreat, and this morning, we all gathered in a room to sing before we separated for our two hours of silence. Already, I am eager to hear noise. After a few minutes, my ears become accustomed to the stillness, and I can identify the almost artificial sounds of insects with their chirp, buzz, and hum. A car passes by, its blaring music mixing with the sound of the insects, and I wonder if the sound of the cars is our chirp, our buzz, our hum.

“I’m not good at this,” I whisper.

As I write in my journal, the cars and the chirping birds become a psalm. I listen and write them. After an hour and a half, I decide I should be still. “Lord, I’m going to be quiet now,” I whisper, and after the words escape my mouth, I realize that it sounds more than a little presumptuous. “Speak to me,” I add with what I hope is humility, but sounds more like demanding.

Then I close my eyes and hug my knees against my chest as I sit with my back to a tree. The wind blows the branches; there will be a storm soon. It is beautiful and frightening now, like the silence in which God may or may not speak. I shut my eyes tighter as if I am squeezing a dishrag, trying to coax out the last bit of water.

Though I try to keep my mind clear, my thoughts scurry around like puppies. I take each one by the scruff of the neck and hand it to God, making a gift of my lack of focus. “I am afraid,” I pray when the thought comes to mind. As I present this thought, another one replaces it.

My grace is sufficient for you. I open my eyes, trying to figure out if I have made this up myself.

Be still and know that I am God. It is no new revelation, but I feel privileged, unforgotten, and pray a thank you. Opening my eyes, I look at the sky above that is pulling a mask over the sun, preparing itself for rain and winds. Each time I look at the sky in New York, I hope for snow, eager for the quiet beauty to fall around me and blanket the earth like manna. Even this pensive grayness, though, is the character of God, I think as I pack up my journal and walk from the woods.

* * * * *
The clock in my college room reads 2:00 am. “You’re ridiculous,” I tell myself. I want to sleep, but I must work first. I have decided that I need a break in the middle of it, to keep the time of silence that a few friends and I have agreed to.

“I should be able to do this, to be quiet for a little bit,” I whisper, and I am not sure whether I am talking to myself or God.

Sitting down, I intend to get quiet, spend my fifteen minutes, and leave, my duty completed. It takes me twenty just to clear my thoughts and steady my breathing, and it strikes me how silly it is that I think I can live a noisy, busy life and yet escape into silence instantly. I have always considered time as the greatest enemy of my waiting before God, but maybe it is the loudness: a loudness not just of sound but of spirit, rising from the schedule I have given myself.

The absence of sound prods me, and I realize how unnatural it is to be sipping coffee after midnight, long after night has set and the rest of those I know have gone to bed. I try to remember the last time I had a truly restful night or a truly lucid day, the last time I have read myself to sleep with a children’s novel or a book of poetry, or the last time I have read the Psalms and offered my honest prayers along with the psalmist’s.

“I’m sorry,” I pray, and I am. The only sound I hear is the heater beside my bed humming. There is no word from God, only the realization that I want more than the noisy life I am letting myself lead. Maybe that is word enough.

* * * * *
Here in Idaho, I can almost see the constellations from my window. The car hum lulls us as we pass through the Idaho foothills filled with pines, along the river that is clearer than any we have in West Virginia. It is serene here. My uncle and brother have fallen asleep on the drive home from the restaurant in Coeur d’Alene, a small town in Idaho, near where we are staying with my aunt and uncle. My grandmother has died, an event that should make me miss her and mourn for her life. Instead I mourn for the fact that, other than knowing about her cravings for sliced avocados and good cheeseburgers, I never really knew her.

My brother and uncle wake when the engine grows suddenly silent and my mother insistently whispers that we are back. As I step sleepily out of the car, my breath is stolen by the passion of the burning stars. White as opals, they cluster together. I picture lines connecting the stars into constellations.

I rarely look at the stars. My house at home lies near the interstate highway, lit by enormous lights that throw a jaundiced glow on the road and somehow into the air. One of the strip joints nearby has recently bought a searchlight, and every night, it roams the air, inviting people to the land of booze and topless girls. The sky is loud with light.

Here, near my aunt and uncle’s house in a clearing in the Idaho pines, the sky is silent with stars. Sometimes the silence is not darkness; it is a night sky in full bloom. Sometimes silence is not dead quiet; it is stillness in sound. I realize that silence is a type of order, an order that I am missing in my life. This order draws me, the stars joyful and neat as a Mozart minuet, tranquil as my soft footfalls padding inside my aunt and uncle’s house, even as my breathing as I lie down to rest.

* * * * *
For the past two hours, I have been talking and staring out the window, the full moon glancing out behind the clouds as my friend drives us north and back to college. On breaks, Josh and I drive eight hours from college in western New York to our homes: mine in West Virginia and his in Kentucky. As we pass the sign for Erie, Pennsylvania, I realize that we have been talking nonstop for six hours about Thanksgiving break, our families, God, and the movies. Now he is telling me about graduate school applications and The Future, a phrase that I always mentally capitalize.

“I just don’t know where to go or what to do,” I say. “I don’t know.”

For me, “I don’t know” is usually a gateway phrase, a signal that I will take a breath and elaborate or finish my thought. But this evening, I am trapped there.

“Have you thought about taking a day to spend some time in solitude and meditation about it?” he asks.

I want to smile at his polysyllabic words, but instead my lip curls in frustration at myself. “I just don’t think it would work,” I say. “Every time I try to be quiet, I just get anxious or distracted and then find out things that I don’t want to know.”

He tilts his head back suddenly in a kind of backwards nod, almost like the words have given him a little push. “What sort of things?”

“When I was out in Idaho for my grandma’s funeral, my mom and my brother missed their plane and had to come the next day.” I stop to bite my thumbnail and peel away a cuticle that is hanging loose like a hinge. “And I was sitting there, just trying to be quiet, when I realized that I was thinking about my dad and his cancer, and I had this fear that my family’s plane was going to crash or something.”

Pausing again, I touch the cool glass of the window. “It’s like I’m afraid to be happy because then I think that God will send me some other tragedy. I don’t like finding that out. Some things I’d rather not know.”

We stay quiet for a while, and I want to add more. The skin between my eyebrows is furrowing in the helpless way it does when I have no words. I don’t know how to explain how I am feeling, that I am not just afraid of God. I am also afraid of God’s people, specifically the ones who would rip everything physical out of my arms and give me only spiritual fluff to hold. I remember people telling me when I was younger that spiritual things are what matter, not physical things. I think of the preacher hired to give my grandmother’s eulogy, who mispronounced her first name and stumbled through her obituary, using her life as a brief vignette in his sermon about salvation. I remember ladies hugging me at my father’s funeral, telling me that he would always be with me in spirit–that it would be just like he was there in person.

Every time I am quiet and alone, I almost fear that everything I love will go away, that some shabby brand of Gnosticism will invalidate all the ways in which I wonder at God. The light reflecting obliquely off the purple taffeta dress of a little girl. The hundreds of pouches of fluid inside one slice of peeled orange. The mournful loveliness of the Poulenc clarinet sonata I played in high school.

“I don’t know,” I tell Josh.

We say nothing, listening to the whir of the car tires on the road. A few minutes later, he speaks again. “Maybe you could just start small, five minutes or so, and see if that’s better for you.” He pauses. “And maybe that won’t be the way God speaks to you the most.”

I do not voice the thought, but I do not want to be one of those people. When others talk about what God has shown them, I want to be shown. Some of my longing rises from genuine desire to know God, some from a desire for others to think of me as one who thinks and lives deeply.

I change the subject back to details, things concrete and physical, the place where I feel most at ease. “The moon looks beautiful,” I say. “Whenever it’s full, it always makes me think that something important must be happening.”

Outside the car, the weather is surprisingly warm for late November. As we keep driving north, I wonder when it will arrive: the snow we have all been awaiting for weeks, the snow that must be coming soon.

* * * * *
On Saturday mornings, I sleep until my eyes open without effort. Saturday is my idle day, when I immerse myself in the pleasant work of cooking a homemade meal for my friends, washing my dishes, and folding up the clothes that I have hung from the posts of my bed. I let myself jot incoherent phrases in my journal, read poetry, write letters, and page through the Bible that has sat unopened on my bedside table for days.

I turn to Luke, to the passage about the Annunciation. The Mary I have always pictured speaking with the angel is not the vague Mary of a Renaissance painting but a frail girl, her body not comprised of curves but of jutting lines, her eyes growing wider to hold mystery. “I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary says to the angel. “May it be to me as you have said.”

I have been helping first-year students with their essays in the writing center for the past few weeks, and I nearly underline the passage and mark it with the words, “Rewrite in active voice.” I catch myself and laugh at the ridiculousness of trying to change the phrasing of inspired words. I want Mary to say, “I will make it happen,” or “I will do what you have said,” but she does not.

After the angel calls her blessed, the only response of Mary is praise. She accepts her situation, quiet before God, before she does anything. She walks around with the weight of a child in her, faces the snide comments, and gives birth, but first she says, “May it be to me as you have said.”

I bless Mary for being quiet and holy without ignoring the world and its simple, tangible beauties and pains. She says, “May it be to me as you have said,” but then she finds comfort in the embrace of Elizabeth. She breaks the quiet night, screaming in childbirth, and she nurses God. She treasures up all these things and ponders them in her heart, and I realize that stillness is not something to be discovered but nurtured.

Quiet, like sleep and rest, is a form of humility. When I am quiet, I accomplish little. Just to be still is an obvious act of faith that there is someone or something worth being still for, that the world will not end when I stop darting around.

Perhaps the entire Christmas narrative depends upon the grammar of receiving. I repeat Mary’s prayer. “May it be to me as you have said.” I invite my anxieties into the prayer, and to my surprise, it does not seem like clutter but adornment.

“May it be to me in my mourning,” I say. “May it be to me as I worry about my family. May it be to me in my confusion about love. May it be to me in my exams and the papers I have to write.” I feel silly as I always do, applying the mystery of the enfleshed God to myself, a girl living in a messy dorm room with a flickering overhead light. But I keep on because maybe this is itself the mystery: that God loves even my silly anxieties, validates my worries by holding them to the breast like a mother. “May it be to me as I try to get in shape. May it be to me as I figure out what to do about the future. May it be to me as I try to find your compassion.”

I reach the end of my list of worries, and I find that I can sit there, still. “You can speak if you want to, Jesus,” I say. “But if you don’t want to, that’s all right.”

I am too busy enjoying the moment to realize that I’ve stopped striving. The silence is not empty; it is full of presence. I close my eyes and smile at the simplicity and joy of sitting there, bringing my doubts almost as a gift.

* * * * *
I decide to take a nap to escape the lazy fretfulness of mid-afternoon. As I open my eyes an hour later, I can hear laughter down the hallway of my dorm and the spray of the shower. A pot boils in the kitchen. Rubbing my eyes, I walk to my computer to check my emails and begin to consider starting my reading.

I delete two junk emails and open one from a friend who is away this semester. “To get you in the mood for silence and contemplation,” she writes, “here’s a poem.” She usually sends me long, witty emails and signs them “Love, glad tidings, etc., Rachel.” Today she sends me Denise Levertov, and I feel my eyes welling up as I read the poem:

And then
once more the quiet mystery
is present to me, the throng’s clamor
recedes: the mystery
that there is anything, anything at all,
let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,
rather than void: and that, O Lord,
Creator, Hallowed One, You still,
hour by hour sustain it.

As the icons on my computer screen blur, I feel completely present in a way that I have not felt for days. I want to chide myself for crying in front of the computer at nine lines of a poem, but I feel like breaking the moment would be a small ingratitude, a tiny blasphemy.

I walk to the window in the corner, pull the cord that opens my blinds, and stand there, my palms cupping my face. I take a breath, and as I exhale, its warmth travels up my neck and back through my shoulder blades. It is dark outside, but it is snowing, the flakes of it falling as soft and light as powdered sugar.

“That there is anything, anything at all,” I whisper at the window.

As I stare at the snow that I have been awaiting since August, I am aware of everything. The still hum of my computer. The catch and release in each breath. My heart, suddenly so life-giving, so essential.

“You still, hour by hour sustain it,” I repeat, awed at the otherness of the moment. I run my hand across my fissured lips, and every crack and imperfection feels strange and foreign, a wonder.

I imagine doubt and faith as a quarreling couple beginning to reconcile, one tentatively holding the other’s arm. “I am afraid of you, but I love you,” I tell God.

It is a quiet revelation, as quiet as the snow accumulating outside, and maybe no one else would see it as a word from God at all. I open my mouth, but before I move my lips, I discover that I don’t want to speak. I let my breaths pray for me, and as I watch, the falling snow seems more and more a silent incarnation.

I expected the volunteer process to be a little less of an ordeal than what it was (eighteen hours of training over the course of three days, a flurry of forms, vaccinations), but I’m glad it was so thorough.  It was very helpful, especially as my field ed church has lots of older people, including countless shut-ins that can’t make it to Sunday worship.

The most helpful elements of the training for me were the session on the stages of dying/dying process, led by a hospice nurse, and the session on grief and bereavement, led by one of the hospice chaplains.  One of the most important tasks for the dying, according to the training, is telling the stories that matter to them.  Asking for and giving forgiveness.  Expressing love to family and friends.

Our packet included a quote from the novelist Isak Dinesen that I’ve thought about several times in the past few weeks. “All sorrows can be borne,” Dinesen writes, “if you put them into story.”

Being in a rural church that’s not very program-heavy, I do a lot of pastoral care visits.  So far, I’ve gone along with my supervisor, as I meet people and get acquainted, but soon, I’ll be doing lots of visiting on my own.  Many of the shut-ins are older ladies, in their seventies or eighties (one is 98!), and many are widowed for many years or just a few.

We make conversation, my supervisor, the parishioners, and I.  About the flowers or potted tomato plants lining the walks that their children or grandchildren have planted.  About the dog or cat that is doted on like a child.  About the health problems and surgeries of others in the church.  After a while, almost without fail, they will tell the stories of their lives as I sit and watch their beautiful, wrinkled faces.  One talks about sewing clothes for her and her children from the brightly covered feed sacks.  Another talks about her husband’s job with the fire department and how he loved his children.  Another simply tells us how her husband of sixty-five years was a good man and confesses how she misses him every day.  Another, much younger man we visit breaks down and cries at the mention of his parents, who have passed.  They show us pictures, color or black and white.

They are strikingly honest, and I feel blessed, as if I have been trusted with these memories, to hold them and keep them safe.

One day, between visits, my supervisor and I made the fairly long drive from the hospital to the houses around the church.  As we drove, I asked questions, trying to connect the dots of who is related to whom.  “It took me a while to figure it all out,” my supervisor said.  “But one of the most important things we do is just to learn the stories.”

As an English and writing major, stories feel familiar.  I spent (and hope to still spend!) years trying to write stories that are beautiful and true, regardless of whether they are fact or fiction.  But in some ways, it feels like I’ve still been learning stories here in divinity school.  The narratives of our faith: from Eden to Sinai to Babylon to Galilee to Jerusalem one Sunday morning.  And on and on from there.  The narrative of the Church and the people who have formed and shaped it and carried it into the twenty-first century. A friend in a nearby town in Virginia has started a similar project: blogging through the year and telling the stories of the saints of the church, or as he calls them, “the stories that matter.”

These stories, the stories of the Christians who loved and worshiped and testified and passed on the faith, and the stories of the love between God and God’s people, these are stories to be passed on, shared, and told in different ways.

And other stories, the ones of the beautiful, wrinkled ladies, are just to learn and to treasure.  They are precious all the more for that.

I, on the other hand, am a seasonal eater.  I like heavier things in the winter and lighter things in the summer.  And, though summer seems like prime ice cream season, I usually feel (like Will Ferrell in Anchorman) that in the summer, anything dairy is a bad choice.

Enter popsicles.  We have a gourmet popsicle place in Durham that everyone raves about.  I kind of feel guilty about not liking it.  (It’s local!  It has cute stickers for people to put on their cars!  It has mojito pops and hibiscus-chili pops and all sorts of things!)  But at $2 a popsicle, it’s too steep for a just average pop.

The other day, I saw a popsicle mold at the store and decided that this was my chance.  With just a sale-bin mango, a couple of sale-bin limes, and a quick simple syrup, there were my popsicles.  All natural, at the price of about 25 cents apiece.  (Take that, Locopops!)  This recipe was fine for my four-popsicle mold, but if yours is bigger, just go ahead and double.

Mango Lime Pops

(adapted from Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It: And Other Cooking Projects)

1 ripe mango, peeled, pitted, and sliced into smallish pieces

1/4 cup lime juice (from two limes)

1/2 cup sugar

1/2 cup water

(optional: 1/4 tsp cayenne pepper.  I left it out, but you might be more adventurous)

Make a quick simple syrup by combining the water and sugar in a small saucepan over medium heat until sugar has dissolved.  Combine sliced mango, lime juice, and simple syrup (and cayenne pepper, if using) in a blender and puree.  Pour into popsicle molds (mine had four), and freeze for at least 6 hours.

100 degrees.

This is North Carolina, not Florida, and certainly not Arizona.  It was a humid, muggy heat, too.  I did not sign up for this.

When the weather heats up to the TRIPLE DIGITS (ahem), I feel the need to cool down in some way.  This summer’s Big Thing has been iced coffee.  I blame my friend Kelly, who got me addicted and then rudely went to Kenya for the summer, leaving me here with an expensive iced coffee habit and no one to be addicted with.

(The nerve.)

Of course, Kelly is amazing, and so is iced coffee.  What is also amazing is this great low-tech iced coffee fix at home.  I made up a Mason jar of it on my countertop, and this morning, I was greeted by a delicious brew that only had to be run through my reusable coffee filter.  I bet you could also use a French press, with great results.  It’s also not as acidic as regular coffee since apparently running the near-boiling water through the grounds increases the acidity.  My sensitive stomach is grateful.

Poor (Wo)man’s Cold Brew Iced Coffee

Recipe shamelessly borrowed from the Smitten Kitchen (which was itself shamelessly borrowed from the New York Times)

Makes 4 drinks

2/3 cup ground coffee, coarse grind (but I imagine pre-ground would also work)

3 cups water

Stir together coffee and water in a Mason jar (or a French press, if you want to be fancy), and seal with a lid.  Let sit at room temperature for about 8-12 hours.  In the morning, filter coffee through a reusable coffee filter (or a regular one a couple of times) or, if using a French press, press as usual.  Serve with half and half, sugar, and ice.

There you are.  Your summer miracle for triple digit temperatures.

Tune in later in the week for Parts 2 & 3 in the Amazing Warm Weather Treats Series: homemade Mango Lime Pops and homemade sangria.  (It’s even better when you use Three Buck Chuck, I promise!)

(Pictures coming soon.)

Over the past few months, our apartment has been invaded by roaches.  (Roaches are disgusting.  Therefore, you’re perfectly welcome to inwardly say, “Ew,” every time I use the word.  I do.)  We’ve sprayed.  We’ve Boraxed.  We’ve bug-bombed.  But the disgusting little buggers (pun intended) keep on coming back.  So we’re taking the opportunity to move to a nice little two-bedroom townhouse with hardwood floors and more space in a lovely wooded neighborhood within walking distance of Duke.

When we’re staying in one place, it’s easy for me to hoard.  The Nutella is for a special occasion.  I’ll use the beans later.  The things in the freezer will keep forever.  But as the move draws near, I do less shopping and more pulling together meals from the boxes and jars in our freezer and pantry.  The popcorn jar grows empty.  The small bit of rice in the bag is used up.  The chicken breasts and blueberries in the freezer find their way into dinners and smoothies.

It’s a small exercise but one that reminds me to be mindful, to pare down, to examine what I have.

And to be creative.  A ripening mango plus the juice from two forlorn limes, sugar, and water makes delicious popsicles.  Leftover shredded chicken plus a flour tortilla, some chopped tomato, a few drops of Ranch, and a sprinkle of bacon bits makes a good wrap. A dollop of homemade pesto plus shredded chicken, mayonnaise, and the last piece of baguette makes a delicious sandwich.

“What we have is here,” writes Wendell Berry.  As the cabinets are emptied and the popcorn jar holds on to its last kernels, I think he’s right.