Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere. – Einstein
Sitting. Fingers frozen, tapping on my laptop with
birds really chirping!
A cacophony of praise to the Holy One.
The wonder of it.
Sun shining. Blessed,
I am conscious of my dirty heart. So often
resentful, feeling left out or uninvited
to the party.
(I’m starting to think Facebook isn’t good for my soul) and
He says to me:
Enough.
I want to be enough.
I Am.
It was stunning for me to realize that I had no anxiety the entire time I was away at the Festival of Faith & Writing. The thought of returning home brought the familiar burning in my chest — so unwelcome. I do not want to accept its presence. And just for a minute I know that I must drill down and try to find the truth there, asking myself Can I figure out why I am afraid of coming home?
There was a small sense in which this place, this moment wasn’t real.
Just as I lament to myself (a regular foible of mine, to be sure) that I didn’t have any real relationships here at the festival, another part of me knows that it was quite wonderful to wander anonymously. Soaking in wisdom and not be expected to say anything. I didn’t have to be wise or special in any way. I could many times, for hours on end, not utter a single word to another human being; which I found was peaceful, even liberating. (Not speaking except perhaps to an infrequent stranger in a seminar, so that I wouldn’t come off a weirdo.)
But mostly, I was silent.
I wasn’t even writing this week. My head was going, of course. Especially my dreams which were full of thoughts, words, conjectures and I would wake every morning with all that magical and perplexing jumble. Words. Ideas. Inspiration came unbidden, naturally, because of all the incredible people and ideas surrounding. And then it would drift away as my mind became clear and the caffeine settled into my veins.
And then, we return home and there it is. The fear.
Here it is. I didn’t have the sense this week that God is disappointed in me. It was gone – that feeling that is always hovering in and around me that I’m not measuring up. The legacy of a childhood gone awry, the anger and disappointment of my human father killing joy.
Where did it go and why did it have to return? Drilling down, still further, to that little place where I feel God’s displeasure. I have a hunch this is not of God or from God at all.
I was having this amazing conversation at dinner with Tom. He expressed his belief that most American Christians have this lover relationship with God, I knew that I don’t. I have a disappointed-with-me-and-angry-at-me-parent type of relationship with God.
I think I know God. Fact is I hardly know God. If he is even knowable fully in a human lifetime, I sure doubt it. And God knows everything about me. And God is very much not disappointed with me. In fact he’s thrilled. He made me to be a creative, a thinker, a deeply passionate, mostly introverted whittler of words and pictures.
And God likes me – generally.
Of course I’m am still an ugly sinner. Deeply aware of my spiritual lack. Needing a Holy filling daily, even moment by moment. Needing a Holy shaping, a changing by the beautiful Potter who is creating something beautiful out of the pieces and parts of my little life.
No, he’s not disappointed and there it is, that’s the source of my anxiety. That’s the place that I must return to work on, over and over, and again, even as I perfect this craft of writing it is the being that matters most. I must always, and frequently, sit with him and allow the Holy One to perfect me.
It’s a homecoming I am unused to — this beautiful welcome he is offering. It is so good to know that I am home.
[Being wounded] came effortlessly,
like an comfortable sweater
she put it on easily, too often.
Frayed and worn,
pain became her fate.
[Being changed]is hard, and only
comes by choosing. An old woman or a toddling child,
each must take
a step. It’s faith in the making.
Being wounded or being changed
comes in the choosing.
I have always known that words have power
to disappoint and even threaten.
They so often offend and injure, colliding with others
perceptions
of me,
of themselves,
of life together in this messy place.
And words heal,
offered as a rich confession that brings one to the edge of truth
and back again to our plain old lives.
Sometimes it’s a sweet and holy thing,
words. The offering.
If I didn’t choose to put pen to paper, finger to keyboard?
What if, what then? If I didn’t fight to get
this very moment down through distractions, through issues and problems of my day.
What if I stopped fighting for these words?
Driving along, I feel that anxious gnawing in my stomach, again.
I am full of self-loathing, doubt and fear. I hate this weakness, but I am questioning every word put down,
wondering how and why.
Why try so hard?
But then I know.
I would write even if no one tells me I’m good.
Then it’s said to me: “you’re good” and I don’t believe. Or I wonder,
is this enough?
These thoughts, do they change
anything
anyone
for
the
better?
This not merely about purpose.
It’s not simply about being good or even great at this craft.
I don’t know why I write, except that I was made for this.
Each thought, scratched out on a piece of tattered envelope is an offering.
Each confession a piece of me. My flesh, my hopes, my mind
are all there on the page. I write.
This is what I was made to do.
And I will have to leave the rest up you.
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Something else I wrote on the negative power of our words, Hatred’s Sweet Kiss.
Today I said no.
I said no to something that might have been sweet and good, something that I would enjoy and that would make me feel good about myself – helping other people. It was something that was even noble. Can I be honest and tell you that I need some things to do that make me feel good about myself? The recent Stations of the Cross exhibit, which I was a part of, was profound for me in that it was a thing that I did, for me.
Today I said no.
No because there are other good things, needs, jobs for me to do. And I have to be careful as an addict, to not feed that need to help others.
Things are going on in my family, screaming out to me, which need resolution and clarity and my time. My children are of the age that they need my daily prayer, daily. My attention, fully. My love and affirmations, honestly. This takes the kind of attention that I haven’t had for them as of yet. My widowed mother living alone needs more of my attention, care and to be blunt she needs errands accomplished. My sisters each deserve my love and attention in a way that I haven’t ever had the courage to give them. My marriage isn’t perfect; it has holes that need patching even though, after eighteen years together, we know it’s for life. We’re in the boat together but we’ve sprung a few leaks. No one’s sinking but we deserve to give the time that a good marriage requires.
So, today I said no – no to something good. So that I could say yes to being a mother, a sister, a daughter, a wife and more than anything I said yes to be a writer.
Today I said yes.
In the space of days I grew up. Not wise in years or experience, but still inevitably I became an adult this week.
I am not ready for this next stage of life but then, that’s how life works doesn’t it? Was it John Lennon who quipped that “Life happens while we are making other plans?” Seriously true.
When I was a child, I was often hiding — afraid. More often than not habitually worried and anxious about my father and mother, each for different reasons. It was the fights — the yelling, the meanness, and then Dad’s long absences which even as we savored them I feared what they meant.
And when he returned, I hid. I was attempting to be invisible. I think I was underdeveloped emotionally, for as I went numb to life I lost many, many years of my life that I cannot remember. Try as I might, and I do try so very hard, I cannot recall the early years in Papua New Guinea, then California, most of high school in Texas, and only a small amount of college years. All those years I lived with my parents. And in the years post college what I remember is still all intertwined with my parents dysfunctional marriage and relationships. My life was so tangled up with my parent’s happiness and my father’s happiness and success that even as they travelled all over the world doing “God’s work” I returned back home to them over and over again.
I worked for my father. I attached myself to his coat strings of always striving and never being satisfied. I had no way of knowing at the time, but all I wanted was to know him. To gain his impossible approval would have been a cherry on top of the Sundae of simply knowing my father and finally understanding why he was so angry.
But I never learned why he raged. He died without really telling me, except to say that his anger was “righteous” and to the end he justified it. Even as I told him the day before his brain surgery that he had hurt me, that he had wrecked me. I told him, out loud to his face that I was damaged and he said he always thought his was a righteous anger. For most of my life I doubted God’s existence because he didn’t heal my father – not to heal the brain tumors which I never asked for and never expected, but I prayed for my father to be healed of his raging anger that he took out on my mother for forty+ years and on his four daughters all of our lives, as well as on many of his employees and other innocent people.
Oh, for most of my life I was asleep, numb, and afraid to breathe. Stomach aches of stress we remembered this week as we recounted how each of us daughters live with various ailments from having ulcerous stomachs, frequent headaches, addictions including alcohol, the raging, and for me at least, I have ongoing anxiety, cataclysmic fear and depression.
In the space of days, this week I grew up as I realized that my father is gone these nine years and my mother is old. There is no one else to take care of her and she has no plan. How could he have left her with no plan? Because he didn’t ever believe he would die — stupid man. And so, we the daughters who are still fraught with the consequences (of him) will become the adults who care for her. This is right. This can be done.
But in some ways I am angry. Just as I have begun to wake up, to see that my life was half-lived, full of fear and frequently put on hold pain, even as this is so, I must once again become the care giver, in the space of days. I must grow up and forget the past which I cannot remember and step bravely into the future.
I must grow up.
Family in town and from out of town
sometimes means heavy remembering,
and just a little trying to forget though you are
no longer disappearing.
Into the bottle.
Family in town means many goings-on,
even when you’re sick and tired. It means
running out of money. It means trying hard to make everyone
happy. Trying hard to just be.
Happy.
Family in town
means someone drinking too much, and
everyone else acting like it’s not true.
Your triggers activated, but sticking to the
almost- four- years- sober- kind -of- truth.
Family in town means laughing, lots of gut busting laughter,
Eating too many desserts, and wondering if you’re
forgetting something important.
Family in town, you remember and forget.
People gone. People here.
You don’t get to choose
Family in town.
There are people,
good people who toil every day
at work they don’t love and some
days simply endure.
Why do these people, good people do that?
They’re partnered with a creative soul;
a dreamer, someone
who scribbles words one after another, collected into pages
of an idea that is yet to come;
that hears a different drum beat and dance;
who changes others’ trajectory through an image or a song;
who observes life for its beauty and complexity;
who follows an uncomfortable path into the unknown.
These people, good people do
their everyday work because they love a dreamer.
Here’s to the good people whose love’s labor
is a gift to us all.
For Tom and Carol and the other good people.
JESUS IS HUMAN. JESUS IS GOD.
(edited for theological accuracy!)
It was important for me to learn that Jesus was fully human in every way, even though he is also the Son of God.
Jesus hungered. He grew weary after a long dusty walk or a difficult day. He prayed, yes he talked to God and it was necessary to do so. He required food and water, even human love. He is fully human.
Jesus had people, his people, his community – a mother who loved, a step-father who provided, half siblings all with their messy lives and needs, friends who gave to him and took from him. He had friends who got sick and died.
He wept salty tears. He thirsted as he hung there, dying slowly and painfully.
If he was not fully human his dying would be meaningless. If he is not the Son of God his dying would be meaningless. It is in the joining, of being fully human and fully God, that his sacrifice is fully known to us.
The day I was able to absorb the idea that this Jesus died for me, my heart and my life were forever changed. First to fathom it, was just the just beginning. But then to accept the notion that Christ would have died on that gruesome, utterly painful cross for me – even if were I the only sinner needing his sacrifice – yes, only me. Still he would have died.
Owning that concept fully and completely, that Christ died for me, changed me into a different person. The trajectory of my life altered, its purpose settled into a different rhythm as I was able to understand, though I will never know fully, this sacrifice.
As I worked on this piece “the weeping women of Jerusalem” I thought about how often I weep as a mother. It is often because of motherhood — the burden and the responsibility to care for, guide and protect my children, my deep love for them and even more so my strong desire that they would come to know the Jesus that I know. My heart breaks from it, sometimes.
As Jesus met the women of Jerusalem, who wept for him, according to Luke 23:27-31, it is said:
There followed him a great multitude of the people, and of women who bewailed and lamented him. But Jesus turning to them said, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For behold, the days are coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never gave suck!’ Then they will begin to say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us’; and to the hills, ‘Cover us.’ For if they do this when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?”
I know the wounds of motherhood, the weeping for my children. Jesus meets us there — in his sacrifice. And he will meet our children too, though we must trust him to do so and allow him wipe our tears.
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Stations of the Cross is a visual art and music experience in Madison, Wisconsin, opening March 30, 2012, with exhibit hours during Holy Week from March 30 through Good Friday on April 6. See our website for details on the art and music exhibit experience, artists, blog posts, and exhibit schedule. RSVP on Facebook.
The middle years
of middle age come without fair warning.
Raising the young
who think they know everything.
And those of us solidly wedged into midlife know
with confidence, that we know next to nothing.
The middle years are half way to a certain death,
while breathing in a life we did not pick. For
life happens even as you make plans, dream dreams, and pray.
The middle years
when the body betrays,
the heart is crushed
by what actually happened,
not our plans.
The mind with every strong conviction
is suddenly even more
uncertain.
Oh, for the days of knowing everything!
But then going back there to certainty
would mean doing this
all over again.
Whether I die of a prolonged fight with cancer or go quickly in a mishap, I hope that I will have no regrets.
I watched my father die and learned something. For whatever reason, Dad couldn’t let go of his life. He died resisting, even disbelieving that it was possible that he might actually die.
He wouldn’t allow goodbyes, because he believed that there was more he was supposed to do; there was more that God wanted him for, there was more to accomplish for God. I can’t help thinking how sad and arrogant that idea is.
And yet, I spend more days that I want to admit asking “Is there something that God wants of me?”
I have spent prolonged, painful years learning this simple lesson. (Or not learning, but banging my proverbial head against the wall.)
I have wrestled with God, fought, cried, and shaken my fist at God insisting that there must be something important I can only do — insisting that God help me feel valuable, necessary – even important.
Believing that there was more than this, that God has for me to do. How sad, how arrogant that idea really is.
Perhaps these years of frequent struggle were meant to help me absorb this one truth, this one hard lesson. I can’t do anything to make God love me any more than he already does. No more than he did at the moment that I came to know him fully. You see, I don’t believe our days and nights of toiling matter much at all in the Big Story.
To the God of the Universe.
When I die, he will ask did you love me. Did you love those I put in your way while you were striving for significance? Did you feed my lambs? How did you treat them? Did you give up your power? Did you give of yourself? Did you give away the things I entrusted with you – power, money, love? How did you care for those along the pathways of your life? Did you give up your life?
This tiny nugget of truth eluded my father. He died believing he hadn’t done enough.
I hope I die knowing God is pleased and that there isn’t anything more I can do for him. Whatever state of my mind and heart in those last days of my life, I hope that I will know there is nothing more that I need to accomplish.
I hope I will know when I die that I spent my days giving it all away.
Nothing you do today or ever will do will make God love you more. Do you believe that?
In a couple of week I will be a part of The Stations of the Cross exhibit in Madison Wisconsin. It is a collaborative effort among 15 artists and musicians to create a week-long art exhibition as an experience of the 14 stations of the Passion of Christ in the final days of his human life.
This is something I wrote considering the Stations.
For the project seven visual artists have each taken two Stations of the Cross and have created something within their medium (paint, photography, glass mosaic, cloth, sculpture, etching). Each was considering the suffering and resurrection of Jesus as they interpreted it visually. Then musicians responded. Each artist had the freedom to choose the “lens” or perspective through which they interpreted the journey of Christ. Over a period of several months, they internalized and stewed on their stations to discern and recognize its gravity, complexity and significance. Then they reacted in a concrete form.
It isn’t often as a visual artist, that I choose to actively express a part of my faith through my photography. This project was an exception to that. 
The Christian life is often described as a road walked with Jesus, ever cognizant of the suffering that surrounds us every day. If we were able to walk with him through those days and hours, two thousand years ago, even the moments before his death, how might that change us?
Someone once said that much of the spiritual journey is being stripped of all that we tend to put our trust in. Life is found in losing it for Christ’s sake; life itself and that which God has prepared for each of us, if received fully, deeply, viscerally, into our dna, will teach us what it means to walk with Jesus today.
The object of the Stations historically is to help the faithful to make a spiritual pilgrimage of prayer, through meditating on the chief scenes of Christ’s sufferings and death.
We invite you to walk with us back to those days of Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday if you are local to Madison:
The Stations of the Cross exhibit will take place at the Common Wealth Gallery in the Madison Enterprise Center, 3rd floor, at 100 S. Baldwin St, Madison, WI (map).
The exhibit will be open during the following times.
The Bible says that there is no human pain or joy that Jesus has not taken on to himself when he lived and died two thousand years ago in Palestine. From the Garden of Gethsemane to the Cross he died on. Because of his sacrifice, we are able to see the world differently and experience the highs of love and joy, as well as the lows of suffering and sorrow. This is in and through Jesus.
As Henri Nouwen said: “Jesus died and rose for all people with all their differences, so that all could be lifted up with him into the splendor of God. There is immense pain in the wide world around us and there is immense pain in the small world within us. But all pain belongs to Jesus.”
Walking these stations is an opportunity to pause, set aside the distractions of your life, in order to listen and remember Jesus of Nazareth. What you suffer he suffered. Experience the redemption and good news.
God whispers to us in our pleasures,
speaks to us in our conscience,
but shouts in our pains;
it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
–C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
Walk with us. Walk with him.
Logic & Imagination 