Caged Birds and Clouds of Witnesses

 

I do not know why the caged bird sings.  Not in any way to the extent that Maya Angelou did, to have been caged in by extreme brokenness and abuse and trauma and political will beyond my control – and then to live as witness to a relentless hope birthed by scars formed out of too many unyielding flames.  I am a white, privileged woman born to highly educated parents who has been afforded every opportunity and more to be anything and everything I want to be.  Yes, it is true that I face discrimination in my family configuration.  And my experiences are a fleck of dust in the context of slavery, the Jim Crow laws of the South that still inform perception and reality in my home state and the ludicrous over-representation of people of color in prison, below-cost-of-living jobs, limited access to education and substandard housing.

Maya Angelou was – and is – one of the Sages who began to penetrate my naïve consciousness while I grew up on college campuses in the South.  Her words were beautiful, devastating, encouraging, challenging and empowering.  The formidable and gracious space her presence created, even on a stage several rows from me, simply made me want to be more.  I wanted to be more attentive, in tune with the pulse of humanity's breadth and spurred to action and hope by the messy intersection and co-existence of brokenness and hope.

I do not know if I have achieved any of them, those budding aspirations she began all those years ago when her words and presence began their work in me.  But I am working toward it, still.  The news of her death reached me – quite literally through an NPR broadcast – as I drove through her hometown of Winston-Salem today following a day of discussion and debate about what we need to end homelessness in North Carolina.

My faith, and its ancient texts, talks about the clouds of witnesses that surround us.  Witnesses to encourage.  To empower.  To tell the truth even when that truth is crushing.  To push us to change everything.  And hold out the promise and power of relentless hope.

Deep sadness at the loss of Maya Angelou’s witness on this side of God’s great embrace. Overwhelming gratitude for the undying legacy and truth she leaves us.  "Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear, I rise, " she says.  And so she did. And is.

Never Waste an Uphill

 

I try to run every now and then.  Or, really, to jog.  I don’t have much interest in a flat-out run.  Even when I played competitive sports, I was the last to the line in every sprint.  When I first started attempting to put jogging into my life on a regular basis as an adult, a friend told me to never waste a downhill – to always run a downhill to get a breather.  Here in the southern Appalachians, there are a whole lot of hills.  There is one really great flat run in town by the French Broad River, and I always feel like such a better runner when I get the chance to follow that path.  But the more accessible run – the one that is just outside my front door through the streets of West Asheville – that one has hills.  Today was a day I got a couple of hours to myself, and so I went out my front door in my running shoes and began to do my meandering jog.  It felt great. As I reached my turn around point, I realized why – I had pretty much been running downhill for 25 minutes.

Like thousands of other people, today is a complicated day for me.  Full of angst and grief at not being the mom I had always wanted to be for my Abigail, feeling her absence more keenly as parades of moms and daughters walk past me at church, and stand in line for brunch at the neighborhood eateries and the long stretch of hours until Tuesday afternoon and I see her again.  She taught me, and still does, that I can be a mom despite – and maybe because of – my multiple levels of baggage and failure.  And at the same time, as I sat with tears streaming in church today, there are acres of gratitude for my Marley, an unplanned for and completely unexpected gift of a child who I get to love and parent and learn from in a hundred ways each day.  She, too, reminds me that it is not my failures that define me, but instead the expansive grace and love that forms me in my very real and messy and chaotic humanness.

I think there are probably not many downhills for very many folks that do their best to show up, in all of their humanness, for life.   Certainly there are not for me.  It’s when I am going uphill, I realized today, that I pay a whole lot more attention to what is around me – ‘cause I need every bit of it to make it to the top.  A spot of shade, a more gentle span of road, an encouraging smile from the guy mowing his grass.   A second chance, even, at love and marriage and parenthood in the climb out of the ashes of other dreams.  

And the 25 minutes uphill to get back home today?  Well, I walked the last 15.  And was grateful for every step.

Choosing Church

 I joined a church today.  And not because I was the Pastor, or married to the Pastor.  But because I chose to.  It is the first time in my life that I have done so as an adult (or as a child attached to parents who made the choice) that was not attached to a vocation calling for either me or my spouse.  And, yet, it is entirely that as well – our vocation as a family – that led us to the place we have inhabited on Sunday mornings since September.  Each week, each email, each call or conversation I have thought to myself, “this could be home.”  Simultaneously, we have as a family said, “these are our people.” 

 

And we are not there each Sunday.  We are the family I was often frustrated with when I was the Pastor – absent sometimes for 3 weeks in a row when Sunday School needed extra helpers and we as parents needed support and worship was sparse and we were part of the reason why.  Our life as a family, with two more than full-time working parents and children who get sick at inconvenient times, and sometimes with so much else going on that a few hours of quiet removed from the world on Sunday morning is what we need more than air to breathe…that is my life.  My reality, my joy, my angst, my waking dream – all in the same moment.

Still, though, it is Church that sustains and creates and moves and changes and molds me.  It has been so since before I was in the world, I suspect, and certainly since that long ago moment in a Southern Baptist church in South Carolina that welcomed and blessed me into God’s family to enter the journey Jesus offers us, and walks beside us every step of the way.  For Michelle and I both, taking this step today to say Yes in a very public way is a not-small thing that signifies a years-in-the-making-opening to so much that neither of us thought would ever come into being again.

I joined a church today.  We joined a church today: a non-traditional (whatever that means) family with all kinds of scars and hopes and loves and sorrows and joys for the present and future that God is creating with us all the time.  A church that reminds us, and lives, that Jesus joins us right here in the middle of the story and that Jesus allows our Alleluias to rest with him when necessary to remind us of the promise of Easter – as my two pastors spoke of so wisely today.

A blessed life it is, with Easter ever on the horizon.  And resurrection happening sometimes even when the ashes are still lingering on our foreheads.

Showing Up

 

Sunsets in the southern Appalachians are one of my favorite times of day.  The sun slips away quietly here, earlier than in the flatlands, sliding behind the soft edges of these old mountaintops.  Color lingers in the sky a little longer, shades of pinks and oranges.  Today in the early days of Spring, bare tree branches are outlined against the fading colors.

And so here I sit, watching the colors change, a glass of decent wine beside me.  It’s quiet, peaceful and I have music on in the background to keep me company.  So much to be grateful for, and I am thankful beyond words for all of it.  And yet I struggle mightily to keep the sadness at bay because it’s one of those weekends – the really long ones that stretch from Thursday night to Tuesday afternoon without a glimpse of the little blond-haired, blue-eyed girl that calls me Mama.  These are the hardest days of the month.  While I am certain the same is true for her other parent when my daughter is with me, I am learning to not try and tell a story that is not mine to tell. 

Letting go of what I had known with certainty would be my life – what I knew deep down in the blood and guts that make up who I am – letting go of that life is a daily practice, and I suspect will be so for a long time.  Because it doesn’t get easier to not have those running feet of my girl running around me everyday.  It doesn’t get easier to wake up thinking I’ve heard her cry out and then realizing it was just a dream because her bed is filled only with her stuffed animals and princess pillow.  It doesn’t get easier to stumble over the school bus she’s left near the door, causing me to smile at her remarkable imagination while tears run into an empty room so full of her presence.  It is harder now than ever.

I went to church early on Easter Sunday, a tradition my parents began long ago with Easter sunrise service when I was growing up.  Grieving because there was no small hand holding mine, no pulpit waiting for me -- but showing up because I knew that I needed to.  Grateful for the inner push that got me into the pew, and for my girlfriend sitting beside me who weathers all my lows and highs and everything in between.   The priest said that believing is sometimes as basic as showing up, time after time.  Maybe as simple as choosing to get out of bed when you can’t find a reason why getting up matters.  And I wondered, as I was weeping silently and holding out my hand for the Eucharist, if faith and believing and hope could be as messy and as earthy as the blessed bread and wine becoming part of my sore and bruised and wanting body.

Maybe this is why I cherish the sunset so much.  Because it shows up, one of the most primal of acts that keeps our world turning and surviving – reminding me that showing up for my life is just as primal an act.  It’s not the life I was certain I would inhabit.  Much of it is far richer than I could have ever dreamed possible; much of it more difficult than I thought I could survive.  I am learning to show up for a life that is chaotic and predictable, painful and exquisitely joyful, heart-breaking and soul-mending – often all in the same moment.

The sun has set for today on this part of the southern Appalachians that is becoming my home.  A few more tentative roots have gone into the ground from my heart and soul, watered by my modern-day tears into the soil made up of my ancestors’ toil and heartache and joy.  It’s enough for now.

On Election Eve

 

Bombarded is not too strong of a word.  Radio spots. E-mails.  Phone calls.  Television commercials.  Facebook ads. Signs stuck in the ground every couple of inches.  Billboards.  All of them demanding we take sides, and each side listing dozens of reasons that the other side is evil, un-American, and against you personally. 

For the record, I am a registered Independent.  I have never voted a straight-party ticket, though I do tend to vote more for one side than the other.  And yes, I have voted in this current election, and did not vote straight-party this time either.  I know my friends and co-workers may find that appalling, but it’s true.

I could tell you hundreds of reasons why I voted for President Obama a second time.  I am passionate about them all.  What I am more passionate about, though, is what happens next – what happens when we wake up on Wednesday, after the votes have been counted and the victors and losers alike have stumbled home after a very long night of celebrating or not.  Because regardless of who wins what, we’ll still all be here.  Neighbors.  In-laws.  Co-workers.  Sisters.  Parents.  Citizens of a country built on a myriad of hopes and mistakes.  Human beings who continue to build lives full of all kinds of hopes and countless mistakes.

Mary Oliver said once that the world doesn’t have to be beautiful to work, yet it is anyway.  It’s easy to forget that in an election season, when too many seem intent on dividing neighbors rather than uniting us all for the common good of a world that is, indeed, in need of a change.  A world that is, without question, in need of a people that want to move forward into a future that includes less of taking sides and more of sitting at the same table.

Angels and Demons

 

It’s one of those Good Fridays that lends itself to solemnity. Fog. Rain. Damp chill that follows you, even indoors.  I should be getting in my car to go to Good Friday service, to follow that ancient liturgy, remember the story with others who seek to make sense of all this marked day means year after year.  But I’m not.  I am sitting here, unable to shake the words, the face, the anguish of J.P.  A man tormented, relentlessly, by demons he’s been unable to shake. A lifetime of pain that expresses itself in ugly words, aggressive and violent behavior, addiction, literally uncontrollable rage.  He prays all the time.  Carries a rosary, pleads with Jesus to save him.  Pounds walls, waves knives, talks about getting a gun to kill those he thinks are against him and what he thinks is the right way to be in the world.  Recounts his numerous sins, wonders aloud if God will forgive him, bows his head in shame.

            There’s a clinical diagnosis for him, I am sure.  Likely several.  Over the years I’ve known him, he has resisted any kind of medical treatment, certain God will save him, that Jesus is all he needs.  “Medication is its own kind of demon,” he said to me once, “and I don’t need any more demons.”  He talks about angels, too, angels living in the human bodies of those who’ve tried to love him, to be his friends, those who keep opening the door for him time and time again to help him work toward some semblance of stability and safety.

            Some versions of the story we remember today say the earth stood still the moment Jesus of Nazareth breathed his last.  An attentiveness of the highest order to hold vigil with One who would choose death to show that there is no place Love will not go.  And so the earth stood still, centered on that hill of skulls, keeping watch over the broken, battered body of Jesus.

             Angels keeping watch, standing between the demons and the lives they seek to devour.  I encounter both, every day.  It’s ugly. Messy. Heart-breaking.  We scrabble for any small sign of life, of hope, of a step forward.  It comes, often, in ways we cannot predict or anticipate.  All those years ago on a cross studded with nails, soaked in blood.  This morning, in J.P. pulling out his calendar and writing down an appointment to see a therapist.

            “…let the whole world see and know that things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new, and that all things are being brought to their perfection by him through whom all things were made…”  --Good Friday liturgy, The Book of Common Prayer

Marked

I went to church at noon today.  Left email unread and a list of things to do mostly still to do.  I was feeling pretty out of sorts, to be honest.  Tired, in the bone-deep way that only emotional and spiritual exhaustion bring.  I have a good life.  An amazing life, even.  And – and, I have so much baggage that keeps following me around.  Some of it can’t be classified as baggage, really, more just the real-life messiness of a divorce involving a shared child.  But some of it is simply baggage.  Stuff that needs to be ground into dust, let go of, forgiven.

So I went to church, in the middle of the day.  To be embraced by the liturgy, to acknowledge with others the depth of our need for repentance, to be reminded of our mortality, to be assured of our forgiveness for all that has been done and left undone that turned away from Life.  I listened to ancient, prophetic words.  I heard the good news.  I took the torn bread and poured out cup into my own human brokenness.  And I got marked.  Marked with the sign of the cross - smeared in black, oily ashes on my forehead.  Somewhere, in the midst of the liturgy, the spoken word, the sung prayers, smeared crosses and broken bread, I became a little more whole.  Let go of a bit more baggage.

The cross on my forehead has nearly faded away now, 8 hours later.  Sweat, distracted scratching, time…the ashes are barely noticeable.  It reminds me some of what is happening with a tattoo on my back, a mark made 15 years ago now.  That mark, over time, is also fading.  It was – and is – a mark I’ve cherished, both at its most vibrant and now as it fades more and more into my body.  The ashes and that tattoo: both are symbols of the very core of who I am.  Identities that matter, yes.  And identities that simply are solid and whole and me: claiming me from the inside out as one who loves, one who is forgiven, one who is marked for Life.

“ Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?” –Isaiah 58:6-7

This season, these weeks of Lent, may I remember the core of why it is I choose to seek this fast.