Archive for April, 2009
turning off the fear
I don’t watch the news. Haven’t for a few years now. The media is just too hysteria-producing, crazy-making, irresponsible and false. And to this point, my avoidance of the news has served me well. I haven’t missed the anxiety perpetuated by the press and have easily gotten info on significant news events in plenty of time to act appropriately.
That said, I freaked out today. Just enough of the news had seeped into my consciousness to push my panic button. Swine flu. Unemployment. Wall Street. Infant vaccinations. Toxins. Cancer. War. Death.
I put away the magazine report about the shamefully high aluminum levels pharmaceutical companies knowingly pump into infants via vaccinations. I touched my belly and imagined Jude asleep, at peace, safe…for now. And then I listened to Over the Rhine’s song, “Changes Come:”
I wanna have our baby
Some days I think that maybe
This ol’ world’s too f***ed up for any firstborn son
There is all this untouched beauty
The light, the dark both running through me
Is there still redemption for anyone?
Angry and scared, I found myself at a crossroads. I had this huge opportunity to either let fear win, to listen to the “loser talk” that says to be very much afraid of government and Wall Street and war and pandemics and global warming and the irresponsible medical industry. Or to rise up, to hope, to bless, to love.
So I did the best I could right at that moment. I went to the local hardware store and bought all the peace lilies and reed palms they had. The smell of the dirt alone breathed life into me. Water dripped from the thick, green leaves and ran down my arms as I lifted plant after plant into my cart. Breezy, storm-coming-soon air brushed across my face.
And I knew as I waited in line: it’s all gonna be alright. And not in that cheesy denial Hallmarky sort of way. Not in the bumper sticker way either.
I knew because of what we celebrated a few weeks ago, what we celebrate today. There isn’t just an empty tomb. There’s a King, presently risen, sovereign, merciful, and very much aware of our current human condition. I inhaled the truth as I remembered that His perfect, abiding, infinite love drives out fear. Unwanted circumstances? We still have those. At least for now. But His love most definitely drives out fear.
When I got back from the hardware store, I tapped my favorite playlist, cranked it loud, and placed our new plants around the apartment – especially in Jude’s room. And as I did, Mary Gauthier sang out:
We hang in the balance
Dangle between hell and hallowed ground
And every single one of us could use some mercy now.
Mercy, I whispered as I set the last peace lily on the table next to Jude’s crib. And peace, I said, laughing at the spot on my belly where Jude was sticking his butt out. Then I blessed my son with words for him alone.
Mercy.
Peace.
Blessing.
It may be all we’ve got right now. But it comes from the death-destroying Source of Life. And it’s more than strong enough to hold us. If we’ll turn off the fear long enough to let it.
No Commentsmomma bear
A lively tune filled the air around our apartment building as I got in my car to head out on some errands the other day. As I closed and locked the driver-side door, a Latino man hopped out of his minivan singing gracefully with the happy melody: “Jesús es mi salvador…” His voice was pleasant and he smiled as he pulled repair supplies from the minivan.
I sat in my car rubbing my pregnant belly, watching the man like a hawk. He couldn’t have looked more benign, more friendly, more well-meaning. But it didn’t matter. I had become momma bear.
I’ve heard that this is a state of being not uncommon to pregnant women. Toward the final days and weeks of pregnancy, an overwhelming desire to nest and protect take over the most rational thoughts and turn a perfectly normal woman into an aggressive, untrusting creature.
If I’m like that at our apartment in the confines of my locked car with a harmless maintenance man, just imagine me out in public. I am a beast. From insane drivers to the strange man at the gas station who keeps looking at me to the nice cashier at the grocery store who reaches out to touch my belly, it makes no difference. Everyone is a threat. In momma bear world, there is no distinction.
One article I read said, “One of the most dangerous bears that a human can encounter is a mother bear protecting her young.” Another article reiterated that by saying, “A mother bear with cubs is at her most aggressive state.” And finally, Bear.org found that, “attacks by defensive mothers account for 70 percent of human deaths from grizzly bears.”
I’m not sure what the remedy is for momma bear syndrome (MBS). Maybe there is no cure. Maybe it’s chronic. Maybe even when I have little Jude in my arms, the MBS won’t go away. And I suppose that’s not a terrible thing. It’s just maternal instinct, a really good urge that helps us protect our children, even if sometimes we end up protecting them from harmless dangers.
But one thing’s for sure: I have undeniably contracted the MBS bug. And it doesn’t seem to be going away. So the singing maintenance man better watch his back.
No Commentsdeaf man
Oh, how happy I should be if my hearing were completely restored…
~ Ludwig van Beethoven
I pulled up to the park today in need of fresh air. A place to stretch my bones. A quiet place to read, to ask, to search, to walk. I imagine it’s the unpredictable flood of hormones as I near the end of my pregnancy, but something has just been unsettled in me, brimming beneath the surface. Then, suddenly, it will settle and all will be well with the world again only to be disheveled and muddled by some unknown source or by unruly circumstances.
And that’s where I was: trying to center my chi again, so to speak. I figured the way to achieve my goal was by reading an obligatory passage of Scripture, knocking on Heaven’s door, and even shedding some tears so God would know how sincere I was.
But all I could do was sit in cold silence. Unable to speak, unable to hear. But then I did hear something. Just underneath the layer of Springtime city park noises – a gurgling creek, singing blue jays, rustling honeysuckle in bloom, and mating carpenter bees – I heard him.
Beethoven.
The radio was set to NPR and my ears quickly tuned to the soft violins that mark the beginning of Beethoven’s piece, Piano Concerto #5 In E Flat, Opus 73. But you see, this isn’t just any Beethoven piece. This isn’t even just any classical music piece. This is my favorite classical music piece. A piece I have listened to no less than 500 times over the course of 12 years. Like no other song, the strains of this concerto reach into a place in my soul even I don’t fully know.
That’s when I sensed it: a call to simply listen. To set the Holy Scriptures aside. To stop trying so hard to conjure up what to say to God. To stop trying to win gold stars or warm fuzzies from Him. And instead to just receive this gift. His gift. An exquisite song and a holy moment I couldn’t have possibly created or earned.
So I listened. I took deep breaths. I felt baby Jude adjusting his ever-strengthening limbs in my womb. I smiled. But before the concerto could reach the third movement, something broke in my heart. It broke as I remembered that Beethoven was deaf. As the intoxicating melody played on, I couldn’t help wondering how a deaf man could compose music so full of passion and life, beauty and grace.
As the lavish tune came near its end, I realized that Beethoven, deaf as he was, couldn’t have made such passionate and grace-filled music had he not been deaf. It was his brokenness, his weakness, his handicap that made his works exceptional.
So I thought about my state of being, how I had been so deaf this morning. Mute, too. And blind. But then I thought about grace and mercy. The grace and mercy that had met me in a very messy, frigid and restless moment. Met me in a song. Grace and mercy that I may have missed if not for my own weakness. Because if I’m not weak, if I’m not broken, then why would I need grace? Why need mercy?
I sat in a different kind of silence after the song ended, aware that God had met me in all my deafness, in all my limits and inadequacies, in all my ungrace and unmercy. He has come to all of us, and He keeps coming to us, in ways that we couldn’t anticipate or look for. Like in a 200-year-old concerto on the radio when we’re expecting a passage from Leviticus. And if we – you and I – are willing to be willing to set aside our preconceived notions of how He speaks (or sings or dances or breathes), we’ll hear it pulsing underneath all the other sounds of our lives. Grace. Mercy. Love.
And in some language meant for each one of us, He will say into our impaired ears, “Hey, listen to this, Beloved. You won’t believe how beautiful the song of a deaf man can be.”
1 Commentthanks, ms. falsani (a book review)
I just finished reading Cathleen Falsani’s book Sin Boldly today. As I closed the last page of the book, I couldn’t help smiling and feeling a bit lighter on my feet.
Maybe it was the combo of finishing her book the same day I started re-reading Henri Nouwen’s Life of the Beloved.
Maybe it was the Spring air and the puffs of white clouds in an afternoon sky.
Maybe it was a surge of nice pregnancy hormones.
But whatever it was, I came out of the week-long funk I’d been in as I read the last chapter of Cathleen’s treatise on grace. I even laughed.
It probably had something to do with the way she helped me stretch my grace muscles this past month, to see all the nooks and crannies where grace resides…sometimes really ugly and uncommon pockets of the world where grace abides. But it also had something to do with finding such a common voice, a soul sister of sorts, in the pages of Sin Boldly. I heard echoes of my own feelings, hesitancies and hopes as she recorded her interactions with extraordinary people.
Take this conversation, for example, as a Vermont native questions Cathleen about her religious background.
“Wait, go back to that Southern Baptist part,” Julia said, interrupting, as she does. “Are you born-again?” articulating her question as if she were asking me if I were really a headhunter or a Martian.
“Yes,” I said, “but I’m not an asshole. At least not theologically speaking.”
I could picture myself saying the exact same thing to any number of people who ask me if I’m a Christian. Because, let’s face it, Christians (like every other group) get stereotyped, pigeon-holed and otherwise ridiculed due to the asshole-ness of a few poor representatives of the faith (though we are – all of us – poor representatives of Jesus more often than not).
But I digress. That was just one small example of why I loved this book. The candidness, the messiness, the laugh-out-loud-ness, the unorthodox search for love and grace, mercy and peace. It is a book I highly recommend to anyone who wants to be moved a step or two closer to an understanding of unearned favor, unmerited joy, undeserved love. Because, as Frederick Buechner says, “in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”
Amen, brother Buechner. And thanks, Ms. Falsani. You have helped me break off another link in the chain of lies that bind me to ungrace. Grace has indeed taken me “by the hand and romanced me.”
No Commentsnoise
I sat in front of the dark TV screen and a remote I hadn’t touched in over five weeks and I thought about this fresh and vital side of Easter. The other side of 40 days of fasting. Mostly, I thought about my pre-Lent attitude about fasting, an attitude that sounded something like this:
I’m already a disciplined person – moderate, temperate, restrained. I already spend so much of my life in fasting mode, sacrificing and giving up luxuries. Why should I have to give up any more of the few, small pleasures I afford myself on such a limited basis?
Can anyone say entitlement mentality?
So I was sitting on the couch, staring at the reflection of the sun in our darkened high-def boob tube, thinking about Lent and how surprised I was by this fast, surprised by how it had transformed and freed me from chains I didn’t know needed to be loosed.
You see, my TV-watching wasn’t excessive – at least not in the hours-spent-on-the-couch category. Nonetheless, I had still managed to abuse it, using the very sound of afternoon shows to keep me from feeling lonely as I work from home. The days can be long and, boy, that Ellen sure makes the silence not seem so loud from three-to-four o’clock. And then there’s Biography Channel at four o’clock. And the Game Show Network at five while I prep dinner. Oh, and then why not leave it on the music channel while Jason and I eat dinner. Then back into the living room to numb out in front of Nick at Nite or Food Network.
And there you go: the silence, the loneliness, cured. But something else had begun to die.
It was this dying that I became aware of once I began examining my heart in preparation for Lent. As I considered the number of things it would be good for me to say no to for a little while, it became clear that I had used TV (and so many other safe addictions) to fill a void, a void that I needed if I was ever to explore other deeper, more fulfilling things. I had used it to keep me from better places. Places Ellen and Rachael Ray and Chuck Woolery can never take me.
To good places where I make a phone call to a friend or relative. To contemplative places where I read a favorite chapter from a familiar book. To selfless places where I write a card to someone in need. To solitary places where I go for a walk. To quiet places where I take a nap and feel my baby kicking inside. To essential places where I talk with God. And listen. Listen to His Spirit. Listen to bird songs and rain drops outside my window. Listen to my life.
And in saying no to something that I was misusing (because of so much fear), in Lent I found myself saying yes to so much life and lightness and freedom. Refreshed relationships. Revived mind. Energized body. Reawakened soul.
With Resurrection Day come and gone, I may or may not turn the TV on to catch my 9:00 p.m. episode of Seinfeld every night. I can hardly believe it, but I just don’t need the noise anymore. Then again, even if I don’t need it, I’m thinking a few laughs at George Costanza’s expense are exactly the noise this celebration calls for.
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