Imaging a Void

This past April, after two years of combining and analyzing data, global astronomers constructed the first ever image of a black hole. The Event Horizon Telescope Team (named after the term for the the edge of a black hole that is the gravitational place of no escape) brought together eight radio telescopes stationed at different points across the planet and synced by powerful atomic clocks.

As I learned more about this miraculous event, I was struck by the similarities between a black hole and the subtle, almost impossible to name, darkness that inhabits many people’s stories.

• I grew up in a good Christian home.

• My parents were never divorced.

• I always had everything I needed.

• I was never abused growing up.

These statement can all be true and an adult can still struggle deeply with issues that make them feel crazy. We all have unnamed places of darkness in our lives and I believe speaking our untold stories in community requires a great cloud of witnesses (maybe even eight!) to see the way well-disguised harm has robbed our lives of light.

Evil by its very nature is invisible. The more subtle evil is, the harder it is to image. The most important photos of our lives are ones where there is no light. But how do we take a picture of something that does not emit light? How do we see a void?

No single person on earth can take a picture of the damage done by darkness in their story. Ours lens are all too small. We all need an Event Horizon Team. A team to see the accretion disks in our past—the points in time when our dignity traveled so close to darkness that it broke apart our glory.

As you watch the video below, do you hear how difficult it is to capture the voids of protection, care, comfort and nurturing in our stories? When in your story do you suspect the gravitational pull of darkness? Do you have an Event Horizon Team that helps you bring together these elusively invisible images?

Mass in a Hard hat

Engraved in my mind since mid-June are the inspiringly awkward images of the first mass held in the Cathedral of Notre Dame. After its devastating structural fire on April 15th, 2019, the pictures capture well the task of living in the middle space of trauma—the place between destruction and recovery. Priests wearing white hard hats as they are adorned in their ceremonial robes demonstrate both a commitment to sacred tradition and a wisdom that structural safety has been compromised.

As you look through these images, what event in your life comes to mind? When did you stand on the banks of the Seine and stare dumbfounded as something valuable in your life was consumed by flames? What hard hat did you wisely learn to put on if you were ever to go inside again? As you searched for a sense of normalcy in the aftermath, how had the view of the ceiling changed?

The Privilege of Chronology

A recent episode of my favorite podcast (On Being) featured the singing/songwriting dynamic duo Amy Ray & Emily Saliers, known as The Indigo Girls. The entire podcast is fabulous and fascinating but most through provoking for me were Sailer’s words on the loss it can be for members of the queer community to have life events out of order:

“I’m getting married next week. My partner’s Canadian. We’re getting married by a justice of the peace because we’re afraid they’re going to repeal the laws before we get a chance to — so we’re going to hurry up and get married, and then we’re going to have a ceremony. So queer people they have to — you can’t do it the way you dream about it really, you know? We had the kid first and then — it doesn’t matter how straight people do it. It’s fine. But we haven’t had the same privileges of chronology.”

The phrase “privilege of chronology” is an insightful path we can all follow deeper into our stories of loss. As a developmental trauma survivor, I had to become more adult at a very young age in order to parent my parents. This beautiful phrase “the privilege of chronology” captures the tragedy it was for me to know how to do my own laundry at age 6 but without a memory of someone ever reading a picture book out loud to me.

When in your story have things been dis-ordered regarding time? What did you learn to do earlier than would have been good for your young heart? What did no one teach you until later in life when an inability became a source of shame? When as an adult have circumstances (infertility, premature loss of a parent) meant you felt “behind” others?

What does it mean for you to name a loss of the privilege of chronology in your story--that something didn’t happen the way you dreamed it would? How might you give yourself the gift of becoming a “time traveler” as you care for yourself now?