Beyond Holding On

This time of year, when I’m weary of the cold, short days, darkness becomes a force to survive. I start counting down the days til the WInter Solstice, trying to outlast discouragement.

Waiting it out. Making it through. Holding on. These are strategies I perfected at an early age in a chaotic home.

But Barbara Brown Taylor’s words invite me to a different posture in these final seven days before 2020’s diminishment of light ends.

“I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again, so there is really only one logical conclusion. I need darkness as much as I need light.”

Learned. Saved. Needed. These are not words I associate with darkness.

What if instead of surviving darkness I could relax into it? Savor it? Enjoy it? Is that even possible?

Opening up. Resting in. Embracing. Not things I learned to do as a child, but often what my soul is asked to do on its journey towards adulting.

This year, December 22nd will be a longer day, but only by three seconds. An imperceptible shift that usually has to accumulate for months before I sense the relief of it.

But, if I can embrace this final week of deepening darkness, maybe my spirit will be more able to sense the growing light in the weeks to come.

J.R.R. Tolkien says it this way:

“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all the lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”

How will I embrace this final, long week rather than merely survive it? How will you?

Resource: These quotes and so many other great insight has seeped into my heart this advent through Kathy Escobar’s Advent guide A Weary World: Reflections for a Blue Christmas.

5 Things That Are Making Me Hopeful

Over the past few months, with hope in short supply, my soul has learned to notice, grab ahold of and savor even the smallest of things that open up a place in my chest to breathe a bit deeper. In case you are hanging on by a thread today, here are the things that are helping me believe that our world (and more specifically my life) will not always be what it is today.

#1 This short video on the careers of Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg:

“Suppose we had come of age at a time when women lawyers were welcome at the bar, today we would be retired partners in a big law firm. But because that route was not open to us we had to find another way and we both ended up on the United States Supreme Court.”

I am clinging to the hope that when a route is not open to me, there are more powerful things I can become.

#2 A line of prayer from Sarah Bessey’s Advent Guide this year:

“Teach us how to wait well with defiance and compassion, give us good work to do today to keep the sadness our companion not our master.”

I want to learn how sadness is my companion but not my master.

#3 I’m trying on the idea of becoming an Episcopalian so listened to Brene Brown’s Unlocking Us podcast featuring Bishop Michael Curry. So much quotable wisdom but I’m replaying certain segments just to hear him laugh. It is so refreshing to hear a world leader joyful at a time like this.

I want to laugh even in this heavy season.

#4 On December 3rd, a year from the day Kamala Harris dropped out of the Democratic presidential nomination race, she was announcing her chief of staff as Vice President Elect.

With all that has unraveled in the span of less than a year, I am clinging to the possibility of what our lives can encompass a year from now.

#5 A stanza from Jan Richardson’s poem Blessing the Tools of Grief:

“It is hard to see from here

how these tools are the same ones that will make us again,

this time with an aching slowness,

a painful pace so measured we will hardly perceive it

when it begins to happen—

the joining that comes piece to piece

in a pattern that will never be the same

but will leave us inexplicably whole.”

I know things will never be the same again but I still want to feel inexplicably whole.

BONUS: Though questionably inappropriate for a 13 year-old boy, my son and I are taking a lot of joy in making our way through Season 1 of Apple TV’s show Ted Lasso!

Brave Delusions

Richard Rohr summarizes psychologist Carl Jung’s philosophy in these words:

“Humans produce in art the inner images the soul needs in order to see itself and to allow its own transformation.”

But what if our “art”, the image that leads us towards greater emotional health, is a delusion? Can something false help us see what is true in ourselves?

de·lu·sion

• an idiosyncratic belief or impression that is firmly maintained despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality or rational argument

No other work of art better portrays the way our self-created delusions help us live into reality than the 2007 movie Lars and the Real Girl. This slow, exquisite, tender and brilliant film follows Lars and his girlfriend, Bianca on the journey of their love story—except Biana is a blow up, life sized doll Lars buys off the internet. The movie masterfully explores how our delusions are a way to work out our fears, take risks we can’t take alone and test the waters of the world’s ability to accept us. They can even be a lifeline to hope.

Join me on December 22nd from 6:00-7:30 pm MST as I lead a small group discussion of the film and the ways “lies” have given us courage to tell the truth in our stories.

Willful Forgetting

In the 2017 podcast series Seeing White (season 2 of Scene on Radio), Chenjerai Kumanyika, assistant professor at Rutgers University and frequent guest on the show, unpacks the phrase willful forgetting.

Concerning racial realities in America, the term refers to the phenomena of white America putting out of its consciousness our history of racial oppression and terror. The term struck a deep chord with me because I recognize willful forgetting in my work with clients as well as my own story.

On a Saturday afternoon, at age seven, I worked up my nerve to tell my mom about a form of abuse that was happening to me. I remember the knot in my stomach and the laundry basket of unfolded clothes I carried into the living room so I had something to focus on rather than look her in the eyes. For years I believed abuse stopped the next day. It wasn’t until I was in my mid-twenties that I realized it was four months, a eternity for a first-grader, between our conversation and an event that delivered me.

That’s willful forgetting—when we remember reality in a way that creates the emotional distance we need from a truth we are incapable of holding.

What if the only way white America can end our willful forgetting of our country’s racial history is by confronting the natural, willful forgetting we’ve done with our own stories?

What if the very narratives we turn away from as a nation are the ones that could lead us back to our own?

Join me in exploring Harriet Jacob’s autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (available for free on Hoopla). Penned in the 1850’s and published in 1861, Jacobs was the first woman to author a fugitive slave narrative in the United States. At a time when state laws in the South made it a crime to teach the enslaved reading and writing, she used her words to reveal the awful truth of American slavery.

In her story you will see your story and that will enable you to more clearly see the stories of those around you.

Sign up for a 90-minute virtual group discussions (FREE for first time guests of my online membership community, Between Touches):

• Monday, September 28th 1:30pm-3:00pm MST

• Wednesday, September 30th 8:30am-10:00am MST