The Task of 2021: See the System

THE single most courageous moment in our search for freedom is when we begin to reframe our story not around a person who caused us suffering, but the landscape, the backdrop, the soil of our life that gave harm access.

In his book, Love is the Way, Bishop Michael Curry writes:

“Gandhi used militaristic language for those who engaged in the work for nonviolence because you are struggling against something but not against people. You are struggling against systems and ways of being and ways of living and of organizing a society. You seek to convert the people—to transform not only oppressed but oppressor as well.”

After the week our nation has endured, violence is clearly an entity greater than any one person—it’s a network. We collectively suffer when we refuse to see the interconnected root system under trauma.

The eyes to see societal systems and the courage to change them are forged in the fires of our own story.

• Have we done the work to see the system we grew up in?

• Do we understand the network of forces that were operating underground during key moments in our lives?

• Will we look beyond the person that embodies hurt and see the stage on which our story unfolded?

In 2021, my membership program, Between Touches, will use movies and memoirs as springboards for opportunities to write and share our stories.

This month, we’ll look at the ordinariness of harm in our lives through the movie Boyhood (2014). We’ll discover the everyday stories we need to explore in the coming months to see the foundational system that ungirds our past and still guides our present. Join us!

Nests From Scraps

Sharon Beals' "House Finch Carpodacus mexicanus frontalis"

This past week, I’ve struggled to tap my typical 4-ish, new-year-reflective, anticipatory-of-the-future self. Just the thought of looking back over journal entries since March makes my stomach churn.

I have felt afraid to set a goal, choose a guiding word, make a bucket list or even pray for change. The loss, devastation, unraveling, exposure, diminishing and reducing has made hoping for anything new feel dangerous. As a trauma survivor I don’t like being surprised (or any event I didn’t plan and orchestrate myself for that matter) so 2020 was my own private version of purgatory.

Perfectly in sync with this past year, Jan Richardson’s poetry, from her book The Cure for Sorrow, has guided me forwarded. Instead of my usual list of wishes, plans, goals and intentions, her words have given me a picture—a simple image—of how I want to turn towards this coming year.

From “Blessing the Fragments”:

Look into the hollows of your hands and ask what wants to be gathered there, what abundance waits among the scraps that come to you, what feast will offer itself from the pieces that remain.

“Blessing That Holds A Nest in Its Branches”:

The emptiness that you have been holding for such a long season now, the ache in your chest that goes with you night and day in your sleeping, your rising—think of this not as a mere hollow, the void left from the life that has leached out of you. Think of it like this: as the space being prepared…your heart making ready to welcome the nest your branches will hold.

What if all the scraps and broken, dead twigs that have fallen around me this past year could be gathered to make a nest—not the picture-perfect kind that’s factory made and sold in antique-esque decorating stores but the kind only held together by spit and grime?

What if these scraps were woven together so tightly they could actually hold things—not just soft, light, gentle finches but huge birds of prey that swoop down and almost suffocate you with how much space they inhabit?

What if this nest could become a refuge—not just just a lean-to made by a stranded hiker waiting for morning but a shelter for things that suddenly land, making themselves comfortable and staying for God only knows how long?

What if this nest could bear weight—not the inconsequential kind but a weight that far exceeds it own,

What if this weight, that plops down unannounced and without warning, could be held—not as an attack, restriction or failure but as a weary creature in need of rest?

What if I went beyond making a nest for whatever 2021 will hold and instead became one?

What if we all did?

Freedom In Infection

***The heart of this post, though it discusses a friend whose family had mild cases of COVID and survived, seeks in no way to communicate that COVID-19 is “mild” or that fear of being infected unfounded. Though my friend has mostly recovered, without seemingly long-term health effects, does not mean that countless others haven’t suffered permanent, devastating loss in the face of the same disease. My friend is white, affluent, works from home and has more than adequate health care. As do I. Our reality has not been the reality of death for over 317,000+ other Americans, and my reflections are not intended to diminished their stories.

Though it’s been over two years since our kids were at the same school, two close friends (I’ll call them Amber and Sarah) and I still connect a few times a month. We’ve talked our way through Brene Brown and Richard Rohr books, prayed our teenage and adult kids through seasons of struggle and all spring deliberated for hours over who we hoped (and predicted) would receive the Democratic presidential nomination.

Last month, COVID-19 cycled through Amber’s household so for weeks we forewent our quarantine ritual of walks along the Platte River. Yesterday, we finally reconnected for the first time since mid-November, and I was amazed at how relaxed Sarah and I felt with Amber.

There was such freedom of there being virtually no chance, even if we were asymptomatic, we were a danger to Amber. And since her family had all been well for over two weeks, she wasn’t endangering us. As we all said goodbye at the end of our walk, both Sarah and I had huge smiles on our faces as we freely hugged Amber. We then turned awkwardly to one another and nodded. Sarah and I still had to be cautious with each other.

All day I’ve been in awe at how light it is to relate to a close friend who has survived COVID-19. We didn’t both have to catch and recover from the disease in order to enjoy the simplicity it brought to greeting and talking together, only one of us had to go through it.

The freedom I felt yesterday reminds me of what it’s like to talk to someone about a struggle I know they have personally endured. Whatever it is—grief in marriage, a kid struggling with anxiety, a cancer diagnosis or a teenager overhauling their identity—I don’t have to worry about what they can handle or understand because they’ve already survived it. I can simply let my guard down and take a posture of receiving care and comfort.

What if we could somehow know more of what others around us have gone through? Would we share more of our own struggles with them? What capacity for care would be available to us all if we felt freer to draw closer to one another?

And what if we more deeply understood what it means that God was fully “infected” by humanity and survived the journey? Maybe we’d be less afraid and move in closer for the relief our bodies feel in a strong embrace.

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.