Destruction as Salvation

In his book, Love is the Way, Bishop Michael Curry tells the story of a 1993 fire that incerated the roof of his St. James parish in West Baltimore.

He writes:

The roof was blazing when the fire chief walked up to me. ‘We’ve got a decision to make. If you don’t create another source of oxygen, the gas inside is going to build up, and it could blow out all the windows, maybe even the entire building.’ He pointed to the largest and most beautiful of all the windows, a rose stained-glass window that decorate the front of the church. ‘I need to break that window to let in the air. Do I have your permission?’ They did and it was the beginning of the end of the fire. The roof was gone, but destroying that window saved the building.

Though a decision like Curry’s is never one I want to be faced with, this vivid picture is a balm for the ways I wrestle with my own intentions. It invites me to look at the things I’ve dismantled or broken in hopes of saving something greater, and strengthens me against accusations (from within and without) that I’ve ruined things rather than fought to save them.

Whether you seen a shattering act as cruelty or kindness depends on how wide your camera angle is—are you looking at merely the beauty of the stained glass window or at an entire building being ravaged by fire?

What are you fighting to save?

What are you willing to lose in order to win?

What needs to be broken to preserve something greater?

What permission do you need to give others?

Who sees your actions as kind instead of cruel? Do you?

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.