“Why love if losing hurts so much? I have no answers anymore, only the life I have lived. Twice in that life I’ve been given the choice: as a boy and as a man. The boy chose safety, the man chooses suffering. The pain now is part of the happiness then. That’s the deal.”

–From the movie Shadowlands

 

Zack and I have been part of a small group of recently married couples for the last three years or so. We’re not as recently married now as we were when we started, but the group serves its purpose of normalizing a lot of the weird behaviors and things that happen early on in marriage that could otherwise drive us all into isolation. “You guys do that, too?” is a common refrain.

We have walked with each other through some wonderful moments of celebration and some heavy moments of grief, and right now we are walking the line between the two. Our families are near and far, our parents are healthy and ill, our hopes are realized and caught in our throats.

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.” (Ps 23:4)

But that is most of life, isn’t it? We walk through the valley of the shadow of death and we learn not to fear. Then we are afraid, and we learn not to fear again. We live moment by moment in the tension between joy and tragedy, solemnity and silliness, gravitas and absurdity. Laura van den Berg wrote a lovely piece for Vogue.com about getting married in Boston five days after the explosions at the Boston marathon.

“What would it be like to host a celebratory event—if it could even go forward—in a city soaked with grief?” she asked. Her question might have been specific to her wedding, but I’m guessing there was more ruminating underneath her words. How could we go forward with our marriage in a world where people were torn apart by bombs? How could we trust our love for each other in a world where love is not protected, not held high? How can we live in a world where we trade off pain for happiness, where we make Faustian bargains without even blinking and then wonder when we lost our joy?

Perhaps all we can do, like van den Berg suggests, is measure our love, our joy, our aliveness against time, “the most uncertain commodity of all.”

Not to get all Woody Allen on you, but we will all die. A family friend of ours is entering hospice right now. One of my sister’s dearest childhood friends had to move her wedding up several months to make sure her father, who is dying of cancer, would be able to walk her down the aisle. I could tell you stories. We are all measuring ourselves against time, always.

I measure my love for Zack against time. I imagine us “old and grey and full of sleep,” as Yeats said, our bodies wizened and slowed, holding tight to the joy of our memories and the joy of our old age. I am not racing the clock, but I am measuring my life against time because I never want to forget that someday I will be visited by Thanatos, enter the splendor of the Elysian Fields, leave behind some of what I know. Perhaps I will not even know that it has happened when it does. Perhaps it will be a great struggle. But to trust God is to put Thanatos in his right place, both at the end and in all his moments of destruction while I am alive.

The greatest thing isn’t happiness and the worst thing isn’t pain. They are important and necessary and very real, and we are so meant to live through those seasons of life together, like Zack and I get to do with this small group of people. But the greatest thing is to live outside of time, and the worst thing is to live bound by its constrictions.  The greatest time is kairos time, because in kairos is freedom and wherever freedom is, there is God. And if there was ever a being who could live in the tension between suffering and joy, that is Him.

UGHHHHHHHHHH.

I know that’s not what you’re supposed to say–or how you’re supposed to feel–about any Bible verse, let alone the one so often cited as a favorite, an inspiration, a hopeful light in the darkness. But this verse is used so frequently as a sort of nudge toward contrived cheerfulness or vocational direction when, in fact, it wasn’t written that way at all.

Here’s what I don’t want to do: I don’t want to suggest that we shouldn’t take solace in these wonderful words. I don’t want to look down on anyone for whom these words have been a balm in hard times, as they have to me and to so many others. What I do want to do, though, is suggest that we’ve been looking at this passage the wrong way for a while now.

The book of Jeremiah is a commingling of lament and warning–like most of the Prophets. Jeremiah warns of the destruction of Israel unless they repent. Predictably, they don’t–prophets would have been out of a job if people took easily to change–and some pretty shitty stuff happens to Jerusalem. (You probably remember that any long work lamenting the state of a society can be called a “jeremiad.” This isn’t cheerful stuff.)

So, in the 29th chapter, we read a letter that Jeremiah sent from Jerusalem to the elders and leaders at Babylon:

This is what the Lord says: “When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my good promise to bring you back to this place. For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you,” declares the Lord, “and will bring you back from captivity. I will gather you from all the nations and places where I have banished you,” declares the Lord, “and will bring you back to the place from which I carried you into exile.”

The Babylonian elders don’t like the letter–one accuses Jeremiah of “posing” as a prophet and suggests he should be shackled. Jeremiah gets another word from the Lord, and the next chapter has some beautiful writing about the freeing of exiles and some really confusing writing about the Lord striking the Israelites because their sins are so many. But I suppose that’s the job of a prophet, to bring the incomprehensible and gracious word of God to us, to offer it to us as a sacrifice that we will choose to give up or cling to.

Here’s the thing about Jeremiah 29:11: It is clear, the more we read it, that God’s promise of prosperity and hope is inextricably linked to the communities that we find ourselves in. It is also abundantly clear that the prosperity and hope that God has for us has nothing to do with my rising above you or anyone else. If I am destined for flourishing (a destiny that requires my activity and participation), then my community not only shares my destiny but also acts on my behalf–as must I for it.

This passage is no bit of Hallmark-card sentimentality, and we think of it as such to our own detriment. It is part of a book shot through with despair and sadness of the highest order–The world is not as it should be, and you people won’t do anything to make it right. That is Jeremiah’s message. And God’s best plan isn’t for me to enter the right career field or get the most money or never experience fear or worry. God’s best plan is never for me apart from His world. God’s best plan is nothing less than the good future of all of His people, wherever and whoever they are, doing whatever is good for Him–because that will be good for us, too.

(I am indebted to T. Lo’s Jeremiah/Lamentations Commentary…)

In honor of National Sibling Day, which today apparently is, a list of things I did as an older sister:

• I once convinced my younger brother that I had grown deathly ill with salmonella after eating copious amounts of cookie dough–the same cookie dough he had just scarfed! I laid down on the couch, stomach down, and made lots of moaning noises. It was a pretty convincing performance, but I couldn’t quite force myself to throw up. He freaked out.
• I pretended to hurt my ankle after hiking up from the pool at my grandparent’s condominium complex to their house and made Mallory carry me.
• Mallory (my younger sister) had two really close friends–Nicky and Emily. I made plans once in my diary to steal them from her, when I was mad at her for cutting into my Donkey Kong time. I wrote things like “Tell Nicky she has pretty hair,” and “Talk about books with Emily.”
• Our house got really warm during the summers due to the combined factors of my mom’s distaste for air conditioning and the humid Midwest summer heat. The basement stayed cool, especially at night, and there were two futons in an L shape in front of the TV. One night–and I was definitely over 16 when I did this–I went down to the basement to sleep. I turned on the TV and realized, in its glow, that Johnny was stirring on the other futon. I told him that if he didn’t want to watch TV he should leave. He pointed out that he was there first, to which I turned the TV up louder and snuggled in. Johnny told on me the next morning and I had to rake leaves for an hour in our backyard.
• My shining moment, though, was when I convinced my siblings that my parents were splitting up. (A brief aside: This is a TERRIBLE thing to do; people go through incredible pain when this actually happens, and I was a super weird kid.) I hand wrote a note that I conveniently “found” on my parent’s bed, from my mom to my dad: “John, I am leaving you. I love you and the kids. Goodbye forever, Nancy.” I thought the “goodbye forever” sign-off was an especially inspired touch. I don’t much recall Mallory’s reaction–whether she believed me or went along with the charade–but I remember Johnny crying in the corner of the kitchen. (To reiterate, TERRIBLE. I made my younger brother cry and it cracked me up. I’m still chuckling.) It didn’t take too long before I let him in on the joke, which I don’t think he found so funny. We eventually told my parents about it and, all these years later, give my mom a hard time–it would be her, we say, who would leave Dad; never the other way around. She gets blamed for a hypothetical scenario that I created nearly two decades ago. So I think it’s worked out.
• Mostly, though, these two strange people have been the best friends I never would have chosen. We are so incredibly different, one from the other, and so easily annoy each other with our proclivities that we likely never would have interacted more than absolutely necessary. So I’m really glad that we got stuck with each other, because they have made my life so sweet and fun and hilariously funny. They have forgiven me for a lot, they have acted older than me many times and had hard conversations, they have achieved a great deal at young ages in fields they are passionate about. They are good people whose lives I love to watch unfold, with that strange mixture of pride and ownership that only an older sibling knows. My mom will still tell us (when she’s not defending herself from false accusations) that we are the only people on earth who will hold each other’s childhoods when our parents are gone; the only people who lived at 4245 Eisenhower Circle and tapped on walls to send messages and sat on the roof while the sun set and drove into stop signs out of Pat’s Pantry parking lot and got read to by Dad’s booming voice while our heavy eyelids drooped. No matter how much Zack loves me, he can never know that. And I wouldn’t want any two other people to hold my childhood, too.

 

Like any writer worth her salt, my house is full of books. Bookshelves, yes–we have three floor-to-ceiling versions. But they also get stacked in the funniest places. I hardly have space to peanut butter my toast these days (which, as you all know, is the most important part of my day) for the overflowing piles on our kitchen counter–and don’t even get me started on my nightstand. There are worse problems a person could have.

I returned home on Sunday from a ten-day residency on Whidbey Island for the SPU MFA program. It never disappoints, and this windswept place filled to the brim with dear friends is not far from my mind. I came home, though, to three new galleys for review and my first installment of my Quarterly subscription, curated by Maud Newton. It’s rare that I am equally excited about all the galleys I get–there are usually one (or more) shlocky Christian how-tos in the bunch–but this is a fantastic batch.

First, Matt Appling’s Life After Art. A few weeks ago I was at a conference in Santa Barbara celebrating the life and work of Dallas Willard and in it, as is his wont, Dallas beautifully defined the word “play” for us as “the creation of value that is not necessary.” That is much of what Appling is getting at in his book as he explores what we adults have forgotten since we left the art rooms of our elementary school youths. Appling grapples with issues of life without beauty and brings his experience as an elementary school art teacher to bear on a fantastically thoughtful book.

 

Rebekah Lyons deals with a topic close to my heart when she writes about experiencing anxiety and confusion on moving with her family to New York City in Freefall to Fly. I’ve dealt with anxiety for a long time, and within a faith context the answers that come in reply to struggle are often trite and meaningless. Lyons places herself in the middle of a great mess so that we might learn something about the goodness of a God who finds us, even when we aren’t sure that we want to be found.

 

The book I was most anticipating, though, was North of Hope by Shannon Huffman Polson. Shannon graduated from the SPU MFA program at the end of last summer’s residency, so we only overlapped for a few days. Aside from her stylistic prowess and deft ability to weave a narrative, I simply liked her a lot. A woman who served as an attack helicopter pilot, who got her MBA from Tuck and summited Kilimanjaro and has two sons and undertakes the kind of internal and worldly pilgrimage that would scare most of us half to death–how could you not be held rapt?

 

I haven’t finished these three yet, but am excited to talk about them more here. Oh, and the Quarterly book that came this time around was Colson Whitehead’s The Colossus of New York, complete with HANDWRITTEN POST-ITS from Maud Newton pointing out her favorite parts. I’m pretty sure they were handwritten and then Xeroxed, but let me have my moment. I devoured Whitehead’s Zone One, so I’m really looking forward to this one, and to some good fiction in the midst of all this Creative Nonfiction I’m immersed in.

This day used to be marked on my calendar for months ahead of time. I could feel it coming, anticipate in my bones and my stomach churning and how close I was to tears at any given moment.

But eight years have passed by now, and for the first time in a long time I woke up on March 2nd unaware that it was March 2nd or, more accurately, why I should remember March 2nd.

I’ve written about this day before, about Laurie and how we found out she went missing, about the days long search that resulted first in finding her car, then the note, then her body. I’ve written about the wake and her water-bloated body, about the funeral that was standing room only in a chapel that held a thousand people. I’ve written about all of this, but still, I feel the call to remember, to call Laurie to mind.

I lived in Santa Barbara for three years after Laurie’s death, and every year on this day I would go for a long drive, alone, winding around the Santa Ynez Mountains; the huge estates, the abandoned hippie communes, the sage brush and chaparral starting to make their appearances after the mild California winter. New life was springing up while I was remembering new life being cut down.

Our tight-knit group of high school friends had no idea what to do with Laurie’s suicide. We could understand death, on its face, as something that we would all eventually be subject to in the very distant future. But we could not understand Laurie’s choice. She had withdrawn from us in some ways those last few years, but we had all gone to different colleges or countries or stayed around town and didn’t see nearly as much of each other as we once had.

For us, though, there will always be a sudden rift in time–Before Laurie and After Laurie. We have lived in an After Laurie world for a long time now, and we have all moved in different ways since that day in March. We wondered what we could have done; we are more alert to depression or hopelessness in other people. We see now because we did not see at 19.

On one of those long sojourns up East Mountain Drive, I couldn’t bring myself to turn around when the paved road gave way to gravel. So I kept on in my Jetta, crunching my way to the side of the mountain crest. I reached the end of the road where the pavement came back for a quarter mile or so. At the very end, in pale blue sidewalk chalk, was written two words:

 

WELCOME HOME

 

And so, Laurie, welcome home. Welcome home into good rest. And to Randi and Steve and Chris and Emily and Kaitlin and all the rest of us, welcome home to us, too. Welcome home to this magnificent life we get to live and in living to remember, and in remembering to sadness, and in sadness to the light that comes to us all.

Laurie’s senior picture

It’s no secret that I love awards shows with an unquenachable love. They are one of my favorite things to watch, probably because they are basically four hours of People Magazine, which I also love: Who is wearing what? Who showed up with whom? Who fell? It’s fashion and film and high levels of self-congratulatory behavior.

 

I’m not going to say anything about Seth MacFarlane’s hosting job, but you can read some good articles here and here. OKAY, I will say that I thought he was a lot funnier than I had anticipated–I dislike both “Family Guy” and “Ted”–so my expectations were set quite low. I think “boobs” is a funny word, so there’s that. But his smarminess wore on me as the night went on, and by the time he made the joke about John Wilkes Booth, I was yearning for Steve Martin. Not because it was inappropriate; it just wasn’t that funny. Seth had his moments, though, and, And! I was utterly charmed by the Charlize Theron/Channing Tatum pas de deux. That was some lovely shit.

 

But the most important part of Oscar night is the fashion. No way should “Argo” have won Best Picture or Jennifer Lawrence Best Actress, but what remains aren’t the acceptance speeches. So let’s get to it!

 

Confession: One of my favorite parts of the entire Oscar experience is the fact that everyone changes into a second gown for the after-parties. I usually end up wishing that the actresses would have worn outfit #2 to begin with. Case in point, Anne Hathaway. Her original gown was a bad take on Gwyneth’s 2000 number (which apparently has its own Wikipedia page!), but with weird nipple darts. You can’t see the nipply action too well from this image, but a quick Google search will fix that right up. The nipples clearly weren’t her nipples at all, but the odd construction of the dress harkening back to Jean Paul Gaultier’s cone bra made famous by Madonna. I just wanted to grab her, take her backstage, and find a seamstress who could iron out her chest, stat. PLUS, the construction of the top of the dress makes it look like a satin apron! Those small spaghetti straps might be sexy to Mrs. Boyardee, but they just didn’t do anything for me.

The bottom of the dress–waist down–was lovely. I really liked the color, even if it did follow the beige/pastel trend of the night (though I think the red lips clashed a bit.) But it reminded me of one of my favorite dresses of all time: My senior prom dress. It was gray with a big pink slash of fabric around the middle that tied into a huge bow in the back. So, I have to give Annie credit for that. But the back of the dress cut her off in some weird ways. The only saving grace there was her crazy beautiful diamond necklace. But overall? It was a nipple apron gown, and there’s just no moving past that.

 

Someone said of Salma Hayek that she had the fanciest neck brace in all of Hollywood, and I really can’t imagine why in God’s name she would have otherwise chosen this getup. It is, in some ways, a welcome break from the largely dull red carpet and her past getups which were very “HELLO, I AM SALMA HAYEK, HERE ARE MY GIRLS” kind of thing. But I think she just ended up looking (especially in this picture) like a weird formal Barbie.

SIDENOTE: Did any of you used to get the Christmas Barbie dolls? My cousin and I got them from our grandmother every year until we were 25 (Kidding, we were 24) and we loved them. They had to be presented in extra large Barbie boxes because their outfits were so intricate and huge, their dresses so voluminous, that they could not be contained in a regular Barbie package. We loved those dolls and played with them endlessly (Courtney’s stayed in the package for safekeeping, mine came out right away and was usually deformed and missing shoes an hour later), but my sister was always so jealous she never got a holiday Barbie. She never really played with dolls much, but she will still get up in arms if you bring up holiday Barbies.

So, Salma, the holiday Barbie look rarely works for human beings; even ones as beautiful as you. Her hair, my friend Katelyn pointed out, looks like she just threw it up to get on the treadmill. Which is almost a sin, because I would kill for her hair. (That is not true. I would seriously maim for it, though, and that is no idle threat.) The velvet dress was super pretty and simple and if she had just worn that with a HUGE necklace dripping in rubies and emeralds, I think we all would have been happier.

 

 

 

 

 

 Naomi Watts is a major frontrunner, in my opinion, for best dressed of the night. She pretty consistently hits it out of the park for awards shows because she knows what looks good on her and sticks with it. She isn’t a major risk-taker, but she isn’t a wallflower either. Case in point: This metallic Armani Prive. It could have easily been a strapless number made interesting with its color and texture, but the sleeve and collar detail–its asymmetry–make it so much better. And it’s such a sleek dress that her minimal jewelry, natural makeup, and messy hair were exactly what was called for.

 

I don’t have a ton more to say about her–it’s just a beautiful, glamorous look–but I will say that one summer my dad and sister and I saw Liev Schrieber play Macbeth in Shakespeare in the Park in Central Park, and he was so wonderful in that role. But even then I couldn’t help but hope that Naomi Watts would come out from behind the stage and sit down next to us to chat, because she just seems so approachable and fun and warm. Like Nicole Kidman before she married Tom Cruise and then divorced him and then married Keith Urban and then peed on Zac Efron in The Paperboy.

 

 

 

 

At this point, I don’t think anyone can say anything bad about Jennifer Lawrence. I mean, I don’t think she deserved to win the Academy Award when she was up against Jessica Chastain and Emmanuelle Riva, but she can hardly be blamed for that. (My beef was with the pretty and charming girl who is slightly offbeat playing a pretty and charming girl who was slightly offbeat and got the man in the end. Great performance, but not Oscar-worthy.) Anyhow. SURELY you have seen her post-Oscar interview-cum-Jack Nicholson introduction? Her response to the spill she took on the way up to the stage: “What do you mean what happened, look at my dress! I tried to walk up stairs in this dress, that’s what happened!” 

Her lack of guile is utterly charming and endearing; everyone wants to be her best friend. Except for me, because I would never let my best friend wear that dress to the Oscars. Or, to be more precise, I would have cut the skirt down to half its volume before she left. The dress looks like something Carrie would have worn to a wedding in Sex and the City, only to realize when she arrived that she was, in fact, wearing a wedding dress herself. And then she would have written about the meaning of wearing white to a wedding while sitting cross-legged at her desk and chain-smoking in men’s underwear. But I digress. I loved the dress from the top to the hips, LOVED the back-necklace (super elegant), but the bottom was just too much flare. And too much to walk up stairs in, clearly. But, last night was really the night when J. Lawrence could have done no wrong, so we can’t hold too much against her.

 

You know who we can hold too much against?

 

Yes, that’s right. Melissa McCarthy.

 

I thought, when I first saw her, that it was a joke. Her hair, that is–the dress is bad, ill-fitting, and seems to have a garbage bag peeking out where the slit should be. But her hair, oh her hair. Did she put her finger in an electrical socket? Stick her head out the window on her drive to the red carpet? Did she get styled in Texas? It is such a mystery to me. Her hair is gorgeous–thick and reddish-brown and there are one million ways that it could have looked fantastic. But this was not one of them.

 

If she has a stylist, that person should be severely flogged. Her hairdresser should leave the country as soon as possible. And she, well, she can be forgiven this one mistake because one of the things that is best about Melissa McCarthy is that she is an actress and not a fashion plate, and she doesn’t try to conflate the two. I like that about her. But if she ever shows up in public with that hair again, I will weep and gnash my teeth and assume the end of the world is very near.

 

 

 

 

 

From the worst to one of the best:

After her truly sad dress at the Golden Globes, I had high hopes that Chastain would redeem herself this time around. When I first caught a glimpse of the back of the dress while Ryan Seacrest chattered away in the corner of the TV, I was wary. Redheads do not usually do terribly well in copper. Gold and silver, yes. Many bright colors, yes. But copper and bronze tones can tend to wash a ginger out, and that would have been a shame.

But.

On second and third and fourth reviews, I only grew to love the dress more and more. Her hair and makeup were just right (if very “Old Hollywood glamour,” which seemed to be the theme for the night)–Kelly Osborne pointed out that if she hadn’t done the red lipstick, the whole look might have been way off, and I tend to agree. By the end of the night I loved everything about her look, and I really liked that because the beading and color of the dress were so unique, the rest of it was simple. All in all, a major winner. She made me proud of my race.

 

 

 You’ll have to indulge me for a second, because this isn’t exactly red carpet stuff. BUT. This dress was by leaps and bounds my favorite of the night. I love it so much I want to marry it, or get married in it, or marry it WHILE I AM WEARING IT. I meta-loved it. Diane Kruger is a lovely actress, and a fashion plate to boot. She is also dating Pacey from Dawson’s Creek, whose real name is maybe Joshua Jackson?, but who I like to think is just a more dapper version of his character from my most beloved teenage TV show.

 

So, first things: She has the legs to pull this dress off, which not many people could. She could look a bit like the Flying Nun, too, but somehow that just makes it work even more! Has there ever been an Academy Awards where the Flying Nun was referenced? I don’t think so; not until this year. The shoes, the miniaudiere, the makeup, everything was perfect for a big Hollywood Oscar party. The hemline is so perfect for the dress, and the dolman/cape-y shoulders are just perfect. I wish I had been there just so I could have met her in the bathroom, told her I loved her dress, knocked her out with some ethylene like they used to do at the doctor’s, stolen her dress, and made Pacey run away with me. Is that weird? Don’t answer.

 

 

That’s a wrap for now, as I’m off to do some unimportant things like try to write and read and work and stuff. What were your favorites? What did I miss? And were there any that were just terrible? I’d love to hear about those, especially. Oh, and…

 

Honorable mentions: Jennifer Aniston’s red Valentino, with very Aniston beach-y hair; the front of Jennifer Garner’s dress and that necklace; Octavia Spencer’s beaded number; Quevenzhané Wallis with her poufed sleeves and puppy purse.

Meh mentions: Charlize Theron’s white peplum (again with the bridal!); Halle Berry’s Bond Girl getup (I still can’t make up my mind about it!); Nicole Kidman’s L’Wren Scott column dress (yawn).

Dishonorable mentions: Amanda Seyfried’s outer space sexy McQueen (the cleavage circle underneath the choker thing is weird to me); Reese Witherspoon’s gown (which was a gorgeous dress and color but needed to be pulled up at the top and let out an inch at the hips); the back of Jennifer Garner’s dress, Renee Zellweger looking like a hot mess.

 

A final word: If you have not seen Hattie McDaniel’s acceptance speech at the 1940 Academy Awards for her role in “Gone With the Wind,” watch it. It is one of the most touching moments in film history, and the dignity with which she receives the reward is just the right antidote for the one-upmanship that marked most of the show on Sunday.

 

I’m not so sure when, as a society, we picked up on the notion that getting hurt in a relationship was a bad thing. Hurt, in this case, being the result not of abuse or unbalanced power dynamics–because those are different topics for a different day–but hurt by people who disappoint us, who let us down, who dash our tightly held expectations.

If we aren’t hurt, where do we grow? If we don’t receive the dark gift of unmet expectations, how do we draw good boundaries? I believe with everything in me that our hearts are meant to be protected from foolishness, but even the wisest people can be hurt. And I’m far from there.

Being hurt is not some choice we get to make, unless we dress ourselves in the emotional equivalent of a knight’s armor and live small and solitary lives. And that is not the kind of life I care to taste, not even for one moment. Being hurt serves a purpose just as honorable and true as being filled with joy, and those are not mutually exclusive experiences. Our joy may deepen as we are able to carry burdens with those who have experienced similar hurts.

Lean in and let me tell you this truth: we connect at the deepest and truest level in our hurts, in our vulnerabilities. We are most human and most like God when we shoulder these hurts side by side. Battle scars are inevitable in relationships between less than perfect people, which are all of us who live east of Eden.

Leonard Cohen has a lovely bit in his song “Anthem”; words that have rightfully become a rallying cry for this kind of thinking. This is what he says:

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

And for people of the light–on our best days–that is worth remembering.

When my best friend and I met for the first time, we hated each other.

We hadn’t met so much, actually, as simply crossed paths. I had a curling iron in my backpack (long story involving poufy bangs that required maintenance) and she prided herself on never wearing makeup. I was the oldest of three children, she was the youngest sister of two older brothers who were both athletic and competitive.

But over the next few years, our hearts were softened a bit toward each other. We bonded at first over mutual frustration with a friend (gossip being the true uniter of any teenage girls), then in gym class with Mrs. Townsend who made us run laps around the top shelf of the gym, and after several months we, an unlikely couple, considered each other best friends.

And so it has been for the last twelve years or so. We grew up together in Chicago, Kaitlin and I, until I moved to California to start college. She stayed in the Midwest and will never leave, for reasons that involve her close-knit Italian family and a stern Chicago pride in being what some call “hearty,” which only means a stubborn cold person. I will probably never leave California, and so our lives are lived two thousand miles apart except for the few times a year we see each other.

Kaitlin got married young, a few months after graduating from college in 2007. She was always the most mature of our group of friends, always acting with the wisdom of an elder while we the rest of us were flirting and sneaking sips of cooking wine and generally being seventeen. So when she married Neil at 22, none of us were terribly surprised. We knew that their youth belied the seriousness with which they had approached all of life, and she and I lived very different lives at 22. But they were so inextricably linked that our circumstances–marital status, distance, time difference–would not become hindrances. And as mature as she was, our senses of humor matched perfectly–another ingredient that can enliven even the most dormant friendships.

The night of her wedding, Kaitlin danced with her father to Eva Cassidy’s rendition of “Fields of Gold.” She met her dad on the dance floor, and the words to what I had always thought of as a romantic song reached me in a new way that night as I thought of all the life we had experienced together and all that was to come, of my life in the West and her life in Chicago, of the children and the sunsets and the miles of earth to come:

 

You’ll remember me when the west wind moves upon the fields of barley.
You’ll forget the sun in his jealous sky as we walk in fields of gold.

I never made promises lightly and there have been some that I’ve broken,
But I swear in the days still left we’ll walk in fields of gold.
We’ll walk in fields of gold.

Many years have passed since those summer days among the fields of barley.
See the children run as the sun goes down among the fields of gold.
You’ll remember me when the west wind moves upon the fields of barley.
You can tell the sun in his jealous sky when we walked in fields of gold,
When we walked in fields of gold, when we walked in fields of gold.

 

A good friend is like this. A good friend holds your entire past in her hands, because she knows all of you. It is you and she in the fields of gold, gathered and joined like barley at the harvest and bound together by wonder, by chance, by God’s goodness. It is a curling iron and a soccer ball and the other chaff burned away to make room for the kind of connection that bares soul to soul and bears witness to the sacred nature of being human together. And we, now, hold each other near through the dark winter and the bright summer and the normal days that make up most of our lives. That child is here now, her daughter, and we will watch her run as the sun goes down, watch her in South Haven at the lighthouse and at the place where the Pacific Ocean abuts the American continent, and in many many decades we will watch each other with wrinkled faces and slowing minds and we will think of the day when we met, the fields of gold we once ran through, and the fields we have yet to enter.

Not terribly long ago, I wrote a letter to Kaitlin’s daughter, to that girl who I have known in one way or another since I was fourteen years old.

Charlotte Rose Sternberg was born at 10:35 pm on November 18th, four days past your due date. This makes complete sense to me, since your mom is both a night owl and perennially late. You were born into a world with more trouble than I’d like the world to have for you. But oh, Charlotte, you were born into a beautiful world. 

There will be fireflies and humid days and afternoon thunderstorms in the summer. There will be breezy days with a bit of chill in the fall – on those days, make sure you go down to Lake Michigan. It is good for your soul to see the water.

There will be meals that you eat that make your life richer. This will include two hot dogs, ketchup and mustard only, and an iced tea at Portillo’s, and a slice of chocolate cake. It will also include pizza from Lou Malnati’s and fresh, gooey blueberries in the summer, and corn on the cob so sweet and fresh that it will almost taste like candy.

There will be people who make your life richer; people you cannot even dream about or know right now. They will come into your life in the most surprising ways and they will be people you never knew you could be drawn to. This is a funny thing about the wildness of life. Your heart, your life, your soul will be full and expanded for those people who get in your blood because they are your family in every sense of the word.

In the words of Pat Conroy, I pray for you to “See the world with eyes capable only of wonder, and a tongue fluent only in praise.” The world is such a gorgeous and terrible place, and who you are will only add to that. We all have beauty and darkness inside of us, and to marvel at the goodness of life adds to its beauty.

Mostly, I pray to our God:
Let her know adventure
And the sun that grows things
And the rain that grows things
And the night that grows things
Let her know it all

And one day, if you meet a girl in a church bathroom who is curling her bangs and you roll your eyes, that’s okay, too. Friendship doesn’t fold so easily.

 

 

At a recent screening of the documentary film Hellbound, I had a question for the director. I raised my hand and, nervous of the crowd around me, identified myself as an Evangelical Christian. “But I’m a Democrat who lives in San Francisco,” I was quick to add. In other words: “I’m not like them! I’m not like the crazy people who picket funerals or believe the earth was created in six 24-hour days.”

And while all that is true–in terms of where my beliefs line up–I found myself cringing at my own response afterwards.

About a year ago, I wrote a piece for Her.meneutics responding to a popular video in which a young Christian poet claimed to “hate religion but love Jesus.” And while I understood what he meant, I argued that this was a false dichotomy. The organization of Jesus’ people under the authority of the church (“religion”) is a really good thing. And it has also done tragic and brutal damage in the name of Christ. But holding the bad in tension with the good is part of the call of the Christian life. (Even when the bad appears to be from God–as Job reminds us.) And what I wrote then remains true today:

“We do not get to separate ourselves from the Church, as Christians. We do not get to claim non-religiosity simply to fit in, or to feel better about ourselves. As a friend of mine put it, to say that you love Jesus but hate religion is akin to saying you love your best friend but hate his wife. That relationship will not last.”

So, why was I so quick to throw caveat after caveat at my identification as an Evangelical Christian? I think the answer is fairly simple: In that moment, I cared as much about what the group of San Francisco moviegoers thought of me as I did about identifying with my rich, messy, sometimes shameful theological community. I’m not sure whether it was the right thing to do, though I had reason to believe that identifying as an Evangelical Christian in that community was unpopular. First of all, Evangelicals in America have a pretty bad reputation, not undeservedly so. We have become more known for what we are against—gay marriage, abortion, fun—that what we are for has been drowned out. This group of people so concerned about opening up the possibility of a personal relationship with a good God has often been its own worst enemy, and I do not want to put myself outside of this group simply because it has done some things I disagree with. Secondly, by many accounts San Francisco is the least Christian city in the country.

Some people laughed in the theater when I gave my introductory caveat, and I appreciated the knowing smiles and nods that came my way. It is a messy business, being part of any tradition, because someone, somewhere along the way, has screwed up or said something I disagree with. It’s like that other odd institution, the family, in which we have little influence on the actions of those closest to us, but we still love them, we still share the same name. And then there are my own mistakes; the things I say and do that don’t represent the rest of my tradition in the best possible way. At those times, I hope for grace and forgiveness and people who will move forward with me.

I care a good deal about what other people think of me. It isn’t all bad, but that desire to be thought well of too often leads me down roads of disassociation that aren’t where I really want to go. I want to stand with my brothers and sisters throughout the entirety of the Christian tradition, mistakes and kindnesses blended together, so that we might be truthful people who can move into God’s kingdom together. No stones cast, those days, only peace. Only unity.

 

 

 

I am in the middle of a five-day road trip through northern Northern California–North of San Francisco all the way up to the Oregon border and then down the coast. And this morning, I woke up in Nevada City (originally a Maidu village, settled in 1849, home to Joanna Newsom) where it is 27 degrees outside. I woke up at the Parsonage Inn to the smell of coffee and a fresh breakfast of popovers and breakfast potatoes and bacon and poached eggs and fruit topped with cream and now I weigh a thousand more pounds than I did at 8am, but no matter.

Now, I am at the head of a long oak dining table, feeling like no one so much as Frank Gilbreth, Sr, commanding his family through table manners and votes on dogs and subjects not of general interest. I am waiting—for what the day might hold, for the absolute adventure of life that is ahead, for the warm popover dusted with powdered sugar to cool, for the arrival of Christ the child who will save the world. I am waiting in the quiet of the season as well as in the exuberance that this kind of anticipation produces. What a world to encapsulate so many stories, so many people, so many hopes. What a good place.

How easy it is to forget the bigness of the world, to think that all that matters is what is within ten square miles of where I happen to be. I am far from where I usually am–not so far, not so foreign a place, but it is new and different and full of people whose lives I do not know and never will. Knowing that I do not know–what others have called “wonder”–is one of those unexpected spiritual disciplines that is most felt in this season of hoping for what we do not know, for that mystery we are called into.