dear hilary: the winds of homecoming

Dear Hilary,

I have to admit I’m scared. After a few years of living oceans away from my hometown, I am moving back to what I used to consider my home. The only problem? It doesn’t feel like home anymore. I’m worried that people will expect me to be the same as I was four years ago, but the truth is I’ve changed. I’ve drawn closer to God and I love how He has shaped me over the past few years, but I am afraid those I used to be close to will only see me as “not the same” as I used to be.

Hilary, how do I shake the fear of rejection and embrace this new season of my life?

Love,

Scared to Move On

Dear Scared to Move On,

When one of my dearest friends was on her way back from Italy last summer, I wrote in the journal I was keeping for her (a journal of thoughts to share with her, stories of my days, questions about her time in Italy and her joy and her journey) this quote from Rilke:

Oh, not to be separated,
shut off from the starry dimensions
by so thin a wall.

What is within us
if not intensified sky
traversed with birds

and deep
with winds of homecoming? – Rilke, Uncollected Poems

I want to give that to you here – that image of the winds of homecoming. I don’t really know how to make sense of it myself, if I’m honest, and I don’t know how to give it to you. Words are unwieldy gifts. But you have written so tenderly about your fear that Rilke, in his own tenderness, seems to be the necessary reply.

My shortest answer to your question about whether people will see you as changed or simply “not the same” – whether they will embrace who you are becoming or mourn who you are no longer? You cannot control what people make of the changes. 

Some people will be overwhelmed by the new picture of you that they see. Some of them will take it completely in stride. The human heart can react in a thousand ways to the same situation and there is just no telling, not for one moment, what a given person will do or say in response to what they see. I wish I could offer you more control – but the truth is, the fear you harbor is about a thing that you cannot control no matter how or when you come home, no matter what you write about it, think about it, process out loud or silently about it.

The fear is not bad, in and of itself, but it does not have a solution that has anything to do with other people. You have to mud wrestle this fear on your own. You have to slide tackle it. Rilke can help us, here. You talk about being away from home as having changed you, going from what you were to what you are now, going from one thing to another, as if you have lost the first person along the way. But I think we are expanded – I think that’s what Rilke wanted to show us. We are intensified sky traversed with birds. We are deeper for having the winds of homecoming in our bones and our bodies. We are among the widening expanses.

Travel, being away from the familiar, expands us. I don’t think you have lost the person that your friends and family from home would have recognized. I think, rather, that she is deepened and shaped by your having been away. You have not lost her; she is simply revealing new dimensions and spaces.

So you have to wrestle with this fear that you have become someone people cannot recognize, that your self has changed so profoundly that others will not love and cherish it. For I think that the people in your life who love and cherish you will love and cherish how the winds of homecoming and the winds of departure and the winds of being away have shaped you. I think you must lead the way in this: love and cherish who you have begun to become. Love and cherish and beam out to us that you have begun to transform, and that though it is filled with beginning and uncertainty and all the rest, though you are slide tackling your fears about it, you believe it is beautiful.

Dear heart, believe the winds of homecoming are beautiful in you.

Everything follows from that.

Love,
hilary

dear hilary: the love equation

Dear Hilary,

I have another question for you. This year, boys have been a huge distraction.

When I decided I like a boy, it begins to consume my thoughts and actions. I change the direction I walk to class just to “accidentally” run into them, I scheme ways to end up in situations with them, I make sure to get to math class early just so I can find a seat beside them. I do irrational things all the time. Maybe it’s infatuation or lust, but then why does it feel so real then? It just seems impossible to shake this frame of mind. I want to stop obsessing, but at the same time I like obsessing. Is any of this natural? Is it unhealthy? Or maybe it goes deeper, and I am just desperate to be loved and treasured. Even so, my heart is aching from these boys- this is something that seems so silly but has such a legitimate weight on my heart.

Love,
A little obsessed

Dear A little obsessed,

You know what I can’t stand, really, truly, cross my heart shoot me ten times before you make me … ? Settlers of Catan type games. I’m terrible at them. I lack all the strategy. And that makes me mad. And then I do something stupid, I don’t want to admit it, or I do, and I basically just end up feeling pissy. Not a fun time. I like cards, I like charades, I like 20 questions that I turn into 20,000 questions, I like Mafia and a thousand other ones. But make me settle villages and stuff, and I’m sunk.

So last year this boy that I really liked brought me to a friend’s house on the water, and a funny group of us – maybe five or six people – sit down to play … yep, you guessed it, one of those bridge-building farm settling monasteries and something about blocking other people’s castles games. I wasn’t jazzed about it, but I played the whole game.

And not because that’s the polite thing to do, though my mother did raise me to be polite. I did it to impress the boy. I did it to keep his attention. I did it with some well-timed doe-eyed looks in his direction, a wink or two. I can only imagine if I could see myself I would laugh – here I am, making faces at the game in my head, and then whenever he makes eye contact, holding on for dear life to those brown eyes and hoping he’d look just a bit longer.

In the love equation in my head, playing this game + batting my eyelashes + walking by his office by the mailroom in my work outfit + some well placed comments about German philosophy + drinking a second cider at the bar on a Thursday night x my hope squared = LOVE.

I think most of us do this, just as you describe your own love equation to me – if you sit here in math class + walk past them and if you use the Pythagorean theorem to calculate just where they might get coffee after school that day… maybe that’s how you get them to see you. Maybe that will = LOVE.

I want to separate out how real your feelings are from whether your changing seats in math class or walking in a different direction has a tangible effect on a relationship. Your feelings are real; you are attracted and interested, and honestly I’m going to hazard a guess that some of it is infatuation, some of it is exploration, some of it is longing, some of it is that delightful butterfly feeling when you recognize how wonderful and lovely someone is, and there is a whole lot more feeling that can be easily categorized. That will all be real no matter what you do or don’t do on a given day of the week or a given Saturday night game night.

And yes, honey, I think some of it is maybe a little bit much. I liked the feeling of liking someone so much I wound up playing games I didn’t like and changing how I walked and what I wore and what I talked about (though I love German philosophy). When the excitement of adventuring into romantic feelings becomes the trump card in your (even small) decisions, I think it’s good to take a step back. Changing your behavior won’t make anyone like you more or notice you more – it won’t satisfy those longings to be treasured and appreciated and loved, it won’t do much of anything.

Remember Sugar - real love moves freely in both directions.

Love moves freely. It moves when not constrained by constantly monitoring behavior, input and output, looking for an equation that will finally work. It moves when your longing to be more of who you are meant to be, your longing to lean into the true and beautiful and good of your life, equations abandoned, is where all your energy is going.

Resist the temptation to take my words and make them another voice in your head that calculates the way towards those boys or that kind of love, dear one. You can’t force contentment and the growing wings as a way to get those boys to notice you. You can’t ask your heart to long for the good/true/beautiful so that the boy in math class sees you – that’s no different from calculating which seat.

Instead open up your hands and heart and start asking the question – what are those lupine seeds I’m going to scatter today (thanks, Miss Rumphius)? How can I do one more thing to make this world a little more beautiful? Who are the people right here, right next to me? How do I make their world a little more beautiful? 

We don’t have to play Settlers of Catan. We don’t have to change seats. Real love is on the move already. You and me, together, we can just open towards it.

Love,
hilary

Daddy, where are you?

Daddy.

I never call Him that. If we’re frank, I don’t know how to refer to the Almighty the way I whine to my own father in the early morning light of a cold February. I prefer the prayers well worded and quick. I prefer the deep rhythms of a church reciting together, high and low pitched voices in a strange kind of harmony. I like to imagine that when I stammer my way through grace, I sound something like the holier ones who have come before.

I know they tell us that Jesus called Him Abba – and that’s an equivalent, in the space of translation, to Daddy.

I never really thought we’d be allowed that kind of endearment with God. When I pray, I can’t imagine that God responds to that, that shouldn’t I pray something pretty? Shouldn’t I show God that I’m not wasting my love of words – that I’m putting them in the right order and they say such pretty things?

I called him Daddy twice in the last two days.

I didn’t say it in Hebrew or Aramaic or Greek or some other language that makes it sound somehow more authentic or graceful or the way that I imagine we approach the altar and the throne of the Lamb. I blurted out the “Daddy” of my three year old days. The Daddy of goodnight hugs, two or three at a time, and surprise breakfasts at the diner for good grades and the unselfconscious airport reunions after traveling away from home in high school.

The point of praying can’t always be the pretty.

It can’t be the right theology, so carefully crafted. It can’t be the deep concepts, addressing in God the question about His imminence and His transcendence and His real presence, and the hundreds of unknown dimensions of His reality. It can’t be us asking beautiful, calm, composed, reasonable.

Because we’re a desperate people after the heart of God. And in the afternoons where it rains, and rains, and you tell God that however He does it, Jesus needs to get inside your head and do something about your selfishness, and you don’t know what it is but He can just do it, whatever it is, there is something in that that gets you a little nearer to trust.

All I say  is, “Daddy, where are you?”

And I won’t finish the sentences I imagined when I imagined praying – not of intercession or listing the people or the thanksgiving. I won’t wrap the things I believe in beauty. I won’t because I’ll be crying too hard or laughing too hard or both. I won’t because this is the whole prayer.

Daddy, where are you? 

Love,
hilary

when there are everlasting meals (guest post)

You guys remember Preston, right? We wrote letters last year, and between the time zones, the words, the Skype, and the way of things, something kind of amazing has happened. Is happening.

I’m not going to say much more, right now, because I blush furiously when I try to talk about this person, and I get tongue tied, and my heart decides to practice for a marathon, and I can’t stop smiling. You kind of get the picture.

But today, I wrote something over at his space and well, I’d love for you to read it? You can click here.

When your father is crying on the morning drive to school and whispers that Granddad died in his sleep the night before, you don’t eat the whole day.

You don’t eat anything in seat 48H on Virgin Atlantic, except the chocolate pudding, and you have two helpings of that, and return to your books. You read the words over and over but they’re swimming in front of your eyes, and the turbulence outside is nothing to what’s raging in your heart.

Keep reading, over here?

Love,
hilary

P.S. In case you didn’t know, Preston is pretty amazing. I still can’t quite believe the story of us. But here I go, blushing. But he is. Amazing. And I am a really lucky girl.

dear hilary: you are held

Dear Hilary,

I finished high school today. And on one hand, I’m relieved to get my life back and start my summer and move on to whatever God has in story for me, but on the other…I just can’t believe it’s actually OVER. And there’s still so many questions, so little closure with the people I’ve grown to love. One minute I was part of their lives, and now I’m not, with little or no time to say goodbye. What’s going to happen to them? And why can’t I be there to see it?

Love, Wanting More Time

Dear Wanting More Time,

I had this flash of an image of you when I read your letter in my inbox last week. I could see you, hands open, a crowd of people in one, all shouting and laughing and crying and jumping on top of each other the way people do at graduations, and in your other hand, the summer, the next things, which look mostly like a huge blanket of fog overflowing between your fingers. There you were, in my mind, holding these two unruly things, this tangle of people and this bank of fog, and you are trying to hold them out in front of you.

It strikes me that you cannot hold onto either of them.

The people are a wonder, aren’t they? I remember at graduation last year this moment with some of my fellow graduates, after we’d marched in and out, taking this picture where we tried to jump in the air at the same time. The picture came out with us all in various stages of contortion, mid-air or landing on the ground with a thump. But the expression on our faces is the same – some kind of uncontrollable delight. Delight in one another. In the day. In the selves we didn’t even know yet we would become in the next year. I have that picture in my office, all of us laughing and delighting together. About January of this year, I looked at it in the middle of typing notes for a project, and felt my throat tighten, my eyes begin to tremble, tears just peeking out from beneath my eyelids. I don’t see those people every day anymore. I don’t even know what all of them are doing, where they ended up, if they got into that grad school or took that job or moved across the country or the world. 

I couldn’t hold them. Not in the snapshot from last May. Not in my hands in the quiet nights before we all grew up and outward. I tried to, I really did. Looking at that picture in January was a reminder of how much I had longed to hold on tight and build deep, everlasting bridges, and invite everyone to live on the porch of my heart forever with glasses of lemonade and sweet tea. But the thing about rising, dear one, is that we must keep rising. That’s Sugar. We have to keep going, out past the point of holding onto each other just as we are. Out past the knowledge of what we all do and what we all dream and who we love and when and why. We have to journey into the fog you’re weighing in your other hand.

I’m a big fan of this idea of rising, of journeying onward, even into the fog that seems to murky and dark. Mine has been, this first year out of college – but it teaches you to walk on your knees, to crawl, slow and steady, to learn the feel of decisions and love and the path in front of you, brick by brick and bird by bird. I think that’s where you and the wondrous people you love begin. Together. You get on your hands and knees. Release yourself and release your friends from the idea that you can hold this life: be held by it, instead.

You’ll find the fog not so terrifying when you’re a bit lower to the ground. You’ll feel the path with your fingers, and you’ll find that there are hearts and hands searching next to yours. These will become your community, will journey with you, for a time, for a lifetime, for something in between. They may not always be the people you have loved and lived next to until now; likely, some will depart for different journeys, paths branching out again and again, and you, though you love them, will have a path branching a different way. You ask me for an explanation about why you can’t see it, but there isn’t one of the kind you want. I’d give you an answer if I had one, but I suspect that what you want more than that answer is a way forward.

So: though it is murky, though it is some days dark and damp, though it is not clear, you are held by this life. So are those wondrous people. No more holding on now, dear one. It’s time to begin.

Love,
hilary

myself, twenty two

I wake up earlier than I wanted to – it’s humid here, and there is a humming in the air itself, weightier. I think about coffee, about putting on the Nashville Cast soundtrack (yes, I think about that), about lying there for a while longer. With a groan only the Holy Spirit and I know about, I pull my sneakers out from the box in my closet and a pile of other shoes tumble to the ground. I groan again.

By this time, I thought to myself last year, I’d be one of those people who are more faithful with running. I said to someone in January I would run a marathon this year – and now the prospect of the 4.5 mile loop almost sends me back to bed. I meet my not-met expectations on these runs some mornings. They lope along next to me, commenting, “Gee, I thought by 22 you’d know more about what you believe.” “You’d know how to do a lot more than boil water and not catch yourself on fire while standing next to the grill.” “You’d write more letters.” “You’d have something published.” “You’d figure out what the HECK to do with lipstick.” “You’d do one of those spring cleanings with your closet.”

22 sounded like all those things to me last year.

But this morning, I just start to talk.

I talk and talk as I run, a stream of words as busy as the streams by my house. I talk to drown out the silence of the morning, and I talk because talking is reintroduction to the pattern of being with God, the pattern of knowing Him. I talk until I can’t talk anymore, and sweat drips down my back.

I tell God that the ducks swimming in the pond are beautiful and that the morning is beautiful and there is one thing more I must do, according to the Miss Rumphius book, and that is make the world more beautiful, and boy do I hope, Father, that you have some ideas for me. Because I’ll sow lupine seeds like Miss Rumphius or I’ll write papers about Lonergan’s philosophy of education or I’ll listen for hours to the stories – such good stories – of the people You allow me to know. I’ll do anything, I tell Him, only let me stay near to the beauty of You?

And I talk and spread my hands, all the way down the long hill, until, abruptly, the words stop. God enters.

Quiet your heart. I am speaking. 

I bite my lip – there is always one more question and before I can stop it, it trips off my tongue, and God, I think He laughs.

Quiet your heart. I am speaking. 

To stay in the beautiful a little longer. To linger, gently, in the morning, heart quieted against the fast-fading ideas of what I thought I would be. To hear the silence, again, that stillness that shouts His presence, to be steadfast to it above the noise.

I want to scatter lupine seeds across the plains of this widening world.

Love,
hilary

dear hilary: the other side of the door

Dear Hilary,

I have a question. And it is this: how do you know when it’s time to move on? To give up? I said I wasn’t like anyone else. That I wasn’t going anywhere. And I don’t want to. What if the deep quiet love with a wild and crazy illogical side is the true love. I’m sure I could meet someone new some day and fall in love with them, have a passionate romance, what have you. But what if this is my only chance for that deep true sitting quietly by your side not saying a word just being there love? What if he is the person i could spend the rest of my life with, just like he was terrified of? How do I know whether to let go because clearly he isn’t ready to admit anything yet? If he even actually feels the same at all? and because i don’t need this back and forth pushing me away and pulling me back nonsense? Or whether to just be patient and hold on, because the wild quiet love is worth waiting for?

Sincerely,
Steadfast and confused.

Dear Steadfast,

I pondered your letter the whole time I was away, driving along the autobahn or standing in museums looking at bits of five hundred year old German script or taking pictures in front of statues of Martin Luther outside churches. I pondered while I ate cake and drank black coffee – what do I possibly say?

Your letter asks the question I answer two ways and then ten and then back to one, and then wrap myself in a knot trying to sort out. I don’t have a clean answer; I can only tell you a bit about what other, wiser people have told me, and tell you a bit of a story, and hope that spreads a little glow on your path as you go.

Not too long ago, there was a guy – I’ll call him Mr. W – that I was firmly, steadfastly convinced that I would be in a romantic relationship with. We hadn’t had one up to that point, but we had the glimmering possibility of one. We had long conversations about what felt like everything on the planet, we liked a lot of the same books, we liked ideas, we liked to sit in bars over wine or gin and argue. There was chemistry, no doubt about it, and there were sparks flying, and I was sure that this was the love you talk about: wild and quiet and passionate and steadfast all at once.

But. That little word, every so often, would pop up – in conversations about Mr. W with my friends, or with myself. But. There was the irreproachable fact that we weren’t in the relationship I saw a glimmering possibility for. We weren’t together on the couch after a long day of work. We weren’t writing the letters, making the picnics, holding hands, telling our friends. I knew that possibility was there; but it hadn’t been made true.

So, Steadfast, I asked, point-blank, not in pretty words but in true ones. I put on makeup and thought about what I’d wear and ate half a grilled cheese in my brother’s truck beforehand because I was so nervous. And the answer was no.

Before the story gets too long-winded, I want to bring you with me, if you will, to an afternoon just before I asked Mr. W for the last time about the glimmering possibility of us. I am sitting on a couch in a brightly lit office, and my counselor, wise woman that she is, asks me how I feel about the prospect of having this confrontation. The words, awful, terrible, please don’t make me do this please please please come to mind. But there, clanging like an iron bell (thank you, Sugar), are the words I speak:

“The truth has already arrived, though, hasn’t it? I’m just going to open the door for it now.”

She looks at me in surprise, and I mirror the same expression back to her. Yes, she says, smiling. Yes.

Steadfast, I think the truth has arrived. I think you know this, from the letter you sent me, and I think you are now peeking at it from behind the door of your heart, and you have to decide if you open the door. Opening the door to the truth won’t mean you get special knowledge of what the future holds. But from everything you tell me, this guy, he is saying no, and that’s the truth standing at your door. The other things you know about him or his life situation, they aren’t knocking. They aren’t here. When all has been laid out on the table before you, and the answer is no, then no is knocking at your door.

My counselor told me over and over in the year before I opened the door that it takes the time it takes. No more and no less. So I’ll echo that to you, too. It takes the time it takes. You are allowed to be steadfast and confused before you open the door and walk outside and meet this guy’s answer and grapple with what it offers you and what it denies.

But eventually, I think, that’s where you must go. You must open the door. You must look that answer in the eyes and listen to it, and let it ache, and let it roam around, and let it lead you. Because the truth will always lead you somewhere. His no will journey you to a new place. Mr. W’s no took me somewhere completely unexpected. The truth does that.

And here is the other thing, for your fear (and my fear) about whether there will ever be any love like the one you express in your letter – the truth also always leads towards fullness. The guy in your letter, he doesn’t sound like he leads there. His no will not bring an end to the fullest love that you can imagine – it will bring only an end to one possibility, glimmering and beautiful though it was.

There is fullness and joy on the other side of the door. I promise this. And in the acceptable time, I have all kinds of confidence you’ll fling that door open.

Love,
hilary