becoming a tortoise

I linger at the enclosure surrounding the African spurred tortoise. I want one to make eye contact with me. Jack kicks at his stroller, ready to move on to see the two rhinoceroses around the corner. I push the stroller aimlessly back and forth, small bands of sweat beginning to form in the creases of my skin where I am expanding – it seems minute by minute – to make room for our second child. I keep looking at the four tortoises in the enclosure, silently crushing the weak grass under their ancient feet, their heads edging out past their shells ever so tentatively, sometimes barely even enough to see their dark, watchful eyes.

I have loved turtles for a long time. When we pass them on our walks by the Brazos river and I see them sunning themselves on a log I call out “Hello, ancient ones!” Sometimes I am sure this prompts them to dive into the water. Other times I seem not to disturb them at all, and they pile one on top of the other, a precarious cascade of shells.

I love their silence, the millions of years they’ve treaded the water and the grass. I love watching them slip from a log into the water or slowly venture to eat a piece of fruit thrown in by a caretaker. The African spurred tortoise might live up to 150 years; the Galapagos tortoise up towards 200. I cannot imagine so much life; I cannot imagine how much it must weigh, how it would feel. I wonder if their shells are markers of this longevity. I wonder if they carry the weight of such long living with them.

—

I don’t know hardly anything about turtle memories; I know that mine fails spectacularly. I think about this as I sit on my couch, realizing that I am yet again afraid of the coming semester. How will I do it all or be enough. The worries are scratched and wobbly, a record that’s been played too long and too often. I’m tired of this narrative, aren’t you? Not just the narrative that whispers to us that we really aren’t and really can’t (after all, just who did we think we are). But I’m tired of the story about that story, I’m tired of running through the week fighting off dragons that might never breathe fire, and parading my sword around as a badge of honor.

The turtles move so slowly through the world, and their living stretches out farther than my own. Why am I racing? What am I trying to catch up to? Who do I think is about to leave me behind if I stop to take in a lungful of wind off the Brazos and call out to the ancient, quiet ones below?

—

In Deuteronomy 6, Israel is told: Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. (Deuteronomy 6:4-9).

I need to hold again in my hands, on my forehead, this great task, this one aim. I need to become a tortoise, and carry the commandment on my back – I need it to weigh me down again, to slow each movement and hour and day.

There is no one I need to catch up to, nothing I might lose, no way I will be left behind. If I am quieter, if I move less rapidly, if I take these words into my heart and bind them to me – perhaps then I will be quiet enough to remember the Lord my God. Then I will move slowly enough to see Jesus.

Love,
hilary

when i meet my ghosts

The ghosts cling to me, thin and cobwebbed. They trail behind me. I don’t notice them for 1,000 days and then I play a song, five minutes of praise and the ghosts crowd the car, clamoring for my attention. They all want to hold my hand. They all want to remind me, to whisper their moment back into life.

There are 43 days of ghosts and then there are 180 days of ghosts that surround them and there are moments that stretch too far forwards and backwards to count.

They are ghosts dressed in scrubs and halogen lights. They are ghosts that use hand sanitizer and take off all jewelry below the elbow. They are ghosts of footsteps and clipboards and bedsides.

I tell myself we have moved farther out on the water. I tell myself that me and God, we are so much farther out, we are finally okay together again, we can talk.

But when I sing that the grave cannot hold what your grace has justified, when I try to sing that this is the day that the Lord has made, and I will rejoice and be glad in it then I am a living ghost, driving the old roads by the Waco airport, praying, believing for a miracle that became 43 days and two surgeries and 7,000 cotton tipped applicators and 104 trach changes and two nights where only the ghost of my heart kept beating and only the ghost of my lungs kept breathing as we suctioned and prayed and ran out of oxygen and drove to the hospital.

What should I do with these ghosts? One moment I declare that they should be banished, for there is no use for them here where we are all living. And then I feel my daughter moving inside me and I see my son moving outside me and I realize that I do not want to give them up to the God whose name I sometimes cannot really speak. I do not want to know how frail my own arms are. I do not want to keep going in pursuit of him. I imagine that Peter’s sinking was not just because he doubted, no, it was also weariness, because the days are long and the nights can be longer, living with the mystery of the Son of God. I imagine that the work of faith to keep your feet afloat was too much for him – how often it is too much for me. How far away Jesus must have seemed on that dark water. How far away Jesus seems to me when the ghosts remember for me how very deep and dark is the sea.

This is not a story of banishing those ghosts, this is not a story of dismissing them with the fierce words of promise or the declarations of Zephaniah spread over me like a shield. This is not a story of taking respite from the storm in the Word because here the Word is in the storm, and the Word is troubled waters, in the very midst of them, not just a peaceful bridge over.

But the Word of God is not a ghost.

No, the Word of God is living and active, and sharper than a sword… and it pierces past my memories and the clouds of tears in the Target parking lot. There is no easy resolution. But there is encounter. Among the waves, in the water itself, there Jesus comes to meet me.

It’s been almost two years since I walked the hallways of the NICU. And there are songs that call up those footsteps and Subway still tastes like waiting for a surgeon’s call – but now I see Jesus walking next to me. We haven’t talked much about those days.

But we somehow have been in them together.

Love,
hilary

I am a long way out on the water

“I hope your baby has both his eyes.”

She tells me this when she can’t find the card she made for Jackson. When she comes out for goodnight hugs to the group of women gathered to shower me and this little one with love, she hugs my belly separately from me. I hold onto the card, put it next to my bed. Her mom tells me that she and her brothers and sister have been praying for Jackson, for miraculous healing. I’m not sure there are more powerful prayers in the whole Kingdom than those of these children, who know Jesus with a closeness most of us have forgotten.

We are bringing her card to the hospital with us, and I have been praying daily that we might get to show her that God has answered her prayers.

—

My son’s elbows and knees (or feet, or something else) press close to the edge of my skin, and I remember that we are close to his birth. There are only a few weeks left. I have quieted down, my body moving deliberately, slowly. We have come a long way from the first positive test in January. We have journeyed far. And as I have slowed down, I hear something surprising. I hear Jesus ask me to be bolder. Pray, Hilary Joan. Come and kneel with me and pray. 

—

When we first found out about Jackson’s cleft, we drove in a stunned kind of silence to the new hospital. We sat in the new, terrifyingly quiet octagon room where we would have ultrasound after ultrasound, blood pressure, weight, the daze of normal and not. We waited, we listened, we drove home. I thought my heart would strangle me in its longing to escape from the car, from the little person nestled so safely, so joyfully inside me, from the news, from the everything-it-now-must-inevitably-be.

At 29 weeks, we had an MRI. Jackson was, as he always is, on the move. The results of the MRI showed that the right ear hadn’t formed completely. “This is new for us,” my doctor said. “But they can repair it surgically. The internal structures are there, so there is a good chance he can hear eventually through that ear.” I wrote down words on the back of a credit card envelope. I hung up the phone, and again, my heart and its desperate desire to escape my body, escape the ever-dwindling weeks, the soon-to-be birth. There were only 11 weeks left then. No time for a miracle. No time for Jesus.

—

‘I hope your baby has his eyes.” 3 weeks from our due date I meet this little girl, who has a boldness I’m not sure I have ever had. I meet this girl, who prays for something I claimed to be too hard, too late, too impossible. 3 weeks from our due date, I hold a card that prays for what I have been hedging around. I hold the prayer that I have been afraid to admit that I am praying.

—

The Jesus Storybook Bible includes the story of Jairus’s daughter. Listen to these beautiful words:

“‘We don’t have time!’ Jesus’ friends said. But Jesus always had time. He reached out his hands and gently lifted her head. He looked into her eyes and smiled. ‘You believed,’ he said, wiping a tear from her eye, ‘and now you are well.’ Just then, Jairus’ servant rushed up to Jairus. ‘It’s too late,’ he said breathlessly. ‘Your daughter is dead.’ Jesus turned to Jairus. ‘It’s not too late,’ Jesus said. ‘Trust me.'”

—

I know what the MRI says. I know the ultrasounds. I know the plans and the teams and the big words. I know the impossibility that it must seem to be.

But week after week, Jesus has shown up. Take heart, it is I. Do not be afraid. 

Week after week, I have been invited to pray with the One who formed my son Jackson. Week after week, I have been invited to ask for something that is hard to believe. Week after week, I have lost my footing in that once-sturdy boat.

Week after week, I have learned it is safer on the water with Jesus than in the boat with only my anxious, strangled heart and the crowd that murmurs – it is too late. 

Jesus stands there: It is not too late. Trust me. 

—

“At Jairus’ house, everyone was crying. But Jesus said, ‘I’m going to wake her up.’ Everyone laughed at him because they knew she was dead. Jesus walked into the little girl’s bedroom. And there, lying in the corner, in the shadows, was the still little figure. Jesus sat on the bed and took her pale hand.

‘Honey,’ he said, ‘it’s time to get up.’ And he reached down into death and gently brought the little girl back to life.”

—

Jesus tells me to get out of the boat and get on the water. So here it is:

I am praying that God completely, miraculously, heals my son Jackson. I am abandoning the reasonable. I am abandoning the words – “well, whatever God wills,” or “if not, then we’ll do X” because those are the words that I use to stay in the boat while Jesus waits for me on the open water. I am abandoning the careful attempts to make you think that I am still “realistic” about our circumstances, to reassure a mysterious crowd that I am still seeing things as they are.

I am abandoning the familiar strangling anxiety of the boat, the familiar unbelief.

Hilary Joan, pray. Come kneel with me and pray. It’s not too late. Trust me. 

—

I don’t know how Jesus is speaking to you about prayer. I don’t presume to know. But if I can ask, if you would, come out here with me on the water for a little bit? Whether it is about Jackson or about something in your life, will you come out here, where the reasonable drowns in the presence of grace, where what is expected  falls at the feet of the one who promised it was not too late for Jairus’s daughter? Here, in the middle of the water, there is none but us and Jesus. And we are safer here, in the arms of the one who saves us, in the hope of the one who heals us, in the mercy of the one who loves us.

Will you come out here with me on the water? Will you come and pray with me?

Jesus is here. It’s not too late, Hilary Joan. Trust me. 

Love,
hilary

when I learn something about expectations

We are getting so close to Jackson’s birth it seems like I should be able to picture it all. I close my eyes on the couch, thinking – okay, we will go to the hospital. I’ll be in pain. There will be doctors, questions about medication, about how-far-apart-are-the-contractions… 

I can’t picture any of this. I sit on my bed and I feel him sliding around, and I am overcome by how much I want to be able to picture it. How I want to see it happening and unfolding before me – how much I want to picture my son.

But that’s the thing. I can’t.

I have closed my eyes, input all the information from doctors, from thousands of images, from the many appointments we never expected to have. I try to imagine holding this little guy, watching the NICU people love on him, as I know they will if they need to. I ask God for an image – just a glimpse, Lord? – and my mind is empty.

—

There are days and hours when I sift through the laundry or look at our statue of St. Francis or a spare pair of shoes lying somewhere they don’t belong (because I leave my shoes everywhere), and I am surprised at how God has broken open my ideas about being pregnant. How this was the summer of walking around the broken glass.

I had ideas about baby name books, about weekly self-portraits at the bathroom mirror. I had ideas about what growing another person would feel like, about the smiles from strangers and the pride of the hard work that it is to carry another heart around, and not only another heart, but another everything – kidneys and lungs built up from the cells, from the smallness. I was so proud at the beginning, so sure it would be everything I expected or better. I built a lot up on that idea that it would be better – I would look better than I imagined, my child would be the paragon of timely growth and expected physical and mental appearances, I would have the most stamina, I would be one of those moms who never gets tired, never has a hard time doing anything, merely carries her baby along on the inside until it emerges, and everything afterwards is picture-worthy, caption-worthy, other-approval-worthy. I had ideas from the pictures, the blog posts, the stories, from Facebook, from my own head.

—

And then, there was the 18 week appointment, the announcement that it was a boy, the first time we really saw his fierce being, his beautiful, alive, kicking self. And there, coming along behind him was a diagnosis, a list of names and symptoms, a list of coordinating appointments, new doctors, a new hospital.

And my expectations died.

—

With all death there is grief, there is an ache to return to what you were holding onto before it was pried out of your fingers. With all death, even the death of those things that weren’t real (those expectations and ideas, those pictures in my head) that is needed, there is a longing, a wish, a sadness or a patience or both. Some moments I lie in bed thinking, what has happened to us? 

I feel him move so often, I wish I could tell you. He is shy around other people – he moves for me, for his dad, sometimes for a patient grandparent. But he saves most of it, I think, for him and me, for the quiet of the sleepless nights.

He is the life that arrived when my expectations died.

He is the better that was standing on the other side of the broken glass.

—

I do not know what Jacks will look like. I’m not in denial about the words, the list and doctors and symptoms, the thin picture they might try to paint.

And I do still put my hand over this boy and I ask God to do something that I would not believe even if I was told. I tell God to remember His promises. I ask, and ask, and ask, for a miracle.

Every day since we learned about these things that will follow Jack into the world, every day since, I have asked.

Perhaps the real reason that I can’t picture what it will be like to have this baby doesn’t have anything to do with Jack’s cleft, with the mystery surrounding the right side of his face. Maybe the real reason is that Jesus is protecting us from the expectations, rescuing us both from the weight of my attempts to know too much, to see too far ahead.

Jesus is saving better for us.

And from the other side of the expectations, Jesus walks towards us, arms open. From the other side of Mary’s expectation of a body in a tomb, Jesus names her. From the other side of the crowd’s expectations that Lazarus and Jairus’s daughter can never rise from the dead, Jesus wakes them. From the other side of our expectations that we will drown in a storm we cannot control, Jesus silences the water, the wind.

I can’t picture what will happen in a few weeks.

I am, for the first time in my life, sure that means it is something better than I could imagine.

Love,
hilary

dear jackson: it will be better

Dear Jackson,

You are growing so much, little man. I am amazed at your hard work – the doctors say you’re right on time, even measuring a few days ahead. You move and squirm around a lot, but I know that the space is starting to feel small. The world here is bigger, and there will be much more space for you on the other side. We have a big backyard and sidewalks, we have the river walk where Dad and I go sometimes to talk and sift through our thoughts, where we go to wonder out loud.

It’s been a little while since I wrote to you about your cleft. We had the MRI, the ultrasounds, the follow-up appointments and there will be a few more before September. You are being such a good sport about letting these strange people take pictures of you. And I know it is a lot, and I think we’re both relieved when we pull out of the hospital each time, heading home, the three of us still making our way through.

I have been talking about you to God, every day. Lately I’ve been asking how this is happening to you, this complicated, challenging stuff.  I keep saying that it seems like you’re too little to have to go through all of this, that it’s so unfair, how much I wish I could be the one to have this instead of you. How much I would give for you not to need any extra help, how much I would give.  And I tell God that I don’t understand how this can be happening to someone I love so much, because, little man, I love you so much more than I can explain.

But then Jesus asked me while I was standing in my closet, trying to pick out something to wear, in that silence that so often carries the voice of God to our noisy hearts: Hilary, do you believe that I love Jackson? 

And then Jesus asked me, Hilary, do you believe that what I will do for Jackson is better than what you can imagine? 

Little man, I do believe this. And I want you to know that I believe it. I believe that when you are born, in those few short weeks that stand between us and the mystery and adventure of your birth, Jesus will be celebrating. Jesus will be rejoicing with us that you are here, that you are finally here in the world with us. And I believe that if you are miraculously healed before birth or if you go through some surgeries, if you come out screeching or if you need a little help breathing from the doctors and nurses in the NICU, if you have some or all or none of what we are preparing for right now, I believe that Jesus will do, and is doing, better things than I can imagine.

I could try to trust in ultrasounds, in MRI reports. I could try to trust in miraculous healings or dreams or prophecies or the late night prayers we are praying over you. I could try to predict what will happen, to imagine you, to imagine what is ahead. But I believe, little man, that it is better to put my trust in Jesus.

And Jesus has better plans for you than the ones I could come up with. Jesus has better things for you than I can ask or imagine. Jesus knows you and loves you so much beyond my imagining.

Jesus led me to your dad – and he is so much better than I could ever have imagined.
Jesus led me to studying philosophy, to asking big questions about disabilities and differences, about human nature and the image of God – better than anything I imagined when I was applying.
Jesus led me to the right college, to the right high school – both better than I could have imagined when I first set out.

And Jesus brought you to us, and you are already so much better than I could have imagined. Carrying you along with me, every day, I remember: what God has in store is always far more than we could have imagined by ourselves.

So, Jackson, these last few weeks, I am leaning on this for both of us. I don’t know what is up ahead. I don’t know where we will be in 8 weeks or what it will be like. But I know, I know, I know that Jesus is with us and ahead of us. He will be rejoicing when you’re born, for there are far better things in store than the things we can imagine.

I can’t wait to see you, little man. Just a few more weeks. We will be rejoicing.

Love,
mom

love is the unrelenting muscle

By now maybe you’ve heard through a grapevine or around the web, the news that Preston and I are expecting a baby. I had thought years ago I would do a lot of blogging about becoming a mom when it happened, that I would want to catalog my daily questions and thoughts in the midst of all the changes and strange cravings and morning sickness, the moments of realization, the moments of gratitude.

I don’t, anymore. It seems a season for quiet, for listening close, for making silence, as we used to tell my Sunday School students. Becoming a mom is among the most wondrous things that has happened in my life – but I probably won’t say too much about it here.

But I want to tell you about the sound.

I want to tell you about the sound of his or her heartbeat, at 9 weeks, in an ordinary doctor’s office on an ordinary Friday, trying to lie still as my nurse practitioner moved the Doppler monitor below my belly button. At first it was just the sounds of searching out the little life that I’ve been taking on faith is growing inside me, but then.

Then, there is this sound, this unbelievable, unyielding, steadying heartbeat. And it isn’t my heartbeat. It’s hers, or it’s his. It’s the baby’s heart, beating away.

The heart is the most unrelenting muscle I have ever heard. The heart is the muscle that begins its work and does not cease, not for one moment. And it begins first. It’s already beating as the brain grows and takes shape, begins to assemble thoughts still as mysterious as whatever lies on the other side of this thin place, where heaven and earth are tremblingly close to each other.

The heart, beating. It sounds so ordinary and then it sounds so unbelievable. Her heart has been beating for weeks now, without me knowing. His heart began to beat before I knew it, before we tuned in with the monitors and the watches and the steady checking in of doctor’s offices.

And this matters to you, because your heart, your faithful, steady, unrelenting muscle has been beating in you for longer than you can imagine. It has kept you.

I think about how we connect the heart, not the brain, with love. I think how we talk about the heart of God, not the cerebral cortex. And though God is far beyond any attempt to imagine Him having a literal heart, I do not think that we are completely wrong to imagine ourselves, to imagine this world, as in the heart of God.

Because God’s love is the same unyielding, unrelenting, steadfast muscle. God’s love is the patient, ever-present sound echoing through our bodies and our lives. God’s love is not too tired to carry us. God’s love is the unrelenting muscle that carries us.

And this baby, he or she is reminding me that there is something not to be forgotten about the mystery of a heartbeat. About the mystery of how we say that we are close to God, that we are held in His heart, that God loves us.

Because love is found in the unrelenting muscle of our lives. And we must love this way: unyieldingly, mysteriously, beginning from before we know it or decide it and continuing long after we think we have done enough, that we are satisfied, that the other person does not love us back or we have given too much of ourselves. We should love this way because it is costly but it is freeing, because it is difficult but familiar, because it is unlike anything in the world and yet it is the foundation of the world.

We should love one another this way, because this is how God loves.

This baby, he or she has a heartbeat set in motion by God. And this heartbeat, which is different from mine, is teaching me to love again more wild, more free, more unrelenting. Like a heartbeat.

Love,
hilary

the impossible brightness, again

“It is not the critic who counts.” Almost a year ago, I wrote a letter on my blog about that. I was talking about the cocoon we spin around ourselves, one that is supposed to protect us from things failing or falling apart or changing uncontrollably. I was talking about loving, daring greatly, how in that work and wonder the critic in us, the cocoon-spinner, does not count.

Far beyond romantic love, I spin cocoons of protection around every paper, every possible declined application, every possible mistake, every possibly possible … you understand, I think. I spin cocoons of anonymity and safety, of carefully worded posts or no posts at all, of endless caveats of when I become more of … then, I will do and be and think the braver things.

But daring greatly is not about the someday marvelous thing we might do. It is not the moment we suddenly defy ourselves and our cocoons and spite the critic in us. Those are marvelous moments, yes, but they are not all there is to daring greatly.

Daring greatly is believing that you carry in you the impossibly bright love of God. It is about entering into the impossible brightness that God prepared for us before we did any marvelous daring thing. It is in all of our tiny revelations, our smallest moments. Daring greatly is saying, “I need to talk to you about this,” three fourths of the way through the long flight when you’ve already argued and made peace and you think, if I say it now I will surely ruin everything. Daring greatly is pressing the “send” button when you’re so sure that if I send that, it will be rejected. Daring greatly is getting on your knees when you think every trace of God’s calling and purpose has disappeared, and even then, saying, Our Father. 

And it’s showing ourselves to care too much, to be un-aloof and earnest and eager and people of a brighter believing:

it’s doing the dishes and trying to find the Chinese restaurant in the unfamiliar town so you can do something spontaneous for someone you love, it’s making and remaking the same plans as you learn the rhythm of a friend’s heart, and it’s helping on a logic problem even though you could say you don’t have time,

it’s praying with, not just for, it’s being unembarrassed in the restaurant or the bank or the escalator in the mall to pray blessing over the stranger in the grey flannel two steps up from you,

it’s admitting that we are lights in the world, even in our yoga pants during rainy Mondays when we feel the least influential, admitting that we are lights that God would have put on a lampstand to illumine the house long before we ever thought ourselves worthy.

Because love is impossibly bright, and it is already alive in us. Because Jesus has gifted us His brightness, not for ourselves but for the house, for the stranger who knocks on the door, for another’s stepping toward Jesus.

Daring greatly is not just for the marvelous things that defy gravity – it is for the every day revealing and sharing of ourselves as bearers of the impossible brightness of God’s love.

That is the impossible brightness. That is daring greatly.

Love,
hilary

when no one else can believe it for me

We were back at a church we love this past Sunday. I’m a long-road Anglican, winding my way along a path from childhood and pink dresses at First Communion to that St. Michael and All Angels confirmation, a swirl of the Spirit descending and those words, this is a new anointing, my daughter. This particular church, where the light spills in across the altar, where the choir and the electric organ sing bold to hymn and spiritual alike, where there sits this beautiful banner I stare at every time I go in – yellow, gold, that proclaims: Yours is the glory, Risen Conquering Son. is where I first saw my husband in the midst of being deeply and irrevocably in love with God. This is where I learned that there are ways of being traditional that sing spirituals and pray for the Spirit to come and fall upon us. This is, in short, where I relearned how to encounter the Lord Jesus.

On Sunday the pastor preached on fear.

On Sunday, Jesus came and sat down beside me.

We sat together, my eyes on my hands, hearing what by now feels so familiar – that anxiety is not our nature, that we are fearful from the first moment of disobedience, that perfect love, who is the person of Jesus, casts out fear. And you all know, in your journey with this rambling heart, that I am acquainted with fear. I’ve lived and wandered inside it often. It’s the kind of dark where my eyes adjust quickly, my adrenaline kicks in, I feel my way through the blackness and so often think I’m doing just fine.

And you all know that I’ve been thinking about that a lot. I keep writing about it. I’d say it was some kind of theme or meditation for the season, but I think it’s more likely that God is content to dwell with us where our hearts most often go to hide from Him, and so He waits for us, comes out into the dark after us, beckons us into the midst of His very self.

So here we are, me and Jesus, and I’m counting the invisible threads in my skirt and I’m hearing again that Jesus will cast out fear, I am hearing that the Holy Spirit lives in me, I am hearing, I am hearing… Jesus, just the stillness of Jesus, is near me.

Then the pastor says, “I cannot believe this for you.”

I bristle at the thought. Aren’t we carrying each other? When the road is long and we are weary aren’t we leaning hard on the faith of each other, on the promises kept generation to generation, of the stories others tell us when we cannot tell ourselves?

But then there is this moment, where I think about it again. I close my eyes, stop counting the threads.

Jesus desires relationship with me. Me, without helpful scaffolding or hiding behind the true things someone else has said. And having faith isn’t just assenting to what someone smarter has said. Jesus doesn’t desire my agreement with someone else. He is too in love with the being of me to want less than my self. My whole self. My whole self, believing.

I do believe we should lean on each other. I believe we should carry each other. Oh, but how we must believe this without hiding from the nearness of God to each of us, in the just-us-ness of our being?

I told my mother once I was doing something because of the lightness of me. I think God’s answer to that question, the one we keep asking, the one we keep hiding from, the one not about God’s goodness or qualities or cosmic salvation or any of that, but just the one about how God loves –

because of the being of you. 

Because of the you that is so gorgeously alive. And you are enough of a reason for all the nearness of God. It is our whole self that must believe. It is our whole self, believing, that God is desperately in love with.

That kind of love is so particular, no one else can believe it for us. We have to believe it, too.

Love,
hilary

would I catch flame (a synchroblog with addie zierman)

It wasn’t that long ago that I came to college with my bags packed and my mind full of theology I didn’t understand. I’d grown up in old rhythms: liturgy on Sundays and Eucharist like manna, a provision from heaven I didn’t know how to need. I grew up so desperately hungry for understanding of God that I read more than I could stomach: Catholic books and Eastern Orthodox theology, books with complicated titles. I talked big about ideas with all the confidence of a teenager who learned the word “eschatological” three days ago and wants to use it, wants to fill the world over with what she thinks she knows about God.

I grew up Christian but thought I could grow up as the next C.S. Lewis, write the apology for my generation, tell the world why it was logical and reasonable and rational and right to be what I was. I grew up Christian, learned the habits of prayer and the way that the seasons change in the church – preparation to celebration to growing to Pentecost and again and again how I tried to understand too much about too much, cram heaven into my head while I still didn’t know how to French braid my hair.

That summer of going to college I thought I’d figured out what it meant to be Christian, to live out a life of faithfulness: it meant knowing the answers and complicating them, tracing the shapes of ideas into journals and class discussions and making my heart so safe in the right theology that it might never need to wonder about the presence of the love of God.

I drove up to the dorm and I unloaded my laundry basket of things – a few picture frames, books, notebooks and pens in neat piles, and waited.

I waited that whole year to feel right. I waited to hear God the way the people around me kept hearing Him, the way they closed their eyes in worship and put their hands above their heads to the songs by the bands I didn’t know existed (but I could sing a hymn, and I was proud of that, thinking I’d escape God into the warm and safe arms of the old ornate words and the incense and the icons). I waited for the moments where I would finally understand what falling in love with God felt like, finally make myself read my Bible and have quiet time in the mornings the way, it turned out, youth group taught you. And I hadn’t gone to youth group and I hadn’t played the Chris Tomlin CDs and maybe I hadn’t done much falling in love with God, I thought, as I walked to and from class trying to fit my theology around the worry that I might never catch fire.

But the fire of Pentecost can descend at a moment, like ice, like clear water, like dust that spins you and settles you and unsettles you again. Like Eucharist manna – the provision of mystery, in mystery.

I was in a parking lot, on a Sunday morning, tears tracing the indents my dimples make in my face whenever I move.

Then I was in a still Chapel late at night, the kind of stillness that bends towards a heavenly silence.

Then I was in a blue TV room in Washington DC learning that the very word Jesus was power.

Then, and again and again now – I take what is unto me the very Body and Blood, the mystery provision, and I fall in love with God who teaches my heart how to make room for Him, not the words about Him.

And the fire is small and flickers daily. And the Spirit descends. And I catch flame.

Love,
hilary

I’m linking up with Addie’s synchroblog to celebrate her book release of When We Were on Fire. I can’t wait to read it (because her words are good words, food-to-the-soul words).

to save you

It is too dark for me when I walk inside. I immediately regret that I have come into this stillness, my skirt with its ripped silk lining announcing my arrival with a soft rustle. I can’t see who is in front or behind me. The twelve candles, the twelve flickering, bright disciple-symbols dance and snap to my right. I sink into the hard wood of the pew and wish I was driving home singing to country music.

It is too quiet for me. I can hear every distracting thought rumbling towards my mind – that there is so much work to do when I get home, not enough time, that I’ve eaten not enough or too much, that this or that difficult question has been raised in a conversation with a friend. I shuffle my feet, feel my fingers clutching at the rim of the pew in front of me. The wood is worn smooth from the sweat of prayer and impatience; and I wonder how many hands before me have regretted coming heree, this place where a Spirit hovers over us, protecting, keeping watch.

Tenebrae means darkening shadows, I read, and this service is about the disappearance of the light.

I’m more afraid than I have been in a long time. We stand, think the Lord’s Prayer in silence. I can feel myself close my ribcage, catching my breath over, and over. Tonight, One who was obedient goes up to be offered for me, the disobedient, and I am afraid. I am afraid of Him.

The cantors begin. The notes are not sweet but searing. They land, each one, it seems, closer and closer to my pew. Their voices lament with Jeremiah and I try not to listen, but in the silence nothing else can be heard except these words – O Lord, nothing but these words –

“You will flee, and I will go to be offered up for you.”

Candle after candle is snuffed out. Light after light disappears from the altar, and still it is darker, and still, my soul clings to the idea that perhaps I am not one of these twelve bright, brief flames. Perhaps I am faithful to Him, perhaps I know better, perhaps, perhaps…

“You will flee, Hilary.”

The Spirit whispers. A rib seems to snap, a fleeting, sharp pain in the middle of my chest. No, Lord. It couldn’t be. More candles go out.

And Jesus says again: “You will flee, and I will go to be offered up for you.”

We stand. My heart pounds in my chest, and I am on the run from that voice – I am fleeing from the truth that I have been the first to flee from Him – but there is nowhere to go. Where can I go?

They hide the Christ candle. The sanctuary is finally, utterly dark. Tenebrae means darkening shadows.

A gun sounds behind the altar. A symbol, I know, of earth and heaven torn apart by this death, but I stop breathing and begin to cry.

I sob through the silence. I sob through the slow return of the One candle. I sob and sob, tears in my hair and fogging up my glasses and I am breaking apart, because the same voice that said, “You will flee, Hilary,” has just whispered,

“And so, Hilary, I will tear earth and heaven apart to save you.”

A gun sounds, the Christ candle returns. A gun sounds, I sob and sob and sob, for my flight, for His salvation. I whisper back to Him – O Lord, I need saving. 

He tears heaven and earth apart to save us.

To save me.

I leave the church still in tears.

Love,
hilary