I've discovered seminarian David Henson's blog this year, and I find that he really speaks to a lot of my concerns about being an American and trying to be a faithful Christian. He's just written this post on the feast days of Lent which gave me a lot to think about. Have a look.

Sore must be the storm that could abash the little bird

Readings for the second Sunday in Lent:

Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18
Psalm 27
Philippians 3:17-4:1
Luke 13:31-35 

Every time I sat down to read and ponder the passages for this week, I got caught up in the story of Abram (who later became Abraham, in case you, like me, have trouble keeping track of all the name changes in the Bible). The beginning of the passage shows us Abram longing for a legitimate son to be heir to his household. At this point, he's between seventy and eighty-six, so he must have known with all his heart that he would never have an heir. I mean, a person can hold out hope for a long time, but at some point, reality intrudes, and we have to face facts. I think this is Abram's big moment of crisis. He knows it's not going to happen, and he cries out to God, basically paraphrasing Once in a Lifetime, by The Talking Heads, "How did I get here?...My God, what have I done?"

I think we can all relate to Abram at this moment. Here's a guy who has only wanted a son all his life, a boy to give his household to, and it's not going to happen. His heart's desire is slipping away from him, and there's nothing he can do about it. It's a common experience, I think, at a certain stage of our lives, maybe at several stages of our lives, to have to come to terms with the paths our lives won't be taking. And for some of us, that means our heart's deepest desire. I've been doing a little of that myself over the past few years, and it's difficult. One of the only things I've ever wanted to do with my life is to write a novel and get it published. Now that I've got the novel and I'm sending it out, I deal regularly with the possibility that being a novelist isn't in my cards. I've put a lot of time over my life into becoming a novelist--writing time, conference time, reading time, time I could have spent on other things if I knew the novelist thing wasn't going to happen. That's a terrible realization to have, and with it comes a responsibility: When you know that the thing you've been holding out for isn't going to come, do you chose to change your life, to salvage the time you have left with something that is less than the desire of your heart? At what point is it time to switch to Plan B? (Spoiler Alert: I have no idea.)

But, you know what? I'm lucky. Because being a novelist is a deep desire, but it's not my deepest desire. My deepest desire was to find someone who found me so worthy of love that he'd choose me for his new family, and then for us to have children together. And I know that makes me incredibly blessed. I have known many people for whom marriage or children (or a published novel) was their hearts' truest desire, but, for whatever reason, it did not come. Or it hasn't come yet. Or it came, but at a time when it could not be accepted. And that loss is a loss that may be more difficult than death, because we can't mourn it. Because the book is not totally closed on our deepest desire until it's closed on our lives, is it? We may, like Abram and Sarah, intellectually acknowledge that the odds of getting our heart's elusive desire are infinitessimal, but our hearts don't care, and our hope somehow lives on. As Emily Dickenson wrote:

Hope is the thing with feathers--
That perches in the soul--
And sings the tune without the words--
And never stops--at all

Hope refuses to stop. Even if outwardly, it looks like we've moved on, inwardly there's hope fluttering around.

Which is why we love the story of Abram and Sarah, who seem to have given up when God tells Abram, you will have your heart's desire. And Abram goes, "Oh, okay. Great." Which is to say, he just believes it--another testament to the strength of hope, though I think it's worth noticing that it's after he gets this message from God that he impregnates Hagar and conceives Ishmael, so maybe he didn't totally believe God after all. Maybe he was proceeding with Plan B just in case.

But there's another reason why hope flutters around in our souls, and why we find Abraham and Sarah's story so important--because it totally happens. It happens all the time. My grandmother adopted two children because she was infertile, my mother and my uncle. Then, more than ten years after my mother was born, my grandmother became pregnant with my second uncle. When my father was in the hospital dying from heart failure, my sister had not spoken to him in many years. It was my deep desire, for both their sakes, that she call him before he died. Every day at the hospital I waited, and then I heard through my mother that she planned to call. I didn't tell Dad though, just in case. I waited and waited until one day, something changed. I suddenly saw their relationship through her eyes, and I understood why she hadn't called, and I gave up. I let go of the reunion, which I  wanted as much to set my own heart at ease as for either of them. She called the following morning. A dramatic coincidence, right? But isn't it also true that often when we stop trying to force the outcome that we want, we find that we've got the outcome we wanted all along? It's frequently been true for me.

And the thing that I always tell my single-but-wanting-to-be-married girlfriends who feel like time is running out for them is that when you want something badly, it feels like it will never happen. You think to yourself, well, first we have to meet, and then we have to get to know each other, so that would take, maybe six months to a year, and then we have to decide to get married, and I don't know how you could know something like that without at least two years dating....and so on. (Or in my case, first I have to get the novel done, and then I have to find an agent, and then he has to find a publisher...) But the thing is, when your heart's desire comes to you, it comes the way it's been eluding you. Namely, not according to plan.

Which brings us rather nicely to the gospel lesson for today where Jesus says that he has longed to gather the children of Jerusalem as a mother hen gathers her brood under he wing, but they (we) were not willing. Can't you just feel his longing? It's heartbreaking. Jesus yearns to gather us together. That was the plan. But we will not be gathered.  We, his heart's desire, refuse to go to him. I don't think it's a coincidence that when he speaks of his longing and heartbreak he likens himself to a mother. Women know what it is to long for children--whether they are their own or not. Whether they exist at present or not.

There will be a lot of talking in a month or so about the good news of the resurrection, but for me, that image of Christ as a hen trying to protect her children is the good news of the incarnation. Jesus came in full humanity to live among us, and Jesus knew what it was to never have his heart's desire. So whether we are like Abraham and Sarah, and finally see our longing realized so long after we've let hope fly away that we laugh until tears run down our cheeks, or whether we, like Jesus, yearn our whole lives for something that will not be, we can be sure that in our laughter and in our sorrow, we are joined by one who was not just willing to die for the privilege of connection with us. He was willing to become, like us, a flutteringly hopeful creature, subject to the gains and losses,  sorrows and joys that can fill up a life, hoping against hope to be reunited with the ones she loves.

Be Not Afraid

Here are the lessons for the first Sunday in Lent:
Deuteronomy 26:1-11
Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16
Romans 10:8b-13
Luke 4:1-13

For those of you who didn't bring your bibles to the internet today, you can read them here.

So, Psalm 91: 9-10 tells us this:

Because you have made the LORD your refuge, *
and the Most High your habitation,

There shall no evil happen to you, *
neither shall any plague come near your dwelling.

And I would like to begin this first entry of blogging the lectionary by asserting that in every way we understand this statement, it's complete and utter bullshit. I mean, we all do the polite thing with God and don't mention that, actually, a ton of Christian people have died of Ebola and Smallpox and AIDS. And if cancer isn't a plague, I don't know what is. But evil happens to people who have made God their refuge all the time. All. The. Time.

I remember the first time I really confronted this fact. I was on a plane, praying that I would land safely. I’m always nervous flying, and I’ve always allayed my fear by asking God to take care of me. But this time, in the middle of my request, the thought came to me that God’s faithful people die in plane crashes regularly. God doesn’t prevent bad things from happening to his faithful people. Most of us don’t reach the double digits without knowing some really wonderful, faithful person who died before his or her time or was made to endure unimaginable suffering. Some people don’t see ten before they become the faithful person dying far too young or dealing with torturous circumstances beyond their control.

So what are we supposed to do with that? I’m not talking about the whole how-does-a-loving-God-allow-evil-in-the-world thing, because God isn’t saying anything about why evil might exist in the passages for today. Instead, God’s saying, over and over again, “Don’t worry about it. I’ve got your back.” Or, as Paul says in Romans: "If you confess with your lips that Jesus is lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved."

It seems pretty clear cut, right? So we, his faithful children believe that God does have our back. Right up until he lets some mofo come and stab us in it. Where does God get off making promises that he doesn’t seem to have either the intention or the power to keep?

I think there are a couple of ways we, as people of faith, tend to deal with this contradiction. One way is to say, “Well it was just God’s plan.” To me, this all reeks of the backside of a bull as well. It’s not God’s plan for a woman to outlive her first graders. What kind of douchebag god plans something like that? Not one that I’m willing to worship, that’s for sure. I understand that this is just a short way of trying to affirm the goodness of life while acknowledging the senselessness of tragedy, but we really need to stop trying to find short ways to say these things, if only so that no more mothers have to hear about how having their babies ripped from their arms was all part of the plan.

The other way we deal with this whole “I will take care of you, even though you have plenty of evidence to the contrary" thing is to deny the worthiness of others. We think, “Oh, that person didn’t know how to trust God.” Or “I guess she wasn’t faithful enough.” Or “He wasn’t really a True Christian the way I am.” This is how we insulate ourselves from tragedy. We find all of the ways we aren’t like That Person who had That Horrible Thing happen to them, because we can then pretend that those differences are enough to keep That Horrible Thing from happening to us. This is why when, on hearing someone has a brain tumor, we think, “Well, he did have that cell phone up to his ear practically 24/7.” We want to find the secret incantation, the magic mental pill, that will help us believe that we will never suffer the same fate. In short, we lie to ourselves.

But the truth, I think, can be found in a question. The question, which we have to ask Paul, is, “Saved from what, exactly?” Because when Paul was writing his letters, Christians were dying horribly all the time. So God certainly wasn’t saving them from death. What was he saving them from? Let’s put a pin in that question for a second and notice something about these promises that God keeps making to his people.

I feel like these promises that are being made are very similar to the promises I make to my kids when they ask me things like, “But Mommy, you aren’t going to die, are you? What’s a coma? Could I go into a coma? Will I ever be blind?” The kids have asked all of these things recently, and I really don’t want to lie to them. So I elide my answers: It’s my job to do everything I can to keep that from happening. Or, that’s for mommies and daddies to worry about that, so that kids don’t have to.

That, I think, is the more important part of what the scriptures say—not, no harm shall ever come to you, but rather, try not to worry about it, because when you’re worried, you’re not fully alive, and you deserve to be fully alive for as long as you’re on the earth. So believe in your heart, as Paul would say, and confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord, and you shall be saved from your attachment to your own survival. And not because it’s a magic trick that God’s only willing to do if you call him by the right name, but because God works through every human soul in the same way, and every human soul shrinks and shrivels when it is fed by fear.

And isn’t that really what Jesus is doing in the wilderness? Saying no to fear? Every time the devil challenges him, it’s with issues of the here and now: you’re hungry, turn these stones to bread. You’re insignificant, but I can make you important. You’re going to die, and there’s not a damn thing you or your god is going to do about it. And Jesus answers all the questions with a variation of the same answer: Eating is not the most important thing. Acknowledgement is not the most important thing. Staying alive isn’t the most important thing.

So back to the question for Paul—Saved from what, exactly? I think the answer is saved from fear. Or at least, from fear’s power. Because our fear and the ways we try to protect ourselves from what we’re afraid of have real and lasting effects in the world.

Here’s an example: my husband registered to be a bone marrow donor when he was in his twenties. A few days ago, he got a call. He might be a match. So he’s taken the next step to find out if he can donate marrow to some stranger. He’s really excited, because how often does a guy get a chance to save a person’s life. My reaction? You can’t do this. What if there are complications? What if you get an infection in the hospital and you die? What would the children do without their father? My fear spoke loudly for a moment. And then I voiced those fears, and told him how ashamed I was for thinking those things. And it was fine, because we both knew, the fear was understandable, but unreasonable. Bone marrow donation isn’t all that risky, and anyway, someone might die if he didn’t help. Of course he was going to help.

If only all of our fear was so easily dealt with. Most of the time, it’s a much greater struggle. Evil is real, and it can come for us. But if we can stare it down, if we can begin to see with God’s broad perspective, and affirm with Lady Julian of Norwich that “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well,” then something miraculous happens.

If I can face my own fear enough that I can accept that That Horrible Thing that’s happening to you might just as easily be happening to me. If I don’t just wash my hands of the struggle and the suffering by blithely saying, “God’s got a plan.” If I can engage you in your pain without needing to keep myself separate from it. If I can have the courage to see life for the holy crap shoot it sometimes is, then I won’t turn my head or pretend I don’t see when your roll comes up snake eyes. Instead, I’ll sit there with you, staring at the dice for a long time in disbelief, and then, when it’s time, I’ll help you with whatever you need until you’re ready to pick up the dice and roll again. And when I—when all of us—can do that, then we will know that we dwell in the shelter of the Most High.

Watch This Space

So while some of the world revels in beignets and plastic beads, I've been thinking about Lent. As a good Episcoplian girl, even when I'm not attending church regularly, I stil feel the need to observe Lent and Advent with a passion. (Heh heh heh, get it? Passion.)

Since Lent starts off all about the guilt, I thought this year I'd do something I've felt guilty about not doing in a long time--blogging. See, as an aspiring novelist, I often hear that I need to have an online presence. I also have an Etsy store, and often get advice that I really need to be blogging about the artwork I make.

But I never do, mostly because I just find it hard to believe that I'll have anything new to say about the process of writing or making art, and my house is not usually clean enough to set up photo shoots about the fun craft project my kids all did together. (Who am I kidding? We never do cute craft projects. That's why I sent them to preschool--I know how to delegate to my weaknesses.)

I do, however have a misguided notion that I have something to say about religion and faith. If string theory turns out to be correct, then I'm sure there are multiple alternative universes in which I'm an ordained priest in the Epsicopal church.

So my big plan is, I'm going to pretend I'm a priest for Lent--every Monday through Friday, I'll read the lessons for the week, and then on Saturday, I'll write a little sermon in the form of an essay. Totally, totally self-indulgent Lenten discipline, I know. But it comes from a place of guilt, so that's got to count for something.