Lauren Winner on Practice and Belief

I have long held a deep fascination with Lauren Winner.  If you have never encountered her writing or had the opportunity to hear her speak, I would encourage you to do so.  I have actually spent more time listening to her speak than I have reading her books.  Her works include Mudhouse Sabbath, Girl Meets God, Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Christianity, and, most recently, Still.  Winner is absolutely brilliant.  When she walks into a room, you understand immediately that her level of intelligence far surpasses yours or that of anyone around you.  Her signature style includes cat-eye glasses.  Her voice is deep and textured like gravel.  She has tattoos.  I know this because she wore a shawl when I saw her speak last year.  It was not entirely cooperative and fell several times, revealing the ink on her upper arms.  None of this is particularly important to what I want to share with you, except that these things make her all the more fascinating to me. 

As I said, I have seen her speak more than I have actually read her work.  I read Still last year.  I highly recommend it for anyone, but especially for those who have been mucking through life's hard stuff and whose faith is suffering.  It isn't that this book will cure what ails you, or that it will make your doubt dissipate.  Rather, Dr. Winner's voice whispers in your ear, giving you reassurance and providing a companion for your loneliness and uncertainty. 

I am finally reading Mudhouse Sabbath.  It is a slight book, written in part at Mudhouse, a familiar-to-me coffee shop in Charlottesville.  In the volume, Winner considers the shift that took place in her spiritual practices when she left Judaism and become a Christian.  Several years into her new found faith, Winner discovered that she missed the intentionality of Jewish life.  She explores eleven practices that she found important and considers how they might be applicable in the life of a Christian. 

While reading the introduction, I was struck by this:

Practice is to Judaism what belief is to Christianity.  That is not to say that Judaism doesn't have dogma or doctrine.  It is rather to say that for Jews, the essence of the thing is a doing, an action.  Your faith might come and go, but your practice ought not waver. (Indeed, Judaism suggests that the repeating of the practice is the best way to ensure that a doubter's faith will return.)  This is perhaps best explained by a midrash (a rabbinic commentary on a biblical text).  This midrash explains a curious turn of phrase in the Book of Exodus: "Na'aseh v'nishma," which means "we will do and we will hear" or "we will do and we will understand," a phrase drawn from Exodus 24, in which the people of Israel proclaim "All the words that God has spoken we will do and we will hear."  The word order, the rabbis have observed, doesn't seem to make any sense: How can a person obey God's commandment before they hear it?  But the counterintuitive lesson, the midrash continues, is precisely that one acts out God's commands, one does things unto God, and eventually, through the doing, one will come to hear and understand and believe.

 Upon reading Still, one sees this practice come alive in Winner's life.  Through doubt and heartache and even rejection, Dr. Winner continues to attend church, to participate in liturgy, to pray (or, when she could not, to have others pray for her).  She does this though she does not necessarily believe. 

I have been in this place.  I stayed in the realm of doubt and uncertainty for some time.  Strangely, I always felt most comforted when speaking the words of the Confession with my church family.  Many weeks, I did not honestly believe the words, but I felt secure resting in the arms of those who did believe. 

I still have a lot of doubt to confront.  I believe that I will always live with this tension.  Yet, I am determined to continue practicing.  By God's mercy, may I learn to believe in the deepest part of my being.

Practicing Resurrection for Lent

In the last few years, I have come to hold dear the season of Lent.  This is not because I have maintained any serious practices or held any season long fasts, but because I find it to be a meaningful time of reflection.  I find myself thinking more often of Jesus, of faith, of the beauty around me.  Beginning Lent with the imposition of ashes is especially meaningful to me.  The reminder that I am dust, and that to dust I shall return, evokes paradoxical feelings of trepidation and utter peace.  The ashes remind me that I am but a fleeting whirl of dust; they remind me that God can make even dust beautiful and valuable, that God, in some unknowable way, is spilling out of the cracks and is making all things new.

I received a pack of Lenten devotionals from the local church where Jordan and I have twice attended an Ash Wednesday service.  I flipped through the pages and discovered that a poem by Wendell Berry had been included.  I have been reading Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front over and over.  I had been contemplating what practice I would assume for the duration of Lent.  I hadn't landed on anything specific, only that I wanted to be intentional about having daily practices that connected me to God and to the beauty that is around me and is me.  As I came to the last line of Berry's poem, I paused, struck by the simple wisdom of his directive:

"Practice resurrection."

This has become my Lenten journey, to practice resurrection.  I suppose I should say instead that it is my journey to discover, as far as I can, what it means for me to do this.  Thus far, it has meant fighting anxiety with deep breaths and reminders of God's faithfulness.  It has meant positioning myself to be available to people.  It has meant setting aside work in exchange for time with a friend or a walk.

I wonder, what would life be like if one actually believed in the practical applicability of the resurrection in her everyday life?  Does the mundane become beautiful, enchanting?  Does, as my friend Anne Paulus has phrased it, the "ordinary glow?"  I hope so.

A Tree Grows

Last night, I finally finished A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith.  I say finally because I have been reading this book since mid-December.  When this semester began, I slipped the volume in a space alongside the other four books I am reading and abandoned it for several weeks.  I finally returned to it last weekend and, over the course of the week, spent spare moments reading a paragraph, a chapter, fifty pages. 

If you have not read this book, I would say that you must.  I generally allow some time before I determine whether a book has truly impacted my life, but in this case, I can honestly say that the story of the Nolans has sunk deep into my mind.  It is a story of poverty and its cycles, addiction, brokenness; more importantly, it is a story of family, hope, and resilience.  Smith's descriptions of poverty in Brooklyn in the early 1900s remain relevant and poignant even today.  She adeptly demonstrates the work ethic, determination, and struggle of the poor, revealing how the world devalues inherently valuable human beings based on their socioeconomic status.  Brilliantly, she does this through the eyes of a child who, through no fault of her own, is born into poverty and who necessarily sacrifices education and freedom so that her family can eat.

The book begins and ends with the description of the tree growing in Brooklyn.

The one tree in Francie's yard was neither a pine nor a hemlock.  It had pointed leaves which grew along green switches which radiated from the bough and made a tree which looked like a lot of opened green umbrellas.  Some people called it the Tree of Heaven.  No matter where its seed fell, it made a tree which struggled to reach the sky.  It grew in boarded up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps and it was the only tree that grew of of cement.  It grew lushly, but only in the tenements districts.

You took a walk on a Sunday afternoon and came to a nice neighborhood, very refined.  You saw a small one of these trees through the iron gate leading to someone's yard and you knew that soon that section of Brooklyn would get to be a tenement district.  The tree knew.  It came there first.  Afterwards, poor foreigners seeped in and the quiet old brownstone houses were hacked up into flats, feather beds were pushed out of the window sills to air and the Tree of Heaven flourished.  That was the kind of tree it was.  It liked poor people.

That was the kind of tree in Francie's yard.

We are reminded of this tree's presence throughout the book, and, in the final sentences, its significance as a symbol of hope, determination, and resiliency is reiterated and reinforced:

She looked down into the yard.  The tree whose leaf umbrellas had curled around, under and over her fire escape had been cut down because the housewives complained that wash on the lines got entangled in its branches.  The landlord had sent two men and they had chopped it down.

But the tree hadn't died...it hadn't died.

 A new tree had grown from the stump and its trunk had grown along the ground until it reached a place where there were not wash lines above it.  Then it had started to grow toward the sky again.

...But this tree in the yard -- this tree that men chopped down...this tree that they build a bonfire around, trying to burn up its stump -- this tree lived!

It lived! And nothing could destroy it.

About a year ago, I was reading in Job and encountered these verses: 

For there is hope for a tree 
 if it be cut down, that it will sprout again,
 and that  its shoots will not cease. 
Though its root grow old in the earth, 
and its stump die in the soil, 
yet at the scent of water it will bud
and put out branches like a young plant.
 But a man dies and is laid low; 
man breathes his last, and where is he?

These words, found in the midst of many disheartening observations and laments, were particularly piercing to me.  How often I have approached my own life with this kind of bleak, despairing perspective.  In the midst of struggle, loss, uncertainty, and loneliness, it certainly feels as though I am being cut down.  Need we remember how the slow process of dragging a saw back and forth against a tree's rough bark, gashing its lifeline, until it falls?  Yet, the tree does not know that its seeds will spread, or that its roots may give life to yet another tree.  In the same way, we cannot know what life our suffering will bring.

One of my favorite songs is "The Sun and the Moon" by mewithoutyou.  With the words from Job resounding in my mind, I understood these lines for the first time:

Daniel broke the king's decree,
Peter stepped from the ship to the sea
there was hope for Job like a cut down tree,
I hope that there's such hope for me

 There was hope for Job, even as there is hope for a cut down tree; there was hope for Francie, even as there was hope for a tree that had been hacked down and burned.  The tree lived.  And nothing could destroy it.

Friends, a Tree of Heaven grows near each of us.  Even in the most uninhabitable spaces, beauty springs forth.  Hope stretches its branches, allowing each of us to rest in its cool shade, even if for a moment.  It is this beauty and this hope that gives each of us the strength to continue.  It is a tree that grows in the midst of poverty, addiction, hunger, violence, and despair; it flourishes in these spaces, even without water, sun, and pure air.

Much more could be said, yet perhaps I have already said too much.  Look around you, see the beauty seeping out from concrete corners and spilling forth from broken people.  It is there.  Nothing can destroy it.

resolution

This morning, Jordan and I finally got around to beginning the process of taking down the Christmas tree.  I had already packed up the other decorations around the house, but the tree has been standing unlit and un-watered since the day after Christmas.  Due to a few interruptions, the tree is still standing, entirely stripped of the baubles, ribbons, and lights that adorned it. 

While we pulled the ornaments off of the tree, I thought about how much has changed over the last year and wondered what life will be like next year as we place those same ornaments onto another to another tree.  Last year, as we were taking down our tree, I dared not even dream that we would practice the tradition in our own home this Christmas.  Yet, here we are, the tree and me, spending a few moments alone in our sweet house. 

Jordan and I have had a lot of good, but difficult, conversations in the last few weeks and months.  It is likely that 2013 will bring about some significant changes in our lives.  (Don't get excited, I'm not talking about a baby.)  Yet, I am comforted in this moment by the graces of the year gone by.  I am comforted that one such grace, our home, has tethered us to a place and a people.  Already, both Jordan and I have had moments of resentment, have wondered if we made the right decision, have had waves of anxiety roll over us at the thought of not being able to pick up and go when things are tough.  Yet, our decision was not made blindly or without guidance.  The potential for change in our lives will, I hope, only strengthen the ties and deep our roots.  As I realized this morning while placing a metallic dove into its box, next year, Lord willing, the first or second weekend of December, Jordan and I will bring a tree into this home, place it in front of our staircase, and adorn it with baubles, ribbons, and lights.

I have a few goals for myself this year.  Until last year, I was not one for resolutions.  But, I set a few attainable goals for 2012, and want to do the same in 2013.  Last year, I resolved to run a 5k.  I did.  This year, I have resolved to run a 5k in the spring and fall.  I'm hoping this will give me some incentive to keep running, as I promptly stopped after running a 5k this summer. 

I have also resolved to write more.  Considering I have a thesis to write this semester, I suppose it may seem an unnecessary goal.  But, I have found that writing for school has cast a shadow over writing itself, a practice that I find therapeutic and enriching.  So, I am determined to write.  To help push me along, I've decided to set a goal of having something published this year.  It can be published by a little online journal or community, a barely distributed magazine, or in a never-to-be-read book, but I want to at least try to see this realized. 

I have plenty of other goals.  Some are very personal.  Others are entirely public.  These will include a lot of house projects that I'll post over on Open House 932 (there is a link at the top of the page). 

A giant, heartfelt thank you to all of you who have been part of my life throughout the last year.  Some of you have been friends in the truest meaning of the word and have committed yourselves to loving me.  You have changed my life.  You know who you are, and, if you happened to include "change a life" on a resolutions or bucket list, go check it off. 

Jordan, it seems, is always thinking of me and ways to make me smile.  I have been perusing books of Wendell Berry's poems from time to time, but haven't yet bought one despite my love of his work.  This week, when I stopped by to pick Jordan up from the coffee shop and shuttle him directly to the Boys and Girls Club, he handed me Berry's collection of poems entitled Given.

Here is an excerpt of Part III: Sabbaths VI

By expenditure of hope,
Intelligence, and work,
You think you have it fixed.
It is unfixed by rule.
Within the darkness, all
Is being changed, and you
Also will be changed.

...

But won't you be ashamed
To count the passing year
At its mear cost, your debt
Inevitably paid?

For every year is costly,
As you know well.  Nothing
Is given that is not
Taken, and nothing taken
That was not first a gift.

The gift is balanced by
Its total loss, and yet,
And yet the light breaks in,
Heaven seizing its moments
That are at once its own
And yours.  The day ends
And is unending where 
The summer tanager,
Warbler, and vireo
Sing as they move among
Illuminated leaves.

 It has only been in the last few years that I have begun to understand the cost of time, of a year.  As Berry says, "Nothing is given that is not taken, and nothing taken that was not first a gift."  The delight of receiving a gift of grace inevitably becomes the ache of loss.  I swing dramatically back and forth between a posture of indifference and terror as I engage with the things and the people I have been given.  Indifference because I forget their value and their finite nature; terror because, when I realize these things, I find myself desperately grasping for control.  Less frequently, I assume a posture of awe-struck gratitude.  Those are my best days.  Rather, my best moments.  I find that position to be difficult to maintain; it pinches and stretches parts of me that I would prefer to leave alone.

But today, in this year, I am inexplicably grateful.  (And, it should be said, rather uncomfortable.)  We celebrate a year since my mother's radical mastectomy, a surgery that frightened us all, but left her without cancer.  It was this day a year ago that I sat, waiting, wondering.  What was happening?  What would happen?  What would they find?  Why is the phone not ringing, it has been an hour longer than they told us to expect...  It was this day a year ago that my dad sat with me in the waiting room, only leaving long enough to make his way to the gift shop to buy my mom an anniversary gift, a stuffed animal to keep with her when we all had to go home that night.  Today, we also celebrate a 42nd year of married life for my parents.  Today is a precious, precious gift from a merciful and loving Creator. 

We cannot hold on to anything for long.  It is all passing, here one moment and gone the next.  We hold on to things and people, and they pass through our hands.  But this is where I disagree with Berry.  I do not believe that the gift is balanced by total loss.  I believe that the gift, although taken, continues to give strength and comfort.  Loss, I, perhaps naively, hope, is tipped by the gift on the scale.  

I am learning, although slowly, that I must practice a posture of awe-struck gratitude.  This, as with so much in life, is a discipline.  A difficult and sometimes painful discipline.  Yet, I believe that it is one that leads us to see more clearly "Heaven seizing its moments...at once its own and yours."

"...And yet the light breaks in...the day ends and is unending..."

In his memoir, Jesus, My Father, the CIA, and Me, Ian Morgan Cron describes a brief moment of grace following a terrifying and scaring encounter with a bully.  He is in the woods surrounding his neighborhood.  The bully and his accomplices have left him.  He is humiliated, shocked, and utterly alone.  Cron recalls,

...I felt vacant and half-alive.  

To my right I heard the sudden crack of a twig...It was a fawn.  He was a tan smudge, thirty feet away, unaware of me...I lay frozen, watching him, for so long that my right leg fell asleep.  Eventually the pain of it became unbearable.  Little by little, I shifted my weight to get my right ankle out from under my left thigh, but the crack of a dry twig snapping under my bony butt sounded the alarm.  The fawn's tail shot up, revealing its white underside.  He crouched down and froze; his legs trembled, poised to flee.  ...He didn't run.  He looked at me, and gradually the fear that passed back and forth in our gazes dissolved.  The fawn's legs soon relaxed and straightened, and I lay down on my side with my head propped up on my hand.  After a long while of looking at each other, our eyes registered agreement.  We belonged here and to each other.  

The fawn sneezed, its head jerking downward.  I blinked and he was gone.

How do we explain these fugitive graces?

This story, and this question, surfaced during a conversation Jordan and I had this week.  We were talking about life, the big picture, and God's intentions for our levels of happiness or misery.  I thought of a couple my mother-in-law knows who are living in a place that they might deem "miserable," but stay because they know that they are called to do so.  I thought of my father whose constant companion during the last thirty years has been Parkinson's disease.  I thought of the thousands, likely millions, of children taken captive each year and used for sex, hard labor, and other unimaginable things.  I thought of Ian Morgan Cron, who faced not only a bully on this day, but an alcoholic father every day.

I thought of the "fugitive graces" with which the suffering are showered.  Like drops of dew, they nourish and revive us for the day ahead.  I cannot explain our suffering;  I do not know why pain and loss and disappointment and despair swarm, seemingly unchecked, in the midst of humanity.  Yet, these fugitive graces flicker before us, like light dancing on the wall, a fleeting glimpse of a Beauty beyond, a Grace everlasting.  How can we explain them?

I am realizing that these graces are not few and far between as we might think, but are countless and constant.  A man arrives at a wedding in a wheelchair.  A friend pushes him from one place to the next.  Yet, when the music starts, he can't help but tap his feet.  The friend brings him a walker, and the man journeys to the dance floor where he dances and laughs and laughs.  I saw this only the other day.

A woman is eating in a restaurant.  She sees a young woman who reminds her of her daughter.  The girl is with a boy.  The woman watches them sharing dessert as they watch hockey.  When her server comes to her, she whispers that she would like to pay the young couple's tab.  She leaves.  Moments later, the boy and the girl ask for the check and are told that it has been taken care of by a woman who thought that they were "the cutest couple."  Little did the women know the beauty of her act.  I received this humble and unassuming hospitality last night.

The flower blooms.  The grass tickles.  The sun shines.  The rain pours.  The child laughs.

"How do we explain these fugitive graces?"

I do not know.  But I am ever so grateful.

 

 

 

i can honestly say that i did not write this to impress you.

      Pardon the long silence.      

      The year of second grade, first crushes, and Hooked on Phonics, my parents gave me a small journal for my birthday.  I can vividly remember that tiny book, its cover’s depiction of a white unicorn galloping through an enchanted forest, an image that was set against a background of soft teal.  However delighted I, a girl enthralled with horses and fairytales, was by the journal’s cover, it was not this feature which compelled me to carry the gift with me to school that January 29, to pass it around to all of my friends, flaunting my new found freedom.  You see, this particular journal, handpicked for me, was graced with a lock and one key.  This meant that I suddenly had the liberty of expressing my deepest secrets without fear of ridicule, shame, or an invasion of my privacy.  That January 29, when recess came, I sat down on an unused staircase in my school’s gym, surrounded by my closest friends and began to write.  What I wrote I cannot remember, likely something about the boy I was crushing on (a truth that, even at that age, I could not bring myself to admit to my peers), but I can remember that those girls faithfully stood guard, chasing away any boy who ventured within ten feet of our enclave. 

            I have thought of that day often and wondered what else I received for my birthday that year.  My mother is a particularly good gift giver, so I assume that, for any other child, the other presents I received would have taken complete precedence over that journal.  Yet, of all of the gifts I received on all of my birthdays, I remember that journal and that day. 

            Since then, I have always had a journal in my possession.  In my closet, I have a box of them, beginning with those I wrote during my later high school years and continuing through last year’s model.  Despite this, I do not pretend to be a faithful to those bound stacks of pureed tree.  Most of my journals are half-empty, and the ink-stained pages demonstrate the erratic nature of my writing.  An entry from March is followed by a silence of six months when, in September I begin writing faithfully, almost obsessively, only to stop, one day, mid-sentence, distracted by something or someone. 

            And it is then, when I open to the first empty page after another long silence, that my eyes fall on the unfinished thought.  At this point (and this has happened more than once) I find that I am completely overwhelmed.  By what?  Perhaps by the partial thought lingering on the page, still staring over the edge of the cliff from which its completion has fallen, forever lost, irretrievable.  Perhaps by the implications of an unfinished sentence, an indication of the chaos and ceaselessness of life to which I have submitted, having bid an apathetic farewell to life-giving, joy-imparting activities and practices.  Perhaps.  Certainly, I am overwhelmed by my failure.

            Earlier this summer, I went for a morning run.  My sweet Jordan made a playlist for me, one filled with songs to get my blood pumping and my feet moving.  This came as a great relief, as I had been listening to the same Roots song again and again and again during my jogs.  On this morning, the first with my new playlist, the ipod gave out five minutes into my run.  With the exception of the mile runs we were all forced to do in high school, I’m not sure I had ever run without music to drive me along.  Knowing that if I went back to the house to get our other ipod, I would find an excuse to sit down, resulting in a perfectly sound explanation of why it would be perfectly acceptable to rest today and “go tomorrow,” I decided to keep going.  Sans musical goading.

            I am not a runner.  I often find myself gawking at those people who are naturally gifted in this area, astounded by their effortless gazelle-like motions.  Still, I enjoy running.  (I should point out that for me to not only enjoy but actually engage in an activity which does not come easily is a rather significant feat for me.)  Yet, on this morning, I do not have the music’s beats to guide me into a day dream, my imagination shaping a vision of a mythical me, the Lindsey with the astoundingly fit body, the shining hair flowing behind her, the inability to sweat…the one floating along the pavement, her feet barely touching its surface.  No, this morning it was all about reality.  The reality of sound, specifically the sound of my feet on the pavement.  When I run (ok, JOG), it sounds as though a stubborn four year old is being dragged through the grocery store, away from the toys, by her impatient mother.  A loud stomp followed by a dispirited shuffle, followed again by a stomp and another shuffle, the child clearly unable to resist the adult’s power, but giving it everything she has anyway.

            This was not the most encouraging sound to hear at 6:15 in the morning.  Yet, as I pressed on, I began to realize something which, in all honesty, has yet to take root.  I am almost always driven by the need for predetermined results.  When I run, I don’t run because I (actually) enjoy it, I run so that I can be thinner, healthier, more accomplished.  With those ends in mind, I force myself to run for a certain amount of time or distance, at a certain speed, et cetera.  I do this, rather than simply running to run, running because I need the release.

            I am always afraid of failure.  Always.  At some point, for some unknown reason (although I have my theories), I became a perfectionist of sorts.  My desire to succeed (read impress/receive affirmation from other people) began to infiltrate my schoolwork, my hobbies, my musical tastes, my clothing choices, my food choices, every public part of my life.  Somehow, it even began to take over my private life.  Indeed, my desire to please the humanity around me and my fear of failing to do so seeped into my journals.

            Would you like an example of how neurotic I can be?  I have actually considered, with some frequency, the possibility of someone reading my journals after I die.  It is actually important to me that that person or those people find something of interest and depth there, that my words have some lasting significance.  That I have some lasting significance. 

            I close the journal containing the unfinished sentence and begin a new one, determined this time to write words weighed down, pinned against the page, with deep and profound meaning.  Yet, again I am interrupted or again I do not have the focus or drive to finish my thought, to write anything but a scrawled plea for help, for peace, for assurance.  If someone does read my journals after I have ceased to breath, this is what he or she will find and, really, this is who I am.  Erratic and desperate, a paradox of fullness and emptiness, wordiness and silence. 

            With all of this in mind, I write now.  I write simply to write, acting on a whim, a need to say something, valuable or not.  I write because it is one of my most treasured practices, one so important that I can remember the first journal given to me, as well as those given to me as gifts later in my life.  I write because regardless of whether it looks or sounds like I am shuffling along, it makes me feel as though I am gliding effortlessly through the long miles of life.