And Zechari’ah said to the angel, “How shall I know this? For I am an old man, and my wife is advanced in years.” And the angel answered him, “I am Gabriel, who stands in the presence of God; and I was sent to speak to you, and to bring you this good news. And behold, you will be silent and unable to speak until the day that these things come to pass, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time.” Luke 1:18-20

Zechari’ah, a man who had walked blamelessly with God for his entire life, stood in the presence of the angel Gabriel and could not believe God’s good news. How could this be? How could such a faithful man doubt after years of committing his life to God? How could he refuse to believe even as he heard the promise of God’s blessing?

It would be all too easy to scorn Zechari’ah. Foolish man who looked a holy gift horse in the mouth! Weak of faith, ignorant of all he had formerly professed! What a loser! He is the stuff that parables are made of—the protagonist who blows it, a most pitiable type of character who professes to believe but ultimately collapses under the weight of his own doubt. Oh, Zechari’ah, we love to loathe the doubters! We delight in scapegoating them as we busily bury our own unbelief in the deepest pockets of our souls.

In the Tragic Sense of Life, Spanish author and philosopher, Miguel de Unamuno, writes:

Those who believe they believe in God, but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself.

Perhaps Zechari’ah, like many of us, believed more in the idea of God as he followed the Commandments and precepts of God. But he seemed to falter when the ideal became real. Gabriel was no idea but a living, breathing deliverer, a holy UPS man with a special delivery: a long awaited child.

As much as I would like to scoff at Zechari’ah’s unbelief, holding fast to the conviction that certainly I would respond differently, I am painfully aware of my own doubt. Just as I am sadly aware of the fact that I am often one who believes she believes in God. And yet even as I claim this sad awareness, I take solace in Unamuno’s claim that passion of heart, anguish of mind, uncertainty, doubt, and even despair are necessary and paradoxical elements of faith.

I think poet Rainer Maria Rilke would agree, for he contends that your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. Maybe the first step in training your doubt is claiming it. In Mark 9, Jesus comes to the aid of the disciples who have tried, but failed, to remove a demon from a young boy. Jesus addresses the boy’s father, saying, If you believe, all things are possible to him who believes. The father cries out, Lord I believe; help my unbelief! Here the father claims both his belief and unbelief, his desire to believe and his fear that he cannot. In response to his genuine admission, Jesus removes his son’s demon.

And after you’ve claimed your doubt? Then what? Pastor and counselor Eric Venable writes: Doubt is a catalyst for owning one’s faith and allowing the faith story to continue. Perhaps another step in training your doubt is including it as an authentic element of your faith, one that allows your faith story to continue. As we wrestle with unbelief, we may move through seasons of tumult and seasons of peace. These are the seasons of our faith stories. We winter in periods of doubt and summer in times of assurance. Just as surely as the seasons cycle, so, too, do the seasons of our faith stories.

Within months, Zechari’ah and Elizabeth’s long winter of doubt and suffering gave way to a summer of belief and joy. With the birth of their son, John, God’s promise was fulfilled in his time, and their faith stories continued.

Like many, I have longed to be delivered from my unbelief. Often in desperation, I have cried out, Lord, I believe; help my unbelief! But I am learning to look at unbelief differently, to begin a training regimen in which I find ways to consciously use it–rather than let it use me. In his novel Underdog, Markus Zusak writes:

I walked home, seeing all my doubt from the other side. Have you ever seen that? Like when you go on holiday. On the way back, everything is the same but it looks a little different than it did on the way. It’s because you’re seeing it backwards.

I hope that Zechari’ah could finally see his doubt from the other side, that he could look back upon a lifetime during which God had not forsaken him. For there is good news for all who occasionally (or frequently!) suffer from weak faith and unbelief. In his book The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, Timothy Keller writes that it is not the strength of your faith but the object of your faith that actually saves you. God delivers even those whose imperfect faith is often riddled with doubt.

As I think about the seasons of my own faith story, I can see my doubt from the other side of winter. In the smallest heralds of spring, I can see that my Deliverer is near–winter, spring, summer, and fall.

Deliverer

I will raise my cup of deliverance and invoke the Lord’s name.
Psalm 116:13

Outside, the world grays.
Bone-weary and lean,
trees reach with brittle fingers that break the sky.
The stalks of Black-eyed Susans bear heads like spiny sea urchins
and the white souls of pampas grass sing hoary carols
along every road.

Everything waits for deliverance from the bondage
of these days:
finches whose once-gold wings now tarnish the frozen air,
capless acorns which litter the timber floor,
clouds which collapse in thin, pale ribbons
upon the horizon.

Everything waits to be delivered—
for a shot of chlorophyll to the heart,
a familiar chorus of crocus
and thickets laced with light.

Yet even in our exile,
the lichens prostrate themselves
on the backs of sleeping stones.
And wakened with the green hope of fungi,
the stones cry out:
Behold, our Deliverer!

After these days his wife Elizabeth conceived, and for five months she hid herself, saying, “Thus the Lord has done to me in the days when he looked on me, to take away my reproach among men.” Luke 1:24-25

To be delivered from reproach among men–what deliverance this would be! To throw off your cloak of shame, to step out from the shadows, and to walk confidently into the company of men and women whose easy camaraderie you had looked upon longingly from your own dark rooms. Who among us wouldn’t put this type of deliverance on their Christmas list this year (and every year to come)?

To feel reproach for the infertility which has defined you for years, however, is a singularly female condition. This is a largely silent form of reproach, a form consigned to whispers and quick looks passed among fertile women. It is reproach that defies our better sense, for we intellectually understand that biology fails in a broken world, and we socially acknowledge that a woman’s worth is not measured by how productive her womb is–or not. And yet, nonetheless, this reproach persists.

Reproach grows from the seeds of difference, and difference often blossoms into discrimination. Polish psychologist and WWII prisoner of war Henri Tajfel pioneered a series experiments called the minimal group paradigm. Tajfel wanted to know just what conditions would prompt people to discriminate against others in an outgroup. What he discovered was that he could create distinctions between groups that were truly minimal–even trivial–but they still provoked one group to discriminate against those in the perceived outgroup. Regardless of the degree of distinction, it seems that humans generally reproach those they regard as other.

There would have been nothing to visibly mark Elizabeth as infertile. She would have easily moved within the throng of women in the market place. Still over the years, Elizabeth would have been relegated to the outgroup of the barren, and she would have felt the sting of reproach even long after her child-bearing years. As she looked longingly at women who took their fertility for granted, she may have felt as though infertility was a life-sentence from which she would silently and privately suffer.

I am painfully and personally aware of this outgroup, as are many other women who have faithfully charted their ovulation cycles, desperately resorted to the latest medications and medical procedures, hopefully turned over their life savings to doctors, herbalists or whoever offered the possibility of pregnancy, and silently braved their days among fertile female colleagues, friends, and family. Although the stigma of infertility was clearly more public and reproachable in Elizabeth’s day, it lives today. At the very least, it lives though self-reproach, which is perhaps the most brutal form of all.

We live in a world with so many outgroups. Is it any wonder that this world is rife with reproach? Even when we believe we are far too complex to be defined by any group or label, it is inevitable that our personal, political, social, or spiritual views will land us squarely in some outgroup. And it is inevitable, then, that we will become reproachable.

In A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens’ character Belle, the beautiful young woman whom Ebenezer Scrooge was once engaged, says to him:

“You fear the world too much,” she answered gently. “All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach.” 

We often fear the world too much. And when our hopes meld into a single desperate hope to escape the world’s sordid reproach, we yearn for deliverance. For reproach, like black mold, sends spores behind the walls of the tender selves we send into the world each day. And there it grows. And grows. We breathe it in, and it weakens what immunity we have against all that threatens to undo us. We yearn for a toxic clean-up crew to deliver us.

The author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, J.R. R. Tolkien writes: Fairy tale does not deny the existence of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance. Could Tolkien be right? Could sorrow and failure be necessary for the joy of deliverance in the real world as well as in fairy tales? As an older woman (some estimate at least in her 60s), Elizabeth bore a child. After a lifetime of reproach, after decades of sorrow and shame, she was joyfully delivered.

Like Elizabeth, most of us long for the joy of deliverance. French writer Alexandre Dumas understood that our longing should center less on deliverance, however, and much more on the deliverer. He writes:

God is always the last resource. Unfortunates, who ought to begin with God, do not have any hope in him till they have exhausted all other means of deliverance.

Although Elizabeth and her husband Zechari’ah had spent their lives walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless, it is God–not their upright living–who delivers them from childlessness and the world’s reproach. He sends the angel Gabriel to Zechari’ah:

“Do not be afraid, Zechari’ah, for your prayer is heard, and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall call his name John. And you will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth” [Luke 1: 13-14]

As I reread Elizabeth and Zechari’ah’s story, I cringe at my attempts to deliver myself from sorrow and shame. I recoil at the countless times I have exhausted all other means of deliverance before I turned to God. I am going to edit my Christmas list this year. I will begin by removing Deliverance and replacing it with The Deliverer. In this season of Advent, truly the joy of deliverance begins with the right deliverer.

They [in the northern country] had, as well, invented a holiday called Thanksgiving, which Ruby had only recently got news of, but from what she gathered its features to be, she found it to contain the mark of a tainted culture. To be thankful on just the one day.
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

The mark of a tainted culture–thankfulness contained to just the one day. Oh Ruby, if only your words were just the ignorant claims of an uneducated fictional daughter of the Civil War! If only Thanksgiving were not the much anticipated pumpkin-pie-eating prologue to Black Friday (which has now become Black Thanksgiving eve)! If only the obligatory prayer of gratitude wasn’t dusted off but once a year! If only. . .

There is something decidedly frightening about how Halloween and Christmas have squeezed Thanksgiving into such a small and singular holiday role. In the whole holiday pie, Thanksgiving is not even a sliver. It is a crumb, an afterthought shoved between the aisles of clearance Halloween candy and Christmas tinsel. It is an excuse to smother your sweet potatoes with an entire bag of marshmallows and your pecan pie with real whipping cream. Too often, it may be a table with too much food and too little gratitude.

In Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community, Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes:

In the Christian community thankfulness is just what it is anywhere else in the Christian life. Only he who gives thanks for little things receives the big things. We prevent God from giving us the great spiritual gifts He has in store for us, because we do not give thanks for daily gifts. We think we dare not be satisfied with the small measure of spiritual knowledge, experience, and love that has been given to us, and that we must constantly be looking forward eagerly for the highest good. Then we deplore the fact that we lack the deep certainty, the strong faith, and the rich experience that God has given to others, and we consider this lament to be pious. We pray for the big things and forget to give thanks for the ordinary, small (and yet really not small) gifts.

Bonhoeffer’s accusation that we dare not be satisfied with the small measure of spiritual knowledge, experience, and love that has been given to us is, sadly, a sign of the very tainted culture that Ruby Thewes described. It is, indeed, counter-cultural to be grateful for small measures of things. Too often, we expect super-sized measures of everything from french fries to love to success. Perhaps out of our perceived scarcity, we’ve learned to live like squirrels, stuffing our cheeks with more acorns, storing up stuff in every conceivable nook and cranny. We buy more Rubbermaid totes and busy ourselves with storing up our treasures here on earth, girding ourselves with more of everything.

As I’ve aged, I’ve begun to realize how small my world is becoming. I have no children to raise, no mounds of laundry to sort, no lunches to pack or permission slips to sign. I have no work place to go to or colleagues to work with, no meetings to attend and no projects to complete. These worlds often seemed so big to me as they lay solidly on my shoulders like a giant yoke. I pulled and I pulled, my eyes fixed on the possibilities and challenges before me. For the greater good, I pulled. For a lasting legacy, I pulled. For what was right and true, I pulled. The great expanses of what might–and should– be shone on the horizon, and I pulled.

But now, I often feel as though I could pull my world with one finger. It’s a world whose perimeter is closer, as if my life were tucking itself tightly around me. But within this perimeter are such ordinary, small (and yet really not so small) gifts. And I find myself grateful–so very grateful–for this small measure that has been gifted me daily.

When my grandson flings the front door open, kicks his boots off, and hangs his coat on the small hook designated just for him, I am grateful that I live 50 yards from this toothless boy who has grown to regard my house as his second home. When my granddaughter places the Sorry board game before me and declares, with feigned optimism, that I actually might win this time, I am grateful, so grateful, to lose again to this blue-eyed girl who is blossoming into a young lady right before me. When my children gather around our family table and laugh long and hard, recalling shared antics and stories from childhood, I am grateful beyond measure. When I hear my mother’s voice through the phone which brings us together across the miles, I give thanks for her very presence which continues to sustain me. When I read my father’s words and remember how these words were often born as he walked the alleys of my hometown with a small, blue notebook in his pocket, I give thanks.

In the end, Bonhoeffer was imprisoned and later executed as a political prisoner during the Holocaust. His world shrunk to the size of a prison cell. His circumstances were evil, but his gratitude was endless. He writes:

How can God entrust great things to one who will not thankfully receive from Him the little things? If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian fellowship in which we have been placed, even where there is no great experience, no discoverable riches, but much weakness, small faith, and difficulty; if on the contrary, we only keep complaining to God that everything is so paltry and petty, so far from what we expected, then we hinder God from letting our fellowship grow according to the measure and riches which are there for us all in Jesus Christ.

Even when there is much weakness, small faith, and difficulty, when our lives are so far from what we expected, Bonhoeffer reminds us that we must gives thanks to God for the measure and riches which are there for us all in Jesus Christ. This is a tall order for most of us who find ourselves continuing to strive for the lives we expected–and still expect. A tall order, indeed, for those of us who, in spite of ourselves, want a larger measure of everything (and a standing order for more, in case we run out).

If it were possible, I would invite both Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Ruby Thewes to Thanksgiving dinner. And then, I would invite them to stay. Thanksgiving should be an ordinary, daily discipline, a gratitude for the small measures I have been given, and I could really use a pair of good mentors.

Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise; give thanks to him and praise his name. Psalm 100:4

We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.  Thorton Wilder

Seconds before he would succumb to anesthesia for his tonsillectomy, my grandson, Griffin, looked intently into his doctor’s eyes and asked, “Could I just have a moment?” A few weeks earlier, he had three baby teeth pulled, and he wore the trauma of this experience like an albatross. Teeth extraction and now surgery? At six years, how much more could a boy take? He just needed a moment.

Oh, I’ve been there in those circumstances when I was desperate for just a moment. Sitting at my desk, waiting to give an assigned speech; crouching in the starting blocks, waiting for the gun to begin the 400 meter run; lying on a hospital bed being prepped for a D & C which would remove any traces of the life I’d hope to carry for nine months; standing in a visitation line, rehearsing what I could possibly say to the bereaved family. Just a brief respite, the chronology of my life stopped and frozen in a single frame, a space in which to breathe. Could I have just a moment? Please.

In her novel, Nineteen Minutes, Jodi Picoult writes:

Do you know how there are moments when the world moves so slowly you can feel your bones shifting, your mind tumbling? When you think that no matter what happens to you for the rest of your life, you will remember every last detail of that one minute forever?

As my daughter and I sat with Griffin awaiting his surgery, he pleaded in earnest: Let’s just go home now. We should go home and reschedule this. I’m really scared, so we should go down the blue hallway and leave. For nearly an hour, he talked in hopes of creating a moment of blessed relief, an assurance that–at least for today–he could keep all of his body parts. It was almost more than I could bear. I could feel his mind tumbling, his six-year-old world unraveling, the loose ends of it lying spent on the antiseptic hospital floor. I wasn’t sure if he would remember this for the rest of his life, but I was quite certain that I would.

And yet there are other types of moments. In The Age of Reason, Jean-Paul Sartre referred to these types as little diamonds. American author, Catherine Lacey, claims these moments are the ones you wish could stretch out like a hammock for you to lie in. These are the good ones, the keepers. Fleeting as they may be, these are the moments that you store in your treasure chest and take out, like keepsakes, to admire again and again. We live our best lives in the sanctuary of such moments, and they often sustain us through dark and barren times.

Years ago, I read the account of a POW captured and imprisoned by the Viet Cong. For months, he lived in a cage about the size of a large dog kennel. He recalled how one day stretched painfully into another. With no one to talk with and nothing to do, he could only wait for execution–or rescue. He recounted how he spent his days golfing his favorite courses, imagining each hole, living through the moments of each drive and putt. Philanthropist and entrepreneur Alex Haditaghi writes: Life is not made up of minutes, hours, days or years, but of moments. Nothing is permanently perfect. But there are perfect moments. This POW lived in the perfect moments he had experienced, and those he hoped to experience, on golf courses all over the United States. These life-saving moments made the agonizing months of captivity and torture bearable.

Poet Gwendolyn Brooks writes:

Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies.
And be it gash or gold it will not come
Again in this identical disguise. [Annie Allen, 1949]

The moments of our lives may be gash or gold. They may wound us deeply or bless us abundantly. We may long for them to delay what we fear and dislike, or we may wish for them to grow exponentially, increasing what we love and admire. Either way, they will not come again. In the Sanctuary of Moments, we have shelves of these moments, gash and gold, which define us.

The uncannily adult request for just a moment will define my grandson, I’m afraid. As he approaches new experiences and events, he will undoubtedly see courses of action play out in his mind. And these will terrify him more often than not. I know this because I, too, have suffered from such an imagination.

These days, however, I find myself pleading for more moments. As American playwright Thorton Wilder writes, I want to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures. I am acutely conscious of my treasures, even those heart-wrenching moments when I would give anything to keep Griffin safe within a beautiful bubble like the one in the photo. Inside this bubble, there would be no tonsillectomies or public speaking or break-ups. Inside this bubble, one could string life’s wondrous moments like shiny pearls. But even when I find that I can do little more than hold a trembling boy before his surgery, I am conscious of these moments, too, which are treasures nonetheless.

I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me                                   And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.
 Robert Louis Stevenson

I remember memorizing “My Shadow” from my dog-earred green volume of Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses. The rhymes just rolled off my lips, and I thought little of shadows and much more about my recitation. In truth, like most children, I often thought of my shadow as a substitute playmate when no other could be found. My shadow was always with me, and this was a good thing.

Until it wasn’t. A good thing, that is. Until later in high school when I studied the works of Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung who wrote:

The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.

The shadow as a moral problem, an awareness of the dark aspects of the personality? This shadow is not your childhood friend, the happy, little fellow that offers good company. A student of Jung’s and fellow psychologist, Erich Neumann, describes the shadow as All those qualities, capacities and tendencies which do not harmonize with the collective values – everything that shuns the light of public opinion, in fact – now come together to form the shadow, that dark region of the personality which is unknown and unrecognized by the ego. 

Anything that hides from the light of public opinion and which is unknown and unrecognized by the ego or conscious mind seems suspect, indeed. Suspect and frightening. As I matured and stowed my Child’s Garden of Verses in the back of my closet with my Barbies and a few beloved stuffed animals, I grew increasingly aware that my shadow was the sort of problem that would simply not go away. Coming to grips with it was, as Jung argued, going to take considerable moral effort.

From adolescence on, I worked diligently and with real conviction to maintain a public persona much like a face to meet the faces in T. S. Eliot’s poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. This was a face whose attributes harmonized with the collective values of my world. This was a cheerful, optimistic, humble, and hard-working face. This was a face that largely kept its form regardless of the circumstances. This was a female face, a persona that was characterized by all those social mores and expectations for women. Looking back, I’m not proud to admit that I was darn good at keeping up this face. The failure to do so, I believed, was social death. The failure to do so was simply unacceptable. I could have been a poster child for Jung’s theories regarding repressing the shadow and over-identifying with the ego.

In Briefing for a Descent Into Hell, novelist Doris Lessing writes: There it lay, just out of sight, deadly and punishing, for its pulse was that of a cold heaviness, it had to be a counterweight to joy. This is the shadow, the dark aspects of one’s self that are just out of sight, those undesirable qualities, thoughts, and feelings that surely must be a counterweight to joy. At the forefront of my own list of undesirable qualities was shame. Just below the surface of all the joy and assurance I projected was a deep and abiding sense of shame. I was ashamed that I didn’t regard the needs of others before my own, that, too often, I compared myself to others, that I had failed to do something I should have, that I wasn’t more insightful, more empathetic, more encouraging, more giving. In short, I was ashamed of almost everything I was and would be.

For much of my life, my shame–like a good shadow–followed me into and out of relationships and experiences. And though I worked hard to ensure that others didn’t see it, its dark presence loomed and threatened to unmask me. Jung writes that shame is a soul eating emotion. Contemporary writer and sociologist Brené Brown claims that shame corrodes the very part of us that believes we are capable of change, that it derives its power from being unspeakable.

In his book Shame and Grace, writer and theologian Lewis B. Smedes writes that the difference between guilt and shame is very clear–in theory. We feel guilty for what we do. We feel shame for what we are. Shame is such a powerful shadow because it confidently pronounces what we are (and what we are not). And it becomes even more powerful when we feed it by encouraging it, repressing it, and refusing to speak about it with others. Too often, I was guilty of all of these, and so my shame grew. Like a shadow, I simply couldn’t shake it.

At the core of my shame has been a persistent preoccupation with self. Regrettably, I have spent too many hours of my life preoccupied with what I am not. And as this preoccupation increased, it devoured precious minutes and opportunities. As I have matured in my faith, I have discovered that this type of preoccupation is a universal impediment to living for Christ. When John is testifying about Jesus, he says: He must increase; I must decrease. [John 3:30] This is exactly it. I must decrease. My shadow must be outed and shrunken. If Christ is to increase in my life, if I am to be who I long to be, then I have to call forth my shame into the public light and name it what it is: a shadow of the worst sort.

In her best-selling book, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent and Lead, Brené Brown writes: If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame can’t survive. If Carl Jung were alive today, I would like to think that he would buy a ticket for one of Brown’s talks. And then, I’d really like for him to rise unabashedly from the audience and shout, Preach it, sister! I mean why not? One researcher affirming the work of another–it could happen. It should happen.

There are seasons in our lives when shadows darken our world. They emerge from their hiding places and blot out the sun. Jung knew that we all have these shadows and, that if we are to grow and mature, we must acknowledge and deal with them. The apostles understood that, dark as these shadows may be, our preoccupation with them–even if it is self-deprecatory preoccupation–must decrease. Seasons of shadows are universal impediments to seasons of light. The good news, however, is that light abounds and flows eternally from so many sources. We just have to step into it.

 

My Shadow

 An hour after dawn,
 my shadow stretches proprietarily along the road
 blackening the sunny mounds of trefoil
 and the burnished wings of finches.
 Its legs are dark trunks.
 Across the seas of first light,
 its torso spreads like a continent of shame,
 while its head, a hapless tectonic plate,
 settles over a mantle of shoulder. 
  
 Its appetite knows no end:
 bridal heads of Queen Anne’s Lace
 scarlet crests of cardinals,
 dew-glazed grass, maple saplings—
 it stuffs them all into its burgeoning belly.
  
 Now as the sun streaks through the trees
 and lights up the orchid petals of cone flowers,
 it blunders forward—leaden, determined,
 the worst of me.
  
 Even as morning christens the world,
 it holds the road
 and will not move aside. 

Find a heart that will love you at your worst, and arms that will hold you at your weakest.
Anonymous

All the way into town, Griffin cried. “I don’t want to go, Grandma. I really don’t want to go.” We were making the 9-mile journey into town to meet his mother who would take him to the dentist. His upper lip was swollen, and through the rearview mirror, I cringed at his duck-like profile. Though he had not complained, the fact that he’d eaten only two bites of pancake and his forehead felt warm to the touch gave him away. Something was wrong.

“But I don’t want to go. I really, really, really don’t want to go,” he insisted. Over and over again, like a mantra, he pleaded. As we pulled into the parking lot where we would meet his mom, he crawled from the backseat over the console into my lap. I wrapped my arms around him and let him cry. I had exhausted any words of comfort. There was nothing more I could say. Words were cheap; arms were better.

We rely on words for comfort, particularly with boys. Big boys don’t cry. Big boys are brave. Big boys muscle through. Personally, I like words and have relied heavily on them to carry me through most situations. I suppose I have believed that if I just kept talking, if I could find the right words, I could fix things, heal hurts, and solve problems. Yet the older I get, the more I have become painfully aware that, too often, words fall short.

In The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood writes:

Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings . . . but there’s something dead about it, something deserted.

I, too, want a real body to put my arms around. Sitting there in my car with my arms wrapped as tightly as I dared around Griffin, I was embodied, weighted with purpose, tethered to someone and something so much greater than myself. Arms are better–for those being held and for those doing the holding. Arms provide tangible means of comforting and of being comforted. Words may be good, but arms are so much better.

In his novel, Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin writes:

She fitted in my arms, she always had, and the shock of holding her caused me to feel that my arms had been empty since she had been away.

There have been so many times when I have held a friend or family member’s baby and felt the poignant absence of my own babies whom I held long after they had fallen asleep. In the middle of the night when the moon shone through the window, a sleeping baby in my arms, peace washed over and through me. When we fit someone into our arms, it’s often this way. We relish the gush of love and peace, while we simultaneously feel an emptiness born from absence. Still, who would trade those exquisite moments when we meld with another, when our arms pull another into the sanctuary of love.

As a young college instructor, I once took a coed to my home over the lunch hour. In her essay, she had confessed that she had been sexually abused by her father and her brothers for much of her adolescence. Anguished, I reread her words, honest, clear words that reeked with fear and pain. How could I bring her into the cubicle of the office I shared with four others? How could we talk about her experiences in such a public place where only a bulletin board provided us with some sense of privacy? Naively, but with the best intentions, I offered to make lunch for her in my home. My children would be at school, and my husband was at work. We would be alone and free to talk–and to cry. There, I would be free to put my arms around her as she wept.

When I returned to school, a colleague asked where I had gone during lunch. Without revealing much, I admitted that I had taken a student to my home to discuss some private issues she had painfully revealed in her latest essay. You took her to your house? And you were alone with her? Taken aback, I could only affirm that I had done just that. As a seasoned educator who was legally savvy, she warned: You don’t want to be alone with students. You don’t know what they might accuse you of later, and you have to protect yourself at all times.

I understand that some educators, coaches, employers, and others in power abuse the healing nature of appropriate touch. Their arms are not safe refuges; their intent is not to comfort. Regrettably, because of their abuse, it is now too risky to put your hand on another’s shoulder or your arm around them. Arms may be the right remedy–perhaps the only remedy–but they must remain passively at our sides while we offer what words of comfort and assurance we can muster. The world we now live in is not always arms-friendly.

Imagine all the wondrous things your arms might embrace if they weren’t wrapped so tightly around your struggles, writes author Sheila M. Burke. Sadly, I confess to having lived too much of my life with my arms wrapped tightly around my own struggles. Even my body language often gives me away. My arms encircle my frame, as if to hold myself together, as if to keep my struggles from showing their ugly faces. There are certainly so many wondrous things that I might have embraced. But I didn’t. My arms were too full of myself to take in anything or anyone else. There were other willing arms to take in all my pain, doubt, and fear. I turned inward, though, sadly proud of my willingness to tough it out on my own. When I might have stepped into God’s loving arms, I rationalized that such comfort was for others but not for me. If I had not had my arms wrapped so tightly around my own pain, I might have walked blessedly into the arms of mercy.

In her book of poetry, Turquoise Silence, Indian poet and freelance writer, Sanober Khan writes of the refuge that is found in a mother’s arms:

i want to
stay curled and cosied
and chocolated….forever
in my mother’s arms.

Curled and cosied and chocolated in your mother’s arms? Yes, please! In foxholes, at work and at rest, in board rooms and bedrooms, there is probably not one of us who has longed to curl into our mother’s arms. If only for a moment, we dream of the comfort that only these arms can bring us. If just for a second, we project our wearied souls into arms that offer–as Robert Frost once described poetry–a momentary stay against confusion.

As I held my grandson in the car that day, I realized that I was but a substitute for his mother who would soon scoop him into her arms and who would, without saying a word, bring solace to his weary six-year old soul. Though the dentist would later pull his three front teeth and Griffin would arch in fear against any attempts to administer the “happy gas,” even in the midst of such trauma, he understood that his mom was there with open arms that would take him home.

There is sanctuary, indeed, in arms that will hold you at your weakest. As I find myself increasingly at a loss for words, I plan to use my arms more–to love, to comfort, to offer a momentary stay against confusion. And I know one boy who fits into them perfectly, and always will.

What if there were truly opportunities to learn? For its own sake, for the sheer joy of it, for something other than for earning a score, a win, or for performing or promoting something. What if you could send your daughter to learn ballet for its own glorious sake? The arabesques, pliés, grande jetés—all danced in a simple black leotard with others who marvel that their arms and legs can take on such exquisite lives of their own. What if you could send your son to learn football for the joy of playing it? Running, kicking, carrying the ball—or not—all amidst teammates who fall into breathless, spent heaps at the end of each play.

What if your daughter didn’t have to buy multiple (expensive) costumes for the end-of-year recital, the recital which is the driving force behind every practice from the very first day, the recital which is the be-all- and-end-all? What if your son didn’t have to worry about the game in which some would show off what they’d learned and could do, while others (many others) would sit the bench, their hands in their laps, their dreams on hold?

Don’t get me wrong: there is surely a time and place for performance and competition. And clearly there are those who take lessons or attend practices because they want to take the stage or the field. But there are also those who do not. They would like nothing more than to learn for the sake of learning. To revel in the process. To purely enjoy the experience and the people sharing it.

When I was in elementary school, I wanted to learn to play the piano, so that I could sit by myself and play the songs I loved. I could think of nothing better than holing up in our music/sewing room where I could sing and play the entire Sound of Music repertoire to my heart’s end.  When I learned that there would be a recital—gasp—at the end of the school year, my dream began to wither. During weeks to come, I agonized over every practice piece as if it could be the piece, the recital piece. At night, I had previously imagined my fingers floating over the keys as if they knew instinctively where to go to make beautiful music. But now, I could only see visions of recital disasters to come: I would trip as I made my way to the piano; I would forget the very first note and would sit in dumb fear as the audience awkwardly looked on; I would fly through my piece, my fingers congealing in a tangled, sweaty mess of disharmony. When I realized that performance was the end goal, things sadly changed for me.

As I watch my grandchildren navigate their way through childhood, I am even more painfully aware that there are few—if any—opportunities to learn for the sake of learning. The performance is the thing. The game is the real goal. I have found myself thinking about where a child could go to learn to dance, to play music or sports without the expectation of performing or competing? Is there such a place? Are there such people who offer these opportunities? Perhaps not. Sadly, most parents want to see the finished product, to get something for their time and money. They want a public showing with costumes and uniforms, accolades and talk of artistic and athletic futures. Many want to live vicariously through their children who may or may not want what their parents so desperately want for them.

If someone were to advertise lessons or practices during which kids could learn new skills, practice them for an hour with other like-minded peers, then pack up and go home, would this “sell”? Or would people scoff and declare these people crazy for thinking such programs would actually succeed?

And what about academic learning? It, too, is largely geared with the end in mind: the test, the final paper or project. After all, educators must measure student learning, must evaluate who has learned what and when. If I had a dollar for every student who said, “will this be on the test?” I would be a very, very rich woman today.  Because in their eyes, the test is all that matters. For the most part, learning is superfluous. And they have come by this belief naturally, for to a great degree, we have instilled it into them since they first entered the school doors.

Consider the eager kindergartener who has nervously but excitedly anticipated the start of school. During the second week, she is tested and found “behind” already. The phone call goes home offering (actually requesting permission for) special services for a child who has been determined at-risk. Before she could even begin to learn how to read, she has been tested and found wanting. She performed poorly, and the test verifies this. And so it begins: years of learning measured by tests.

Again, I understand the necessity of measuring learning. Having taught for 41 years, I spent more hours than I care to remember with a red pen in hand, head bent over a stack of student essays. There were so many occasions, however, when I desperately wished that I could put down the pen, push the writing rubric aside, and simply read for the sake of reading what another had written. I couldn’t help but wondering how my student writers felt. Were their essays truly the products of all they had learned or were they merely attempts to produce what they believed was expected? I knew the answer, but it wasn’t the one I wanted it to be.

In my years as an educator, I read and heard professionals and peers mourn the passing of curiosity, the death of any genuine desire to learn. Truthfully, most of my students had held funeral services for such things long before they left elementary school. Since then, they were merely complying. Learning for its own sake was a luxury they simply couldn’t afford. They set their sights, as they must, on accruing credits, maintaining or raising GPAs, and making acceptable (or in some cases, exceptional) scores on standardized tests.

Years ago when one of my daughters was a preschooler, I stood behind a one-way mirror and watched her learning in her Montessori classroom. For days when I quizzed her about what she had learned at preschool, she answered matter-of-factly, “I washed the baby.” Really, I thought. No tracing letters on worksheets? No counting to 20? But there in front of me was living proof of her claims. She walked to a shelf and removed a tray that held a small plastic tub, a baby doll, a pitcher, and a sponge. As other children chose their own activities, she carried the tray to a table, took the pitcher to a small sink, filled it to the designated line, carried it back to the table, poured it into the tub, and submerged the baby into the water. Then she proceeded to wash the baby. I stood amazed as she washed and washed and washed, fully intent upon scrubbing until she was satisfied that the baby was clean. Wholly absorbed in her work, she took no notice of her peers who were busily sorting colored beads, building towers, and pouring navy beans from one container to another. And then she was done. She carried the tub to the sink, poured out the bath water, placed the tub on the tray, and returned everything to its rightful spot on the shelf.

Dr. Maria Montessori, an Italian physician, opened her first school, Casa dei Bambini (Children’s House) in 1907. She was a passionate advocate of child-led, hands-on learning, much of which took place during long, uninterrupted periods of time. This “freedom within limits” is a trademark of the Montessori method. Dr. Montessori argued that children could sustain their focus on learning and practicing a task if they were given choices, relevant tasks, and time. Even as I write this, I cringe as I think of many teachers and coaches who are now rolling their eyes and muttering, “Yeah, right. If your kid washes the baby for days, this will really teach her how to read and do math. And get into a good college? Forget it.”

I am acutely aware that our current educational systems, as well as our athletic and artistic programs, are designed to reflect what we believe is most efficient, practical, and necessary for success in today’s world. Kids must get a leg-up before kindergarten, so they enter with an early skill set, so they’ve mastered letter and number recognition, can write their name, sit and listen without disrupting others, and generally function as good classmates. If they are interested in sports or the arts, they must learn to practice and perform, to take criticism early, to be selected—or not. And all of this training, testing, and performing on stages, athletic fields, and tests goes on and on and on. A seemingly endless progression of proving oneself before a jury of their peers, their teachers and coaches.

We do it this way because we believe it works. We believe that it produces the best dancers and football players, the best readers and problem-solvers. What if we were to seriously rethink our systems? What if there were ways to authentically differentiate learning by offering better and more choices? What if competition and performance were choices, not expectations for all? I understand that most teachers and coaches are doing their very best within the systems and programs they’ve inherited and are expected to use. But common-sense dictates that no one—and I mean NO ONE—can meet the intellectual, emotional, and physical needs of every child in a one-size-fits-all system with one-size-fits-all expectations. Almost every school or program has a mission statement that reads something like, Meeting the needs of every child, every day. Nice words that are often sadly nothing more than lipstick on a pig.

I wish that I lived in a world in which 6-year-olds could choose to participate in a flag football program that allows them to learn the skills and rules of the game without expecting them to already know them and without expecting them to compete. These types of programs would not be for everybody, I know. Still, they would be wonderful alternatives for those who dream of learning to play for its own sake. And if their parents wanted to see if they were getting their money’s worth? Well then, they could sit on the sidelines with a good cup of coffee and watch their kids learn–running and falling and giggling as they go.

In a recent Monster Mike video (my grandson’s favorite YouTube fishing celebrity), he and his fishing partner attached a GoPro (with a chip clip, no less!) to a shark’s fin. Griffin and I watched as the shark swam and the camera recorded as far as the fishing line would allow. We didn’t get to see much of anything but aquatic plants, yet the whole idea of a GoPro attached with a chip clip was pretty cool.

Coincidentally, a day later, I saw a photo of a turn-of-the-century pigeon with a miniature camera attached to its breast. Was this a hoax? I knew that pigeons were used to carry messages during war, but photographs? I investigated and found that the photo was historically accurate and that there were, indeed, camera pigeons.

Dr. Julius Neubronner, a German apothecary, submitted a patent for a new invention in 1907, a few years after the Wright brothers made their famous flight at Kittyhawk. His invention? The pigeon camera: a small, lightweight camera fitted with a harness and a timer, so that photos could be taken during flight. His invention featured a pneumatic timing mechanism which would go off at regular intervals in puffs of compressed air that would trigger the exposure. Generally, the pigeons flew in a 60-mile range, so this allowed Neubronner to collect many photos from a relatively large area.

Initially, Neubronner created the camera for his own purposes of tracking his flock of pigeons. He quickly discovered the possible commercial and espionage benefits of his invention, though, and he began showing it and selling postcards of his birds’ aerial photography at expositions all over the world.

Some have claimed that the pigeon camera was our first drone. The photos are wholly dependent on the pigeons’ flight routes and are often random, with angles awry and wing feathers framing shots. Still, in addition to photos from kites and hot air balloons, they are some of our earliest aerial photos. Neubronner’s camera pigeons gathered surveillance photos at the battles of Verdun and Somme during WWI. In the Washington D. C. Spy Museum, these birds and their early technology have their own room. Airplanes–and later drones–and their ability to take targeted aerial photos would quickly replace the camera pigeon, but for a short time, this invention allowed military forces to see behind enemy lines without leaving their positions. Some sources claim that the CIA used this technology even as late as the 1970s.

As one whose father raised and raced homing pigeons, I admit that I had never heard of Dr. Julius Neubronner and the camera pigeon. His turn-of-the-century technology rivals the GoPro attached with a chip clip to a shark fin. Griffin and I watched the Monster Mike video, waiting for another creature–a shark, squid, or octopus maybe–to appear and wow us. But for three minutes, the shark swam along the ocean floor capturing footage of plants and a few tiny (and I mean you had to look really closely to see them at all) fish.

Photographing from pigeons or sharks is a crap shoot. In the end, photographers strap expensive pieces of technology onto birds or fish who have no clue that their special mission is to find and capture specific images. In contrast to drone photography, there is something wonderfully wild about these pictures. It’s like putting your quarter into one of those toy machines with little plastic rings, key chains, and assorted small figures and hoping beyond hope that you will actually get the prize of your desire–and not another smiley face sticker. In these moments of expectation and waiting, you can imagine what you will receive. In your mind’s eye, it’s even more glorious with each re-imagining. And even if you did receive another smiley face sticker, you convince yourself that there’s always a next time. I wonder if Julius Neubronner felt this way each time he strapped a little camera onto one of his pigeons and released him or her. I like to think that he did.

I have no pigeons or sharks. Nor do I have an actual camera, save my cell phone. Just fifty yards from my house, however, there is a pen of seven chickens who have been known to escape and canvas the area. And I do have a new roll of duct tape just itching to be used. I could tape my phone onto the chest of one of these hens and see what incredible photos I could get. . . or not.

 
 Goldenrod
  
 Goldenrod takes the fields
 who wave their happy hands
 like parade queens.
 It’s all in the wrist, they say.
 A turn to the east
 and back to the west,
 a maized rhythm made certain
 by the metronome of wind.
  
 In late September, 
 I feel all my honeyed years 
 bend in the breeze--this way, 
 then that.
  
 For a moment, I slow--
 my ragged breath a sharp reminder
 of age.
 But in the next, I walk as a school girl,
 open and golden,
 the day, a gift to be unwrapped. 
 Present then past,
 this way, then that.
  
 It’s all in the wrist, 
 I say to the flaxen fields before me
 and wave my honeyed years 
 for all they’re worth. 

“Then a severe frost succeeds which prepares it to receive the voluminous coat of snow which is soon to follow; though it is often preceded by a short interval of smoke and mildness, called the Indian Summer.” Michel-Guillaume-Jean de Crèvecoeur

Jean de Crèvecoeur, a French-American soldier who later became a farmer, first recorded the term Indian summer in his 1778 Letters From an American Farmer. We continue to use the term to describe unseasonably warm, summer-like weather that precedes the frost of winter. A short interval of smoke and mildness. For me, sometimes this interval is as good as it gets.

As I was walking the rural roads of southern Iowa last week, I noticed the recent roadside mowing. The county crews had been out for one last job, and as I walked, I plowed through thick piles of grass clippings. I couldn’t help but mourn summer’s roadside bounty: wild chicory, trefoil, Queen Anne’s Lace, tiger lilies, foxtails. Until today, when I came out of mourning and rejoiced. Summer wasn’t giving up. Summer was still showing up. God bless Indian Summer.

 
Last Mowing
  
 After the last mowing,
 the grasses shorn nearly to the earth along Mink Road,
 the wild chicory and Queen Anne’s Lace bloom quickly.
 Their slender stems hold blue violet heads and bridal bonnets
 on doll-sized versions of their summer selves.
 At three or four inches, they are no less lovely
 than they were in late June.  
 In the early days of September,
 they refuse to give in, refuse to welcome the autumn
 that is sure to come.
  
 I walk with my head lowered.
 I can’t get enough of these tiny soldiers
 who muscle through grass clippings and roadside waste.
 These are September’s heroes who have forgotten their place,
 who insist on singing even as the cottonwoods and maples
 drop their leaves.
  
 Today is not a good day to die, they say.
 Today, the world is not enough without us.
 Today, we sing.