When I look out on such a night as this, I feel as if there could be neither wickedness nor sorrow in the world; and there certainly would be less of both if the sublimity of Nature were more attended to, and people were carried more out of themselves by contemplating such a scene.
― Jane Austen

This afternoon, I sit in my room near Saratoga, Wyoming watching the snow fall on the mountains outside my window. For the next three weeks, I will have the privilege of working in the company of two other writers, three artists, and one composer at the Brush Creek Ranch and Foundation for the Arts. Each resident is provided with a private room and studio, along with hours and hours of unstructured time. When I contemplate the splendor of the scene outside my window and the hours of solitude before me, I confess to feeling as though I may be carried out of myself.

Jane Austen understood one of the greatest desires of my heart: to be genuinely carried out of myself, to be pried from the choke hold that self-consciousness and reason have on my soul, to become untethered, loosed into creative spaces that I have imagined but not yet visited. How often I have conjured an image of simply stepping out of my self, shedding its brittle shell like a locust, and emerging as something quite different, quite unaffected. Too often, however, I’ve retreated back into my shell where I can navigate life comfortably and safely. And because I’ve lived here for so long and cluttered up the place with all sorts of things, I haven’t exactly created the best conditions for contemplation.

American Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton writes:

To enter into the realm of contemplation one must in a certain sense die: but this death is in fact the entrance to a higher life. It is a death for the sake of life, which leaves behind all that we can know or treasure as life, as thought, as experience, as joy, as being.      

Herein lies the rub: the death part. This knowledge that one must in a certain sense die is precisely why I’ve danced around the edges of contemplation. Oh, there have been times when I’ve tooled around the contemplative dance floor. Holding a sleeping baby in the middle of the night, listening to the sound of running water in a creek, watching the waxy leaves of cottonwood trees as they move in the wind. In these moments, I was truly carried out of my self. But these were brief jaunts. In the world of Trappist monks like Merton, these jaunts wouldn’t qualify as any real type of contemplation. Still, for precious moments, I died to something wondrous and profound.

Photographer Dorothea Lange argues that the contemplation of things as they are, without error or confusion, without substitution or imposture, is in itself a nobler thing than a whole harvest of invention. I think that too often I’ve regarded contemplation as a means of invention, as a mental and spiritual field to be gleaned. Contemplate a little, harvest a lot–or something like this. But Lange’s argument that we must contemplate things as they are is surely a strong one. It is a first–and essential–step towards any prospect of invention. When I think of those I admire most–writers, philosophers, artists, theologians, and good human beings–I am moved by how they stand in wonder before the world as they contemplate all sorts of things, just as they are. Their willingness and ability to do so has given the world the most magnificent harvest of invention.

In “From the Garden”, poet Anne Sexton writes:

 Put your mouthful of words away
 and come with me to watch
 the lilies open in such a field,
 growing there like yachts,
 slowly steering their petals
 without nurses or clocks.

Maybe this is my biggest impediment to contemplation: putting my mouthful of words away. Words–spoken and unspoken–budge in with bluster and bravado. They steal the show before there really is a show. Lest there be too much silence and too little creative harvest, they swoop in with good intentions and take the stage. My own words sometimes sicken me. I’d much rather they stop swooping in and, like lilies in a field, content themselves with steering their petals/ without nurses or clocks.

I have no contemplation excuse for the next three weeks. I’ll have no Netflix, no errands to run or meetings to attend–just uninterrupted hours of solitude in a stunningly beautiful place. I hope to write, of course, but I hope to spend time in contemplation first. I hope to sideline any words or conscious thoughts that might want to get into the game too quickly. For there is a lot of sitting the bench when it comes to contemplation, and I intend to spend some good time there.

White space: the unprinted area of a piece of printing, as of a poster or newspaper page, or of a portion of a piece of printing, as of an advertisement; blank or empty space

We are a society sorely short on white space. Our spaces are burgeoning with print, noise, activity, stimulation and stuff of every size, shape, and color. We are full to the gills, bloated beyond description. If, by some miracle, we are afforded an unscheduled half hour, we fill it, congratulating ourselves on time-management wizardry. And if we discover stuffless space in our homes or workplaces, we either haul in more stuff or distribute the stuff we already have to fill it. Even–or perhaps especially–in its human form, nature abhors a vacuum.

German typographer and book designer Jan Tschichold writes:

White space is to be regarded as an active element, not a passive background.  

In design, as in life, there is much to be said about white space as an active element. Used actively and intentionally, white space can be an entry space for the viewer, claims German artist Norbert Bisky, a space where you can get into it [the piece of art]. Could it be that we choose to see the white spaces of our lives as passive so that we might justify our fevered attempts to avoid entry into self-reflection? Could it be that we simply don’t want to get into our lives any more than we can explore in a 33 character-tweet?

I admit that I have looked into white space–as a writer and a human–and cowered in its face. At best, it proffered possibilities, at worst, nullity ad infinitum. At times, it rolled in like heavy fog. Wave upon wave of vapor so dense, so consuming that I could see nothing but the specter of my own heart, hear nothing but the rambling of my own mind. Mine was a Gothic tale that not even Stephen King could pen. Scary stuff, indeed.

Scary–but necessary. Without it, there is a very real chance that we will become (collectively and permanently) a people who do but cannot be. Ask any parent or teacher to recall the number of times they’ve heard their children or students claim that they are bored, and you will hear a shot of disdain heard round the world. Boredom is the battle cry of those who loathe (and fear) white space. I’m bored. This is boring. What else can I do? Is this all there is? Today more than ever, parents and teachers must meet this barrage of boredom with miraculous, on-demand remedies. They must sweep in like cruise directors of ships that have gone tragically aground. They must whip out their bags of tricks and sort through their contents in search of something newer and better. Their reputations as good parents and successful teachers depend upon it.

In her article, “Let Children Get Bored Again” (The New York Times, Feb. 2, 2019). Pamela Paul writes:

. . . boredom is something to experience rather than hastily swipe away. And not as some kind of cruel Victorian conditioning, recommended because it’s awful and toughens you up. Despite the lesson most adults learned growing up — boredom is for boring people — boredom is useful. It’s good for you.

What? Boredom is for boring people? Boredom is useful, good for you? So claims Paul who goes on to argue that until a few decades ago, we believed that a certain amount of boredom was actually necessary and appropriate. In her article she cites composer and actor Lin-Manuel Miranda (in an interview with GQ magazine) who attributed his unscheduled afternoons with fostering inspiration because there is nothing better to spur creativity than a blank page or an empty bedroom. I contend that the world is a much better place because Miranda’s blank pages and empty bedrooms spurred the likes of Hamilton.

Paul admits that it’s not really boredom itself that’s important but what we do with it. She explains:

The idea isn’t that you suffer through crushing tedium. . . [but] that you learn how to vanquish it. This may come in several forms: You might turn inward and use the time to think. You might reach for a book. You might imagine your way to a better job. Boredom leads to flights of fancy. But ultimately, to self-discipline. To resourcefulness.

Boredom, like white space, begs for vanquishing. But we have stopped expecting and teaching our children (and adults) to be vanquishers. Before I retired, my students were hard-pressed to listen to a lecture of any length. Boring, they said. Listening to teachers drone on and on is SOOO boring. Reading for more than 5 minutes? REALLY boring! Homework? Absolute drudgery! And rather than train them to listen longer, read and work more intently, too often I confess that I moved all too naturally into entertainment. I used to joke that I’d become the David Letterman of the secondary English classroom. I could recite Top Ten lists created for my students’ educational pleasure (Educational? Who was I kidding?) I could tell stories to lead into and out of classic pieces of literature, glittering tales intended to make our work more relevant. I could show a video–a really fine adaption of a literary work–to make the difficult more palatable. My bag of tricks was deep. And oh, so shallow.

Blessedly, I fought the good fight more times than not. Still, I cringe when I recall the times I caved and worked the crowd like a starving stand-up comedian. I regret that I didn’t roll out some white space and simply shut up. I am saddened that more of my students didn’t enter this space actively and expectantly. I am disappointed that they failed to understand the necessity and value of spending time there.

Some may argue that we just don’t have time for white space in our curricula if we are to make our students college and career-ready. Still others may insist that we can’t lose our kids to boredom if we are to keep their eyes on their respective educational and vocational prizes. Pamela Paul, however, counters by asserting that teaching children to endure boredom rather than ratcheting up the entertainment will prepare them for a more realistic future, one that doesn’t raise false expectations of what work or life itself actually entails.

Perhaps our current fear and dislike of white space and the boredom that may accompany it will give rise to a whole new professional development industry. Students or employees bored, powerless before the blank page, paralyzed by unscheduled, unsupervised time? We can send our White Space Trainers to your school or workplace today! (Can’t you just imagine the power point presentations and training sessions designed to raise test scores and improve graduation rates through well-designed white space development?)

Seriously though, we have a white space crisis before us. I’m all for raising up a new generation of vanquishers, emboldened–not frightened–by the boredom and the mental, emotional, and spiritual spaces they encounter.

 
 On Your Birthday
 
For years, he wrapped his best gift
 into a single sheet of typing paper
 and tucked it in the corner of your vanity mirror.
 And there, your husband’s words,
 like spring’s first crocus, 
 pushed their snowy heads eagerly
 into the gray days of winter.
 Each birthday, they took careful root in the only
 seed bed worth tending.
 
 To his best reader,
 to the love—oh, the love of his life!
 To the home he carried with him
 into and out of the dark places that might have undone him, 
 but for you. 
 To the one who makes do, who takes little
 and gives much.
 To the loveliest of all the birds he kept,
 the one whose silver wings flash like bright berries
 in the junipers.
 
 And now the words are left to me.
 I can hear my father’s fingers on his Royal typewriter,
 the quick slap of thumb and forefingers,
 the blue rush of each carriage return.
 I can feel the round keys give themselves, as they must,
 to a rhythm preordained. 
 And the small metal stand with wings that unfold 
 to hold notebooks and such
 quakes with each image pounded into life.
  
 Now, the words he gifted--
 so many words spilling from line to line, 
 jumping the white spaces of the decades--
 now, this word cache strains against the grave.
  
 And so, on your birthday,
 consider this a single page tucked into the corner
 of your vanity. 
 Consider that the old black Royal lumbers on
 with humble words unearthed from the genetic soil 
 of the one who loves you
 always. 


With all my love, Shannon

Curated: carefully chosen and thoughtfully organized or presented

I don’t think I have ever spoken or written the word curate or curator but a handful of times in my entire life. Though I love art–and had once planned to pursue a college art major–truthfully, I am pretty clueless about the role and work of a curator, one who carefully chooses and thoughtfully presents the artistic works that appear in galleries and museums. This world, the world of a genuine curator, is filet mignon to my Hamburger Helper. It floats and lilts, while I trod and plod. This is the world of those chosen few who have devoted their lives to the study of great artists, to the history of artistic styles and trends, to the standards by which we judge what is artistically sublime and what is merely good. In short, this is the world of a chosen few.

Or it was the world of a chosen few. Now, however, anything and everything is curated, which means anyone and everyone can be a curator. The world of curation has left the heavenly realms of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to take its place in countless Facebook photos and posts. Power in hand, we are currently curating the heck out of things.

In a 2009 New York Times article, “The Word ‘Curate’ No Longer Belongs to the Museum Crowd,” Alex Williams writes:

The word “curate,” lofty and once rarely spoken outside exhibition corridors or British parishes, has become a fashionable code word among the aesthetically minded, who seem to paste it onto any activity that involves culling and selecting. In more print-centric times, the term of art was “edit” — as in a boutique edits its dress collections carefully. But now, among designers, disc jockeys, club promoters, bloggers and thrift-store owners, curate is code for “I have a discerning eye and great taste.” Or more to the point, “I belong.”

Oh to have a discerning eye and great taste! To belong to a group of others who, too, have discerning eyes and great taste! And to stand above, and in judgment of, those who lack such discernment and taste! For many, this is the stuff that great curation is made of now. Consider, for example, a lesson plan entitled Curated Lives for 10th graders from the website commonsense.org. The lesson designers frame the lesson with this statement:

Social media gives us a chance to choose how we present ourselves to the world. We can snap and share a pic in the moment or carefully stage photos and select only the ones we think are best. When students reflect on these choices, they can better understand the self they are presenting and the self they aim to be.

I suppose a lesson like this could go one of two ways: 1) teachers could help their students understand that the curated lives they present on social media are not their real lives OR 2) teachers could help students understand that they can curate their lives more effectively and thus, socially present their very best lives possible. This lesson may prompt some real soul-searching, or, sadly (and most likely), it may prompt more intentional curation of students’ social media selves. And all this in an estimated time of 50 minutes!

There are entire websites and blogs devoted to curating your life. From one such website, we read that The Curated Life is the pursuit of finding what makes living better. From another, we read: Curating your life means carefully choosing what you allow to shape your identity, atmosphere, relationships and sense of well-being. It is about realizing your worth and making choices that uphold your worth. You live full of hope for your future and curate your present life accordingly.

Curating your life is about shaping your identify, about realizing and upholding your worth? Scroll through Facebook or Instagram photos and posts at any moment on any given day, and you can find proof of this in a smorgasbord of faces and bodies, families and lives that are so much better than yours. These photos and posts shine with happiness and health. They dazzle with success and glitter with satisfaction. Such is the intended effect of curated lives: perfect family gatherings, brilliant selfies, achievements of every size and color. The rest of us who forgot the rolls and made the wrong kind of pie for the holiday dinner, whose wrinkles (or zits) have passed the point of any realistic photo editing, and whose greatest achievement is dusting at least once a month–well, we can just look on and weep.

Media scholar, Internet activist, and blogger Ethan Zuckerman writes:

Curators are great, but they’re inherently biased. Curators are always making an editorial decision. Those biases have really big implications.

Of course, curators are biased. And of course, they make editorial decisions that have really big implications. That’s the real point of curating, isn’t it? Presentation is everything. Whether it’s your home, your family or relationships, your personal or professional self, you can edit what you want others to see and what you do not. You can bias others towards what you want them to think. And the implications of this? Ideally, this all works in your favor. Others will look on in sore amazement at the curated you. They will “like” your photos and posts–or, at least, they will feel compelled to “like” them. For to disregard them would be to disregard what many others have “liked”, which would then make you an outsider, a real pantywaist in the curated world of social media.

The implications of curating our lives on social media and, in general, are often tragic. People claim that they must take mental health breaks from technology, to turn off their phones and to refrain from checking Facebook or Instagram. They claim that in order to keep their sanity and any sense of well-being, they have to stop the barrage of curated success and joy that continuously floods their screens. Cease and desist, they say. Or face the consequences of depression and FOMA (fear of missing out).

In an interview in The Guardian, Swiss art curator Hans Ulrich Obrist writes:

It’s worth thinking about the etymology of curating. It comes from the Latin word curare, meaning to take care. In Roman times, it meant to take care of the bath houses. In medieval times, it designated the priest who cared for souls.

I don’t think that curation today has much–if anything–to do with caring for souls. Perhaps it should, though. Perhaps the world would be a better place if curators were ones who cared more for their own and others’ souls than for finding the best angle and light for stunning selfies. Certainly, the implications of this type of curation would yield immeasurable benefits, for who among us couldn’t use some soul-tending? And you would never have to tune out or turn off from this kind of curation. Quite the contrary. You’d want to hang out with these kinds of curators because in their presence, you wouldn’t need a social media presence at all. You could just be present in the moment without feeling as though you needed to photograph or record it.

But there would also be challenges associated with this type of curation. Caring for the soul is the work of introspection, personal–not public work. This is internal work that is often quite messy. And this is work that would take time, quite possibly an entire lifetime.

Curation of the medieval kind would be a hard sell today. As we privately cared for our own and others’ souls, how would we know how many views we received or how many friends liked our work if we had no public platform? Without the validation of social media, how could we possibly continue curating?

I don’t have answers to these questions. I’m just convinced that these are the right questions to ask if we are ever to be the beneficiaries of genuinely and soulfully curated lives.

And all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them. But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart. Luke 2: 18-19

“Why were you searching for me?” he asked. “Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?” But they did not understand what he was saying to them. Then he went down to Nazareth with them and was obedient to them. But his mother pondered all these things in her heart. Luke 2:29-51

Over the span of my lifetime, perhaps my heart’s greatest cry has been that I might be delivered from worry. There are few things I would claim to be really good at, but worry is one of them. Actually, sometime during my 30s, I probably reached professional status. If there were an Olympic event for worrying, I’d have gold-medaled consecutively. I’d be a sought after talk-show guest, regaling television audiences with spectacular tales of worry and woe, dishing out advice for the worrisome, and looking appropriately worried–creased brow, tight lips, ragged cuticles, in a word: haggard. I’m also very good at looking haggard. Somehow, in a tragic turn of God’s natural order, I’d come to regard worry as good and necessary work. It was the work of good mothers and teachers, the work of martyrs and saints. Or so I thought.

If anyone had cause to worry, it might have been Mary. To learn that you would be carrying the Son of God, that your betrothed would soon discover that you were pregnant before marriage (and not with his baby), that as a 12 year-old, your son would remain in the temple after you’d left for home and that he would claim that he was simply taking his place in his Father’s house? Just one of these things would be enough to bury you under a mountain of worry from which you may never dig yourself out! But Mary pondered these things in her heart. Even as I reread these scriptures, I’m acutely aware that while Mary pondered, I simply worried. While Mary rested in God’s promise and assurance, I worked myself into frenzies of apprehension and fear. While Mary waited on God, I forged ahead of him, trying to pave my own desperate way.

Novelist Sue Monk Kidd writes:

I had tended to view waiting as mere passivity. When I looked it up in my dictionary however, I found that the words passive and passion come from the same Latin root, pati, which means to endure. Waiting is thus both passive and passionate. It’s a vibrant, contemplative work. It means descending into self, into God, into the deeper labyrinths of prayer. It involves listening to disinherited voices within, facing the wounded holes in the soul, the denied and undiscovered, the places one lives falsely. It means struggling with the vision of who we really are in God and molding the courage to live that vision.     

Like Sue Monk Kidd, the real problem with waiting–even waiting on God–is being passive. For much of my life, I’d come to regard worry as active. If you were worrying, you were exacting some kind of control over circumstances which were chaotic and uncertain. If you were worrying, you were demonstrating your willingness to work hard at life and love. If you were worrying, you were doing something.

Herein lies the real difference between Mary and me: she pondered things in her heart, and I worry about things in my head. Mary didn’t ask to be delivered from worry, and even though she clearly had normal mom-things to worry about, I’m guessing that she slept well. In contrast, I often lay awake, struggling to sleep as the winds of worry buffet gray matter against the rocky shores of my brain.

Christian speaker and writer, Henri Nouwen writes:

A waiting person is a patient person. The word patience means the willingness to stay where we are and live the situation out to the full in the belief that something hidden there will manifest itself to us.

Mary was a patient person in the truest sense of the word. She was willing to live each day to the full, believing that something hidden would manifest itself to her. She was able to ponder things without expecting immediate answers or solutions. Instead, she lovingly carried the things she couldn’t yet understand, storing them as treasures in her heart. Our willingness to wait reveals the value we place on the object we’re waiting for, writes pastor and writer Charles Stanley. Mary was willing to wait because she valued and understood for whom she was waiting. She had faith that God would reveal all things to her in his time.

For many of us, waiting is a dash, an unwelcome punctuation mark in the sentence of our lives. It delays the conclusions we seek and the outcomes we desire. It interrupts the answers to the questions that plague us. It intrudes upon the rhythm of life we’ve come to expect. If we have to put our lives on pause, we like commas better. They offer short respites after which we are able to get on with things. But dashes? They try us. They test our very souls.

Christian author John Ortberg writes:

Biblically, waiting is not just something we have to do until we get what we want. Waiting is part of the process of becoming what God wants us to be.

Ortberg rejects the notion that waiting is merely something we have to do until we get what we want or that it is a period during which we have to endure until we get answers we want. Waiting, he claims, is a necessary part of God’s plan for us. After the angel appeared to Mary to tell her that she would be the mother of God’s son, without hesitation, she said, Behold, the bondslave of the Lord; may it be done to me according to your word. [Luke 1:38] From this moment on, she would wait upon God, accepting whatever was done to her.

In the end, Mary understood–like Elizabeth and Zechari’ah–that though she may not be delivered from those things which wound and scar us, she would always be able to take comfort and refuge in the Deliverer. She could ponder all these things in her heart because she understood that God held her heart in his hands.

This is the good news of the Advent season. The Deliverer is here, and he holds your heart in his hands.

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.