Writing, Parenting, and Working in the Mess: Authentic Spirituality and Social Justice

I'm cheating a little, because it's the busiest time of year in academia. This is not a new poem, but it seems an appropriate one for a study of the Resurrection. Rest in peace, Bob--never forgotten. Hard to believe it's been more than four years since we lost you--and since I had this amazing dream. Gathering             For Bob I dream I am sweeping flakes of wax from the floor of a long, narrow room. The other refugees turn in their sleep like a row of flags that curl and tighten, over and over, in the wind.  Only my daughter and I are awake.  “What are you doing, mom?” she asks me in the same small, steady voice she used, when I heard you died, to ask “What is the news? Why are you crying?” “Trying to save what I can,” I say. She says she wants to help, kneels and makes her hands into small dams against the floor. I sweep the remnants toward her. And then we begin to see what they ...

Jubilee Dreams Leviticus 25: 10-13 Sometimes, in my dreams, my 50 th year, the one I never believed would come, the one that means I have outlived my mother-- that year, the 50th, sometimes settles drearily, just another winter morning, and sometimes, train-bound for nowhere, clutching a bag of coins to my heart, the police flash a light in my face. But it's my birthday, I say, and everybody turns toward their windows, not looking, not looking—then, suddenly darkness, thick as the bottom of the coffee cup, the grounds I do not dare to read now that I am 50 and pressing my luck. Don’t press your luck I say over and over to strangers in cabs or on moonlit paths through mountains or in ordinary time, walking to work or running on the elliptical. Sometimes I wait, shivering, in a small, white room, thin hospital gown tied loosely around my waist, the one windowsill buried in snow, buried Don’t press your luck Sometimes a friend in ...

After a 40 day fast, Greek families slaughter a lamb, roast it on a spit, and eat every last bit of it. Perhaps relatedly, I am a vegetarian. Perhaps it was the wide open eyes of the lamb on the spit—it always looked like it was still alive. Or maybe it’s because my cousin Connie liked to gross us out by eating the lamb eyes. Or perhaps it’s because, when I was five, I once wandered into the kitchen for a drink of water after playing in the backyard and found a giant, dead lamb sitting on our counter. My mother was casually reaching into its gut to pull out the innards. Magiritsa, also known as lamb-gut soup, is a staple on Easter. The soup is actually pretty delicious, if you can forget what goes into it. “Why do we have to eat the guts?” I asked my mother once. “Because we shouldn’t waste anything,” she said, simply. As I got older and learned about the meat industry in the U.S., I became more convinced that refraining from meat was probably a just act—why support ...

Tuesday, Day 24: Easter Basket Here is an autobiographical poem that captures a post-Easter adventure (involving an Easter basket put to use in a new way) from a few years ago. My excuse for not posting earlier is that I lost my computer! Thank goodness I live in the kind of community where all things lost eventually come back to us. Saved When your daughter cups her gloved hands around the baby grackle’s downy skin, you think, This is going to end badly. Still, when she empties her Easter basket, lines it with horse hair-- when she spends her last ten dollars on worms—when she tells the clerk at Jerry’s U-Save to fuck off after he asks, Don’t you believe in natural selection? —when she sits on the deck for two long days, feeding the squawking bird fragments of worms carefully cut with your best kitchen knife, dropping water from a doll’s bottle into its open beak— you keep your mouth shut. And when the bird wakes you on the second day by crying out her ...

Sunday, Day 22: Koulourakia We taught the children at church how to make the Greek cookies called koulourakia—how to roll out three strands of dough and braid them—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They did their best to braid or at least twist the dough into shape, and loved brushing on the eggs and sprinkling on way too many sesame seeds. While we worked, we talked about the parable of the yeast, and all the ways that little things can become big. We talked about Rosa Parks refusing to get up and how that sparked the Civil Rights Movement, although one of the kids noted she hadn’t been the first, only the first that those in power wanted to make visible. I tried to talk about how Jesus called a couple fisherman to follow him, and that’s what started an entire movement to make love of self and neighbor the way to get close to God, instead of other things that weren’t so important, and how this small lesson was the Big Lesson we were supposed to learn from Jesus, but I pretty much...

The secret to delicious tsoureki (Greek Easter Bread) is the mahlepi. Mahlepi is the seed of a cherry tree that can be found in the Mediterranean. The tree is stunning, with beautiful white blossoms, not unlike the cherry trees that bloom in the U.S. The taste of mahlepi is impossible to describe. It is almost bitter, but also nutty, and fruity—see, that doesn’t do much for anyone who hasn’t tasted it. Its seeds are utterly ordinary. The recipe never calls for very much, if any. But there’s a clear difference between tsoureki without the mahlepi and tsoureki that includes it. This year, I made a loaf for American Easter and forgot to include the mahlepi, and it was good—but it just tasted like an ordinary semi-sweet bread. Luckily, my cousin Connie who raised me after my mother’s death has my mother’s recipe, and sends me a loaf every year. We cut that one after Easter Liturgy for Greek Easter and the difference was immediately palpable. Rising in a corner of our kitchen, ...

You cannot put a fire out; A thing that can ignite Can go, itself, without a fan Upon the slowest night. --Emily Dickinson As the Easter liturgy wears on—two a.m., three a.m.—we hold tightly to our candles, watch the flame to make sure the wick can hold it. The plastic cup secured to the candle catch the wax, but we have to remember to keep scooting it down as the candle burns so it does its job. In the process, sometimes a little wax escapes. The black cover of my Holy Week services book sports spatterings of wax, as do some of the pages toward the end. We carry the candle up to take communion, hold it carefully away from the cloth we take in our hands and hold under our chins. We carry it back to our seats to hear the joyful Easter sermon by St. John Chrysostom, including these words: "If any have struggled from the first hour, let them today receive their just reward. If any have come at the third hour, let them with thankfulness enjoy the feast. If any have ar...

My mother lifted me so I could see the blue shell shattered, the violence of birth. The trees that lined our yard, shielded us from the neighbor’s driveway, were just tall enough back then for nesting in our view. We watched the tiny birds’ wet heads emerge, their first horrifying need. Food, food, the squawked, and the robin-mother touched her beak to theirs. In comparison, the quail nest, even though it was right there three feet from our sandbox, was unreachable. The mother would guard her speckled eggs, circling, circling, squawking her warning.  Don’t go near, Mom said, but one summer afternoon, bored,  my sister and I got as close as we could. The mother bird lifted her wings and lunged at us. My sister laughed while I ran away, terrified for some reason of that tiny, powerful mother-quail. And now we live in an old house with nests in every rafter. Birds chirp all day, high pitched syllable, twit twit twitter, low, intricate melody--so many sounds. I wish...

“The wound is the place where the light enters you.”—Rumi The post-Easter Bible readings border on creepy. Jesus keeps showing up when people least expect him. Sometimes he’s totally recognizable, and other times he’s not. Locked doors and other obstacles are no match for him. But he’s not a ghost, exactly, because he eats, drinks, and sports his crucifixion scars. In one of these visits, Jesus enjoys a meal with his disciples—all except Thomas, who isn’t there for some reason. When the others tell him what happened, he says something to the effect of, “Unless I stick my fingers in his wounds, I’m not going to believe it’s him.” Maybe he believed he was the recipient of the greatest practical joke on earth, or that the disciples had accidentally purchased bread laced with acid—whatever his reason, the account of 11 soul-brothers just didn’t make sense. But then Jesus shows back up, and tells him he can stick his fingers in the holes on his wrists and side. I always cri...

"Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." I have a lot of trouble with this iconic verse. Really? We're supposed to stop toiling, and just let God do the work? When has that ever worked out for anyone? Isn't that the dangerous trap of any religion--that we begin to trust God so much that we stop believing we have a role to play in making the world a better place, except to "be good" and wait to be swept into heaven?   Well, given the full context of Jesus' life as change-maker, rule-breaker, and advocate for justice, I don't believe for a second that this is what he meant.  Instead, perhaps he meant that there is a place for trust in our lives. Perhaps he wanted us to just stand still once in awhile, noticing the beauty and power in our own fully and carefully created, unadorned selves. If we don't trust, at least to s...

In high school our youth group spent the night at church on Holy Thursday, taking turns holding vigil at the foot of the cross, where an icon of Jesus was nailed. On Friday morning, we would participate in an intimate morning service, then help the women of the church decorate the Epitaphion or tomb of Christ. The Epitaphion was like a huge, wooden table with a dome above it, and it was always decorated with carnations—blood-red and white. At the 3:00 service, Jesus’ body was removed from the cross and placed in the Epitaphion, and at the end of the service, we kissed his body, then knelt before it and crawled beneath it to signify our own willingness to die with him. One year, I froze when I got underneath the Epitaphion, overwhelmed by the scent of polished wood and the fresh, almost minty scent of the carnations. I felt a little dizzy. I didn’t actually want to die. I don’t know what made me take the whole ordeal so literally that year—but I was truly panicked. I heard ...

In springtime, my mother used to sing a song that she may have made up: “Yellow, yellow daffodils, dancing in the sun, yellow, yellow daffodils, tell us spring has sprung.” Daffodils bloom long before any other flowers—but they are also the first to disappear. By the time the other flowers, even the early ones, start showing off, the daffodils have turned brown and begun to curl into themselves, as if they are sorry they showed up too early. “I get so tired of the showy annuals,” an elderly woman said to me once when we were taking a walk. “I like a plant that lasts. Give me a perennial any day of the week.” “What about the perennials like daffodils and tulips that don’t last long?” I asked her. “Oh, those….” She sighed. “Those I can’t live without. They are sometimes the only sign that spring is coming. And at the end of the winters we have here, we need a little hope, even if it doesn’t last.” She paused. “And anyway, by the time the daffodils are gone, everything ...

On the day before my father was forced to leave his home because of foreclosure, he picked as many dandelions as he could. He boiled and froze the stems in plastic bags of promise: he had owned three acres once. Foreclosure could not un-tell that story. He had these weeds and would never go hungry. He knew how to live off the land. After my grandmother's burial, my mother picked dandelions  out of the ground and tossed them onto her mother's newly covered grave. The least desired flower. The yellow pest. The edible stem. The deep, unremovable root. The sun-yellow face. The wispy, white seed. The nesting, and growing, and blowing, and seeding again. How all that is beautiful and seemingly useless spreads by rooting itself in the midst of what is most valuable. Dandelion: unlikely Easter flower.

Every year in late August, my mother and I went shopping for three pairs of shoes: tennis shoes, school shoes, and church shoes. I have a really narrow foot that made it nearly impossible for me to find shoes that fit well. We often had to buy shoes way beyond our family’s budget. Looking back, I wonder why the church shoes—usually patent leather shoes with buckles—were so important. But it was simply unheard of to wear pants or “school shoes” to church. We had to dress up. My dressy shoes were relatively comfortable, in retrospect, but they always felt less comfortable than the other two pairs. As soon as I got home from church, I’d take off my church shoes. If the weather was nice, I'd immediately go out and run barefoot in the grass. I loved the feel of the grass against the bottoms of my feet—a little ticklish, a little scratchy—a feeling that made me sure I was deeply and completely alive. If you are around my age, you may remember the boy who lived in a giant bub...

My sister and I often received purses in our Easter baskets. I remember some of them: the white cloth purse with delicate, embroidered flowers along its edge; the small, shiny black purse with a clasp that snapped in a satisfying (i.e., loud) way; the purse from Greece with an image of Helios, the God of the Sun, driving his chariot. My favorite purse, though, was a round purse with bulky, smooth, wooden handles and a thin lining. Small, white buttons were sewn into the lining, and one could purchase covers for this purse in a multitude of colors and fabrics that buttoned on. I could now have a new purse every year! I don’t honestly remember how many covers I accumulated. There is an Easter photo of my sister and me standing on either side of my father. I’m wearing a blue and white striped dress and clutching the purse, which is covered in matching fabric. In another photo, the same purse appears with a cover sporting giant, almost fluorescent flowers. In a third, there is a b...

One of my favorite memories is sitting at the top of a mountain in the center of Ikaria after an all-night panigiri (village party) when I went to Greece for the summer in 1998. I watched the sun literally rise out of the ocean, which spread out like a giant cloak of darkness around the island. I watched it inch its way above a rocky, desert coast, across a forest of aromatic pines higher up the mountain, until finally, it enveloped me. I was exposed, the music still playing behind me, the whole world new again, even as the party went on. It was Sunday morning, I realized, and somewhere, a priest was preparing the Eucharist, and some faithful were undoubtedly heading to the liturgy. I felt the deepest peace of my life enter my stomach, spreading from there up my esophagus, all the way into my throat.  I felt a deep connectedness to those who were heading to church, as well as to those dancing behind me. I felt a deep connectedness to the significant other I had recently le...

When I was little, rather than going to the long midnight liturgy, we always went to the Agape Easter service on Sunday morning. This was a joyful service that was child-friendly and fascinating. The good news of the Resurrection was read in as many languages as possible, followed by the Resurrection Song, Christos Anesti. At the end of the service, rather than distributing the traditional red eggs, our priest would distribute eggs in every color of the rainbow. Before doing so, he would preach a simple sermon about the color of each egg, recounting its symbolism. I wish I could remember what all of the colors meant. The priest in my childhood, now deceased, was a stern man. Most of the children feared him at least a little, but I had some good reasons to be afraid. Once, I accidentally brushed my hand against the communion chalice, which is not supposed to be touched, ever. Another time, I slipped on my way up to communion and almost fell over. Both times, the Fr. B did not...

The shroud in which Jesus’ body was wrapped mirrors the swaddling clothes his mother used to hold him close to her after his birth. In Byzantine iconography, the manger in the icon of the Nativity is purposely made to look like a tomb, and the baby’s bedclothes like a shroud. We don’t shroud the bodies of our dead anymore, at least not in the U.S.—but we carefully dress our dead in their best clothes, tuck gifts into their caskets for the journey. We want to accompany those we love through any transition, but the truth is we all walk alone, except for the Spirit embodied in us, our soul-selves who are so much bigger than the selves we or others will ever know. The church I attend now in small town Minnesota gifts college graduates with prayer shawls made by mission knitters. We wrap these shawls across the students’ shoulders and wish them well on the next phase of their journey, praying over them in a long chain of interconnected hands. Shawls are also gifted to those str...

My sister and I sometimes received new dresses for Easter—not every year, but often enough for some of these dresses to stick in my memory. I remember a blue and white pastel striped dress, a pale orange dress with a laced collar, a robin’s-egg blue dress with a white pleated skirt. They were fancier than the dresses we usually wore to church.  I loved those new dresses, even though I inevitably spilled something on mine at some point. We weren’t allowed to put them on until right before church, just to be safe. After the long days of Lent, when no dancing, weddings, or parties were allowed (save for a couple exceptions, like the Annunciation), we entered a long season of parties. We would wear those dresses to all special occasions that spring and summer—weddings, baby showers, birthdays—but we continued to call them our “Easter dresses.” Today, that Easter dress is a metaphor for carrying something precious and beautiful into the spring and through the summer. Nothin...

My family is from an island called Ikaria—rural, off the beaten path, and rustically beautiful. The landscape varies greatly, but in my father’s village of Magganiti, the coast is populated by the largest rocks I have ever seen. Some tower over the ocean, at least 10 feet above the coast, impeding the view of the sea. One of my favorite photos of my daughter was taken during a trip to Greece in 2010. In this photo, she has climbed to the top of one of these giant rocks, and she is standing there, her arms spread wide, in awe at the view of the sea on the other side. I took the photo from the ground, so she looks especially majestic, completely happy and at peace. I adopted my daughter as a single mom out of foster care when she was 14. Her trauma haunted her constantly—it was, her social workers told me, the most severe trauma history they had ever encountered. “You will have to be ready for anything,” one of them told me—“ready to visit her in prison, or to go to her funeral. P...

My father-in-law picked rocks out of the corn field behind his home in preparation for our wedding. “Don’t worry. He’s going to love this project,” my soon-to-be spouse said to me, but I wasn’t so sure. He is not the most talkative or expressive person—to put it mildly. He often chooses not to attend parties or family gatherings, preferring instead to be alone, running or skiing miles of trails on an almost daily basis, regardless of the weather. I was a bit wary of him at first. While there was no question how my mother-in-law felt about me or the wedding, I wasn’t sure about his feelings. After all, his daughter was marrying a woman—surprising enough on its own—but I am also an older woman with a special needs child and a complicated life. Somehow, my spouse and I got the idea that our guests should write messages on rocks instead of in a guest book. We wanted to carry something heavy into our lives together. We had become friends and later fallen in love because we had found i...

“Above all else, guard your heart, for everything flows from it.” Proverb 4:23 is one of my favorites. Sometimes I am so full of conflicting feelings, of overwhelm, that I can’t control what I am doing. I am frantic, moving too quickly through life, or else, the opposite—so overstimulated that I can’t move. Either way, I am no use to the world. And, I can’t see the world, either—can’t feel awe at the dawn’s slow coming to light, at the colors of the sunset, at the sounds of giddy laughter from children in the park. I pull the dog along on his walk instead of walking beside him. I fret about everything that has to get done. How do I get this way? By not taking time, every day, to be present with myself, with all that is larger than myself. By not paying attention. Not getting enough rest. Saying “yes” to too many things. Sometimes, though, we guard ourselves from what is deep within us by purposely becoming overwhelmed with things to do. We avoid silence, quiet, time to ourselves....

My mother and I sit beside each other in a dark room, breathing, listening to the quiet. I wait for her to turn on the flashlight I know she has in her hand, to flash its light around the room. When she does, I name what I see: lambie, the stuffed lamb with the velvet face; the edge of the lace curtains, the windowsill, a nail in the wall, my tattered blankie, a can of playdough. As soon as I have named something, the light goes off, and we return to darkness, to waiting. Later she spins the the light on the ceiling so fast that I see jagged streaks like the lightening that illuminates the sky on stormy nights. Later still, we play flashlight-hide-and-seek, wedging our bodies close to the wall or behind the door of a closet, waiting for the other to find us with the light. At the end of the game, she flicks on the overhead light, and I have to close my eyes to shut out the brightness. I see shadows swimming beneath my lids, and I wait until they go away before I open my eyes aga...

My Easter basket always included a chocolate egg from Temo Candy Company, a local store that was owned by a Greek family we knew. We dreamt all year of the Temo’s Easter eggs. They were huge (or at least, they seemed huge to me then), and skillfully hand decorated with each of our names and small, colorful flowers. They arrived in a cardboard box with a crinkly, see-through window of plastic that was almost too lovely to open. They were also, of course, incredibly delicious. During Lent, in addition to fasting from meat, we always gave something else up, something we really craved. Usually, for me, it was chocolate. Holy Week required a strict fast—no meat or dairy. So, the chocolate eggs tasted especially good after so many days of fasting—but eating them too quickly could also be dangerous. We never forgot the first time we got an Easter morning belly ache. We learned to slice and eat the Temo’s chocolate eggs slowly over time, to savor them. Chocolate has no biblical associa...

Monday, Day Two: Light We are rarely completely without light unless we choose to be. Even on a cloudy, new-moon night, a small remnant of starlight shines through the thick covering. Or perhaps we live in a place where streetlights never go off—even with the curtain drawn, an eerie, electric-yellow light glows, reminding us that even in the privacy of our own homes, our shadows are still visible. People who are sight impaired may not see light, but they can certainly feel it—sunlight on their faces, the well-worn paths in their own homes, the well-known streets of their neighborhoods. Let there be light, one version of the creation story begins, and there was. Creation always begins with light. The baby entering the world encounters light through her closed eyelids, even before she can see. The man awaking from a difficult surgery notices light as he wakes, even before he begins to feel the sensations in his body, the numbness and the growing pain. In the Catholic Christian tradi...