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

He has been whirring through the house with a trail of cuss words and thrown-off socks settling behind him for over an hour when I say, "Stop, let me show you something." Sometimes the best way to slow him down is to catch him off guard, and, curiosity piqued, he'll get quiet, at least until he realizes I don't have the treasure he's after. It's maybe three months since he showed up in the middle of the night with an army of social workers and police, scared but even then, eager to love me. He touches the worn corner of the icon, saying, "She's broken right here," and I say, "Yes, she's very old." He traces the red covering over her head, asks, "Is she that religion you told me about, the one some people don't like but we believe we should take care of everyone?" "She's a different religion, Jewish," I say, "but some people don't like them, either. This is what Jewish women wore along time ag...

In my favorite photo of my mother, she's wearing the blue dress she wore most often, loose and simple, with a thin, white belt. She leans against a staircase in Quaker Square in Akron, Ohio, where we spent every Saturday, her elbow nonchalantly perched on the banister, wearing a Chewbacca mask. She stood there for an hour, still and silent, while my aunt, my sister and I watched for the passer-bys' reactions behind the register at the Sweet Greek. We giggled at each gasp, each surprised expression, the handful of blood-curdling screams. She never took the mask off, or apologized, even to the terrified children who were pulled along by their irritated parents, even when one mother said, after her toddler burst into tears, "What kind of person DOES this?" My mother was not stoic, but she knew how to be still: how to stand in a ray of sun coming through the window, eyes closed, just feeling the warmth on her back;  how to mend a garden, slow and steady, pulling weeds...

In October the Sweet Greek would transform: an eerie orange glow, witches on brooms hanging from the ceiling. "Halloween Store, This Way," read a silvery sign above the register, pointing up the stairs. There, just around the corner, she'd rented an extra room in Quaker Square. We helped her get ready, pulling spidery threads from plastic bags, unfurling them over the entrance. We plugged in black and orange lights, hiding the extension cords, unpacked the dry ice and heaved it into a kettle, setting the witch's broomstick against its side. Then my older cousins climbed the ladder to line the shelves with masks: Nixon and Carter, Frankenstein and werewolf, R2D2 and C3PO. There were capes of every color, Alice in Wonderland skirts, scrubs and bellbottoms and more, hung on garment wracks so close together it was hard to squeeze through. After Greek School we always went to the Sweet Greek for baklava or kouambiethes, cut the Ikarian way, or else we chose one of the gi...

Teal blue, sky blue, turquoise, royal blue, indigo--she pulled them carefully from her box of 100, sharpened their edges. At the library, she thumbed through dictionaries in a dozen languages, carefully wrote the word "blue" on strips of white paper, alternating colors. She safety pinned each strip to her blue blouse and blue skirt, threading the pins with shiny blue beads. When the day came, as night fell, she pulled on blue tights she found at a ballet store. They sagged a little at the ankles, but they would do. She pulled the blouse on carefully, lifted the skirt and pinned it tight around her meager waist--it, too, was too big, but who cared? Blue eyeshadow, bracelets, earrings, brooches, ribbons, and then the best part: blue glitter sprinkled into her hair. She let it fall all over, sticking to her face and arms, laughing at herself in the mirror.  And when her husband asked her what in the devil she was doing in there, she cackled (her regular laugh was a cack...

Their honeycomb-wings radiate the sweet taste of summer, feather-light, wind-strong, a scattering of snowflakes to remind us what's coming. They eat the threads that held them in darkness, push off from the sturdy milkweed leaf, fly toward the rainbow in the light, its imperceptible shades. Never forgetting the darkness, or how to be still, they gather, hardly fluttering, taking in whatever the goldenrods and purple coneflowers offer: bright colors, fragrant nectar, a place to rest. They lay their seeds, die in the brush, each day on the prairie the sigh from a great, ancestral longing. Or else, if they were born to the right generation, they fly faster than gravel-road drivers, scattering, gathering again. Soundless, they know how to find one another by shadow and light, huddle like calves in a windstorm, birds in a nest. The trees of their great-grandmothers await. Deep in the thin walls that hold honeycomb from honeycomb, in the feathery antennae, in the small, white circles o...

The mothers are close now, as always. They hover in the shadowed corners of our memories or at the edge of our sight, doing whatever they always do: bending over a garden, washing the dishes, hurrying to work, shouting at us through an open door, sitting still in the dawn's first light when they think we are asleep, looking at us or out the window. They smack at mosquitoes or flies, kneel to gaze at ant parades, gently release spiders through cracks in the screen. They gather shawls, jackets, magnifying glasses, snacks and swimming suits, clean socks. Over and over, they say "that's enough" or "just a little longer" or "I can hardly believe it!" or "let's go have some fun," their voices merging like the monarchs among the purple coneflowers, wing atop wing, then rising, then spreading thin. They hurry through their days, hardly looking our way, too busy, too busy. Or else they are right beside us, swimming the side stroke in the s...