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

 On December 28, our family hit a Christmas low. The night before, my spouse and I and the two youngest had driven to see a spectacular light show and hour away and sang Christmas carols all the way there and back. We went to bed happy and full of wonder. I hoped my son, who is the only other early riser in our house right now, would sleep in because we were up late.  The next morning, I woke up feeling icky (don't worry, this isn't going where you think it is), and I got up and realized I HAD to run, immediately--my body desperately needed it. But when I put in my earbuds to listen to Christmas music, I just wasn't feeling it. So I said my usual silent prayers instead, then listened to a podcast. I didn't sit in front of the Christmas tree like usual; instead, I did a longer work out, and some yoga, and got dressed as if we were back in ordinary time. Except the day was not ordinary from there on out. When you live with and love and care for people living with trauma, ...

 Yesterday morning my eldest daughter woke in our home for only the second time since the pandemic began. We knew having her here was a risk, but I couldn't bear the idea of being separated at Christmas. (We did everything we could to mitigate the risk, including testing and quarantine leading up to her visit). In this season I usually sneak downstairs before anyone else is awake to meditate, read, or write in front of the Christmas tree instead of at my desk, then go downstairs to work out on the treadmill, with Christmas music in my earbuds. I need this alone time to stay present during the day. But yesterday I heard my eldest waking and letting the dogs out in the midst of a blizzard. It occurred to me that it was perhaps the first time someone else had let them out in the pre-dawn darkness before an inevitable accident, and I felt grateful and considered sleeping in.  Instead I went downstairs. She was by then seated in front of the lit tree, having lit the Advent candles....

 “Darkness can become the tending place in which our longings for healing, justice, and peace grow and come to birth.”—Jan Richardson At Holly Skogen Park, there is a long, narrow cement drainage tunnel through which rain water and melted snow trickle or rush from the highway into the creek that runs through the park. My son says he wants to crawl through it. I say no, a strange, inexplicable fear rising in me. “You could drown,” I say, and then we both look around at the rain-less, snow-less landscape and begin to laugh.Through my laughter, I add, “Or get run over. The cars on the highway on the other side move fast.” But he’s still laughing, and after getting that sentence out, I am, too. “You don’t want to lose me,” he says. It’s a statement of fact. He’s not asking a question, so I don’t say anything. He looks at me for a minute, his head cocked to one side. “Is that your biggest fear?” “I never thought about it, but maybe,” I say, a long series of fears—some realisti...

 My son sometimes runs away from school. Sometimes he is raging, or feels unsafe—but sometimes, he simply gets a sudden urge to see something new, different, to escape the sameness of his surroundings. He feels trapped, and who can blame him?  So he runs. He attends a day treatment program about 20 minutes from our home. It’s a town I’ve driven through thousands of times on my way to the nearby state park or the Twin Cities, but one where I have rarely stopped. One time, when we were debriefing one of these episodes, I asked him for the first time where exactly he went. “To Holly Skogen Park,” he said, in a tone that suggested I should have known this. “It’s my holy place.” I was completely confused. I’d lived in the area for more than 20 years and loved state and city parks, but had never heard of this one. I asked him to tell me about it, but he shrugged and said, “I like to go there to talk to the trolls.” Well, I thought, my son has a great imagination. You would t...

 We were in a car on the corner of Smith and Cleveland-Massillon in Fairlawn. The ugly, rambling Summit Mall was across the street to our right. It was an ordinary moment in an ordinary day. We were probably on our way to the mall, or the library just down the street. We must have waited at this red light hundreds of times in my childhood—maybe thousands. I wasn’t a mall-wanderer; that was reserved for kids whose parents weren’t as protective as mine, who were much cooler, who gathered at the fountain in the middle of the mall, laughing together—probably at me.  I was old enough to be aware that I hated living in such a boring, rural-rapidly-turning-suburban place, that I hated the drab buildings emerging out of nowhere, built shabbily and rapidly--though I didn’t have words for it then. In short, this corner brought me nothing but anxiety and irritation on a normal day, unless I was enduring it only to get to the library. On this particular day, it was that twilight-gold-...

Our house was built in 1913, and while it’s been updated many times since then, the original glass and tin doorknobs remain on nearly every door. They are beautiful, if impractical. They don’t lock. They get dirty easily and need to be cleaned almost daily. They are fragile, too, and must be turned slowly and carefully if one wishes to pass from one room to another. When we purchased the house, we did so on a contract for deed, hoping we would be able to afford the down payment and buy it outright five years later. The contract for deed including an odd stipulation—that we were not to replace the house’s original doorknobs. We agreed, though we wondered how we would be able to keep this promise. We were taking a risk, invested in a project to welcome people in need of healing into our home. How could we demonstrate hospitality while also asking them to be extremely careful whenever they opened or closed a door? Ironically, the more than 17 people who have lived here—for short sta...

If you look at the tip of the pointer finger on my right hand, you will see a tiny, white scar shaped like a half-moon, or a thick eyebrow. You have to look closely—or, if you’re holding my hand, to run your finger gently and attentively over that narrow space between the whirlpool-swirl that, when marked with ink, creates a fingerprint, and my fingernail—to detect it. Numb, it aches only if I overuse it, which I rarely do; I’m lucky to be left handed. After the injury, I had to re-learn how to type so that my middle finger now automatically touches the keys that used to be the stomping grounds of my pointer finger (thank goodness I’m no longer in a job or class that measures my productivity by words-per-minute). When I’m actually tuned in enough to remember it’s there, I feel a sharp ache of gratitude, and hear my own laughter echoing in my mind. I wish I had a great story to tell, one of heroism or recovery from tragedy—but all I have is a story about resentment and distraction. ...

In The   Book of Joy , a book documenting a week-long conversation between the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu about joy, the two spiritual leaders identified forgiveness was one of the pillars to cultivating joy.  I come from a family that does not model forgiveness well. We cared for one another fiercely. When someone hurt one of us, we held that person apart, sometimes indefinitely. "It's a Greek thing," one of my cousins said once when we were discussing this. "We just don't know how to let things go. And, we have long memories."  "Maybe it's because we're related to those ancient, angry, vengeful gods," I joked. "Or at least because our ancestors believed in them."  It was funny at the time, and there was some context--we were talking about a particular decades-long, unnamed but continually honored, rift between two families. But it was also true--I couldn't remember a time when I saw someone forgive.  And, when it comes to h...

I go for a run before dawn in a city I do not know. In time, the sun presses down, a pink sheet above the thickening fog. In time, there is a bridge, a creek, corn husks stooping in the wind, a train track, a boy breathing heavily beside me on his bike. The train’s coming, he says solemnly. You'd better wait with me. I don't know why I do what he says, but when I stop, he clambers off his too-tall bike, leans it against his hip, puts his hands in his pockets, then smiles up at me. How do you know? I ask, looking North, then South, and seeing nothing. I’ve lived here all my life, he says. Besides, you’ll hear it first. I wait with him, even though, by now, I could be rounding on another mile. A black cat steps gingerly over the tracks,  rubs against his ankle. He bends to scratch her neck, Then lifts and presses her body against his chest. She goes limp there. Sure enough,  the train’s whistle shrieks long before I see the engine. The cars rush by, the weight of their hurry ...

 Awake Those long, narrow windows on the shabby, dung-colored house behind yours: couldn’t they be eyes, wide with surprise? And the telephone wire bent the wrong way, curved by the wind-- couldn’t that be a giant nose  almost touching a lip— that smear of snow against the bright green grass? And if the sun suddenly flairs up so that the window-eyes twinkle-- yes, twinkle!—do you read it as a sign? Do you put your work aside for awhile, pull a blanket over your shoulders, and settle in to stare at that startled, smiling face until you, too, are startled and smiling and awake?