Boldness
Hosea 1:2-10
Colossians 2:6-15
Psalm 85
Luke 11: 1-13 (16-19)
After my mother died when I was 13, I struggled with my faith for years. Her death set off a series of outcomes—most importantly my father’s ongoing struggle with mental illness and anger/violence—that threatened on a daily basis to submerge me. I am thinking of this today because I have been talking with a new friend about the violence she experienced in her own home. She is young and angry. The idea of forgiveness, much less of actually making it through to the next day, seems completely impossible. As her friend, I have to be present where she is, to recognize that whatever journey she takes to heal, it can’t be rushed. I have to let her know it is OK to be right where she is, and I realize those are the most loving words I can offer her now.
Last week I told her that what I admired about her was that she wasn’t trying to pretend that the ugliness, the darkness, wasn’t ugly or dark. In a way, though the story in Hosea seems horrible to me, that’s probably what God was trying to do, too. He tells Hosea to marry an adulterous woman because everyone is adulterous. He asks him to name his first child for a town that he will later destroy, the second “not loved,” and the third “not my people.”
But then, after the third is born, he says, “Yet the Israelites will be like the sand on the seashore, which cannot be measured or counted. In the place where it was said to them, ‘You are not my people,’ they will be called ‘sons of the living God.’” There God is again, telling his people they have to attend to the long view—that what will happen in the next hour or day or even in their own lifetime isn’t the whole story.
In the reading in Colossians, St. Paul reminds Christ’s followers that Christ came into the world to create a new religion that is based on Christ rather than “human tradition and basic principles of this world.” In a way, he’s also telling the Colossians to pay attention to the long view—to see themselves and their experiences with Christ as part of an ongoing story of the relationship between humans and God.
At 13, I didn’t understand that I was part of this story. When I heard, in a church camp song, the words from today’s reading in Luke: “Ask and it will be given unto you.
Seek and ye shall find. Knock and the door shall be opened unto you…” I felt angry. I read these verses, predictably, as being "all about me." God didn’t answer prayers, no matter how hard you prayed, or my mother would be alive. He didn’t help you find answers, or I would understand why she had died, I would see a larger purpose to her death. (Even now, I have trouble when people say that a tragedy has a larger purpose—even though I have been inalterably changed by my mother’s death, mostly in ways that I now consider positive, I would still have taken more years with her than the positive outcomes I received from the loss). And he certainly didn’t come to the door when I knocked—I got nothing but silence.
I have a memory of lying on the floor next to my aunt Katina in her house. I don’t remember when it happened—sometime between my mother’s death and my graduation from high school. I don’t remember what we talked about, either—and after her death, I really wished I could remember--only that I felt deeply loved and, for the first time, thought that maybe I was going to be OK. Later that night, I prayed to God, “I don’t really get any of this, but I think I’m ready to let you back into my life anyway.”
It was a beginning. I could have stayed angry and bitter, closed off from other people, but my aunt had nudged me just enough to get inside to some real place where it was OK for me to be open to something larger than myself, than my own little life. Even now, when I feel like I’m doing things more for myself than for the world—when I do something kind for someone just so that I’ll feel better about myself, rather than doing it because it’s one concrete way I can care for the world—or when I go into an angry, self-obsessed funk—I think of that night. I try to put myself there again, praying that prayer, open to the mystery of not knowing, not understanding, of being led in some way. In time—and this took many years—I came to understand those words as meaning something different than simply, your prayers will always be answered, or even, as a priest once tried to tell me they meant, your prayers are always answered, though not always in the way you expect.
Neither of those are exactly right. Those verses are more about an attitude of boldness—of knowing when to ask for something even if you don’t know how you will be answered, to knock even if the door is closed. As Jesus said in the parable in today’s reading, God responds to boldness: “yet because of the man’s boldness he will get up and give him as much as he needs.” In a way, in that moment, my aunt’s presence was “as much as I needed,” and telling God I wanted the spiritual side to my life back, even though I was still angry at God, was a bold response to that abundance.
Last year I was in the adult version of the same place--feeling hard and angry most of the time. It was a hard year for me; I’m only just beginning to realize just how hard. My father was finally OK, for the most part, after a long struggle with a nervous breakdown and then bankruptcy. During that time I had been busy taking care of the details—helping him get legal help and medical help, helping him move out—but I didn’t have the strength to actually be present to his pain, because I still hadn't found my way through the pain of my own childhood. When it was over, and my relationship, for different reasons, was also over, I was angry that nobody was around to take care of me—my father was fine, my partner was fine (or at least, it seemed so from my perspective), but I wasn’t.
Always capable of handling practical details, I did what I had to do: moved out, bought a house, tried to recreate my life in a new image—the whole time feeling lost, even though everybody kept telling me how amazed they were at how brave I was, how well I was doing. This made it worse—I had no way to break down. I did and said lots of things I regret to the people around me. For an entire year, I was not myself, and when others came to me for help, I helped for all the wrong reasons and in all the wrong ways, always because it made me feel good and superior to do so, and always because doing so meant I might be able to find some of my own healing through the act of helping. In the process, I probably did more damage than good.
I had no way to connect to others because I was living so deeply in my own pain. It’s not that people didn’t reach out—some did—but I always focused on those who didn’t, or said or did the wrong things. In retrospect, I needed to tell them what I needed, but I didn’t even know myself. If I’d paid attention to the memory of my aunt and I lying on the floor in the dark, saying whatever it was we said to each other, I would have realized that what I needed was time, quality time in which I could be myself. Everyone seemed too busy for that, and I didn’t know how to ask for it.
But this summer I’ve started to listen again, to pray the prayer, “I’m knocking, even though I don’t know why or what the outcome will be.” And this week I was called upon to be there for people in ways that should have been hard for me, should have triggered painful, angry, self-centered responses in me because they hit so close to home. Besides the new friend just starting to deal with the violence in her family, I also heard from an old friend who left Morris five years ago after she was a victim of a hate crime. I had tried to help her then, but I was more focused on catching the perpetrator, on politicizing what had happened, then on being present for her. I’m glad to have this opportunity to make amends, to talk about that confusing time in both our lives, to admit that my work, which I pretended had been on her behalf, was actually not about her at all, but about me, about my own anger and pain at all the people who had hurt me because of my sexual orientation.
I am now, finally, at a place where I can be present with another person’s pain and struggle without being consumed with it. I am learning how to listen with my soul and not with my heart and brain, learning to keep things from becoming about me. I am learning to be present at exactly where the other person is instead of trying to push her to some other place, or pretend, for my own benefit, that she is somewhere else.
Maybe I had to learn this lesson before I could become a mother. My new friend said to me at the end of one of our conversations, “You will be a great mother.” It meant so much coming from her—it meant that I’d found a way to be present to where she was instead of pretending she was in a different place or trying to take her somewhere she wasn’t ready, or didn’t want, to go.
"Will you be angry with us forever?" The psalmist asks. "Will you prolong your anger through all generations? Will you not revive us again, that your people may rejoice in you?" God doesn’t answer, so the psalmist himself goes on to sing, boldly, "Love and faithfulness meet together; righteousness and peace kiss each other. Faithfulness springs forth from the earth, and righteousness looks down from heaven. The Lord will indeed give us what is good.”
Colossians 2:6-15
Psalm 85
Luke 11: 1-13 (16-19)
After my mother died when I was 13, I struggled with my faith for years. Her death set off a series of outcomes—most importantly my father’s ongoing struggle with mental illness and anger/violence—that threatened on a daily basis to submerge me. I am thinking of this today because I have been talking with a new friend about the violence she experienced in her own home. She is young and angry. The idea of forgiveness, much less of actually making it through to the next day, seems completely impossible. As her friend, I have to be present where she is, to recognize that whatever journey she takes to heal, it can’t be rushed. I have to let her know it is OK to be right where she is, and I realize those are the most loving words I can offer her now.
Last week I told her that what I admired about her was that she wasn’t trying to pretend that the ugliness, the darkness, wasn’t ugly or dark. In a way, though the story in Hosea seems horrible to me, that’s probably what God was trying to do, too. He tells Hosea to marry an adulterous woman because everyone is adulterous. He asks him to name his first child for a town that he will later destroy, the second “not loved,” and the third “not my people.”
But then, after the third is born, he says, “Yet the Israelites will be like the sand on the seashore, which cannot be measured or counted. In the place where it was said to them, ‘You are not my people,’ they will be called ‘sons of the living God.’” There God is again, telling his people they have to attend to the long view—that what will happen in the next hour or day or even in their own lifetime isn’t the whole story.
In the reading in Colossians, St. Paul reminds Christ’s followers that Christ came into the world to create a new religion that is based on Christ rather than “human tradition and basic principles of this world.” In a way, he’s also telling the Colossians to pay attention to the long view—to see themselves and their experiences with Christ as part of an ongoing story of the relationship between humans and God.
At 13, I didn’t understand that I was part of this story. When I heard, in a church camp song, the words from today’s reading in Luke: “Ask and it will be given unto you.
Seek and ye shall find. Knock and the door shall be opened unto you…” I felt angry. I read these verses, predictably, as being "all about me." God didn’t answer prayers, no matter how hard you prayed, or my mother would be alive. He didn’t help you find answers, or I would understand why she had died, I would see a larger purpose to her death. (Even now, I have trouble when people say that a tragedy has a larger purpose—even though I have been inalterably changed by my mother’s death, mostly in ways that I now consider positive, I would still have taken more years with her than the positive outcomes I received from the loss). And he certainly didn’t come to the door when I knocked—I got nothing but silence.
I have a memory of lying on the floor next to my aunt Katina in her house. I don’t remember when it happened—sometime between my mother’s death and my graduation from high school. I don’t remember what we talked about, either—and after her death, I really wished I could remember--only that I felt deeply loved and, for the first time, thought that maybe I was going to be OK. Later that night, I prayed to God, “I don’t really get any of this, but I think I’m ready to let you back into my life anyway.”
It was a beginning. I could have stayed angry and bitter, closed off from other people, but my aunt had nudged me just enough to get inside to some real place where it was OK for me to be open to something larger than myself, than my own little life. Even now, when I feel like I’m doing things more for myself than for the world—when I do something kind for someone just so that I’ll feel better about myself, rather than doing it because it’s one concrete way I can care for the world—or when I go into an angry, self-obsessed funk—I think of that night. I try to put myself there again, praying that prayer, open to the mystery of not knowing, not understanding, of being led in some way. In time—and this took many years—I came to understand those words as meaning something different than simply, your prayers will always be answered, or even, as a priest once tried to tell me they meant, your prayers are always answered, though not always in the way you expect.
Neither of those are exactly right. Those verses are more about an attitude of boldness—of knowing when to ask for something even if you don’t know how you will be answered, to knock even if the door is closed. As Jesus said in the parable in today’s reading, God responds to boldness: “yet because of the man’s boldness he will get up and give him as much as he needs.” In a way, in that moment, my aunt’s presence was “as much as I needed,” and telling God I wanted the spiritual side to my life back, even though I was still angry at God, was a bold response to that abundance.
Last year I was in the adult version of the same place--feeling hard and angry most of the time. It was a hard year for me; I’m only just beginning to realize just how hard. My father was finally OK, for the most part, after a long struggle with a nervous breakdown and then bankruptcy. During that time I had been busy taking care of the details—helping him get legal help and medical help, helping him move out—but I didn’t have the strength to actually be present to his pain, because I still hadn't found my way through the pain of my own childhood. When it was over, and my relationship, for different reasons, was also over, I was angry that nobody was around to take care of me—my father was fine, my partner was fine (or at least, it seemed so from my perspective), but I wasn’t.
Always capable of handling practical details, I did what I had to do: moved out, bought a house, tried to recreate my life in a new image—the whole time feeling lost, even though everybody kept telling me how amazed they were at how brave I was, how well I was doing. This made it worse—I had no way to break down. I did and said lots of things I regret to the people around me. For an entire year, I was not myself, and when others came to me for help, I helped for all the wrong reasons and in all the wrong ways, always because it made me feel good and superior to do so, and always because doing so meant I might be able to find some of my own healing through the act of helping. In the process, I probably did more damage than good.
I had no way to connect to others because I was living so deeply in my own pain. It’s not that people didn’t reach out—some did—but I always focused on those who didn’t, or said or did the wrong things. In retrospect, I needed to tell them what I needed, but I didn’t even know myself. If I’d paid attention to the memory of my aunt and I lying on the floor in the dark, saying whatever it was we said to each other, I would have realized that what I needed was time, quality time in which I could be myself. Everyone seemed too busy for that, and I didn’t know how to ask for it.
But this summer I’ve started to listen again, to pray the prayer, “I’m knocking, even though I don’t know why or what the outcome will be.” And this week I was called upon to be there for people in ways that should have been hard for me, should have triggered painful, angry, self-centered responses in me because they hit so close to home. Besides the new friend just starting to deal with the violence in her family, I also heard from an old friend who left Morris five years ago after she was a victim of a hate crime. I had tried to help her then, but I was more focused on catching the perpetrator, on politicizing what had happened, then on being present for her. I’m glad to have this opportunity to make amends, to talk about that confusing time in both our lives, to admit that my work, which I pretended had been on her behalf, was actually not about her at all, but about me, about my own anger and pain at all the people who had hurt me because of my sexual orientation.
I am now, finally, at a place where I can be present with another person’s pain and struggle without being consumed with it. I am learning how to listen with my soul and not with my heart and brain, learning to keep things from becoming about me. I am learning to be present at exactly where the other person is instead of trying to push her to some other place, or pretend, for my own benefit, that she is somewhere else.
Maybe I had to learn this lesson before I could become a mother. My new friend said to me at the end of one of our conversations, “You will be a great mother.” It meant so much coming from her—it meant that I’d found a way to be present to where she was instead of pretending she was in a different place or trying to take her somewhere she wasn’t ready, or didn’t want, to go.
"Will you be angry with us forever?" The psalmist asks. "Will you prolong your anger through all generations? Will you not revive us again, that your people may rejoice in you?" God doesn’t answer, so the psalmist himself goes on to sing, boldly, "Love and faithfulness meet together; righteousness and peace kiss each other. Faithfulness springs forth from the earth, and righteousness looks down from heaven. The Lord will indeed give us what is good.”
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