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

Note to reader: All the text in italics is from Mary Oliver's poem "Love Sorrow."  Love sorrow. She is yours now, and you must take care of what has been given. Brush her hair, help her into her little coat, hold her hand, especially when crossing a street. For, think, what if you should lose her? Then you would be  sorrow yourself; her drawn face, her sleeplessness would be yours.  She stretches out her fingers, shyly, this child who is anything but shy. As the woman paints her nails, she chats excitedly about everyone she knows who has been adopted. She calls over her grandmother, wo owns the small salon--the only one nearby with an opening on such short notice--to tell her it is our daughter's adoption day.  Before that, I walk our son to the door of his school, then into his classroom. He doesn't want to let go of my hand. This is unusual--usually he runs into the building with something specific he wants to tell his para, who waits for him just inside the doo...

Every year I join an online community focused on Advent. Some years, I participate in the chat; most years, though, I simply read the beautiful meditations by Jan Richardson and freewrite about the questions she poses in my journal. And, I have two other Advent devotionals I really love and try to read whenever I have a break throughout the day, as well as my own writing practice of trying to post here. Plus, every year I have a devotional I carefully choose for the year, not always rooted in Christianity—though this year’s is. So, it, too, has become an Advent devotional in this time of year. I mean, what can I say? I love this season. Usually I am up early, sitting with the readings, then working out, then letting the dogs out, then getting a shower in, all before the first child needs my attention at 7:00. But this year my grandson has some days needed care earlier than that—and other days, because of the demands of the kids, work, and life, I’ve used that morning time to get ...

 In a year when everything seems backwards or slightly out of focus, even the trees are confused, turning at the wrong times, showing the wrong colors.  “I love your maple, as always,” I say to my neighbor, looking up at a canopy of reddish-yellow leaves, “but I miss the usual bright red.” “Yes, she surprises us every year,” he says, dismissing the doomsday talk of draught-climate change-someday-we-won’t-see-these-colors-ever-again that play on my mind far too often. “Never quite the same color as the year before.” I lost track of my word for the year sometime mid-year. Usually, that word is a daily meditation, but as one of my friends wrote to me, “Who but you would have dared to accept a word like ‘focus’ at a time like this?” She was right, sort of. Every time I really hit a groove, get into a long-term project, I get interrupted. A student at my door. An e-mail from the chancellor to which I have to respond right away. A text from one of the kids. A call from the...

  Long before the sleepy island of Ikaria, known for its all-night panagiria, awakes, I walk to the outskirts of the village where my dad grew up and find an old donkey path that leads through the summer brush. I walk, hurriedly, with no particular destination.  It is 1998. I’ve come to the home of my ancestors to mourn my mother, to come to terms with my father’s complicated story. A week earlier, my great-aunt Agglaia died while taking her morning swim. The same week, my Thea Sofia began to experience intense stomach pains, and the night before she had been lying on her couch, writhing in pain. I suspect she has cancer--something about the way she describes her symptoms, the hollowing of her face.  When I wake, I feel restless, overcome with grief.  And so I walk.  I come around a bend when it appears suddenly: a small, white chapel a little off the path. I try the door, but it’s locked. On impulse, I run my hand over the top of the arched doorway and find a k...

On the first day of Greek Orthodox Lent, halfway through the Lent that most of the Christian world observes, I woke early to drive my eldest daughter back to the town, 1 1/2 hours away, where she currently lives. We left before dawn, and I felt happy: we are both morning people, and I was anticipating a good, deep conversation to end her visit home, followed by 1.5 hours to myself to sing or shout or talk to the Great Love or listen to a podcast or my favorite tunes. Getting 1.5 hours to myself is unheard of in this phase in my life; I couldn't wait.   Instead, 15 minutes into the drive, the wind kicked up, and small, then large, balls of icy snow began to crash relentlessly into the windshield, splattering like paint. The roads turned icy, and I began to slide across the center line. I slowed down. My daughter, oblivious, told a joke. When I said I would need to concentrate, she could tell by my voice that she needed to check out to preserve her own sanity: she fell immediate...

Focus: a localized area of disease or the chief site of a generalized disease or infection Four days before my 50 th birthday, a mob of Trump supporters tried to stop Congress from certifying a fair and democratic election. They stormed the Capitol building, sporting shirts that read “six million were not enough” and waving Confederate flags, filling the Rotunda where, not so long ago, Ruth Bader Ginsburg became the first woman and first Jew to lie in state. “It’s not like there’s just one of them,” my sister said later on the phone. “They’ve expanded like…like a cancer.” Four days before my 13 th birthday, my mother, age 49, came home for the last time from the hospital at the end of an on-and-off, four year battle with cancer. The photos of my birthday are poignant; I’m wearing a jean dress with a red shirt and blue polka dotted bow tie. My mother is sitting in a wheelchair wearing a red robe. “We match,” I remember her saying, smiling up at me from her chair just before my aun...