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

S has remembered more details: a child prostitution ring, who knows how many rapists. How they hoped she'd get pregnant, and that the baby would be a girl. She cannot forgive them unless she gets justice, she says, so we are on that road: in the next week, we'll hear back from a police officer in the city where she grew up, find out for sure what our first step is, but it looks right now as if she will need to tell her story to a local officer. Luckily, I know most of them, so we will be able to make this happen in a way that feels as safe as possible for her. But what happens next, I can't control. All of it, so out of our control. I have told her it's OK to stop at any time. I have told her that she does not have to take this on. I have told her I'll be there for her, no matter what she decides. She wants to know if she's allowed to cry. She wants to know if I'm sure I'll always love her. She wants to know if I'm sure it was her fault, any of it. A...

I can’t believe this, but the Greek Orthodox Church has a website. I wonder what the church fathers and mothers would think about the images of saints showing up on a computer screen. Not only that, but a person can sign up to have daily scripture readings and stories of the saints delivered directly to her e-mail inbox. So, because I couldn’t think of a better idea for a way to honor Lent, I signed up for those readings and promised myself that I’d read them every morning. I decided I would also go back to an old morning discipline I abandoned some three years ago of writing three stream-of-consciousness pages every morning. I would read through the e-mail once, and then just start writing, not worrying about whether what I was getting down had anything to do with the readings for that day. And, within a week, it became painfully clear why I’d given up those morning pages around the same time my partner and I broke up. As they are intended to do, they break down all the barriers a ...

Voice #1: Thank you for the sympathy card and letter. I don’t have time to respond right now, but know that I appreciated it. Voice #2: Thank you for the sympathy card and letter. What you wrote was very meaningful to me. We haven’t been in touch in a long time, so it would have been easy for you to ignore the fact that my father died. But I appreciate that you took the time to write from the heart. Thank you. Voice #3: It was really nice to get your letter. Even though things have been rough on and off between us for so many years, I always know that when it matters, you will come out of the woodwork and say the words I need to hear. One time, long ago, you told me you weren’t really a writer, but that’s crazy. What you wrote was comforting and disturbing and ugly and beautiful at the same time. You were brave to write it. Voice #4: Nobody sends cards with actual letters in them anymore except my 86-year-old aunt and random elderly friends of my dead parents, so it was so nice to get ...

Once, my friends P and J and I went out to eat with my father. They mentioned Santorini to him—how beautiful it was. He replied, disgustedly, in his signature thick Greek accent, “Santorini is NOTHING.” He then proceeded to explain to them that if they really wanted to see the most beautiful place in Greece, they ought to visit Ikaria. If you ask S what she remembers about Ikaria, she will mention one of the following: the large number of totally ignored and flea-infested stray cats, which had never been fed or loved as consistently over a two week period as they were during our visit; the two faced man dream that many of us had, which we concluded was proof that our hotel was haunted; the bagful of rocks she picked at the beach on a walk with her college buddy J. Sometimes she’ll say she was stuck on an island in the middle of nowhere for much too long; most of the time, though, she’ll say she had the time of her life. This isn’t the story I’d tell, but I am glad she has her own. For ...

For months, I've been trying to write a tribute to my mentor Jim Gremmels. I still don't think I have it right, but I think it's closer than it has ever been so far, and I think I'll send this version to his wife Ruth. I think part of the reason I am having trouble writing it is not only because there are so many memories, but also because he himself was such a great writer, so clear and to the point, and so poignant and funny. I can't ever hope to write as well as he did, so nothing I could write would ever be an adequate tribute. Still, here is what I have. A Tribute to Gremmels The first time I had a meal with Jim Gremmels, I was interviewing for the first of many versions of the job I have now at the University of Minnesota, Morris. He claimed to be retiring, and told me over cafeteria pizza that if I got the job, I would also get his office. By this point, he had asked me two questions, and two questions only: did I think I could live in this town, and did I re...

December is always like this; it's just that everything is compounded by several factors: I'm leaving for Greece and trying to have a real Christmas here and trying to get all my work done--which is to say, mine and several other people's who haven't been doing theirs. On top of this, there has been so much loss and tragedy and grief in my life lately, mostly other people's, but I have been holding them up and advocating for and caring about them--which is both energizing and exhausting. There are things to mourn--a student who has passed away, her death rippling across time and space for so many of my favorite students; the teenager from our town stabbed to death by her boyfriend; and, on a smaller scale, the people I care for are retiring or leaving, and I'm discovering how disconnected I feel from some people I used to love, and how connected I feel to others who won't be here much longer. So, basically, I'm more swamped and overwhelmed and sad than I...

When I arrived at the school to pick up S after her play rehearsal, she bounded into the car, practically shouting, "Guess what happened today?" "What?" "A motivational speaker came to our school. He was SO cool. And he's going to talk again tonight at 7:30. Can we go, mom, PLEASE?" Admittedly, the second I heard the words "motivational speaker," I was immediately suspicious. Plus, there was a Halloween party I wanted to attend, and a university cultural event--but I'd missed my chance to get tickets to the second, and I didn't have much energy to pick out a costume for the first. Maybe it's meant to be, I thought. Plus, S is very vulnerable to misinterpreting messages, and tends to get confused about the main idea--maybe, I thought, it would be a good idea for me to go hear this guy so we could talk about him. "Tell me more," I said. "What did you like about him?" "He tore a phone book IN HALF on stage. A...

Finally, 10 years after Matthew Shepherd's murder, the federal hate crimes bill is signed into law by Obama. It's hard to believe. So hard, actually, that I found myself watching the footage over and over--I couldn't get enough of it. There are other signs that things are getting better: there's hope that the Defense of Marriage Act will be repealed, that Don't Ask, Don't Tell will be repealed. And yet, I can't help but reflect on the fact that in the last two weeks, two GLBT students at the college where I teach have dropped out of school, both of them dealing with fallout related to coming out. When we lose queer students--and it happens every year, without fail (and those are just the ones I can count, not including any who silently slip away, in pain and in the closet)--all of the faces of the kids I tried to "save" come back to me. Last night, I dreamed them all, marching in a parade for justice, waving the rainbow flag. At the end was the man...

In the beginning, I wanted to tell you I couldn’t stand the sight of you, the thighs fluctuating from fat to thin, or the bony-kneed, arm-laced-with-knife-marks, pale-skinned bodies. I hated, too, how you wore your not-wanting as a badge of honor, flimsy as the size three dresses you wrapped around hips like cloaks, thick as the cheese you rolled into your napkin, carefully shrouded, to throw away. I didn’t want to understand. To understand would mean facing everything you wanted, everything we all wanted: a home-place where our shame could evaporate, wisp by wisp, into thin air, like the dry ice in the kettle we’d stir every Halloween in our front yard to draw the trick-or-treaters. We liked to dress up. I was always a witch, armed with magic wand, magic broom—I could sweep clean the yellow-brick-road of your memories, turn your days from black and white to color, stir the concoction until it tasted right, even to you. But I can’t go on like this, hating and loving you at the same ti...

Summer, 1987: the sweet-and-bitter scent of the cigar your father says he doesn’t smoke, the gritty rage in the back of your throat, the sound of his phlegm clearing, tentatively, over and over. Twenty years later, you will realize he waited all day for the chance to stand there, on the porch below your window, until your cousin was gone to her night job and you and your sister were believed to be asleep. You keep the window open because Ohio is muggy and still in August, because you love the sound of crickets and the small, round light over the Boltz’s picnic shelter, lonely now against the backdrop of lake and grass. All summer long, Mrs. Boltz sits on a folding chair in the center of the family’s barn and watches her sons pull down each weathered slab of wood, and twenty years later, you will see there was an easier way, that she chose this laborious un-building. But for now you know only that you like to sit beside her on a hay bale, twist the thick, blond strands in your fingers, ...

In his memoir _Firebird_ about his childhood, marked deeply by his mother's addiction and his father's pain, Mark Doty writes, "To tell a story is to have power over it. Now they--we--are part of a tale, a made thing--a perspective box!...What happened defines us, always; erase the darkness in you at your own peril, since it's inextricable at last from who you are...Surely their actions might be something we'd do ourselves: the hand raised to strike could be your hand, the face that trembles to receive the blow your face. The finger on the trigger yours, afraid; the heard held in the gun sights yours also. And that is close enough to forgiveness, to find that any character in the dream of your life might be you. But you don't know that until you tell the story; caught in the narrative yourself, how could you see from that height?" Those words, when I read them the first time, resonated with me. Now, on the other side of parenthood, as with Lamott's wor...