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

  Make radiant the vesture of my soul. –Greek Orthodox Holy Monday Service On Palm Sunday, also American Easter, the day started with my three year old grandson throwing up a blue peep all over my shirt. It continued with my knocking my cell phone into the tub while trying to clean up everybody who had been affected by the earlier incident–a cell phone that was already on the brink of dying because it had been chucked too many times in angry outbursts by one of our children. The day ended on the floor of my 12-year-old son’s room, holding him while he raged, wept over trauma that will never leave his soul. On Holy Monday, I couldn’t find my Holy Week book, one of my prized possessions, a gift from my church when I was about 14. It has been years since I was able to experience Greek Orthodox Holy Week in person. I live three hours away from the closest Greek Orthodox church, and besides that, I left the church when I came out, and sealed the deal by marrying a woman.   Neverthe...

  I sit on a thick layer of brown, crumbling leaves, looking up at tight buds on a canopy of trees. Somehow, although the season is wrong, I know where I am, though I don’t know how I got here: there is no canoe in sight.  I’ve only ever been here in the winter, when Crystal Lake is thick with ice and it’s possible to make one’s way through deep snow to this tiny island, travel the circle of its shore, and walk back, all within a couple hours. I do this every year.  Today, it’s hazy, the sun sending thin rays of light through wispy fog. I’m wearing a light jacket and am comfortable enough, though I can feel the damp ground beneath me. Birdsong, loud and insistent, provides background music, until I hear the distinct call and response of cardinals, the only birds whose song I know for sure. I look around for a red wing, pink tail feathers–but the birds are hiding well.   Then, I hear a sudden, rapid rustling in the distance, and a doe appears, almost skidding to ...

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...