To See The Place

When I was 23 two women left a gaping hole in my heart.  Both women were my age, one worked the street outside my place of work and died alone from a heroin overdose, the other was a close friend from college surrounded by loved ones as her heart gave out at a young age.

During the autumn of these young women’s deaths, I watched the fall colors of New England light up our city, our hiking trails and interstate corridors.  I reflected on the intense reds, oranges, yellows, and occasional stubborn greens, wondering why God would make the death of summer so beautiful.  Because in comparison, there was nothing beautiful about the death of these women, one never got the chance to experience love or hope and the other filled with so much love and hope left behind immense pain of family, friends, and fiancé.  Why would God make our environment so beautiful and our lives so ugly?  What a cruel juxtaposition God put in our lives.  Where was the hope, the redemption?

A year later, I sat at my friend’s tattoo shop, trying to ignore the buzzing noise created by little needles penetrating my foot with bright reds, oranges, yellows and just a few bits of green.   Still angered, still filled with questions, I had come to believe that there must be something beautiful hidden within the tragic, untimely, and ugly.  I refused to allow a meaningless and a cruel God to stand over and against the Hope and Life I believed existed in both women.  And so now, an autumn maple leaf tattoo, dying in splendid beauty, will accompany me the rest of my life, reminding me to keep vigil for these women and for all the dying in the world.

During Jesus’ dying, the woman with the alabaster jar, Jesus mother, Mary Magdalene, and other nameless women kept vigil.  They watched his painful, shameful, ugly death.  Joseph of Arimathea offered his resources and his courage in acquiring Jesus’ body and gently laying him in a tomb.  The women remained at the tomb, with care and love ritually prepared his body and kept vigil.

This week we will journey with all the characters of the Passion narrative and we will eventually find ourselves with these women and Joseph on Holy Saturday, keeping vigil in the space between death and resurrection.  This space where we so often dwell in our lives, the space where there are no answers, no affirmation of fulfilled promises, no signs of hope.  An uncomfortable, painful space yet we remain and keep vigil out of deep love and care for the one’s we love and out of recognition that there is no other place to go, this is where our love dwells, living or dead.

I pray for love this week.  I pray for the recognition of love.  I pray for the courage to love like the women at Jesus’ tomb.  That we might love our neighbor, that we might love ourselves, that we might cling to one another and keep vigil for love lost.  Hope will often ask for our action but it also requires our pausing, our keeping vigil over what we’ve lost.  We keep vigil because we believe that what we’ve lost was something beautiful, something lovely, something worth witnessing.  In the space between death and life, let us keep vigil for those who left us too soon, for dreams unfulfilled, for love suffering on a cross.  Let our vigil be a witness, that even in the most tragic and ugly of deaths our love, care, and courage remain, and this is something beautiful and revealing about us and God indeed.

Let us keep watch.  Hope remains.

I imagine so many beautiful things.  So many beautiful thoughts, songs, and pictures travel through my mind, my soul, and my heart.  I imagine for myself a lovely man to call my husband and lovely children to call my own.  For my neighborhood, I imagine streets filled with laughter, neighbors who know one another’s names, tables where food is shared and late night conversations are held.  For my church, I imagine a sanctuary where all are welcome, where scars, brokenness, sin, and fear find a place without shame, a place where loving relationships transform.

My imagination warms my heart, keeps my mind dreaming and my hands typing.  My imagination lifts me into new possibilities, but all my imagining, dreaming, and visioning must at some point meet reality.

My imagination lifts me into the vision of a family of my own, but reality shows me an empty apartment where I sit alone.  My imagination brings me to neighborhoods transformed into communities, but reality reveals streets where there are still so many neighbors I do not know, where there are too few shared meals.  My imagination calls me to a grace filled church but reality exposes a place where exclusion, boundaries, and mere lip-service cheapen grace, God, and us.

Reality pulls my imagination to the ground and this is good because hope dwells where imagination and reality are forced to contend with one another.  Imagining, dreaming and envisioning are a part of hope, an important step along the way, but hope also requires, planning, action, and the willingness to risk.

To live in hope personally, I have to go on dates; I have to say yes to coffee and dinners. Hope for a family, means a great deal of risk on my part, it means vulnerability and exposing to others my own wanting of something more than just my easy, simple single-girl life.  And it always means the possibility of broken hearts.

To live in hope for my community, I have to go and meet my neighbors.  It means spending my Wednesday evening knocking on doors with friends, hoping that on the other side of the threshold hands will touch, names will be learned, and relationships will begin.

To live in hope as a Christian leader, I must continue the painful work of examining who and what I exclude. I must recognize and allow others to see my brokenness, pain, and sin because without recognition and revelation there is little chance for healing and transformation.

Hope requires both imagination and reality.  Hope lifts us up and it must also pull us down.  Hope demands that we risk, that we work, because without the risk and the work, the reality we hope for simply will never be.

Where does imagination and reality intersect in your life?  What is hope asking of you?

Every day was an emergency.  Every day was filled with some kind of drama.  From fights on the street, to loss of housing, to tragic deaths, to the constant roller coaster ride that was being a Boston fan in 2003 (the year before the curse was broken).  I ran from emergency to emergency, from heartbreak to heartbreak; right out of college and new to the work of an emergency homeless shelter and New England city life, I had not quite yet figured out the rhythm and pace of chaos.

As I ran, Sam’s voice always trailed behind me, “Kid, your making me dizzy.”  “Kid, don’t forget to breath.”  “Kid, do you ever sit down?”  Sam sat at our front desk at the emergency shelter most afternoons. At 65 his body was small, thin, wrinkled, and tired, reflecting a long life on the streets filled with alcoholism, cold nights, and who knows what else.  Sam’s presence quickly became my center, my point of sanity in days filled with emergency.  He was the mantra I needed, “Slow down and breath.”

One day Sam was gone.  I was stunned after inquiring about him that he had left to go drink.

I didn’t know much about alcoholism, I thought there were people who were drunk and people who were recovered, people who were not sober and people who were sober. I didn’t realize that there was a whole world of people between the two realities of sober and not sober.  I soon learned that for many relapse was part of recovery and that for some alcoholism was less about relapse and recovery and more like suffering from a chronic disease.  Sam was a chronic alcoholic, no one remembered Sam not being this way, and since our shelter was one where you had to be sober to have a bed, it meant Sam would disappear for chunks of time.

I got use to Sam’s absence.  Running from drama to drama, I even on occasion remembered to stop and breathe without him.  But one day, in a moment of quiet while sitting in my office, I heard that familiar voice, “Hey Kid.” I turned around and there he was, Sam had come back! I couldn’t hold back the joy as it filled my smile and eyes.  “Sam, I missed you!”  But my joy quickly grew quiet as I saw the pain and weariness in Sam’s eyes. We stood there, taking each other in, and for a moment the staunch difference between us seemed almost unbearable until he said, “Kid, can I buy you a cup of coffee?”  And we began the first of many walks to our dining room for shelter coffee, which I’m fairly certainly is required by HUD to be barely drinkable.

Sam’s presence and absence became part of the rhythm of my life.  I felt peace when he was present and hurt every morning he was gone. I hated wondering where he was and hoped that the next morning he’d return for coffee.

After one particular long absence, my curiosity got the best of me. I had to know – how did he do it, how did he keep coming back when he knew he’d most likely be back on the streets again? And he told me in his beautiful, easy way that he always believed this was the time, this was it.  He said it was always worth coming back, seeking repentance, asking for help, and a cup of coffee.  He said he believe that God always offered forgiveness.  Sam’s voice was not only my mantra he was the beginning of a lifelong lesson for me in hope, forgiveness, and grace.

The last day I ever saw Sam he was outside, he ran up to me and asked me for money as the smell of alcohol dripped from him.  I told him no, I couldn’t give him money.  And Sam yelled, he yelled some of the worse things a person has ever said to me.  My mantra, my center, my breath sunk into his disease and pain.

Sam taught so much and no matter how many times I try to write about him everything seems so lacking.  But more than anything same taught me what hope, repentance, and grace mean.  When Sam would come back to my office there was no hiding where he’d been, what he’d done, his hurt body and his tired eyes revealed it all.  Sam had long ago lost any masks of ego to hide behind.  Sam was just Sam, a beautiful man filled with hope, a loving man who had long ago lost the love of his life, a kind man always seeking conversation and friendship, a hurt man filled with so many demons and so many losses.  Sam was a man that believed in 2^nd chances, in 100 billion chances.  Sam loved enough to always believe in the possibility of forgiveness.

Sam and I never got another coffee date, I never again heard him call out, “Hey Kid, don’t forget to breath!”  But I imagine that someday when I leave this world, someday when I stand within that great crowd of witnesses, Sam will be there.

I have so many masks, it is so hard for me to believe in the things that Sam knew so deeply, things like love, hope, forgiveness, grace and a God that encompasses all those things.  I’m afraid heaven won’t be so easy for me, I think it might be hard to let God and let that whole crowd of witnesses see the whole of me and believe that there’s going to be enough love and grace for even me.  But I think maybe Sam, will have new eyes, and he’ll greet me with the kind of joy I always felt when I saw him, he’ll take my hand and say, “Hey Kid, let’s go get a cup of coffee and I’ll show you how this grace thing works.”

This Lent I am an investigative reporter.  Every day I scour the world looking for signs of hope; no stone is left unturned, news articles, my daily interactions, my to-do lists, TV shows, my dreams, the changing seasons, all have potential.  At any moment, hope may reveal itself or hopelessness might invade. I find myself constantly asking, “Is that a sign of hope?”  “Is that worth my reflection and prayer?”  “Is that worth reporting?”

Without fail my workdays begin with hopelessness, not because I have a hopeless job but because my first task each day is to pick up an issue of the New York Times.  And every morning I am presented with pictures of war, civil unrest, and unthinkable abuses.  This week was no different, Monday and Tuesday I was greeted with pictures and stories of a staff sergeant who methodically killed numerous Afghanis, including a number of children.  Today the cover story presented a women’s prison ironically named Esperanza (hope in Spanish) were women are so crowded that they not only fill every available bed but line the floor, even sliding underneath the beds.

Most mornings I am left with a sinking feeling that we are drowning in a sea of hopelessness.

And despite seeking out hope this week, hopelessness seemed to abound; it even hovered heavily over our weekly Catholic Worker prayer night.  Our prayers and reflections gave voice to moments of tragedy and pain in our personal lives and world.  Hushed silence entered our prayer, as it seemed we had little to offer in this sea of hopeless.

As we sat, our youngest Catholic Worker raised her hand.  We invited her to share. She breathed in and paused as she seemed to gather her thoughts. I expected she was preparing to share with us once again that she was getting to stay up past her bedtime (exciting news for any three year old) but instead a steady, clear song came perfectly off her lips, “Go tell it on the mountains, over the hills and everywhere.  Go tell is on the mountains for Jesus Christ is born.”

We joined her song, and while it lasted only one chorus, the room and the hopelessness of the day found some relief.

At first glance, perhaps this moment was just an example of an extroverted child acutely aware that she had a captive audience and of course, that’s true.  But it was also an example of a beautiful child of God sitting in the silence of hopelessness and offering herself and her gifts.  She changed that room, her voice changed reality.

Each morning I’m tempted to not look at the headlines of the New York Times, to simply fold it up under my arm and go on my way.  But something else is asked of us, we cannot abandon the moments of hopelessness or the people drowning in those moments, we must affirm their presence, be witnesses and sojourners with them, and believe that our presence, our voice, our gifts, and our actions can transform reality.  We can be hope within hopelessness.  We each have something to offer.

How will you be hope in the world this week?  What song will you sing?

This weekend at Spirit of Hope we were encouraged to step off the riverbanks and jump into the river of grace.  We were even encouraged to give one another a little nudge into this river of grace. Maybe for Minnesotans, inhabitants of 10,000 peaceful lakes and lazy rivers, this sounds enticing, but not so for this New Mexican.  I for one am glad that our Minnesotan rivers are still frozen solid.

In New Mexico and Colorado, where I grew up, water is either nonexistent or incredibly powerful.  There is nothing lazy and peaceful about our water, it is filled with jagged rocks, falls, and white-water rapids.  It’s the kind of water where people disappear and vehicles get stuck (Don’t judge Minnesotans, yes we try to drive across rivers but you drive on lakes.)

So as faith was related to jumping into a river at church this weekend, I was less than excited.  I’d call myself a faithful person but I’m not sure I have “whitewater rapids, 50 foot waterfall” kind of faith.  I’m more of a riverbanks kind of person, I like it here – safe and dry.

But the idea of jumping into this river of grace has stuck with me. I’ve found myself ruminating on faith and hope and how these two might convince, even us riverbanks people, to make the leap.

Paul says, “Faith, hope, and love remain.”  A lot of thinking, writing, praying, and money has been spent on love but not so much on faith and hope.  It’s hard to separate the two. In the English language we use them interchangeably, “I have faith that I will get the job.” or “I am hopeful I will get the job.”  They seem to mean the same thing, so why did Paul separate them?  Perhaps the answer lies in what faith, hope, and for that matter love, call us to.

Faith, like we talked about at Spirit of Hope this week, asks us to let go.  To paraphrase Brennan Manning, faith calls us to jump into the unknown with no explanation or justification.  Faith is all about letting go.

Hope on the other hand is about clinging to and holding on.  It is in clinging to hope, that we wake up each morning, broken, bruised and scared, but still able to put our feet to the ground, stand up and believe that both ourselves and the world our capable of something much more.

As a child, I played on the riverbanks in Colorado.  There mountains shadowed our every side, waterfalls pushed through rock and the forests surrounded us with mystery and adventure.  And despite my fear and the danger of the river, it demanded our crossing, we needed to get to other side and beyond, into the forest where dreamt up worlds might be discovered.

I remember standing once on the riverbank, both enticed by what lay ahead and frozen stiff by the rapids that stood between me and the next riverbed.  My mom shouted at me as she balanced on a large boulder out in the river, “Corein, you have to jump.  Jump and you’ll be able to reach my hand.”  My feet had to let go of the safety of the riverbed if ever wanted to reach my mom’s hand, cross the currents and pursue the adventure that beckoned on the other side.

I wonder if faith and hope are like that, like letting go and jumping in while also reaching out and clinging to.  In faith we truly are naked and helpless, nothing we’ve collected – our achievements, our skills, our honors, will save us.  In faith we just let those go, believing that in the end we don’t need them because there is hope. A hope we cling to, a hope that speaks to the truth in our hearts – that there is something much more to us, to this world, and to the mystery of God than meets the eye.  In faith and hope, we leap from the safety of the riverbanks, reach out our hand, feel the firm, reassuring grasp of our Mother, and forge on into a great adventure – pursuing dreamt up worlds yet to be discovered.

In faith and hope, in letting go and clinging to, we embark on the most important work of our lives, as Paul says, love.

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If you’d like to watch the sermon inspiring my leap of faith you can watch it here.

Grab a pencil. Turn the page of a book.  Scroll down this blog post.  Every one of these activities is possible because of one distinct human feature, opposable thumbs.  For Roger L. Martin, it is this easily overlooked but unique attribute of human beings that serves as the basis of his book, The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win through Integrative Thinking.

Martin follows a number of highly successful business leaders, from the founder and owner of the prestigious hotel chain, Four Seasons, to the creator of eBay, to the CEO of Proctor & Gamble.  As someone who is highly suspicious of businesses, particularly giant corporations and global conglomerates, I didn’t expect to learn much from these businessmen and women, let alone uncover signs of hope in their thinking.  Yet, I’ve found myself dwelling on their stories and wondering what they might teach us about how we think and act with hope.

Martin discovered that each of these highly successful business owners recognized the tensions of two opposing ideas and instead of choosing one over the other, created a new idea that had similarities to each opposing idea but was also far superior.  Like bringing our thumb and fingers together to create tools, fire, iPads, art, and unforgettable dining experiences, these businessmen and women brought opposing ideas together to create something wholly new and significantly better.

These leaders were capable of working with opposing ideas because they recognized the difference between reality and what we call reality.  Aware that what we label as reality, while containing elements of truth, is largely constructed by our own perception and life experiences, these leaders were able to accept that their models of reality and opposing models of reality contained both truth and fallacies.  This awareness, coupled with an optimistic attitude, allowed them to work within the complexities of many opposing models of reality and believe that with time they were capable of creating a better model.

What opposing realities exist in your life?

For me it is my faith, my Christian life, my ministerial work.  On the one hand, I stand staunchly opposed to the faith of my childhood, a faith that labels my call as invalid and my gay and lesbian friends as disordered.  Yet on the other hand, I am deeply in love with my faith’s ancient liturgy, the theological discourse that covers millenniums, and the strong commitment to human dignity, justice, and peace.  My faith and my calling to ministry is a constant struggle. I live within opposition; I hold it in my prayers, I see it in my image of God, I hear it in my sermons, and feel it in my daily interactions.

But what would hope say to me?  Would hope have me cling to one idea or reality, fearing and deriding the other?  Or does hope call for something more?  Might I wade through the complexities of opposition and believe I am capable and creative enough to find something better?

How might hope being calling you amidst opposition and division? 

I believe, that with enough time, we have the capability and creativity, to find a better way, to live and act in a model of reality that more closely resembles the Kingdom of God.

I’m not an expert on hope, not scripturally, not theologically, and not personally.  I know that Paul says we should have it, “Faith, hope, and love, these remain.”  But beyond that, I have little to say except that I want it.

I want a hope that is not fleeting, a hope that goes beyond some surface level optimism, a hope that does more than just placate and pacify.   I want a hope that lasts. I want a hope that transforms. I want a hope that heals.

And so as we journey into Lent, I am making the commitment to read something about hope every day and explore how it fits in this world that seems, at times, so hopeless.

What is hope? What does hope do?  How do you put hope into action? Do Paul’s words stand the test of time, does hope remain?

But perhaps, before answering those questions, I need to answer the why question; why spend 40 days readings, thinking, and writing about hope?

I can’t stop thinking about the Gospel this past Sunday.  These four men, have this paralyzed man, that they want to get to Jesus.  They want to get this man to him so badly that they carry him on mat to where Jesus is staying.  When they get there, it is so crowded they know that there is no way they will ever get to Jesus.  But instead of leaving or just standing outside hoping they’d get in or perhaps catch Jesus on his way out, they climb up the roof (and remember they are carrying someone who is paralyzed), break open the roof, and lower their friend to Jesus.

These men had hope. A hope that called them to be radical, enabled them to be creative, led them to action, and brought about healing.

I want that kind of hope.  We so desperately need healing in our minds, our bodies, our relationships, and our communities.  We need a healing like Jesus offered this man, not only physical healing, but one that restores relationships, one that joins hands, one that binds hearts.  So much seems to stand in the way of this kind of healing, but no amount of standing outside, hoping and waiting, is going to bring about this healing.

And that’s why I want a hope.  I want a hope that calls me to be radical, creative, and active.  One that gives me the strength to carry what is broken, the creativity to climb roofs and break through, and the courage to let go and believe that healing, I have yet to see or understand, might happen before my very eyes.

Why do you want hope? (Please share below or on facebook.)