Comfort

Comfort is a guitar perched on a knee. Picking and strumming and humming.Comfort is a quick text to get dinner.Comfort is everyone at the table together.Comfort is a conversation on accountability and integrity and how we hold each other's hearts. We hold something sacred.In the States, I equated comfort with Complacency. Stagnation, isolation, a routine, a rut.But living in a foreign country, my eyes are opened to the blessing of comfort. Not plush towels and hot water and lavender eye masks kind of comfort, but another kind of security, reassurance. Reassurance of my own worth and value.The comfort of having friends who've known me for a million years. The comfort of speaking my native language with other native speakers. The comfort of a church body that speaks love and truth and beauty into my life whether I want to receive it or not.Comfort can be consolation. And walking with. A back rub, a hand written note, a silent smile.These last few weeks I’ve felt more home here. Not home home, but moments of home, feelings of home, small comforts of home. I’ve felt recalibrated. Calmed. More secure. More me.More sure of myself and what I want.Less needy. Less desperate. Less grasping.Engulfed by grace.Are these the seeds of the last the months, giving birth to grace so wild and wonderful? Giving birth to comfort. In bits and pieces that sound like voices joined in worship in my living room and giggles with friends and morning journaling in the park.I didn't even think about it until now. How He once told me, when I was flailing in burnout, "I don't want to fix you. I want to comfort you."He speaks now,I want to comfort you. To bring you comfort. Consolation. To come beside you in your pain. To catch your tears and hold your heart.You mourn the joy you've lost. I mourn with you. You mourn the friends you miss. I mourn with you. You mourn the dream that hasn’t turned into all you’d hoped. I mourn with you.I want to comfort you. To bring you the comfort of voices joined in worship in your living room and friends who place a hand on your knee, your shoulder, and say "How are you, really?"My comfort looks like emails from friends that say they miss your sweet a$$. That remind you with Pink’s words that you are F** Perfect.I want to comfort you. To give you the freedom to mourn. To let the tears fall and know I am with you.My comfort says. I know. I'm sorry. I feel with you. Lo siento. I feel it.I see you. I know you. I am here.***I’m learning that comfortable is not so bad. I wanted to break out of my comfort zone.  After ten months of uncomfortable, of being whistled at and stared at and feeling like the outsider that I am and missing friends, I no longer view comfort as the enemy.Comfort is grace.Comfort says it's okay to be disappointed. To be angry. To be sad.Because Comfort shares in the good and the bad.Comfort says I want to give you life. To walk in your life.Comfort comes close to the brokenhearted. Comfort draws near to the crushed in spirit.I’m reading Marilynne Robinson’s book, Gilead, a beautiful narrative of a dying father writing to his son, and gleaning gems of wisdom like these,“As you read this, I hope you will understand that when I speak of the long night that preceded these days of my happiness, I do not remember grief and loneliness so much as I do peace and comfort—grief, but never without comfort; loneliness, but never without peace. Almost never.”Today my heart hurts for my friends near and far who are hurting. With their grief, I pray for comfort. With their loneliness, I ask for peace.For those mourning broken marriages, lost jobs, the death of friends, sickness, and disappointed dreams, bring your comfort and your presence.I want to pray as the father in Gilead prays,“And I’d pray for them. And I’d imagine peace they didn’t expect and couldn’t account for descending on their illness and their quarreling or their dreams.”And so I ask that You would come, Comfort, with a peace we don’t expect and can’t account for. Amen *Author's note: I originally started writing this piece in response to Lisa Jo Baker's Five Minute Friday prompt on Comfort, but my thoughts seemed too jumbled and scattered to post at the time--even for a free write. And it seems I had more to say than five minutes would warrant anyway. 

A Better Answer

This is a follow up to yesterday's blog post, Solidaridad, which I suggest reading first. 

***

"I know there is poor and hideous suffering, and I've seen the hungry and the guns that go to war. I have lived pain, and my life can tell: I only deepen the wound of the world when I neglect to give thanks for early light dappled through leaves and the heavy perfume of wild roses in early July and the song of crickets on humid nights and the rivers that run and the stars that rise and the rain that falls and all the good things that a good God gives. Why would the world need more anger, more outrage? How does it save the world to reject unabashed joy when it is joy that saves us? Rejecting joy to stand in solidarity with the suffering doesn't rescue the suffering. The converse does. The brave who focus on all things good and all things beautiful and all things true, even in the small, who give thanks for it and discover joy even in the here and now, they are the change agents who bring fullest Light to all the world." from Ann Voskamp’s masterpiece, One Thousand Gifts

This, this is the better answer to my haunting question: What does it mean to live in solidarity with poor?


“Rejecting joy to stand in solidarity with the suffering doesn’t rescue the suffering.” 


How I wish someone had whispered this truth to me when I first opened my crowded closet; when I first swiped my ATM card for apricot face scrub and a new roll of floss at Target; when I first felt the summer sun warm up my parent’s patriotic front yard.

"It is joy that saves us..."

How I wish our study abroad discussions around solidarity had ventured beyond fair trade shopping and SUV bashing and into the fine art of learning to love our neighbors—poor or 1% or anywhere in between.


"Why would the world need more anger, more outrage?"

I mean, how are we supposed to love the poor if we don’t love ourselves? What kind of improved quality of life are we lobbying for if we can’t even recognize the God-like qualities in our suburban Christian friends?


I learned this lesson the hard way. Floundering and seething in an anger that quickly wore out its welcome.  In an anger that helped neither the poor nor the poor saps around me.

My first real step toward living in solidarity with the poor (on which I still have an immensely long way to go) was when I started to live in solidarity with myself. When I started to live in solidarity with my immediate neighbors. When I started to think that I was worth loving and that, maybe, the people in front of me—my Whole Foods Shopping, Invisible Children v-neck wearing peeps and my less well-versed in the rhetoric and fashion requirements of social justice friends and family alike—were worth loving too.

Solidarity began when I asked myself, like Ann Voskamp, Where can I bring life? Where can I choose hope?

How can I become the brave soul who focuses “on all things good and all things beautiful and all things true, even in the small?” Where can I “discover joy even in the here and now?”

The surprising answer to the solidarity question is this: joy.

And in that joy comes a valuing of all human life and all of Creation, a heart that hopes, eyes that see the gifts, and lips that praise the Gifter.  This is the foundation of solidarity. This is the seed that blooms the hope to sustain a multitude of change agents bringing fullest Light to all the world.

Who wants to live the better answer?

***

P.S. I am still stubbornly passionate (although no longer belligerent) about reducing my injustice footprint and learning to live and act in ways that serve, support, and empower the poor.  I would love to talk shop with anyone interested in living more justly, sustainably, and joyfully.

But how, you ask?

You can read more of my thoughts in my post on fighting both first world apathy and third world poverty or dive into 7 Practical Tips (and delicious writing) from Jen Hatmaker, author of  "7 : An Experimental Mutiny AgainstExcess."  Or check out Julie Clawson’s fabulous book, EverydayJustice. Or find out more about my favorite poverty alleviation non profit that I just so happen to work for: Plant With Purpose. 

Franny and Zooey Obsession Part 2: Seeing God in Chicken Soup

Franny and Zooey are the most sophisticated pilgrims I have ever had the chance to stumble upon. And the job of these pilgrims, of all of us, is the journey. The seeking, the wanting, the longing.  

There are journeys away from love and journeys towards love. Chasing and running. Hiding and seeking. 

But what if what we’re looking for has been here all along? What if the real journey is to discover that the divine is all around us and within us and before us and behind us and never ever apart from us?

Franny and Zooey embark on a journey that leads them to discover that what they’ve been searching and scratching and scrambling toward has been there all along. 

Zooey says to Franny,

"If it's the religious life you want, you ought to know right now that you're missing out on every single…religious action that's going on around this house. You don't even have sense enough to drink when somebody brings you a cup of consecrated chicken soup--which is the only kind of chicken soup Bessie ever brings to anybody around this madhouse. So just tell me, just tell me, buddy. Even if you went out and searched the whole world for a master--some guru, some holy man--to tell you how to say your Jesus Prayer properly, what good would it do you? 


How in hell are you going to recognize a legitimate holy man when you see one if you don't even know a cup of consecrated chicken soup when it's right in front of your nose?" 

Zooey’s right. If we can’t hear God in the whisper, how can we hear Him in the storm? If we can’t see God in the minutely beautiful, in the mundane acts of love and life and service and hope, how will we see Him in holy temples and mission trips? How will we ever reach a state of praying without ceasing when we can’t even partake in communion clothed in chicken soup?

We are in such constant need of reminding that every breath is proof that there is magic and every bowl of chicken soup is consecrated.

The job of the pilgrim is the journey to discover the Christ, the wonder, already among us.