Unempty Moments
I can't remember the day or even which convalescent facility we were in. I can't remember what my mom was telling me or what I was wearing.
What I can remember is her underwear. They were big, literally granny panties. Soft cotton. Conservative white and new baby pink. No lace or ruffles.
I can remember how they folded softly in my mom's hands. She caressed them absentmindedly as she spoke.
We were moving my grandmother into a new facility.
We were in the repeat-the-same-question-every-five-minutes stage of her dementia, not yet to the frantic wheelchair racing or the evergreen season of suspicion. She hadn't yet looked desperately into my eyes and asked if I could find her mother.
But still, we were scared, my mom and I. Missing the mother and grandmother we once knew. The woman who remembered her legendary spaghetti and meatballs recipe and walked loops around her apartment complex with friends bearing names like Petey or Marge.
The fear hung silent between us as we unpacked her clothes, a few books, some pictures of toothy grandchildren for her bedside table.
Henri Nouwen talks about patience as one of the cornerstones of the compassionate life; impatience the deterrent that keeps us tapping our feet, checking our watches, and missing the glory of God.
By this point in the story, (like you I venture to presume) I should have been tapping my feet, checking my watch and writing off another summer afternoon as "empty, useless, meaningless."
But I didn't.
The counterpoint to impatience, Nouwen describes another rendering of time when we experience the moment as "full, rich, and pregnant." When "somehow we know that in this moment everything is contained: the beginning, the middle, and the end; the past, the present and the future; the sorrow and the joy; the expectation and the realization; the searching and the finding."
This was one of these moments. Watching my mom delicately fold my grandmother's underwear. In this moment I was gripped by the thought that love need be nothing more than this simple, intimate act.
It became an unempty moment.* A moment I didn't want to get away from. A moment filled with the glory of God.
To this day, this afternoon represents a rupture for me. A rupture that signaled not a fracture, but a deepening. A deepening love for my grandmother. A deepening respect for my mom. And a deepening gratitude for every humdrum moment-turned-miracle I had left with both of them, together in one room, folding underwear, in an unempty moment.
***
*Precious moments was already trademarked.
Why am I here?
I’ve started taking a spiritual writing class. It must be good because it’s already spurred a million blog ideas and an existential crisis with just one assignment: why am I here?
Not why-do-people-exist or what-is-the-meaning-of-life, but why am I HERE at this juncture in my life. At this computer in this house with these roommates waiting to drive this freeway into this job to do these tasks.
One answer is this:
February 2006, San Jose, Costa Rica
In class I usually sat in the back, jammed against my neighbor in the filled-to-capacity classroom. There were strange wooden pillars inconveniently placed throughout the room, forcing us to cram together in clumps. Our professor, Don Mike, would pace back and forth like a lion waiting to go in for the kill. His sporadic mumblings sounded like growls and soon he would be roaring. My jaw would clench as my heart pounded. He would reduce my beliefs and upbringing to egocentric self-validation. A means of exclusion. Judgment. My faith was offensive, a stench in the nostrils of the Almighty God. A darkened city on a hill. The tasteless salt of the earth. The hypocritical light of the world. The hair on my arms would stand up and it would feel like I’d swallowed a car battery. If anyone, he’d be the one to know when the church was being ineffective; he used to be a Catholic priest.
He would be panting by now; his gruff voice would crack as he condemned American Christianity and everything it stands for. I felt personally attacked as he recounted the horrors of conquest-driven, smallpox-bearing missionaries and money scamming “Gospel of Wealth” televangelists. The blood of every person killed or exploited in the name of God since the dawn of time would stick in the crevices of my guilty hands.
By this point, the pulsating vein in the middle of his scrunched forehead looked ready to burst. I would forget that he coined himself a “recovering Catholic.” I would forget that he did not hold a monopoly on truth. And while I hated him and everything he was saying, I still began to believe that maybe I was the enemy.
***
That’s part of it. That’s part of why I’m here. Writing this blog. Working at this nonprofit that serves the rural poor. Thinking these thoughts.
It’s the why of a life built around overcoming a stigma that my faith is self-serving, self-fulfilling, self-consuming. It’s a why of a life working to not be the world's enemy, the poor's enemy, my own enemy.
It’s not the whole why and it’s not the whole story. But it’s a part. It’s not the best part or the most redeeming part or healthy part.
I’m reminded of a quote by Henri Nouwen (honestly, when am I not?) in Compassion:
"Action as the way of the compassionate life is a difficult discipline precisely because we are so in need of recognition and acceptance… But even setting up a relief program, feeding the hungry, and assisting the sick could be more an expression of our own need than of God's call.
But let us not be too moralistic about it: We can never claim pure motives, and it is better to act with and for those who suffer than to wait until we have our own needs completely under control."
Today, HERE, I am grateful to drive into a job that acts with and for those who suffer and for a God that is using my needs, my why’s, my unclean motives, to accomplish His call.
Basking: The Remix
All last week I was planning to write about how I came to bask in God’s love. But I couldn’t.
I felt silly. I felt like the stories I wanted to share were silly examples of positive self-talk and self-absorption.
I talked myself out of their importance. I started to doubt if I'd really made any progress. I started to doubt if learning to love myself has really helped me love others better.
As I sought to write about these fits of unwarranted compassion, these moments where God spoke to me and set me free, I realized I am not yet fully free.
As I seek to set others free, I am realizing just how trapped I still am.
Am I really better off? The accuser mocks my progress. I've done nothing. I'm no good. Can I really love and serve others better now?
But that doesn’t mean I haven’t had moments of freedom and seasons of basking. It doesn’t mean God isn’t calling me to share these stories of freedom I’ve experienced.
I have heard God. He has spoken to me through words and images, friends and strangers.
And it turns out he’s pretty kind. His words are life-giving. His words are Love.
But this last week I’ve been hearing words that aren’t so kind, that aren’t from Love. Faced with a fear of leading a new book club at my church to share and grow with women struggling with eating disorders, this voice tells me I don’t need to lead because I’m ill equipped. I’m too shy. I’m too busy. I’m too scared.
God must be crazy to want me to lead this book club because I am the least qualified of anyone I know. My friends are friendlier, kinder, more hospitable, more empathetic, better suited to this ministry.
I feel ill equipped to love people, to lead people, and to make an impact.
It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: I don’t lead, I don’t try, I don’t engage, and then I’ve proven that I was ill equipped in the first place.
As soon as these thoughts flood my brain, I’ve abdicated my responsibility. I’ve lost out on the gift that I am and the gifts that God has for me.
Another thought that’s been plaguing me is that I’m being selfish for starting a ministry within my church community. I feel like I’m taking the easy way out. That somehow this ministry is second rate because I’m not directly serving the poor.
I absolutely believe that God has called me to this ministry. And I still feel guilty.
Where’s the freedom in that?
I’m not so different than I was three years ago when I scoffed at the idea of basking in God’s love. I’m still tempted to base my worth on my actions and efforts. On my poverty reduction and social justice scale. I’m still tempted to earn God’s love.
But I can’t.
I am loved. Period. That is the reality of who I am.
Henri Nouwen said, “Over the years, I have come to realize that the greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity, or power, but self-rejection. Success, popularity, and power can indeed present a great temptation, but their seductive quality often comes from the way they are part of the much larger temptation to self-rejection. When we have come to believe in the voices that call us worthless and unlovable, then success, popularity, and power are easily perceived as attractive solutions. The real trap, however, is self-rejection. As soon as someone accuses me or criticizes me, as soon as I am rejected, left alone, or abandoned, I find myself thinking, "Well, that proves once again that I am a nobody." ... [My dark side says,] I am no good... I deserve to be pushed aside, forgotten, rejected, and abandoned. Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the "Beloved."’
As a response he says, “The great spiritual task facing me is to so fully trust that I belong to God that I can be free in the world--free to speak even when my words are not received; free to act even when my actions are criticized, ridiculed, or considered useless.... I am convinced that I will truly be able to love the world when I fully believe that I am loved far beyond its boundaries.”
This week I will share the silly stories of positive self-talk and revelations that have speckled my journey of learning to bask in God’s love. I really do believe this basking, this experience I've had with God's unconditional, unconventional, unfathomable love, has shaped and formed me to love others better.
Let the basking begin.