Singing Amazing Grace

I've been inside of a church since I was born.  My father worked for a Christian organization.  My mother sang in the church choir.  My first step-father was an off-again-on-again music minister and my second step-father has been an off-again-on-again church board member.  I come from what most would classify a "religious" family.

As such, I followed the rules, the 'truths' as they were presented, both whole truths and the slightly broken, damaged truths.

Whole.
Don't murder.  Done.

Broken.
Go to a Christian university and marry right after graduation.  Done.

The thing of it is, I never questioned any of these rules, this path I was being herded down.  If I did ask, it was explained that it was "for my best" and a bunch of other nonsense like that.  It worked out well for me.  Really well.  I may in fact be the poster child for why those cultural practices are around, but even so, I still find myself deeply, deeply wounded by the lack of conversation.  I find that I'm terribly discontent and grappling with ideas and concepts that I have no vocabulary with which to explain because there was no communication ever to be had.  You either believed and accepted or you were out, needing to be 'prayed back into the fold', wayward.

I was talking yesterday with a dear friend.  She is in the midst of being a leaning post for another who is walking the very hard and broken path of marital separation.  And my friend, the one supporting a load of weight, she's struggling to support while giving her friend the vocabulary to explain.  I found myself hurt over a situation I have no stake in, my heart deeply entangled with a person I have never met, simply because I have been to that broken place.  And no one talked to me about it either.  Because as I came to understand in my finite wisdom of pre-pubescence, we, the little "c" church, the ones who come and worship but are always broken and human ourselves, do not talk about BIG things because we serve a BIG God who can overcome all.

Hear my heart.  I firmly believe and have staked my life, my children's lives, and my husband's life on the very truth that says I serve an infinitely big God who can and will overcome any and all obstacles, in my life or anywhere else for that matter.  Period.  That is as core to who I am as the marrow which makes up my bones. He is big, and He will do big things.  That doesn't mean we have to leave every child in the midst of a separation to their own devices to "pray it out" with Jesus.  That does not mean that we have to heap judgement on each other because we don't "have enough faith" to overcome a situation and that most certainly doesn't mean we were somehow lacking and this current trial is God's way of teaching me about that lack.

Bull.

Shit.

Every good and perfect gift if from above above, coming down from the Father of heavenly lights, who does not change like the shifting shadows.  James 1:17 (NIV)

To put it another way...

Every generous act of giving and every perfect gift is from above and comes down from the Father who make the heavenly lights, in whom there is no inconsistency or shifting shadow.  James 1:17 (ISV)

I may be totally out in left field here, half rantings of a mostly crazy person.  Maybe.  But if music is the theology of the masses, and so many "old" hymns are coming back into popularity, then I wonder if I really am that far off or if, maybe, just maybe, I'm not the only one yearning for more.

More commitment to the Body of Christ, the big "C" Church, the one who is supposed to hold up my arms when I am no longer able to raise the staff to win the battle.

More transparency and conversation about these broken, half truths we've been told, we've ingested, and are now getting sick from.

More authenticity and vulnerability to big, tough questions like How is your soul?  Followed immediately by more grace and compassion and accountability when the answer to that scary question is Not too well.

One of my children's favorite songs is Fight Song.  They sing it incessantly and at the absolute top of their lungs.  One of the lines in the song makes me so deeply grateful to the writer of the song and to Rachel Platten for birthing it into popularity.   It is a line that will be forever embedded in my children's souls... and that, is good.  Maybe the church can figure out how to grab a hold of the concept and run it all the way, teaching a whole new generation that truths aren't truths until they are whole... and whole truths are the only ones worth having, worth fighting for.

"I might only have one match, but I can make an explosion."

My heart yearns and breaks to be part of a people who realize that we are the Church.  Full stop.  The Bride of Christ.  Called to be together, called to purity, called to unity through all our many and diverse parts.  To celebrate at the wedding feast the union we have through Christ Jesus our LORD, our bridegroom, our co-inheritor of the riches of the the Father.  That we are called not to aspire to be from a "religion" but to fight the powers and principalities in our minds and in the world, all the while singing out the amazing grace of the LORD who calls each and every one of us "beloved."

Soundtracks

I don't watch a lot of movies, but when I do I generally look forward to the sound tracks most.  The way someone sitting at a desk with a script and a stack of music can artfully (or sometimes not so much) pick just the right song, the right tempo and cadence to fit in a particular scene, it fascinates and  astonishes me.  It's a gift I don't have.  In fact, I can't sing at all.  Don't get me wrong, I love making my joyful noise to the world, but I have managed to squeak out actual notes on less than a dozen occasions in the last decade.  I know this because my husband is lovingly keeping track.  Thanks sweetie.

But poetry set to music... there's something universal and completely personal about that.  You approach a song from your distinct background, your particular color pallet of life.  Sit in a concert of any kind though, and you realize among the raised cell phones and giddily hoarse voices that you all are coming to the same song, at the same moment, experiencing a new together.  That's powerful.

Maybe it's just me.  Maybe I'm too deep or too shallow or something like that.  For me, though, I love the moment when I can sit back and pick out the soundtrack to a certain year or period in my life.  My husband had his garage band/grunge years, full of Green Day and who knows who else.  Thankfully, I didn't know him then.  This year has been a year of seriously powerful songs, ones with a quickening tempo, a general trend towards minor falls married to major lifts.  Many of these songs, for better or for worse, have been shared with my offspring.  My two year old knows just as many words to the Fight Song as her six year old brother.  Not my proudest mamma moment but most certainly not my worst.  Besides, she's so stinking cute!

In those times of reflection about the validity of letting said two-year-old continue in her path of pop music, I often slide down the steep slope of deep, unbridled and unapologetic concern over my kids.  I don't worry about sex or drugs or grades or college.  I worry if they'll travel enough, if they'll be open to new experiences or view points.  I worry whether I'm identifying and cultivating each of their deep-seeded uniquenesses that are woven into the fabric of their hearts.  It's not a worry in the sense of paralyzing fear nor is it something I'm particularly attached to, something that helps me keep them small.  It's me, being their mamma, trying to figure out how to help them be who they are and not stop short at seeing only what they can do in this life.  My biggest fears for my children are not that they'll be hurt.  My biggest fears are that they'll be centimeter deep but kilometer wide people.  That life, for them, will be a college level 100 class, even now.  I don't want them to be the kind of people who read CliffNotes, abide in someone else's summary, or deign to be a subcategory.  No pressure, right?

I know, someday, somewhere down the line, they'll come to me and tell me all the ways I did or did not screw them up for life.  And I'm honestly terrified and totally at peace with whatever they say about me and my parenting.  The thing I want to know, in that instance (or at least what my current self thinks I'll want to know then) is what was the soundtrack as they heard it?  How did event play out from their vantage point?

I can watch the exact same movie as my husband but he will have missed the music completely 90% of the time.  I, on the other hand, have the grit of the guitar strings still phantomly causing my fingers to ache.  Same experience, different take-away.

I know the sound track to my mommyhood, my children's lives as it were.  It's filled with Leonard Cohen's Broken Hallelujah and Rachel Platten's Fight Song, Bob Dylan's Forever Young, Avicii's Wake Me Up and the rasping sweetness of Jason Mraz, all of it.  Without fail though, every single sound echoing from my beautiful, strong, kind-hearted and terribly forgiving first-born is always tinted with the twang of South Africa, the lilt of her preschool teacher and the brashness of the township on my soundtrack of mommyhood.  It's possibly the most lovely sound I've ever heard, my baby's voice.  The problem is, she no longer speaks in that voice.  She's become an American speaker, body language, facial expression and all.  Somehow, somewhere along the way, in the space between her first "he-yur" and her last "eish" my baby realized how harsh and big the world can be.  I've been told, more than once, that I'm too melodramatic, that it was all just a move.  I know things in my heart the way a person knows their own marriage.  This was more.  It's more than a changed time zone or a slight vocabulary adjustment.  In a dozen big and small ways I know this was a divorce, an inability to get back to a certain degree of trust, of security.  And the worst is, my child was just old enough to have learned to read the letters on the wall as it happened.

I am sure the soundtrack for my Steadfast One will be full of Eye of the Tiger type songs, a few love sick ballads and a whole lot of dancing.  Of that, I'm sure.  But what I'm not sure is if I'm willing to own up to my part in the making of that particular soundtrack, in that particular order, at that particular time.  I didn't get the choose the time or place for this, our Love is a Battleground number, but I know for certain in my very marrow which formed the lungs that now sing that song, I would have chosen differently.  Not for me, but for her.

Ebenezers

I have a passion for Christmas.  Not the decorations (although I do cherish every single last scrap of decor I have made, been given, or painstakingly saved to purchase myself over the years) but the whole spirit behind the thing that is Christmas.  There are many who say that Christians should look rather to Easter to love and have as the highest of the Evangelical high holidays but the truth for me is that there is no Easter without Christmas, and that baby who was born fully knowing the "Easter Story."  So I decorate on November 15th (yep, it's a "thing" around these parts) and I have multiple ways to help my family prepare for the BIG DAY.  Possibly my favorite part of all the trappings is the library.

I've been collecting Christmas-ish books for a number of years and every year, they get wrapped so that one by one, my children can unwrap a book and have it read.  I have a copy of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.  It was given to Em by dear friends for her first Christmas. I secretly place this one early on so the kids can listen over and over to it because I treasure the story.

Scroooge.  Ebenezer Scrooge.

There's no story without him and his horrible taste in life choices.  He's this rather awful, slightly vile and pitiable character not a stitch of him endearing.  There's no part where I want to pick him up and carry him around in my back pocket the way I do my grandmother or my kids' old teacher or Atticus Finch.  Maybe it's because the warning he is constantly repeating is to carpe diem and unfetter ourselves from the chains we make in this life.  A bit morbid and depressing sometimes to think every drive through Starbucks, every slice of chocolate cake, every pair of shoes, every moment of anger is forging something within my soul.  A chain of accountability of my time, my resources, my health and my personal attachment to stuff.  Way too heavy for every day.

Funny how one thought can lead immediately to another.  Ebenezer Scrooge and his story is overlaid by my perspective of Ebenezer Stones inextricably.  I cannot think of one without the other.  You can go to the Old Testament/Torah and look up the context, but basically Samuel marked a place between Point A and Point B when God came to his aide in a very real, very profound way.  He wanted to mark the spot, have a sacred remembrance and celebration of exactly what God did for him at a specific moment.  Like the slight indentation in the grass on the exact spot I married.  A symbol in itself, but also an exact locator of that moment, that physical space and time when something truly divine happened.  Something big.  Something real.  Something tangible and worth celebrating year after year, generation to generation.

I have many Ebenezer Stones, and a good many have been laid in the last two years marking our exodus from Point A, that place I called home, the land of milk and honey that fed my soul and my spirit in a way I only just now starting to have words for, to Point B.  I'll tell you when we get to Point B, because I'm not there yet.  But marking that path is achingly important to me, remembering things that have been lost but also things that have been gained.  Either way, the journey is sacred. Scrooge's warning that "no space of regret can make amends for one life's opportunity misused" rings loudly in each tombstone of death.  Things lost- friends, favorite haunts, school, holidays, our dog.  Ebenezer Scrooge, doomed and fated by choice, and Ebenezer, joyful celebration, aide in time of trouble.  They are two separate.  They are one.  They are my reminder that making a sacred space, whether in a desert or a homeland, is important work.

So often I find my soul groans to be... Be more.  Be less.  Be present.  Be a part of.  Be separated from.  Be in community and be solitary.  Ebenezer and Ebenezer.  I'm beginning to think that it's not one or the other, sacred or crotchety old miser.  It's not coexistence and it's not "either or."  I used to believe the old adage that says you can't have joy without sorrow.  These days I'm leaning more towards the idea that it's the tension between the two, the effort of wrestling down the sorrow and the effort of soaring to high heights.  Because the effort is something that you do, something not to be grasped but something to act within, act upon, sit and wallowed in.

As I type, my children are playing 'Native American' and they are now covered head to toe in bits of branches, dirt, sand and filth.  They are sublime.  Not because I love cleaning up their messes, Lord knows that's not the truth.  And not because I love cleaning them up after they've already been bathed (my poor water bill!).  They are sublime because in the process, the effort of getting dirty, they became slightly better friends, they learned from each other, they did the work that creates siblings. A sublimely holy and sacred act.

Somehow, this new blog has become an Ebenezer Stone, something worth celebrating, something good and lovely.  I've already had (and am sure to have more) Ebenezer Scrooge things here.  Posts that are sad and regretful, of "opportunity misused."  But please be assured of this:  this space, this little corner of bloggerworld is my little slice of heavenly musings, things that make me remember it's Ebenezer AND Ebenezer, a sublimely holy and sacred act.

Thing With Feathers

As we were waiting to go trick-or-treating (a wholly American tradition I never hoped to partake in, but have found myself compelled to allow my children to enjoy) my six-year-old man-child started singing a song.  Standing on a darkened street, dressed in white tights, a wine colored crushed velvet fitted jacket and a flute in his hands, he started singing a song from the musical RENT.  His young voice rang out into the balmy night with "five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes" and quickly faded into the abyss of unknown words.  

Yet he still hummed.  His tune echoed the music, but the words ceased to exist on his lips.  The words were utterly lost to him, but he knew the love of the music, the melody in his heart, and so, he carried on.  

That moment in time carried me to another space, another time.  A time in which my heart sang out the music of overwhelming emotion, needing words but my lips could not form them.  A bit ago, my beloved grandfather was in hospital.  Leaving his room after my first visit, I felt a shadow clawing, I knew there was something written in the stars and it wouldn't go well for me, for him, for my family.  A few days later, that gnawing feeling I had been running from, ignoring out of fear, came to pass.  I arrived at hospital with my grandmother only to learn that today was the appointed day no one had known about, Gramps would leave this world.  It was such an agonizing and joy-filled space.  Beth Moore, a Christian devotional author, in her study on the Book of James, alluded that you cannot have anguish without corresponding joy, that the pain of labor is always followed by a birth of something. We were in that space, and it was beautiful.  I stood, as one of many, surrounding my grandmother and grandfather as they drew their last joint breaths, there to fight through all the emotions that come from the new anguish of loss together, united.  I did not have that particular pleasure with my own father when he passed away just months before.  Gramps had half the equation right; he died surrounded by loved ones, lifted on the prayers of saints.  But Dad got it half right as well; he was peaceful, at home, in his own bed.  Sometimes, two halves don't make a whole.  And I was fully aware of all this weighty knowledge standing with my grandmother, my aunts and my uncles, with my Gramps... and my heart broke and the falling pieces sounded a tune my heart knew, but my lips couldn't utter.

Come though fount of every blessing

Tune my heart to sing Thy grace

Streams of mercy, never ceasing

Call for songs of loudest praise

Teach me some melodious sonnet

Sung by flaming tongues above.

Praise the mount, I'm fixed upon it

Mount of Thy unchanging love. 

I was lost.  I was lost to grief and the deafening noise of the world shifting on it's axis.  I was lost to myself and what life could possibly look like moving forward.  It was not the first time my world has come crashing down around me.  Not by a long shot.  But association with calamity doesn't make you assimilate the mess with any greater ease.  In another lifetime, I used to write blogs about my family and my perspective as a woman and mamma who was being seasoned, wizened by life, love and experience.  In an instant, a particular moment in time, at a meeting that will haunt me for as long as I draw breath, I lost the voice that gave lyrics to the music of that gloriously mundane and sacred life I had.  I lost my voice for so many, many things.  I can sometimes recall a string of notes, a snatch of the tune, much like  my son as we were trick-or-treating.  Those whispers of melody are few and far between these days though, the rhythm so distant it's as if it's from another world, a beat from across the waves and beyond the oceans.  

"But now I understood that, although words were God's first creation, silence was closer to His divine spirit, and that prayers given in silence were infinitely greater than the thousands of words men might offer up to heaven."  -Alice Hoffman, The Dovekeepers

I used to believe in the strength and power of words.  My prayers these days though have become this kind of silent lumbering to the throne of God.  The heavy trodden steps of a weary and broken traveler.  But just as there was beauty in that hospital room, and just as there was sacred in a death without the surround of family, there is journey left in this silence.  I've come to realize so much about myself, my Creator, and my faith through this journey of brokenness, of silence.  Sitting in shul today, listening to the cantors, the clear, crystal and heartbreakingly poetic voice of the rabbi, I was struck again that there is a way to pray without words, a way to sing without lyrics, a way to walk without moving.  Proverbs 14:10 says it best:

"The heart knows its own bitterness and joy; he will not share these with strangers." (WEB)

There are things in this life to be pondered and treasured up in the heart.  Things that aren't shared, cannot be.  These are things which live in the space of poetry and art and music and tears.  Things that cannot be explained, only felt.  Heraclitus said that no one can step into the same river twice for the river is never the same, nor is the man.  I am not the same person who used to write about the mundane and sanctified actions of changing diapers, hanging laundry, weeding a garden while a babe sleeps in the shade of an olive tree.  I have not known mundane, or the consecration of it, in too long.  Everything seems to be upheaval, turmoil, a constant battle against the powers and principalities, against my own demons and myself.  So I found myself here.  I have a different timbre to my voice, words that are so unfamiliar and yet so tightly woven into the fabric of my being that I cannot dismiss them.  They are my own utterances, my own unfamiliar groanings.

This, this humble blog, is my space to find my new rhythm, the new purpose for my ever cracking and terribly pitchy voice.  My space to remember that anguish and joy can and will go hand-in-hand if I let them, and that art and poetry and hallowed will be that very intersections within my heart.  My space to remember that even hope has an unnamed space, a sanctuary all it's own.  

Much like my son, who persevered in his song, even when the words failed him, this is my new place to persevere, even when words fail me.  

"Hope" is the thing with feathers-
That perches in the soul-
And sings the tune without the words-
And never stops- at all-

And sweetest- in the Gale- is heard-
And sore must be the storm-
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm-

I've heard it in the chillest land-
And on the strangest Sea-
Yet, never, in Extremity,
It asked a crumb- of Me.
-Emily Dickinson-