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My First Ash Wednesday Service, and a Suggested Lenten Practice For My White Friends

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I’ve never been to an Ash Wednesday service before. This is just our second Lenten season at Saint James Episcopal Church, and last year we couldn’t make it to the Wednesday service, so when we headed downtown yesterday, I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect.

“Stop being so happy,” I told the kids as we walked towards the church. “This is not a joyful service. They put ashes on your head. It’s basically death.”

The kids stared at me as if I’d lost my mind.

I didn’t have anything to be afraid of, though. Reverend Lauren was as kind and gracious as ever, and she welcomed all the children to sit on the carpet up on stage, at the front of the church. She brought out various elements – water, light, oil, and ash – and explained their significance. After she explained the meaning behind Ash Wednesday, she walked around to each of the children and made the sign of the cross on their forehead with the ash.

“Remember you are made of dust, and to dust you will return.”

It was a somber service, yes, but there was a depth to it, a heaviness of spirit that somehow seemed right. I closed my eyes as Reverend Lauren put the ashes on my forehead, and, oh, how human I felt. Suddenly, the shortness of my life was on display for me to see, lasting no longer than the time it took her to mark me. I looked around at my fellow congregants and there was something obscene about the mark, as if I was seeing them naked. But there was also something beautiful about it, as if we had all finally admitted something very important, and now we could move forward.

I opened my eyes, my soul stunned. I glanced over and watched as she did the same to Leo, and I had to fight back the tears. It is one thing to acknowledge your own mortality, but quite another to be reminded that your one-year-old, with his new breath and his innocent eyes, is also marked. He will someday return to dust.

“Remember you are made of dust, and to dust you will return.”

* * * * *

I’ve been thinking a lot about what to give up or take on during Lent this year, and for the last few days one word has been projected into my mind: “Listen.” I haven’t been exactly sure what to think of this.

Then came the recent, trendy firestorms. Cam Newton, the black quarterback for the Carolina Panthers, and all the criticism surrounding him. Beyonce’s new video, Formation, and the backlash against it from many of my white friends. So many issues involving people of color, and so many smug, dismissive, insulting white voices.

Friends, during Lent, I commit to actively listening to my friends who are people of color. Will you join me in this? I say actively because I AM GOING TO SEEK THEM OUT AND ASK THEM TO TALK. My Facebook and Twitter friends. Eric, from across the street. Shayna, my wonderful new friend at Saint James.

For the next forty days, when you feel yourself getting ready to SHOUT your opinion about something that involves someone who’s not white, will you stop, take a deep breath, and find someone of color who doesn’t see things the way you do? Instead of simply spouting your opinion to the world so that all of your like-minded friends can like it or pat you on the back, will you ask people of color why they like Beyonce’s video, and then not argue your own side? Will you ask them how they feel about police brutality without saying anything in return? Will you ask them how they feel about racism in this country and simply listen? Will you ask them how they were treated growing up without comparing it to your own childhood? Will you ask them about the fears they have for their children without dismissing those fears?

Most of us have very deep, foundational reasons for feeling the way we do about certain things. Maybe it’s because of where we grew up, or who we grew up around, or what we’ve seen in the world. Maybe it’s what we were taught, or what we experienced, or what we believe. But other people have seen other things, and if we can stop shouting past each other, if we can stop and listen…I don’t know. It seems the right place to start.

Will you join me in dedicating this Lenten season to listening?

* * * * *

We got home, and we ate dinner, and the kids were playing around the house. I walked into the bathroom, and I caught my reflection in the mirror. The black mark on my forehead shocked me. I had forgotten about it. Instinctively, I reached up to wipe it away. But then I left it there.

How quickly we forget that we are all only ash. How quickly we forget.

 

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It’s Time to Leave What is Secure

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Photo by Anna O’Connolly via Unsplash

I think we all have certain time periods of our lives that serve as turning points, the kind of days or months during which everything seems to change. Someone we love passes away. A relationship that meant quite a lot fades. Careers change or vanish. Traumatic moments of abuse scar us, or instances of great love fill us.

These days stand up on our timeline like a lone tree on the horizon. We glance back as we walk away, and when we see that monument to that particular time, it fills us with a renewed sense of hope. Or hurt. Or confusion.

I inevitably think back to the end of 2009 and the beginning of 2010 when it felt as if our entire world was vanishing. If you’ve read my book, Building a Life Out of Words (get it free HERE), you know what I’m talking about. It was a time of great hurt for Maile and I, a time of severe disappointment. But it was also a time for starting over, beginning afresh.

Whenever I think about times like that, transitional periods, I think of the wonderful words of Brennan Manning in his book Ruthless Trust:

The reality of naked trust is the life of a pilgrim who leaves what is nailed down, obvious, and secure, and walks into the unknown without any rational explanation to justify the decision or guarantee the future. Why? Because God has signaled the movement and offered it his presence and his promise.

Sometimes, I think it’s hard to move on in life from those poignant moments because those experiences are tangible, they’re nailed down, and they often become that which brings us security. Even the painful stuff. Even the stuff we think we’d rather leave behind. We cling to it, because it’s tangible or because it identifies us.

Sometimes walking into the unknown looks a lot like forgiveness, or a willingness to move on. Sometimes walking into the unknown is taking a deep breath and trying again. Sometimes walking into the unknown means saying “no” for the first time.

Don’t be afraid to leave what is nailed down, obvious, or secure. Leave that lone tree behind. Set your face toward the horizon, and start walking.

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Stop Complaining About People in Poverty (At Least Around Me)

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I was out shoveling the snow a few days after the most recent blizzard, and it gave me a chance to catch up with my neighbor Aaron. He lives across the street. He’s an older, African-American fellow, really nice, and we always wave and chat for a bit when we see each other.

Anyway, we were out there shoveling, and he was telling me about how he has to get up at 4am to catch his ride to go for dialysis. His kidneys are failing. He had gotten the call just the other week that they had a kidney for him, but then plans changed, and it didn’t happen.

“Man,” he said, taking his time with the shovel, “I went all day without eating or drinking. Then they called and told me I couldn’t have that kidney.”

He shook his head with disappointment.

“That must be rough getting up at 4:30 in this,” I said, motioning to the mountains of snow. “Must be cold at 4:30.”

“Nah,” he said, smiling. “By 4:30? Things are starting to warm up that late in the morning.”

He laughed and shook his head, as if he couldn’t believe how gullible he was, believing his own words.

* * * * *

I walked across the street and gave my shovel to a woman trying to clear her sidewalk of two feet of snow with a dust pan.

“Looks like you could use this,” I said.

She smiled.

“I have to keep this sidewalk clear,” she said, embarrassed that she had to accept my simple offering. “My friend has a lot of medical issues. I have to make sure she can get out to an ambulance, if she needs to.”

“No worries,” I said. “If you need anything, let me know.”

* * * * *

I noticed an older woman two houses down. She was really struggling to clear the snow, so I went down to help her, and we started talking.

“My doctor said it’s okay for me to shovel snow, as long as I take lots of breaks,” she said.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“My husband and I, we both have cancer,” she said quietly. “But I’m doing better.”

* * * * *

This city is full of people in poverty. When you live in among them, when you become friends with them, when you see how hard they work and how little they get in return for that work, it will change the way you think about poverty. It will change the way you think about things like food stamps and disability, minimum wage and benefits.

I know single moms who walk their kids through the snow in the early morning dark, over a mile, just so they can get them to preschool. Then they walk to work at McDonald’s or the convention center or wash dishes for $8.75 an hour. They work as many hours as they can, and they’re always on the lookout for a second job.

I know dads who race home from working construction or warehouse jobs so they can coach their kid’s flag football team. The team my kid plays on.

I know parents who send their kids to these city schools, the ones we flippantly refer to as “failing schools,” because they don’t have other options. They don’t have the money for private school. They’re not in that massive place of privilege you have to inhabit to be able to homeschool. And they stay up late helping their kids do homework, and they wake up early and do it all again. Every. Single. Day.

* * * * *

Don’t talk to me about the people gaming the system. Don’t talk to me about how we should be drug-testing everyone on food stamps. Don’t talk to me about how the economy would collapse if we raised the minimum wage.

I’m tired of listening to my right-wing conservative friends complain about people in poverty while drinking their boutique beer and Instagramming their latest vacations. We live in a dream world, my friends. Of the billions of families on this planet, we were born into a place of extreme wealth. We’ve been given opportunities beyond most people’s wildest dreams.

If we choose to squander those blessings by sitting in cafes and restaurants with our buddies and arguing over theory, arguing about the latest political situation, arguing over why “those people” are taking taking taking too much, well, I’m afraid we will have hell to pay. If not today, someday.

If you have a problem with people in poverty, stop complaining about them. Partner up with them. Make yourself useful.

* * * * *

My friend Aaron got real quiet while we were shoveling. I looked over at him, and I was sweating under all my winter clothes. He stuck his shovel in the snowbank and gazed down the street.

“I sure would love to get out of the city, though. Get a place with a little more space, somewhere there’s not traffic going by all the time.”

His voice trailed off.

“Gotta get this kidney taken care of first, I guess.”

He picked up his shovel, and he went to work clearing a bank that was way taller than him, a bank he could barely see over.

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The Massive Nature of This Calling: Parent

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“I’ll get him,” I say, at dark-o’clock
in the morning, rolling slowly out of bed.
I am older now
than I once was, and my body sometimes
creaks like a tired house in a storm.

I walk the hall, avoiding the toys.
“Good morning, you,” I say, lifting Leo and burying
my face into his neck, his cheeks, smelling his warmth.
A one-year-old is still so close to their beginning
you can see their rings expanding, if you watch,
if you pay attention. He looks concerned.
“MaMA?” he asks. “MaMA?”
His voice is like the call of a baby bird. He emphasizes
the second syllable.
“She’s sleeping,” I whisper, kissing his cheek again.
“Let’s get brother.”

We walk the dark hall, Leo and I. We go
into my oldest son’s room. He sleeps spread out
on his bed, a lanky boy-man. Waking him, I
remember when it was only him. Time
is wind through the trees, a spirit you see
only when you do not look directly at it.
“Wake up,” I say, shaking the outline of him,
hills under a blanket.
“Five minutes?” his now-deep voice asks
from deep within a well.
“Five minutes,” I say, and walk out
with Leo.

We climb the stairs to heaven, to the place
my girls sleep. We climb the steep steps and
lean into Abra’s room.
“Good morning,” I say, and her eyes open. She
sheds sleep the way a baby duck shakes water
from itself. She smiles. She sits up. She
stretches.
“Hi, Leo,” she says.
He waves, and the way he waves is by opening
and closing his hands, both of them, as if squeezing
away the night, or clutching
and clutching again,
each and every moment.

We walk into Lucy’s room and I put Leo on the bed.
He crawls towards her. She sighs and rolls over.
“Sleep good?” I ask. She nods.
“Leo,” she says, long and slow,
as if meeting him for the first
time, and he kisses her, and she laughs.
“Time to get up,” I say.
“Leave Leo here,” she says.

I always go to Sam last. He hates
going to bed. He hates
waking up. He progresses reluctantly.
I switch on the night, bringing day into
the room. “Sam-oh,” I call to him, over
that great distance. “Sam-oh.”
He is still as water. He sleeps in the depths, in some
other world, some other universe. My voice
comes to him as deep calls
to deep, travels the paths of comets, around
moons and between distant stars.
He is still so far away.
“I’m coming back,” I say. “You’d better
be up by then.”

When I think of these five lives,
and the sixth sleeping inside Mai, I realize
the massive nature of this calling.
Parent.
Each child, a universe.
Each mind, a fresh field of snow.
The tracks we leave behind cannot
easily be smoothed over.
This can be a good thing
if we tread lightly.

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Listening For a Heartbeat

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Photo by Mayur Gala via Unsplash

“It’s going to be fine,” I said.

Winter is a strange time of year. One night you spend far too much time staring out the front window, watching the snow fall through the angular light. Less than a week later you’re driving thread-thin country roads, the fields white and heavy, the runoff wearing ruts everywhere. It’s life, I guess, the cold and the sun, the clouds and the blue.

When Maile and I drove out of the city to a birthing center for Maile’s first midwife appointment, the tension was all around us. A January day that felt like spring. But the tension was also inside us. There was the normal excitement of going to the first appointment for this baby. There was also apprehension, the memory of two prior pregnancies where the first appointment didn’t go so well: missing heartbeats, dark circles where a tiny baby should be, miscarried hope.

“It’s going to be fine,” I kept saying, and Maile kept nodding her head on autopilot.

“It’s going to be fine.”

* * * * *

We sat in the examination room and waited. The clock moves slowest in examination rooms, of that I’m sure.

“Is that my uterus?” Maile asked.

I glanced at the desk beside me, where Maile was looking, and there was an almost-life sized plastic model of a woman’s reproductive system. It was kind of strange, seeing it all there in 3D. It was rather…informative.

“I don’t think it’s yours,” I said. “But yeah, I think that’s a uterus.”

“Huh,” she said.

The midwife came in and asked all the normal questions. Yes, this would be baby number six. Yes, this was pregnancy number eight. No, we wouldn’t be taking another copy of the healthy baby book. We had a few extra copies at home.

“You look nervous,” she said.

“It’s just the heartbeat,” Maile said quietly. “I’ll feel better once we hear it.”

“In that case, let’s find it right now,” the midwife said, smiling a kind smile.

* * * * *

How many times in life do we find ourselves on the cusp of something great…or something devastating? How many times do we have to wait for an answer, or a diagnosis, or an outcome? How many times will we sit in the unknown, the terrifying, with nothing to hold on to?

I think the hardest places to hold on to hope are in those arenas where our hope keeps turning out fruitless. When we so desperately want a child, but the months keep coming and going. When we so badly want the cancer to vanish, but it keeps showing up somewhere else. When we keep coming around to the same submissions, the same proposals, the same promotions, and we keep getting passed over.

Every. Single. Time.

But wait. Because even in those times, even in those disappointments, hope was not fruitless. Hope was not pointless.

Even after our last miscarriage, we buried what remained in a small box, and on the lid of that box was the word hope. Even after my last long spell without work, we regathered ourselves and put one foot in front of the other, hoping things would turn around. Even after we lost our way, we kept hoping we could find that path again.

“And now these three remain: hope, faith, and love. And the greatest of these is love.”

Yes, perhaps love is the greatest, but hope came first, and I think that’s saying something. Sometimes, hope is all we have, but it makes a firm foundation for whatever is coming next. Or whatever is not coming next.

* * * * *

Maile climbed up on to the table, paper rustling, and the midwife pulled up her shirt, exposed Maile’s rounding belly. She put some gel on the little wand and pressed it down on her skin. We didn’t even have time to worry. We barely had time to wonder.

Thump, thump, thump: 159 of them per minute, life racing around inside of her. The occasional Thwamp! when baby kicked. It was like radio waves coming from a distant planet, an entirely separate universe, yet that universe was right there in the room with us.

“There it is,” the midwife said. “Baby’s heartbeat.”

Maile teared up. She looked over at me.

“It’s going to be fine,” I said. “It’s going to be fine.”

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The Spiritual Discipline of Clearing Snow From a Parking Spot (In Five Parts)

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The snow grew deeper, and we wondered if it would ever stop, and by Saturday afternoon I decided I should begin the gargantuan task of digging out our Suburban. Our four oldest kids joined me, though they were clearly on the side of the blizzard, throwing snowballs into my shoveled pathways and jumping from pile to pile, causing avalanches to fill in the trails I had so recently cleared. I was part snow digger and part scarecrow, waving my shovel, frightening them off.

Saturday night was filled with movies and popcorn and long spates of time spent staring out into the swirling, blowing snow as it fell through the light on James Street. This is the blessing of storms: they make us stop. They take our schedules and shred them and ask, “Now what will you do with your life?”

2

We ended up with just under 30 inches of snow. On Sunday afternoon, I finally finished disinterring our vehicle from its icy grave. The snow around it was up to my chest. I sent Abra and Sammy on to the roof of the truck to clear it off. After about five hours of digging, it was nearly free, and there was a path to the house. My job was done.

Late Sunday afternoon we drove to my parents, breaking free from the parking spot I had spent so long clearing.

Heavenly Father, I prayed out loud as we drove away, please make that parking spot invisible to anyone who is looking for a space before we return. Amen.

I was mostly kidding. Maile laughed, but I’m not sure if she was laughing at the prayer or the chances of the space being empty when we got back.

3

More fun, more snow, a little football, some time holding my sister’s twins, and then we were driving home, around 9pm. I’m not sure what I expected to find…one lone, empty space still sitting there? Would every single person on my street looking for a space see that empty gap along the sidewalk and think, Someone spent a lot of time clearing that, so I’m going to leave it for when they get back?

I doubted it.

As we came up James Street, there it was: some kind of small, four-wheel drive vehicle snugly (it felt more like “smugly”) parked in the spot I had spent so much time and effort clearing. There were no open spaces on the block. I sighed. I dropped off my pregnant wife and our five kids, drove around the block to the parking garage, parked on the fourth floor, walked down three flights of steps, slid my way back up the hill to our house, and walked down the sidewalk (part of which had not yet been cleared by the neighbors, in spite of the city’s snow-clearing policies).

I pushed the bitterness down as best I could but it still got to me, sort of the way you try not to throw up when you’re sick but still feel the burn in your throat.

4

I’ve spent far too much time thinking about this fairly minor episode in my life. At least it feels that way. I’ve certainly spent enough time thinking about it to realize that the way we handle snow clearing here in the city is reflective of the way we view the ones Jesus commanded us to love: Our Neighbor. It’s so easy to think of these common spaces, the ones we spend so much time clearing, as our own. It’s so easy for me to stake my claim to small or large pieces of this world and say, “This far but no further!”

I wonder though. I wonder about the questions I was asking on the drive back into the city Sunday night, before I knew if someone parked in the spot I had cleared.

What kind of a person steals a spot they haven’t cleared?

What kind of a person rides on the back of someone else’s hard work?

Why didn’t I stick some furniture in the space, blocking access to it?

I think the questions we ask ourselves when it comes to these kinds of things not only reveal our hearts – I think they also proactively create who we are becoming. I want to ask better questions. I really do. Questions like:

Wouldn’t it be great if someone who really needs a good parking space finds mine empty?

What can I do to help an elderly person or a sick person find my spot tonight when I’m gone?

5

This is the blessing of living in the city, of living in community. No matter how much we want to, we can never completely isolate ourselves from our neighbor. No matter how hard we try, we cannot claim these public spaces as our own. We have to learn to live side-by-side, to offer grace, to think the best of one another.

This is a gift, this snow, these “stolen” parking spaces. Trust me. This is a gift.