Posted on

When the Church Creates, Not Little Christs, But Little Accountants

St. Francis of Assisi from Flickr via Wylio
© 2007 Randy OHC, Flickr | CC-BY | via Wylio

My four oldest children and I walk slowly along the sidewalk on our way to church, the morning sun just beginning to rise above the buildings that line Queen Street. Maile is feeding Leo and they will walk to church later. The city is quiet on Sunday mornings, like the silence after a long sigh. Nights here are busy, cars always moving, people coming and going from one streetlight to the next. But on Sunday morning you could just about walk down the middle of the street and no one would notice.

There is a man sitting on his front stoop, newspaper in hand. He looks up at us through defeated eyes. I say hello. He nods and looks back down at his paper. Abra runs ahead of us, skipping over the cracks in the sidewalk. Sam reaches up and holds my hand. So does Lucy. Cade tells old stories about our family, stories that have become a kind of folklore.

There is the story about when Rosy the Rabbit tried to eat Sam alive. There is the story about how Abra found the hidden stash of 4,652 chicken eggs under the log pile. They talk about the house where we lived on Belmont Street, how Abra fell and hit her head on the bus during our cross-country trip, how I was the only one to see the bear at Yellowstone.

Story after story, and I realize something: every time these stories are retold, they reinforce our family identity. They strengthen the foundation of acceptance and love that these children feel in our home. I laugh and ask more questions.

“Do you remember the time…”

* * * * *

We arrive at St. James and I drop them off for children’s choir practice, then wander into one of the neighboring buildings. There’s a class being held on St. Francis, so I slip in and listen. Father David hands me a card. On one side is a beautiful image of a crucifix surrounded by images of prayer. On the other side this is written:

Prayer of St. Francis
Before the Crucifix

Most high, glorious God,
Enlighten the darkness
of my heart
and give me true faith,
certain hope
and perfect charity,
sense and knowledge, Lord,
that I may carry out
Your Holy and
true command.

* * * * *

“The evidence of our Christianity,” Father David says during the sermon, “is not found primarily in the financial gifts we give to this church. The evidence of our Christianity is found in our coming together and offering of our selves, our talents, and our time to one another and to the world.”

I think he is right. The primary act of Christ on this earth was not the giving of financial resources, but the giving of himself. I think the American church, in spending so much time asking for money and so little time asking that each Christian give themselves, is missing the mark and creating, not little Christs, but little accountants.

* * * * *

We walk home and Leo starts to cry a little because he is hungry. The sun is a bright light behind us now, high in the sky, hot for a late September day in Lancaster. Sammy runs towards a trash can to throw away his water bottle, and he trips and falls, scuffing his hands. He cries, I pick him up, and the rest of the kids circle around him.

“Are you okay, Sammy?” one of them asks.

“Did you hurt yourself?” another one inquires.

He is okay, and we continue our walk. When we get close to the house we see my parents sitting on the porch, waiting to eat lunch.

* * * * *

Late that night I take out the dog (yes, we have a dog – that’s another story), and listen to the city at night: trucks rumbling through, sirens screaming from the hospital, someone shouting to someone else out on James Street. And I think about one line from that prayer on the card Father David handed to me:

that I may carry out
Your Holy and
true command.

Posted on

This God Who Can’t Wait to Punish Us

Men walking away on the beach from Flickr via Wylio
© 2011 Valentin Janiaut, Flickr | CC-BY | via Wylio

We are at liberty to be real, or to be unreal. We may be true or false, the choice is ours. We may wear now one mask and now another, and never, if we so desire, appear with our own true face. But we cannot make these choices with impunity. Causes have effects, and if we lie to ourselves and to others, then we cannot expect to find truth and reality whenever we happen to want them. If we have chosen the way of falsity we must not be surprised that truth eludes us when we finally come to need it!

-Thomas Merton, “New Seeds of Contemplation”

When I was a senior in college, I decided not to play soccer, which doesn’t sound like a major decision, except I had self-identified as a soccer play for fifteen years. One of the most difficult aspects of quitting was letting go of what other people would think about me – I wasn’t a soccer player anymore. What would everyone else identify me as? It felt like a vacuum had formed, a space of nothing, and I didn’t know what to fill it with.

Sometimes we identify not with what we do but with what we have or own. Maybe your identity has been wrapped up in owning a business or having a particular kind of vehicle. What would happen if you lost the major things that you have? How would that affect you?

One of the greatest temptations we will ever face is to be who we think everyone else wants us to be instead of being who we are. Our identity becomes what everyone else thinks about us. We worry…what if everyone realized I’m not as conservative or as liberal as I’d like them to think that I am? What if my friends realized I have doubts about my religion (or my non-religion)? What if people don’t take me seriously?

Henri Nouwen says that most of us go through life finding our identity in what we have, what we do, and what other people say about us. The problem with that is each of these will someday fail us – we will lose everything we have, we will stop doing what we are known for doing, and other people will inevitably say bad things about us from time to time. What then?

Nouwen suggests that we find our identity as “The Beloved.” One loved by God. This can be difficult though, when we’ve been taught for so long that God’s love is conditional on our behavior, that he is ready to zap us at our next mistake.

Who am I?

These days, I find my identity as a writer, but even that feels like a slippery place. What if I have an off day, write poorly…does that mean I’m not a good person? What if people don’t like something that I write…does that mean they don’t like me as a person? As long as I find my identity in what I do, that identity has a weak foundation, one that can crumble at any moment.

Where do you find your identity?

Posted on

What I’m Waiting For

Frederick Eleganza Yarns Floor from Flickr via Wylio
© 2009 Mr.TinDC, Flickr | CC-BY-ND | via Wylio

After two weeks I ease back into this rhythm. I hear the kids playing in another part of the house, their distant echoes comforting. I hear the traffic going by on James Street. I hear Leo begin to cry, and I hear Maile’s footsteps pass along the creaky floorboards in the hall, and then Leo stops crying. The tree in the back yard makes a shushing sound as autumn arrives.

There is always too much to write, and there is never enough. The words are easy to come by, and they elude me.

Today someone asked me what I do for a living. The answer comes quickly now, and without even thinking I say, “I’m a writer. I co-write and ghost-write books for people.” But what does that mean, actually? I know, I know, I’m over-thinking things.

Right?

But that still doesn’t seem like enough, even though it’s what I wanted for so many years. It still feels like I’m waiting for something else, something new.

* * * * *

We are, all of us, waiting for something. I’m waiting to hear back from various people regarding a book proposal I sent out. My kids are waiting for their school day to be over. My parents are waiting to sell their house. I have friends waiting for a baby to arrive, waiting for a relationship to work out, waiting to hear back regarding a job. In winter, the tree waits for spring.

In my experience, waiting can be harmless. It can be something that lies in the background of life, something I know is there but pay little attention to.

But it can also easily paralyze me. Life can become about the waiting, and if I’m not careful everything besides what I’m waiting for falls to the side. While waiting to hear back regarding this book proposal, my life can easily devolve into a series of meaningless activities, all of which feed the waiting: checking email, checking Facebook, re-reading the manuscript, etc etc etc. And even if I escape these activities that surround the waiting, my mind can still turn over and over on itself, wearing a rut difficult to escape from.

What are you waiting for?

* * * * *

I take a deep breath. I sit in silence for five minutes, just five minutes because that’s all it takes to jump the rut of waiting. That’s all it takes to find a new rhythm, slower breathing, a form of peace that doesn’t always make sense. Five minutes sitting on the floor with my back against the door frame, and in the silence I remember the things that are beautiful in my life: the sound of feet creaking floorboards, the sound of children’s voices, the sound of autumn arriving. These are things here and now, things I don’t have to wait for.

Posted on

What I Looked For Among the Winter Trees

08_hang_the_bucket_P2110014
I searched the forest for the yellow strips of plastic we had tied around the maple trees. The cold wind slipped in and out of the oaks and the yellow buckeyes and the dead cedars blight had killed years before – they stood there, silver sentinels, spooky and branchless. When we cut them their insides were an orange-red, and they smelled like memories.

The spring was coming, or so everyone said, and I was trying to catch spring as it ran up the maple trees. I carried my drill to the first piece of yellow tape and pushed it in, forming a hole. I tapped the spile into the tree trunk with a rubber mallet and hung the silver pail on the hook, imagining the sound the sap would make when it ran.

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

The sound of spring on the way. The sound of hope.

* * * * *

I sit in a hotel room in Maryland. My dad sleeps in the neighboring bed – my son is beside me. Every year we come here to Frederick, Maryland, and every year it goes more or less the same. Every year we see mostly the same people, do the same things, set up on the same day, tear down on the same day. But it’s never exactly the same – every year we are, all of us, one year older. It’s easy to forget that. It’s easy to forget that time has passed.

But time does pass, slow, methodical, like the dripping of sap into a stainless steel bucket. Time.

Friends convinced me to try to sell my novel to a publisher, so contacts were made. Emails sent. Proposals written. And now the waiting. The wandering through trees of a nearly-spring idea; the cold wind that rustles thought; the forgotten melancholy that only hope can cause.

Hope is a wonderful thing during the early phases, when everything is motion and planning. The movement, the concrete nature of expectation, gives a kind of certainty to hope, a sense that “but of course it will all happen the way I want it to.” But as time passes and hope slips out ahead of you, disappears among the trees and you have to wait for it to come back, that is when winter seems the longest.

That is when it seems like the sap will never run.

* * * * *

How can we keep hoping, those of us who have walked this road so many times? What will bring us back to the trees for the fifteenth time, the twentieith time, to check if the sap has run?

It’s the knowledge that once you’ve identified the trees, and tapped in the spiles, and hung the buckets, and walked back through the cold forest, at some point the sap will run.

The sap always runs, eventually.

Posted on

Help Me Decide: Should I Use a Pseudonym For My Fiction?

Red Masked Josh from Flickr via Wylio
© 2006 Bill Stilwell, Flickr | CC-BY-SA | via Wylio

So, what’s in a name?

When I write fiction, I feel like an entirely different person, certainly not the same individual who writes the projects that I write for other people. There’s a separation in my mind. Healthy? I don’t know, but there’s the fiction writing me, and there’s the writing books for other people me, and the two feel very separate.

Which is why I always imagined that when I finally wrote a novel, I’d write it under a different name, a pseudonym, something like Shawn Merrill (Merrill is actually my first name). Why?

1 – It feels like a different person writing, so a different name feels appropriate.

2 – I’d like to keep a soft line between the writing I do for other people and the writing I do for myself. What if I write something in my fiction that turns people off from using me to write their nonfiction?

3 – The novels I write are not “Christian.” Ugh. I hate using that term to describe writing, or books, or music, but it’s how people talk about these things. I think I’d feel more free to write the fiction I want to write if it wasn’t as closely tied to the writing I’ve already done, which has been mostly Christian memoirs.

4 – If someone loved my fiction and looked up my author page, I don’t think they’d be interested in reading the nonfiction that I’ve written. And probably vice versa.

On the other hand, someone I was talking to recently discouraged me from using a pen name. She said that the world needed more Christians writing “secular” fiction, and that I should embrace the tension.

What do you think?

Posted on

How This Baby is Saving Me

A friend asked, in the days following my emergency trip to the hospital, if I thought the flare-up in my intestine could be a result of how busy I’ve been. Could the stress be getting to me? The numerous projects? The deadlines?

Of course, I deflected that idea. We are always in control, aren’t we? We are always sure that the alcohol is helping us to cope with life. We are always sure that the sugar is a harmless sidekick. We are always sure that the work and the busyness and the fast pace is something helping us to thrive.

Meanwhile, our minds and bodies, never meant to operate under such heavy burdens, begin to break down.

* * * * *

Maile wakes me between 4:30 and 5:45. She has been up with Leo a few times, and it’s my turn. I roll out of bed and carry him downstairs so she can get some uninterrupted sleep. The house is quiet, but if the windows are open I can hear the early-morning traffic going by on James Street. I sit in the dark living room, light from the hallway falling diagonally through the room, lighting up a few dirty diapers still on the coffee table, a few magic markers half-hidden under the sofa. The chess board is open, pieces strewn in mid-battle.

The light falls on Leo’s face, and I cannot work while I hold him, and I cannot make myself breakfast, and I cannot do anything besides look at his face and remind myself to breathe.

In…1…2…3…4.

Out…1…2…3…4.

In…1…2…3…4.

Out…1…2…3…4.

This baby has forced me to slow down, to sit quietly, to breathe. I chomp at the bit, wanting to run full force again into a day’s worth of work, but he tugs on the reins and holds me in check.

So we sit together, and he smiles in his sleep. A friend of mine on Facebook said that her mother used to say angels were whispering in a baby’s ear when they smile like that in their sleep. I find that easy to believe, on a quiet morning, when the light slants in that particular way, and the early-morning traffic is going by on James Street.