my small span of ardent life (guest post at christie purifoy's)

Today I have the huge privilege of sharing a bit of my writing at Christie Purifoy's blog. Christie has been a favorite writer of mine since I discovered her writing a few years ago, and I'm honored to share this post - talking about wisdom, the architecture of our hearts, becoming who we are... I hope you hop on over! 

When I was in high school I was once described by a new friend as doing a kind of “butterflying” – from person to person, subject to subject, leaving conversations half-finished or always to be continued. I had, in the thoughtlessness of a fifteen year-old experiencing peer acceptance, jumped from lunches to free periods and neglected her. I hadn’t realized that she moved more carefully, finishing each thing before taking up the next one. I apologized profusely, and we went on to build a friendship in chemistry classes and after school theater. But I vowed to myself that I would change, I would abandon my butterfly ways. I would be slow, I told myself. I would be wise.Have you ever kept a promise too well? Have you ever been so good at becoming more like someone else that you left yourself behind?Keep reading over at Christie's - and if you want to read a bit more of my writing, you can learn more about my first book, Forgiving God: A Story of Faith over here and even order a copy from your favorite retailer!Love,hilary

grace, a year later (sharing at Christie Purifoy's)

I get the chance to share a piece at one of my very favorite writers, Christie Purifoy. Her book wrapped me up in a new way to see the seasons, in the world, in my life, in this always-beginning relationship with God, anew. It has meant so much to me, and I'm honored to share at her space today. Join me?Here is a little excerpt:I was all grace-less worry the first six weeks of my son’s life. He was born into the bright steadying lights of the NICU. He was born into weeks of poking, prodding, scoped up and down. His first pictures besides our Instagram snapshots were the flickery black and white of heart and head and kidney ultrasounds.Two by two, we would go into that ark, my husband and I. Two by two, and no more than that at a time. In the mornings the attending physicians and residents would form a crescent moon standing around his bassinet, and the real moon would take the night watch alongside us.We are all born into motherhood. The labor is from us, and for us, and so I too was welcomed by bright lights and pulsing blue and red monitors. I too was born into an endless click, click of blood pressure cuffs and kinked IV needles and blanket forts to hide us while we slept.Keep reading, over at Christie's?Love,hilary

dear jackson: on daring, and prayer

Dear Jackson,When you were small, in what feels like a different country, hidden behind hills of time, when you lived in the country called the NICU, I used to number the minutes. I used to count your breaths, the dip and climb of your oxygen. I used to pray each time you inhaled that the breath would come back out and that you would take another one. I prayed single words as you breathed - keep. breathing. one. more. breath. It was not that you were in imminent danger, exactly - the doctors told us daily that you were stable, that you were safe - but having once witnessed what it was for you to cry out for oxygen, I could never shake the need to count each rise and fall of your chest.Today I realized I have stopped counting.Now I watch the rise and fall of your chest with a confidence that comes, not from the little tube we slip in your neck each week, not from the nurse who watches over you in the long nights, but from you.It comes from how you run from your room to the record player, how you bring us the puffs when you want more, how you love to be chased down the hallways. It comes from how you laugh when you see us, hair sticking up wildly in all directions, when you wake up from naps. It comes from how you press against me in this phase of being afraid of strangers and then how you push away from me back into the world. You are daring, you are adventurous, because you feel safe.And so I stopped counting your breaths.I tell you this as a way of telling you something about prayer. I prayed once by counting. And now that I have stopped, that I have dared to believe you'll breathe without being watched, I find myself at a loss for how to pray. It was easy when there was panic, to keep me focused, to keep the demand right in front of God. Is this trust, I wonder as I watch you attempt to crawl up onto the couch? Is it resignation?We are in a new country, God and I, unfamiliar and brighter. I have to squint my eyes to make out the horizons of where I think I might be going. In the old country of the NICU, the only way I could talk at all was to yell and to count. Now I have stopped counting and stopped yelling - what is left? How will I begin to say something again?  So I pray to you, Lord Jesus Christ, together with the Father who is without beginning and Your all-holy, good and life-giving Spirit, now and ever and unto the ages of ages Amen.I once memorized the feel of these syllables in my mouth, in the anxious wanderings of my freshly 18 year old heart, my knees knocking as I stood in the unfamiliar familiar, Greek and English twisting up and out, past icons and candles, the singing. Every Amen is a comma in the Eastern Church, a pause in the endlessness of worship. I would walk in, often a few minutes late from idling in the car afraid to walk in alone, worship having already begun. I would leave clutching the blessed bread from the priest's warm hands, a piece of the liturgy to go into the world with me. Every Amen a comma, a pause.Back then I thought it proved something to pray conspicuously. I would go into the small windowless study room on my floor, a few doors down from my room, holding a small white spiral bound book of Orthodox prayers - all but announcing my piety to the tangle of women walking the hallway or simply finding the time to take a shower, do their homework, sink their roots into college. I would fumble through the prayers at noon, holding a knotted bracelet to count repetitions of the Jesus prayer. I would make confession, ask forgiveness, pray in a more righteous voice as time went on. I hid my heart in the glorious prayers of other people - surely, God would be more impressed with me if I prayed in ancient words instead of my own.But I want to tell you, Jack, you whose spirit is full of daring, full of courage, full of light - prayer for me now is laughter. Prayer is silence, prayer is half-formed thoughts I say in between tickling your stomach. Prayer is singing "Poor Wayfaring Stranger" night after night and feeling your head sink onto my shoulder as you remember where we are all going - out into that Jordan River, out towards home.Do not be afraid if someday you reach for words - your own, the Church's - and you find your hands come back to you empty. Do not be afraid if you come out of one type of prayer and walk the road for a long while without knowing what to say next.Every Amen is a comma, a pause, and courage is sometimes pausing long enough to feel God's friendship in the weight of your son on your shoulder. That is prayer enough. God hears.Love,mom

this can carry us

I learned to pray when I learned to drive. Those smooth, familiar backroads, at age 17 too hasty in hoping to be older. At the stoplights where even now I do not notice how I know where I am going, I just turn, left, then right, then right again. I learned to pray driving past the old white house covered with vines and lilacs that only bloom for a week, a glorious hidden week in May, the kind that sneaks up upon you and shatters your resignation with joy. I prayed the unconventional hours: early morning requests and questions, the late evening thanksgivings. Often, I repeated this: I love you, Jesus. When I slink into the driver's seat, even now when I go home to visit, I feel the pull of those hours, the richness hidden in rhythm and repetition: I love you, Jesus. I remember the drives, keeping those hours, the expectation, the simplicity. The lilacs bursting forth against the old white house.These hours keep me praying in the long summer of expecting my first son. These hours keep me, my younger self's prayers, ones about God's glory being revealed to me, or the fullness of God's wisdom being shown to me, or the love of Jesus, my younger love of Jesus. These hours keep me, praying somehow still over me from the week of bursting lilacs to the week of driving to Temple, of learning about Jackson, of new glories.I have wanted to write about praying for Jackson, but the truth is, it's really the old prayer I'm praying, that the Spirit is praying in me and for me: I love you, Jesus. I find you so beautiful. My son knows my voice. This overwhelms me, since so much of the day I am quiet. We talk in snatches, I tell him about what I've been reading, I tell him about his cousins, his grandparents, how much love is waiting for him. I tell him about his doctors, too. I tell him that he will love them, that they are helpers, people God gave special gifts to for helping kids heal and grow and be strong. I am telling myself all these things.He hears about this ordinary life all day, carried around inside me with his fierce, strong spirit: he hears Preston read One Hundred Years of Solitude, me proclaiming my craving for red velvet cake and ice cream sandwiches, my laughter with his dad, our plans for crepe myrtle trees and a backyard garden and a library of books just for him. And he hears me on the couch or the bathroom floor, some mornings getting dressed, how those are sometimes hard moments in my expectation. How I cry sometimes because I am new at this, new at even the very act of becoming a mom, becoming his mom.So the old prayer, the lifeline - I love you, Jesus.He hears that, too.May this be the forever thread running through our days together: I love you, Jesus. I love you with the first light slinking through the blinds, with long hours of reading, with appointments and ultrasounds and so many pictures of Jackson as you are forming him. I love you when I pray laughing or weeping, or both at the same time. I love you with the bursting lilacs all those years ago, the first hours set down, that resound now. I love you with everything in me that is unfinished - with the poem that that line comes from, Robert Bly, I think.I love you, Jesus. This is the well-worn prayer. This can carry us.Love,hilary

when I am learning to worry heaven (on prayer)

We have been worrying heaven on your behalf!

She says this laughing from the pulpit, voice bright with the joy of a Sunday morning, and the congregation shouts sings nods claps its approval, its affirmation. We have been worrying heaven on your behalf. We have been up at night and during the day, in the midst of our praising and our praying, telling heaven about you, reminding heaven about you, worrying heaven for you.How long has it been since I worried heaven for another person?How long since I got on my knees, face to the floor, or prayed loud in the car or on a run, how long since I was bold enough to declare that my words spoken in the name of Jesus have power? That when I'm talking to the Almighty, I believe that the Almighty is listening, is hearing, is attending to me?Have we forgotten what it means to pray? Have I forgotten in my desire to make sure I'm contemplating the right issue or the right person or the right non-self-centered words, have I forgotten that Jesus gave me power to worry heaven for another human person?I think about the faithful who wouldn't let God alone, the widow who pursues the judge, the men who carry their brother to Jesus and lower him through the roof, the disciples who panic and cry out on the water, the crowds who clamor for loaves and fishes, the Israelites who wander and persist and insist with God that God has cut a covenant and God must keep it.Why am I so timid when it comes to praying? I don't want to sound like I want something too much or like I wouldn't be happy if God gave me something else? I don't want to be a bother, I don't want to overstay my welcome in the family?But this is what the word of God says in the stillness of my heart when I stop long enough: you cannot overstay your welcome in this family. --We have been worrying heaven on your behalf!The courage it takes, to come bold before the throne, to come as our fullest selves, selves that persist and insist and come back again and again with the same prayers: safety for this person and life for this one, hope and patience and a new job and the truth to come out and a smoother transition and the thing that they really need.I want to pray like that again.I want to make my home in the tangled knot of the family of God, where we cannot overstay our welcome, where we cannot pray too much. I want to worry heaven for the ones I love.--I've been trying to write this blog post for weeks, and I couldn't find the words. I've been sitting at the computer, waiting, and the words haven't arrived. But the other morning, while Preston made coffee and I put off getting out of bed for as long as possible, I heard it: why are you waiting for the right words? The Spirit will teach you to pray. Perhaps I waited so long to write this blog post because I was hoping I could write it about how great this new way of praying is, and how much I have become good at it. And, of course, God hears that too.I don't know how to worry heaven or how to pray with a wild, relentless confidence. But the Spirit will teach me, will teach us.So, courage or not, confidence or not, today I am on my knees, learning to worry heaven. And falling deeper in love with Jesus, who teaches me how.Love,hilary

when no one else can believe it for me

We were back at a church we love this past Sunday. I'm a long-road Anglican, winding my way along a path from childhood and pink dresses at First Communion to that St. Michael and All Angels confirmation, a swirl of the Spirit descending and those words, this is a new anointing, my daughter. This particular church, where the light spills in across the altar, where the choir and the electric organ sing bold to hymn and spiritual alike, where there sits this beautiful banner I stare at every time I go in - yellow, gold, that proclaims: Yours is the glory, Risen Conquering Son. is where I first saw my husband in the midst of being deeply and irrevocably in love with God. This is where I learned that there are ways of being traditional that sing spirituals and pray for the Spirit to come and fall upon us. This is, in short, where I relearned how to encounter the Lord Jesus.On Sunday the pastor preached on fear.On Sunday, Jesus came and sat down beside me.We sat together, my eyes on my hands, hearing what by now feels so familiar - that anxiety is not our nature, that we are fearful from the first moment of disobedience, that perfect love, who is the person of Jesus, casts out fear. And you all know, in your journey with this rambling heart, that I am acquainted with fear. I've lived and wandered inside it often. It's the kind of dark where my eyes adjust quickly, my adrenaline kicks in, I feel my way through the blackness and so often think I'm doing just fine.And you all know that I've been thinking about that a lot. I keep writing about it. I'd say it was some kind of theme or meditation for the season, but I think it's more likely that God is content to dwell with us where our hearts most often go to hide from Him, and so He waits for us, comes out into the dark after us, beckons us into the midst of His very self.So here we are, me and Jesus, and I'm counting the invisible threads in my skirt and I'm hearing again that Jesus will cast out fear, I am hearing that the Holy Spirit lives in me, I am hearing, I am hearing... Jesus, just the stillness of Jesus, is near me.Then the pastor says, "I cannot believe this for you."I bristle at the thought. Aren't we carrying each other? When the road is long and we are weary aren't we leaning hard on the faith of each other, on the promises kept generation to generation, of the stories others tell us when we cannot tell ourselves?But then there is this moment, where I think about it again. I close my eyes, stop counting the threads.Jesus desires relationship with me. Me, without helpful scaffolding or hiding behind the true things someone else has said. And having faith isn't just assenting to what someone smarter has said. Jesus doesn't desire my agreement with someone else. He is too in love with the being of me to want less than my self. My whole self. My whole self, believing.I do believe we should lean on each other. I believe we should carry each other. Oh, but how we must believe this without hiding from the nearness of God to each of us, in the just-us-ness of our being?I told my mother once I was doing something because of the lightness of me. I think God's answer to that question, the one we keep asking, the one we keep hiding from, the one not about God's goodness or qualities or cosmic salvation or any of that, but just the one about how God loves -because of the being of you. Because of the you that is so gorgeously alive. And you are enough of a reason for all the nearness of God. It is our whole self that must believe. It is our whole self, believing, that God is desperately in love with.That kind of love is so particular, no one else can believe it for us. We have to believe it, too.Love,hilary

God is speaking joy

"And I think to myself, how long has God been speaking this joy over my life, and I have been too filled up with anxiety to hear it?"I tell this to her on the phone pacing outside the building where I spend most of my time as a new graduate student. I try to let my feet carry me where they will on the winding paths of campus, past library and other classroom buildings and people on skateboards and scooters, past trendy backpacks and BPA free water bottles.I am relaying a conversation I had with Preston about callings, about anxiety about the future, about what is happening in our lives and what it will mean and how it will happen, and it's in the midst of telling her about the conversation (not even the conversation itself) that I realize it:God has been speaking joy over my life.Anxiety is an unruly substance - it fills up the spaces wherever you let it in. It creeps into the corner of yourself and becomes the drumbeat and gives the marching orders.And I fill myself up with anxiety so much that I cannot hear God speaking. And it is in the very act of resisting anxiety that we will find, that we can hope to find, the ears to hear.Be astonished! Be astounded! For a work is being done in your days that you would not believe if you were told. Habbakuk, 1.5.When was the last time I was astonished at the Lord? When was the last time I was astounded? When was it that I stopped and marveled and felt my knees go weak from seeing the wonder and the blessedness?When I resist anxiety, even for a moment, I can catch a glimmer of the song God is singing over my life: joy.In resisting the anxiety there is promise, there is purpose, and no, it's not a new life plan with a bigger God stamp on it. It's purpose that is drawing nearer to the Father and purpose that is becoming more like Jesus and it is purpose that will lead you to a new city in a new state in a new marriage so that you might know God better and love him more. The places where we live out our vocation have a tendency to substitute their purposes for the ultimate purpose: we think that we're here to become a certain kind of scholar or a certain kind of teacher or a certain kind of electrical engineer, and that's the real reason God said go. But in that we forget: we forget that Jesus first and always and finally calls us to be a certain kind of human being, one who is made glorious by the Spirit dwelling and moving inside them, one who bears God's image, resplendent, made new, gracious and graceful and alive.Before Preston and I got married, I memorized Romans 8. I don't know why, except for the ways that, daily, I have had to remind myself of it. Remind myself that there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Remind myself that you are in the Spirit. Remind myself that those whom he called, he also justified, and those whom he justified, he also glorified. And here again, I remember: nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love that is in Christ Jesus. In the midst of what is unknown, we are not apart from the love of God. In the midst of what can make us anxious, we are not apart from the love of Christ Jesus. In the midst of hoping and praying and waiting and raging, in the emptiness and the fullness, the silence and the singing, we are not apart from such love.Be astonished! Be astounded! For nothing will be able to separate us from the love that is in Christ Jesus. And thus, rejoice.Love,hilary

along the dark and twisty road

Did you know, that there is such a thing as becoming more confused by your obedience?The things I wish someone had told me.Obey, and the road will get darker and twistier. Obey, and the clarity you prized will vanish. Obey, and the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living will become the prayer for water on a desert highway, the simplest, most desperate question - is there manna for me today, Lord? - with no thoughts of hoarding it or storing it up or anything but the one meal, the daily meal, the crumbs from the table meal.Obey, and that sweet daydream you had about what you would be like and sound like and do, the person you glorified in your mind, you in maxi skirts sweeping through your life with such grace and such ease, she is crying on the couch, yet again, making lists, yet again, asking again for a manna she doesn't know how to find on her own.And you think about how to say it because you think there is nothing more embarrassing than admitting it, that you don't have it together on this dark and twisty road.I keep thinking about Jacob.I keep thinking about all the moments when I have likened myself to Jacob, wrestling, strong, prevailing through the night. I keep thinking about all the times that I have said I have wrestled with God and yet my life is being delivered. Or even because I am wrestling so my life is being delivered.It was night when Jacob wrestled. I never noticed that before.Jacob wrestled until the day broke open.Jacob went out into the dark and twisty night, into the utter unknowing, and wrestled until there was light.I will not let you go unless you bless me. I will not let you go.I am saying this in the dark. I am saying this to a God who I grasp for and hold onto, praying that I have, in fact, found God, that the wrestling is a holding fast, that in the midst of the darkness is the closest kind of encounter.The things I keep inscribing on my heart and the sides of my notebooks during class, that this is the place of closest encounter and Jacob, he walked with an ache in his hip because in the ache is the remembering of how we wrestle with God, all of us, and how in that is the closeness, the hope.I'm out here on the dark and twisty road of obedience, and if you're there, too, then can I whisper a hello, I can see you? And together we will wrestle until day breaks open.Love,hilary

in the land of the living

I keep thinking about prayer. I keep wanting pray in this space, to tell you something, to lean over and bend knees and heart with you. 

This is what I pray over us, we who live and move in the ragged tumble towards heaven, on the outskirts of certainty, we who have thrown off the confidence we used to wear so timidly - 

I would have lost heart, unless I had believed that I would see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. - Psalm 27.13

In the land of the living. The goodness of the Lord in the land of the living, the present, the here and now that builds and begins and springs forth under our feet. I cry it out in between stoplights, as I cross under the highway in the middle of fearing that I will never know the goodness of the Lord because I am not enough. 

I pray this wildly over us, abandoning for a moment the usual lilting words, the customary blog post format, the worries that you'll think less or differently of me - 

I pray that King Jesus, in whom we are more than conquerors, will cast forth from you all that keeps you from the hope of the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. 

I pray that Jesus will show up, right in the middle of wherever you are, disrupt the everyday where we become so good at avoiding him, and remind you that nothing in this world and nothing to come, nothing in heaven or on earth, can separate you from Him: 

not exams nor papers written late into the night

not a messy house nor a missed deadline

not a broken heart nor a mending one

not what you have nor what you don't 

not fighting nor going silent nor raging nor the thing you shouldn't have said but you did nor the thing you meant to say and forgot nor the misunderstanding nor the awkward afternoon nor the time wasted or well spent...

None of it can separate you from the love of God in Jesus.  

I would have lost heart tonight between stoplights. I would have lost heart in the beginning of doing a new thing and being so afraid of failing at it - I would have lost heart in the promises of God, right there three blocks away from home -

But I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. 

We will see this goodness, this year, this month, this week, because we are in the land of the living and we are walking with a God who covenants with a people the promise of His presence. We are in the midst of God, of the goodness of God, of the love of God. I believe you will see it stretched wide and loud over your life. I believe you will find that God comes into the midst of you, disrupting the comfortable patterns, the way you think at stoplights or when you're folding laundry, the quiet despair that creeps into our days that what we do is not enough. 

I believe the goodness of the Lord will be seen in this land of the living.

I pray that we stumble into this believing until it has nestled between our bones. I pray that we call out to God to keep His promises to us. I pray that we get on our knees often, preaching the power of the love of God, preaching the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. 

I believe it tonight; that I will see this goodness. I'm whispering it over us.

Love,
hilary

there is no safe gospel

"Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and gathered fish of every kind. When it was full, men drew it ashore and sat down and sorted the good into containers but threw away the bad. So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth." (Matthew 13.47-50)

I read this in a room full of light, warmth trickling across my palms on the table. I'm wearing a favorite grey dress. I'm in a circle of thoughtful and kind people, and we are bending our heads in morning prayer, coffee cups nearby, open notebooks. I've been asked to read the Gospel lesson.I read that there will be a separating of the righteous and the evil, that there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.And the warmth seems to evaporate from me as I let the words spill forth, proclaimed into the spaces between our rolled up sleeves. The Word of the Lord is living and active, we say - and I speak and Jesus stops me, my comfortable dress, my comfortable coffee, my comfortable posture in a comfortable room full of light.This is an uncomfortable parable.I start to pray in something between a condescending and a wishful-thinking tone of voice, something he is unamused by. I tell myself I am just asking why he preaches to us in stories. But the truth is I'm asking, Why did I have to read that parable? Why couldn't I have gotten to read the one about the pearl of great price or the mustard seed or the treasure in the field? It isn't just that I wonder why he teaches in parables -it's that I don't really want to proclaim the teachings that I don't like or understandthat I don't really want to be linked to something uncomfortablethat I don't really want to be that close to some of the teachings because speaking them out makes me uncomfortable.Jesus just looks back at me.My junior year of college I memorized the first chapter of John in French, a project for a French class. I recited it in a brightly lit room in the morning, wearing a comfortable dress. If I close my eyes now, the words can sometimes still appear - my favorite sentence -Le lendemain, il vit Jésus venant à lui, et il dit: Voici l'Agneau de Dieu, qui ôte le péché du monde. Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.There is no safe Gospel. There is no encounter with the Word that will leave us comfortable. Comforted, perhaps, but only first through the upheaval of our worlds, the collapse of our presuppositions, the relinquishing of our desire to have the easiest story to tell. We cannot claim Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of world if we are clinging to a tamer, easier version, without the uncomfortable parables or the uncertainties or the radical promises or the hardest questions. The power of the declaration is in how unsafe it is, how transforming, how world-shaking.I cannot say, Voici l'Agneau de Dieu, qui ôte le péché du monde if I am always searching for a way to make Jesus safer, or find Gospel passages easier to read in a brightly lit room in morning prayer.I have to give up my search for the safe Gospel.I'm still wrestling the parable of the nets, still going back again and again for an explanation, for understanding, for the right way to read it.And in the midst of that wrestling, not on the other side of it, not beyond it, not anywhere but the sweating tired mess of giving up the idea that I'll wake up to a comfortable, non-radical Jesus, and trying to learn what it means to preach this unsafe and life-changing Gospel in my life, in my heart, in the world -Voici, l'Agneau de Dieu, qui ôte le péché du monde. Behold.Love,hilary

the gift is given

It's a slow morning, the kind that you take a long time to wake up fully, not sure if your dream has shifted into sunlight or if you're still in the midst of it. There is a quiet to this kind of morning and an unrest, too, and the heart is full, always, achingly, full.I've been trying to sit with the Bible more lately. I'm a lover of the liturgy, prayer book guidance to the Word. I'm more likely to trust what someone else appoints for me to read than I am to trust my gut telling me where I need to go. So when I sit, alone for a few moments, on the familiar porch, and God says, read about washing the disciples' feet, I'm almost too quick to resist it.Isn't that always the giveaway? We find a reason not to, a reason it's out of order or our sermon series has us meditating on something else, we must consult a calendar and a guide to be in the Word the right way?So I slink towards John, chapter 13.And Jesus got up from the table.He got up from the table and took off his outer robe and took a basin and knelt and washed their feet. These, whom he loved until the end, these, whom he cherished. These, who knew so little about what they had seen. These scattered sheep. He washed their feet."You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand."I am only the first few steps along the cracked cement of understanding, and I'm holding my arms out to balance myself as I read out loud these words.So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet. Is there anything more beautiful?Is there anything more precious than this? That we were taught by his way of living. That we were known in the washing of our feet, and this morning I need Jesus to wash my feet again.I need Jesus to show me how he will come into the midst of everything that is still a mess inside me and he will hold it tenderly, he will change it, he will do this wild act of grace on my heart and set me free. I need Jesus to make the lesson alive in the doing of it, not just the thinking or the idea-making or the understanding-seeking that so often and so quickly becomes misunderstanding. It wasn't about the prayer book appointed reading today, it was about Jesus coming to me and taking off his robe and washing my feet.And I do not understand one thing about this love but that it is gift and it has been given to me.These mornings I go to the Word because the Word is life because the Word is a lifeline in the days where the joy meets the ache and it collides in my heart. These mornings I sit and shrink away but I keep going back because I am sold out to this Jesus, who washes the disciples' feet, who tells us again and again to love as he loved us, we whom he calls friends, not servants. I go back, again and again, to King Jesus because King Jesus is life, because he is freedom, because he is the fullness of beauty, because he knows me.And I do not understand one thing about Jesus' love but that it is gift, it is washing my feet, it is meeting me on my familiar porch, with such tenderness, with such freedom. It is gift, and it has been given.Love,hilary

go free, prisoner

I find myself looking at Jesus out the window of the borrowed Highlander in the midst of Waco.He is there clearly in my mind, maybe car windows can be like the iconostasis some days, that piercing window into heaven, that stirring up of your spirit to meet the Spirit.It's just a few days before Pentecost.I have been in the midst of telling Jesus that I am trapped in my mind, lost in the sea of obligations. I have been telling Jesus with the bold and arrogant assumption more often made by the accustomed Christian that Jesus is mild-mannered and so tolerating this rant, and that eventually the emotions will subside and I'll go on, and Jesus will go on, both of us mostly unchanged.Let me tell you something: that is not Jesus.Instead I hear the thought ripple - no, that's too gentle - rip into my mind, hurricane wind, not just a little bit of fire in the voice. I am telling you, go free, prisoner. I don't know what you're talking about, Jesus, the easiest lie, the lie of pretended incomprehension, because a God that we say is so beyond our knowing surely cannot be speaking so clearly to us, to me, as I stare out the car window hoping against hope that I can find my way around the words.I am telling you, go free, prisoner. It takes nothing less than the Spirit to shake us out of our assumed ignorance back into the obvious truths, the who we are before and afters. Because I am so much of the time a prisoner rattling the iron walls when the door behind me is swinging open and it is Jesus who stands there, arms open, waiting. I am the too busy noticing my own struggles to see that the shackles are at my feet, that the sun through the window is the first day of the week and I'm living in the time of the resurrection.I do this with the story of how eating became harder, or how I don't know how to stand up for myself, or how I am too people pleasing or too quick to worry or how I don't know when to allow myself to feel grace because I worry that if I give myself room to not be perfect I'll collapse altogether. I rattle the walls of the prison of I should be better or I should do more or I am not good enough at and then there is Jesus, calling for me - go free. Me, in that car, driving through Waco, and there is Jesus, caring so much more than I imagine he does. Not mild-mannered, not indifferent, not unconcerned. No, I meet Jesus who says, Go free, prisoner, and who keeps calling out to me, who is relentless in the message that my heart is no longer bound anymore, but freed. That there is no need to rattle the walls because the door is opened, because life is beginning.Just a few days before Pentecost I hear again the old story, the Gospel of the radical concerned grace of God - that God will not be mild-mannered or indifferent with us, but come to us, driving through Waco or when we are in front leading worship or as we glance back at the iconostasis, and Jesus will keep saying, go free, prisoner. I have loved you, I have freed you, you are urgent and important to me, you belong to me. Oh, how the Gospel needs preaching again and again to this tired heart.And oh, how good God is, to still come shout it over me.Love,hilary

for when God has time for you

He pulls me onto his lap in the chair he always sits in to type out the emails, the tasks, the daily-to-do's that pile high in the cramped spaces of our lives.It was a series of comments about this or that thing not fitting well anymore, this or that salad I should have could have eaten, this or that friend I probably should have texted again but didn't...He held me there when I started to pull away, back into the familiar chaos of the busy, making the customary excuses to avoid the quiet place - you're busy, I'm busy, no one has enough time, this will be too unwieldy, this mess of my heart and don't you want me to just buckle down and get myself under control? We only have this many days until everything changes."What would Jesus say about that?" He repeats the question twice before I make eye contact, and again once I do, holding my waist still.I gulp, oxygen suddenly a precious gift, because it's the Name, Jesus, that still undoes my heart at its sounding. I am not sure how to breathe anymore because my husband to be asks me what Jesus would say to me. He doesn't try to fix it with his words, just keeps his hands fixed, because I am going to run away from Jesus if he doesn't help me anchor myself there. Because he knows, and I know, that Jesus has something to say to me."I don't know!"I get angry, the second kind of reaction. If not flight, then fight, and it comes out biting and cold and full of frustration. I don't know, which means why are you asking, which means can we please not do this and can we please not encounter this.But this life does not obey our fighting or our flights, and encounter is gifted to us in the worst times because the worst times are the needed times.I don't want to answer this question, because the answer is this: Jesus would say, Come here. I have time for you. I have time for your mistakeI have time to talk about all this chaos, this wedding, this waiting, the days when it feels impossible to do the work I give youI have time to breathe next to youI have time to hear youI have time to remind you that not everything you have ever done is wrongJesus is Lord of time. Who am I to tell him he doesn't have enough of it? Jesus is the Word made Flesh dwelling in the midst of us. Who am I to tell him he doesn't want to spend time with a sinner-trying-to-be-saint like me? Jesus is the tabernacling, ever-drawing-us-nearer Physician of the soul and body. Who am I to tell him that he shouldn't be interested in healing me?My husband to be keeps his hands on my waist while we sit in that all-too-familiar chair, and keeps me there, so that I can answer this question. What would Jesus say to that? And fellow wanderers, worshippers, lovers of leaving, caravaners on the road and you who are lost in the jungle and you who are scorched by the sand in the desert at noonday and you who walk so calmly and you who ask the fourth question of God when we all stop at three and you who doesn't know how to believe God has time for the sinners, for the people who should know better and still break -Jesus says,Come to me.Love,hilary

when we are not competing

I go to the gym and almost start to cry. There is a row of treadmills and a row of elliptical machines, pristine from the spray-and-wipe-down routine religiously followed by most of the gym-goers. I don't know where to start, and so I choose an elliptical machine, a familiar one, and I plug in my headphones.But I can't shake this worry that starts after about minute 3 that the soccer girls next to me are much better at this. I can't shake the worry that the woman to my left is decidedly unimpressed with the level I put my resistance at and that she is better because hers is over 30 and mine is just 22. I keep my eyes fixed on the orange blinking lights, minute by minute, and amid the shouts of encouragement from the first string center forward to the striker who are running faster than I will probably ever run in my life, I start to calculate it - more loved based on calories burned or miles run, better person, more virtuous version of herself, actually excellent, more good and beautiful than me.A little while ago I read this post from the lovely woman over at Scissortail Silk, about we aren't each other's competition, not one more standard to measure against in this already overmeasured world.And I am fired up and I start this post, my blog says, at the end of March. I think, we are not competing, and I wanted to write and say it out loud, that we, the bakers and butchers and lawyers and authors and midwives, we are all in the ragged band of beautiful making our way towards heaven.We are all, I want to tell you, the raw art, the rare creation. We are all, not in the diluted universals we always use, but in the particular concentration of mitochondrial DNA and endless cells recombining and holding us together, in the concentrated, intense, fiercest way - we are all and each the uniqueness we cannot fathom.I wanted to say this when I first read those true words - we are not each other's competition - but somewhere I lost the message. I went out into the world thinking I had the voice of a prophet and I still preached a fear of the bathroom scale. I still proclaimed scarcity.It can be hard to remember that the work of becoming well is a series of hills you fall down, and the falling and rising, they live together. And so I marched out in March thinking I could wear the banner of the not-competition, and it is May, and I am still sewing the pieces together.But here is what I know, what I preach next to you, in my nervous ponytail making our way through the jungle of the kingdom of God:God is too particular about us to compare.God is too intent on us, on the molecules of being, on how we move and lie down and arise, to watch the numbers at the gym and mark us in a rank of better to worse, against each other.If it is true that God wrestled with Jacob, if it is true that Jesus appeared to Mary and called her name, Mary, like that, each syllable resounding with news of the resurrection and life -then we cannot be competing.Because as Jesus calls her Mary, so Jesus calls me Hilary. So Jesus calls you, calls the striker and the first string center forward, calls the Zumba class ladies and the lawyers and butchers and authors.If God is really wrestling with each of us, our bones pressing against God, our lungs stretched to keep breathing the air that gives the life as we wrestle with the Lifegiver,then we are not competing.We are each the beloved, particular, wrestlers with God.We are each the remarkable made alive again.We are each so singularly loved that God laughs at our comparisons, touches our hip socket with His laughter.And so shall I be delivered.Love,hilary

i bind unto myself

There is a feeling, deep in the pit of my stomach, when I sing. It's not there when I sing just anything, though. I can belt out "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend" at a Cabaret night in high school or sing along with Jack Johnson that senior year beginning in the fall with the lazy sunset and the cabin where the seniors got to spend the last night, without it. It isn't just the love of opening my mouth and hearing my vocal chords spill over into the air, into the room, into your hearing.It only happens when I sing hymns.I used to think them too old, but I didn't grow up in the youth groups and the guitar lessons, the right chords to Hillsong and Chris Tomlin. A friend who went to a congregational church did, filled with stories of the ski trips and missions trips and summer bible studies, filled with games and the healthy junk food and the praise songs, that got you up off your chair and swaying, as you closed your eyes and, it seemed, something wondrous happened.I was an Episcopalian becoming Anglican, thinking about Orthodoxy and Catholicism, and I didn't know those songs, only the old hymns, the 1982 blue hymnal hymns, the tunes we would plunk out on the piano or I would offer to sing into the few standing microphones we had at the church. I wanted to sing with some kind of lark angelic sound. I wanted to bring others near to God with my singing, make something happen in the seats, in the church, out in the world. But I didn't think hymns could do that.But St. Patrick had a hymn - we call it St. Patrick's Breastplate - the hymn of "I Bind Unto Myself Today". It has seven verses and verse six has a completely different melody than the others, and verse one is short -I sang it first tripping over the words and syllables in a small church in New England where the altar was hidden far back and the priest climbed stairs to the pulpit to preach, and then again in St. John's Hall, where the praise band played it with guitars and a drum set as we set a kitchen table groaning with altar cloth and frontal piece and those gifts, through and by the Spirit the Body and the Blood, where we made the space alive with our voices and cupped hands. I sang it unsure then -and then again, and again, I have watched that hymn follow me across state lines and countries, through empty fields where I only remembered one half of one verse in England or along highways and -you see, when I sing it, the words coming and going like water, when I sing it, close my eyes in church or stand in the shower or just hum bits of it to myself in the car, I realize -the hymn binds me to Christ.This song is an act of prayer, this song is an act of worship, this song, this hymn, with all its mystery, the cadence of its sounds, this binds me to Christ.I bind unto myself today, the strong name of the Trinity, by invocation of the same, the Three in One and One in Three. The feeling in the pit of my stomach is less about my singing, more about my spirit.I bind unto myself, today.Love,hilary

advent 3 (the glorious music)

My brother and I love the Messiah. We sang the Hallelujah Chorus in high school together, our voices beaming out those waves of joy, our faces alive in the light that shines in the midst of the darkness of winter. Later, in February or March, when the snow was melting, I'd find myself humming it as I went along the winding roads towards school. There was something in the music, I said.So a few years ago, when I realized that the music was beloved by many more than just me and my brother, I bought us tickets. We dressed up, took a train in the freezing cold to Symphony Hall. It was a 3pm performance, that first time, I think, and the first Sunday in Advent. Our seats were student rush seats, nothing special, but somehow the feeling that we were grown ups, going into the city to see something, walking up the cool steps with ladies in fur coats and men in tweed jackets with elbow patches, meant something. We were learning to be us, we were learning to love the us that we were.And then the music began, and over and over again the words and sounds crashed around our ears, Comfort, comfort ye my people, saith your God. The tenor that first year was beaming, I remember, and though his body was calm, it was as if his voice left his body, to come to each of us, tapping us on the shoulder. Did you hear me? It whispered. I am singing to you, thus saith your God. I have loved choral music ever since I sang Rudolph and Holly Jolly Christmas in my elementary school gym/cafeteria/auditorium/multi-purpose room. I have loved to sing. But then, in that first Sunday, when the waiting had just begun? Then I loved music for the first time.We went back this year. A new night, a new concert hall, a new choir, a new tenor opening God's words to us and proclaiming the comfort of God's people, the coming of the Messiah. A new feeling, sitting in what I think was the same outfit I had worn two years ago, leaning forward in my seat for two hours while I cling to each word like the manna God once sent to the unruly people Israel.And I heard, again and again, not just that we are comforted, but that line from the Hallelujah chorus I sang all those years ago -the kingdom of this world, is become the kingdom of our Lord, and of his Christ, and of his Christ. I have been unruly this Advent, anxious for God's coming but perhaps not for what it will bring to me. Anxious to celebrate, but not to prepare. I have been hungry for the good news but when it begins, as it must begin, in the reminder that we are a people hindered by our sins, in the knowledge of how we have wronged each other and this world, how we have gone astray, how we have fallen apart from God - then I do not want to know the good news. Then I do not want to face the manger, the angels in that field, the Christ child.But the kingdom of this world is become the kingdom of our Lord, and of his Christ. And of his Christ.And he shall reign.However unruly our hearts, however we fear the goodness of the news, the light it shines on us - can there be better music than this? That he shall reign forever and ever.Love,hilary

when I crawl back into the word

"What do I possibly have to say about that." - my response to a thoughtful prompt by my ever-thoughtful fiance when I complained I had nothing to write about.He is too patient with me to say anything to my complaining, to the whine he must hear in my voice through the typed messages. He reminds me that I could write nothing. But how do I explain that I want to be writing, that my heart is restless and I must do something, put something on paper to feel again the way that I feel most alive, that after being quiet here I want to be loud, even if just for a moment? That I want to have something to say.Maybe that's what we all want, scattered in our various lives. We want to have something to say - to the post office lady or the checker in the long grocery store line, to the question over coffee and the quizzical look in passing the peace in church. If I say nothing, how do I know I still have a voice? If I say nothing, am I still here?So I open this blank screen and I start to type and it sounds furious because a part of me is furious, furious that words are what the are, furious that you cannot control them and sometimes you have nothing to say and furious even more because the voice that I haven't been listening to is telling me, "You haven't been listening."I already know it. I haven't  been. I haven't found God in prayer and I haven't sought God in church and I haven't gone into God's word like the woman I am, the one who was at the well, her thirst wrapping around her like a veil.Because wasn't it the Word that was water to her soul? And didn't he say to us, meditate on this day and night?So when she prays in her email that the word would be bound to my forehead and around my wrists,when he is patient with my raging about how little I have to say,when the only thing I hear in church is that I have not been in Word, and Hilary? That's why you feel apart from me,then, I crawl back into it.I open Isaiah and read, slow, deliberate, and the words are loud with God's wild anger and desolation over the beloved chosen people, who have all gone astray, and how there is nothing anymore that gives honor and glory, and Isaiah asks, at the very end, "How long, O Lord?"I crawl closer.I want to hear God's answer.Love,hilary

unless you bless me

I will not let you go unless you bless me.How long did those hours stretch, Jacob to a stranger's flesh, clinging tighter as his muscles weakened, felt the strain of his back and hands and arms and still he held onto the belief that he would not let go, unless.Unless you bless me.Once in an Orthodox Church I was told the story of how Mary entered the temple as a child, how she ran to the Holy of Holies without any fear, how it seemed to recognize and welcome her, who would become the bearer of Christ to the world. I stood beneath the playtetera, the icon of Mary stretched in prayer. I imagine her like Jacob, muscles flexed and strained under the weight of such open hands, such reaching and presenting of Jesus to the world. I imagine her muscles ached with faithfulness, with that clinging of behold all nations shall call me blessed.I used to promise God I'd stop asking to be blessed because I thought prayer was an ever-interceding for another. I told God my prayers were too selfish as they were, too centered on me, on a desperate desire to be better known and better know, my small muscles clinging beneath white dresses or ripped jeans or running shorts, anxious for a blessing. But I imagined prayer like a laundry list I had to keep track of, each tick of another person's name off my tongue a checkmark, a satisfactory nod from the One who cannot be named - so I kept away from asking to be blessed. I kept away from asking for guidance, except my muscles returned again and again to Jacob's posture, then to Mary's, always aching with the desire to be closer.I told God it wasn't right, that prayer was about others, not ourselves, that it was pious of me to put my knees to the floor and name the gifts given, pray for the family and the house and the friendships and the broken bits and pieces of other stories. I thought myself good at praying in those days, when words tripped off my tongue, eloquent and sweet.And then last week on Sunday I read the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel, alone in the night, and how Jacob held on, though his hip was out of joint, and how he said, I will not let you go unless you bless me. And as I stood there, my voice joined in that mysterious way to Jacob's, my hands found their way to stretch open like Mary's -we can wrestle, pray wide into the spaces in our own hearts for a deeper knowing, for muscles that ache with faithfulness, for hands that open towards heaven.And not let go.Love,hilary

would I catch flame (a synchroblog with addie zierman)

It wasn't that long ago that I came to college with my bags packed and my mind full of theology I didn't understand. I'd grown up in old rhythms: liturgy on Sundays and Eucharist like manna, a provision from heaven I didn't know how to need. I grew up so desperately hungry for understanding of God that I read more than I could stomach: Catholic books and Eastern Orthodox theology, books with complicated titles. I talked big about ideas with all the confidence of a teenager who learned the word "eschatological" three days ago and wants to use it, wants to fill the world over with what she thinks she knows about God.I grew up Christian but thought I could grow up as the next C.S. Lewis, write the apology for my generation, tell the world why it was logical and reasonable and rational and right to be what I was. I grew up Christian, learned the habits of prayer and the way that the seasons change in the church - preparation to celebration to growing to Pentecost and again and again how I tried to understand too much about too much, cram heaven into my head while I still didn't know how to French braid my hair.That summer of going to college I thought I'd figured out what it meant to be Christian, to live out a life of faithfulness: it meant knowing the answers and complicating them, tracing the shapes of ideas into journals and class discussions and making my heart so safe in the right theology that it might never need to wonder about the presence of the love of God.I drove up to the dorm and I unloaded my laundry basket of things - a few picture frames, books, notebooks and pens in neat piles, and waited.I waited that whole year to feel right. I waited to hear God the way the people around me kept hearing Him, the way they closed their eyes in worship and put their hands above their heads to the songs by the bands I didn't know existed (but I could sing a hymn, and I was proud of that, thinking I'd escape God into the warm and safe arms of the old ornate words and the incense and the icons). I waited for the moments where I would finally understand what falling in love with God felt like, finally make myself read my Bible and have quiet time in the mornings the way, it turned out, youth group taught you. And I hadn't gone to youth group and I hadn't played the Chris Tomlin CDs and maybe I hadn't done much falling in love with God, I thought, as I walked to and from class trying to fit my theology around the worry that I might never catch fire.But the fire of Pentecost can descend at a moment, like ice, like clear water, like dust that spins you and settles you and unsettles you again. Like Eucharist manna - the provision of mystery, in mystery.I was in a parking lot, on a Sunday morning, tears tracing the indents my dimples make in my face whenever I move.Then I was in a still Chapel late at night, the kind of stillness that bends towards a heavenly silence.Then I was in a blue TV room in Washington DC learning that the very word Jesus was power.Then, and again and again now - I take what is unto me the very Body and Blood, the mystery provision, and I fall in love with God who teaches my heart how to make room for Him, not the words about Him.And the fire is small and flickers daily. And the Spirit descends. And I catch flame.Love,hilary

I'm linking up with Addie's synchroblog to celebrate her book release of When We Were on Fire. I can't wait to read it (because her words are good words, food-to-the-soul words).

a midwife in heaven

She will go before Shakespeare.She will go before Shakespeare in the wild parade of the blessed, after the striving, after the yearning ache or the clambering up mountains to see something (was it just ourselves we wanted to see, after all?).She will come forward, who labored two new beings into the world - the mother, the child - kneeling on a cold bedroom floor in countless houses in the town, kneeling to watch that which God made, new and new again.She will be known among the crowds of the heavenly, and Shakespeare, laughing, will sweep his words aside to make room to praise her.Because this is the kingdom of God, where love is too wild to be measured, where the parade is laughing and ever laughing, at the knots we tangled ourselves in thinking if only we had the recognition or the security of it, the words embossed in prizes or publications, the fame, the knowing.But this is the Kingdom of the anonymous faithful named for all that was glorious in their calling, where the hierarchies are scattered in our abundance of eagerness, where we leave behind how we have named one another - famous or critically acclaimed or somehow not quite enough yet (oh, how often have I named myself that?) -where we leave it behind because the Kingdom is coming, and our joy sees its fullness, and so we abandon decorum and procession and we run, children again, to the throne.This is the Kingdom where a midwife marches in step with a poet, where the bankers and bakers and those who mothered and fathered six children walk through the streets, unknown by accomplishment but known by calling.And some days I sit in a train car with a man whose calling I can hear sounding in me as fierce as my own heartbeat, and I write these words on the back of a receipt from a coffee shop where I met someone two months ago and told us both what I want to write here, what I want to shout to everyone: in the Kingdom of God there is too much joy and too much wonder and too much life abundant that our ladders will be unraveled by the power of the river of living water. I write that the midwife will go before Shakespeare, and laughing, they will praise each other. She will whisper how she saw Twelfth Night once, and he will whisper that he ought to have written ten sonnets in praise of her hands.I sit in a train car in a green dress in summer, remembering how my friend, she first told me this truth: that a midwife will go before Shakespeare, that in a Kingdom where last is first, our measurements fall to pieces, and this will be joy to us.Thy Kingdom come. love,hilary