dear hilary: the weight of all things

Dear Hilary,

My engagement has come to an end. I am devastated. The life that I thought I had, my direction, my focus, my plans for the future with this person that I so loved, have come to an end. There is no hope of return. I feel so lost. Where do I find God in this, when I feel so abandoned? When all the things I thought were promised for us are now dust? How can I even begin to figure out what is next for me? Please help,

Love,Lost in nowhere

Dear Lost in nowhere,Oh my dear. I am so completely, utterly sorry. I am so, so sorry. Your letter goes right to my gut when I read it, revisit it, looking for a way to reach through these electric cables and wi-fi signals and tell you that I am aching for you. And I do not understand how it hurts. But in the midst of the terrible mystery of it, and not understanding it, I wanted to reach over and whisper how very, very sorry I am.Rilke once said, "Life is heavier than the weight of all things." I wondered at that when I first read it. It seems obvious, somehow, that life is heavy, heavier. But then I thought about how we calculate ourselves into knots. How we try to add up the heaviness to understand when we will heal. How we try to understand how much time will take to grow, to move, to be made whole when something becomes, as you say, dust. But time is not obedient to those calculations, and neither is grief, and neither is ache. So Rilke is right, and his counsel is what I want to give you: Life is heavier than the weight of all things.You are in the unmeasurable heaviness, in a dark tunnel and right now, I do not want you to strain for light. We blind ourselves when we pretend we push ourselves to make meaning of it too soon. If the tunnel is dark, and there is no light to be seen, do not rush to see what and where and how and why. I'd so much rather you rage and get quiet and get loud and cry and then, stop, and then start again, at the pace and in the way that you must. Your body will tell you how to do this. It is okay to listen to it for a while. It is okay to feel the heaviness in your throat and your heart.Do not rush to see where God might be going or where He is leading you, or where He will take you next. For though these things have a life, and they do, God does not ask you to see that before He gives you the light to see it by. In the unmeasurable heaviness, in the dark tunnel - He is not asking that of you.I could tell you I think God is outside the tunnel waiting for you (He is, in a way, but that's not the answer). I could tell you that He is next to you in the heaviness and the anchoring ache behind your heart that feels like a constant catch in your throat (He is there, too). But when we ask where God is, it is hard to know how to measure that. Could I whisper to you instead something about who God is?God is the faithful.This is not a faithful that means there is a "greater purpose" or a "meaning you just can't see yet." I call bullshit on that in this moment, because God's faithfulness is not about that. It is about a promise to dwell in and among us. To be Emmanuel. To be walking in our midst and to draw near when we cry out. God's faithfulness is a promise of nearness.So when you cry out, "WHERE ARE YOU?" in your room and in your car and in your office and when you ache with others or by yourself and in the unmeasurable heaviness, in the life heavier than the weight of each thing you wonder,you cry out to one who is faithful.You cry out to one who made love manifest in a body, and that One who took on our flesh took on our heaviness took into himself all that we carry and all that we cannot carry. You cry out the truth - that this is a devastating thing, a thing that should not have been, and your cry will reach him. Your cry - if it is anger and sadness and the weight of all things and confusion, just as you wrote to me -Ask him where he is. Ask him to show himself to you, in the weight of all things and the heaviness beyond it. Your cry will reach him.Love, always,hilary

the ache is still beautiful, a letter to preston

Do y’all remember when Preston and I were writing all those letters last year, Tuesdays and Thursdays, writing out this ramble through faith and life and coffee late at night and Gossip Girl and all the rest? And how, those letters, they were the beginning of something wondrous? We are beginning again, new and the same, our selves familiar and not. You can read his last letter to me here.Dear Preston,I will never, ever, ever, EVER do long-distance.Was that what I said? Did I say that to you once, in a conversation, in passing, probably tilting my head the way I do when I'm not sure what I'm saying is true, but I want to convince you that I'm being really thoughtful? I imagine you were painting in your garage at the time, and I could hear the paint hit the canvas with some kind of fierceness that I didn't understand. You paint forcefully, and sometimes I think maybe that's the way of making beauty; a little forceful, the way that brightness asks for strength to bear it. Sometimes, when we're on Skype and you can't see me, I close my eyes, and listen to you painting, and the silence says more than my words will.But me and that long distance. My vehemence when I said those words seems to grow in my memory, a defiance to it I'm not sure was there, but makes a story somehow wilder, so I tell it that way. I was stamping my feet against the old hardwood of my bedroom floor, or something like that, insisting that the way of love must be just something daily, something clear and easy and full of Friday nights barefoot on a beach or along a boardwalk somewhere and that attempting to build across miles and continents and time changes was the worst idea, ever.Never mind the stories I have been told my whole life. Never mind the long walk through the woods behind campus that sunlit afternoon when my dear friend told me that our choices weren't ever about distance, but about steadfastness in the face of it. That distance could be agonizingly hard but that the space created between those two distinct places, and those two distinct people, would be nearer and closer, a mystery closed to those who watch it. And of course that afternoon, when my mother opened the pages of her own writing to me, the binding frayed and worn by love and how she, like me, said she'd never do long distance.But I knew the ache already, I said. I knew the work. I knew the uncertainty. I would never give it a try.I knew so little, P. I knew so little of the ache.Because this? This ache is beautiful.This is the ache of remembering how we sit side by side at that kitchen table and make worlds with our words, offering each other living water for the journey. This is the ache of how I can hear how you laugh with me, almost falling off your chair, how I can feel your hand brush the small of my back as we go up for Eucharist, how I remember the way you look at me sometimes, this look of wonder that just takes my breath away.This is the ache of how our hearts whisper loud across time zones but gentle when we're in the same room. This is the ache of wanting to tell you when I burst in the door out of breath from running with God that I realized, just then, the radical grace that is when God and I are quiet, together, how I can feel Him running with me but how sometimes, when I complain to Him (like I did the other day) that He feels far away His words are sharp and quick about the reason He runs with me (love, and sanctification, and my feeble heart). I'm longing to tell you, not in messages or typed words, but in the look on my face and the unspoken question I know you'll ask me, and how I will answer just by nodding and smiling. And we will have said a thousand things without saying them.I knew nothing about the wild love of long distance. I knew nothing about how the bridges it builds withstand the longest days and heaviest hearts, how the spaces of Skype and these two blogs and how you write my name on an envelope, they are spaces that are gifts, too. And I am the first to say, to you, to whoever might read this, that the distance aches and hurts and the dip and sway of it sometimes knocks me over.But I'd not be me if I didn't admit to you, that more truly, I knew so little of this, how beautiful it is. How wondrous they seem now, the people I thought foolish for trying something I called impossible. How beautiful, how brave. How I now want to call each of them up and say, "I need you to know I see your courage and your strength, how you wove the threads that kept you, cocooned in love." How I want to tell them that the ache is agonizing and how I miss you,but how their ache, and ours, is still beautiful.Love, always,hilary