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

when I haven't joined the gym

I used to live for the exalted feeling of sneakers on my feet at 4:30. The work day ended I would change clothes in my tiny office, slip into new running shoes-real ones-and take off down the three flights of stairs and bound out into the woods behind the campus where I worked. I ran, and I prayed, and I felt in the singing of my bones a bond with the world, with God, with myself.--I have an eating disorder. She is not easily described or categorized. I like food, and I eat it. So far, it seems reasonable, the relationship we are all supposed to have. But there are stretches of days and hours and weeks where she panics at the thought of ice cream and wine and that extra bag of pretzels last Friday lunch. So she writes me notes to remind me that delight will always cost me something, and here I will pay in ounces and pounds, the disappearance of my hip bones under flesh, the dress from three months ago too tight here, and there, and there.She writes me warnings, exhortations - if you don't join the gym you'll just keep gaining weight, if you only did yoga you'd be a better mother, don't forget that someday you'll regret the extra indulgences... everything in moderation, Hilary, no excess, self-care, self-love, it's what well-balanced people do... She was the reason I put on sneakers every day and ran and ran and ran. I was running away from her, running to fulfill her, running to keep her at bay and keep her my best friend.--I had a baby almost exactly 10 months ago. In the chaos of the NICU I lost the weight of him, all the evidence of his presence in my body, so quickly that I seemed disjointed in my skin. For the next nine months I pumped milk for him, and when I pumped I thought briefly of how the calories would slip away from me, safely into someone else, how I could breathe freely for a little while because the eating disorder, she was satisfied with the knowledge that nothing I ate could come haunt us.She promised me that it was better to be this new, loose self ill-fitted in her skin, that it was good to see the ridges of ribs and spinal chord. She promised it made up for the fact that I hadn't joined the gym. It made up for the fact that I hadn't put on those sneakers, that I didn't even know where I had left them.--I stopped pumping earlier this summer, and my flesh appeared again, different, new. The eating disorder sat next to me on the couch, weeping. How could I - become so different, lose control of my body - but she dried her eyes and she resolved with a smile - now is the time to join a gym, Hilary. Other moms do it, other moms make time for self-care and self-love and they go running with their babies and ... and... you can, too. You'll be okay that way. She is always promising me that if I stretch a little farther I will hold onto something better and more beautiful, that feeling of exaltation she used to give me on those long runs in the woods. She is always promising me that riding on every run is the proof of my commitment to doing what is best for my body, my self, my family, my world.It's time to join a gym, Hilary. --I miss the woods, the exaltation of them and the singing, the place where I would stop and look at the water and feel myself in the world and in love with the world. I miss the way the ground pressed up against my feet and the burning of my lungs while I raced myself up the hill. I miss the sweat and the satisfaction. I miss the simplicity of giving her what she demanded of me, the daily thirty minutes, the sense that it relieved me of guilt, that it washed me clean.And I cannot love her anymore, the eating disorder, the person she promises me I'll become if only I give her what she wants. I cannot love her anymore, and I wonder how to escort her out of my house, out of my car, out of my closet. I wonder how to give up all her promises and to press my hands into my skin again and to feel my bones only as mysteries beneath flesh. I wonder how to put Jack on my hip, day after day, and notice that it holds him on its own, how to feel gravity dance with my feet and to see that there are marks, memorials, of pregnancy on my stomach.I cannot love her anymore, and so I don't join the gym. The tiniest, first beginning, and a new feeling - not exaltation, not absolution for a guilt she invented - but hope.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

dear hilary: shun that bulls**

Dear Hilary,What do you do with the "what if's"? What do you do when you're smiling, writing him a letter, confident of the love you have for him--and then that nasty little "what if" crawls its way into the back of your skull? What do you do when you want to believe that you'll be a good wife and mother and student and friend and God-seeker-follower-lover but that "what if" comes and tells you that you will mangle and destroy and harm everything you touch and that the sin and fear you hate so utterly will tie you down and win?love,doubting thomasinaDear doubting thomasina,I try not to swear too much. It's not so much because I don't believe it's ever right but more because I want to be sure that I do so powerfully - that I name things what they are, that I respond with force to things that are forceful, vehemently to things which deserve my vehemence.And the "what ifs", my dear, are not more nor less than bullshit.Yep. I said that word, and I would say it again. The what if's, which slide up to you, glamorous, sleek, offering you a glimpse into the future, the chance to plan ahead, the chance to give you a head start on everything coming your way - they're a bad apple. A bucket of bad apples.The question, "What if this happens?" sidles up to you, and suddenly, then, it seems almost irreversibly, you're far and away down the road of worrying, convinced you've got it wrong and you look behind you and the what if is far away down the road, laughing.I believe that this is the work of darkness in the heart. I'm acquainted with this darkness. I can spin into questions about whether I am a good wife or a good student or a good anything, and from there I ask, "what if I'm not those things and I've been seriously f***ing up every part of my life from birth until now?" It grows, like shadows do at the end of the day - quickly and without warning. And, like darkness, the what if's make you lose your sense of touch, make you feel like you're waving your hand in front of you but you can't feel anything, can't be sure of anything, can't hold onto anything.Oh, how I am acquainted with this.And then there is the fluttering flag planted in your beautiful letter: What do you do?Can I call it, perhaps, how do we overcome? This is what I believe with every fiber of my being: we overcome this bs by shunning it. We gloriously slam the door in its face when it knocks, when it comes around to the side porch, we look at it, and we say "no." Say it with me. No.There is space in the wide wild kingdom of God to overcome - and it begins with no.It begins with shouting back, and I mean it, say it out loud in your room and say it out loud in your letters and say it loud in church or in the car or in the woods, speak it out:I belong to Jesus.Do you remember how Jesus showed us the picture of ourselves, trembling, vulnerable lambs, and then told us - "I am the Good Shepherd"?He said more than that. He said that his sheep know him. That we know the sound of his voice.You writing this to me tells me you know that there is something wrong with the voice of the what-if. It doesn't sound like Jesus, does it? It doesn't sound like the Good Shepherd. It doesn't sound like hope, like love, like confidence in Him through whom we are more than conquerors, through whom we are co-heirs, through whom we are raised up on the last day and never lost.The voice of the what-if is the voice of a stranger.You can call bullshit on that.You can shout-sing-cry-whisper-pray-rage it, tell it that you belong to Jesus, that you do not listen to the voice of the stranger.And then, however you can, in words or tears, in laughter or hope or something else altogether, ask Jesus to call out to you again who you already are. Ask Jesus to tell you the better story of your life, of your hope, of your wonder, of your worth. Ask Jesus, "who am I?"Hear yourself called beloved again. Then, holding onto that, shun those what-ifs.Love,hilary

when I learn something about valor

Eshet chayil - woman of valor.I turn the question over this morning on my way through the frosted trees. The sun is slow to rise this morning, unruly, as if it, too, is tired after the snowfall last night. I sip the gingerbread latte - my nod to the season, to the red Starbucks cups, to the closeness of Christmas. I don't know why I'm wondering about this phrase in particular - woman of valor - but I know about it from the women that start to come to mind - Nish, and Sarah, Lisa-Jo, and Rachel, Ann, Antonia, Elora - and then I realize I know them from across my life, not just across the threads of connection, electricity firing across miles to bring our words to each other.I know them in my mother, wisdom spilling out as she leans back across the end of my bed and reminds me of the way that we are meant to trust God. I know them in my sister, who texts me to remind me she is here and loves me, who raises her son with such patience and grace that I am sometimes speechless at it. I know it in the women who have colored and changed my life by their knowing me - from breakfasts sophomore year to Thanksgiving Black Friday shopping at the Pentagon City Mall to a walk in the woods and tea on her couch to hours of talk about racial reconciliation and education and what it must mean to love God and to believe that we are to know Jesus by what we do with our hands.And I could not stop thinking about it, the words sounding over and over again in my head. Eshet chayil - woman of valor.How do you become a woman of valor? How do you become the fiercer truth-teller, the wiser grace-giver, the woman who spills out light wherever you walk because you cannot help but do that?Because she is brave, this woman of valor. She will wear red lipstick on a too-early morning and put on a blue puffer coat to shovel the walk. She will stand in front of the room and teach. She will preach the truth over coffee or wine, across the sale racks at the consignment shop or in her office with mugs of tea in front of you and rain outside. She will strike out on her own to chase down a dream in New York, in California. She will sing Sara Bareilles in the car and pull up next to a man in a large truck, who will stare at her and laugh, and she will be unashamed. She is brave. She takes the time with you, again and again, to work out the trembling bits, to ask every question or none at all, and she reminds you that there is nothing for it but to live deep and wide and full, wherever you are. She is unafraid of the truth and unafraid to chase it down, across the mountains and rivers, in the hardest moments, in the lightest ones.I know so many women of valor, I realize. I wonder if they know that they are. I wonder if they know, sitting at the table in Panera or drinking tea in my office or driving in my car on our way back from coffee. I wonder if they know, who have taught me the way grace feels and moves in a life, have taught me that being brave is worth it, in their questions and their laughter and the way they love.I pull my car into the parking space, cut the engine, let the song finish playing from the speakers. I wonder if becoming a woman of valor has something to do with hope, with singing along with Sara and reading the good words of the women who have taught me what valor looks like.Maybe I can begin in the hope to be more like them. To learn the shape of their kindness, their graciousness, their fierce love of the truth. Their courage.I  begin in the smaller prayer, just as I walk up the steps to begin my day. Lord, might you make me a woman of valor?Love,hilary

dear hilary: honor is not in a tan line

Dear Hilary,Beach season is a self-conscious time for most girls, but sometimes as a Christian I find it especially stressful.  On the one hand, I have society and the media telling me that my body is hideous and that I'll never be considered attractive unless I can live up to an unreachable standard.  On the other hand, I have church culture telling me that as a girl, my body is TOO attractive, to the point where I need to be ashamed of it and keep it covered up at all costs to "protect" the men folk, and I get raised eyebrows from church friends when I say that I'm thinking about buying a bikini for the first time this summer.  As a Christian, how can I learn to be comfortable in my own skin without being improper?  And how can I shut out the noise long enough to just relax and enjoy a summer day by the ocean?Love,Modestly PerplexedDear Modestly Perplexed,I love you in the midst of this question. I love how you grapple with it, the wonder about the line that doesn't really exist in the ways we want it to - the line between feeling not attractive enough about ourselves and feeling too attractive towards other people. I want to tell you loud and bright in the midst of this, if I can put my two cents in, since you've asked?buy the bikini.don't forget sunscreen (my upper back will testify to the pain that comes with sunburn...), and take a book from the library with its crinkling plastic protector that creaks slightly as you turn the pages.I don't tell you because buying or wearing a bikini is the only stamp of approval or a self who sees her self well. I don't tell you because I think everyone should, or because I think that by putting it on you will answer the question about modesty and attraction and the whole mess of expectations and cultural norms that come with them. Modesty is about honor, not tan lines.  Modesty is about an attitude towards your body and others, not about a mystery ledger of rules that say, hemlines of this length or longer or shirts of this material but not that, or dresses that swivel with your hips slightly, but not extremely...So truthfully, I think our choices about what to wear follow from our other choices about how we want to walk through the day, how we want to approach one another, how we want to see one another. We can't buy a bikini and hope that it will make us brave or fearless on its own - we have to choose the brave and fearless when we're wearing two sweaters and a pair of jeans. And we can't hope those two sweaters and a pair of jeans will make us magically modest - we have to choose the attitude of modesty and honor when we're wearing the bikini.Maybe it's a wild hope of mine that we can gather back from the stray corners of this or that book or blog post or church conversation or pinup calendar a better sense of what it means to live inside these beautiful bones. Maybe it's wishful thinking that you and I can take the questions tumbling from you about being free and beautiful and alive, and lay them next to questions about being thoughtful and attentive and sensitive - and do that free of the chaos of voices with loud opinions and tape measures.But I'm going to hope for that. I'm going to go ahead and say you won't come up with the same answers that I will, or that your next-door neighbor will, because we live and move with different communities and so our choices, in seeking to honor others and ourselves, will be different. We needn't fear that. We need to listen to each other. If the girl in the pew next to you makes different choices about modesty and her body, listen first. Why does she choose that? And listen without feeling that her choice is a secret expectation on you to choose the same - honor is in listening and upholding one another in how we learn to live out these questions in our own skin.I can see you wanting to run along the ocean at the turn of the tide,  build a sandcastle in the middle of the afternoon for hours, turrets and a moat and a driftwood drawbridge, chase after the joy of summer and let the sun warm your shoulders.Buy the bikini. I know it's beautiful.Love,hilary

last night, I almost quit

You wouldn't believe it, would you? That it should sound so easy, to leave words behind?To give them up.To give, them, up? How could I? Haven't words always been my bones, my bricks, my feathers and wings and roots? Haven't they been the way I learn and forget and learn again? Hasn't it always been writing, mine the quick answer to Rilke's lingering question - whether I must write, else die. Haven't I always said yes? But I almost quit last night.I imagined myself cutting loose the threads that moor me to a space in a corner of the world so much wider than I understand, or fathom; I imagined how it might be, to put away documents in folders, occupy my mind with the already-told stories, the things that are unique and breathtaking and here, in front of us.I imagined silence replacing comment counting. I imagined tucking up my words like quilts in attic boxes. I imagined no more bending and breaking beneath the words and their silence and their speaking.No stories that begin and end in the unfinished places, no more hitting "publish" on a post you're never quite sure resounds the way you  thought it would.No more desperate cherishing of lithe or luminescence or blessing, of caress and carries, of child for the way their sound looks as it finds an ear, the way they build up meaning, the way they are.It’s not the writing of it, it’s the reeling of the writing. It's what I think I could write, if only. But, yet, then, I plaster together words with commas and prayers and they flutter groundward, and there still isn't a good answer, or maybe any answer.I’m bravest and most afraid here.I imagined quitting to fold up inside a safer version of myself; I saw my years stretching out before me, word-less. I pressed my hands to my face, and thought I could see me, not undone by a poem or the way I cannot hear a character speak, not worried over the choice of light and illumine.Brave and afraid, I write still.Brave and afraid, I publish a post where I talk about the almost-quitting, the question of why someone would try this work of penning  glory into syllables and vowels.Brave, and afraid.Love,hilary

dear hilary: be braver

Dear Hilary,I just watched the Brené Brown video - the one about being vulnerable, people who live wholeheartedly? Do you know that one? Her Ted Talk? I want to know how you have learned about doing that in your life so far? How do you live vulnerably?Love,Un-vulnerable in SeattleDear Un-vulnerable,I've watched that video a bunch of times in the last few months. It was a suggestion from my counselor, and, like most of her suggestions, it was a good one. When I first saw it, I was sitting in my office at work and worrying about something (I'm a bit of a worrier, I'll confess). I was eating these really good cookie things I got in the grocery store, 2 boxes for $5, and they promised to be very nutritious and give me hours and hours of energy as well as fill me with the sweet taste of hydrogenated blueberry (I promise, actually, they're really good). As I munched, I worried, and Brené talked, and I thought about vulnerability and shame and courage and those words I'm so fond of and so very not good at living by.This year, the year of 22? I have learned that I am braver than I thought I was. I have also learned that being brave is more about being braver - about the growing from one kind of brave to another, far more than it is about the thing itself.I want to start with being braver than I thought I was. I go on runs sometimes - you probably know this from my blog - and when I run, I talk. I talk to God, I talk to the birds, I talk even a little bit to myself. And the things I say are brave not because they are difficult, but because they are gracious. "I love my body," I said one summer afternoon. "I have done a good job at work this week," I said as I rounded the muddy right turn in the path behind the college buildings, the one that leads to my favorite pond. "God, Your goodness is bigger than my idea of it," was the thought last week as I ran hands up through a cul-de-sac praying for a sign from Him. These things are brave: because they are words of love instead of judgment, words of a recovering good girl who now believes that her job is not to hurl condemnation at her legs or her work ethic or her relationship with God, but instead to say things in love. That's brave.Brave looks like wearing bright blue pants on a Friday night, like eating Ben & Jerry's from the carton, like whispering to your best friend that you do not know if you can believe that you are worthy. Yes, un-vulnerable, brave is in the work of admitting all the places where you ache. This year, my year of 22, I have learned that to be brave is to walk into a room and, for just a moment, believe that all things work together for the good.And then that oh-s0-much-more-important thing: in this, my 22nd year, I learned that it is not about achieving a level of brave all for its own sake. It's not about an arbitrary measurement, where you suddenly are brave enough, where you have arrived at a satisfactory level... Oh no. Being brave is for something else: for love, for the truth, for the sake of the bigger, richer life that you must seek. You must not seek it for merely self-actualization: you must seek it because to be alive is a great and grave privilege. But being brave is more about being brave in the direction of the other things you seek. Therefore, it is a movement, a blossoming. One day you manage to say to your abs that you love them. One day you pray and release. One day, in the middle of the day, you watch the Ted Talk again and you say to yourself, I want to live wholeheartedly, too. And that is brave. And that is braver.Living vulnerably is not a thing to be achieved, my dear friend. It is more a striving to live according to the great privilege it is to be alive, a striving to offer your fullest self because you believe that self is so radiant, so very real, that to offer less is to be less. It is a striving, a blossoming, a becoming.In this, my 22nd year, I am beginning to strive. I am beginning to hope that I will be braver now than I was three years ago and braver in twenty years than I am in ten years, and all the while, seeking not merely bravery or courage or vulnerability: seeking instead the good, wondrous life.That's what I know about being vulnerable, Un-vulnerable: yours is a good and wondrous life. Be brave in its direction.Love,hilary

i begin again

courage: to tell your story with your whole heart.we can't practice compassion with other people until we are kind to ourselves. This. It's this I have avoided and pretended not to know.But compassion -is a result of authenticity -of vulnerability.Nothing less.To have a compassionate imagination, as one friend named my dearest ambition over swirling wine glasses and chocolate cake, to walk into another person's very story- that takes the kind of gentleness we cannot know until we have done it. And we cannot do it without beginning at ourselves.I typed this blog post weeks ago, when I first discovered what felt at the time to be the most revolutionary, inspiring, terrifying, truthful talk I had ever heard. Brene Brown told her audience (and me) on her Ted talk that we cannot begin to be compassionate, to build connection, to grow in love, unless we are vulnerable.Really, she said, the people who live wholehearted don't think about whether vulnerability is particularly good or bad; they simply recognize that it is necessary.But last night I didn't want it to be necessary.I didn't want to build anymore. I didn't want to be vulnerable, to walk around with my thoughts on a blog or in the air against the black sky flecked with a lazy snowstorm. I didn't want to think anymore about whether I tell half the truth or the whole truth, whether there is a window into my heart or not.Sometimes the courage meets the hard place and the messy place and it seems to evaporate. Sometimes the Wednesday night heading home at 10:45 makes you think those words about authenticity and vulnerability are just words on a page without any reality, any connection to you, any roots.And maybe that's okay.Maybe it's okay to begin there. To begin again, there.Some days you hear beautiful and true things and you don't want them to be beautiful or true, and you begin there. Some days, you build bird by bird, brick by brick, and you have to pause and admit to yourself that bricks and birds are not always easy. And you begin there. And if you, wherever you are, find your courage meeting the harder places, find your eyes and arms a little weary, find your beginning in the bird by bird -I'm with you.We begin here.Love,hilary

dear hilary: gripped by fear

Yesterday, this kind of amazing and crazy thing happened. I got to share over at Lisa-Jo's space, and I would love it if you'd visit me over that way? Just click here. And if you have a question for me to ponder with you? Just email me: letterstohilary@gmail.com

Dear Hilary,

I don't think of myself as a pessimist (and I don't think others do either) but I'm noticing my tendency to expect the worst. The phone rings and I think tragedy has struck. Someone pulls me aside and I instantly assume I'm in trouble. Sometimes the fear makes me sick to my stomach.  I know worrying isn't productive and most of the things I fear never come to fruition but logic isn't loosening fear's grip on me. How can I shake it?

Gripped

Dear Gripped,

I read your question and thought about it as I drove home from sign language class. I drove in silence, asking myself occasionally what fear is, where it comes from - what might we possibly do to shake ourselves free from it?

The words that came to me as I swung my car into the driveway, and trudged up the steps to my house through the slush and rain, through the night that always feels impossibly dark, were not my own words. They were Rilke's. I wonder if you know them, from his Letters to a Young Poet?

“Only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.”

I don't pretend to really know what's going on in these words, because I'm far from having sounded the depths of much of anything. But, Gripped, I think Rilke's bigger point is that the opposite of fear is not only courage. It is also trust. 

We are all convinced that the things we do not know - the phone calls we haven't picked up, the being pulled aside by the teacher, the long silence from a friend, the unreturned email - they must be a monster. They must mean that terrible thing that we have always secretly wondered about, but never really tried to understand or imagine. Fear thrives on the things we don't want to know - thrives in darkness, in vague worry, in the unexamined and unaccepted. We too often keep ourselves from knowing the things we are afraid of. And so we do not trust them. And so the fear lives long.

To shake fear, I don't know that you always need to be brave as we typically define it. It doesn't mean being angry with yourself for your fear or trying to "outreason" or "outlogic" yourself or demanding that you suddenly be fearless.

Instead, perhaps we can shake fear by widening ourselves to receive all that the world holds for us. What might the experiences that have you shivering with fear hold for you that is rich and beautiful and good? What might they grow inside you? What might they help you become? What might the phone call bring you - can you imagine in the thirty seconds before you answer it being something marvelous? Can you widen, even if you just say it inside your head, your heart to accept this new thing?

Fear keeps you from being that fully alive self Rilke talks about: one who is open to even the most incomprehensible experiences, one who trusts that even those things which are strange and terrifying hold something good. Fear feeds on our uncertainties, but most of all, fear thrives on our lack of trust.

I think we shake it by repeating the gestures of trust over and over, in our head and in our life, until they are as natural as breathing: arms open, eyes wide, running toward the world.

It will undoubtedly disappoint us sometimes. It will be less than what we want. It will be too much. It will bring crappy phone calls and teachers yelling and family fights and silence and shouting. But all of this makes us more alive, Gripped. All of this, even the things you fear most this moment, can be the very things that are the making of you.

Trust me.

Love,hilary

to the gypsy mama

Dear Lisa-Jo,I'm writing quick because there is always another email or another call or another worry, and I wanted to put something in my space, reach out across these clicking computer keys to tell you, like I told you the other week - your book is a beautiful thing. It's beautiful in all the unexpected ways you taught me to think about beauty. It is the beauty of brave, of encouragement, of moving outside yourself to give something real and living and true to the people that you love, to the people God calls you to. I'll never forget how I first met you - my heart racing and worried about what you would think, since you know my dad and I didn't want to disappoint. And you opened your arms to me. You hugged me onsite.You took this 20 year old lost sheep in DC inside your heart, told her to hold fast to Jesus, to hold fast to the heart she hoped to have, to love bigger and wider. And then you lived it out for me.You lived it in Himalaya (turned Tandoori Grill, but still with that lunch buffet).You lived it when you let me marvel at your pregnant Zoe belly in November at Family Night Dinners.You lived it when you brought me to Relevant (now Allume I think) and let me learn the dip and sway of afternoon naps, and I still hear you and Zoe when I hear "Winter Song" and "Poison and Wine".You lived it, this big, bold love of Jesus when I got to meet Ann and Holley and I about fell over with amazement, that such women could look at me instantly with love, me, "the baby whisperer," as you called me. It might be the best title I've ever had.You live it every day, gypsy mama, and now there is going to be a book about it, about this marvelous rich love, about this parenting journey, about how God breaks our hearts open with His good gifts. And every time I look at you, my eyes full of uncertainty about those boys, you know the ones, and the longing to be with them and the not-sure-how-it-will-ever-work-out - you give me back a gypsy mama love.You give me a love that believes God calls us to a bigger life than just a job. That God calls us to a bigger love than just quid-pro-quo. That God calls us to dance silly in our kitchens at 22, drink caramel mochas without thinking about calories, to listen to one song on repeat 1,009 times.I love you, Lisa-Jo. I love this book of yours, this beautiful idea. I love this bold new step. I wanted to tell you, so that you knew it from my words to yours, from my heart to yours.Someday I hope I am a gypsy mama too, all bold love and wild grace. Someday, I hope my love looks like yours.Love,hilary

dear hilary: the tuning fork

Dear Hilary,I want to please other people. I want to do whatever will make them happy. You want 100 photocopies in 3 minutes? Done. You want a strategic plan for the future of an organization at this college? Done. You want me to be there, run this errand, listen to this problem? I would love to. But then I run headlong into this wall. I really want to be a writer. I really want to be a counselor, of some kind. I really want to put writing and counseling together in some strange beautiful combination, and I don't want to lose threads of theology, or of my love of French, or my love of theater... When I ask people what I should do, they tell me that I would be a great PhD student, of history or political science or philosophy. They tell me I could run an organization, a school even. I want to please them, and I don't want to disappoint anyone's dreams. Help?Love,Afraid to DisappointDear Afraid to Disappoint,Our piano is out of tune at home. The keys clink strange half-tones, and I swear I can hear it groaning when someone asks it to sing one more rendition of "Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming." Have you ever watched someone tune an instrument? They take that strange fork instrument and hit it against something - your knee, or a piece of plastic or wood, the door frame, or something. And then they hold it up to their ear to hear it ringing. The air moves between the two tines of the fork and the note - a middle C, or an A - becomes the foundation for the rest.I have been thinking in these last few months that certain loves in our lives are like a tuning fork. They give us the foundation for the rest, a measure against which we can understand how other things might fit into our lives.Sometimes it's terrifyingly clear that they don't sound the same. I do not love everything in the magnitude that I love writing. I do not breathe, and ache and live in biology; I do not yearn for one more hour with a potter's wheel or a linoleum block printing press. And why should we be afraid of this? We will never be able to do everything, anyway. In the small amount of time we are gifted, why shouldn't our hearts be caught up in the work we love most?I think you ache to write. I think your body physically feels the need to put words on paper. Why else would you write? I think you are beginning to tune the piano of your life by the writing tuning fork. So strike it and listen. Does counseling sound like that? Does teaching? Does directing plays or traveling to France? Does politics, or philosophy, or history?You write to me that you don't want to disappoint others in their ideas of what you should do. I can understand that. You don't want to say no to a career in history or political science or philosophy, partly because you love these professors and mentors. You want to honor their work, affirm the value of their field. That's admirable. But, Afraid to Disappoint, I have to tell you that the only sure disappointment in this life is living less of you. You are the unlikely combination of counseling, writing, French, history, politics, philosophy, and faith. You are the unlikely wedding planner meets chemical engineer. You are the unlike-everything-else musician turned playwright turned nanny turned environmental advocate...Being that, that strange impossible combination, takes everything you've got. It will cost you the security of pleasing others. It will cost you the comfort of a plan. It will cost you a life characterized by steps and guidelines and directions and each thing done right.It will pay you back with a heart that hurts so much sometimes you think that the person just stabbed you. It will give you back failed attempts to plan weddings and failed attempts to get a second interview and failed attempts to move to France. It will give you back uncertainty and breakups at two in the morning when it isn't said but unsaid, and you leave and lie on your bed thinking that for sure you are dead and there is no more and what else could there be, and you'll play country music and read Dear Sugar and throw the book across the room because this life will be so damn mysterious.But isn't that what you really want? To throw books across the room because of the damn mystery of it all, the deep love that roars, the brilliant failure, the moment of singular compassion, the breakup at 2am and the return flight from France and everything it teaches you?Strike the tuning fork. There isn't anything to be afraid of.Love,Hilary

dear hilary: hormones and love

Dear Hilary,First of all, what is the deal with our hormones? I feel like a hostage sometimes in this crazy pattern of attraction and sex drive and then I have other moments where I wonder what on earth is going on. And then I think, what's the right way to do this, anyway? Is there one? A right way to be young and have hormones and be attracted and want others to be attracted back to me, all without going overboard?Love,Hormones + Love?Dear Hormones + Love?,First of all, the deal is that it is actually quite normal to have hormones. We're supposed to have them. They do a bunch of things for us besides signal somewhere deep in our gut that the man or woman across the aisle in the airplane is oh-so-fine. They help our growth, our metabolism (giving us energy), reproduction, the sexual function, our mood... they are powerful chemical messengers, traveling through our bodies (released, I just learned, by major endocrine glands like the thyroid and the pituitary). All of this, aside from making me very, very interested in biology, tells me that your hormones are not alien invaders. They aren't holding you hostage. They're actually a part of you. Maybe it's our culture or our background or our religious beliefs or just our general fear of the body (powerful yet feeble thing that it is), but we must get past the idea that our bodies desiring other bodies is a strange plot twist. They're designed that way, love. We experience powerful attraction to that oh-so-fine man/woman in seat 12E because we are sexual beings. We experience it instinctively. I think it might be that simple.Like all feelings, realizing that you are wondering about sex and your sex drive and if you should or can or will or might someday want to have it is kind of terrifying. Some of this is fun - I look really hot in this dress! - and some of it is fearful - What if they don't think so, or do I really want that to be what they are thinking about when we have a conversation about politics? - and all of it is new.You don't have to have answers. You don't even have to write a letter to me asking for them. I think my advice in your situation, at the beginning of grappling with these questions is to begin to pay attention. Listen to yourself. What do you respond to? What worries you? Where do you feel a disconnect? Pay attention to your answers. Pay attention to how you understand your body, your sexuality, your heart and your mind. You are you, made up of all these things and more, and you stand closest to it all.You ask me for a right way to do this, a right way to enjoy being young and yet not go overboard. I don't know that there is any way to begin to know "the right way" except by listening. Really listen, though. Your letter tells me that you want more than just a quick answer. You don't want to be told that it's okay to make out, but not get undressed, or that you can kiss someone who you aren't dating, but not more. You don't want the highlighted rules, do you?You want a framework. You want a way to make these decisions so that they echo you: authentic, beautiful, young, nervous you. Lists of rules aren't helpful, in the end, because they don't bring a bigger picture with them. They don't help you see the purpose behind the decisions you make.Give yourself some space to listen. Be brave and go first and ask your close friends about how they might answer the question - and listen to them. Begin to ask yourself, "What do these feelings mean? How do I want to express attraction? What do I want to do with my feelings? How do I want to live fully and well?"That's the best place I know to begin in almost everything in life. Including us and all those wonderful crazy hormones.Love,hilary

a new anointing (on being confirmed)

On Sunday I learned why I need Sacraments.Not why we have them, exactly. I know that story, the richness of worship, the liturgical work of the people of God, the long history of Orthodox and Roman Catholic and Anglican and these visible signs of invisible grace. I could trace a history through books I still need to read, walk around in the Oxford History of Christian Worship or write a long academic sounding paper about it.But on Sunday, I learned why I need them.I need the Sacrament because I get lost.I got lost all through college in the rambling halls of beautiful ideas and bigger questions, lost in the big ache of the world, lost in the small ache of my own heart.I got lost in high school in the race to be thinner, prettier, something more than what I was.I get lost in the work of growing up, dazzled by ambition, tempted by every conceivable thing I could want and don't have.And so Jesus offers me the liturgical life: a life of daily reminders of Him, a life of prayer at morning and evening, a life of meditation and silence, of gestures to seal the Gospel in my mind and in my heart and on my lips, to cover myself in the Cross of Him who died so that I might not die.I need to be confirmed because kneeling before the Bishop, a shepherd who follows the Good Shepherd, who prays powerful in the Spirit and lifts high the Cross, this work brings me home again. He cried as he prayed over me, and his words, simple, still, echo forever in my heart: "This is a new anointing, a refreshment, my daughter. We release this your daughter into your care, Lord Jesus."I need the Sacraments to help me stop all my running around, butting my head against the fence. I need the Sacraments to be a signpost and an emptying of myself and a moment to feel the rush of the Spirit move.This is a new anointing.This is a deepening, a widening, a pouring out.I need the Sacraments to insist that the Lord builds this house, and He is the sure foundation. And this Sunday, not tripping, but crying, the Sunday of St. Michael and All Angels, I received a new anointing.And my heart is forever changed.Love,hilary

i make you a promise (on being confirmed)

Tomorrow is the making of promises. The candidates stand before the Bishop, and he says: You stand in the presence of God and his Church; with your own mouth and from your own heart you must declare your allegiance to Christ and your rejection of all that is evil. Therefore I ask these questions:I'm getting confirmed tomorrow.That means promises. That's what confirmation is, this promise-making moment, myself in front of the Bishop and the Church and in the presence of Christ, and the words will flow and my knees will knock together and I'm one hundred percent sure I'll almost trip somewhere in the service.But I'm getting confirmed tomorrow.Therefore I ask these questions:Do you turn to Christ? I turn to Christ.Do you repent of all your sins? I repent of all my sins.Do you renounce Satan, his works and all the evil powers of this world? I renounce them all. Do you renounce the desires of your sinful nature and all forms of idolatry? I renounce them all.It isn't the same as when I first felt God move. It isn't the moment when I fell head over heels in love with Him in Italy looking at Fra Angelico's fresco and realizing that God loves art and music and beauty enough to let us make it. It's not that sweetness of prayer with a friend in a parking lot. It is me, out on a limb of  a promise to God. A promise that I see Him, His Cross, His story. A promise that I will stand up from the middle of the pigsty and come home to Him. A promise to name evil as evil, and not hide behind anything that's "cultural" or "philosophical" or "complicated."I now call upon you to declare before God and his Church that you accept the Christian faith into which you were baptized, and in which you live, grow and serve.Do you believe and trust in God the Father, who made this world? I believe and trust in him.Do you believe and trust in his Son Jesus Christ who redeemed humankind? I believe and trust in him.Do you believe and trust in his Holy Spirit who gives life to the people of God? I believe and trust in him.Tomorrow I will make a promise to trust. Tomorrow I will make a promise to believe, a promise that I do believe, to live and grow and serve out this one life as a long obedience and a wild journey and a joyful acceptance of grace.I make you a promise tomorrow, Jesus, that all I am and have and hope for, all of it, belongs to You. I make you a promise tomorrow, Jesus, in the better silence after my words, that I am bound up in You, and all is grace, and all is love.Tomorrow I make a promise to love the Truth. To belong to Him. Love,hilary

and humbly confess your sins (on being confirmed)

"The Lord be in your heart and upon your lips that you may truly and humbly confess your sins: In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.Oh no. I have to say something. This is the part where I say something. This is the part where I have to make words come out of my mouth. He is waiting for me, sitting in the rocking chair in the small prayer room. Oh, no. Why did I promise to do this? What do I even have to confess? What's this for, anyway? "I confess to Almighty God, to his Church, and to you, that I have sinned by my own fault in thought, word and deed, in things done and left undone; especially _______."That's all we are given in the small red book. Only that thin frame, those few words. What am I going to say? How do you begin to tell the God who already knows everything you've done and everything you've left undone anything? Why does He want me to do this? I mean, what have I done that's that bad, really? The priest waits, time left outside the door. It's only us and the rocking chairs and the cross hanging on the wall. I have to say something. I reach a hand out for my journal, clear my throat. I flip a few pages over, wondering if this was a terribly foolish idea."I have been jealous." That's the first one, and the words slip out like water from a pitcher, spilling over the room, over the sanctified silence. I have been angry at God, and resentful. I have been... Words pool around my hands as I talk to the ground, then to the ceiling, close my eyes and leave the journal pages unread. I catch my breath a few minutes later, look back at the cross hanging on the wall, bow my head again."For these and all other sins which I cannot now remember, I am truly sorry. I pray God to have mercy on me."The sacrament of confession is not popular. I see why, now. We are so used to giving justifications for things. We were so mad that night because... we lied to that person because... it wasn't really that bad. We hide behind these carefully sculpted excuses, reasons, our logic turned in to defend our hearts from the truth.In confession there isn't any space for those rationalizations. It isn't about the great reasons you have for everything you do; it's laying your life in front of God and whispering that most of it has been mess and much of it has been sin and all of it needs His love. In all that silence, the choir singing scales behind me, I pool my words, my life, my faults, at the feet of Christ. And I admit, for the first time in a long time, that I need Jesus to put away my sins. In the Anglican church (and in most liturgical traditions) we say that the sacraments are an visible sign of an invisible grace. They aren't magic, wish-fulfilling, emotionally-satisfying, problem-solving rituals. They are the heartbeat of the people of God who are saved by grace. They are reminders, bells that ring out, signposts on the road, lighthouses amid the tossing sea.The sacraments don't save us. But in every gesture, every word, every silent meditation, every blank space, they remind us of the One who did.I don't go to confession, I realize as we near the end of the Rite of the Penitent, because I believe it will make all things right with God. I don't go because it has special favor in the Kingdom. I don't go because good Christians do it. I don't go because it "works."I go to meet again the Son of Man who has already done the work for me. I go to hear Jesus say that already He has put my sin as far away as East is from West. I go because in the steady words and the sign of the cross, I mark in my heart His promise:Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die.And I scuff my heels on the floor and wipe a tear or two from eyes at this marvelous grace poured out in old words and new buildings, in strangers who are pilgrims together, in heads bowed and fingertips bent in prayer."The Lord has put away all your sins." He says, strong and clear.Thanks be to God. Love,hilary

on holocene (and growing wings)

They played "Perth" first. We are almost as a second thought, as they look out at the thousands of plaid shirts and skinny jeans gathered under the white tent, almost surprised to see us there. They turn their heads back to drums, guitar, close their eyes to everything but this miraculous emerging sound.I hear the music, but I'm lost somewhere inside myself, inside my preppy clothes and self-consciousness. I scuff at the pavement, rub my hands up and down my striped cotton sweater, wish I had studied the lyrics or knew how to stand in the crowd with the music and the people and the cheap wine smell. Somewhere behind me I hear a couple giggle as they share a cigarette.Then they play "Beth/Rest", the song I love but don't really understand. The words wash over the crowd and the strobe lights ricochet off the white faces, the instruments, the water to our left. I can't see the moon but in the song, somehow, I hear the night, the landscape, the horizon line.I sway my hips from side to side, conscious, still a bit out of place. I can't quite shake the idea that I shouldn't be here. This music is for the cool kids - the ones who knew this band years ago and followed Justin Vernon before Bon Iver. This is for people who live braver, more on the edge, who can actually play a guitar and who can sit on the beach in late summer humming "Calgary" while drinking espresso.But then? Then they play Holocene.The pavilion of thousands empties. All I can hear is Justin singing, and the drums battering my ribcage. The people behind me are still smoking, whispering that this song is "so good" but they seem hundreds of miles away. I close my eyes. He sings that line, the one that always gets me: And at once, I knew, I was not magnificent.This is the song I played while I drove down side roads the night of graduation day, after all the leaving, before all the arriving.This is the song I played to wake up on cold February mornings.This is the song I played to sway babies to sleep in my apartment in the haze of the afternoon.This is the song I played to make promises, and, sometimes, when they are broken.He sings Holocene and I come back to myself. The guitar repeats its wandering journey up to that top note, the drums roll, and the night suddenly, wildly, is about growing wings.We all have a Holocene. Isn't that part of the reason we keep making music, even when we sing only to mirrors and each other, even when we try to hide our voices in the bigger swelling sound of a church choir, even when we only know how to play three chords on the guitar and the cello isn't yet a part of our body, but an awkward dance partner?We make music to remember the sounds of all the things we can't put words to. We make music to imprint ourselves, to make snow angels across history, to grow wings. Yes, that. We make (and hear) music to grow wings.Last Thursday I went to the Bon Iver concert. He played Holocene, and I grew wings. I stepped for a moment inside a bigger self, inside a self unafraid to be her self.Dear readers, could I ask you something? Could you play your Holocene today? Could you let it repeat itself over, and over, growing your courage? I keep dreaming that with all these small gifts of brave things, someday we'll all take flight together.all my wild and winged love,hilaryPS. Another one of those songs? This ("I Will Wait" by Mumford and Sons)

dear hilary: the twitter failure

Psst. I know I'm 22, and a new 22 at that - but if you ever had a question, or wanted to ponder something out loud with me in this space? Shoot me an email at hilary.sherratt@gmail.com. I would love to wonder about things with you (and I'm always looking for new questions). Dear Hilary,I don't want to write this letter to you. Writing this letter means admitting that I don't know how to do something. I am a blogger. Kind of. I am in love with writing. But I'm not being very disciplined about it. I started blogging a while ago, and then I wanted people to read my writing, and "follow" me, and I started (trying) to use Twitter, but I just... I don't know how to put my question into words - it is about discipline, and writing, and blogging, and how to do it. I don't want to fall off the horse. But I don't know how to make this writing go.Love,Twitter FailureDear Twitter Failure,140 characters. That's all you get in Twitter-land. 140 characters to share a story, a link, to ask someone a pithy question or jab at someone else with a witty turn of phrase. 140 characters and that INCLUDES spaces. I don't know who these Twitter-gurus are. Maybe they live on a mountain somewhere, coming up with ways to shorten jokes and make links zippier and find the oh-so-important tag line that will make people more likely to click over. There are Twitter parties, Tweet-ups and meet-ups and iPhone apps and Instagram. It's enough to make our heads spin and our fingers quake.It's enough to make anyone dipping at the beginning of things feel like a "twitter failure."But did you ever pause to think you didn't set OUT to be a twitter winner? You didn't start your blog because you wanted to tweet about it - you tweeted about your writing because you believed that people should read it. Because there are aching beautiful things inside you and you wanted to share them with the world. You try through twitter. You try through blogging. You try through coffee dates and prayers and shouting matches and letters written on old notebook paper.The heart of your complaint isn't about Twitter anyway, is it? It's about laziness and discipline and this work of writing.There are only two questions to ask you. Two questions, and the rest is simple:1. must you write?2. if you must, will you put your ass on the floor and write?If the answer is yes to one, then I hope your answer is also yes to two. I hope if you dig inside yourself, like Rilke tells us to in "Letters to a Young Poet" and you discover that you must write. That it sings like a bird aching to be uncaged, that it is the thing you can't help doing... then please, say yes to question two. Put your ass on the floor, as Dear Sugar says, and write. Pick a number of posts and promise your blog and your heart that you will write them. Pick the ways you share those with others - maybe twitter, maybe not... maybe you need to just write them for a while and not worry about whether anyone is reading them. But if you believe this is work you should do, then you must do it.The savvy use of Twitter will be irrelevant.Love,hilary