meadows and witnesses

I stare at the mantelpiece in our living room. There is a pair of baby nail clippers tucked behind one of the bookends, two small rabbit pinatas for Easter that I've waited to give Jack and June because the explosion of confetti needs to happen on our porch and not in our bathroom. In the middle we display our favorite books. These are the books I look at when I wonder why I write, and sometimes, when I wonder who I am.I run my hands along their spines: there are Davy and Reuben and Swede, Cal and Cathy, Asher Lev, Elinor and Marianne. I have read and reread, slipping into the stories like into a pool of cold water, swift and silent, my body and mind submerged in a world so different and so much the same as our own. I read these stories for the sake of entering a space where good is examined and evil challenged, where the Elphaba and Glinda are more complicated than their costumes, where there are quests to be undergone, circuses to be built, a tiger, an orangutan and a boy in a boat. I read to know their worlds and to have those worlds remake my sight.I wrote almost all of my first book, Forgiving God, with those stories watching over my left shoulder. I wrote in bursts, first one section, then another, paragraphs piling up like the laundry that sits in a corner, never quite finished, never quite complete. I would glance up at these writers and characters, and I would keep going, thinking that I would find the end of my story if I just pressed forward long enough.--I thought that the day my book was published I would feel an overwhelming sense of completion. I thought I would wake up to a new me and a new world, submerged in a new Hilary. The hours ticked by and I felt just the same, my laundry was still undone, my kids still wild and the sounds of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker (Act II) still the soundtrack of our bedtime routine. I am still at the beginning, I thought. Have I even changed at all? --I think I keep waiting for a signal to mark that I've grown up, that I'm changing. I keep looking for a report card to come home in my pocket on this season of my life, a neat printed row of letters that tells me how I'm doing, the progress I'm making, whether I can go forward into the next thing. I keep looking for someone to mark and measure the seasons for me. And when the days go by in their usual blur, I am startled, frozen in place.--In ninth grade I traveled down to Texas on a road trip with my school. We were bent on finding the source of one of our school's legends, a van called Rocinante, that had broken down somewhere in Texas when the school was small enough to fit inside 15 passenger seats. We drove down through the south and I fell headfirst into love with it all - the sweet tea in Asheville, the fried okra in Montgomery at a restaurant whose wall was tattooed with the verse, O taste and see that the Lord is good, the gumbo and saxophones of New Orleans.We read this story, this story that's never left me, one afternoon in the heat of Selma while the Spanish moss wafted above our heads. And there is this line in the story, this image that hasn't left me alone - time is a meadow. When we read that, we sat quietly for a while, and tried to imagine our lives not as line but circles. It was impossible for me. I got dizzy from trying to mix up my neatly organized boxes, that steady progress and sure signs of the passing seasons.--Now I stare at my bookcase, littered with the echoes of the life that seems to work only in spirals. I have lived and relived the first few weeks of my son's life, entering and reentering rooms whose doors exist only in my memory. I live on a loop of the same motions, straightening the pillows on the couch or cradling my daughter in the dark, and there is no good measure or meter to these movements. Now I see, perhaps what Faulkner meant was not that we stop making progress, not that we stop changing -but we don't mark our change by rulers or report cards. We can't capture the people we are becoming by holding them up against a measure of completion.Instead, we walk through the meadow. We gather up the bits of our memories and hold them up to the light. We walk back through our memories, feeling how they have changed in our absence. We look at our bookshelves, how they've grown to encompass new stories, how they bear witness to the things we have discovered.I am letting go of the idea that I will feel a sense of completion, that I'll ever wake up to a brand-new self or a report card that details the seasons I'm entering and leaving.And in its place, I am noticing that there are a thousand things bearing witness to who we are becoming. I just have to pull down a story, or walk through a meadow.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).

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

the photograph of my mother

I stole a picture from my parent's mantelpiece in August. It's a rough, 4x6 kind of frame, bent at corners from years of being flung into a suitcase or a box, dust glued to its glass. The back stand of the frame is bent, so it can never stand by itself, solitary against the clean white of a wall or the cherry wood coffee tables of the houses I cut out pictures of in my spare time.I stole it at first because I wanted to fill my office with the evidence that I belonged to something. I wanted picture frames, books on shelves, cute mismatched lamps, a bulletin board with postcards of Van Gogh paintings. I told myself that the old frames would give it a classic, unstudied elegance. I put tea on my shelf and all the mementos of a life still at the beginning: books from my law and ethics class sophomore year next to granola for the days I forget to pack my lunch, glossy prints of faculty art exhibits, my diploma sandwiched between Thirst by Mary Oliver and a bag of Port City Java coffee. I put this picture on my desk next to the larger, shinier one of me hugging my dad at graduation. I almost forgot it.One day when I reached for the phone I knocked it over. It made a sweet, quiet clink onto my desk, a polite cry of dismay. And when I went to pick it up again, I looked at it.And I saw my mother.In this photo she is standing outside in the garden in England, the climbing roses flushed with early spring. The windows behind her are cracked open a bit, to let in the smell of wet, renewed earth - a smell that my dad has always said is in our blood, is good for us. Her arms are folded against her chest in a cable sweater and a pink checked shirt peeks out near her throat.It is the softness that startles me - my mother smiling in such gentle delight, her head tilted and leaning forward, her eyes laughing, but looking through you. She can see me in this picture, even though she doesn't know my name. She can see all the years unfolding between her and Dad, and her gaze has a bigger love than the beginning love of romance. It is mother love and friend love; the love of God and her three year old students in Sunday School. It is the love the house we make as home. It is on your knees love, doing the dishes again love, walking the dog with her twenty-two year old on a Sunday afternoon.There, on my desk, between roses and white windows, between the phone that doesn't ring and a graduation hug, is my mother.The woman I am searching to be already in front of me, smiling at the me that does not yet exist, with a smile that the winery owner will tell me on a Saturday night unites us."I knew right away who you were," he will say, leading me over to where my mom and our guests are sampling reds. "You're the spitting image of your mother."And you will smile, realizing for the first time, that is the biggest compliment someone could pay you.Love,hilary