on champagne and learning to walk

Preston bought me a nice bottle of champagne tonight. The kind of bottle that means we are having a big celebration, that there is something amazing deserving of the best feasts. We drove to buy the champagne after I finished class for the day, just after I got my comprehensive exam results. Our exams are graded; I got an A-.While Preston drove, he declared that this was worthy of that nice bottle of champagne. I called it "pretty good."What he wanted to celebrate, I wanted to say only, well, I passed. I couch my pride in a constant future improvement, I feel good only if I get the chance to do even better next time. But of course, there is no next time for comprehensive exams. That's part of the joy, isn't it? It should be. But there I was, holding the nice champagne in its paper sack in the passenger seat, calling it only "pretty good."What is it about the future that dulls the shine of the present? What is it about the possibility of something even better that makes the real somehow less glorious than God has declared it to be?--I told someone this summer that, Jack? He is the real. He is what my ideals give way before. The ideals of me as a mother in her all-natural, breastfeeding, right-kinds-of-product and no-screen-time and ... glory. That sheen of imagined glory. I said that Jack has cut through it all. He looks at me and I give way. I give way to his real laugh, that dolphin squeak of joy over his trach. He looks at me and I give way, I give way to the goodness of the formula that keeps him growing, the screens that bring him people telling stories in ASL, in a language that he already seems to love. I give way to the real of his life.--Why won't I let Jack cut through the sheen of my imagined glory as a student?Why do I hold the nice champagne and permit myself only to say "pretty good"?--This is the summer where Jack first started to learn to walk. He pulled himself up onto chairs, plastic toy tables that make over 1,000 unique noises, along precarious couch cushions. He fell and he pulled back up and he banged his hands against the surface and he laughed.This is the summer where I sat down to watch him learn how to walk. I could have given that up, I could have studied 30 more hours a week, I could have spent my time grasping the sheen of the student I think I ought to be.And when I first saw the A-, I said to myself, you could have, you should have. Jack was learning to walk. He wanted to hold my hands in the dining room and cross the floor on two feet. He wanted to be held and then to launch himself away from my chest to grab the icon of St. Michael that hangs on the wall near his door. Jack was learning to play peek-a-boo with me. Jack was ripping my copy of Marx and Wittgenstein in his frenzy to stand up independently, pulling my high stack of books down around him.Was all that only pretty good? Was all that not worth the champagne, the celebration?--I am learning to walk, too. I am learning to walk down that well-worn path and answer myself differently. Was it only pretty good? No, it was more. It was the fullness of what I had, it was pouring out the hours, the understanding, the work. It was spilling out onto the altar the hours I had spent - standing bent double to anchor my son's first steps - perched in a chair on the second floor of the philosophy building reading and rereading Kierkegaard, Mill, Hume - worrying myself sick over Heidegger and misunderstanding Marx - singing a human being to sleep.I am rewalking the well-worn path and saying something new. It isn't just pretty good, it is good, full stop. I gave way to the real of my son's life. I gave way, but I did not give up. I gave way, but I did not give in. I gave way, but the way was still full, still fruitful, still full-stop good. --We popped the champagne, we laughed and kissed Jack and watched him try to pull St. Michael off the wall.This is good. Full stop.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

dear heart, love hilary

Dear little one,I already lost count of the ways I love you. Mom sent me pictures of how you grew inside her, for months and months, we waited for those brief glimpses of the two of you together, and I would yell every time and stop what I'm doing and stare at the two of you (because that's the funny thing about pregnancy - a picture of Mom is also a picture of you for nine months). Your mom is a gently beautiful person, full of joy, full of life, and now that you are here, I know that flows into you too, with the physical life she offers. She gave you a special kind of life from her heart and her body these long nine months, and now, you are here. We are beyond excited - we are out in the field of wild joy. We are out dancing in our kitchen and we are outside under the bright summer sun, laughing and praying and trying to find the right days and times to fly out to meet you.When your parents got married I fell down the stairs at the reception. Not all the way, not dangerously, just in enough of a way to be completely embarrassed and wish that I was safe from the memory. But we are a long remembering family, and so your uncles on our side and your parents and grandparents won't let me forget it - and trust me, your soon-to-be Uncle Preston won't let me forget either (he'll love telling you all kinds of stories about me). But their wedding day was a day about your parents, about two becoming one, about love. And these are the roots of love you grow from. I can promise you, little one, they are deep roots. You will grow in a richer love than you know.That day, the reading was from 1 John 4 - about how we love because He first loved us. How we know love at all because it has been shown to us by another, by He who is love. You will be fed on love that is rooted in His love. You will be loved, in the midnights and the hurried mornings, in the laughter and the snow, in the every moment, by parents whose love is anchored and rooted to God's love.And I remember that day knowing your mom - my sister - and your dad, my brother-in-law, became a family. And now you are here, and you are a part of our family, and we are jumping up and down with joy over it and I might fall down a hallway or an airport or an escalator as I run towards you when I meet you.But we anchor each other in a deeper love.We will - this whole family of yours, aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents - promise in our own ways and times, to love you wild and deep and forever. There is so much I don't know about you, dear one, so much I cannot wait to discover. But I promise you a deep and wild and forever love in this family.I promise you all of my love, too. I promise you all of it, anchored in His.Love,Aunt Hilary

i am reminded about light

A photographer will tell you (probably) - it's about light. At the end and beginning, in the dusky red and the early white, in the grey from cloud cover and the blue off the harbor. Good pictures are about light.And not just about sun.They're also about our light. The kind that glows, that sings out, that is finally, fully, un-self-conscious because your self is a self you wrap up in love. The kind that promises to remind you. The kind of light that begins when you decide to twirl in a full yellow skirt and pirouette while staring at the afternoon reflected in the deep, glowing blue of the harbor. The kind that makes you laugh.I told you a while back that this is a year about light. And then, I must have said this a thousand times, that God turned off the lights. I'm fumbling blind, squinting into the miles of Sunday running prayer for a way forward. And He calmly keeps His hand on the light switch.But when I drove to Rockport on Saturday, when I flung out my real prayer - God, can I please feel beautiful today? - and worried it was selfish and unfair, and worried still that to say less was to lie, and then.God gifted light:

God said, light, dear one?

light?

And, somehow, between the green tea, the laughter, the not quite yet spring sun, 

where my winged prayer met my winged heart,

Right there, in the midst of it:

I could see.

Love,hilary

(Photos by Bob Delaney of Rockport)

dear hilary: this is called delight

Dear Hilary,So I'm reading the chapter "Artists, Mystics, and Clowns" in Brennan Manning's Ruthless Trust and wondering: why do we act the way that we do, and how does this reflect God? What's so great about efficiency? Gravitas? Breast-beating? Sobriety? Somewhere along the line I leaned that these were more holy than extravagance, art, and levity. Somewhere alone the line I learned I must stifle effulgent passions, had no time for interruptions, mustn't laugh when there's so much suffering in the world and so much work to be done, must put away childish playfulness. Somewhere along the line I learned that God is begrudging and exasperated. What is God's disposition, anyways?Sincerely,Can't-Lighten-Up Dear Can't-Lighten-Up,In my high school, French was the only foreign language offered. We learned it playing "Tour du Monde" with vocabulary, drawing pictures of "fromage" and "papillon" for each other on the chalkboards in the House, wandering the streets of Angers and Paris and Aix ordering our first café au lait and pain au chocolat in giddy tones. I remember vividly one day after we had gotten out of class, I walked around the corner with my friend and we ducked our heads inside a patisserie, and we ordered in a rush two "religeuses." The woman behind the counter didn't look at my ratty hair in its pigtail braids and my very American purple winter coat (a hand-me-down from my sister, I think) and make a noise that meant, "American." She simply smiled and put the pastry in a small bag with a piece of tissue paper. "Bonne soirée" she called out after us. And I felt the rush of what the French call "joie" - joy.I was a junior the year that we sang Gabriel Fauré's "Cantique de Jean Racine." We used to rehearse the song in its delicate French in a crowded room with uneven and overly polished floorboards. I sat in a grey folding chair, tucked my feet under me, pushed that still-ratty hair behind my ears with my fingernails coated with blue sparkle. The song hushes in its final line to this - "Et de tes dons qu'il retourne comblé." And may our praises return filled with Your gifts. It isn't the exact translation - I'm not even sure I could translate it well, if I'm honest - but the last, hushed line, has the word, "comblé" which, whether or not I understood the line right, is a French word for "overjoyed." The verb "combler" is about filling, being filled.I tell you these stories because you are asking something about who God is, and what His attitude is about us. And I learned this from singing "Cantique de Jean Racine," from the woman in the patisserie by the Lycée David d'Angers, from my years of unkempt hair and hand-me-down winter coats: God is delighted.Delighted, overjoyed - we so often mistake those words for happy, or, more honestly, for naively cheerful or optimistic. We think that if we name those adjectives, we're making it sound like we (or God or both) aren't taking hurt seriously. That we have missed suffering. That we have lost sight of the ache of the world and are applying a pink band-aid to the gaping wounds.But it is the work of delight and joy to come close to suffering, even closer than the so-called serious realism. It is through joy, not cynicism, that we approach the unspeakably difficult.Because joy and delight are not happy feelings: they are the choices to let love win. They are the choice to trust love triumphant. Joy is a choice to believe God when He calls what He has made very good, and a choice to draw near to that very good world in its ache and terror and sadness.If you do not practice laughter, you cannot know this joy. If you do not practice the playfulness, the levity, the extravagant gestures without reason, the shrieks of hide-and-seek games, you cannot walk with us to the places where love is most needed and most difficult.God is overjoyed with us. God is delighted. Because He is these things, because He is delighted in my moment in the patisserie, eating something truly good and laughing with my friend, and wishing the woman kneading bread a "bonne soirée" - He can enact such an extravagant and mysterious story of love triumphant. Because God is delighted, because His delight is not some blithe or silly perpetual good mood, but the serious weight of everlasting love, He is able to save us.This is the story we are going to tell the world. The story of love triumphant over darkness. The story of joy and reuniting, of harmony and whole, of laughter and extravagance. But to tell it, and to tell it in the places most needed, we must practice those things in ourselves.So, dear one, this is the work of delight. It will take everything you've got, to live the blurred lines between sorrow and weeping and joy and splitting your sides laughing. It will take your whole self and a self transformed to banish the categories we've so carefully constructed around what counts as "serious" and what counts as "light," to sing while we cry and rage while we laugh.But I think it can be done. I think it must be done. So that, in the mystery of love triumphant, we can sing:Répands sur nous le feu de ta grâce puissante;Que tout l'enfer fuie au son de ta voix;Pour on us the fire of your powerful grace, O Lord,That all hell flees at the sound of Your voice.Love,hilary

burst with joy

I got a phone call yesterday - a rush of California wind in the background, a rush of shouting and laughter and I caught a few tears, too.They told me in hurried voices that they were engaged, that on Saturday something marvelous and beautiful had just come true and they couldn't hardly believe it, but it was real, and they loved each other and couldn't wait to celebrate and could I mark off space in the calendar for a big celebration soon? And in a rush of California wind blown through my grey New England heart, I heard real joy.It sounds like two people who have set out on a long road holding hands against the challenge and leaning into the blessing.It sounds like her red dress in the vineyard, his hand fingering the ring in his pocket. It sounds like their smiles, saved only for each other, saved only for this day.It sounds like the way that I know they'll carry each other, through long mornings and church services and drives with coffee in travel mugs, in being apart only to be drawn closer together, in the best kind of yearning and yielding, independence and oneness. It sounds like the way that she and I drove along the highway back once from dinner with a friend, and the headlights trickled past us as we went north, and I told her that they have it. Whatever it was, and is, and will become.So these people whom I love are engaged, and in their hurried phone call on Sunday, they offered an invitation: to be part of their joy. To burst with it just as they are bursting with it. To make my own heart glad for the Saturday afternoon in the vineyard and the word "yes" and the question that preceded it.And even though I don't always know how, I want to burst with joy for them. Even though their story meets mine in a different in-between, in the midst of my own questions and worries and late-night lying in bed awake so confused that I just put a song on my iPhone and play it through the tiny speakers to the ceiling?Even though I don't know a thousand things about love?I still want to burst with their joy. The Kingdom is built on our hearts being grateful for all the blessing we hear rushing past us, no matter when or how or to whom. The Kingdom is built on bursting with joy because two people are going to become one.Jesus said, Remain in my loveJesus said, Love one another as I have loved you. As branches of the same Vine, we remain in His love. And with His love, we burst with joy.Because two will soon become one, because love is brave and persists and says yes, because blessings come on Saturday afternoons in vineyards, because there is nothing for it but to smile and screech with joy that this good thing has come to be.Love,hilary

dear hilary: on bringing sexy back

Dear Hilary,Right before Christmas I look at myself in the mirror and scold myself furiously for all the chocolate I've eaten. For the hours I didn't work out. For the way my stomach puffs out, and I lack good posture, and my eyes are an in-between color like my hair is and I never do anything to it and basically I'm just doomed to look like this. I want to change that. I hear people say it's possible, to love yourself, to think your own body is sexy. To think that your butt looks good in those jeans. To believe that, despite even the worst of worst hair days, out of me radiates a sexy, desirable glow.But no one tells you how to actually believe it. So I want to know.Love,Mirror, Mirror on the WallDear Brave Sexy Girl on Fire,I write this to you sitting on my unmade bed that is covered in approximately 5 shoes, a coat, a cell phone, a wool blanket, Christmas cards spilling out of their case, leftover work papers, ribbon and cough drops. I am wearing 4 inch high heels and orange running shorts and my sweaty white T-shirt, having just jumped around my room in said high heels to Usher's, "Scream" and P!nk's "Blow Me One Last Kiss" and the Glee mashup of "Rumor Has It" and "Somebody Like You". I jumped around my room. I shimmied. I swung my hips in what vaguely resembles a circle. I cha-chaed. I salsaed. I shook whatever could be shook. I put my hair down. I put my hands in the air. If there was sexy in the world, I brought it back.I changed your name when I wrote back to you, Brave Sexy Girl on Fire, because we don't get to see our heart's desire in the mirror when we call to it. We don't get to see the "fairest of them all". The problem with asking a mirror is that it will only show you what you already think. It will show you a snapshot of those nagging thoughts. It isn't a new voice; it's just an echo.But. What if you whispered, "I am a brave sexy girl on fire"?Just, what if you did that?What do you think would happen?I dare you to put on high heels and Usher. I dare you to jump around. I dare you to shout to your bedroom walls that you are a brave sexy girl on fire. I dare you to do it wearing a sweaty t-shirt, orange running shorts and four inch heels.It's cheesy, love, but it's true. We have to speak the truth out loud more often than we realize. We have to speak it out ahead of ourselves, so that when we wake up each morning and go to bed each night, it is already waiting for us. The truth about sexy isn't like logic. You can't commit it to memory. You can't plug yourself into one end of the equation and POOF! Out comes a belief on the other end.This is a truth that is three-dimensional, living, a heartbeat inside your heartbeat. This is a truth that you build, with every dance party. With every act of kindness, every smile to a stranger on the street, every dollar you pull out of your wallet to tip the girl at the coffee shop, every outfit that you rock in the morning (especially the ones with cowboy boots, neon pink, ruffles... you catch my drift). You build this belief in your own sexiness. In cupcakes and shimmying hips and three hours reading a good book and dreams about grad school and falling in love. You build it.So this letter ends with a dare. A dare to you, Brave Sexy Girl on Fire. I dare you to jump around dancing and saying, I am a brave sexy girl on fire over and over. I dare you to begin to build.Because you don't have to do a single thing different to glow like the French sky on Bastille Day. You don't need to do anything to your hair or your stomach or your eyes or your hair to have the glow. It is already so gut-wrenchingly radiating out from you I can see it, right now. I can see it in your letter. That's why I name you Brave Sexy Girl on Fire. Because I can see you, glowing, all the way from here.I dare you to revel in it.Love,hilary