dear hilary: go more gently

Dear Hilary,

I am lost, here in this new place.  The person I thought I was, the Christ I believed I followed, the people I learned to trust, lie now in a hopeless heap of feeling-wholly-helpless, and I continue on, digging my grave among the ruins.  This unknown, this not being known, scares me silly.  And when I am with the one who wants to know me?  My goody two shoes and those giant red flags scream at me, telling me to guard my heart because his heart doesn't belong to Jesus.  But right now, I just hardly seem to care.  Help?

Love,Fearful-in-a-Philly-Place

Dear Fearful,The scene: February (why do things always seem to happen in February?). A Starbucks table, the kind not really big enough for two people so you're crammed together, holding your drinks, each allowed one elbow on the table. It's early afternoon, I think, and I look harried and there are creases in my collared shirt because I don't really want to bother ironing it (truth be told, to this day I'm not great with an iron). I hold a mostly-empty cup, toss it back and forth in my hands. I have everything and nothing to say.Let's be simple about it: I had no idea where God was and I wasn't really sure where to start looking. I was scared out of my mind and I didn't want anything to change and I wanted everything to change. And I was so tired I didn't know if I could physically worry any more. And now, I read your words and they stay with me, I think about them and I think about you, and I imagine us in a Starbucks somewhere, October instead of February, at some cramped table tossing our cups back and forth in our hands. Thank you for your sincerity. For being brave enough to say it, that where you are is lost, that where you are is unsure. I hope you know how brave you are.Building in this life can't begin somewhere less than your courage.You say you're digging a grave among the ruins, but I think you can be a bit kinder to yourself here. Yes, the not-being-known, yes, the unknown, yes, the being lost in the forest of your faith and how it is moving and changing, yes, that is real. But I don't think it's ruinous and I don't think you're digging a grave. I think you're in a giant heap of questions and the pinpricks of light between them don't feel like enough to be guided by. It applies across the board, every time you come to a new question - what do I do about the feeling of being unknown? What do I do about the person I thought I was? What about Christ? What about the boy? - everywhere you look, the question looks bigger and the agony of not knowing the answer grows bigger, too.You're in this giant pile of questions and you're turning around and around inside them, and with all that movement, it's hard to see anything.Go more gently.In the year of February meltdown in Starbucks, I took a ballet class. I learned quickly that I was not as flexible as I thought I was.  And I would get into trouble if I tried too hard to get there faster - to get to a perfect arabesque at the barre, to get to a pique turn with the right releve. I couldn't do any of it when I tried to do it all at once. How ordinary, the need to slow down. And how true. In ballet, like in the deepest spiritual and emotional questions, we must be gentle. We must be willing to submit to a gentler pace that leaves us longer in the uncertainty, longer in some of the fear, longer, even, in some of what is hardest.What does this mean for you? I think it means you should stand still for five minutes and watch yourself breathe. I think it means you should go for a walk outside and yell everything you think you're not allowed to yell at God at God, tell Him about the boy, tell Him about who you thought He was and who you thought you were. I think you then get really quiet with God and ask Him He is. Don't ask yourself to hear or understand what He might say or not say. But ask that. Leave the question aloud in the night. Return to it, see how it changes.And as for guarding your heart and the red flags around the boy? I have a lot of thoughts about it, but most truthfully, Fearful, I think the pinpricks of light around those questions will grow as you watch yourself breathe and talk to God and get really quiet. You care more about this than you first told me. Why else could you have put words to it? Guarding your heart is about so much more than the particulars of this person who knows you, who wants to know you, who you care about - it is about all the questions in the heap of questions. It is about being gentler with yourself. You will know more about where your heart is when it comes to this other person when you're gentler with your heart, period. If anything, I want you to release yourself from the expectation that you can know what guarding your heart looks like perfectly now. It's so much more important to me that you are gentler with yourself. It's more important to me that you get those five minutes in the miracle of breathing and that walk in the woods (or in the park, or wherever it makes the most sense for you to go).And, just as gently, I believe the light will grow.Love,hilary

when I remember Canada

We crossed the border thirty-odd times on that trip. I know because we counted - that was part of our work, part of our questioning - and because of the hours I remember we sat bored in the van thinking about how long our customs conversation would be. It was a trip about borders, Jim told us, a trip about the liminal space between, this funny line that creates two nations instead of one wilderness. At the time, I had signed up for the trip because I was a bird on the wing, anxious to feel the air against my face. I wanted movement, change, a stepping outside myself. I also loved traveling with Jim and all of his rituals. I loved how we sat next to different people in the van every day, waited to eat until we all had our food at a restaurant, stopped to sketch and write, shared our journals, saved ticket stubs and matchbooks and rarely took pictures, but always talked to strangers.We started in the upper reaches of Vermont that June, while the mosquitos, early in their hatching, kissed our bare knees and skinny arms. One of the girls on the trip wanted us to insist on doing ab workouts every night. She would time us, thirty seconds on each side, in planks and crunches, in strange contortions of high school bodies already too worried about the wrong things. I collapsed every night we did this, exhausted with the fear that they'd figure out that I wasn't really an athlete.We drove through towns built with that invisible line drawn through the houses, along the streets - half in Canada, half in the US - and took a long ferry out to Campobello Island, owned by both countries. We walked along the beach for hours, picking up trash and scuffing our sandals against bits of driftwood. I caught a piece of seaweed on my shoe, and the sky rippled grey and it started to rain. We sat on benches to eat homemade sandwiches, ham and mustard on stale wheat bread, apples. I drank water out of the Gatorade bottle I had saved for the whole length of the trip, because we were supposed to bring water bottles with us and I didn't have a Nalgene.I remember lying in a dark basement bedroom in a home in New Brunswick one night. We were staying with someone who knew someone who knew Jim, the threads of kindness stretching tight over miles and friendships. The older couple we were with spoke French, and I tried mine on them, feeble though it was, making the noises with my mouth, the Parisian "r" perfected but not understood in their simpler Canadian lilt. I felt foolish, trying to sound French in their sweet yellow and green kitchen, as they fed us blueberry muffins and asked us about our hopes and dreams after high school. They didn't need impressing, only to hear the echo of their kindness coming back in our "bonne nuit" and "merci beaucoup, beaucoup." I lay in bed, looking at a small framed picture of the sweet faced Jesus with lambs and children. I looked at the outline of the girl lying in the bed next to mine, asleep in the strange room, and never before have I felt so sure that the lines between strangers and friends is line, dissolving ever andWhen I remember Canada, I hear myself reading Robert Frost's poem to the sweaty sun-kissed faces of my classmates who had not traveled, who had spent their time planting seeds and bike riding to Boston and sculpting or sewing or glass-blowing or putting on a play in three weeks.Something there is that does not love a wall,that wants it down. I hear myself and those words and think - what walls do we carry with us as we go, dear Frost? Where are those invisible lines between the country of our selves, between you and me, between all that we wonder about and all the questions it would take to learn it?Something there is in me, those long days and nights journeying between those countries, asking strangers and friends about border culture, eating sandy sandwiches and listening to Citizen Cope's "Son's Gonna Rise" on repeat, in the becoming of ten high schoolers, in the traveling and the return, that ceased to love a wall.Something there is in me that wonders, even now,must we have such walls?Love,hilary