a midwife in heaven

She will go before Shakespeare.She will go before Shakespeare in the wild parade of the blessed, after the striving, after the yearning ache or the clambering up mountains to see something (was it just ourselves we wanted to see, after all?).She will come forward, who labored two new beings into the world - the mother, the child - kneeling on a cold bedroom floor in countless houses in the town, kneeling to watch that which God made, new and new again.She will be known among the crowds of the heavenly, and Shakespeare, laughing, will sweep his words aside to make room to praise her.Because this is the kingdom of God, where love is too wild to be measured, where the parade is laughing and ever laughing, at the knots we tangled ourselves in thinking if only we had the recognition or the security of it, the words embossed in prizes or publications, the fame, the knowing.But this is the Kingdom of the anonymous faithful named for all that was glorious in their calling, where the hierarchies are scattered in our abundance of eagerness, where we leave behind how we have named one another - famous or critically acclaimed or somehow not quite enough yet (oh, how often have I named myself that?) -where we leave it behind because the Kingdom is coming, and our joy sees its fullness, and so we abandon decorum and procession and we run, children again, to the throne.This is the Kingdom where a midwife marches in step with a poet, where the bankers and bakers and those who mothered and fathered six children walk through the streets, unknown by accomplishment but known by calling.And some days I sit in a train car with a man whose calling I can hear sounding in me as fierce as my own heartbeat, and I write these words on the back of a receipt from a coffee shop where I met someone two months ago and told us both what I want to write here, what I want to shout to everyone: in the Kingdom of God there is too much joy and too much wonder and too much life abundant that our ladders will be unraveled by the power of the river of living water. I write that the midwife will go before Shakespeare, and laughing, they will praise each other. She will whisper how she saw Twelfth Night once, and he will whisper that he ought to have written ten sonnets in praise of her hands.I sit in a train car in a green dress in summer, remembering how my friend, she first told me this truth: that a midwife will go before Shakespeare, that in a Kingdom where last is first, our measurements fall to pieces, and this will be joy to us.Thy Kingdom come. love,hilary

when i am twenty-three

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? - Mary OliverI end my work day fifteen minutes early so that I can go for a run in the woods. I'm so angry I think I can't quite see straight - angry at myself first, because I fell for a story that wasn't coming true, angry at how when I preached him as a wild gift to my closest friend in the car one afternoon at a red light, God was whispering the truth and I didn't believe it. But my feet move my heart. The prayer, anger to desperate to confused, finally makes it way to the still waters. "God," I pace before, palms opened skyward, "I promised You that this life was Yours. Here. So take it back from me, this life for You, take it back into the mystery of Your will.Tell me - --It is the first time any reader I didn't know from my college days ever emailed me a question for dear hilary. I am sitting on my bed thinking about how I need to probably try to write something again, because it has been weeks and didn't I say I would be better, and not get so discouraged, and not let the poems fall through my fingers because of my fear? They tap out the email with a gentleness, a trust, and in the blackened night blanketed with stars I hear a glimmer that maybe I shouldn't forsake writing - maybe I should just wait.What is it --She and I find five hours on her couch with tea not enough time, because the things that pass between us are so widely varied, journeying among us, our stories keeping us company as afternoons fade to evening, as I look at her in surprise, again and again, because her wisdom is gentler than most. We talked once about the space in conflict, how mediators must create the conversation's parameters but not participate, and we wonder together about what kind of heart you must have to do such work, and I tell her then, that a part of me is so hungry to do just that, but how could I begin? How could I be a builder of spaces and homes for conversations? She smiles, shakes her head, reaches for her teacup. "But of course you already do this."you plan to do --And somewhere, in April, in a bar where I stole a reserved seat at the bar from a couple who apparently decided to wait, or at least, I hope that's what they did, over the rim of my martini glass, I told her in hushed laughter and surprise that this man, I was falling for him, had been for a lot longer than I had admitted, and now what was I to do, feeling the way I did, him so far away and me here, drinking this, in this bar? And she laughed bright in the crowded space, her hand briefly closing over mine. "You tell the truth." We laughed and laughed that night, about the way that I brought Lizzy Bennet to life, about how love is always out ahead of us, beckoning us forward. In the car that night on my way home, I whispered, "I see a little better who you might want me to be, I think." And God said, "Hilary, you are Mine."with your one --There aren't words enough for the way this year has unfolded. Perhaps there will never be, and I cling to the older, better question because it is a kind of promise, on its own, that I don't ever stop asking or need to stop asking about this life, all tangled by belonging and wandering and returning. And I cannot stop wondering, not now a year later, about what we inherit from our former selves and what we give them in return, about how we love, and where, and untamed spaces we go running into all for the sake of love.wild and precious life? --Oh, it is a wild and precious life, Mary Oliver, and I'm grateful alongside you.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

to my someday second daughter

Some days are the days to write to the children you might not have. But you love even just the fleeting glimpse of the life that might sail past you, that might not be yours, but it is so fleeting and so beautiful that you must write something down.Dear one,I write this to you in the early morning of what already promises to be a long, full, grey day. I write in the helplessness of writing, knowing that these words are far away from the people we will be if, and when, we meet in the future. I write as the overwhelming sounds of Mumford & Sons and Bon Iver wash through my small space. I write because I don't know how else to think, sometimes.I pray that you might catch this restless, big love - whether yours is words or sounds or soccer. I hope with the Anne Sexton that those I love will live in a fever of love. I pray that in the space of our life together, my sweet girl, there will be an abundance of this.It is the restless loves that sustain us, daughter. The ones that hammer away at us. The voice that says we must. I am at the beginning of learning this restless love. I am making a moment of peace with it this morning, and so I am writing to you, whispering in the silence of the life-not-yet-lived that these loves grow with us, always ahead of us. My love of writing and my frustration with writing, my love of philosophy and my contempt of my fumbling attempts. You will laugh when you find my notes on Gadamer in the book I bought a few months ago, because you'll then realize your mom makes a fool of herself chasing down an idea. The scribbles alone will give you and your siblings hours of laughter trying to figure out what I meant by "sig?" "but if hermeneutic..." or the very funny, "NO! Wait. No?".I hope someday we are sitting in the study reading, and you ask me why when I was 22 I said I was like Eowyn, Lizzy Bennet, Anne of Green Gables and Atalanta. And then, we'll pull each other close and begin to read together, and learn how we live in the worlds and characters we love. And then Dad will bring us cups of tea as he always does, the old ritual, and you will fall asleep near me, and I will read out loud to the night, to the dog, for the sheer goodness of those words.Oh, it will be a life of restless, relentless love. It will be this love, and nothing less, that creates fullness. It does not mean you need to be reckless always, or that you cannot also be steady, sure on your feet, rooted and growing in all directions. It only means that we are always pushed forward to the greater, more wondrous thing by these loves that move ahead of us, clearing the path, always asking more of us than we think we can give. When you whisper about how much you love the things you love, how you ache with it, remember that these are the moments of the making of you.What a joy you will be, love. What a wonder. What a gift.Love,hilary (your someday mom) 

when there are no words (a letter to preston)

Some of you know that last year, my friend Preston and I started pondering theology out loud in letters. He writes on Tuesdays, I write on Thursdays, and we wander through Gossip Girl and workloads and grace and mystery and espresso. Won't you join us? You can read his last letter to me here.Dear Preston,I think not long ago we were talking about writing, why we do it, and I rambled off something to you about silence - that we write to get to the better, fuller silence. I can't remember exactly what I wrote you, only that I kept wondering the question, turning it over in my mind.Why do we do this, this gut wrenching work, this turning our selves inside out and displaying it? I freeze every time I hover over the publish button. I think about being too revealing and being too closed off. I wonder if books are safer (are they?) because they're bound beautiful and the words have chapters and categories, instead of spilling out all over the same website in no real order. Why do you, Preston? Why do you write?Rilke keeps asking me this week: must you? Is it the thing you cannot live without? And this week my answer is such a tentative, restless yes. It's a yes of impatience, a yes with a no lurking under it, and then a deeper, more reluctant yes lurking under that. I must write. I can't help writing.Some days I wish I could stop. Some days, when I close my eyes and think about the weight of this world, the ruins of St. Mary's Cathedral you mentioned before, that one sculpture I'm desperate to see again in the Musée Rodin, the passage in Atonement that makes me cry when I read it (and I read to help myself cry in my real life sometimes, too) - I just want to stop all the words.I want to sit in silence. I want a small punctuation mark, the comma or period, and then, that lingering space.The pause,The pause.I am tired of seeing how little I'm really capable of saying well. I am tired of the tug of words on my hands, saying, "come, write the world, everything you see, never cease your amazement and sorrow and awe." Sometimes I want to stop feeling amazed and sorrowful and awed and just feel that silence.Do you feel that too, sitting in front of your blog or your books, wondering about the way you see the world and how much you see in it? Your post from yesterday - about the old sadness, and the hope, and the Light that breaks forth? It made me want to stop all the words, except for Pablo Neruda and Rainer Maria Rilke (because in the midst of my silence I hear, not their words, but the space their words create), and have the world sit in silence.The pause before the storm resumes. The pause when even the wind will cease howling for a moment and listen to the greater stillness that hovers over the land.Maybe the purpose of all these words is just to reach for that silence. Maybe we are supposed to write our way there, and people everywhere sing or paint or train for marathons or bake bread or build homes or families in the unsteady journey to the greater stillness I can almost hear hovering over the land.I'm going to leave us both with Neruda, and the deep space of his words and the swell of the ocean I imagine lived in his heart, whether he could taste and see it every day or not. I imagine that we'll someday, somehow, live inside the stillness.

Let us look for secret thingssomewhere in the world,on the blue shore of silenceor where the storm has passed,rampaging like a train.There the faint signs are left,coins of time and water,debris, celestial ashand the irreplaceable raptureof sharing in the labourof solitude and the sand. - Pablo Neruda, from On the Blue Shore of Silence

Love,hilary

some mornings you wake up wondering

beep. beep, beep, BEEEEEEEEEP. I jolt upright, panting. My fingers sleepwalk towards my cell phone, sliding it silent again. I look around. I've kicked my comforter into a heap at the foot of the bed, scattered pillows across the floor in my dreaming. I feel my arms, goosebumped and cold.I know the dog is downstairs, waiting for my father to feed him. I can hear my mother in the next room clinking hangers together as she decides what to wear for the morning. I know my brother is sprawled on the old couch under our one air conditioner, and the other brother (the red truck driving brother) is eating a bowl of cereal before his work day begins.Everything is in its place, all the people, all the animals, even the flowers that bend their petals towards the sun that hasn't quite finished rising. And then there is me: sitting in a pile of leaf-printed sheets, hair in a messy red-blond halo, wearing a T-shirt from my days in an elementary school play and an old pair of soccer shorts, and my heart is spinning.What if I have been wrong this whole time, Jesus? What if when I thought you said, "This is important," you didn't mean what I thought you meant? What if you meant for me to move to DC, to move to teaching, to move to France? What if you wanted me to go to grad school after all, and if I was there instead of here I wouldn't face this heart-and-gut-wrenching situation, this worry, this falling and failing? I dreamed I had gotten it wrong, I realize cup my chin in my hands and draw my knees up towards my chest. I dreamed he had wanted something else from me, something brighter and braver.I hear the water running for toothbrushes. I hear the coffee gurgle and drip, and somewhere in the ordinary morning below these three hundred year old floorboards, the world is moving.I swing my legs over the bed, trip over a stray book, and fall to my knees. This isn't funny, Jesus! I'm already late! I roll my eyes, but then I close them.

¹ Out of the depths I cry to you, Lord;²     Lord, hear my voice.Let your ears be attentiveto my cry for mercy.

³ If you, Lord, kept a record of sins,Lord, who could stand?⁴ But with you there is forgiveness,so that we can, with reverence, serve you.

⁵ I wait for the Lord, my whole being waits,and in his word I put my hope.⁶ I wait for the Lordmore than watchmen wait for the morning,more than watchmen wait for the morning.

⁷ Israel, put your hope in the Lord,for with the Lord is unfailing loveand with him is full redemption.⁸ He himself will redeem Israelfrom all their sins.

Today, I will wait. More than watchmen for the morning. The coffee will be almost gone if I don't hurry - and I race through the rest of the room, gathering shoes and glasses, putting an earring in while I try to brush my hair. Even here, though? More than watchmen for the morning. Love,hilary