praise is calling, a letter to preston

Do y'all remember when Preston and I were writing all those letters last year, Tuesdays and Thursdays, writing out this ramble through faith and life and coffee late at night and Gossip Girl and all the rest? And how, those letters, they were the beginning of something wondrous? We are beginning again, new and the same, our selves familiar and not. This is the first of the new letters - but you can read Preston's last one, from last October, here. (And just so you know, he is unlike anyone I have met before. In all those amazing ways that words fail to capture. I'm amazed and awed and all the rest by him)Dear Preston,"You know what I think? I think maybe I'm finding it. You know, the THING." I cradle the phone lovingly, just the way I used to when she and I would talk the miles between New York and Massachusetts in our college years. I remember how we didn't know who we even might want to begin to be, how then, everything was new and she taught me to joy in that, rather than to fear. I remember how the not knowing used to send me running for some comfort somewhere, for books or academic sounding research projects, but she said I had a calling different than that - something about writing, about telling stories."I think I'm finding it."Do you remember me telling you about this conversation? Did I tell you about it? Sometimes, I think you and I have talked about everything, but I'm back to wondering if I can put words to what is going on in my heart and mind. I'm thinking about this again, this morning, in the long stretch of the day and the longer stretch of the summer, thinking about calling, thinking about what I'm hungry for.We use the word vocation all the time. Is it because we almost never know the real word? What do you call it - the hunger that somehow feeds you? What do you call it - the thing you must do, as dear Rilke would say, the thing that calls forth from inside you and outside you and that will not relent? What do you call it - the way of being?What I'm after, anyway, is a way of being. What I am longing for, anyway, is to wander without being lost, to ramble with a pattern, to... something. I can't quite figure out what.The words trip their way out of my mouth, always a little ahead of my thoughts - "I'm called to praise."But we all are, aren't we?What would be special or different about that calling?Doesn't God have a more unique purpose than that? (the questions begin, a slight trembling of my bright horizon line, and I blink a few times as I continue to pace the pathways of the old, familiar campus)We live in a difficult time to talk about calling  - the emphasis has landed so heavily on our uniqueness, on our gifting, on how God has specifically called each of us to each particular, discreet, place and time and conversation, that we have forgotten how much of our calling is universal, even, dare I name it, ordinary. We spend time seeking the very thing only we can do, imagining that calling must be there, where deep gladness and deep hunger meet (I kept the napkin with that Buechner quote from a three years ago) but also where they meet and I am unique there, a pioneer."I'm called to praise."That's what I can't shake off. I think about the way that words can sing out from one person to another, can Name (you know, like Meg?) things as real, can breathe love. I think about how maybe my life can be flamed with praise. How maybe I can sing in the kitchen to children in the future that we should praise the Lord, the Almighty, the King of Creation. I think about the world, lit by praise, the hard work of perceiving what is true so that it can be mirrored and imagined and understood.I don't know what it holds, exactly, but you know me with things like this - I just can't get over it. The calling to praise. Perhaps now I am just to listen closer. To the world, to people - and maybe listening is where we can begin.Love, always,hilary

the wondrous offering, a letter to preston

Dear Preston,I know, we sort of stopped doing these letters for a season, and I know that we'll talk about this, on Skype or when you are here, in my kitchen, in not so many days, but we made these letters to write our way towards the true and the beautiful. And when I saw something in church today, I wanted to tell you. I wanted to write it here, first, in this our place of beginning.Behind our altar there is an icon of the crucified Christ. I see it every week, I'm almost blind to his face, until that moment I get on my knees and I'm asking for the Body, and for the Blood, asking Christ to enter me, asking Him to be with me in the deepest mystery. Then, I look at that icon and it is like the Orthodox say - it is a window. I feel the air move differently, a wind coming from the icon, from the altar, from the outstretched arms of that crucified Savior. I feel the air touch me as the priest's robes swing by, the steady gesture of offering.Today I saw something else, too. This is what I have to tell you, the moment that stopped me.Today, I watched as the priest made the gesture of offering during the Memorial Acclamation - the final doxology where we pray, my eyes leaking a few stray tears at the steadfastness of this faith in the face of my own wavering heart, this Church who breaks and breaks and by breaking keeps us whole...

 "By him, andwith him, and in him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit all honorand glory is yours, Almighty Father, now and for ever."

And the priest lifts the bread and wine above, and in this gesture upwards, I realized: the outstretched arms of the crucified Christ icon are still visible. You can see Him pinned to the cross behind the priest praying that this mystery would take place in the unity of His spirit. You can see, not his face, but his arms, stretched in offering, in love. I have never known if I can possibly understand the Cross - and the questions swirl and dip in my stomach some days - is this penal substitutionary atonement or the Moltmann suffering Christ or the cosmic redemption - (and you know how much I trip over theology)but Preston? The outstretched arms are visible behind our offering. What does that tell us? What does it promise? I don't know. But I know my heart has been stopped, that I can go no further, and though the words are tentative and tremulous I know I have seen something wondrous this morning and I wanted to tell you, I had to tell you.Is it that Christ, to whom we offer, is visible because we are offering what already is His? We are making our offering in response to the offering already made, our sacrifice a poor remembering and reechoing through the world that we know who has stretched His arms out, once for all, and every moment? Can we see and hear the air change and move as we gesture upwards, and just behind the gesture, is the Person to whom we make the offering, who was Himself first offered?Do you remember the scene in Gilead, the one with the baby and the girl, the leaf and the river? When they go back to the car, it says, "Glory said, 'I do not understand one thing in this world. Not one.'" That is how it feels now. I have seen something wondrous like the child and her mother kneeling in the cool clear of a stream and learning the world by sight and touch, and I do not understand one thing about it.Christ's arms behind our offering. Christ to whom we make the offering. Christ, invisible yet poured out in the mystery of remembering Him. Today I realized that I have sold the idea of this Eucharist is memorial so desperately short. I have thought that was not the fullest way to imagine it, not when there are mysteries of presence and participation.But we must not make light of the remembering. Christ commanded a memorial. In remembrance of Him - almost as if He commanded that we see His arms behind each gesture of offering. That when we get on our knees to receive, we come into the memory of Jesus outstretched, offering Himself for us.I do not understand one thing about this world. I do not understand one thing, but I wonder at each thing, holding onto it like the child with the leaf. And perhaps it is enough to know that the offering is wondrous, and beautiful, and fearsome to behold.Love, from my heart which is wondering,hilary

words keep vigil

I don't remember the last time I felt this unsure about what to write. I can't remember the last time I sat here and knew the words were waiting for something I wasn't willing to wait for. The words are wiser than me.Maybe that's what writer's block is about, sometimes, a protection of your heart from the things it wants to say but shouldn't, or can't, or if it did it might tremble the foundations in the ways that destroy but do not build.Maybe the words keep watch over us. I'm not above believing that, in some mysterious way they have, in the way writers and words befriend each other, every day, and heal and reconcile and fight again. But maybe my lack of words, my sense that they are hiding somewhere just beyond my reach, maybe that is their offering of protection.We will come back to you when your heart is ready.We will come back to you when you have allowed silence to teach you as much as we teach you,when you have given us up as your birthright or your talent or your calling or your property, and remembered that were-member you.I sometimes hate how when I write I discover that there are a thousand things the words would like to reveal to me. The words find me out, hollowed by a lie I'm trying to tell or weighed down by the truth I've been avoiding. The words - about love or calling or fear or last night's conversation or this morning's prayer - the words gesture at the bigger silence I must enter. The words find me, too comfortable in what I know I can do, too sure of myself, and they look back at me from the white of the screen or the page and I see how little I actually know. I see the silence they point to - the delicate and unsayable - and I see how I hide from it.So I sit here and I wait, and I wait, and I think about how I'm trying to write a post about waiting for words that are patient inside my impatient heart, and again, even here, the words point to the bigger silence.We will come back to you - the promise -when you have allowed silence to teach you as much as we teach you - the work -when you have gotten out of the way long enough to remember that He is always speaking.I don't know what to write. But the words, somewhere beyond me, keep a vigil.Love,hilary

dear brothers

Dear brothers,You're each in your own worlds a bit these days, high school and college, relationships and summertime, work and landscaping and extra physics prep and climbing trees. You're together in some of those worlds, when you disappear into the cave of the living room to play video games or watch Duck Dynasty or the Sox game.I don't think I tell you often enough how much you have been teaching me.Take that drive home for instance, the other night, when you were willing to listen to me while we played Eric Church off my iPod, how you told me about your excitement for our someday-families being close to each other, about the cousins we haven't ever had before, about the wonder, about the time. You and I don't always talk about the future, and we're in a forever competition about who knows more Harry Potter trivia (you do, but I will never give up the fight on it), but when you said that I could feel that future smile at us from wherever it lives right now. I could imagine it, all the siblings drawn closer together, children and spouses and laughter, more food than we could possibly eat, the sun lingering on the horizon line just for us, just for those summers.You heard me, and I heard that you have a bigger heart and a braver one and that man, I have so much to learn from you about the kind of love that really forgives and forgets and chooses joy even when we're pissed off. Do you know that? That those years of Calvin and Hobbes at the kitchen table, the years of us eating with paper napkins and a simply set table and not having the cable or the new computers - that all of that, it has made you a tremendous man? This past winter, when I realized I was homesick for you even though we live in the same house, I tramped out through the snow to where you were creating a different world, your imagination still wilder and wider than most, and you taught me how to climb the tree and look out over the back yard, even though I'm scared of heights? Do you remember that? And how you taught me about building your own forge from the bits of old metal we don't need anymore laying around behind the shed and even though we didn't say much afterwards, that afternoon I sat on my bed and cried and laughed with God that you, my youngest brother, are who you are.And then there are the coffee mornings, older younger brother, and how we slip into a routine without realizing it, our hearts beating out on our sleeves, in the quiet space we draw between eggs and toast and unlimited refills. There are those mornings when I confess my jealousy to you, where you teach me how to ask forgiveness, really ask for it, where I tell you that I am afraid I might never find what I'm looking for and you so gently remind me how much of it has already found me.You and I drying the dishes while the kids we love refuse to fall asleep and their parents will be home soon? You and I watching Raylan (me terrified), the house gone to bed? You teach me to love the every day and to be watchful over the people I love. You teach me to care more about the condition of my kindness than my clothes and to treat others with more respect than I would probably offer on my own. I run upstairs to you in the midst of the visit that is changing my life and you're awake, and we lie on our mattresses and talk into the night about how this is becoming real, and you're there with wisdom and patience and you remind me that God is good. And on the drive home from church and lunch I caught my breath again because I saw a truck that looked like yours and I remembered that in our family you are always the first to offer peace to our hearts and slowest to anger and in this, God shows me what it means to love as He loves. I saw a truck that looked like yours, and I just had to smile. What a gift you are.So brothers, who are so different and yet of one mind, all I wanted to ramble about in this blog post, which has gone on a long while now, is that you teach me, and you remind me, between Duck Dynasty and the grill and the summertime, that there is not one thing in this world quite like having brothers - and not one thing in this world like you.Love,your sister

it isn't a thunderstorm

I left him a message early in the morning yesterday, trapped as we are in this moment in the pull of telephone lines and frayed Internet cables. With all that we have to say to each other, with all the questions the pour out and the long pauses that pour back in, I wonder some days if we are causing power outages in hometowns somewhere along the highways that separate us. Town after town, momentarily offering up their electricity so that we can have just five more minutes, just one last smile on Skype.I keep thinking about this new season, after driving through the early, easy morning with my mother, talking about how we know the things we know, and how surprising it can be when we know more than we think we do, or think we should, and I think to myself that knowledge no more obeys me than you or anyone else.I shouldn't know so certainly as I type the tiny letters into the tiny box on the screen too small to carry the amount of love I need it to, should I? I shouldn't, because we live by a calendar of boxes of days, because we think there is always an acceptable line running through time, because for every story we have the one we think it is supposed to be.In my head love was always a thunderstorm, violent and wild and untamed. In my head it was like the ocean and you in a canoe, paddling until your sides ached and you let yourself be capsized, let yourself become lost, let yourself be overturned.The story I told myself about how love must work was that kind of hurricane weather and a purple sky and the smell of rain hurtling over the fields emptied of other people and with the wheat bending down in deference to a wind. That's how it would be real - a chaos of love and lightning.There isn't a thunderstorm.This unnerves me. So I go running, yell at the afternoon, where was the hurricane, by which I would know? Where was the thunder across this landscape, the wild and chaotic arrival of love? How did I miss it? Wasn't that how God would tell me?When I stop moving, the gentle breeze comes off the water with its early summer taste and there is the sun that last year reminded me that all time is about belonging to Jesus, and the water so wide and still my whole self grows small in its presence. No, it will not be in a thunderstorm. It will be in quiet. I look for God in fire and cloud. I look for clarification, for certainty, for a knowledge I could stand on, in a wild and obvious sign. Not in the wind, not in the earthquake, not in the fire - no, but behold I am standing on the mountain before the Lord and I hear a still, small voice.Love is not in a thunderstorm or a bright, blinding hurricane: it is morning coffee and holding hands in the car just to be sure of each other and the pause before we apologize, and the way our conversations bend back towards grace even when neither of us want to, and how he asks me to pray and doesn't care if it rambles its way towards God in the Mexican restaurant with the girl's night out next to us and our food growing colder, how we let the kids that have become like nieces and nephews to me clamber over our nice Sunday clothes and try on our sunglasses, how we do dishes together, how he knows just when my voice is about to tremble and says into the phone, "Hil. Calm your heart."I stay by the still water for a long time. And then I call him, just once more, and we both hear peace.Love,hilary

dear hilary: the winds of homecoming

Dear Hilary,I have to admit I'm scared. After a few years of living oceans away from my hometown, I am moving back to what I used to consider my home. The only problem? It doesn't feel like home anymore. I'm worried that people will expect me to be the same as I was four years ago, but the truth is I've changed. I've drawn closer to God and I love how He has shaped me over the past few years, but I am afraid those I used to be close to will only see me as "not the same" as I used to be.Hilary, how do I shake the fear of rejection and embrace this new season of my life?Love,Scared to Move OnDear Scared to Move On,When one of my dearest friends was on her way back from Italy last summer, I wrote in the journal I was keeping for her (a journal of thoughts to share with her, stories of my days, questions about her time in Italy and her joy and her journey) this quote from Rilke:

Oh, not to be separated,shut off from the starry dimensionsby so thin a wall.What is within usif not intensified skytraversed with birdsand deepwith winds of homecoming? - Rilke, Uncollected Poems

I want to give that to you here - that image of the winds of homecoming. I don't really know how to make sense of it myself, if I'm honest, and I don't know how to give it to you. Words are unwieldy gifts. But you have written so tenderly about your fear that Rilke, in his own tenderness, seems to be the necessary reply.My shortest answer to your question about whether people will see you as changed or simply "not the same" - whether they will embrace who you are becoming or mourn who you are no longer? You cannot control what people make of the changes. Some people will be overwhelmed by the new picture of you that they see. Some of them will take it completely in stride. The human heart can react in a thousand ways to the same situation and there is just no telling, not for one moment, what a given person will do or say in response to what they see. I wish I could offer you more control - but the truth is, the fear you harbor is about a thing that you cannot control no matter how or when you come home, no matter what you write about it, think about it, process out loud or silently about it.The fear is not bad, in and of itself, but it does not have a solution that has anything to do with other people. You have to mud wrestle this fear on your own. You have to slide tackle it. Rilke can help us, here. You talk about being away from home as having changed you, going from what you were to what you are now, going from one thing to another, as if you have lost the first person along the way. But I think we are expanded - I think that's what Rilke wanted to show us. We are intensified sky traversed with birds. We are deeper for having the winds of homecoming in our bones and our bodies. We are among the widening expanses.Travel, being away from the familiar, expands us. I don't think you have lost the person that your friends and family from home would have recognized. I think, rather, that she is deepened and shaped by your having been away. You have not lost her; she is simply revealing new dimensions and spaces.So you have to wrestle with this fear that you have become someone people cannot recognize, that your self has changed so profoundly that others will not love and cherish it. For I think that the people in your life who love and cherish you will love and cherish how the winds of homecoming and the winds of departure and the winds of being away have shaped you. I think you must lead the way in this: love and cherish who you have begun to become. Love and cherish and beam out to us that you have begun to transform, and that though it is filled with beginning and uncertainty and all the rest, though you are slide tackling your fears about it, you believe it is beautiful.Dear heart, believe the winds of homecoming are beautiful in you.Everything follows from that.Love,hilary

dear hilary: the love equation

Dear Hilary,I have another question for you. This year, boys have been a huge distraction.When I decided I like a boy, it begins to consume my thoughts and actions. I change the direction I walk to class just to "accidentally" run into them, I scheme ways to end up in situations with them, I make sure to get to math class early just so I can find a seat beside them. I do irrational things all the time. Maybe it's infatuation or lust, but then why does it feel so real then? It just seems impossible to shake this frame of mind. I want to stop obsessing, but at the same time I like obsessing. Is any of this natural? Is it unhealthy? Or maybe it goes deeper, and I am just desperate to be loved and treasured. Even so, my heart is aching from these boys- this is something that seems so silly but has such a legitimate weight on my heart.Love,A little obsessedDear A little obsessed,You know what I can't stand, really, truly, cross my heart shoot me ten times before you make me ... ? Settlers of Catan type games. I'm terrible at them. I lack all the strategy. And that makes me mad. And then I do something stupid, I don't want to admit it, or I do, and I basically just end up feeling pissy. Not a fun time. I like cards, I like charades, I like 20 questions that I turn into 20,000 questions, I like Mafia and a thousand other ones. But make me settle villages and stuff, and I'm sunk.So last year this boy that I really liked brought me to a friend's house on the water, and a funny group of us - maybe five or six people - sit down to play ... yep, you guessed it, one of those bridge-building farm settling monasteries and something about blocking other people's castles games. I wasn't jazzed about it, but I played the whole game.And not because that's the polite thing to do, though my mother did raise me to be polite. I did it to impress the boy. I did it to keep his attention. I did it with some well-timed doe-eyed looks in his direction, a wink or two. I can only imagine if I could see myself I would laugh - here I am, making faces at the game in my head, and then whenever he makes eye contact, holding on for dear life to those brown eyes and hoping he'd look just a bit longer.In the love equation in my head, playing this game + batting my eyelashes + walking by his office by the mailroom in my work outfit + some well placed comments about German philosophy + drinking a second cider at the bar on a Thursday night x my hope squared = LOVE.I think most of us do this, just as you describe your own love equation to me - if you sit here in math class + walk past them and if you use the Pythagorean theorem to calculate just where they might get coffee after school that day... maybe that's how you get them to see you. Maybe that will = LOVE.I want to separate out how real your feelings are from whether your changing seats in math class or walking in a different direction has a tangible effect on a relationship. Your feelings are real; you are attracted and interested, and honestly I'm going to hazard a guess that some of it is infatuation, some of it is exploration, some of it is longing, some of it is that delightful butterfly feeling when you recognize how wonderful and lovely someone is, and there is a whole lot more feeling that can be easily categorized. That will all be real no matter what you do or don't do on a given day of the week or a given Saturday night game night.And yes, honey, I think some of it is maybe a little bit much. I liked the feeling of liking someone so much I wound up playing games I didn't like and changing how I walked and what I wore and what I talked about (though I love German philosophy). When the excitement of adventuring into romantic feelings becomes the trump card in your (even small) decisions, I think it's good to take a step back. Changing your behavior won't make anyone like you more or notice you more - it won't satisfy those longings to be treasured and appreciated and loved, it won't do much of anything. Remember Sugar - real love moves freely in both directions. Love moves freely. It moves when not constrained by constantly monitoring behavior, input and output, looking for an equation that will finally work. It moves when your longing to be more of who you are meant to be, your longing to lean into the true and beautiful and good of your life, equations abandoned, is where all your energy is going.Resist the temptation to take my words and make them another voice in your head that calculates the way towards those boys or that kind of love, dear one. You can't force contentment and the growing wings as a way to get those boys to notice you. You can't ask your heart to long for the good/true/beautiful so that the boy in math class sees you - that's no different from calculating which seat.Instead open up your hands and heart and start asking the question - what are those lupine seeds I'm going to scatter today (thanks, Miss Rumphius)? How can I do one more thing to make this world a little more beautiful? Who are the people right here, right next to me? How do I make their world a little more beautiful?  We don't have to play Settlers of Catan. We don't have to change seats. Real love is on the move already. You and me, together, we can just open towards it.Love,hilary

Daddy, where are you?

Daddy.I never call Him that. If we're frank, I don't know how to refer to the Almighty the way I whine to my own father in the early morning light of a cold February. I prefer the prayers well worded and quick. I prefer the deep rhythms of a church reciting together, high and low pitched voices in a strange kind of harmony. I like to imagine that when I stammer my way through grace, I sound something like the holier ones who have come before.I know they tell us that Jesus called Him Abba - and that's an equivalent, in the space of translation, to Daddy.I never really thought we'd be allowed that kind of endearment with God. When I pray, I can't imagine that God responds to that, that shouldn't I pray something pretty? Shouldn't I show God that I'm not wasting my love of words - that I'm putting them in the right order and they say such pretty things?I called him Daddy twice in the last two days.I didn't say it in Hebrew or Aramaic or Greek or some other language that makes it sound somehow more authentic or graceful or the way that I imagine we approach the altar and the throne of the Lamb. I blurted out the "Daddy" of my three year old days. The Daddy of goodnight hugs, two or three at a time, and surprise breakfasts at the diner for good grades and the unselfconscious airport reunions after traveling away from home in high school.The point of praying can't always be the pretty.It can't be the right theology, so carefully crafted. It can't be the deep concepts, addressing in God the question about His imminence and His transcendence and His real presence, and the hundreds of unknown dimensions of His reality. It can't be us asking beautiful, calm, composed, reasonable.Because we're a desperate people after the heart of God. And in the afternoons where it rains, and rains, and you tell God that however He does it, Jesus needs to get inside your head and do something about your selfishness, and you don't know what it is but He can just do it, whatever it is, there is something in that that gets you a little nearer to trust.All I say  is, "Daddy, where are you?"And I won't finish the sentences I imagined when I imagined praying - not of intercession or listing the people or the thanksgiving. I won't wrap the things I believe in beauty. I won't because I'll be crying too hard or laughing too hard or both. I won't because this is the whole prayer.Daddy, where are you? Love,hilary

when there are everlasting meals (guest post)

You guys remember Preston, right? We wrote letters last year, and between the time zones, the words, the Skype, and the way of things, something kind of amazing has happened. Is happening.I'm not going to say much more, right now, because I blush furiously when I try to talk about this person, and I get tongue tied, and my heart decides to practice for a marathon, and I can't stop smiling. You kind of get the picture.But today, I wrote something over at his space and well, I'd love for you to read it? You can click here.When your father is crying on the morning drive to school and whispers that Granddad died in his sleep the night before, you don’t eat the whole day.You don’t eat anything in seat 48H on Virgin Atlantic, except the chocolate pudding, and you have two helpings of that, and return to your books. You read the words over and over but they’re swimming in front of your eyes, and the turbulence outside is nothing to what’s raging in your heart.Keep reading, over here?Love,hilaryP.S. In case you didn't know, Preston is pretty amazing. I still can't quite believe the story of us. But here I go, blushing. But he is. Amazing. And I am a really lucky girl.

dear hilary: you are held

Dear Hilary,

I finished high school today. And on one hand, I'm relieved to get my life back and start my summer and move on to whatever God has in story for me, but on the other...I just can't believe it's actually OVER. And there's still so many questions, so little closure with the people I've grown to love. One minute I was part of their lives, and now I'm not, with little or no time to say goodbye. What's going to happen to them? And why can't I be there to see it?

Love, Wanting More Time

Dear Wanting More Time,

I had this flash of an image of you when I read your letter in my inbox last week. I could see you, hands open, a crowd of people in one, all shouting and laughing and crying and jumping on top of each other the way people do at graduations, and in your other hand, the summer, the next things, which look mostly like a huge blanket of fog overflowing between your fingers. There you were, in my mind, holding these two unruly things, this tangle of people and this bank of fog, and you are trying to hold them out in front of you.It strikes me that you cannot hold onto either of them.The people are a wonder, aren't they? I remember at graduation last year this moment with some of my fellow graduates, after we'd marched in and out, taking this picture where we tried to jump in the air at the same time. The picture came out with us all in various stages of contortion, mid-air or landing on the ground with a thump. But the expression on our faces is the same - some kind of uncontrollable delight. Delight in one another. In the day. In the selves we didn't even know yet we would become in the next year. I have that picture in my office, all of us laughing and delighting together. About January of this year, I looked at it in the middle of typing notes for a project, and felt my throat tighten, my eyes begin to tremble, tears just peeking out from beneath my eyelids. I don't see those people every day anymore. I don't even know what all of them are doing, where they ended up, if they got into that grad school or took that job or moved across the country or the world. I couldn't hold them. Not in the snapshot from last May. Not in my hands in the quiet nights before we all grew up and outward. I tried to, I really did. Looking at that picture in January was a reminder of how much I had longed to hold on tight and build deep, everlasting bridges, and invite everyone to live on the porch of my heart forever with glasses of lemonade and sweet tea. But the thing about rising, dear one, is that we must keep rising. That's Sugar. We have to keep going, out past the point of holding onto each other just as we are. Out past the knowledge of what we all do and what we all dream and who we love and when and why. We have to journey into the fog you're weighing in your other hand.I'm a big fan of this idea of rising, of journeying onward, even into the fog that seems to murky and dark. Mine has been, this first year out of college - but it teaches you to walk on your knees, to crawl, slow and steady, to learn the feel of decisions and love and the path in front of you, brick by brick and bird by bird. I think that's where you and the wondrous people you love begin. Together. You get on your hands and knees. Release yourself and release your friends from the idea that you can hold this life: be held by it, instead.You'll find the fog not so terrifying when you're a bit lower to the ground. You'll feel the path with your fingers, and you'll find that there are hearts and hands searching next to yours. These will become your community, will journey with you, for a time, for a lifetime, for something in between. They may not always be the people you have loved and lived next to until now; likely, some will depart for different journeys, paths branching out again and again, and you, though you love them, will have a path branching a different way. You ask me for an explanation about why you can't see it, but there isn't one of the kind you want. I'd give you an answer if I had one, but I suspect that what you want more than that answer is a way forward.So: though it is murky, though it is some days dark and damp, though it is not clear, you are held by this life. So are those wondrous people. No more holding on now, dear one. It's time to begin.Love,hilary

myself, twenty two

I wake up earlier than I wanted to - it's humid here, and there is a humming in the air itself, weightier. I think about coffee, about putting on the Nashville Cast soundtrack (yes, I think about that), about lying there for a while longer. With a groan only the Holy Spirit and I know about, I pull my sneakers out from the box in my closet and a pile of other shoes tumble to the ground. I groan again.By this time, I thought to myself last year, I'd be one of those people who are more faithful with running. I said to someone in January I would run a marathon this year - and now the prospect of the 4.5 mile loop almost sends me back to bed. I meet my not-met expectations on these runs some mornings. They lope along next to me, commenting, "Gee, I thought by 22 you'd know more about what you believe." "You'd know how to do a lot more than boil water and not catch yourself on fire while standing next to the grill." "You'd write more letters." "You'd have something published." "You'd figure out what the HECK to do with lipstick." "You'd do one of those spring cleanings with your closet."22 sounded like all those things to me last year.But this morning, I just start to talk.I talk and talk as I run, a stream of words as busy as the streams by my house. I talk to drown out the silence of the morning, and I talk because talking is reintroduction to the pattern of being with God, the pattern of knowing Him. I talk until I can't talk anymore, and sweat drips down my back.I tell God that the ducks swimming in the pond are beautiful and that the morning is beautiful and there is one thing more I must do, according to the Miss Rumphius book, and that is make the world more beautiful, and boy do I hope, Father, that you have some ideas for me. Because I'll sow lupine seeds like Miss Rumphius or I'll write papers about Lonergan's philosophy of education or I'll listen for hours to the stories - such good stories - of the people You allow me to know. I'll do anything, I tell Him, only let me stay near to the beauty of You?And I talk and spread my hands, all the way down the long hill, until, abruptly, the words stop. God enters.Quiet your heart. I am speaking. I bite my lip - there is always one more question and before I can stop it, it trips off my tongue, and God, I think He laughs.Quiet your heart. I am speaking. To stay in the beautiful a little longer. To linger, gently, in the morning, heart quieted against the fast-fading ideas of what I thought I would be. To hear the silence, again, that stillness that shouts His presence, to be steadfast to it above the noise.I want to scatter lupine seeds across the plains of this widening world.Love,hilary

dear hilary: the other side of the door

Dear Hilary,I have a question. And it is this: how do you know when it's time to move on? To give up? I said I wasn't like anyone else. That I wasn't going anywhere. And I don't want to. What if the deep quiet love with a wild and crazy illogical side is the true love. I'm sure I could meet someone new some day and fall in love with them, have a passionate romance, what have you. But what if this is my only chance for that deep true sitting quietly by your side not saying a word just being there love? What if he is the person i could spend the rest of my life with, just like he was terrified of? How do I know whether to let go because clearly he isn't ready to admit anything yet? If he even actually feels the same at all? and because i don't need this back and forth pushing me away and pulling me back nonsense? Or whether to just be patient and hold on, because the wild quiet love is worth waiting for?Sincerely,Steadfast and confused.Dear Steadfast,I pondered your letter the whole time I was away, driving along the autobahn or standing in museums looking at bits of five hundred year old German script or taking pictures in front of statues of Martin Luther outside churches. I pondered while I ate cake and drank black coffee - what do I possibly say? Your letter asks the question I answer two ways and then ten and then back to one, and then wrap myself in a knot trying to sort out. I don't have a clean answer; I can only tell you a bit about what other, wiser people have told me, and tell you a bit of a story, and hope that spreads a little glow on your path as you go.Not too long ago, there was a guy - I'll call him Mr. W - that I was firmly, steadfastly convinced that I would be in a romantic relationship with. We hadn't had one up to that point, but we had the glimmering possibility of one. We had long conversations about what felt like everything on the planet, we liked a lot of the same books, we liked ideas, we liked to sit in bars over wine or gin and argue. There was chemistry, no doubt about it, and there were sparks flying, and I was sure that this was the love you talk about: wild and quiet and passionate and steadfast all at once.But. That little word, every so often, would pop up - in conversations about Mr. W with my friends, or with myself. But. There was the irreproachable fact that we weren't in the relationship I saw a glimmering possibility for. We weren't together on the couch after a long day of work. We weren't writing the letters, making the picnics, holding hands, telling our friends. I knew that possibility was there; but it hadn't been made true.So, Steadfast, I asked, point-blank, not in pretty words but in true ones. I put on makeup and thought about what I'd wear and ate half a grilled cheese in my brother's truck beforehand because I was so nervous. And the answer was no.Before the story gets too long-winded, I want to bring you with me, if you will, to an afternoon just before I asked Mr. W for the last time about the glimmering possibility of us. I am sitting on a couch in a brightly lit office, and my counselor, wise woman that she is, asks me how I feel about the prospect of having this confrontation. The words, awful, terrible, please don't make me do this please please please come to mind. But there, clanging like an iron bell (thank you, Sugar), are the words I speak:"The truth has already arrived, though, hasn't it? I'm just going to open the door for it now."She looks at me in surprise, and I mirror the same expression back to her. Yes, she says, smiling. Yes.Steadfast, I think the truth has arrived. I think you know this, from the letter you sent me, and I think you are now peeking at it from behind the door of your heart, and you have to decide if you open the door. Opening the door to the truth won't mean you get special knowledge of what the future holds. But from everything you tell me, this guy, he is saying no, and that's the truth standing at your door. The other things you know about him or his life situation, they aren't knocking. They aren't here. When all has been laid out on the table before you, and the answer is no, then no is knocking at your door.My counselor told me over and over in the year before I opened the door that it takes the time it takes. No more and no less. So I'll echo that to you, too. It takes the time it takes. You are allowed to be steadfast and confused before you open the door and walk outside and meet this guy's answer and grapple with what it offers you and what it denies.But eventually, I think, that's where you must go. You must open the door. You must look that answer in the eyes and listen to it, and let it ache, and let it roam around, and let it lead you. Because the truth will always lead you somewhere. His no will journey you to a new place. Mr. W's no took me somewhere completely unexpected. The truth does that.And here is the other thing, for your fear (and my fear) about whether there will ever be any love like the one you express in your letter - the truth also always leads towards fullness. The guy in your letter, he doesn't sound like he leads there. His no will not bring an end to the fullest love that you can imagine - it will bring only an end to one possibility, glimmering and beautiful though it was.There is fullness and joy on the other side of the door. I promise this. And in the acceptable time, I have all kinds of confidence you'll fling that door open.Love,hilary

this is where I learn something

A day is not a long time. 24 hours, minutes ticked by in neat regular fashion, so many of them already dressed in the colors of what we must do - emails that need writing, conferences that need planning, phone calls and food and sleep and sweating to Zumba routines in your brother's bedroom so you don't break the 200 year old floorboards of your upstairs hideaway. Not every minute is extraordinary. But sometimes a stretch of unextraordinary ones, sleek and swift, upend you.I am driving back to Berlin to fly home. I start thinking about my blog. The rows of trees along the autobahn are neater than the ones at home; the fields are bright yellow with an unidentified crop. The cars blur past our windows, a sky still swollen with rain that hasn't started falling. I've been in another country; it feels like going home is to travel somewhere unfamiliar again.I'm thinking some unpretty thoughts about my blog along the German highway. I'm defensive against this nagging worry about me and writing, and something someone who really matters said to me before I left, "Are you their Holy Spirit?" And he was right - that's the question to stop me short.But the defensive thoughts have lingered across the ocean and some days of separation from the online world, my lungs full of self-righteous air, so justified in what I think I do when I write about perfectionism and being "enough" and grace.And in the way of it, as it always is when you travel, you catch the eye of the land spread out before you and something looks back at you. Maybe it is just the gentleness of the horses in their pasture, but the one who makes eye contact with me has a fierceness about her that makes me momentarily afraid. She isyoung, stamping her foot impatiently at the green earth, and she tosses her mane just as we flyby. We stare at each other a while after.God tells me often that I ought not to imagine myself so wise and knowing. But I'm 22, and I assume that I can learn it on my own and teach it twice before my time.  I place my words around me like fenceposts and bricks, laying my comfort and security in them, but the true things I say, o dear foolish heart of mine?God gives them because I need saving.Maybe the mare who looked at me could see that I confuse the two, the why I write and the who I want to be and the real way of grace.Maybe she shook her mane at me because of that.Or maybe God has been speaking to me about this for weeks and it was only her look that stopped me in my brick piling fence laying defensiveness. God has been speaking.I don't have wisdom about being a perfectionist. I write about it, here and here and all over my heart, but I don't have it. What I bring is just this: that God sometimes lets us write out what we do not really know in order for us to learn it. What I bring is me, bricks and fence posts abandoned as I walk curious toward the truth that God saves me, and the most surprising thing is that is forever a one-way street. We set tables, that person with the right questions tells me.And we bring our words not as bricks but as bread, here for the breaking open and sharing, here because we are all hungry.Back on the road in Berlin, I am now thinking about the mare in the field. About the sleek and swift moments that upend us. About how traveling, however long and far, brings us home again.Love,hilary

be, still.

Tonight I walked back to the chapel, after the black caps and gowns had paraded past, had gone out to dinner, had found their way to celebrations and shouting and the I-can't-believe-it's-here that was my own just a year ago. I walked, and walked, feeling the blisters where my shoes don't quite fit my feet, feeling the dip and pull of my shoulders after carrying the day, feeling the weight of my body pulled towards the earth.Maybe my knees knew where they wanted to go before my heart did.I sat alone in the chapel, in a back pew. I stared at the empty chairs, the empty, echoing room. There were only a few chandeliers lazy and lit, swaying almost as an afterthought of wind. We breathed, the room and I. We waited each other out. I waited, what felt like an age in the sweetly dimming sunlight, for God or maybe just for some sense of something out there, some echo of yes, we see you, from the pews and benches, from the hymnals flung in piles or the ferns beckoning me with their long green fingers.Oh, God, love is hard.It is hard to want a thing so delicate, so very unsayable, that our words gesture at it almost helplessly. It is hard to walk in a thing that I barely know. It is hard to widen my heart past the length of the day and the ache in my feet and the steady drumbeat in my left temple. I slid off my shoes - a reflex - and I folded in on myself.God, love is hard.I sat and sat and sat and sat. And nothing changed. No whisper in the breeze through the single open window. No flame of hope or joy streaming over me. No promises or reminders resounding in the empty room. I could hear the fans whir themselves to sleep. I could hear a clock keep its time. I could almost hear the slight shake in my hands against the edge of the pew in front of me. But the house of worship was quiet.I'm the girl who always wants the voice from heaven reassurance. I'm the girl who expects Him to say it loud and say it obvious, a gold star on my forehead at the end of each day, an answer when I worry. And the stillness echoed so loud I was afraid I might drown in it. Be still and know... I've never know how to do that. Be still. My mother knows how to make silence with the littlest ones on Sunday mornings. With them, she weaves stillness through their hands and toes and flailing elbows and anxious knees. The youngest learn to listen to the silence, the hollow widened space where God walks. Again, they must teach me. Again, I know so little, sitting alone in the chapel in the middle of the sunset chasing away the afternoon. I know so little about a world hollowed and lit by silence. I know so little about how God sounds; I wonder how much I have lost in not listening.But it was still in the chapel tonight.Maybe that was Him.Love,hilary

dear hilary: the thinnest envelope

Dear Hilary,I've been telling people for a good while now that I have plans for graduate school. You see, I've always had plans for graduate school. Once it was law school and once it was nursing and a few times it's been a joint JD/PhD and always it's been the idea that I should and can be a part of that. But lately, when I tell people, I tell them the school, the fellowship, the hope, and then I start to worry. Because what if I don't get in? What if I get that thin envelope in the mailbox? What if I'm not one of the few who get chosen to be a part of the class of... ? What will they all think? What will I do?Love,NervousDear Nervous,What will you do? I'll just ask the question back at you. It isn't for anyone else to work out or reason how you build a life after that gnawing possibility of rejection. We can give you the pep talks, pass the B&J, or the g&t, or both, tell you to stop worrying and stop feeling that prick of fear, because you have a beautiful life... but this one belongs to you and there isn't all that much I can tell you. You, however. You can tell you a lot.You can tell yourself that the meaning of the thinnest envelope is less than the meaning of the love you've sincerely built in the afternoons and the extra hours and the holding your palms open for another heart. You can tell yourself that if graduate school A or B  says no, it means less about who you are than the six pairs of eyes that gaze up at you during the busiest time at the prayer circle, mean less than the three year old who thanks God for you, right there in her list of horses and birthday parties.You can approach the mirror with an open hand and whisper that you are going to hold it open and watch what is put inside it, without peering sideways at what is put in the palms of the other hands that grace your life. You can imagine yourself a seed, in a fallow field, hungry for the rain, but unafraid.You can whisper a bit of peace, say Sarah Bessey's, "calm your heart" while you drive home. You can remember that not one of us came into the world stamped with a seal of graduate school approval and all of us came in with God's image borne deep in our bones and His law written on our hearts and He is right there, engraving His name over the walls of our hearts.You can pour the second glass of red wine. You can write yourself a letter and put it in the thinnest envelope and mail it to yourself for the same day that those other envelopes, thick or thin, arrive next year. You can write love inside that letter: love for the work that has belonged to you, love for the work that is mysterious and yet to come, love for the people, love for the places, always more love than you were able to bear but you somehow did, anyway.That's all you.What people think if you don't get in is a deep fear that lurks under the bed. Will they love me, if I'm not a ? we whisper. If I never have a - if I fail to win - if I don't - ? And this is what will catch us slowly, the sinking feeling that perhaps what they love is only how well we've performed.You work your way out by rereading the old and good and true words. You run back to the promises that we have been set free, and He who loves, He is from everlasting. His command to abide in his love. His promise to send His Spirit to be with us.You are loved abundantly, dear one. Not because of an envelope or a graduate school or an anything. Love is just like that: overwhelming and rich and somehow, always, seeking us. Let it find you.Love,hilary

myself, eighteen

I'm trapped in a heard of other freshmen in Boston all wearing matching tan tee-shirts with an orientation logo emblazoned on it, promising me that if anyone wanted to think I was a cool, sophisticated college student, they will see my t-shirt and sneakers and know better.I hold my phone in the palm of my hand inside my pocket, sweating against the keys. I wait, and wait. I spend the first three weeks waiting.It would have been better if I didn't have the evidence that I had spent the last ten days in the middle of the woods in upstate New York telling a group of people I had never met before that this boy, he and I were a thing. A thing I couldn't define, a thing I couldn't quite pin down, one Starbucks lemonade and one impulsive kiss against a car door the afternoon before I left, but a thing. I was sure of it.He doesn't write back. I keep myself away from the ten digits I'm sure I've memorized in tracing them over and over in my pocket, because I don't want to text him but I want to text him, and I promise I have to let one more hour go by where I'm silent, and the hour becomes two, becomes a week... and maybe I don't know the ten digits as well anymore, was it 7-8 or 8-7 and was there a 9? But I imagine what I'd say, in my first-year indignant heart, it is rageful and spiteful and angry. And I start to spin the story.I tell my roommate in hushed whispers at 4am while we're eating cookie dough straight from the tube how much experience I have with boys. I laugh to the girls on my floor as one of them puts a 5 day Garnier hair dye in my hair about the fact that if you kiss someone in the middle of the night on a beach you're going to find you are covered in sand, completely, the next morning. I proclaim that my love language is physical touch. And I wink.God catches up to me on a walk around the quad right before first semester finals. I don't notice Him at first, walking head bent to the concrete against the early-December drizzle. But I'm worn thin in trying to write that scene between Martin Luther King, Jr. in the Birmingham Jail and his wife. I'm thinking about stage directions when I realize God is there, too.Do you want to talk about what happened?I have said no a thousand times, I remind Him. I've told the story already. It's better the way I tell it. It's safer the way I tell it. I keep walking, repeating things about the Kings and the scene in the jail. I read over the words in my head.Do you want to talk about what happened? I still say no, but perhaps there is a crack, a pause, just small enough for a bit of the Spirit to slip inside my well-walled heart. I sit on a bench, damp from the rain that just stopped. I put my books next to me, not realizing until I hear the slap of paper on water that I put them in a puddle. I cringe, and put them on the wet concrete at my feet.You cared for someone. A pause.He didn't stay. Another pause.And this means something to your heart.I start to cry. I'm eighteen and in college and I had a thing that wasn't a thing and I told that group of people in the middle of the woods in New York that I had a thing that turned out not to be a thing, and now I've told everyone that I was pleased with myself, with all that I did and said and I made it this story, and that was going to make it feel better, was going to make it safe again, I was going to be safe inside the laughter and the knowing wink and the hair dying on the first floor bathroom.It can't be the kind of beautiful I want it to be, Hil, until you let it mean something in your heart. It can't be restored to you if you keep it. I stop crying.Let Me have this story. I don't want to give it back, and my version is safer, steered clear of it meaning something. Of it hurting. Of it aching, and healing.Let Me have it. The rest of eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, and counting, I watched Him make more of this story - more healing, more peace, more delight, more laughter - maybe even something like wisdom.It began that first night. It began with the thing that wasn't a thing, that became an entirely different and more beautiful thing. I gave Him back the story.Love,hilary

and we are hearing what we are

Last year, on this day, May 10, I wrote a letter to Preston. Something about it caught my mind when I was thinking I wanted to write something today, that I wanted to remember how much the years bend and shift with our changing weight. How gravity loves us, pulls us, releases us, how time spins, and stands still. How it all seems to change and not change and there is wonder, and there is grace. Always that. Something about this letter (originally published here) felt like it was the beginning of the right question. Dear Preston,Isn't it strange, this ache we feel for the departure we must have known was coming? I graduate in nine days - you in just two - and I'm sitting on my bed angry at the idea of leaving, as if it was a surprise tucked into my acceptance letter, a clause I didn't read. You're going to have to go from this place, it says, and I want to rebel, insist that no, we can always be here where it is safe and familiar, where it is challenging and messy, where hearts have emptied and overflowed.But then the thunderclap, as you put it, and the sweeping in of departure. And we'll never come back here, will we? Never as we are now, and the place which seems so familiar will bend with the seasons and look different when we happen upon it in ten years. Among the great and varied changes of this life, it's places changing we forget about most. Baylor and Gordon will change; the green of the quad and the presence of the coffee shop on campus and the feel of the chapel pews and the long sidewalks leading past the baseball field to the track - they will weather new conversations and new feet, new adventures and heartbreaks. These places we love most will not stand still just to watch us move. They, too, will journey on towards their fullness. The places, too, will become more fully His.I'm deep in Rilke, deep in the goodness of those words. After all this, it is Rilke who reminds me, in his gentle way, to trust and behold and marvel. Can I share just one small thing with you, because it's too beautiful to leave on a page in a book?"Orchard and Road" (Collected French Poems)In the traffic of our daysmay we attend to each thingso that patterns are revealedamidst the offerings of chance.All things want to be heard,so let us listen to what they say.In the end we will hear what we are:the orchard or the road leading past.All things want to be heard. I wish I had learned this four years ago, when the stars clamored from the night sky, when the trees whispered, when the people I passed on the sidewalk looked longingly at me, waiting to be recognized. I wish I had learned to listen to what they were saying. I missed them. There are a thousand images I might have captured, rendered permanent in words or in the silence between words; a thousand people I might have loved, a thousand books I might have read, a thousand cool rainy nights I might have walked and prayed and thought.But in the end we will hear what we are. What does he mean by this? By listening to the world, we will hear what we are. We who are so in-between, who yearn beyond the world but root ourselves in the world - how can we know what we are?We are leaving, Preston, and the departure aches in places I didn't know existed. In the traffic of my days I attend to that ache. I listen to what it says: it says I have loved. It says I have given my heart away. It says what I am is human, and to be human is to ache and love.Today and tomorrow, I'm praying that you would hear what you are in the traffic of your day: that you would hear about how you loved, and rejoiced, and ached. That you would hear how you belong to Him. That you would hear the orchard, and the road leading past.Love, and every grace,HilaryPS. A year later, still in the traffic of our now different days, still with our hearts and minds bent towards the true and beautiful - with a year of working and theology and sacramentality (things we know better know that we don't know), and a year of crowded bars and dinner parties, a year of grace that sometimes ached and always lasted - I still wonder about Rilke. I still want to hear the orchard, and the road leading past. I still think this must be about wonder.

dear hilary: pull up a chair

Dear Hilary,I'm not a loud person. I don't write op-eds or shout my thoughts during class. I don't feel like I fit - I'm afraid to say something because, I might be wrong. But I admire people who give their opinion. Who have thoughts and opinions on things like infant baptism and an ideology that lines up with Hegel or Gadamer or St. Thomas Aquinas. But I don't have something neat and I'm not confident my opinions are right. Where is there a table for me?Sincerely,Too QuietDear Quiet,When I lived on Capitol Hill I went to a Baptist church on Sunday mornings. It was a ten minute walk, easy to get to, and every Sunday they served free lunch to the starving intern and college student populations that flock to the city in search of a place at a table. They would pile lasagnas or pieces of chicken or ham sandwiches, and once I think I saw pizzas, their white boxes stacked unevenly in the serving window. At those lunches there was a table of excited students - some from my program, some from schools in the city, a few post-college interns - always talking and laughing, gesticulating wildly with whatever was on their fork. I would creep down the hall towards the room after standing too long by myself in the "book sale" section of the church next to books about the loneliness of single life and searching in vain for the remarkably good looking man who had once talked to me as we both walked out of the metro at Union Station.But I never sat at the table. I couldn't bring myself to eat more than a piece of celery once, standing in the back, and I think my roommate once insisted that we at least eat some bread and spaghetti. I still hovered anywhere but that table of smiling, confident people talking loudly about their view of resurrection and grace and the "political game." I assumed that their table was for the people who knew where they stood and who they were. Who had it sorted out. Who had opinions. Who didn't stand too long next to books on singleness waiting for the mystery man from the metro.I wish I had asked your question out loud, by sitting down next to one of them.The thing about tables is that they're these places of invitation and acceptance, a give and take between each person there, across the plastic blue tablecloth or the fine linen, three chairs apart or bumping elbows. The table in the Baptist church might not have seen or recognized me - but I don't think I made myself all that visible. It felt at the time that I wasn't qualified, wasn't a part of the crowd, but I think the harder, quieter truth is that I wasn't really listening for their invitation. And I didn't trust that there was something I was going to offer simply by my presence, elbow against elbow, passing the extra napkins or the brownies or the salt.Where is there a table for you? You are needed and welcomed in surprising places.You can't be everywhere, sweet pea, and perhaps you cannot have dinner at every table you encounter. But you can, when you come across people who make you think, who you admire, who cherish good words and ideas - you can pull up a chair.It will not always work. I'm scared to give you this advice because there are moments when the grace runs dry and the harshness runs wild, and you aren't invited to draw nearer. I'm sorry in advance for those moments.But I am on the side of trusting that you bringing yourself, even without your loud and confident opinions is something wondrous. I am on the side of thinking it is worth it to pull up the chair, to believe you have something to bring with you, because you are.I am on the side of believing that tables are the beginnings of the truly beautiful between people.There is a table, many, in fact, for you in this world. Somewhere, there is a beautiful waiting to begin.Love,hilary

myself, fourteen

"Dear Heavenly Father," I start the traditional way, the adjectives in a pleasing order, my list of requests and people at the ready. "I pray for..." I am lying on my side inside a thin sleeping bag in a youth center in Montgomery, Alabama. The boys are in a room next door, giggling to themselves. A block falls off a shelf, and they race into our room screeching that there are cockroaches in the room next door, and we screech back that we are all supposed to be asleep and if the teacher hears you he's going to come in here and be disappointed.

We can't stop laughing, though, under the thin sleeping bags and the humidity, I forget my prayer in an effort to scoot a little closer to the circle of people telling secrets and even though I don't know any secrets, I hover just near enough to listen.

This is the summer where I try to be too cool to pray. I sit in church unenthusiastic, thinking more about how I want to marry the boy two aisles up and how I scrawl his name across journal pages. I pretend that church is just this thing we have to do, my family and I, and really I am just like everyone else and I want all the same things and Sunday morning with Bread and Wine is just like the soccer and lacrosse practices at the field in the town. I wish to myself I was playing soccer and lacrosse on Sunday mornings. 

I have braces stretched across my smile, which makes me self-conscious about smiling, but it doesn't really stop me. In the pictures of this trip, you'll see me in clothes that don't quite fit but I wanted so desperately to seem like I was the kind of girl in the advertisements with the cutoff shorts and the long straight hair and the effortless tan. In the pictures you can see my trying.

Myself, at fourteen - the word is trying. There is a yearning that radiates from my pictures, my smile, my neatly three-hole-punched tests and papers. There is a hopefulness that enough makeup will turn the school dance at Halloween into something fun and me into someone who could be brave enough to dance without looking over her shoulder. I watched the people watching, and I was afraid. Who wants to be the girl who prays when there is music and racing heartbeats? Who wants to be the girl who worries over Sunday morning worship when there is adventure on a Saturday night? 

That June of cockroaches in Montgomery, the night we ate catfish from a local pond and I promised that I would come back to the South  - it feels like a forever ago. 

And then the other day I was her. She reappeared at the corner of my memories and my present, waved as if to remind me that in the summer of fourteen, I believed I could make my faith an add-on to my heart instead of its very blood and oxygen and beat. Because I wanted to curl up in the sleeping bag on the very inside of the circle and have the secrets and go to soccer practice instead of church. Maybe it had something to do with the harder things of daily life in faith, maybe it was just a day I didn't really want to kneel, pencil skirt to office rug, over the work week. Maybe it was just a yearning without another reason. 

I recognized her in me the other day, the girl who wanted to be too cool to pray that June and that whole summer. And I waved her nearer, so that perhaps in the mystery of knowing ourselves I could reassure her, though she is a past self, that it will be better to be on our knees for the world. It will be better to yearn after the Word made Flesh who comes to dwell inside and among us. It will be better, in the end, not to have been too cool for any of it. 

Only on our knees can we hear our heartbeat. 

Love,
hilary

dear hilary: why we pray

Dear Hilary,If God is other, if God is something inconceivable and beyond, why would we pray? Why should we pray? How do we even know if he hears or cares, if there is anything real about the Person you say you get on your knees in front of? I don't want to pray anymore. And why should I?Love,The ChallengerDear The Challenger,I'm torn between telling you that I believe in intercession, in prayer, in the agonizing work of getting on our knees because of something about St. Augustine, St. Teresa of Avila, and this one man who lives in rural Mississippi who I met last year on a trip down to see my mentor - and telling you that I'm not sure I always do believe it, but I pray anyway. Both are honest, in different hours of the same day, in different seasons of the same year. And the reasons behind our prayers are mysterious, I think, and somehow beyond words, but I'll try.I pray because of things like, well, the fact that God's otherness has been brought so near to us in the image of God we bear, in how the Incarnation has flung all our ideas of "cosmic distance" out the window. I haven't ever known what to say to the red shift and the rate of expansion of galaxies, other than to ask whether the Incarnation shouldn't shatter any idea that we have about what love is, and what it contains?And when I get on my knees in my office and bend my head and close my eyes against the too-bright office light, I'm not sure I know how to believe Him against the black holes, the waves and vibrations of shadows and shuddering dimensions, the unknowns. And call me a fool, but I remember a love so particular He knows my name, cares where I work, who I befriend... a love so particular, He came to earth to save me. God is inconceivable; but it's His movement that mystifies me more than His being. The fact of them: the fact of this Redeeming, the fact of this messy, sweaty, bloodied birth and life and death; the fact of his loving, not just in the hypothetical, but in the lived. I can say, "I pray because God has commanded me to," and there is something in that all on its own.I pray because God Himself cut the covenant. God saved Israel. God wandered with His people, through the years of disobedience and the agony of distance and all in the movement towards this pivotal mystery: the Word made Flesh.And whether we want to, or not, doesn't really seem the question you're asking. I think if you waited a little longer, you might ask that question differently. I think you'd be asking whether you can trust the work of prayer. Whether it means something.And that answer is a terrifying yes.You can trust the work of prayer, of speaking words too big for your head and your heart, of interceding for a person you love.I can't pretend to really know why. My logical and theological arguments begin to fade at the moment when I face the real question - can we trust this - and I don't know how to tell you yes. But yes.God is inconceivable, beyond comprehension, the creator of the dimensions we know nothing about. And He is wondrously close to us. And His love is particular for you and me. And a love that particular is listening.Love,hilary