advent 3 (the glorious music)

My brother and I love the Messiah. We sang the Hallelujah Chorus in high school together, our voices beaming out those waves of joy, our faces alive in the light that shines in the midst of the darkness of winter. Later, in February or March, when the snow was melting, I'd find myself humming it as I went along the winding roads towards school. There was something in the music, I said.So a few years ago, when I realized that the music was beloved by many more than just me and my brother, I bought us tickets. We dressed up, took a train in the freezing cold to Symphony Hall. It was a 3pm performance, that first time, I think, and the first Sunday in Advent. Our seats were student rush seats, nothing special, but somehow the feeling that we were grown ups, going into the city to see something, walking up the cool steps with ladies in fur coats and men in tweed jackets with elbow patches, meant something. We were learning to be us, we were learning to love the us that we were.And then the music began, and over and over again the words and sounds crashed around our ears, Comfort, comfort ye my people, saith your God. The tenor that first year was beaming, I remember, and though his body was calm, it was as if his voice left his body, to come to each of us, tapping us on the shoulder. Did you hear me? It whispered. I am singing to you, thus saith your God. I have loved choral music ever since I sang Rudolph and Holly Jolly Christmas in my elementary school gym/cafeteria/auditorium/multi-purpose room. I have loved to sing. But then, in that first Sunday, when the waiting had just begun? Then I loved music for the first time.We went back this year. A new night, a new concert hall, a new choir, a new tenor opening God's words to us and proclaiming the comfort of God's people, the coming of the Messiah. A new feeling, sitting in what I think was the same outfit I had worn two years ago, leaning forward in my seat for two hours while I cling to each word like the manna God once sent to the unruly people Israel.And I heard, again and again, not just that we are comforted, but that line from the Hallelujah chorus I sang all those years ago -the kingdom of this world, is become the kingdom of our Lord, and of his Christ, and of his Christ. I have been unruly this Advent, anxious for God's coming but perhaps not for what it will bring to me. Anxious to celebrate, but not to prepare. I have been hungry for the good news but when it begins, as it must begin, in the reminder that we are a people hindered by our sins, in the knowledge of how we have wronged each other and this world, how we have gone astray, how we have fallen apart from God - then I do not want to know the good news. Then I do not want to face the manger, the angels in that field, the Christ child.But the kingdom of this world is become the kingdom of our Lord, and of his Christ. And of his Christ.And he shall reign.However unruly our hearts, however we fear the goodness of the news, the light it shines on us - can there be better music than this? That he shall reign forever and ever.Love,hilary

when it's finals here

It's finals here, with reading day on Friday. There is a light snow falling now, there is a movement across campus - the hurrying of Christmas and Advent, the fear about exams and finishing it all, the longing to be able to just go out and drink peppermint mochas at Starbucks without thinking of all the responsibilities, all of the work, all of the things-you-said-you'd-do-and-didn't.My senior year of Gordon, I remember this time of long runs and this fear, oh, this aching fear that I was not loved, that I was not enough, that the world I was holding by the tips of my fingers had already left me behind. That what everyone thought I was, I wasn't, and what they thought I could do, I couldn't.I wrote this post about "Winter Song" - still, to this day, my favorite collaboration between two artists I love - and I wanted to give the people who were reading my blog way back love, to carry them closer.And today I remembered that our hearts might ask these questions even when we can't ask it out loud, even when it's busy and Christmas-y and full to overflowing.So, if this finds you in the midst or at the beginning of your finals, if this finds you with those questions about enough and beautiful and worthy and cherished, about whether those will be words that belong to you?This is my winter song to you. Can I remind you that the bravest work is done when we do not believe we are brave? Can I remind you that the word "enough" is only really relevant in the story about Christ come among us, the final, full and sufficient sacrifice that becomes victory and redemption and life everlasting - that Jesus is enough. That we are longing for him, the fullness that he brings? Can I remind you that what is beautiful these days isn't caught on camera or in the bright lights at the gym, but it's somewhere living between the kind words you choose to say and the extra Hershey's kiss you remember to put in someone's mailbox, or the hug you give them when you pass the peace of Christ on a Sunday morning? Can I say that you are, and we are, somehow worthy and cherished, because the Lord longs to be compassionate towards us?Because how the Lord longs to be compassionate towards us.This is my winter song to you, and to me, too. Because that senior year when I wrote that blog I was running four or five miles a day to hide from myself, scared to move at all for fear that the careful holding everything in place would collapse. And even now, I wake up to the cold morning and I worry that I will lose the things I love because I am not enough.I write in the hope that, by saying it, I will bring a beacon of light closer - that I will be your harvester of light. Maybe it will shine a little on me, too.Love,hilary

advent 2 (maranatha)

I only know the word as an Advent word. I only hear it as a crying out, a prayer, desperate and true -Maranatha! Come, Lord Jesus.There is a holy impatience in the word. Perhaps, a holy impatience in Advent altogether. It is the impatience of a people who, though not ready, want to be made ready, a people who cry out prepare the way even as our hearts falter and fumble. Even as we still say the unkind or ungenerous thing (oh, how many of those I have said and thought), even as we still forget to open our homes, even as we treat each other without the care of a people walking in the light, even then -we want Jesus to come.Maranatha. Lord Jesus, I long for you.I used to ache to light the second candle on the Advent wreath. I used to long for nothing but to be old enough to read out to the congregation - "Today we light the second candle of Advent," - I used to bounce around these old walls and floors with the knowledge that we were closer to Christmas. My child self knows how to be impatient for the wonder of Jesus better than I do. And though perhaps the impatience was mingled with a few hopeful glances at my stocking (I have it still, decorated with my name in felt and a bear holding a present), though perhaps I was easily caught in the swirl of the season -even then, I was longing for him.Maranatha, maranatha.Is it so soon that I have forgotten how words are whole prayers? I have sat here this afternoon wondering about whether I can, or should, or even know how to write in this space anymore. I have asked God, didn't I know how to pray here, once?But only the word is sometimes the widest prayer. A clatter of syllables on a thirsty, impatient heart.Maranatha.Come, Lord Jesus.Pray it with me?Love,hilary

all that christmas music

Preston and I were driving to the airport this week (the not fun kind of drive, where we know it'll be a little while before we can see each other again), and he was playing a CD of Advent and Christmas music. It doesn't surprise me that much anymore to discover the things that this man knows and loves are close to my heart - old hymns set to new sound, simple melodies that whisper through the cold drive that we are waiting for the Messiah, that we are anxious for him, that we are hopeful, that we are preparing the way.But since that drive, I've been listening to all that Christmas music - the kind that plays in the Gap and on the Michael Buble Holiday Pandora station, the music that surrounds us with dancing sugarplums and dreams of warm fires and friends and falling in love.And a dear friend was talking on Wednesday about how couple-y Christmas can feel. How that can be hard.All those images of ice-skating on Frog Pond, you know? And the way that the TV seems to tell us Christmas is really about love, and love is really about romantic love, and romantic love is really about Kay Jewelry, and the logic twists and turns around us and we feel trapped in a story we were never writing ourselves, left to ourselves.Last winter I wrote this post for Lisa-Jo, about how I wondered if my skinny jeans would still fit while I ate my way through a bag of peppermint bark looking at all the heart shaped icons on Facebook. How I felt sitting in those jeans and how I didn't believe it would happen, how I told God that it would not happen, how God said, "I have named your life beautiful," and how desperately and deeply that has changed me.This year is the first year I'll have ever had someone to call mine on Christmas.The first year I'll have the chance of kissing anyone under any kind of hanging plant at a holiday party, or clinking champagne glasses with. And I sing along with the holiday stations thinking about love, how to keep it safe from too many commercials telling stories to us in our skinny jeans or our pjs eating our peppermint bark watching hearts pop up on Facebook or another rerun of the holiday love movies.And while I love the Christmas music, the warmth and familiarity of it, while I play the Pandora stations and you might even catch me swaying my hips in time to Lady Antebellum in a store this weekend -I want to tell you that the love I love most this Christmas is the love of the man who took me to Panera and to see Frozen because he knew I would like it. The way he catches my eye and does the dishes and tucks my feet under the blanket on the couch because he knows I get cold. The way he kisses my forehead, just because.And the love I love most is not less than this: the love of my mother, who laughs with me as we curl up under the covers. The love of my father, who wraps me tight in hugs sometimes for no apparent reason, other than he loves me and wants to remind me, right there in front of the stove. The love of my brothers, with their fiercely handsome hearts, the way that they teach me to give more of myself, to listen better, to drink Dunkin' Donuts and watch Despicable Me. The love of my sister, our FaceTimes with the baby nephew, the love of my brother-in-law and laughter over sausage pizza and the quiet of the family gathered together. The love of the friends that call and text and write and give of themselves in the way that teaches me how - the love that teaches me how to love.That's the love I want to sing about, in between Justin Bieber's "Mistletoe" and Michael's "Cold December Night" and someone else's something else that tells us Christmas is only one picture of love.Because Love comes down this Christmas, because Jesus becomes known in the hugs and laughter and making space for each other, passing around the peppermint bark.Because I want the fullness of love for us this Christmas.Love,hilary

when I crawl back into the word

"What do I possibly have to say about that." - my response to a thoughtful prompt by my ever-thoughtful fiance when I complained I had nothing to write about.He is too patient with me to say anything to my complaining, to the whine he must hear in my voice through the typed messages. He reminds me that I could write nothing. But how do I explain that I want to be writing, that my heart is restless and I must do something, put something on paper to feel again the way that I feel most alive, that after being quiet here I want to be loud, even if just for a moment? That I want to have something to say.Maybe that's what we all want, scattered in our various lives. We want to have something to say - to the post office lady or the checker in the long grocery store line, to the question over coffee and the quizzical look in passing the peace in church. If I say nothing, how do I know I still have a voice? If I say nothing, am I still here?So I open this blank screen and I start to type and it sounds furious because a part of me is furious, furious that words are what the are, furious that you cannot control them and sometimes you have nothing to say and furious even more because the voice that I haven't been listening to is telling me, "You haven't been listening."I already know it. I haven't  been. I haven't found God in prayer and I haven't sought God in church and I haven't gone into God's word like the woman I am, the one who was at the well, her thirst wrapping around her like a veil.Because wasn't it the Word that was water to her soul? And didn't he say to us, meditate on this day and night?So when she prays in her email that the word would be bound to my forehead and around my wrists,when he is patient with my raging about how little I have to say,when the only thing I hear in church is that I have not been in Word, and Hilary? That's why you feel apart from me,then, I crawl back into it.I open Isaiah and read, slow, deliberate, and the words are loud with God's wild anger and desolation over the beloved chosen people, who have all gone astray, and how there is nothing anymore that gives honor and glory, and Isaiah asks, at the very end, "How long, O Lord?"I crawl closer.I want to hear God's answer.Love,hilary

advent 1 (turn to light)

I once heard that Christmas was celebrated at the time it was because it was the time that pagans celebrated the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. It was the time when people ran after candles and lampposts and fires, tried to beat back the darkness for the sake of the wild light that illumines, keeps safe, anchors. It was the time when the dark  was long and the sunlight raced across the sky and it feels, it always feels, like light is a scarcity we must hoard for ourselves and keep close until summer comes again.I'm not sure if that's the entire reason Christmas is celebrated in December, or if there is something beyond that, but perhaps it isn't as important as this word, light.And all the poets who have used the word seem to take a step toward me in my quiet non-writing life these weeks, all the lines of poetry that echo through the hallways of other years:somewhere overhead, the geese are turning into light again  - David WhyteFor the child at the bright pane surrounded bySuch warmth, such light, such love, and so much fear. - Richard WilburShe is awake and stars at scars of light - Mark Strandhe fixes a funnel of mirrors, a trap for light. - May SwensonI think of the word, "light" the way it cuts us off even as we want it to go on forever, sounding the promise of seeing. I think of the way that we hunger and wonder for the light, the way it moves, the way it must move, beyond us.And you and I today are the people who have walked in this great darkness, these lengthening shadows, and today we are the people who must, who must always, turn our hearts in Advent towards the coming of the light.And on us, who have dwelled in a land of deep darkness, on us the light has dawned.Can you see it now, the shimmers of it on each other's faces? Can you see how it begins to warm us, color our eyes bright with its beams? Can you feel, just softly at first, how even the promise that we have been walking in darkness, even the word light, stops our hearts short with its certainty?Might we be the people who turn to light again.Love,hilary

dear hilary: make an invitation

Dear Hilary,I'm here. I made it to college and somehow surviving on my own. I love these people and the opportunities I get and almost everything this place has to offer---but this week especially, I've been so afraid. Of everything. I'm afraid that there will be no one to catch me, that I'm destined for life as an outcast. I have people here who care, but they have their own lives and somewhere they belong. They have their own friendships, and even my roommate knows so many more people than I do, I just don't know how to ask for help---but I want it, but I'm so afraid of being in the way.There are so many deep friendships here, and it's beautiful to watch, and I don't want to be jealous, but maybe I am. And maybe I'm starting to wonder ifI'm not worth knowing that deeply, that I'm destined to be on the outskirts. I just don't see where I fit here. I'm too scared to do much of anything.Love,FreshmanDear Freshman,I almost transferred my first semester of college. Between the chaos of having chosen a major and suddenly wanting to switch it, living with a stranger, moving from my small, tight-knit circle of friends in high school to this bigger pond where people seemed to know each other after three minutes during the Orientation games or the day trip into Boston, I didn't think I could make it. I walked around with my old high school backpack, sat in my classes or in the dining hall, and imagined what it would be like to start over. Or better yet, to stop starting over. To spend the rest of my time in a familiar place with familiar people.I want so achingly ready to be done. And so I hear that same worry and frustration in your letter, and I want to tell you, the way that I seem to write in most of these letters, that it is not wrong to ache with the transition into college. It is not wrong to be unsure of yourself in a new place and unsure of the people who are with you. These feelings belong to you, and they are part of you, and they are part of the story of you in college. It is okay to let them exist in their loud, clattering selves for a little while.What kept me at the school I eventually grew to love was a woman with a piece of zucchini bread. Yes, that simple. That seemingly small. She called one of those first few weeks in and told me that her mom had sent her zucchini bread in a care package, that she couldn't possibly eat it all herself, so what did I think about coming over and having tea?I remember thinking at the time it was the first planned thing I had had in college so far. An RD and her zucchini bread in her apartment on a Friday afternoon. It sounds so simple. It sounds like it wouldn't be very much compared with the friendships that seem to multiply every night, that make the lounge loud and impossible to study in, that crowd the dining hall and the library and the walkways on your way to class.But I think it's more powerful than that.Belonging is not measured by the number of people at your table at dinner, and by what you think your roommate is doing, or how well they fit in, or if it seems like your whole first year seminar is throwing parties on the weekends. My guess is, honestly, that most of them feel the same way. It'll show differently in each of us, but I promise that they are also wondering about how to belong and if they will fit and whether anyone is really willing to get to know them beyond the customary exchanges of "hi" and "how are you" (to which your response has to be "good", though I have no idea why we came up with that). They wonder if you'll see them, just as you wonder if they will.So you want to know what you can do, to bridge these gaps, to feel less afraid. Bake zucchini bread. Invite someone from a class to eat it with you. Invite your roommate to go to the grocery store with you because you'd like the company and it's a chance to get off-campus. Invite these people who right now seem to have it together into a space that you make, a space that you're creating in and among everything that is new and overwhelming.There are more rarely moments when we "see how we fit" and more often moments when we help others fit into something new with us. You are already brave enough to ask these questions out loud to me. So I know you are brave enough to google a recipe for something that you love and bake it and bring others in to share it with you.That first invitation will be more meaningful than you know.Love,hilary

dear hilary: stay at the table

This is a new kind of dear hilary question - but one that I care a lot about, and I'm excited to share.Dear Hilary,As Christians, what, if anything, do we stand to gain from political disputes?  Should we just throw up our hands and agree to disagree, even on emotionally charged issues that matter deeply to us?  Or should we dive in headfirst and fight the good fight, even when it starts to poison our relationships and hurt our ability to love those with whom we disagree?Or is there a third option?Sincerely, Swing State of MindDear Swing State,When I lived in the bright chaos of DC, I remember wondering how people "did it" without losing their minds. The mantra of "it's who you know, it's the connections you have," or the walk along K Street with the power houses and the promise-makers-and-breakers was a lot to take in. And it seemed like the longer I spent time there, the more I realized the immense complexity of political life. The process of getting a bill to the floor alone is long enough and complicated enough to want to throw up your hands. And sometimes, when you hear one more report on the 7 o'clock news or one more newspaper headline about gridlock and insider Washington and the stalemate of government and this or that filibuster fight - you think this can't be what it is meant to be. And I don't think it is. I don't think we are intended to sit at tables and yell at each other over nicely arranged water pitchers and smoothly swiveling chairs. I don't think political conversation is meant to be so defensive and so positional that everything we hear the so-called "other side" saying we treat as an attack we must vigilantly rebuff.But here is the thing. A conversation only dissolves when people leave it. It might be a loud cacophony right now, it might sound like chaos, it might make us want to give up - but it still has life in it. If we withdraw, if we become so dissatisfied that we simply cease to participate, we might send a signal of our dissatisfaction, but we won't have a better conversation. We won't get to be agents of that change.I don't want Christians to be in politics simply because we represent an important philosophical perspective on matters of political and community significance. That's true. We care a lot about highly charged issues and our reflections can add a lot to policy-making. I want us to be there because we are fundamentally people of peace and justice. I want us to be there because, if we claim Christ, then we claim a kind of approach to politics, to conversations, to decisions about our common life, with the fiercest kind of commitment to listening. Peacemaking has to begin with listening. Justice has to begin with listening. If we leave the table, how will we hear?That means if we sit at the table, if we model for others and for each other (because we need that, too) we can make the conversation itself, the very way we go about deciding these things and weighing different opinions, one that is peaceful rather than punishing. We can ask questions and sincerely listen. And yes, maybe the philosophical opinion on one policy issue won't become law the way that some of us in this wild knit-together family wanted. Maybe it will be less than our original vision.But we can be a people who don't retreat into a silo of the like-minded. We can be a people who disagree within themselves, but who know that to do this common life, we have to listen. You say that sometimes our opinions hurt our relationships and makes it difficult to love those with whom we disagree? But whether it's in politics or families or workplaces or third-grade classrooms this was the charge we were given by Christ. We were told to love. So we have to get down in the dirt with each other and practice it. Couldn't it be, in fact, that participating in this political life is a part of how we learn to love?Can we imagine together that this politics thing doesn't have to be fighting the good fight and hurting those we love? We do that no matter what, so we'll bring it to politics. But can we imagine that politics could be the kind of chasing after justice with our whole participation at the table, disagreeing with care and attention, being the first to stay at the table when it gets difficult, being a people who listen?If we leave the table, how will we hear? Love,hilary

be taken care of

A few years ago, I fainted in an airport (I think I've told you all that story). I was afraid and in Cincinnati and away from my parents and a fresh almost 18, thinking I could be on my own. The first moment of panicked "what's wrong with me?" when I came to on the cool airport tiled floor was enough to convince me that I never wanted to feel so helpless again. I wanted to be able to sit up, drink water, get back on the plane and go home, without the soothing voices of the medics or the reassuring hand in the ambulance or any of the rest of it.But of course a few short years later, and I regain consciousness on the floor in the sacristy, the room where we gathered before the service, and I realize that once again, I'm panicking. I don't feel like I can breathe because I don't remember what happened, and the suddenness of losing control makes me feel like I am made of paper and might fold up, an origami crane, and fall down. I am surrounded by people and they offer orange juice, some says bring her a muffin or something to eat. They tell me to breathe, to inhale and exhale and follow a flashlight with my eyes and I'm scared, and my paper crane self wants to crumple at the sight of these people, care cradled in their hands, offering me the chance to need, to be taken care of.I am in the hospital bed in hallway 43, they take blood to run tests, they run an ECG/EKG (apparently the k is from the Greek kardia, meaning, heart, but that's a google search on a Monday night). I wonder, disconnected from the world, where home is. I think of my fiancé and the miles that still stretch between us and how there is a part of my heart that is never quite whole without him. I wonder about that picture of my heart's electricity.I wonder if it tells the story of how I've been trying to do this self-sufficient, emotions-in-their-alphabetical-non-offending-box thing for a while. I wonder if it shows how much of my heartbeat is caught up worrying that I'm not quite there yet, not spiritually or emotionally there, so much still in process like the scared crying almost 18 year old I was back in the Cincinnati airport. I've so wanted to be brave and strong and able to bear cheerfully what I've been given and not complain and not need...But then I think, would it be so wrong, to have my heartbeat whisper that I need taking care of, too? Would it be so wrong to lie in this hallway, waiting for blood test results and a saline drip to run its course, eating chicken salad out of a plastic carton while my brother, wise and steady man, makes me laugh quietly at the edge of the bed?Would it be so wrong to want to be taken care of, to want my fiancé's hand on my forehead and the marching orders to get back in bed, the call to check in and make sure that heart is okay? Would it be wrong to admit how much I need that?I faint in church on a Sunday morning, and they take a picture of my heart.For the first time, I hope it says how much I need.Love,hilary

dear hilary: the weight of all things

Dear Hilary,

My engagement has come to an end. I am devastated. The life that I thought I had, my direction, my focus, my plans for the future with this person that I so loved, have come to an end. There is no hope of return. I feel so lost. Where do I find God in this, when I feel so abandoned? When all the things I thought were promised for us are now dust? How can I even begin to figure out what is next for me? Please help,

Love,Lost in nowhere

Dear Lost in nowhere,Oh my dear. I am so completely, utterly sorry. I am so, so sorry. Your letter goes right to my gut when I read it, revisit it, looking for a way to reach through these electric cables and wi-fi signals and tell you that I am aching for you. And I do not understand how it hurts. But in the midst of the terrible mystery of it, and not understanding it, I wanted to reach over and whisper how very, very sorry I am.Rilke once said, "Life is heavier than the weight of all things." I wondered at that when I first read it. It seems obvious, somehow, that life is heavy, heavier. But then I thought about how we calculate ourselves into knots. How we try to add up the heaviness to understand when we will heal. How we try to understand how much time will take to grow, to move, to be made whole when something becomes, as you say, dust. But time is not obedient to those calculations, and neither is grief, and neither is ache. So Rilke is right, and his counsel is what I want to give you: Life is heavier than the weight of all things.You are in the unmeasurable heaviness, in a dark tunnel and right now, I do not want you to strain for light. We blind ourselves when we pretend we push ourselves to make meaning of it too soon. If the tunnel is dark, and there is no light to be seen, do not rush to see what and where and how and why. I'd so much rather you rage and get quiet and get loud and cry and then, stop, and then start again, at the pace and in the way that you must. Your body will tell you how to do this. It is okay to listen to it for a while. It is okay to feel the heaviness in your throat and your heart.Do not rush to see where God might be going or where He is leading you, or where He will take you next. For though these things have a life, and they do, God does not ask you to see that before He gives you the light to see it by. In the unmeasurable heaviness, in the dark tunnel - He is not asking that of you.I could tell you I think God is outside the tunnel waiting for you (He is, in a way, but that's not the answer). I could tell you that He is next to you in the heaviness and the anchoring ache behind your heart that feels like a constant catch in your throat (He is there, too). But when we ask where God is, it is hard to know how to measure that. Could I whisper to you instead something about who God is?God is the faithful.This is not a faithful that means there is a "greater purpose" or a "meaning you just can't see yet." I call bullshit on that in this moment, because God's faithfulness is not about that. It is about a promise to dwell in and among us. To be Emmanuel. To be walking in our midst and to draw near when we cry out. God's faithfulness is a promise of nearness.So when you cry out, "WHERE ARE YOU?" in your room and in your car and in your office and when you ache with others or by yourself and in the unmeasurable heaviness, in the life heavier than the weight of each thing you wonder,you cry out to one who is faithful.You cry out to one who made love manifest in a body, and that One who took on our flesh took on our heaviness took into himself all that we carry and all that we cannot carry. You cry out the truth - that this is a devastating thing, a thing that should not have been, and your cry will reach him. Your cry - if it is anger and sadness and the weight of all things and confusion, just as you wrote to me -Ask him where he is. Ask him to show himself to you, in the weight of all things and the heaviness beyond it. Your cry will reach him.Love, always,hilary

i write a poem

The edge of the row of the mostly-empty plane, three hours from Boston and home and all I can think is how the words have left me. Because there is nothing like holding my nephew for the first time, nothing like wondering at it, nothing like feeling his breathing slow to the steady hum of sleep, nothing like singing him "Come Away with Me" with Norah Jones on repeat in the kitchen, offering him my voice and my swaying hips, my own breathing steadied by his. 

It makes me want to be a writer again, makes me want words to take wing into your heart - and I am remembering how on the days in college when I was afraid I would read poetry in slim soft covers and savor the words, tasting the way I wanted to write. Because I could tell you the story about holding him, the steadied breathing, the sway, the Norah Jones, even the kitchen - 

but I want to give you poetry.

And I want to render thanks to God that way, in a poem written on a plane late at night coming home from a visit that was pure gift. I want to put my poor love for this world into words in slim soft covers someday, put them in your bookshelves and in your hearts, tell the story of how I have been loved, wildly loved, and how I long to live and move in this world, by writing poems.

And so, last night, thinking about poetry, thinking about the steadied breathing of my nephew and the beautiful swirling days of fall, sitting at the end of a row on a plane, I wrote.

Trainspotting

The crickets are resurrected,
singing.
The desert of the station feels the echo.
Everywhere is thirst,

Everywhere, wanting.
I wait, swing my legs along the yellow strip of warning
near the tracks:

Where are you?
The world shivers heat
and I wait, a blue
dress falling down my back.

I am a moment,
An ocean, a longing voice
in the chorus of the night.  

Somewhere, in your day, may poetry find you, and bring you something beautiful.

Love,
hilary

love on a sunday afternoon

It's Sunday afternoon and the haze of sleep is settling over us both. I feel my limbs heavy, asking for a moment or two to close eyes and breathe deeper and rest, find a moment in the chaotic joy of seeing him again to sleep. At first I fight it - we only get so many days, and I want to be awake for them, I want every moment with this man who in the airport late on a Friday night makes my whole heart swell in my chest at the sight of him, who catches me and kisses me in baggage claim, in front of everyone, and pulls away only to hug me closer to him. Because that embrace is home.But two days later and the cold I've been trying to ward off won't budge, wants time to move through and around my body, and my body politely insists on sleep. We sit on the couch on the porch, in the cold October sunshine, and I put my feet across his lap and he sits reading a commentary on Genesis and he piles more blankets on me to be sure I'm not cold, to be sure I'm peaceful. I feel his steady breathing, the rise and fall of it. There is a silent joy among the birds and branches, the leaves descend towards their winter resting place and a car pulls in the driveway and someone goes to the grocery store and someone else comes home from a different church activity, and we sit on the porch and I fall asleep.I think this must be the look of care - how we become unhurried with each other. How there is enough time to take a nap on a Sunday afternoon in October, despite my protest that long distance makes every moment of closeness to him seem impossibly short (so why would I sleep it away). How it is his voice that tells me, tickling my ear, that I am, in fact, tired, and I do, in fact, need to sleep. And it is his hand that drifts across my ankles in the gesture of care. Reminding me of his presence, reminding me that there is enough time in the long journey together.I don't know how to describe it, or why I would try to fill words with the unutterably beautiful feeling of falling asleep next to him on a Sunday afternoon late in the day when the sun is dripping gold across the tops of the trees. Perhaps all I wanted this to say was that the look of care, the way care moves, is not what I expected before I met him. Before I might have told you that care was bold and grand and sweep-you-off-your-feet, that it was a wild trumpeting kind of thing, that everyone saw and noticed and gaped at. And I do run towards him and kiss him in the airport and we do laugh and cry and hug each other -and then on a Sunday two days later he astounds me by sitting on the porch with me and reading while I take a nap. He astounds me with the gentleness of care, with the simplicity of it, with the way that love moves, unhurried, from one to another and back again.Care is quiet and full and this morning, I close my eyes and miss him and remember the slow Sunday afternoon. How this must have been what I was longing for:  such astonishing every day love.Love,hilary

dear hilary: call out

Dear Hilary,What makes a calling big (and none of this bullshit about how we are all called to big things and I should just be thankful for the thousands of gifts I have right now)? Real talk: what does it mean to be called?Love,Over ItDear Over It,So, you want to real talk. We can real talk. We can sit down here, in this space - let me buy you a cup of coffee (dry cappuccino or mocha something or cider, if you want to feel like fall) - and we can real talk.I could look up calling in the dictionary and talk about the sense of desire for work. But you'd probably see through that, right? Tell me that anyone can look up and parse a definition?I could tell you the lilting words of the many wise writers that calling is about the sense of doing what you cannot not do, that it is about gladness meeting need, that the world and you meet in a field somewhere, literal or metaphorical or imagined, and hash it out, and you emerge with a sense that you have purpose. But from what you ask me, from the way your question sounded when I first read it, you'd ask for more than that, too, right? You want something else. You want more.Here is more: you aren't supposed to fake a contentment in your life just because others appear to have found it. On the road to the unfolding of your calling there is nothing more problematic than trying to pretend you have found it before you have, to tell yourself the lie that this is all you have been given so you better sit down and play at peace and joy because you won't get anything else. Peace and joy aren't playthings. They're things you hunger after with your whole heart and mind and body and things you fight for (and sometimes with) and the thing I want to tell you is that you cannot fake your way to a calling.So why don't you wrestle?Why don't you hang on with your limbs and stray thoughts tangled together, with everything you have, to the question what is my calling? Why aren't you fighting harder for a way through the thicket, or standing at the edge of things and shouting that you want to know where God is and where He is going, that you are tired of living in the pretend of "already-finding-contentment" because that's not gratitude, really, is it? We both know that. We both know that it is better to go out and holler in a field that there is nothing you know right now than to sit on the concrete sidewalk and be wounded by what you haven't actually wrestled with.Peace and joy more often arrive fiery. Peace and joy aren't pretty feelings, they're movements in and around you. Contentment is about a stillness that comes both without and within, about a listening to God, about a listening to yourself. Your letter to me tells me that you haven't shouted much about it. And we are both like this. I cup the questions of big calling or wild calling in my hands and run in the woods with them, careful like I'm holding a baby bird that will break. But the question isn't fragile. And God is not.And the truth is, I am not, either.We are both wild and brave enough to face the question of a big calling, without the comfort of trying to make ourselves content with what we see. We are both brave enough to launch out and say, "THIS I LOVE" or "THIS I CHERISH" or "THIS, THIS, GOD, DO YOU SEE ME?" and wait for an answer.It is a long story in the Bible of people who strive with God, who go out into the field to yell and holler and ask.You have to do that before you can get still enough to hear an answer. And being called?Maybe for us, maybe for you, it means actually more about how you are calling out to God and asking to be called back to. Maybe it is about the sound of your voice meeting the Word, being silenced and changed by it. Maybe rather than worrying that you have or don't have a big calling, or what it even means (because I doubt anyone can tell you the feeling or the way you know or the kind of thing that it is)you can call out -Do you see me? And hold that up, and hear.Love,hilary

unless you bless me

I will not let you go unless you bless me.How long did those hours stretch, Jacob to a stranger's flesh, clinging tighter as his muscles weakened, felt the strain of his back and hands and arms and still he held onto the belief that he would not let go, unless.Unless you bless me.Once in an Orthodox Church I was told the story of how Mary entered the temple as a child, how she ran to the Holy of Holies without any fear, how it seemed to recognize and welcome her, who would become the bearer of Christ to the world. I stood beneath the playtetera, the icon of Mary stretched in prayer. I imagine her like Jacob, muscles flexed and strained under the weight of such open hands, such reaching and presenting of Jesus to the world. I imagine her muscles ached with faithfulness, with that clinging of behold all nations shall call me blessed.I used to promise God I'd stop asking to be blessed because I thought prayer was an ever-interceding for another. I told God my prayers were too selfish as they were, too centered on me, on a desperate desire to be better known and better know, my small muscles clinging beneath white dresses or ripped jeans or running shorts, anxious for a blessing. But I imagined prayer like a laundry list I had to keep track of, each tick of another person's name off my tongue a checkmark, a satisfactory nod from the One who cannot be named - so I kept away from asking to be blessed. I kept away from asking for guidance, except my muscles returned again and again to Jacob's posture, then to Mary's, always aching with the desire to be closer.I told God it wasn't right, that prayer was about others, not ourselves, that it was pious of me to put my knees to the floor and name the gifts given, pray for the family and the house and the friendships and the broken bits and pieces of other stories. I thought myself good at praying in those days, when words tripped off my tongue, eloquent and sweet.And then last week on Sunday I read the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel, alone in the night, and how Jacob held on, though his hip was out of joint, and how he said, I will not let you go unless you bless me. And as I stood there, my voice joined in that mysterious way to Jacob's, my hands found their way to stretch open like Mary's -we can wrestle, pray wide into the spaces in our own hearts for a deeper knowing, for muscles that ache with faithfulness, for hands that open towards heaven.And not let go.Love,hilary

would I catch flame (a synchroblog with addie zierman)

It wasn't that long ago that I came to college with my bags packed and my mind full of theology I didn't understand. I'd grown up in old rhythms: liturgy on Sundays and Eucharist like manna, a provision from heaven I didn't know how to need. I grew up so desperately hungry for understanding of God that I read more than I could stomach: Catholic books and Eastern Orthodox theology, books with complicated titles. I talked big about ideas with all the confidence of a teenager who learned the word "eschatological" three days ago and wants to use it, wants to fill the world over with what she thinks she knows about God.I grew up Christian but thought I could grow up as the next C.S. Lewis, write the apology for my generation, tell the world why it was logical and reasonable and rational and right to be what I was. I grew up Christian, learned the habits of prayer and the way that the seasons change in the church - preparation to celebration to growing to Pentecost and again and again how I tried to understand too much about too much, cram heaven into my head while I still didn't know how to French braid my hair.That summer of going to college I thought I'd figured out what it meant to be Christian, to live out a life of faithfulness: it meant knowing the answers and complicating them, tracing the shapes of ideas into journals and class discussions and making my heart so safe in the right theology that it might never need to wonder about the presence of the love of God.I drove up to the dorm and I unloaded my laundry basket of things - a few picture frames, books, notebooks and pens in neat piles, and waited.I waited that whole year to feel right. I waited to hear God the way the people around me kept hearing Him, the way they closed their eyes in worship and put their hands above their heads to the songs by the bands I didn't know existed (but I could sing a hymn, and I was proud of that, thinking I'd escape God into the warm and safe arms of the old ornate words and the incense and the icons). I waited for the moments where I would finally understand what falling in love with God felt like, finally make myself read my Bible and have quiet time in the mornings the way, it turned out, youth group taught you. And I hadn't gone to youth group and I hadn't played the Chris Tomlin CDs and maybe I hadn't done much falling in love with God, I thought, as I walked to and from class trying to fit my theology around the worry that I might never catch fire.But the fire of Pentecost can descend at a moment, like ice, like clear water, like dust that spins you and settles you and unsettles you again. Like Eucharist manna - the provision of mystery, in mystery.I was in a parking lot, on a Sunday morning, tears tracing the indents my dimples make in my face whenever I move.Then I was in a still Chapel late at night, the kind of stillness that bends towards a heavenly silence.Then I was in a blue TV room in Washington DC learning that the very word Jesus was power.Then, and again and again now - I take what is unto me the very Body and Blood, the mystery provision, and I fall in love with God who teaches my heart how to make room for Him, not the words about Him.And the fire is small and flickers daily. And the Spirit descends. And I catch flame.Love,hilary

I'm linking up with Addie's synchroblog to celebrate her book release of When We Were on Fire. I can't wait to read it (because her words are good words, food-to-the-soul words).

dear hilary: 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

it is about being seen

I don't need this I don't need this I don't need this. I repeat it over and over to myself, sinking into the scratchy wool chair in the downstairs lobby. I'm here because my parents tell me I need to talk to someone, need to walk through the perfectionism, need to admit the things I don't want to admit - I don't need this I don't need this I don't need this. I look around - the water in its bulky upside down Poland Springs dispenser, the packets of Swiss Miss, the old copies of Martha Stewart Living or Bon Appetit, which I flip through foolishly (I barely cook anything) as I wait. Pumpkin sage ravioli. Pumpkin chocolate cookies. Something with cinnamon that sounds beautiful and impossible. I toss the magazines aside and move my feet around the edges of my chair.I don't need this - isn't this for those who really struggle, not for 19 year olds with perfectionist tendencies and maybe some insecurities but nothing major, nothing she can't get a handle on if she would only try harder and shape up and be better?I don't need this - it was just one or two comments to my parents about feeling not good enough or that I was a bad friend and a failure.I don't need this - I'm Hilary. Hilary is put together. Hilary doesn't need to go to counseling.She comes downstairs to get me for the appointment and I walk quietly behind her.Her couch is softer than the chair downstairs, and the office is quiet, and there are paper cups for the hot tea I know she must offer or make for most of the people who come through in a day, in a week. I see the rain on the glass panes of the window behind her chair, and though I am afraid, though I worry, though I think in my head still, I don't need this - something in her smiles tells me it is okay to keep talking.She asks me questions no one has asked before - asks me to tell her all about what I think to myself as I walk through a day, asks me to tell her about school, and how I perform, asks me to tell her about my stray thoughts and my someday dreams and what it is I think will happen if... And I find myself back, week after week, spreading the questions like puzzle pieces between us. I talk about how things make me feel. I talk about what I wish I was, and don't believe I am. I talk about my desire to be prettier, or thinner, about my perceptions of the world, about friendship, about trust. I talk about boys, long, winding conversations where I can't tell beginning from end, the heartbreak from the hard conversation from the new possibility. We take our time.--Nearly three years later, we sit in leather chairs. Her office has moved to a different building on campus, and it's only a brief meeting - we're both in between so many things. But I have to tell her - not in the words, I'm engaged! - but in the smile, in how I tuck my hair behind my ear and how I smile (I smile differently now, softer, I think, but also bursting with life), tell her that she has made a difference. A big one.It was as simple as being seen those years ago on her couch. It was as simple as her kind smile amid the puzzle pieces and the grace that pours out when we see one another. And as I untangled all the knots of not needing it, I realized - I did.I needed to be seen. And she saw me - saw me wild and free and imperfect and so desperate to share myself with the world and so afraid to do anything. Three years later, and we are both near tears, and I tell her the words I should have said a long time ago:This was one of the things I remember most from college. You were one of the most important people I met here. And you, seeing me? It meant everything.Can I ask us again, wherever we find ourselves? Can we see each other again? Can we pause, and look for each other, look past the Oh, I'm fine, and the schedule and the college exams and the minivans. Because it means everything.Love,hilary

when my mind wanders

on a Sunday late morning, mid-day, really, we're driving home together, music or no music, around the winding roads and past the farmstands and apple orchards, fall around us. I think about how the leaves are like flames now, licking up the sides of the trees,how the wind lies in wait to surprise the scattered seeds of the last of the dandelions,how all of this should make a beautiful poem, the ordinariness of nature, how it goes on and on harvesting the expected and the surprising in one fell swoop of the calendar.This year the word was light, I remember, as I see the sun peek through the trees and catch the edge of his glasses. I glance at him, a second longer than I look at anyone else.I remember that God turned all the lights off, suddenly. I remember how last October I cried and cried about being among the ones who never strayed from the crowd, when God told me at a stoplight how He leaves the rest of the world to come after me, in search of me the way no one else ever has been, ever will be.Last year the fall was golden, and now it turns red, and again and again the harvest returns, offers something to us.I think about Rilke and poetry and how there are now 45 poems in my computer that weren't there before. How it must be an act of obedience.And then I think about you.I drive and I think about you, writer, reader, lover of leaving - that's Rumi, a long quote about ours not being a caravan of despair - I think about how you have watched this year, in a way, watched the light dawn and fade, watch me wonder about stillness, peace, watched me try to write wisdom into a space where more often than not I am the one who must learn from you.I think about how I could not write, but that you, you, read this. And you give me space to write it wrong, write it with questions hanging on branches, write about silence and presence and God's wild love... Rilke is right, always, but as I drive and think about you I want to tell us - tell you -the reading of it matters.The reading of the poetry,or the blog posts,the half-my-heart-intact prayers,the reading of it is important.It makes a difference to me to think about you when I think about writing down the leaves have turned to flames on the trees. It makes a difference to know that I can clang pots and pans in a field somewhere about the Kingdom and midwives and Shakespeare, about silence and ache and courage, about not knowing where to find God and sitting in a chapel all alone at the end of a long day.My mind wanders as I look at the world on a Sunday afternoon driving home, and it takes me to you. I'm so grateful.Love,hilary

dear hilary: a revolving door

Dear Hilary,Every one around me seems to be falling in love. The older I get the more I realize I'm not sure what being in love means. Each person I ask how they know it's the love and not some other shade of love they never answer the same. And yet somehow it's the same. The person always finishes with, "You'll just know." But I don't know. How did you know it was love?Sincerely,Is It Love?Dear Is it Love?,I think I asked myself that question every night before I fell asleep in the days leading up to meeting Preston for the first time. Is it love? I asked a group of ducks that wandered across the road on my way to Starbucks one morning. Is it love? I asked my bleary-eyed reflection in the mirror. Is it love, is it love - and behind the question was this fear about myself. I had asked people, just like you have, about love. I had heard the many answers: that you know because they will order the Chinese food on the night you need it without being told, that you know because they'll offer to do the laundry and the dishes in the same day, because they catch you around your waist on the street, with people watching, and kiss you. Because they'll tell you things that you've longed to believe about yourself but you couldn't before, give you a pair of hands to help you hold all that you are and desperately hope to become.I had heard it.And then I met Preston in that airport.I'd tell you that I just knew, too, but the truth is that I think knowing about love is more like a revolving door. You walk around and around inside love, see the outside world in one instance, the inside world (the world of you and the person you love) in another. You ponder them both in the same moment. You spiral in and out of knowing, in and out of certainty.What keeps you afloat is trust.What keeps us all afloat is a trust that even if we don't know, if we have moments when we wake up and it is a question, when everyone tells us "you'll just know" and we think that there is no way that can be true - because I hardly know myself some days - that's when you trust that you can still walk forward, still walk around and around inside the love, and somehow see your next step.I could tell you the stories of falling in love with Preston, small moments when I felt it moving in my heart: the time we ate Chinese food on the floor watching Company (the Sondheim musical), or the time we made my family dinner in the kitchen and I was singing Alison Krauss songs and he was searing lamb chops in something I couldn't even probably pronounce, or the time that we sat side-by-side in the midst of something really hard, and prayed our way through it...But the truth is, though I knew in those moments I was in love with him, part of the joy is realizing it new every time - a moment of being surprised by the in-love-ness. It takes me asking, "is it love?" to answer yes. On days when all I want is to sit across from him in a Starbucks somewhere and write on our blogs and be in our own worlds, together and yet distinct, when all I wonder is whether this gift is really what I have now dared to dream it is...I guess a part of me likes asking, "is it love?" not because I want to doubt, but because there is something to saying yes. To choosing the answer to that question every day. To walking through the revolving door, the worlds never the same when I circle back around to them.I knew it a long time ago; and I learn it again every day.I want to wrap everyone up in the safe and beautiful words of, "you'll just know." But I also want to wrap around you the words that love is a many-splendored, ever-moving, choose-it-again-and-again kind of thing. Maybe the knowing must and should move with us, too.Is it love? We wonder in the world.There is a beauty to trusting the question as a way towards the answer.Love,hilary

i run again

The woods turn golden this year, a fierceness in their leaves. The wind has changed its rhythm along the familiar path. I set out over the stream, across the roots of the ancient trees, weathering the season with them.I often wish I was more than I am.I pound down the first path around the smaller pond. It is always muddied by couples trying to find the gravity to keep them  together in a midnight walk or the cross-country team training for the weekend. I pass no one in the afternoon, and my feet are angry against the earth. I feel them praying resistance to God even though I pray out loud for a heart that can hear, a listening heart. Our whole bodies pray, don't they. Mine prays at war, angry and confused, patient and devoted. It is an out of rhythm prayer. The sweat clings to the back of my neck and I dart among the corners of the path, chasing myself, or God, or running from both.I often wish I was more than I am. The old lie, that there is an other we might be, better than what was first made and called good, cuts the air from my lungs. The path widens and I hear behind me another runner and his dog. The dog bounds up beside me - a beautiful lab, her fur the color of wheat in summer, deep-set eyes and a lightness to her running. She touches my leg with her wet nose. I look down, smile, but ignore her as I run ahead. The dog hangs back, but only for a moment, and then she races forward to tag me again, a bark to get my attention. We go on in the game, running ahead only to be caught. We stop together at the opening to the pond, where the wind is, and the dog dashes into the water and begins to play."She likes to run with the head of the pack," the runner explains as he catches up to us. I smile slightly. "She's beautiful," I say. Another moment, watching her chase down a shimmer of sunlight, and I keep running. I wonder about the dog playing tag with me on such an ordinary day.We  often choose to wish we were more than we are."Thank you, for the dog," I hesitate - could God be pleased with that? Was that even prayer, to be thankful for a dog while out running in the woods alone?There was a poem that a friend gave me, about geese that turn into light. About how we were not leaving, but arriving. About an indescribable wedge of freedom in the heart. You know this poem, I pray - David Whyte, The Journey, a poem that changes you,  clings to you like the leaves piled high in the silent woods."Sometimes everythinghas to beinscribed acrossthe heavensso you can findthe one linealready writteninside you."The one line, the one about freedom, the one about the golden fall and the leaves that cling like fire to the trees, the one that captures, just for a moment, the certainty of the presence of God?"Thank you," I whisper, over and over, tears falling, as I turn left up the steep hill to go home. "Thank you, for the dog."I wish for nothing but to draw nearer.Love,hilary