dear hilary: talk to me

Dear Hilary, Finishing up my Freshmen year of college, I have found these last months to be consumed with the desire to fullfill a definition of beautiful and be the sort of person a boy would desire. Everyone around me seems to be speaking of identity and verses are continuing to declare God's love and claim of worthiness on my life. Yet, I find my self so deeply desperate for the affection of a boy, for a romantic relationship. I have never had a boyfriend and I feel like I have no one pursing me in that way. So I'm really wondering, is it okay to dream of this man? Because I used to believe that God had that man for me, it was just a matter of waiting and loving him first. But now I wonder, that perhaps I am called to that single life or an early death or to not finding that guy until I'm in my 30s or to marry someone that is not like the man I have dreamed of. I just don't feel like I am worthy of being loved in that sort of way or if it is even fair of me to dream of such a guy. How do I approach the Lord in prayer when I don't even know if there is a guy? And can I dream of a guy with particular qualities or is that un-christ like and foolish because the only thing I should look for in a partner is his love for Christ?Love,Just AskingDear Just Asking,I was driving home one weekend from college, in the midst of thinking about and wondering about this one guy who was in my microeconomics class. We sat next to each other, we passed notes about where the supply and demand lines met in the graph and whether that always determined the price. We occasionally saw each other outside the regular Monday, Wednesday, Friday clock. It's funny how you can find yourself in a rhythm of thinking just like the other rhythms of your life. 4:30 on those days saw me turning my thoughts to the what if we dated and the why doesn't he ask me out? and the ever-present am I worth that? There is a certain kind of ache in the rhythm, a certain all-too-familiar. I would overthink what I was going to wear to class that day, I would write those notes in the margins of my notebook and I would walk back to my dorm wondering everything you are wondering, about love and the person and whether Jesus was going to get around to giving me a person anytime soon.And I could write a lot about how this remembering is a work of conviction in the heart but also the practice of grace, the realizing that our past selves are not to be condemned as the worst possible versions of ourselves, but to be loved and accepted as being the people that they were, knowing what they knew... but that is a different story.I am driving home. That's where we are. I am driving home and I am turning left, sneaking around the bend in the road a little fast than I should, and as I swung the car through the turn I found myself saying, "God, what is the deal?"And God said, "I see you've decided to talk to Me."I promptly started to cry. I drove and cried and talked, spilled out the story into the empty car which is not empty because God and I are finally, really, talking. I said everything, the notes, the protests that what if I was not worthy, the questions about if he was ever going to ask me out. I said it, spoke it into being.And that was the beginning of the change for me. Not when the boy dated someone else, or when the other boy and I ended things, or when Preston and I got together. The beginning of the change was this drive home, the fall whispering through the trees, promising winter, promising, further on, spring.God, what is the deal? We do not always begin in a glamourous, beautiful, prayer. We do not always begin in the right words. But if we begin, then we begin. If we are willing to say something to God, then we open our hearts to be changed, to be molded, to be made more.I will not tell you whether you should desire specific qualities in a guy or not, dear one - because I do not believe it is wrong to ask and imagine. I believe only that it is more dangerous when you are not honest with God. I mean gut-wrenchingly honest. I mean on your knees honest. I mean with your Bible open and your pen raging across the pages of God's promises honest. I want you to get real with God so that you can get quiet and hear God.We hear so many times that we should make our worthiness not about guys. Oh, have I heard this and preached this in the coffee shops and along the sidewalks. But can I tell you, across the wires of the Internet, something?I think God is more willing to tell us our worthiness without us trying to make ourselves believe it without Him. I think God wants to tell you you are worthy. I think God wants you to get alone, to get rage-y, to get serious, to ask the question. I ask it, still. Only when we are willing to ask God, who alone can answer our questions with the fullness of His life, can we begin to feel the life moving in us.The point of your life and my life and all the lives that scatter this beautiful world - the point is the real conversation with God. Not whether he wants you to love him before he gives you a guy. Not whether you'll have an early death or be like Paul or find love in college or work 10 jobs or 1. Not whether you are a poet or a preacher or a physical plant manager.The point is always Jesus, looking at us, looking at you, in the beautiful singularity that you are, and saying, "Talk to me." When we start talking, and only then, do we start to make our hearts able to hear God. About boys. About college. About love. About worthiness. About the aches wrapping around our hearts."Talk to me." This, my dear friend, this is our invitation.Love,hilary

on poetry (a guest post for Seth Haines)

Today I get to share over at the wonderful Seth Haines's space about poetry. About why I love it, how I love it, why it makes me move and think and wonder. Join me over here?I'm not a poet, I'm the hidden in morning traffic undone hair and lonely smile. I'm not a poet, I'm wild bursts of laughter at the wrong end of the dinner table. I'm not a poet, I'm a gyroscope spinning in your closed hands. I'm not a poet, I'm a tangled yarn of words half phrased and loosed over the page like prisoners bolting for the cracked door. I don't write poetry because I'm a poet. There'd be no point to the words, then, they'd be only the stricken shadows of a claim of identity, something to put after my name, titles lining up along behind me, wife, lover, student of and knower of and, and, and. I'd say, "I'm a poet" and really just mean to tell you to take me more seriously, treat my words like silver or gold rippling through your hands. I'd say, "I'm a poet" because I'd want you to think I'm a good writer and the title will tell you everything.Keep reading over at Seth's place, and let's celebrate poems and poets and the way that words make this world so beautiful.Love,hilary

I’m not a poet, I’m the hidden in morning traffic undone hair and lonely smile. I’m not a poet, I’m wild bursts of laughter at the wrong end of the dinner table. I’m not a poet, I’m a gyroscope spinning in your closed hands. I’m not a poet, I’m a tangled yarn of words half phrased and loosed over the page like prisoners bolting for the cracked door.I don’t write poetry because I’m a poet.There’d be no point to the words, then, they’d be only the stricken shadows of a claim of identity, something to put after my name, titles lining up along behind me, wife, lover, student of and knower of and, and, and. I’d say, “I’m a poet” and really just mean to tell you to take me more seriously, treat my words like silver or gold rippling through your hands. I’d say, “I’m a poet” because I’d want you to think I’m a good writer and the title will tell you everything.- See more at: http://sethhaines.com/uncategorized/on-poetry-by-hilary-sherratt/#sthash.nHqJImSk.dpuf

I’m not a poet, I’m the hidden in morning traffic undone hair and lonely smile. I’m not a poet, I’m wild bursts of laughter at the wrong end of the dinner table. I’m not a poet, I’m a gyroscope spinning in your closed hands. I’m not a poet, I’m a tangled yarn of words half phrased and loosed over the page like prisoners bolting for the cracked door.I don’t write poetry because I’m a poet.There’d be no point to the words, then, they’d be only the stricken shadows of a claim of identity, something to put after my name, titles lining up along behind me, wife, lover, student of and knower of and, and, and. I’d say, “I’m a poet” and really just mean to tell you to take me more seriously, treat my words like silver or gold rippling through your hands. I’d say, “I’m a poet” because I’d want you to think I’m a good writer and the title will tell you everything.- See more at: http://sethhaines.com/uncategorized/on-poetry-by-hilary-sherratt/#sthash.nHqJImSk.dpuf

I’m not a poet, I’m the hidden in morning traffic undone hair and lonely smile. I’m not a poet, I’m wild bursts of laughter at the wrong end of the dinner table. I’m not a poet, I’m a gyroscope spinning in your closed hands. I’m not a poet, I’m a tangled yarn of words half phrased and loosed over the page like prisoners bolting for the cracked door.I don’t write poetry because I’m a poet.There’d be no point to the words, then, they’d be only the stricken shadows of a claim of identity, something to put after my name, titles lining up along behind me, wife, lover, student of and knower of and, and, and. I’d say, “I’m a poet” and really just mean to tell you to take me more seriously, treat my words like silver or gold rippling through your hands. I’d say, “I’m a poet” because I’d want you to think I’m a good writer and the title will tell you everything.- See more at: http://sethhaines.com/uncategorized/on-poetry-by-hilary-sherratt/#sthash.nHqJImSk.dpuf

to the girls in my zumba class

Dear girls in my Zumba class,Dear you who is willing to jump up and down to music we don't really know the words to, you who is willing to do the moves with more energy after 50 minutes than I think I have in my whole body, who laughs at our blurred reflections in the mirror,you are what makes me brave. I've been up and down the mountains and hills for a little while now, with this question about food and how to eat and the fact that sometimes I don't know how to finish a bagel in the morning, I'm so nervous that it will upend my life. I've been in the thicket of the thoughts about mirrors and beauty and whether the scars on my stomach from the time I had my gallbladder removed are moments of skin knit together, moments of pride that my body is always doing a healing work on itself, or if I should be embarrassed and try to hide the thin pink line that dances near my belly button.I've thought about writing and not writing, I've written and deleted, and in the end of every day I don't write a blog post about this journey up and down the mountains of that question - am I beautiful? -you are the people I see at the other end.You jumping up and down in the aerobic studio to Pitbull and Lil' Jon. You in old T-shirts and yoga pants and running shorts and neon sneakers and bare feet. You, afraid and unafraid, because we are all a little of both if we are honest. I can't describe how much courage you breathe into my lungs just being in that second row with you.And yes, you know, it is courage to shake my hips and courage to swing them in something that I think might someday look like a circle. And yes, it is courage to keep dancing at minute 50.But it is also courage to be.You give me courage to be, without walls, without the tap tap tap of the prison guard of my mind that says I should eat less run more be more do more perfect more. In Zumba, there is no better and no best, there is just us and the courageous being of us.If I could tell you anything it is that yesterday at the end of class I walked out and realized that I think you are all, each, singly, remarkably, beautiful. I realized that I know this in my bones, that you are beautiful, that you are courageous.And maybe it's time I walked out of a class and thought of me alongside you, as one of those beautiful and bright courageous beings. Maybe it's time I walked out of class and let the lessons you are teaching me sink into my bones.I wish I could paint this for you, write the way you have built my courage from my pink sneakers to my heart, how you have changed me beyond what I had imagined could change. You, with every routine and every sigh and laugh you are rebuilding my idea of what it could mean for me to be beautiful. To be courageous. To be whole.Gratitude is not measured in a word count, so I will only say, again, you have done infinitely more than you know. And this girl, she is learning beautiful from you.Love, hilary

all I know how to do is read

"To write good poetry," he said, that cold afternoon, the kind where the fall burns to winter, our bodies huddled in bulky sweaters, feet crammed into rain boots a bit too small for us, pens and pencils out and at the ready over the white spaces, "you must read good poetry."This was not the first time he said these words, not even the first time he had reminded us that most of the work of poetry is reading it.We were ready to slice sentences like bread into fragments tripping over the page, to pair words the rhymed with precise, clean movements. We wanted the ease of the clicking consonants and the sticky slow rhythm of iambic pentameter. We were ready to be poets - but perhaps most of us thought poetry was the easiest art, since it had the most silence?He told us to read.It was Mary Oliver and Pablo Neruda and Ellen Bass. It was Katha Pollitt and Tom Hennen and Donald Hall and Richard Wilbur and Linda Pastan and a hundred others who write into the vast world without our knowing, most of the time. Every day, a poem. Every day, a person who saw the world and who spoke it back, its absence, its presence, its earthy goodness, its salt.He told us to read, and for the first time I became hungry for words, for the way they each sound and how they flow into one sound which is many which is one meaning which is many, again. I wanted to read as I had never read before, savor the pages of the thinnest books, not the hefty pages of great American novels and trying physics textbooks. No, give me the lightest touch of pen to paper, the silence of Emily Dickinson's dashes and the desperate yawning chasm of Edward Hirsch's "Self-Portrait as Eurydice". There is something deep in the words, something I would start to grasp just as I finally let the book slip from my fingers, and with it, the memorized neatness and the words and all that was left was the impression that I had met something, been asked a question, been gifted a bit of living fire.He told us to read, and I have been reading.And not just the books in the old poetry bookshop down the side street in the heat of summer when I am falling in love with Preston, not just the poetry I find and write and make, no, I have begun to read the world.I have begun to see the way the sun rises slow in the April and too fast in fall, how there is a dance to rain against a windshield, a hypnotic, unending chaos that draws you in. I have begun to read the steps between home and the pond, the wind like Braille against my fingertips, hands moving like scissors as I run. I have begun to believe that to read the world like this is, indeed, to love the world, as it is, as it must be, as it yearns to be.It is this way with the man who shovels snow too early in the morning to talk back to the silent trees. It is this way with the woman I see making her way nervously, heels-clicking, down the sidewalk towards the post office on Saturday, the way it is with the bird chatter or the dog and his patient tail thumping the song of our mornings.All I know how to do is read, for poetry does not teach you to write, only to see everything new through the ache between your eyes and your pen, between the word you must delete despite your love of it, its syllables and sounds, because the poem itself does not need the word. I know how to read and, if I am patient even with myself, the world who is patient with me still will read me, open me up like the well-worn copy of Farmer Boy that I watched my father open, night after night, years ago.This is the most brazen command of and to the poet - read. Love,hilary

what breaks does not shatter

I write the words slow, the way that I used to in pages, pink pen pressed hard against the fake parchment paper of the Harry Potter journal. I am trying to learn that sometimes just because the words can come quickly doesn't mean they're the right ones, so I type slower than normal into the blank screen.I'm sitting cross-legged on my bed while I do this. I'm sitting with journals scattered around me, the old stories of my young self, the evidence of a thousand nights of anguish softened now by time and the half-finished tea by my bed. I'm rereading, because when you move away from home, when you get married, there is this exquisite sadness of leaving your room. There is this old self who you think will slink away, a shadow you couldn't sew on tightly enough, and she'll keep pace through the house, while you sleep and wake in a strange, new home.It hits me this way, when I am looking for my self among the things I am choosing to leave behind, that I have been preaching a story with my life that I do not believe enough. Isn't that funny? This young self - stirrup pants and crooked front teeth in sixth grade in the hallway when the boy didn't like her back, or the self in the ill-fitting American Eagle jeans at the mailbox with three crisp rejection letters, or the self in college who lay on her back one winter night after falling on the ice and spilling hot chocolate down her coat not once, but twice -this is the self who has been preaching the truth to me, and I have not been listening.And this is the truth she is speaking: even what breaks does not shatter.I can revive at a moment's notice the stories, the humid June air or the night that I pressed my address written in sharpie on an index card and said "write to me", thinking it was the beginning of something. I can sit on that bed and I can relive the bar and the dress and the anger I wore so badly, draped over me like the sheets I pretended were wedding gowns years before. I can tell you the song that was playing in my head the days after I didn't get in or the day I realized the friendship had changed, I can have the conversation over and over again in the safe aftermath of my car, crumple my fist against the steering wheel and make my heart swell again with everything that went wrong, everything that hurt, everything I remember about being broken.But this is the living proof - for the me that can remember the breaking is not, herself, broken. No, she is alive, and gloriously alive, and she is sitting typing deliberately on her bed, pressing these words into her heart. Not everything that breaks shatters. And even just the breathing, in, and out, of those words, those pressed deliberate words, starts  to build up this wearied heart. And the worry, that I can't do this, can't leave this home this room these old journals, that I can't go off and be brave -the worry quiets.It is all too easy for me to hold on to the memories of being broken, the familiar pieces of hurt, the way that he said or she looked. It's too easy for me to see myself as not complete, or still recovering, to imagine myself frail or small or unable, incapable. It's easy to say that to myself when I am weary-hearted and the mountains keep rising up before me, and I think, I'm still broken, that still hurts me. But my younger self has been the living reply.I am widened by the months and years of work running my fingers along the frayed edges of her couch cushions, trying to put words to the counseling questions, to make a space where I hear my own self.I am widened by the quietest moment in the morning when he only kisses me hello, no words, catches me up in his arms and in that gesture promises forever, promises us, in this, promises that he is the kind of man who will keep his promises.I am widened and changed and made bolder and braver by writing out into the spaces where you see me, pink penning these words over us both: we are not shattered. we are alive. Maybe it's the beginning of brave - a belief that you have, all along, been braver than you know.Love,hilary 

where are you speaking

"It is the Hebraic intuition that God is capable of all speech acts except that of monologue which has generated our arts of reply, of questioning and counter-creation." - George SteinerDear God,Pause. So, God.Pause, again, take more time, roll the name off your tongue, honeyed and sweet but sharp and knifing its way through the air. God.Pause. This is how I pray. I lose the words as quickly as they come, and for me, the word-smith, the hammerer of syllables, who watches words like owls at dusk, eyeing the next feast, the next shadow spilling over the ground. This is how I pray, stops and pauses, distracted by the name God, by the question of if I pray too much with "He" or "Father" because I'm listening too much to the sound of my own voice than I am to the silence where God speaks and sings. I pause and hear myself, preen my feathers in the righteousness of a bright sadness of Lent, which is a phrase from Alexander Schmemann in a book that I haven't been reading but said I would read this Lent, a fact I haven't told God in the midst of my pleased-self-reflection as I pray.God does not monologue; where did I learn it?In the hazy heat of the summers I stayed home and ran through my sprinklers, forgetting the provisions of the creation? In the midst of the chaos of the weeks that roll through my several synced calendars? Where did I learn the prayers of run-on sentences that begin and end with me and all the words are blurred not like poetry but like the overachieving grasp at something good to say to God breathless and always trying to beat my self at my own sense of piety?God does not monologue. Pause, the phrase on the page, alone, before these italicized words are added.  God.Where are you speaking?Because God does not monologue, I can use the second person, the "you" that in French has taught me formal and informal, friendship and lover and austere other, in those three letters looping through the prayer. Another pause, I've been writing and writing but the truth is I don't know anything more about prayer after writing this, even these very words I crave and love. If God does not monologue, God must want us to talk with him. He must like conversations, even the ones like this, the ones that are me pausing and asking myself if I know how to pray, the ones admitting, God, I don't know how to pray and I'm talking and talking and writing and the words have lost me.Where are you speaking, O God my God?I will claim you in the second person, human being to Creator.Where are you speaking, God?I will talk back to you, this intuition of what you must desire and ask of us, in the depths of the silence that is your speech.And I will fall silent too, to un-learn my monologues.Amen. Love,hilary

when you say yes

Maybe you've heard a time or two from this blog post or that Facebook status update or a tweet or two, that I'm getting married and moving to Texas. Maybe you've heard something about graduate school, about me and philosophy and these three little letters that will (Lord willing) go after my name in about five years, letters that symbolize the working and wondering and the mind-boggling amounts of reading I'm going to try and do in those years.But here is the thing, the thing I never knew I would be writing: before I said yes to Baylor, before I said yes to learning how to properly say, "Sic 'Em, Bears" (it's more complicated than you think) - I said a different yes.I said yes in a library of love letters.I said yes in the haze of an August afternoon, in the haze of falling into love, realizing ourselves already in it, maybe some of you who read all those letters were wondering about it, yourselves.I said yes to this, the ache and ark of marriage (that's Denise Levertov, in a poem called, "The Ache of Marriage").It was the best yes: that day, moment after moment of driving along a highway and to the grocery store, of kissing him in the parking lot, thinking, you're it, you're my fiancé now, you're the person while we looked around helplessly, chose strawberries, I think, feeling our way through the rest of the day the way that the blind trace the edges and shapes of the world and so see it better.Saying yes to Preston, now almost seven months ago - that was my best yes.It was the best yes, and no, I don't mean that in the way of comparing one person's choosing, moment, realization of God's calling loud and bright in their life versus another. Because God calls as God calls, and for me, in this season, the lesson is that the calling is presented only to you. Others may confirm it, see it, strengthen it, slow it down -but God is calling you. You are the hearer, you are the listener. You are the called.We are so quick to worry and to wonder if God is speaking, but I keep thinking these days, He must be speaking all the time but I have no ears, or no time, or no patience enough to sit still and hear. I run up to God's door this Lent, over and over, begging for a word and God looks at me:Hilary Joan, have I not been singing over your life? Have I not been calling you, August haze to March frost?Am I so quick to forget how loudly God is singing, whether or not there are big moments of yes or no, big choices, big afternoons with big promises?God is still singing after I say yes to Baylor, God is still singing after I said yes to Preston, after the big moments and the big decisions and the feeling of momentum and moving forward with things.God has always been singing out over us, over these waters we walk on, calling out to us to come a little closer.Love,hilary

next to Jesus

Most of the time I don't walk next to Jesus.I walk sideways the opposite direction, smile frozen in place so if he happened to look over, there I would be, right prayers right charitable giving right causes right theology. And when I think he isn't watching I inch away. You'll find me pressed into a corner of the big family room of the faith, probably with a drink and my idea of a superior opinion in hand, watching nervously to see if anyone is watching me, if I look as good at this as the next one of us as the next one of us as the one over there who actually reads the Bible more than once in a fiery moon in summer. I'm a hideaway in the habits of this faith.--I walk past him in cities: head down, headphones in, insulated against the cold and against the winter and against the possibility that this banner of believer calls you to something more than just Sunday morning. I walked past him once outside a Starbucks in DC and was so sure I had missed Jesus that I went back with coffee and a sandwich and he only took the coffee, we never really spoke, I left the sandwich on the edge of a slab of concrete. I turn up my collar against the wind and wonder what I did, signing up for a lifetime with a lover of souls and a freer of captives, because someone like that takes you to captives, to lost and hungry and bleeding souls, to hospitals and corners and back alleys.--In the Ash Wednesday service the Gospel is about the Pharisee and the tax collector, praying. I'm an acolyte, a torch bearer, and so I'm close to the Gospel when it's read, the words loud and the incense sticky against my face. "God, I thank you that I am not like other men." I tell God in my head at that exact moment that it is a good thing I'm not like the Pharisee - that I don't talk to him like that, that I know the moral of this story.Jesus doesn't say anything but I know he heard me. It's the silence of him as I hear my own prayer said back, still in the words of the Gospel. "that I am not like that tax collector..." That I am not like that Pharisee. Jesus looks back at me in the final words, reads me quiet and certain and the condemnation seeps into my heart and the incense is still clinging to my robes: "Truly I tell you, whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted."--Nothing is safe with Jesus, it turns out.You can't keep your life, the habits of your heart, the way you expect the world to read you like a book, to be what you need, to offer itself to you for your easy understanding. You can't keep that superior opinion in the corner of the room and you can't walk past the corner and you can't, oh, how you can't pretend to Jesus that you're doing it right.He who would save his life? What was it? Will lose it. I forget that part.It's too quiet here, now, in the after of Ash Wednesday, we're entering a bright sadness, as the Orthodox would say. It's too quiet so I can hear myself, hear how little of what I think I am and what I think I know I am allowed to keep if I'm going to be someone who loves Jesus.But this Lent, me, the Pharisee with the incense sticking to her robes and the old habits of her life sticking to her heart, I want to walk next to Jesus. I want the bright sadness before the Easter morning. I want Jesus. Whatever I must lose to find him.Love,hilary

dear hilary: that impossible brightness

Dear Hilary,My question concerns (as most questions seem to) fear and love. For a long time, I was afraid to love, and then I was brave and fell deep into it, and then what I was most afraid of happened: I was too much, or I wasn't enough. The end of it was confusing and tangled and I got hurt again and again, but I held on, thinking that I wanted to show him grace and love and forgiveness. The problem is, I didn't show any of those things to myself, and now I'm so embarrassed and afraid of how hurt I got, how long I held on, and how badly I was willing to be treated. The question is, how do I forgive myself for that? How do I move through the fear of love ending and fall in love again, now that I know how the ending burns? How do I get over the fear of never falling in love again, which is partly what motivated me to hold on to the love I found for so long after it hurt me?Love,The Edge of HopeDear The Edge,"It is not the critic who counts." Can I ask you to go look this up? I won't say more, but I will say click beyond Goodreads, beyond the quote itself (I'll give it away - it's Teddy Roosevelt), and down towards the bottom will be this name, Brene Brown, and if I say nothing to you in this, it's just that you remind me of her mantra. This letter, this act of describing your question, this being willing to be you here in this space - that is what she calls daring greatly.Today all I can think about is this time that Preston asked me something that flipped me upside down. "Are you," he said, pausing over the words and over the rim of his mug (we were sitting in the living room), "always this unkind to yourself?" We were drinking coffee and going through my applications to graduate school and I was telling him with a lot of confidence that I was NOT going to get in and I should NEVER try and I should just quit and not be a philosopher or anything because everyone would find out I was a fraud and... then he asked that question. "Are you always this unkind to yourself?"I got mad. I don't really know why. Maybe because the truth doesn't set you free before it royally pisses you off and arrives at the most inconvenient time and screw up all the plans you had for avoiding it. I hated the question, though, for what it pointed to in me: that my unkindness wasn't towards others in that instance. It was towards me. It was shame and regret and hurt I piled on and on as a way to protect myself from potentially being rejected. "Who am I to apply to school X? Smart people apply there" or "Who am I to have loved so wildly? Only fools don't realize what it costs..." or my personal favorite, "Who do I think I am to be enjoying such a good life? It won't last!"  Unkindness asks that question, tries to protect us in a cocoon of doubt and embarrassment, tries to keep us from making what we think will be a mistake.The cocoon is not where it is at. I mean, we all go there, we all build one, but maybe specifically here, when it comes to love and fear, I want to put up a big warning sign that says, BE KIND TO YOURSELF. I want to stamp it across every sign you see today. You do not need a cocoon of doubt or fear or embarrassment or shame. Because actually, in fact, I believe you are already stronger than the cocoon. I believe you are stronger without it.Here, in love, the critic in you does not count. At all. In any way. You loved, and it ended, and it was terrifying and beautiful and tangled and ugly and hurt like hell and probably still does on some mornings (I have those days too). But the forgiving of yourself begins in a kindness to yourself. A basic, gut level kindness. A kindness that says, "I dared greatly. And now it hurts." A kindness that says, "I was brave. I believed in love. It disappointed me that time." A kindness that does not hide the truth - the real truth - which is not that you should be embarrassed or ashamed of loving, but the truth which is that you dared and even so it is complicated, and no blame or unkindness will clarify that paradox.There is an impossible brightness to love: that paradox of daring and fear, of deep connection and also things not working out every time. That kind of love, falling in it, falling out of it, that is where you tell me you learned things about grace and forgiveness and love. I believe you did learn about those things. I believe now is the time to hold them in your hands and offer them back to yourself, not as warning for what not to do, not as judgment for how long you stayed or what you were or were not willing to do for this person, but as the gifts of that time. As the gifts of daring greatly. As the gifts of the impossible brightness of love.You are already out here in the brightness, love. You don't need the cocoon. You're far too strong.Love,hilary

you are already alive

I tell her this as she sits in my office, my feet tucked up under me, a habit of mine that is designed for stillness but really just makes me fidget more, an unwelcome thing when I am trying to listen. I tell her how this past weekend, in between a flying back and forth and the worry that sat with me on the couch those mornings, my Bible open, my heart sounding a gong in my bones.I tell the story like it is something I came up with on the fly but the truth is I've been out there looking for it for years, this answer that finally comes to me, a gong to beat next to my heart, in time with it: you are already alive. You are already alive. You do not become alive when you get into grad school or when you get married. You do not become alive when you finally leave your hometown or when you make your way nervously forward to accept the Oscar or the Nobel Prize or the third grade spelling bee ribbon. You do not become alive at the next brush of hands or the next on your knees powerful prayer and you do not become alive at some distant moment in the future when the dishes are washed and the kids washed and the house washed with the light of some unattainable perfect.You are already alive.And me, too. I am alive, too. I am alive in the aching wondering unanswered. I am alive in the before vows, in the twist of the ring around my finger waiting in line at security, and I was alive before that, too. How gloriously alive was I, that last month of college when I named this space the wild love and when I sat in a bar and felt that I might be beautiful, those jeans and all? How gloriously alive was I driving home that night in the aftermath of it, listening to Bon Iver on repeat? How gloriously alive, in the still chapel reading me last May or the loud bright weddings where I watched love bloom or the times I sat here scribbling and asked God when my life would really begin?I am already alive. Not tomorrow, not when the email finally comes, not when there is something better I've earned or won or by luck or by work or by begging I have that I didn't have before. Not even the beautiful things, poems in crumpled pockets or sunlight after the longest winter or a move or a marriage or a child or a friend or a promotion. They do not make me alive, because I am already alive, and this life, this life is already moving, already a river is running through it, and the invitation is echoing across me, skin to bones to muscles in their gentleness:will you be already alive?This is the answer God gives me to the question I can't remember asking, or perhaps there doesn't always have to be a question for God to still give an answer.Hilary, be already alive.

an unnecessary letter of love

Dear you,These are the long days, aren't they? These ones at the beginning of another month of winter, whatever the groundhog says with his ancient conversation partner, the shadow. This year, I don't know what he told us. It was a Sunday and I was late for church, and I arrived in this half breathing whirlwind clutching car keys but wondering if I had remembered to drive with my license in my wallet. I know you must have those days too, days of too much forgetting, days that you tell the wall that it cannot go on like this as you throw clean socks into a dirty laundry basket just so that you can see the floor again.I don't know what made me think of it tonight, maybe the feeling that this blog was always supposed to be about love, and the lingering squint-eyed gaze in the dance studio mirror tonight at my hip shaking body made me realize it had been a while since I offered some love unbidden and unnecessary and unbounded by a reason.I'm playing Nashville Cast music on Spotify right now. I'm singing it to the screen as I type. This, too, unbidden and unbounded.We don't spend our words on each other enough. I'm so sad about that, when I let myself. I'm so sad that there are millions of words flung into the ecosystem of us and not nearly enough of them have been about this work of loving each other. Not nearly enough for you. We've spent ourselves on the theology on the policy on the philosophy on the worry on the big church and the small and the medium-sized and what we think and must think and should not think about it all. We've spent words like water on all the ideas, thin bridges in the storm, stretched across the miles.What do I even think the work is? But there I go, almost writing about what I think about the work, almost spending more words trying to describe what I want the work to be or how I think maybe this letter is the work. I don't really know, to tell you the truth. I stared in that dance studio mirror and I thought, I want to tell someone the stray thought. I want a bridge of words towards another person's heart tonight, however thin it feels against the storms. I come to the empty screen and I start to write. What do I tell you? What do I say?I'm singing "Believing." This song. I'm singing about how you keep me believing. And it's true. That simple. Writing to you keeps me near to King Jesus, as my dad has been teaching me to call him, and I'm crying while I write it and I'm trying to sing at the same time. Unbidden, and maybe only a little bounded.I don't know if you know how much I love to sing. It's the kind of love I have for writing some days, the good days, where it is the doing of it, the creation of sound and the way I imagine my voice moving through the air, how it might look or feel if you came across it. Do you have something you love that much? Would you tell me about it? Do you sing, too?I was telling you something, I think, about loving and words and this letter. But maybe, unbidden and unbounded and unnecessary though these words seem in the moment when I'm playing the song again - it's all just that loving this, the words, the hope that maybe when you read this you feel like someone saw you today and wanted you to know it, maybe that's the letter.And the love.Love,hilary

dear hilary: the edge of your hope

Dear Hilary,I am a recent college graduate, unemployed for five months, living in my parents’ house and watching as my hopes for graduate school disappear as the letters come back. I’ve lived through several tragedies in the past several years -- murder, abuse, relationships broken up. I feel as if I am suspended in motion, watching my friends get married, have kids and buy houses – and I wish they had what they have. How do I have hope in the Lord when I am continually disappointed with what happens in my life? Is it wrong to want to be happy?Sincerely,Afraid to hopeDear Afraid to hope,Every time I read your letter, I start to think. I think about you, writing away at your computer somewhere. I think about the way you crafted your story, your question, and what you might have been doing while you wrote it. I think about how courageous you are to write it down at all, because writing makes things a different kind of real. I think about whether you'd drink a latte or something without caffeine in it, if we went out to coffee together.And your question? There is no pithy quote on this wide and wildly beautiful world that would capture an answer to it. Because you want to know about a living thing - hope - and living things are never as simple as those handpainted lettered signs on the Pinterest page. You want to know about a thing that moves with us, that spills over into the most surprising corners, that feels at once impossible and utterly, undeniably, real.After I read your question the first few times, I did yoga. I am not great at yoga, so I picked the "easy yoga for beginners" (because that can't be that hard, right?) on amazon and I started. The first thing we did was lie down. I almost turned the video off and muttered something dismissive about the idea that lying down is a kind of exercise, but for some reason I stayed. I closed my eyes, the way the all-too-peaceful instructor told me to. I willed myself to be calm. That hardly ever works for me, because my heart starts racing and I think of my to-do lists and then before I know it I'm already missing half the warrior pose. But that too peaceful instructor, she said something that made its way into the maze of my racing heart and mind. She asked, "Where is your body right now? Honor what your body is telling you. Honor what your body can do today."I think there is this part of us all that secretly believes everything important happens in our heads. The disappointments and the hurts and the joys and the wondering, that's all work internal, in that life of the mind, in that wild wandering heart space. And we think that space is, must be, infinite, able to do whatever we tell it to. We think we can think our way or feel our way or demand our way into hope or faith or love. We think we can order the heart space around, tell it to expand, tell it to get wiser - tell it to memorize Pinterest quotes - tell it to have hope in the Lord.And that's where I think we go wrong.We are just one: body and heart and mind all tangled together. We can no more say to our minds or hearts that we can be more hopeful or less disappointed than we can tell our bodies to sink deeper into Warrior II or arch our backs higher in Cobra. "Honor what your body can do today."You have to start testing the edges of your hope. You have to get real with God and with yourself and ask, "Where are you today, body and heart and mind? Where are we with this lived thing, hope?" And sink a little deeper, and honor where you are today. Explore it. Ask God all the things you think you can't ask because you think if you ask you won't get closer to hope. I mean the gritty questions: I mean the "Why is this happening to me?" and the "Wasn't I faithful to you?" and the often-lurking-for-me-anyway "Do you love me? How can you love me when this is what I see?"Afraid to hope, I am here to tell you hope is hard won, body and spirit jumbled together. It is a tested thing, it is a thing that lives. And this is the greatest gift to us. Because it means that when we honor where we are today, we inch towards more strength tomorrow. When we honor the conversation we are really having with God today, we move towards a new conversation tomorrow.It isn't wrong to want to be happy, by the way, but I don't think what you're after here is an answer to that. I think you're after the bigger thing - the hope, the hope that is beyond the optimism we associate with happiness, or with achieving the things we want. You want the bigger thing, the hope. I love that about your letter. I love that you ask such a big question. How courageous you are.So now, I will ask you to be courageous again: go forward, body, mind, heart as one, and test the edges of your hope. Bang down the door to God, be loud, ask yourself where you are today. Sink a little deeper into the stretch of hope, the stretch of this wild thing that is you and God. Tomorrow, I promise you, hope grows.Love,hilary

this is a place of remembrance

"I AM DONE WITH THIS!" I scream it over and over, part hysterically crying, part hyperventilating, the oxygen fighting to enter my body. "I am done. I am done. I am. DONE." Who am I talking to, on the drive back to campus to charge my now-dead phone? What am I talking about?Is it the ever present shadow of bride to be workouts, the ticker of the treadmill and the stairmaster, the well meaning tight lipped smiles of the people in the gym all out to prove we love our bodies, love ourselves, have the balance, have the motivation, the stamina?And the way that I tell myself that 382 calories is insufficient for an afternoon, add up the numbers, spend them again and again, streams of numbers divided and earned, calculated on the drive from Starbucks to work and home again, and so I climb stairs for an extra ten minutes because you must, you must, be above 400 every time. You must or else what is the point and do you know what will happen, the wild collapse?"I am done with this" - with what?With the endless looping ribbons of thought about whether it is worth writing a blog post about something as small as climbing stairs at the gym on a Wednesday, that who needs or wants to read such a thing, with the frustration that even when I start to write it I want to tell it better, that there is some other voice asking if this is the right word choice, if I would get more traffic by using some other words, if I got to the Jesus part of this quicker then I would be a better blogger, a better writer, a better Hilary.With the frustration that there is no clean telling of a story that I live in my skin and bones with oxygen that still fights to enter my body and leave it, the most common of journeys, the most transforming of journeys. With how much I have paused and deleted and revisited, thinking I will find a new ending if I hit "save" enough times.There is a Jesus part to this. There is a part about God. But I can't run there because when I run there I get pushed back into the hurricane. We have arenas of salvation, arenas of sanctification, Julie told me once. This is mine: that I am not allowed to run from the fact that I struggle, wonder, worry, count and obsess and overplan how to keep my body in the form I have chosen as right enough (but always, the enough, because there must be room for improvement, there must be more zumba classes and more pilates and more of everything else that might make me better). This is the arena of sanctification, me and God in the ring, wrestling as much with each other as with the bystanders, the voices offering those classes and the quick fixes.Didn't Jacob call the place Peniel, where he encountered God and yet his life was delivered? And wasn't it there a striving with God? And wasn't there the fierceness of blessing, the ache for it, every muscle overworked with the longing?And I build a place of remembrance between my dashboard and my heart, a remembering that somehow my life is preserved. That's the Jesus part to this story. That when I drive away from the overcounting and the oxygen fights with my body for permission to breathe again is that this whole post is a wrestling. This whole story is a wrestling.A day after I scream there is a cancelled appointment, an idea in my head that I'll go to an extra class, fit in one more day at the gym, an email to my father to ask if he can bring the gym bag I left behind with him, and not five minutes later his head pokes around the door to say he is already here, he can't go back for it.Who will say this is not all a wrestling?Nor this writing my own place of remembering that my life is being delivered?

i bind unto myself

There is a feeling, deep in the pit of my stomach, when I sing. It's not there when I sing just anything, though. I can belt out "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend" at a Cabaret night in high school or sing along with Jack Johnson that senior year beginning in the fall with the lazy sunset and the cabin where the seniors got to spend the last night, without it. It isn't just the love of opening my mouth and hearing my vocal chords spill over into the air, into the room, into your hearing.It only happens when I sing hymns.I used to think them too old, but I didn't grow up in the youth groups and the guitar lessons, the right chords to Hillsong and Chris Tomlin. A friend who went to a congregational church did, filled with stories of the ski trips and missions trips and summer bible studies, filled with games and the healthy junk food and the praise songs, that got you up off your chair and swaying, as you closed your eyes and, it seemed, something wondrous happened.I was an Episcopalian becoming Anglican, thinking about Orthodoxy and Catholicism, and I didn't know those songs, only the old hymns, the 1982 blue hymnal hymns, the tunes we would plunk out on the piano or I would offer to sing into the few standing microphones we had at the church. I wanted to sing with some kind of lark angelic sound. I wanted to bring others near to God with my singing, make something happen in the seats, in the church, out in the world. But I didn't think hymns could do that.But St. Patrick had a hymn - we call it St. Patrick's Breastplate - the hymn of "I Bind Unto Myself Today". It has seven verses and verse six has a completely different melody than the others, and verse one is short -I sang it first tripping over the words and syllables in a small church in New England where the altar was hidden far back and the priest climbed stairs to the pulpit to preach, and then again in St. John's Hall, where the praise band played it with guitars and a drum set as we set a kitchen table groaning with altar cloth and frontal piece and those gifts, through and by the Spirit the Body and the Blood, where we made the space alive with our voices and cupped hands. I sang it unsure then -and then again, and again, I have watched that hymn follow me across state lines and countries, through empty fields where I only remembered one half of one verse in England or along highways and -you see, when I sing it, the words coming and going like water, when I sing it, close my eyes in church or stand in the shower or just hum bits of it to myself in the car, I realize -the hymn binds me to Christ.This song is an act of prayer, this song is an act of worship, this song, this hymn, with all its mystery, the cadence of its sounds, this binds me to Christ.I bind unto myself today, the strong name of the Trinity, by invocation of the same, the Three in One and One in Three. The feeling in the pit of my stomach is less about my singing, more about my spirit.I bind unto myself, today.Love,hilary

when this is a thought about marriage

Preston starts his posts with that word, "when" - an invitation, I think, to realize the passing of time and the not-passing-of-time, the way when you sit to read his words you remember that you are exactly where you are, reading, in your kitchen or on your iPad. It's funny how the vocabulary of the one you love begins to seep into your own, their words swirled next to yours, the way tea steeps in a mug on an early morning.I've been thinking about marriage - maybe that's not so surprising - and when I think about it, inevitably, I start thinking about the ways we talk about marriage. I think about the advice blogs, the story-becoming-advice blogs, the blogs that remind us that this a great big work, different from anything we've tried before, blogs that remind us that this is also the most normal unfolding of life, the most apparently inevitable thing, the way that they hold your hand or kiss you good morning is the only thing that could be.And my head fills with other people's thoughts faster than its own sometimes, trying to think my way into wisdom about marriage, sewing a patchwork quilt of what other people have done and thought and tweeted and posted and shared. But my stitches fumble, and when I look over at him in the quiet of the morning, the pieces slip to the floor. I can't read my way into being good at marriage. I can't repost or borrow or sew together thoughts to cover us in the moments when we don't understand each other, or those moments, even more surprising, when we understand better than anyone else ever has.And maybe, before journeying down the road of what someone here and there says will make this work, I must close my eyes, lean into what is right in front of me. The way he says hi on Skype, ties his tie when we are going out to dinner, the way we laugh or curl up to watch Game of Thrones together or the way that we  both know when it's a night to stay in, instead of go out, a night to pray, a drive where we will talk about deep things in the church or a drive where we will ask about our favorite praise songs growing up.Once, before Preston and I got together, before the full unfolding that would be this love story, I went for a walk with a friend. It was warm, the end of May in New England, when the world bursts green and the sun plays with the trees, throwing its light on everyone who passes by. We walked, talking about marriage, talking about love, and I remember so desperately wanting to store up everything she said, learn and memorize her words until they sang out from me as if they were mine. But as she talked, and we wandered out of the woods, back into a small cluster of houses around a pond, the afternoon stretched long and we leaned into it.She didn't want me to memorize her stories. She was telling me as a way to push me towards discovering my own. She was sharing about her life, her marriage, not as blueprint but as beautiful, as the wonder of how God led her and her husband into and out of each thing. She was telling me, not because she knew best, but because she knew how much of the story we must write on our own.I don't know if I believed her at the time. But I do believe her, now, in the months that still stretch out before our wedding, in the nights in and out, the jeans and sweatshirts and the salsa dancing club and all the wonder of the in-between every day learning each other.It isn't a blueprint. It's just all, always, beautiful.Love,hilary

dear hilary: the shape of your grief

This one, friends, doesn't have a letter in front of it. This one, since Preston told me to write the hard thing, is the letter just for me.

Dear Hilary,

It is always weeks after you think it will arrive that grief finally, politely, knocks on your door. It isn't in the moment you make the bed in the house that is emptied or bake dozens of cookies and do the dishes over, and over, worrying that there won't be enough bowls when the rest of the mourners arrive. It isn't when you finally lie on the bed at home after the flights, after the funeral, after the tears you knew would come when you realize your engagement ring is the exact color of the suit she was buried in, or when your brothers cry next to you, or when you spend an hour playing around the world in basketball in the concrete driveway even though you can't move past the first place, because you don't really know how to play basketball.

But one afternoon, a weekend, when you've done the errands and dropped off the dry cleaning, when you've had tea and coffee and not worried about the whipped cream you put in the coffee, when you're settled adding street names and numbers to a spreadsheet for your wedding, and you suddenly realize it: everything she never saw.

You didn't show her the binder you made, the colors of your bridesmaid dresses or the way your dress fits you, just right. You didn't show her the ring, in person, you didn't exclaim the way he holds your hand or how much he loves to cook for you - and you know she would tell you you are lucky and you and your mom, you don't deserve these men who cook for you. She didn't know that he makes you laugh, even at yourself, or the way you look in a picture together, or your plans for five children, and how your mother thinks it'll be all boys.

And you will sit, binder in hand, on your bed and realize with a start that you are getting married and you can't give her a corsage and you can't hug her and you can't take a picture with her, with all the women in all their wedding jewelry all together, those pinterest pictures everyone tags can never be yours.

The shape of grief is ever-moving, the heart is the hammer that molds it, beat by beat, the well-loved driftwood on a beach after winter, shaped by the movement of wave after wave, slowly sanded smooth, gentle, even. 

This is the shape of your grief, Hilary: an absence physical as presence, while you bake cookies and organize flights and make the world move in the right times and places, the grief waits for you. It waits for your heartto hammer it smooth again, beat by beat.

The shape of your grief: softening, still.

Love,
hilary

so i write today

I am sitting on my bed in the chaos of Preston's departure, unwilling, unable, maybe, to really bring myself to the zumba youtube video workout or the making of dinner or the folding of laundry that's overdue in a corner of the room. It's a hard thing, long distance, because the stillness is lost in the miles logged, the yet-another-plane-ticket, the counting up and down the days and hours until you can be next to each other again. 

I am thinking about Momastery tonight. I'm not sure why, an article on Relevant that people have been sharing on facebook that made me think of something of hers I read once and so I go to Glennon's blog, because Sarah Bessey links to it and I see that under the Relevant article, and I find myself paging through and reading those good words and thinking about writing and good words and spaces with nice colors and clean CSS coding. And I think about how I have so often wanted to have a big space like that, and those thoughts have a something, I don't know if it's a bitterness or just a wistfulness, or somewhere between them, about writing and me and the wide gap between what I think it should be and what I think it is.

Her Ted Talk link is in a corner. I click, lean against the pillows. She is only a few minutes in when I start to cry. 

I want to be someone telling the world to take off its superhero cape. I want to tell you my story of emerging, how I have learned the shape of kindness can be the word no and the shape of grace can be in an ending. I want to tell you, especially, that I never thought I'd ever be a writer because I assigned the role to someone else in my poetry class that first year and I pretended I didn't want it so that it couldn't hurt me if it didn't happen, and I want to tell the world that sometimes the song about freedom has stanzas in it for whatever cage you've lived in. I want to be someone like Glennon, I think, and 17 minutes later I'm still on my bed in the same leggings avoiding the same zumba video with the same hole in my heart. 

There is a part of me that thinks in this moment about the fact that I don't have my own domain name and I don't know how to code CSS, that asks me who I think I am, writing like this, 23 years old and still not sure if she knows how to make pancakes right. 

But I am still writing today. I am still wanting to add some stanzas to that song about freedom and I still want to say to you that if you and me together in this watch these women - who write brave books and who speak brave Ted talks and who keep shouting about things like daring greatly and carrying on, warrior and being a jesus feminist and how mothers are superheroes - if you and me together watch them, 

I think we'll start to tell each other. We'll whisper carry on, warrior in the supermarkets and down the corridors and into all the small places of our lives. We will tell you the new mom as we hug you during the peace in church that you are a superhero. We will learn how to write cards and notes to girls who wonder about how to be brave and dare greatly. And we will tell them yes, you can. And we will tell them yes, you are brave and beautiful and good and let's be in this together. 

And so I write today. 

Love,
hilary

when it was a year about light

I am 22 in this picture I paint of myself for you, looping the words over us like so much leftover Christmas ribbon. I am achingly frustrated and desperately unsure of myself. I am sitting, as I usually do, on my bed with the blankets still unmade from when I woke up. I am living in the in-between, in a place I know so well - so much better, really, than I wish I knew it. I wanted to be somewhere new, I say to myself as the New Year's night lingers on. I wanted to be in DC, I wanted to be in France, I wanted to have done something or gone somewhere, and yet I feel as I type that the word of the year must be light. 

It is meant to be a year of light. 

I expect this will mean the utter brilliance of day. I expect that God will hear this prayer of a word and turn my shadows into sunlight. I expect that when I wake up in the newness of the year, I will be different. I go to bed in that messy pile of blankets and I am ready to be transformed. Perhaps I even smile a little as I sleep. 

God turns out all the lights. 

The months pass and there is less clarity than ever before. I do not know where to find God even in all the usual places I go looking for him. I am still in the same place and I walk into the same building at work and feel as though I must have prayed it wrong, said it wrong, chosen the wrong word. Because in the wintering of the year I am wandering through nothing but shadows and all that I think I know of me is gone. I sit in Tenebrae, the service of the lengthening shadows at the end of Lent, and even there, though I hear Jesus say to me "You will flee, and I will go to be offered up for you," I cannot find a window to open for the light to come into my heart. I must be praying some angry prayers in this year, too, prayers that tell God just what I think of this silence, this darkness, this apparent failing of my hope for light. 

But it is the wonder of the world that the shadows reveal the light more brilliantly. It is the wonder of knowing God that we are given a glimpse of how God loves us through praying a word like light and walking through shadows. It is the wonder of a year where I moved from thinking there was an easy way towards the light to despairing about shadows to meeting God again and new for the first time - 

it is the wonder that to be still before God with a trembling self one year ago is to pray a wild prayer. It is the wonder that God hears such prayers, that God is close to such prayers. That God so tenderly answers them. 

Love,
hilary

advent 4 (how to delight)

The lights dim just as the couple and their two boys, bedecked in Fair Isle sweaters and tiny yellow rimmed glasses, settled next to us. The boys can't be over four or five years old, and they beam out their excitement when the first tiny dancers, the street urchins, appear onstage. The costumes are new this year, the set is new, the people, perhaps, are new too. Somehow, in this matinée theater, we are all being made new, made children again by this familiar music.I love the ballet for a thousand reasons. I love the delicacy and the strength it requires. I love how joy is captured in movement, but perhaps it is a gift of joy as much as the joy for the dancer, the knowledge that the audience behind the lights is receiving something from the watching. I love the way that the story is ours to imagine with the music, with those onstage. I love the way this story in particular is about so much and yet is so simple. I love how ballet reminds me about the truth of balance:everything pulling in the right direction, tension that produces harmony unlike any other, a stillness that, underneath, is held by tremendous strengthand how to desire it.And in this matinée, the day before the final Sunday in Advent, when the word is joy, when Christ is near to us, when we are anxious with the anticipation of what will come, I sit with  my mother and celebrate what it means to be childlike in our unabashed delight: the costumes, the Arabian section of the second act, the costumes, the Snow Queen and King, the Sugar Plum Fairy. We lean forward in our seats, marveling, and the boys next to us, our faces are mirrors of each other. We wonder what it would be like to be at the Boston Ballet School. We lose ourselves in the setting and the thousand pairs of shoes that the dancers go through each performance. We almost float out of the theater, humming and singing the melodies, now well-worn in our minds, but somehow, again, new.And isn't this the promise and work of Advent? That we must be ever more familiar with the coming of Jesus, and yet be as delighted as the first time we heard such news? We must learn the rhythms of a life lived before the Lord, and yet we must discover that such a life will make us as free to wonder and delight as the first time we ever hear God say, "I know you."And so I dance my way out of the Opera House, marveling at the ballet, making my posture straighter to mirror those dancers, moving a bit lighter on my feet all the way back to the car, and next to me, my mother does the same.What is truly good and beautiful must always make us new.Love,hilary

when I learn something about valor

Eshet chayil - woman of valor.I turn the question over this morning on my way through the frosted trees. The sun is slow to rise this morning, unruly, as if it, too, is tired after the snowfall last night. I sip the gingerbread latte - my nod to the season, to the red Starbucks cups, to the closeness of Christmas. I don't know why I'm wondering about this phrase in particular - woman of valor - but I know about it from the women that start to come to mind - Nish, and Sarah, Lisa-Jo, and Rachel, Ann, Antonia, Elora - and then I realize I know them from across my life, not just across the threads of connection, electricity firing across miles to bring our words to each other.I know them in my mother, wisdom spilling out as she leans back across the end of my bed and reminds me of the way that we are meant to trust God. I know them in my sister, who texts me to remind me she is here and loves me, who raises her son with such patience and grace that I am sometimes speechless at it. I know it in the women who have colored and changed my life by their knowing me - from breakfasts sophomore year to Thanksgiving Black Friday shopping at the Pentagon City Mall to a walk in the woods and tea on her couch to hours of talk about racial reconciliation and education and what it must mean to love God and to believe that we are to know Jesus by what we do with our hands.And I could not stop thinking about it, the words sounding over and over again in my head. Eshet chayil - woman of valor.How do you become a woman of valor? How do you become the fiercer truth-teller, the wiser grace-giver, the woman who spills out light wherever you walk because you cannot help but do that?Because she is brave, this woman of valor. She will wear red lipstick on a too-early morning and put on a blue puffer coat to shovel the walk. She will stand in front of the room and teach. She will preach the truth over coffee or wine, across the sale racks at the consignment shop or in her office with mugs of tea in front of you and rain outside. She will strike out on her own to chase down a dream in New York, in California. She will sing Sara Bareilles in the car and pull up next to a man in a large truck, who will stare at her and laugh, and she will be unashamed. She is brave. She takes the time with you, again and again, to work out the trembling bits, to ask every question or none at all, and she reminds you that there is nothing for it but to live deep and wide and full, wherever you are. She is unafraid of the truth and unafraid to chase it down, across the mountains and rivers, in the hardest moments, in the lightest ones.I know so many women of valor, I realize. I wonder if they know that they are. I wonder if they know, sitting at the table in Panera or drinking tea in my office or driving in my car on our way back from coffee. I wonder if they know, who have taught me the way grace feels and moves in a life, have taught me that being brave is worth it, in their questions and their laughter and the way they love.I pull my car into the parking space, cut the engine, let the song finish playing from the speakers. I wonder if becoming a woman of valor has something to do with hope, with singing along with Sara and reading the good words of the women who have taught me what valor looks like.Maybe I can begin in the hope to be more like them. To learn the shape of their kindness, their graciousness, their fierce love of the truth. Their courage.I  begin in the smaller prayer, just as I walk up the steps to begin my day. Lord, might you make me a woman of valor?Love,hilary