hope and imagination – Page 5

Our Imperfect Saints

Autumn makes me think of my grandmother’s pumpkin-shaped sugar cookies. She’d cover them in orange buttercream frosting and then decorate the tops with Jack-o’-lantern faces using a rich cocoa icing. I loved those cookies. My grandmother sold them for 35 cents apiece at the local pumpkin festival, and they sold out every year.

My grandmother loved making things that made people smile. As a child hovering around her in the kitchen, I wanted to learn to do whatever she did. We’d stand at the kitchen counter together. Talk of baking would flow in and out of her questions about my schoolwork and what my friends and I were doing. She’d listen with a smile that crinkled the corners of her eyes, prompting me to say even more. I treasured those hours together.

I’ve often thought of my grandmother as one of the “saints” who went before me. I’ve thought of her faith as the thing that let her move through the world as she did, allowing her to smile as she smiled. Experience has shown me, of course, that faith involves more than smiles. In fact, I’m finding that both my faith and my grandmother’s legacy are becoming more and more complex as I live into them.

I knew even as a child that my grandmother had days when her smile wouldn’t come, when her attention strayed to things that furrowed her brow. Attempting to talk with her at the kitchen counter on those days, I’d try to tell better stories, describe happier things, say something to draw her back. When her attention returned, however, she’d often caution me about the neighbors or friends I’d spoken of, warning me that they couldn’t be trusted. I knew she heard things, saw things, and even smelled things that weren’t real. I didn’t understand what was happening, and I said nothing.

When I reached high school, a biology class introduced me to descriptions of mental illness. The lists of symptoms captured my attention. I saw in them, for the first time, possible explanations for the behaviors I’d noticed in my grandmother. The descriptions left me wondering what she experienced. I spoke with some family members about what I’d read, but I still said nothing about my grandmother.

Many people and many families say nothing when a family member is suffering from mental illness. They don’t understand what’s happening with a loved one, and so they remain silent. I completely understand the silence.

As a college student, I remained silent for a long while about what was happening in my own life. Energy and euphoria for a few days, then exhaustion and tears for the next week – I’d never before experienced such extremes. I didn’t understand what was happening with me, and I kept most of it to myself for quite a while.

Twenty-some years later, I’ve become much more familiar with the experience of navigating a mood disorder. I don’t have the paranoia or more extreme symptoms my grandmother experienced. I also don’t know to what extent my mood disorder involves a genetic predisposition toward certain kinds of mental illness. What I do know is that I’m still coming to know and appreciate my grandmother and her faith even years after her death.

My grandmother and I can place ourselves in a story and a history as old as the Bible. I look to Moses, Sarah, Abraham, and the Israelites who struggled and persevered faithfully, never seeing the fullness of God’s promise in their lifetime. I think about the disciples, who loved in the face of mockery and suffering, embodying Christ’s unending love. The Bible is full of stories pointing to God’s desire for fullness of life, for an ongoing healing and blessing (“perfecting”) that Christ’s followers have been empowered to live. These stories remind me as they may have reminded my grandmother: God does not promise a perfect life free of suffering, but God promises to be with us as we persevere in love.

As Paul writes in the letter to the Hebrews, “Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith” (12:1-2a). Like that great cloud of witnesses who came before us, we also make our way within God’s still-unfolding redemption, a way shown by the love of Christ and inspired by those who have persevered that their lives might point to that love.

I think of my grandmother’s life as pointing to that love. I suspect she struggled for as much fullness of life as her mental health allowed, and so I continue to reflect on a faith that allowed her to face her struggles and persevere: raising a family, frosting sugar cookies for the pumpkin festival, and leaving her granddaughter a legacy of so many smiles and so much love. Memories of what she did, and made, and shared, never cease to encourage me about what’s possible.

The unfolding work of God happens even and especially in the context of imperfect and painful legacies. I’ve sometimes experienced a legacy like mental illness as a burden, and yet I wonder if that sense of a weight might not be laid aside, much like the weight that Paul speaks to the Hebrews of laying aside. What if a difficult legacy came to us more as an ingredient of our days, as an element in our work to embody God’s love and healing? We could run the race that is our days drawing strength from every ounce of love and perseverance in our ancestors without expecting them to have been any more perfect than Moses, Sarah, Abraham, or the disciples. We could run on behalf of them and so many others, knowing that none of us has yet beheld all that’s possible.

That’s a massive scope to keep in mind, of course. Many days, I find I do best when I back up and focus on smaller pieces of that bigger picture. Like baking. I bring out the cookbooks and cookie cutters my grandmother left me. I roll out dough knowing that I still don’t quite achieve the consistent thickness that she did. I’ve found, though, that even oddly shaped cookies, hung on a doorknob or left on an office table, will bring smiles. Perhaps neighbors and colleagues notice the love behind the gesture. Like my grandmother, I love giving smiles. Though little things, those smiles nonetheless remind me of what powerful blessing we carry and how far we can run with the examples of love we have, by God’s grace, been given.

This essay originally appeared in the October 10, 2022 issue of Bearings Online.

Remembering Hope

All winter I watched a neighbor’s deck lights from my back window as they glowed against the grey and cold. The string of lights stretched between tree branches above the wooden deck. Morning and evening, I watched those lights create a small space of warmth against the dark woods beyond.

I suppose I needed that sense of warmth. Winters have felt colder and greyer to me these last couple of years. Weather data might not support that impression, of course. My sense of lingering cold may have had more to do with pandemic time, with watching people still consider COVID case numbers and hesitate to gather with a lack of outdoor options. Perhaps my sense of relentless grey had more to do with news of war and civilian casualties in Ukraine. I’ve wondered how much pain a world can bear. I’ve craved peace, health, warmth, sunshine, comfort, and so many things.

Wondering, craving, waiting in the cold and grey, I’d sometimes wander by my back window and be caught up short, surprised: I was smiling at the sight of the deck lights. Gazing out into the dim grey light of a morning or evening, I’d find the deck lights glowing gently nearby. They brought a smile to my face before I’d even realized it. These moments at the back window surprised me again and again. Something about the warmth drew me. Something about those lights, alone lighting the land as far as my eye could see, stopped me. They kept making me smile.

Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against the grey, or night, or cold. I love darkness, nighttime, winter, rain, snow, and all sorts of occasions that send a person inside in search of warmth and light. I appreciate, too, the seasons of life that invite us inward. Outward constrictions come in many forms: constrictions on physical space, on extroverted activities claiming our attention, on energy-consuming habits we could once afford. Outward constrictions on these can offer a us gentle nudge to pause and rest, to dwell in smaller, glowing spaces that comfort us.

As I get older, though, I become more and more aware of how times of needing comfort will come sometimes and linger. They may linger long past our tolerance for them. Perhaps this awareness fed into what became my unplanned winter practice of pausing to behold the string of lights glowing above my neighbor’s deck each morning and evening. They brought me joy.

Joy calls out to joy, after all. Light reminds us of light. Those string lights sent my memory back to my grandparents’ house at the end of a small, winding road up a wooded hill. Evenings fell there with not a single streetlight in sight. To a city girl like me, darkness felt deeper there. When I’d spend a winter night with them, I’d wake before dawn and follow a trail of nightlights that my grandmother left leading to the kitchen. She and my grandfather would be sitting there at an island counter, drinking their first pot of coffee under the warm glow of two overhead lights. I loved finding them there together, waking slowly and gathering their energies for the coming day in that small spot of warmth and light.

I find that memory tells me a lot about what is possible. Good memories bring me not only comfort from the past. They point me towards the future, as well, and towards hope. Those small spots of warm light reminded me of the comforts I still carry with me that will, in one way or another, surely come again.

In the summer of 2020, after months of lockdowns and restrictions, I gathered outdoors with a few friends on someone’s back deck. String lights ran between their house and a stand of trees in the yard nearby. Our chairs socially distant, we sat underneath the deck lights and made a feast out of cheese, crackers, chocolate, and chit-chat until well after dark. Under that string of lights, friends lingered at a time when I think that many of us dearly needed that kind of pause together. It felt like regrouping and gathering our energies for the long pandemic months still ahead. Sitting on a back deck with friends, I remember feeling lighter, more glad, more relaxed than I had in months.

What memories call out to you? What moments remind you of what’s possible?

Our best memories can serve as promises, too. Making our way through days, months, or years, we’ll stumble across a moment that glows, a moment that captures our attention at a deep enough level that it reminds us of what’s possible. Even during the cold, grey, rainy, and snowy spring days we’ve recently had here in Indiana, I’ll still pause by a window with the warm glow of my neighbor’s deck lights. I’ll remember to trust that longer days, days visiting with friends in the evening sunlight, even days of a deeper and more just kind of peace, will come.

What God Does with Dust

It layered itself like a fuzzy film along baseboards I didn’t often clean. It gathered on books I hadn’t opened in years. Dust marked what I liked to forget.

“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” the clergy would recite on Ash Wednesday in the church of my childhood.

I remember a jumble of moments in that building whose stained-glass windows rose above our high school football field. My breath caught in my chest at Easter when the chancel choir sang from Handel’s Messiah. I puzzled over a benediction one pastor gave each week that called us to remember that we are being redeemed. I can’t say I remember much at all about the dust.

Forgetting isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It helps with daily functioning. We ignore some things at some points in our lives (like baseboards and dust) to remember other things (like music and benedictions). We prioritize. It’s just that priorities, like people, can change with time.

My own relationship with dust began to change with the arrival of the pandemic. We spent so much more time at home. Many of us still do as this third Lenten season of pandemic approaches. More time at home means a more consistent view of dust. Baseboards, bookshelves, blinds—no corner of my home is immune to its presence.

“By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground,” God tells Adam after that incident with the fruit, “for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return” (Gen 3:19). A sign of mortality, dust marks our very lives. Something happens, and we see that more clearly. Like the fruit that Eve and Adam ate, the pandemic has also shown us more than we saw before. It’s taken away opportunities to ignore what’s in our midst.

Some days, a mountain bike showed me this. I practiced this new hobby with a vengeance during spare pandemic moments. Falling to the ground was part of that. I’d clip a tree trunk here and approach roots the wrong way there, losing control of my bike and ending up in the dirt. I arrived home marked by the dust of the ground, my vulnerability to tumbles (and injuries and illnesses) a little more visible these days than it used to be.

Most days, I arrived home from those bike rides energized, as well. Dust up and down my legs, mud slung up the length of my back – I’ve grown to love those bike trails for how they wake me up. They alert me to the earth, the days, the changing seasons, and the people and critters around me. It could be that getting dirty makes me feel a little more alive, like I’ve risked some things and found out where my limits (for now) may be.

I’ve become alert to the world on a smaller scale. No more crowds of people and activities to choose from, I treasure little things around me, like a fist-sized Petoskey stone from a biking buddy. It sits near a window where its patterns of fossilized coral glow in the sunlight. Cards from friends and family line my bookshelves and tabletops. Each little touchpoint with another feels luminous. It makes dusting those shelves more complicated, but I want the cards there. The clutter shows me care and blessing every which way I look.

“And your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth,” God promised Jacob in a dream at Bethel, “and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring” (Gen 28:14). Leave it to God to make dust an image of vast and limitless blessing, but that’s exactly what God does. Forming humanity from the dust of the ground, God breathes into us the breath of life (Gen 2:7). Crafting promise, hope, redemption, and all sorts of new creations, God breathes the breath of life into the dust of our days. With dust every which way we look, we can’t help remembering what God is in the habit of doing with dust.

Lent approaches with another call to remember our mortality. When I hear the Ash Wednesday liturgy this year, I hope I remember the miraculous things that God does with dust.

This essay originally appeared in the February 28, 2022 issue of Bearings Online.