Grieving, weakness, God, and my friend Rich

I am re-running this, because I know that my publisher put my blog URL on the back of Flame in the Night, and if anyone new here shows up because of that, I want them to know about the person I dedicated the book to.

I wrote this in March 2017.

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I've been realizing, as I recover from finishing my manuscript, just how many things I put on hold as I raced toward the finish line. (And then limped over it, having gotten a nasty chest cold in the last week of the work; between the book and my 3-year-old I managed to ration out just enough energy to finish.) One of those things, naturally, was cleaning the house. (You should've seen it.)

But I think another may have been grieving.

My dear friend Rich Foss died in January. I think it was January. It's been so surreal. It was expected, in a way; his health was bad at the best of times, and was getting worse. Then the blow came suddenly: he was newly diagnosed with an auto-immune disorder, when his immune system's continual fight against his chronic lung condition was all that was keeping him alive.

Rich was always a brave and honest man. He could barely walk; he'd had rheumatoid arthritis since he was seventeen, and by the time I met him his feet literally pointed in opposite directions. He spent the bulk of his time in a mechanized recliner, hooking himself up, with his wife Sarah's help, to three or four medical machines daily to stay alive. And I'd venture to say he spent the bulk of that time facing things head-on. (Not just his own things. All the things. But that's too long a story for today.) He had been talking openly about his own death for over a year, even when the rest of us felt that social impulse to tiptoe round it. He had known a long time that he wasn't going to live to a ripe old age. When the last diagnosis came, he accepted that it was the end. He went on hospice care.

But we did think he was going to live longer than two weeks.

When it happened, one level of my soul accepted it, in a stunned sort of way: this is happening, this is real. But for weeks afterward when I woke up, at the moment of coming back to consciousness, it would hit me with shock: Rich is dead. There was a part of me, down inside sleep, that still had no idea.

I used to visit Rich every Thursday evening, for years. We'd talk about this or that. But in the past two years we'd started to talk almost exclusively about the book I was writing. After the first few weeks of mostly talking about myself and my work I started to get uncomfortable: clearly I was monopolizing these conversations. I loved being able to talk about my writing--it's not easy to do so in a way people can even understand, when you're still in process, and Rich did--and Rich was always generous with his listening, but I needed to rein it in; even the most patient person would get tired of this week after week. I kept checking in with him about it, first in subtle ways, then asking him outright. Finally he managed to convince me: he was genuinely enjoying himself.

It felt like a miracle to me. That I could get what I so badly needed without having another person generously sacrifice their time for me; that I could get it while actually adding something good to someone else's day. Rich was a writer himself--if you can find a copy of his beautiful novel Jonas and Sally, I recommend it very heartily--and interested in Story, in the travails and dilemmas and emotions of human beings and how we resolve them, how we make the big choices, which is what fiction is about. As I went deeper into the book, themes developed in it that were very dear to his heart. He would tell me stories from his own life that re-echoed the themes, we would talk about what those things meant to us. Sometimes I would come to him with my latest thorny problem and he would give advice. Sometimes I would simply tell him the scene I wrote that day, and watch him react, and see that it was right. Sometimes what I was writing would lead into profound stories from memories he was sifting through and processing, knowing he was at the end of life. Sometimes he would cry.

(I think he would be all right with my telling you this. He was a very open person.)

Then came the time it became a miracle for him.

He used to be a leader, a writer, a mentor, a counselor. He was profoundly respected, it was clear at his funeral. But in his last few years he had no energy for the contributions he used to make; all his energy was spent in the sheer work of staying alive, managing his medical conditions--and that took work all right, a day-long routine of medical machines. One hour of conversation a day was pretty much what he had the energy for after that. And he needed more and more help--someone to come over & warm up his supper, for instance, which he could do but getting up and walking would wear him out. I did that often, I loved doing it, it meant a chance to talk with him, even if briefly. As things went more in that direction, I was stunned by how much that meant to him--that I wanted to.

It was getting harder and harder for him, being helped. He'd been helped all his life, of course, but he'd also been a leader. Now he talked about being an "outsider." Now most of the interactions in his day were someone coming over and doing him a favor. One that he wasn't able to return.

But with me he was. With me he had the energy (on a good day) to have at least a little bit of deeply meaningful conversation, because Story energized him; with me he was a mentor giving deeply valued advice and understanding, giving me something I needed very much. With me he was not just a receiver but also a giver, and he needed that. His soul needed that. We came to understand this end-of-life friendship as a deep gift of God to us both.

There was something about it that was very hard to understand, for me. It's this: God's power is made perfect in weakness. To receive, to be helped, isn't this a connection that has God in it? Simone Weil says "Compassion and gratitude come down from God, and when they are exchanged in a glance, God is present at the point where the eyes of those who give and the eyes of those who receive meet." I think that's beautiful. And true. I knew Rich agreed with me on this. And I knew Rich was deeply connected to God. But to see just how much it hurt him, this profoundly respected man, just wondering if he was a burden to the friends who stopped by to hook up his oxygen or microwave his pizza--I don't want to go into detail, honestly, I don't want to make you picture this, that might be a bridge too far in terms of openness--well, I couldn't parse it. What about the power of God?

What I learned from his feelings at the end of his life was this: oh Lord, Heather, it is so much harder than you think.

I have not been tested on this. But I will be. Except for those of us who die very, very suddenly, every single one of us will be. And that is the other thing I have learned: in the face of someone who is in that place of vulnerability, when you have to help and yet helping is painful, that is the one response that brings connection and relief: I will be in your place someday.

(It's ironic. It's one of the themes in my book. The Jewish characters and the pain of their vulnerability, the way the non-Jewish characters have a profound "I had no idea" shock when they finally come to understand--due to the threat their rescue efforts end up placing them under--what their friends have really been experiencing this whole time.)

Why? Why does weakness, plain material weakness, hurt us so much? Why does dependence on other people hurt us so much? Why are we ashamed of it? It's one of those places where all I've been taught about God seems so right and so good, and yet it is so hard for it to come to birth in our daily world. (What Simone Weil said is beautiful, and I still believe it, but I love her all the more because, though the quote doesn't show it, if you read the whole essay you will see that she fully understands the pain involved, and the difficulty; what she is describing in the quote is literally a miracle.)

Why? I don't know. I don't know. There are only two things I know: It is much harder than I think. And I will face it someday.

Oh, and one more thing: I still believe. And Rich knows. Rich knows all of it now.

So here is the thing I can say at the end of this story, that I would not have dared to say at the beginning, because I fear so much to sound selfish about my friend's death. Ever since I finished the book I have been mourning what I used to think this time would hold. I was recording the book for Rich to listen to. I had just recorded Chapter 15 when he died. I went ahead and recorded Chapter 16, because I had other reasons for wanting a recording. It broke me up hard, to read it into the microphone, to feel no-one on the other end. I always believed he was going to read this book. I want him to read it, I want to put it in his hands. But they're gone.

And yes, I mourn the help he could have given me. There are very specific questions I want to ask him: should I change this? Is this over the top? And I don't dare tell people that part, out of context. But the help he gave me was the connection, the friendship, the gift, it was the help I gave him too. It was the help God gave us. It was the miracle.

In my head, he was going to live till spring came. We would talk. He would listen to the book and we would talk about it, talk about it. I would bring him the first spring flowers. And then I would be ready to let go. That was how it was going to be, in my head.

Oh Lord, Heather. It is so much harder than you think.

Broken hands and new roads

I was going to write about family separations at the border. I was going to. I didn't know what really could be said about it; in fact I don't know what to say now. I've tried and tried to write a blog post, to be honest--about that, or about anything.

The fact is, my hands still don't work.

I tried to write a blog post about that--to share what I was going through in the middle of it, rather than at the end as people always seem to do. I didn't know what to say. I've been wordless. Once--when the pain had started to come back and I knew I had nothing to lose by the experiment--I typed a sentence. What I mostly learned is that I've half-forgotten how to type.

There's hope for the hands. They actually are improving still, I'm able to do careful light housework without compromising them--it's so good to finally be able to do something, anything, and to get the place clean again--and after a great deal of research we've chosen a method and a place for therapy which by all accounts has a good chance of working. As for me--I've been wordless. I don't take back my previous post, all the meaning I've found in this, but I've been in the place of "I don't know what this is anymore." Sometimes when I look at my a-few-months-younger self, I see someone who couldn't bear to have plain old meaningless ordinary troubles happen to her. I mean, I did learn the things I said. But I set out to learn them. I don't remember asking God what this was. Maybe because it seemed pretty clear. I may have guessed right.

But I probably should have asked.

We're scared of the emptiness. Of not knowing what this is. Of course we are. That's what stories are about, in a way--why we like them and need them. It helps to watch other people go through it, see how they handle it. Robert McKee, the Story teacher, calls it the Gap--the moment when the familiar solutions stop working, when the character is forced to choose a new road.

Can I, for instance, learn to write by voice recognition? Write fiction by voice recognition? I would have called it impossible, but last night I wrote the first page of a short story. It flowed and grew and made me see things, the way good rough-drafting does. I couldn't believe it. I was just trying to write down a few lines I'd thought of, awkward as I expected it to be. Instead I wrote--spoke--a scene. Someone killed a rabid fox. I saw it happen.

In a way, I don't know why I'm boring you with this. To type or not to type? These things are so personal, huge on the inside of a life, very small when looked at from outside. Like a tendon in the foot or in the elbow, just part of the equipment of everyday life, disregarded.

As a child I wondered why prayer requests seemed to be always about health. I wanted people to be more spiritual, or more selfless. I was healthy as a weed.

I was going to write about the family separations. I still don't know what to say, except that when I think about it, really think about it, I feel like I'm trapped under the oak that fell last week just downslope from my spring in the woods. And I experience a burning anger toward Trump--utterly useless. And of course I think of other family separations, of the police official at Vénissieux who asked, annoyed, why all these people were yelling so much. To which a priest replied, "If someone took your children, wouldn't you yell?"

By the priest's account, the official looked thoughtful, and said yes. May God be with the people in parallel positions today, and give them courage to choose new roads.

Broken hands

I'm very sorry for my long silence. I thought it would be shorter than it was.

The short version is, I lost the use of my hands for two months.

Sometime before Christmas I told you all on this blog that I had hand pain and needed to take a break. I had not only stressed and inflamed many of the muscles of my forearm, but also one or more of the tendons that connect those muscles to the elbow. Unfortunately, I was pretty stupid in dealing with it. The story of my stupidity is pretty boring, I suppose, but basically I kept making what I thought were radical, difficult changes in my routine and they kept turning out to be too little, too late.

The last of these changes was to stop using my right hand entirely. I not only used the mouse with my left hand, I typed with my left hand, and I chopped up vegetables for supper with my left hand. You can see this coming, can't you?

I got tendonitis in my left arm too.

I barely know how to tell you what it feels like not to be able to use your hands. It feels like death. Because, I think, death—not a loved one's death, not a stranger's, but my death and yours—feels like helplessness. Death is the moment when it doesn't matter if your life's work is sitting unfinished on the desk, when the world doesn't care. The moment when you can't do anything about it. The moment that most of us, deep in our hearts, don't believe is coming.

I remember the sensation of stopping. The impatience in my soul, the forward momentum—I have to finish this edit I have to clean the house I have to start working on the new farm and show these people what I can do I have to plant my garden I have to—it died hard. Several times. The first time was at Easter. April 1st. I thought I'd be out for a month then. I thought that was a huge deal.

I didn't want to stop.

We found ways. I stored my laptop outside our apartment, bringing it in once a day to deal with urgent email using voice-to-text, manipulating the touchpad with my chin. My husband started doing all the dishes, and chopping vegetables for me when it was my turn to cook. I tried to come up with recipes with little or no chopping. I told my son gently and continually that I was sorry, I couldn't move the little car around, or build the Lego train with him, or get his wagon out of the shed. I accepted not planting my garden—and then my husband offered to plant it for me. I accepted things being done other people's way or not at all. I watched weeds grow, and did nothing. I watched dust thicken, and did nothing. I watched grass grow up around piles of split firewood that needed stacking. I could not change the world. I could only accept it.

I learned to sit. I learned to let my mind wander, and not try to force it into important and purposeful paths. I couldn't do anything important and purposeful, anyway; thinking about it only hurt. I learned to sit and accept the world, let it come into me, whether it was important or not. The movement of the leaves in the wind. The tiny flowers in the grass and the bumblebees visiting them. The ants, the woodlice, the holes in that dead tree that the woodpecker made. I learned to sit in the woods and let them breathe around me. I learned to sit among the trees and not tell them over and over that I was wasting my important time by being with them. I learned their names. I carried my field guides in a bag I could sling around my neck almost without using my hands, and I learned what an ash tree looks like, and an elm, and a basswood. Once I started seeing the shapes of leaves, I couldn't stop. I know so little still, but I feel like I've learned so much. I know where there's a spring now, two slender tunnels opening out of the clay inner structure of a hillside, one slightly larger, one slightly smaller, like mother and daughter. I go to that spring every day. I pray, some. I also just sit. I watch a chipmunk run up and down, or a bird whose name I'm not sure of in the fading light go about its peaceful business. It doesn't have to be something important. Several times I've seen a pileated woodpecker—rare in these parts—but I don't go there to see it. If that was why I went, I wouldn't go. Not after the first time it failed to show up on my timetable.

I don't know how to explain what has happened to me. There was a time when I loved the woods, yet when I could have gone to them, I stayed inside on the computer, reading funny stories about other people's bad books or bad behavior. (You may not be familiar with this particular pleasure; it's relaxing, because it tells you it's all right, at least you're doing better than someone. Might be best if you don't give it a go.) I'll tell you the truth: I never once got angry with God about what was happening to my arms, and that's not because I'm a good person. It's because I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt I had done it to myself. Yes, I partly did it to myself writing Flame in the Night. But if I had finished my writing and gone to the woods instead of sitting at the computer, clicking on little pictures of cards or scrolling and scrolling while laughing at somebody, I would be fine.

I'm not saying it was a punishment, either. It was a kindness.

Oh, it felt plenty mean sometimes. Like being pushed down and down. Every time I began to feel the joy of recovery, to believe I would be better, I relapsed. I let the joy tempt me into doing too much. Putting a few books away. Taking some notes by pencil. I felt the pain come back, and sat there watching my son play, wondering how many days I had lengthened my sentence by, and trying to look like I wasn't about to cry.

It was two months, in the end.

And it was worth it.

There are practical things. The benefit to my son, of having been called upon to be kind and gentle with me, to see that I'm not all-powerful; of having had to do things himself that he'd rather depend on me to do. The garden, which in spite of the weeds is a family endeavor now, my husband and son proud of what they've done for it—no matter if I go back to doing it all in time, I will remember and so will they. The bonds of need and help and kindness reaffirmed between me and my husband; I have felt so loved. But beyond even that, something has happened to me. Sitting in the woods; reading books, real books, at times of the day I used to spend online; not really wanting, anymore, to read about what's wrong with other people. (I'm not saying I never will again. But you know how they say that if you stop eating sugar, you stop craving it? It's like that.) I'm better at waiting for others now, not trying to fill every minute of my important time. I notice things more. I let the quietness come into my mind, the silence I used to run from so hard—I don't quite remember why. I think there were bad thoughts in it, regrets and fears—or I thought there were. I guess I've found some. They weren't so awful, once I stopped running.

Or I wonder if the silence itself frightened me. Nothingness, emptiness has always felt like my enemy. Doing nothing, being nothing. I wonder if it looked a little bit like death. I'm not saying I'm not scared of death, or even that I'm less scared. But I do know that it will come someday, and that seems like a step in the right direction. And in the silence--would I have run so hard if I'd known?-- is not nothingness at all. In the silence, where I die a little from my quest to be and be and be something, where I open myself, the lives of others come in. The lives of trees, humble people who stand where God planted them and drink sunlight, and make air. The small, humble animals, rummaging around the woods for their daily bread. Perhaps the silence will let the lives of other people in better too; I haven't had much chance yet to find out. Maybe that's not what God had for me this time. I already knew that listening to people was important. I could have spent two months doing that, and felt I had justified my existence. But there are very few people here now, and what they need from me is work. So I went to the woods. I went to the woods and sat at God's feet, instead of running around and around looking for something to lay at them.

I'm starting to use my hands again. A little. The other day I pruned back a potted heliotrope, scraggly and distorted from a winter of neglect. I cut it back hard—within an inch of where it comes out of the soil, sparing one bud to become the new stem. I layered good compost all over the soil around its roots. We think of these plants as flowers, but the life is not in the flower. The life, the strength, is in the root. I watered it deeply, let the nutrients from the compost leach down to where the roots drink. I prayed, You've cut me back, and You've nourished me. Help me grow straight now, and flower.

The heart of the story ("My God, why have you forsaken me?")

In the end
Everything will be
All right
And if it's not
All right
Then it is not the end

That's how a worship song written by a dear friend of mine goes. Ah, but you should hear her sing it--and her church sing it with her, sounding like they believe.

It struck a chord with me, because for a long long time I've cherished a concept I call "the middle of the story." It's about... well, I should just show you.

The truth is I'm exhausted again. Hopefully this is the last of it. But I looked through my archives and found a write-up of the only sermon I've ever written, and here it is. The topic I was given was Jesus' cry from the cross "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

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Let me tell you a story.

Once there was a man who was a friend of God. God promised him he would have a son, and be the father of many nations. He waited many years, and trusted God as much as he could; and finally the son came, and was to him like a gift of laughter. And the son grew up happy, and loved, and one day God said to the man: take your son up on the mountain, and kill him.

And the man didn't understand, but he did what God said; he took his son up on the mountain, and he tied his son up, and he got out his knife. And God said stop. God said kill the ram instead. God said, you've passed the test; through you and through your children all the nations of the earth will be blessed. And the man and his son went back down the mountain; and what God had promised came true.

Let me tell you another story.

There was a man, the great-grandson of the other man, who was given dreams and visions from God; that God would someday lift him up high above his brothers. His brothers hated him for it, and sold him to slave-traders, and lied to their father and said he was dead. He became a slave in a foreign country. His master's wife lied about him and accused him of the most unpardonable thing a slave could do, and they could have killed him. And they sent him to prison to stay there the rest of his life; in prison, where God's promise could never come true.

Then he was summoned to interpret the king's dream; because he was known for interpreting dreams. The king saw that what he said was true, and he had him sit down at his right hand and oversee the country to save it from famine. And his brothers came to him, and he forgave them; and his father came, and he saved them all from the famine that had come on the land. And what God had promised came true.

Let me tell you another story. A little story.

When I was seventeen I spent my first summer on my own. My parents were overseas. I lived with a friend, a friend who said we could share the rent, and who didn't tell her landlady about me. I was a stupid kid, I didn't know what was going on, I couldn't find my picture ID for the tax forms at my job and they wouldn't pay me till I did; I'd been working for six weeks and I only had fifteen dollars left when the landlady threw me out. She gave me four days. My parents were overseas and my friend was out of town and I didn't know what to do. I went around to churches, to friends, anywhere I could think of and I got the brush off. I went in to work and there had been a fire. I had put chemical-soaked filters into the trashcan I'd been told to put them into, and they'd spontaneously combusted and destroyed two months' work. And there I was. And I said God, I don't know what you're doing. I guess you don't owe me anything. Whatever.

And the next day I went in to work, because they hadn't fired me. And it was weekly prayer-meeting so I told them what they could pray for me about. And one girl said hey, there's an empty bed at my house, my sister's gone for the summer, we could work something out. And two days later I moved in with her.

Her name was Grace.

And it was my first experience of the real world, and the first time I truly saw God come through. And without it, I probably wouldn't be up here today.

That's my story.

An author once said that God created humankind because God likes stories. I thought about that; it sounded cool; and then I thought about it some more and it sounded like a condemnation of God. Stories are fine when you're listening to them, they're wonderful, but I've been inside a story. It's something else to be inside a story. What is a story about, when you're inside it; when you're right in the middle? What is in the middle of these stories? Pain. A girl feeling alone, abandoned, afraid she'll have to sleep on the street. A man enslaved and in prison, falsely accused and condemned for the rest of his life. A man standing on the top of a mountain with his son tied up in front of him, his heart screaming “God, what are you doing?” At the heart of a story is pain and darkness.

Let me tell you a story.

God became a man. And that man was a teacher. He taught the words of life, he taught the way, to those who would listen, and he lived it too; and people followed him. He knew that it wouldn't last. He knew that he had to die, for our sins and because of our sins. He knew that those in power did not want to hear the words of life, would rather kill him than hear.

This man was not only God; he was also a man. No one can understand it. And like every man and woman he had to choose, it was his choice: to trust God or not. He cried out in the garden and he trusted, and he said Your will be done. But that was not the heart of the story.

They beat him and they laughed at him, and they spat on him and he couldn't wipe it off. He was exposed, nailed to a beam in front of everybody, and everybody turned away. There was no one there who believed that God was with him; no one. He was the scapegoat, he was hung on a tree and accursed, and even God turned away from him. And he cried out a desperate scream: My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?

At the heart of God's story is pain and darkness.

The cross of Christ is our salvation in a thousand ways. But for now, for today, let me tell you one small way. Because when we are honest about that moment at the heart of the story, that moment of pain and darkness, when we are honest we admit that there is no way out. That at that moment no courage can sustain us. That at that moment no amount of believing that God is there, even if we can't feel him, can hold up our heads. That at that moment we are alone in the dark. Think. Remember. Maybe you haven't lived any moment like that; but I think you have.

Jesus showed us the way to life, in everything; even in that terrible moment. And what did Jesus do, in the darkness at the heart of the story?

Jesus did not turn away.

He didn't say whatever. He didn't say, I should have known. And he didn't lie. He spoke what he felt, what his heart knew, what was all around him; he cried out the absence of God. But who did he cry it to? To God. My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? He cried out like a child to his father and mother, to the only good he knows: where are you? The cry of absence is a cry of trust; because he cries as if God is listening.

And God was listening.

And God was with him, and faithful, and never let him go; and though he went down to the darkest place God raised him up. He brought him to the end of the story, just like he brought Abraham, and Joseph, and me. And in the dark at the heart of our stories, it is still as dark as it ever was; but we're not alone. He has gone before us, showing the way in that darkness. "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?"

Being small and not despising

You know, I work pretty hard on blog posts. Some weeks. If I have the energy. Some weeks I'm just too worn out, so I post something previously-written, or just kind of run my mouth a little. Last week was one of those. I was really just running my mouth.

I'm... kind of surprised how many people felt it was something worth reading, and worth sharing.

I wonder--is it maybe that we all feel like we're making applesauce in a world falling apart?

That it's so awful, and we don't know what to do, what will make a difference, and pray and we send some money, and the crisis just keeps on going and maybe our money helped a little but it was only a little and the appeals keep rolling in and it's all still awful. And we don't know what to do but do the work that's put in front of us, we don't know what to do but make applesauce.

And we also feel somewhere deep down--in our hearts? in the earth beneath our feet?--that applesauce is worth something. That putting our roots down and holding on is worth something. That in spite of it all there's a future and we need to be ready to survive and to share.

Are any of those how you feel?

I don't really know what to say, again, today. I'm tired again. I've made a lot of applesauce and a fair amount of apple butter, and Paul and I between the two of us even managed to clean the kitchen floor afterward. (Ever boiled applesauce? It goes "Splat. Splat." and spits itself at you. And the floor. Protective gear is in order.) The world is still an awful mess. It doesn't clean up so easy.

My cat killed another chipmunk yesterday. I wish she'd stop. She doesn't eat them, doesn't even try. I love her, but she is quite frankly a clueless, overbred lap cat whose entire goal in life is to get people to pet her. She's beautiful and appealing, with big eyes and big paws and incredibly soft, long gray fur, and whoever bred her for these qualities managed to get rid of almost all the common sense. If I'm forced to walk anywhere in her company I'm sure I look ridiculous; I adopt this wide-set waddle, my boots swinging far around to each side, to avoid kicking her as she continually positions herself right in front of my feet no matter which way I turn. In hopes I'll pet her. Good luck, kitty. (The Boy & I call her Love Cat. She has a theme song.)

I saved the chipmunk. Not in the sense I would have liked--it was fully dead, limp and warm in my hand. No, I hesitate to admit this, but I saved it in the fridge.

Is it strange that I didn't want it to go to waste?

There are three barn cats in what we call the Valley, where the barns are and where the farm section of the communal land begins. They're two brothers and a sister, all ginger; their mother was a wiry little feral cat and a great hunter, but they grew up under someone's porch with food available, and they've had some trouble resigning themselves to barn cat status. (My cat came from under that porch herself--just showed up one day, no clues as to where she came from, rail-thin under her long fur, like a mangy gray lion. We were catless at the time and adopted her--the owners of the porch couldn't possibly handle one more cat, and the idea of her surviving on her own is just laughable.) They're healthy but on the thin side, always thinking about where their next meal will come from--and asking that exact question, quite loudly, to any humans they see. The Boy and I always wish, when we go down to the Valley, that we had brought something for them.

So I'll be bringing them something today.

I'm raising the Boy to believe you should never kill anything unless you have to. It just seemed the best thing. I don't like to see kids stepping on bugs just because they can, and he doesn't do that. Yet I still feel a little odd sometimes at how comfortable he actually seems with the idea of death and killing--he switches back and forth, now at almost four years old, between the point of view of the hunter and the hunted, between detachment and empathy. Sometimes even in the same game. But I couldn't teach him hunting was bad. Not when I was trying to teach him the animals in our woods here, half of whom live by it; not when he opened one of my National Geographics to a picture of an Amazon tribesman, wiry and smiling, his very long bow held loosely and alertly in his hand. "Where that man lives, there isn't any store," I told him. "They can't buy food. He knows how to hunt animals with his bow to get meat for his family." We played hunting for days. We pretended to make a little fire and cook the meat. He loved feeding his "family." I think he'll fully understand giving the chipmunk to the barn cats. I think he'll approve.

I even believe, to some extent, in never killing plants you don't have to. I know, it's nuts. But I have a notion, which I've never been able to carry out, that to truly respect the woods as God's creation, maybe you should never kill a tree you can't identify--even a sapling, even a seedling. What if it's something needed, something beautiful and rare? (Yesterday I had five actual living mature American chestnuts pointed out to me, standing around an isolated farmhouse. I wouldn't have known them.) I can't identify all the saplings. Maybe someday. I'm working on it. But at least I know enough to hold off a bit. When Paul and I moved here, we decided we wanted a redbud in the backyard. We almost pulled out the scrubby little sapling that was there instead, to make room. But we waited a year. And it bloomed.

It was a redbud.

When I weeded my inherited flowerbeds after arriving here, I was careful, knowing just how much I didn't know. I took out only weeds I recognized. Everything else I waited to see bloom. One odd dark-green vine--in my herb garden of all places, which I broke ground for myself--I left for years, simply because I'd never seen its like anywhere in the woods. Last year it bloomed. It was clematis, hundreds of little white star-flowers. I've seen the same one for sale at a nursery. This year I built it a trellis for it, and it brightened my garden, in the fall when all else began to fade.

I think it's worth something, being careful with things. A lot of the time I do it simply because I have to, because I live a small life with little money, but it's become a habit partly because I've found such nourishment in it. Waiting for the gift rather than taking it, it feels more like a gift. It's been that way more and more for me, as I've grown into this life.

It's about not despising things, I guess. It's about seeing the gift, even when the gift is small. It's about being okay with being small yourself, and not despising yourself for it. We have been taught for so long, in our culture, that we are either great or worthless.

It's a lie.

The chipmunk was not worthless. I respect it by not wasting its death. The small things that grow out of the earth are not worthless. I respect them by not uprooting without need. I am small, and give small gifts, and rejoice in small gifts, and am not worthless.

Same to you.

Making applesauce in a world falling apart

That's not meant to be a cute title or anything. It's just... what I'm doing these days.

Today the last family moved away from the Christian intentional community we lived in, which has folded. Well, the last family for awhile; but the other two families that remain are a steep four minutes' walk from us through the woods, and we're now sitting among four empty houses. Some of which need cleaning, which I suppose I will do. It's a sad day. A lot of people's hopes and dreams went into this place and it's hard to lose those. But mostly at this point, it's a tired day. The dissolution process has been so slow and long.

It's very quiet here now...

This used to be her house

Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. The community, the world. I couldn't believe my eyes when I found out just how bad it is in Puerto Rico. They say the death toll could rise into the hundreds--not from the storm but from the aftermath, no power, no clean water, no refrigeration for medicines--in Florida a few people died because a generator failed, and here millions of people have no power. I don't know how you make the government listen, convince them that these people are entitled to just as much help as Texas and Florida, just as much help as all other American citizens (and I certainly don't know how I would do it, I who never could reconcile myself to people having different rights depending on whose jurisdiction they were born in.) But I found a couple of places to donate where the money goes directly to help as fast as possible...

And then to cap it all Trump has capped the number of refugees allowed into the U.S. at 45,000. I mean listen, I'm terrible with numbers, they usually mean nothing to me till I find another number to compare them with, but even I knew the moment I heard it that 45,000 is ridiculous. I honestly just re-googled it before writing this because it looked so puny I wondered if I'd forgotten a zero.

We are in the midst of the worst refugee crisis since World War II. And we're accepting fewer than ever. WHY? I can't even. I really should write a screed about this. I just don't have the energy. I guess I'll have to make do with--if you're newer to this blog or just haven't read them before--directing you to my post "If they hadn't welcomed refugees, they would never have hidden Jews." And/or to the story of Varian Fry, the American hero who saved thousands of people from the Holocaust by breaking U.S. law and smuggling them in under the nose of the State Department, an act of civil disobedience I salute with both hands.

Refugees outside U.S. consulate in WWII France

Refusing refugees has real consequences. People die.

We're in the midst of the worst refugee crisis and the worst famine year (click here to donate) since World War II, and not only our President but also our news media barely mentions it. Maybe I should just start getting my news from Oxfam. You know, there's a game I play in my head sometimes of imagining a perfect world. It's like Heaven or the new earth, except without the parts I can't imagine, immortality and bliss and all that. It's just ordinary life with one difference--we all trust each other. No evil. (Imagine the sheer amount of resources freed up, even in what we consider nice stable countries, with the need for protection from each other removed. What would we do with all that time? Garden? Create? Make sure everyone had enough food, maybe?) One day I imagined what the news media would be like in that world. Supposing there were still natural disasters & all--they would be messengers letting us know where to send help. That's what they would be. The thought almost made me cry. Maybe I should just start getting my news from Oxfam.

So what do I do with the world and the community falling apart around me? I make applesauce. It doesn't seem the best response, but it's the job in front of me. I've done what I could think of to do for the world, which is precious little, I've given the money I could give. I've done what I could think of to do for my neighbors, mostly little, practical, daily-life things for those who remain; little, practical parting gifts for those who are gone, and help loading the moving truck. And here I am, looking out my front door at four empty houses, a vineyard, and three laden apple trees. Not to mention, a little further off, an acre of raspberries that are theoretically dying of disease, but are giving off quite a decent crop as they do so. And my garden full of tomatillos and green beans that have ripened so slow in the strange cool August we've had (I'm not complaining... but sweet fall weather in August was sort of eerie) that they're only just ready to preserve now. So I preserve. Cook and can and freeze. What else is there to do?

You see, we're staying here. For the known future, at least, but that may be quite a long time. When the community folded, it gifted the land to a new non-profit called Hungry World Farm. It's local people who are starting it, people from the local Mennonite church--friends. We've gradually moved into caretaking this place, and we have an agreement with HWF to continue doing that through the transition and beyond.

So I make grape juice. Thirty quarts for us, forty quarts to place in the old communal "Food Room" to be shared by people I know and people I don't yet know, people who will come. (That's an estimate. I don't want to count them! I would be OK with never seeing or smelling another steaming quart of grape juice right now.) So I make applesauce, and sock away apples in the root cellar believing someone will eat them. It's what you do, in the country. You take what God and the land have given you, and you preserve it against the coming cold. The coming storms. It's what you do, when the storms are all around and haven't reached you yet. There's precious little I can do but put my roots down and hold, and take what I am given and make food, but I'm grateful to be shown what's given me to do. And it's plain enough. You should see those apple trees. I've made sixteen quarts of applesauce already without picking a single apple. I swear. I just picked a bushel and a half of windfalls up off the ground. I may need to learn to make apple butter.

When life gives you fallen apples--remember that they're apples, I guess. Sweet and precious, and a gift. I am so grateful for the kindness of the land, the fruit and flowers it gives. I am so grateful for the firewood stacked by the driveway, that we will be warm this winter. I am so grateful for the quarts of applesauce lining the shelves of my pantry. And I wish I could send them to Puerto Rico or to South Sudan, but I can't; but I hope and I look to the future, and I believe someone will come with whom I can share them, if only I wait.

__________________


Image credit for apple tree in winter: Elena Elisseeva

Elderberries, and seeking your food from God

I biked a couple of miles to the Hennepin Canal this week, to pick elderberries. (Not actually for exercise; if I'd had a car I would have driven, but I don't and I wanted the berries. My carless condition is a story for another time, but I'll say this for it: it's easy to stay close to the earth when you don't have a choice!) I've been getting my manuscript in shape to send in to the publisher for the second time after some revisions—one reason I'm not up to any other really heavy writing this week—but elderberries wait for no-one. It was now or never.

Elderberries like to hang out over water. In French they're called sureau, which literally means “over water.” I noticed this year, picking some of my harvest from the bushes beside the road near home and some from the bushes hanging low over the canal, what a difference water makes to them: the road berries are puny, mostly seed, which I used to think the natural condition of elderberries—but the canal berries are fat and black and shiny, and when you squeeze them you can feel the juice. I'll be making that canal trip again next year. The berries hang so low over the water that the fattest clusters tempted me right into the canal—but it turned out to be barely ankle-deep at the edge. I'm in.

There aren't actually that many wild foods I regularly gather. More than the average person, I guess, but less than most enthusiasts. Elderberries for syrup; nettles for nettle soup (a French country recipe) and nettle tea (which tastes rather like spinach tea but is an excellent natural iron supplement); fiddleheads and ramps one time each spring, stir-fried together; and once, a solitary morel. (Maybe it'll happen again someday!) I hope to try acorns this fall—I'll have to look up the process, but I believe it involves soaking them and discarding the water to leach the bitter tannins out—largely because in playing with the Boy I once split an acorn open with a knife to show him the inside and I swear it smelled exactly like brown sugar. I couldn't stop smelling it; I still have it around somewhere to take a whiff from every now and then. I just have to find out how they taste, if only once.

There aren't that many wild foods I gather, but they're important to me. The process is important to me. There's something about the haphazardness of it, the searching—gathering rather than picking—that suits my notions of how life truly is. There's something about the wild itself, the unplanted place, whether woods or ditch or hedgerow; there's something about that unplanted place holding out food to you, for you to pick. Food out of the ground already seems a miracle to me, even when I work hard for it; I can't make a pumpkin or a raspberry, and the fact that they swell and ripen on the plants at all seems like a bounty and a gift. But foraging goes a step beyond: in the place God chooses, not in the place I choose, grows the thing I need. My only work is to search.

In my favorite psalm, Psalm 104, it says “The young lions roar after their prey, and seek their food from God.” I've never hunted, but I can see it. Foraging is like that too, and I'm sure hunting is even more so—especially if you do it for hunger, not for fun. There's so much hope involved and so much chance. You seek for the gift, but in the end the gift is given. There is no certainty. We walk out to seek our food in a world we don't control. Even if it's only a gallon or two of berries, it's a reminder of sorts: that our food, and ourselves, are not products of our making. That the earth and the Lord are the matrix of our lives; that we are creatures and not gods.

Every year in September I make elderberry syrup. The berries are reputed to have immune-boosting properties, and I believe it; if it happens not to be true, the syrup makes a truly delicious placebo (which you'll know, if you've read much about the placebo effect, is nothing to sneeze at.) I arm for the winter with elderberry syrup and echinacea tincture, the one from the wild and the other from my herb garden. Here's the recipe I'll be using for the syrup. Please note that if you ever try elderberries for yourself, it's important to cook them in some way no matter what you're making with them (some people dry them in an oven for instance) because heat rids them of some mildly toxic properties that can cause an upset stomach.

Elderberry syrup

2 quarts fresh ripe elderberries
¼ oz grated ginger root
½ tsp ground cloves
Honey


Put the elderberries in a large pot with ¼ cup of water and simmer on low heat until they're soft. Strain out the pulp and reheat the juice in the pot; add the ginger and cloves. Simmer till the liquid is reduced to half its original volume. Measure the liquid and add an equal amount of honey. Stir the hot liquid and the honey together till thoroughly combined. Let cool.

This syrup will keep 12 weeks in the fridge, or all winter in the freezer. (The great thing about the honey is, it stays runny in the freezer, so it's very easy to dole out the freezer syrup a few spoonfuls at a time.)

When you're fighting a cold or flu, take 1 or 2 tablespoons of the syrup several times throughout the day (on pancakes if desired!)

Charlottesville Part II: By their fruits you shall know them, aka Do they hide Jews?

So. The churches.

Like I said. I think this is why I wrote that post on Christians and the Holocaust, though I didn't know it at the time.

I'll be honest, I felt bad about writing that post. I felt like I was writing something that brought pain and not joy, and I don't like to do that. But I also felt like I was supposed to, because it was true.

I think we have a tendency--even now--to assume our fellow Christians will do the right thing. Or are doing the right thing. Yet Christians participated in the Holocaust. Christians owned slaves, Christians justified the very worst kind of slavery, Christians opposed the civil rights movement and bought into the "separate but equal" line.

Frederick Douglass said, "Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the greatest possible difference."

Jesus said "By their fruits you shall know them."

A bad time has begun in my country. I believe it will get worse. Yet there are prominent evangelical leaders who believe it's a good time, who are gloating over what they think God is doing in this country.

They are showing us the trajectory they have been on for a long time, and its logical end.

They thought they needed power, to take back this country for God. They thought such things were done by power. They fell in love with power. (Not by might, not by power, but by my Spirit, said God. My kingdom is not of this world, said Jesus. They didn't hear the still small voice. They were looking the other way.)

They ate the fruit, and it was sweet. Huge churches. Millions of followers. Political influence. They were already drunk with it when they met someone who promised them the kingdoms of this world. All you need to do is vow loyalty to me, to praise me and never criticize, he said. It's not really bowing.

They shook.

(He demanded a loyalty oath of his CIA chief. You think he didn't demand one, in some way or other, of his evangelical council?)

Now they have a President who lets them into the halls of power, who caters to them. And also to Nazis.

Where is Jesus in this?

By their fruits you shall know them.

I see a separation coming. I pray it is clear. But it probably won't be. I pray God gives us eyes to see it. (By their fruits you shall know them.) I see a separation coming, between Christians who seek power and Christians who follow Christ. Who love their neighbor as Christ commanded.

Why a separation? Isn't it bad to have the Body of Christ divided? Well here's the thing. Here's the thing.

It's about who we trust. We trust other Christians. Instinctively. So did Christians under Hitler. That respected Christian leader seems all right with it. It's probably all right.

And not just any Christians. We trust people we consider to be the Right Kind of Christians. Who have correct doctrine, who move in the right circles, whom our families and friends trust, etc. People who show the cultural markers we
know from childhood, who feel familiar.

(Here's another secret belief I had as a kid. This one's even more embarrassing, and more revelatory. I tried once to figure out an easier test than some long doctrinal quiz for figuring out who was a Real Christian. Here's what I finally came up with: Well, at least if they shop at Christian bookstores you can be sure. You want to talk about cultural markers? I had intuited how it worked.)

This is dangerous now. Especially for us who were raised evangelical. Many, many evangelical leaders have eaten the fruit.

This is not a time for asking who has correct theology. Yes, theology truly based in Christ might have saved us from coming to this pass, but if a leader ticks the right boxes on atonement and resurrection? That's not what I needed to know. If a leader says the name of Jesus and all the right people approve of them? That's not what I needed to know. There's only one thing I need to know.

Do they hide Jews?

That's a metaphor, of course. (Unless it becomes literal. I know there are Jews who believe it may. They can't afford to dismiss the possibility. They will never dismiss it again.) What I mean is, do they respect, aid and protect those forced to live in fear, those threatened with harm by the violent and the powerful? Or do they look the other way and minimize and justify?

By their fruits you shall know them.

This is not some kind of "works salvation" here. I'm not even remotely talking about who is going to heaven. Who is going to heaven is frankly none of my business; it's God's. I am called upon to make exactly zero decisions about this.

I'm also not talking about who to respect or treat as our neighbor. Jesus is real clear on this: everyone is our neighbor. We are to love both our neighbor and our enemy. We are to love the child we meet in the street and the neo-Nazi wielding a club. (In different ways.) It's a hard religion, but at least it's clear. There is no one we are not commanded to treat well.

That's not what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about who to trust. That is a decision we're called on to make daily. I'm talking about who is currently following Jesus; who will not lead us away.

The name of Christian will not help us, anymore than it helped the Christians in Germany.

We American Christians have talked a lot about persecution. Some have claimed they were experiencing it. Some have sensed that if it did come it would renew the Church spiritually. In fact I've wondered if the two aren't connected. I think we have a certain sense that Christians are supposed to be persecuted, and a certain uneasiness when we're not, which some have tried to do away with by pretense. I think there's something to it. (The uneasiness that is.) I hope to write about that sometime.

But listen, here's what strikes me about Christians under Nazism. Under the Third Reich and under Nazi occupation, Christians were persecuted--if they obeyed Jesus.

If they didn't, they were fine.

If there's one thing I am utterly certain about in all this, it's that the next time Christians are persecuted in the United States, it will be exactly like that again. No-one will be threatened or harmed for claiming the name of Christ.

Only for obeying Him.

Only for loving their neighbors. Only for hiding Jews.

We must walk into this time with our eyes open. We must love our neighbors, and look into their eyes. We must respect, aid and protect those to whom evil is done or threatened by the violent and the powerful, always and no matter what. Yes, we must do it on the internet, but we must remember the real world is the place where real people live and die. Hiding Jews in the real world means this: we must be open at all times to what we see around us and to the leading of the Spirit, and ready to obey. What will it be, and who? We must look around our neighborhoods with open eyes. Know our neighbors, be ready to hear their troubles, tear down the "not my problem" walls in our minds. Like the family on welfare who hid six-year-old Isaac Levendel, we must live in such a way that if people we know have to ask themselves, suddenly and with no time to spare, Who would this child be safe with?--they think of us.

And what we do, we must do nonviolently. In word and deed. When our fellow Christians do wrong we must beg them to repent.

That's a post for another time. But I'll leave you with a quote from someone I write about, whose record for hiding Jews was pretty good.

"The duty of Christians is to resist, through the weapons of the Spirit, the violence they will try to impose on our consciences. Loving, forgiving, and doing good to our adversaries is our duty. Yet we must do this without giving up, and without being cowardly. We shall resist whenever our adversaries demand of us obedience contrary to the orders of the gospel. We shall do so without fear, but also without pride and without hate."

-  André Trocmé

Sounds to me like what Jesus would do.

That's all for now, friends. God be with us all, and God be with those in Houston and the Gulf Coast today.

Charlottesville Part I: Time does not heal a poisoned wound

So I guess this is why I wrote that post the other month about Christians and the Holocaust, though I didn't quite know it at the time.

I still don't know exactly where to start. I just keep wanting to say, "So. Nazis."

OK, let's start here. You've probably watched this already, but if you haven't, please watch it.

But please don't watch it with children in the room.

The car attack is in there, starting at 11:22. You don't really see people getting hit.

I had a secret belief as a kid. I never told my parents, because I understood that officially, I was dead wrong, but I was still sure I was right. I had a secret belief that politics didn't really matter. Hadn't my parents noticed that no matter who was in office, our lives didn't change?

I suppose I would have seen the matter differently if politics determined whether it was legal to buy and sell me--or kill me. Or even if politics had determined that for my ancestors.

I also would have seen the matter differently if I was growing up right now.

When I was a kid, people didn't kill other people in the street over politics.

(Or so I thought. Should I say white people didn't kill white people in the street over politics? Was the death of Tamir Rice political?)

The reason that I took down the original version of this post was that I started feeling very uneasy about how it could be read. There were two parts to the post; they were related but I didn't make the relation clear. First I talked about how the deepening polarization of politics in this country had finally crossed the line over into open armed violence and murder, and I shared vague but dramatic fears of some type of civil war. Then I transitioned into saying that the moral wound of antebellum slavery and of racism in the U.S. has never truly healed, because it has never been truly and fully acknowledged. Time does not heal a poisoned wound shut away from the light.

Since posting, I grew more and more uncomfortable about that combination. Or rather, I lay awake at night and my brain asked me, Heather, are you stupid or are you trying to stoke fears of a race war?

I mean, I trust you, Dear Reader. But there are people out there, I know they are out there, who believe one is coming because different races simply cannot live together. I mean I respect them, they say (a bald-faced lie) but we're too different, we're better off separate. (But equal?)

And that's not what I meant. We all know who showed up to a supposed protest armed for war, and it wasn't Black Lives Matter.

So here is my simplified version.

There was a time when white Americans didn't kill each other in the street over politics.

That time is done.

I keep thinking about all the talk, the endless talk, about politics in the U.S. becoming more and more polarized. I thought about how I haven't heard any of that talk lately. As if it's crossed some kind of threshold. Some point of no return.
I keep thinking about how city after city taking Confederate monuments down is a kind of change I had never expected to see in this country. About how armed, openly Nazi rioters are another kind of change I never expected to see.

I think about the web of taboos and safeguards every civilization weaves to keep words spoken in anger from crossing over the line into violence. I think about that moment, that moment when the line is crossed and there is death and people screaming in the street, not in another country but in your country, between fellow citizens of the same country. Which is mine, no matter how much I may have tried to deny it in my youth. This country, this country of the desperately hidden wound.
There has been something in me, even in adulthood, that still believes in its heart that my life is serene, above the deadly tides of history. That thing inside me shakes when I watch that video. That's the truth. I see people who look like me beating each other with sticks. I know, if I was there, which side I would be on, and it's the side that was hit by a car. That's the truth. I see that and it scares me.

So instead of talking about war this time I'm just telling you what I feel. That I'm scared. That history is a terrifying thing. That I, as one of the privileged, can no longer assume that my life will not change. And maybe you as well.

This country has never been whole. It has never been whole since the day it started importing people as commodities to be bought and sold and raped and murdered with impunity. That is a moral wound a nation doesn't recover from. Could it have become whole, when that stopped? With a true repentance, recognition of the true magnitude of the evil, a wrenching remorse? With confession, atonement and perhaps forgiveness? I don't know. It can't be known. Our forebears offered scorn, mockery and underhanded oppression instead to the people their parents had sinned against so terribly. Even now, it's all taught in the schools, but it took me a long, long time to understand. It took me a long time to understand that what my ancestors did in my country can absolutely be compared to the Holocaust.

The textbooks didn't tell me--for example--that white male slave owners frequently raped their female slaves, had children by them, and then in full legal respectability could sell off their own children as slaves. To be treated the same way they had treated those children's mothers.

And breaking up families by force, don't get me started.

How does a country that allowed things like that to happen, that made it legal, go on with life and pretend everything is OK? Claim that it's all good now because the children of the victims of such evil have finally been granted the privilege of drinking at the same water fountain as the children of the perpetrators? Listen. Forget "white guilt," I don't remotely imagine I'm responsible for what my ancestors did, I am talking about truth. About willing, open, public acknowledgement of the truth of how bad it was. The survivors of the Holocaust were granted that. The survivors of American slavery were not. Their descendants have been given crumbs of it, and been told over and over to ask for their crumbs more politely. And been told to walk politely past the huge statues of men who fought in hopes that they would be born slaves too.

Yes, it was a long time ago. No, time does not heal a poisoned wound.

Now they are saying again that they want some truth, about what happened then and what is happening now. White allies are standing with them and saying it too. And white supremacists and neo-Nazis, choosing to openly embrace the brutal side of human nature that whispers and screams kill the outsiders, the side that we've hidden and repressed for decades and never succeeded in doing away with, come armed against them and commit murder in the street.

And the President does not condemn them.

And prominent Christian leaders do not rebuke him.

The Christian church. I have so much to say. The Christian churches in this country that justified and defended the holocaust of slavery. That supported the KKK. The failure of the Church under Nazism was mostly failure to resist. Its betrayal in this country was worse.

And now? What of the Christian churches now?

I have so much to say. Too much. I think I'd better post again tomorrow.

I don't know what's going to happen. I honestly don't. But I think we have to be ready for things we didn't formerly see as possible. I think we have to start thinking now about how we will meet them. I think we Christians have to think long and hard about who to trust to guide us into this time.

Off the top of my head, I can think of one Person.

More on this later. God be with all of us.