Just Faith, Everyday

Suffering doesn’t have tact. For some reason, though we’d like to think otherwise, the holidays are not immune to sorrow, which makes facing them--for those who suffer serious losses--all the more difficult. For years I have thought about those who have touched my life who have suffered through death and loss when everyone around them celebrates something joyful, mostly because I have come to know what this burden is like, and partially because I have always felt a pang in my heart for stories like that of my mother-in-law, who lost her 25 year old daughter to leukemia, and nursed her through the grueling chemo come holiday or not. For people like her, the world falls apart a little bit, and trying to piece together anything of a celebration becomes an Olympic feat. She finds great joy now in her grandchildren, simplicity in play with them, maybe some of that silver lining we want to look for, we force into platitude, but she’s come upon this honestly and genuinely. As for me, I h...

Platitudes as conversation stopper--as a way to make the ambiguity stop, to put an end to discomfort and fears arising from the sufferer. Reading about this recently made me pause and consider my culpability and experience with it. The idea here is that someone listening to your grief seems to think some one liner can help. I know I try to relate by telling my own story, and in some cases this may not be appropriate, in another may be the best thing--to forge solidarity, not try to find a solution, or wrap up the messiness as if you were clearing someone’s floor of your child’s detritus. I think of the ways telling my story has begotten this--first, trying to express my anger and anxiety about Isabella’s feeding and cleft issues, about the insurance debacles, about the stressful scheduling of appointments and negotiating or understanding the feedback we’d receive, the way we personally dealt with it all. How I just wanted someone to listen. To that mess. To the mess of my curre...

There’s nothing like being in survival mode to get you sober, off that high of life that can be misleading, detaching you from the mediocre, the material. I can only really attest to my personal experience with this, and feel sheepish sometimes talking about it, but lately my writing obsessions have turned to ways I can share my life with others--with those I love and those who don’t love me back, per se, but maybe need to hear a message of hope or change or destruction, and what comes of it. When I start writing about other people’s survival, I get on shaky ground, but here goes. At 5 am on a recent September morning, my husband woke me and gently said we need evacuate--our next door neighbor’s house was on fire. The panic that welled in my chest was a surprise even to me--and hours later, sitting and writing about this, I wonder what I would have done had we been the ones fire had chosen this particular moment. This reaction I pushed down to put on a straight face for Isabella, ...

I make lists. Of all sorts. Grocery lists, academic lists, chore lists--things to do and be done. but I also make lists about my hopes and dreams and maybe I’m weird that way, but I’ve found over the years that mindfully, thoughtfully considering my dreams has helped me make them reality. Some took longer than others. Finding a home we could afford took a little while and a lot of doing, but putting it on my list created a conversation between my husband and I about what we really wanted, what we agreed and disagreed on. Of course this list begat lists but created in us a unified front in the search. The same was true of Isabella’s cleft palate surgery: we rose to the occasion together, we learned what we needed, how to ask for it, what did not work for us and how to say no. We attained each measured goal and let go the parts we couldn’t. The measure of that list was our daughter. We would move mountains for her. Then there are the lists that seem impossible, perplexing. The grow...

There is a need for kindness. We need to be kinder to each other, to listen just a little but more, show just a bit more compassion, even in the small things, the everyday things. In the smiles we share, or the burdens--respecting that someone’s burden is as heavy as she thinks it is. Respecting that someone’s outlook matters in the moment, that this too shall pass, that there are realities and then there are realities. That there are violent people in this world as much as there are peaceful, but that peace trumps violence when it comes to resources: there are so many ways to love. The tools we’re given to love are masterful, mysteriously appear when we need them, surprise us, delight us. I am looking for that delight in every glimmer of sunlight, the coolness of moonlight, every face and touch and hope. There is fear, and war, and injustice. These things, too, do exist. There is an ugliness we have wrought which can bear down mightily on the most hopeful of souls. That can te...

It’s funny how idiosyncrasies strike me as life lessons--maybe I’m protecting myself against the harshness of reality by locking on to simple things, ways of grasping the all-too-real. I’m glad to have a trusted group of friends with whom I can discuss the ins and outs of the spirit which I know moves me. A recent topic was patience, and long-suffering that comes with it, sometimes, as fruits of the Spirit. (In a way, patience isn’t something you can develop all on your own--it’s a gift to pray for, meditate on.) The stutter start of life’s transitions has become a source for me of great frustration and doubt, tests of my will. At best these become bumps in the road, at worst real detractors that present an unearthing, a recreating that can be painful, mostly because what you’d hoped for yourself can get pulled up with the weeds, and patience becomes a required element to be able to step back and look at what to do, what the next step is. The discussion brought to mind a seemin...

When I create centeredness on the Spirit in my life, I find I’ve made room for seeing purpose in everything from conflict and petty arguments, to old habits and disagreements, strife and suffering and pain. I know I have done it before and can do it again, and in retrospect see how all the goodness came about in spite of chaotic human existence. When you’re in the midst of any conflict, it’s often hard to see and understand; our wills battle against what’s alien, especially when we’re somewhere--literally and figuratively--we’ve never been before. This place, this state of mind or being prepares us for more, nerves us, shores us up, bonds us with steel in the face of the worst life can and does bring. All this thinking came about after a trip North and re-acclimating myself to my now home-base, sitting on the front porch and observing. We recently got a new roof, and my husband and the contractor yabbered one day about some young engineers on their crews going to Georgia Tech (gasp...