Carmen’s Chatter

“And the LORD shall guide thee continually, and satisfy thy soul in drought, and make fat thy bones.” —Isaiah 58:11

Back in 1983 a door in then West Germany forever opened for me, exclaiming, “Schön! Schön! Schön das Du da bist!” (“Wonderful! Wonderful! How wonderful you’re here!”) I began to think it had a beautiful recording on its hinges. But, no, behind that door was a woman with a beautiful bun of neat white hair and a greeting as tall as she was physically short, and her welcome was always sincere. It was, in fact, indefatigible. No matter how many times I turned up, a lost waif, on her doorstep, she took me in. She must have literally translated that verse about being hospitable to strangers because you might be entertaining angels unawares. I could have told her I was no angel, and saved her much trouble.

Meet my German grandmother. The woman who gave my soul a transfusion of Christ’s love when I most needed it. When I applied for a Rotary Club International Graduate Scholarship, the wife of the Dean at Shorter College, Mrs. Margaret Whitworth, told me should I make it to Heidelberg, I should look up their friend, Frau Sophie Buschbeck, whom they knew because in the 1940’s the Whitworth’s church had sent shoes and rations to German refugees, and Dean Charles Whitworth and his wife had “adopted” Sophie and her eight children. Frau Buschbeck had written them back often, thanking them. Over the years the families had also visited, traveling great distances to see each other.

I listened to this spiel the way you do when you’re twenty-two and know everything. Yeah, yeah, whatever. When I was accidentally assigned to Ruprecht-Karls Universität Heidelberg by what I would later consider an act of God (and was, literally, the need to more equally distribute the Rotary stipend students)—I didn’t care that this famed Sophie Buschbeck was there in Heidelberg, too. I would soon graduate from college, and I was going to take Germany by storm.

Except I didn’t. I arrived—ja wohl!—and promptly lost control over everything. Or more precisely, I continued losing control. It was a downward-spiraling sort of thing. I didn’t even pass Heidelberg University’s (very stringent) entrance exam the first time I took it. I had actually failed a test. It was a sobering experience. Also, I seemed to be totally unable to cope with life in general.

To make matters worse, my application papers had been lost, so the local Rotary Club in Heidelberg didn’t know I was coming; and I had no place to stay. More homesick than I ever thought possible, I found myself standing (a rather forlorn-looking twenty-something in jeans) in a public phone booth in Boppard, Germany, along the Rhein River. I realized then with a pang of irony that I’d gotten what I wanted—total independence—and quickly wished instead for a friend.

So I poured handfuls of strange round coins called Deutsche Mark into a pay phone. I pulled out an unremarkable-looking piece of crumpled paper, read the ten digits, and pressed the buttons for null-sechs-zwei-zwei-eins-vier-fünf-sieben-fünf-neun or (06221) 45759. This was Frau Buschbeck’s number. Twenty-seven years later, I have it memorized. But when that number was given to me by Mrs. Whitworth at a lunch at her house some months before I left for Germany, I’d scrawled it down, stuffed it in my wallet, and given it no further thought whatsoever. It was unimportant.

A crisp old voice answered, “Halo?” as if it weren’t expecting a phone call. The voice was loud, the way white-haired people speak when their hearing is not at full strength. Halfway through my explanation of who I was (in hesitant German), Frau Sophie Buschbeck realized who I must be and, sight unseen, broke my stuttering with a grand welcome. That’s when I first heard her sing out in German, “When you arrive in Heidelberg, if you’re not too weary, would you come to the Schlossfest concert with my family and me?” That was for September 23, 1983, and I instantly said, “Ja-ja.” I knew enough German to realize I had just been invited to go to a concert at the famous Heidelberg castle (Schloss); it turned out to be a classical music concert that was as magical in its beauty as was the castle, and Frau Buschbeck’s family welcomed me into their fold.

And that’s how a wonderful friendship began between a seventy-nine-year-young World-War-II-survivor and a twenty-two-year-old neurotic American student. It was as if there weren’t six decades between our ages. And, although Frau Sophie Buschbeck died in 1992, the absence of her life, as Sylvia Plath says, grows beside me like a tree (“For a Fatherless Son”). I have decided hers is a fruit tree, and I’ll tell you why.

Frau Buschbeck always kept her fruit bowl conspicuous and ate oranges and apples and pears daily, like candy (well, it seemed to me). To her they must have been like edible gold, a celebration of plenty. And she loved the smell of apples. She enjoyed reminding me that the poet Schiller kept apples in a bowl beside him when he wrote because he found the sweet aroma inspirational. Later I would learn why she valued fruit so much. To me, an apple was an apple, something easily found at Kroger.

Frau Buschbeck also took it on herself to feed me once a week, on Fridays, always roast chicken (something she would not have ordinarily cooked in her German kitchen) because, she said, it was good for my health and was also something I would like for its being very “American.” I can’t say I was thrilled at first with what I saw as “enforced lunches” weekly. I perversely preferred to be left alone with my solitary books and a feast of crackers and peanut butter (the latter not a local German supermarket item and only secured through a friend who had connections with a nearby Army base store). But when Frau Buschbeck invited, you didn’t dream of answering, “I’m not coming.” You went, you were thankful, you ate, and you washed dishes afterwards.

I also became fond of Frau Buschbeck’s crunchy Bratkartoffeln, those thinly sliced, golden brown pan-fried potatoes that I eventually fell in love with. Also, in Frau Buschbeck’s small apartment I ate gallons of the best sauerkraut, nothing like that put-your-teeth-on-edge sharply vinegary stuff you buy in stores in America. Sophie Buschbeck made sauerkraut with whatever she had at hand, and it was sometimes sour, sometimes sweet, and sometimes both at the same time; it was always delicious, and it was never the same way twice.

Frau Buschbeck even arranged for homeless me to sleep in the attic of her apartment house (and what a view it had of Heidelberg sparkling at night, as seen through the tiny dormer window!), until a kind university administrator, Frau Treue Pfundt, helped me get a dorm room in Neuenheimerfeld 684, Stock 1, Zimmer 20-I. So what it was roach-infested. I had a home, and a sweet German roommate, Gundi nee Schuster Hiller (whom I write and send gifts to to this day and who every Christmas sends me a card and a calendar with Bible verses in German on it).

My dorm room was only a few minutes’ bike ride from Frau Buschbeck’s home at 28/30 Mozartstrasse, and that address is all you really need to know. Her life was all about music. She played the piano, and often enjoyed four-handed compositions with her eldest daughter, while a teenaged granddaughter played the recorder and an eight-year-old grandson the violin.

I saw Frau Buschbeck almost every day, and we always went for a walk; and we always read from the little blue Losungen (literally Solutions, also Devotionals book). On cold winter nights, she wrapped a wool shawl around her shoulders and had me sit next to her and read the Bible to her, in German, of course, in that old, hard-to-read Gothic type that at first I found almost impossible to decipher and therefore most annoying.

I was at a low point in my life spiritually. Problems in my family meant that I was sick of soul. The Bible and its very familiar verses were having a hard time touching my weary, bitter heart. I didn’t know that this darkness was despair. But God through Frau Sophie Buschbeck found his way back into my heart because the conscientious student I always have been was determined to learn to speak German well, to understand spoken German, and to read it with ease, too; therefore, I didn’t mind reading the Bible aloud to her because it was an opportunity for me to better my German.

How ironic that the thing I most ran from was given back to me when I least wanted it and when I could least receive it. That was a true gift from God. All the old, battered religious concepts that my soul was burnt out on became utterly new in a different language with a new, wise, kind, Christ-focused friend. Watching Frau Buschbeck daily and praying with her regularly, I learned that true prayer is ordinary, that it can be as common as breathing.

Praise of God was at the core of our friendship. We always sang. We sang during devotional times, we sang grace before the ubiquitous hot lunches, we sang grace before the cold suppers of sliced dark bread and thinly sliced ham and cheeses and pickles, and, yes, we sang good Lutheran hymns in church. Singing was obviously not the exclusive activity of church services in the world of Sophie Buschbeck. Singing was for daily use.

Sophie Buschbeck and I always spoke in German. She was sympathetic to my desire to learn her difficult native language, and so she patiently put her own desire to learn English on the backburner. Later, at the end of my stay, I found in an English book she loved to read a list of English vocabulary words that she had been working on while I was there. There on the back of a recycled envelope she had written a list of English vocabulary words and their definitions, all in English, in an old-person’s shaky, light-fountain-pen-blue-ink handwriting. That shamed me, for I realized as my heart constricted, how much she had shown me God’s love, helping me learn German, instead of insisting that I teach her English.

We did everything together, and anything I did with her was exciting. Even the simple act of mailing a letter in the public mailbox at the corner was, with Frau Sophie Buschbeck, an amazing experience. She always put her hand through my bent elbow, the better to dash across the street in an admirable (by then, after a birthday) octogenarian jaywalk. We must have made an unusual sight, a wrinkled, white-haired German woman with a slightly bent 5’1” frame, her arm threaded through that of a young, brown Cuban a good six inches taller.

We walked everywhere briskly, and along the way to the mailbox, Frau Buschbeck would point out with great excitement the ordinary bright red berries sparkling in the bushes lining the sidewalk. She christened these “Schmucke” (“jewels”). Her arm through mine as ever, she pointed at them through my elbow, looking out from under her blue velveteen hat, and then she’d exclaim, “Look at those jewels!” I’d never have noticed them otherwise. Once at the public mailbox, she’d sail the letters into it with a sunny, “I hope this Post makes them happy.” Sophie Buschbeck did everything con brio.

We also went to art exhibits and plays and concerts. She would hide away in her purse without my knowing it a little bar of delicious, rich German chocolate for us to split at intermission. We went shopping for groceries. We traveled together. We even visited a nursing home and shut-ins, always taking them fresh flowers or fruit.

Years after Frau Sophie Buschbeck’s death, I read Rilke’s “Requiem for a Friend” and felt I had found her serendipitously in his poem. Rilke is remembering his much-missed, special friend, Paula, and he believes he can commune with her spirit if he goes on a pilgrimage of sorts because her essence seems to inhabit every common thing, as Sophie Buschbeck’s did:

I will stand / for hours, talking with women in their doorways / and watching, while they call their children home. / I will see the way they wrap the land around them / in their ancient work in field and meadow. . . . / I will go to watch the animals, and let / something of their composure slowly glide / into my limbs; will see my own existence / deep in their eyes, which hold me for a while / and let me go, serenely, without judgment. / I will have the gardeners come to me and recite / many flowers, and in the small clay pots / of their melodious names I will bring back / some remnant of the hundred fragrances. / And fruits: I will buy fruits, and in their sweetness / . . . will live again.

I read this and felt he was describing my Sophie Buschbeck. The requiem ends with this line about his soul-friend, Paula: “Denn Das verstandest du: die vollen Früchte” (“For that is what you understood: ripe fruits”) (Stephen Mitchell, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, 74-75).

It was true, in every way that line can be. When Frau Sophie Buschbeck ate an orange, I was always reminded of the way a happy child eats one. Nothing but that orange exists in this whole wide world. All of a sudden, an orange seems to be a magical thing, a thing of mystic beauty. It becomes the epitomy of good. It becomes a link to God. When peeled, its rind gives off an oily perfume in slight, damp clouds. Then it drips sweet drops of juice. And its pulp on the tongue has a rough-smooth texture when suddenly noticed.

It is the song of the orange that Frau Sophie Buschbeck sang. This joy is how she approached me, how she loved me back to God, how she was a big part of my healing. It is how she saved my life. In her spiritually mature, God-attuned attention, my very immature, very damaging ways began to heal, and my soul itself began to ripen. She loved me with God’s agape love, and I began to be healed in the warm rays of what she kept on singing about daily—the true Son.

Therefore, I always thought Sophie Buschbeck was aptly named. She was wise, and of course her first name means just that. I don’t, however, mean she was pompous, the way I picture, say, the philosopher Bertrand Russell might have been. I mean she was not bitter, and she had every right to be, just like my first landlady in Boppard, who had made it through World War II with great hardship and told you about it every day, spitting vituperation in your food as she passed your steaming plate of boiled spinach. Bitterness is not a good condiment, I discovered in a tiny room on a dark lane I knew as Beyerhofgasse 15.

Sophie Buschbeck once told me that she had no pet because she had no time for one. Besides, she said with a short laugh, “The people I look after are my pets.” She meant that she cared for others with a daily regularity that was somewhat astonishing for me to see. Sophie Buschbeck was always having lonely people over or was visiting those who had no one else. There was a woman she and her daughters knew who had once been a concert pianist but who had had a total nervous breakdown for some unmentioned reason and could no longer perform in public. But she performed for Sophie Buschbeck and even for me the time I was invited along. This was something like a minor miracle, for before we left, Sophie Buschbeck said, “If she doesn’t want to perform with you there, it is not a big deal. She is a fragile, hurting person, and she must be loved in that. She is lonely, and we visit her in her loneliness, to comfort her in some small way.”

The week before Christmas, Sophie Buschbeck always cooked and gave a dinner for about six elderly friends of hers. That year, I was also invited. As I helped her prepare the food, I thanked her for inviting me and admitted, “It’s just me and your other lonely people tonight.” She chuckled. But it was true. We both knew it was.

The first weeks of our knowing each other began the old German way—I addressed Frau Sophie Buschbeck with the formal Sie for ‘you’ and not the friendly and informal Du. Sie is required when speaking to strangers and older people and is a form of high respect. Du is reserved for intimates or for someone your own age. But soon enough it seems I had passed some unspoken test, or perhaps she had also wearied of the decorum: “Please, you may use Du,” she offered in an almost apologetic tone. She added something that cracked my bitterly armored heart open, too: “And you should call me ‘Mutter Buschbeck,’ if you like.” Mutter Buschbeck, for “Mother Buschbeck”—she had made me family.

By then we had became constant walking partners and the best of friends. I felt I could tell her anything, but I was satisfied to tell her mostly of my life there in Germany, and the stories she told me as we crisscrossed the hills across from and above the famous Heidelberg castle along the Neckar River riveted me. Each week we walked the aptly named Philosopher’s Way, and she talked, as any widow might, of her husband, a Lutheran minister who had died only a few years before. Occasionally she told me how she missed him. Above all, they had been great friends, and this alone, with my family’s issues, was worlds of health to me. She told me many small stories about her day-to-day life with Friedrich ‘Fritz’ Buschbeck. These would later help me style my marriage.

Mother Buschbeck also spoke of fleeing from the Russian soldiers with her eight children. “I had heard the stories of what they do to girls.” She got each older child to hold the hand of a younger. “So many mothers lost children in the crush of boarding trains, never to see them again. Horrible. Just horrible.”

She described years of making jam from carrots. “You don’t know how terrible it is to have hungry children and you must tell them, ‘No, this bread can’t be eaten today. We must save it for tomorrow.’ Terrible.” She told me that her two oldest boys still became weary early at night, from not having enough to eat when young. Today her children are lawyers, doctors, pastors, a psychologist, and an engineer. They are all amazing, accomplished people. And they all have her generous spirit.

Only once did I hear the note of regret in her story: “For my twenty-fifth anniversary I wanted a piano, but instead I was overjoyed to get a letter from my husband.” This letter came during World War II, from Russia, and it was important because it told her that her husband, Fritz, was still alive. During the war, her pastor-husband, her Mann, spent five long years in a Russian prison camp. He was there for their twenty-fifth anniversary.

Their oldest daughter Elisabeth told me once that her father grew closer to God in his imprisonment:

During his time in prison, he came to love the Bible in a new way. Father said that that was because he had no commentaries, only the Bible. He came to rely on it and on God’s spirit more. He said he learned what the phrase ‘to wait on God’ means, what that verb harren in ‘harren auf Gott’ means. It means ‘to wait on God,’ and he said he learned that waiting then. He came to love the verses with the verb harren in them. He memorized them. He said them often to himself. He said they made him strong until he came home.

Later, when back in America, I looked these verses up:

Yet the LORD is waiting to show you his favor, yet he yearns to have pity on you; for the LORD is a God of justice. Happy are all who wait for him! (Isaiah 30.18)

Lead me in thy truth and teach me; thou art God my savior. For thee I have waited all the day long, for the coming of thy goodness, LORD. (Psalm 25.5)

The LORD is good to those who wait for Him, to the soul who seeks Him. It is good that one should hope and wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD. (Lamentations 3.25-26)

Sophie Buschbeck’s life made my soul sit up and pay attention. Here was someone who’d had it harder than I and who had come through enriched and unembittered. I watched to see how she did it. I wanted to know how she waited on God and where she found her undeniable joy.

Mother Buschbeck’s number one secret seemed to be that she had not turned away from heartbreak. She had accepted it. She had embraced the hard reality of pain. As Rilke says in “The Tenth Elegy”:

Someday, emerging at last from the violent insight, / let me sing out jubilation and praise to assenting angels. / Let not even one of the clearly-struck hammers of my heart / fail to sound because of a slack, a doubtful, / or a broken string. Let my joyfully streaming face / make me more radiant; let my hidden weeping arise / and blossom. How dear you will be to me then, you nights / of anguish. Why didn’t I kneel more deeply to accept you, / inconsolable sisters, and, surrendering, lose myself / in your loosened hair. How we squander our hours of pain. (Mitchell, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, 205)

This, then, was the main lesson I had to learn. It had never occurred to me that pain was to be accepted. I thought that hurt was to be fought against, and even conquered. I thought anything less was failure. I had forgotten that the man on the cross tasted vinegar and cried out to God, asking why he had been forsaken. And this is God’s Son, turning to his Father in his utmost pain, as I had still to learn to do. As I have still to learn to keep on doing.

So, during the year 1983-84, one Rotary Club International Graduate Scholar at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg studied much more than German Language and Literature and started learning not to “squander” her hours of pain.

“How many times have you driven to my house?” Beth asked, sounding quite serious.

I was safely at her home at the time and seated in front of her warm fireplace, where I had confessed my latest misdirection.

I started to answer, “Um—,” beginning to count up the times mentally, when I realized her faux-serious tone of voice had once again snuck one past me.

“You—”

“Now, I’m just teasing with you.”

I mean—what could I really say? I myself was marveling that a grown woman could get lost between Rome and Acworth.

Because I know Beth loves me, I never mind the ribbing.

Because also I do get lost easily, I mean, seriously.

To help me with this directional malady, my sweet husband, Sean, bought me a GPS for my forty-eighth birthday a year ago.

Did you know you can still get lost with a GPS? It’s possible. I can attest to that. That’s why I need one so badly and must learn to use it better.

So here’s why Beth was teasing me. I went to visit her not long ago, she lives in Acworth, Acworth is about thirty-seven miles from Rome, and I got lost in the middle of those. The last thing I remember her saying to me was, ever so gently, the way only a friend who’s known you (and your foibles) for thirty-two years can say, “You know your way here—it’s not hard—you just go 411 to 41. Right?” And when she heard my long, drawn-out silence stretch across the wireless line, she quickly added, “No worries. I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

So although it should take me only about forty-five minutes to get to Beth’s house, I always give myself an hour because I don’t like to keep her waiting, and I never know when I’ll take a wrong turn. Once I’m sure I’ve made all the right turns and can relax, I’d rather drive really slowly, arriving just on time (the GPS helps with this changing “arrival time” calculation); if I get somewhere early because I have to leave so early to accommodate my possible wrong turns, I have also been known to sit for a few minutes in a nearby parking lot reading a book, until the agreed-on meeting time arrives. I hate being late, for any reason.

So. I plugged in my GPS. I plugged in Beth’s address. My GPS started talking to me. I started driving. All was well. I kept driving. My GPS kept talking to me. All was well. I kept driving. And then I thought that the lavendar, go-this-way road on the GPS was to the right, so I turned.

Then I heard those dreaded mechanical words, “Recalculating.” I sighed. I remembered what kind-hearted, gentle Sean has always said to me, “Don’t panic when you get lost. That’s when you get to see new places.”

Sigh.

So I kept driving. I saw a new bridge being built; it was amazing, really, just half a bridge towering above me as I rode underneath it, a tiny man in a hard-hat perched on top of it with surveying equipment, and I thought bravely as I was passing under it, Sean was right. I would not have seen that bridge if I hadn’t taken a wrong turn.

Then my GPS calmly said, “In .3 miles, turn right.” So I did that, wondering, Where am I? I was instructed to get on highway 61. I did so, thinking any minute I would be in Florida or somewhere like Czechoslovakia. But, lo and behold, in six miles, I was instructed to get back on 41. All was well. I had only taken a minor detour, and so I arrived at Beth’s house right on time. And it was a terrific visit.

But the point remains that I get lost easily.

I get lost easily when driving in a car, and I get lost easily when navigating my emotions, too. Just because no one else can quite see me getting lost emotionally doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen on a regular basis.

This reminds me of something Cynthia Bourgeault (I believe) once said at the Abbey in Conyers, when she was leading a conference on prayer there, and I was happily in attendance. She said that she’d just gotten a GPS and how wonderful it was for navigating new terrain and how we all also need to tune in to our “God Positioning Systems.”

So I’ve been thinking about my God Positioning System. This “GPS” includes the Bible and prayer and good friends who will direct me to the Bible’s wisdom and to prayer and to what one book I read recently called, “Christly virtues.” I loved that “Christly.”

So when I get lost in anger, I read, “A quick-tempered man does foolish things” (Proverbs 14:17), “A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger” (Proverbs 15:1), and “A hot-tempered man stirs up dissension, but a patient man calms a quarrel” (Proverbs 15:18).

And when I get lost in wanting to manipulate something that I should turn over to God and let go, I read, “Folly delights a man who lacks judgment, but a man of understanding keeps a straight course” (Proverbs 15:21), and “Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight” (Proverbs 3:5-6).

And when I start to get lost in thinking I’m wise or something, I read, “Do not be wise in your own eyes; fear the LORD and shun evil. This will bring health to your body and nourishment to your bones” (Proverbs 3:7-8).

And when I want to judge someone else, I read, “Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye” (Matthew 7:1-5).

And when I think, Life’s not fair! I read, “Better to be lowly in spirit and among the oppressed than to share plunder with the proud” (Proverbs 16:19).

And when I want to lose my temper, I read, “Better a patient man than a warrior, a man who controls his temper than one who takes a city” (Proverbs 16:32).

And the list goes on and on.

Perhaps the most piercing, relevant Proverbs to me has become this one: “When words are many, sin is not absent, but he who holds his tongue is wise” (Proverbs 10:19).

As I told Beth over some loaded, cheesy potato soup that was as delicious as it was caloric, every morning I get up and think, What can I not say today? People who know me will doubt that, but it just proves that everyone is fighting some spiritual battle that perhaps seems to show little to no fruits . . . yet.

Now, to my best friend, Beth, I will say pretty much almost anything. Okay, I will indeed say anything to Beth. I mean anything. I feel that free in our friendship, and it’s a huge blessing, a very freeing experience. I also feel that freedom in my marriage, thankfully, but otherwise, in general I’m learning the value of limiting my words in all of my relationships, especially at work.

No one really needs to know all that I think. My jokes are not that funny. My points are not that helpful. And often the truth can be damaging in ways I had not foreseen. Keeping my mouth closed more often would be a huge step in the direction of wisdom. I’m sure.

So I’m trying not to get sidetracked by my emotions daily. I’m trying to stay on the course of love. But obviously I’m always getting lost in foolish human detours of the heart like pettiness, anger, resentment, judging, complaining, and so forth.

But I also always have my GPS with me and my loving friends, keeping me focused on God’s way, thankfully.

Those of you who know me and who know my awesome daughter know that I asked Kate could I post that blog, and she read it and approved of it. If she hadn’t liked it, it wouldn’t be up.

Also, I did come clean immediately after I picked her up that day from middle school. As we were riding home, I told her I’d enjoyed watching her, to which I got the requisite, “Oh, Mom, that’s so lame.”

And I replied, “Well, I don’t do that regularly, you know; but it was kind of like the middle-school version of sitting outside the fence at the pre-school playground and watching your three-year-old before you pick her up.”

That comment was met with a big *sigh*.

I am listening to Owl City. That is not unusual these days. I mean these months. Ever since my daughter, Kate, introduced me to Adam Young, I’ve been hooked by his poetic lyrics about love, by his puns, and by that gorgeous sound. It’s like the purest yearning on a CD. I have played Ocean Eyes over and over to the point of wearing out the speakers in my Honda Accord.

I am listening to Owl City while I watch a teenager at a local middle school. It is the very end of the day, and all after-school activities are over. It’s five o’clock. Teenagers are socializing in clumps waiting for their parents.

This teenaged girl is tall, with a mane of straightened, burnished golden brown hair, and the kind of legs that explain why God invented skinny jeans. I notice that her face is also beautiful and that she goes from person to person, hugging them. She is graceful, but also there is something heartachingly poignant about the way her elbows fly out to the sides as she runs towards a friend she’s known since elementary school, her arms open, ready to hug her.

I am not my own, for I have been made new.

This is my daughter, Kate, and she doesn’t know I am sitting in the parking lot, watching her. I may be excused this parental indiscretion, perhaps, because she texted me as I left college, “NO HURRY.” That translates as, “I want to visit with my friends after band and chorus practice.”

As I am driving the ten minutes to pick her up, I get a second text, “SLOW DOWN.”

Well, as there is only a certain amount of slowing down one can do on GA Loop 1 without being run over, I have arrived too early still. I am often told that I arrive too early, so—ever the attentive student—I know that this is one of those times. I can tell because as I drive in front of the high school, I look left across the parking lot to the middle school and see my daughter with a handful of her friends. Even at that distance, I can tell she is animated and having fun.

So I very discreetly pull into the parking lot, kill the lights, and sit quietly as a mouse, trying not to be embarrassing. I sometimes think as a middle-aged parent, If I pretend I’m not there, no one teenaged will see me. It’s kind of similar to the two-year-old’s trick—if I cover my eyes, I don’t exist.

I’m floating away, lost in a silent ballet. . . . silent ballet.

I watch my daughter run down the sidewalk in front of that sandy brick building with the curiously green tin roof, hugging all of her friends. She is smiling. I see her braces. She is laughing and happy. And I marvel again at how beautiful she is. I almost don’t breathe. I don’t want to spoil the moment, for either of us, because the distance between us is great (and I don’t mean just the physical space there the size of two asphalted lanes).

And I am right beside you. . . . Are you there? Are you there?

The rhythm is that she leaves her group to hug others and then rejoins her group, and she is talking and smiling in her chocolate brown North Face jacket. Then I get a third text, “You almost here? No rush.”

Now I am caught. I text back, “5 min.,” hoping God will forgive me this white lie, while I justify it by saying to myself that she’s not ready for me to pick her up yet, that she’s having too much fun, which is true, but I know I texted that response also because I myself want five more minutes of seeing my daughter without me in her life.

Introduce me, and I get the unsmiling teenager more than smiling and argumentation more than laughter.

Late nights and early parades, still photos and noisy arcades, my darling, we’re both on the wing.

She is beautiful, and as I watch her running down that sidewalk, my heart filled with love, I wish she could know this sky-large love and know that I always want the best for her. How does that train go off the rails? I suppose it is age appropriate, for both of us, she as a teenager and I as a (gulp) peri-menopausal woman.

When did we both get so old? How did the sparsely-haired, chubby-legged baby who once fit on my lap grow into this other creature, this other being, this gorgeous, independent teenager?

You would not believe your eyes, if ten million fireflies, lit up the world as I fell asleep, ‘cause they’d fill the open air, and leave teardrops everywhere. . . .

How did that cholicky baby who cried for three months straight become this articulate teen who can write essays like a gifted college student and out-argue any adult in her vicinity? And why does my world seem to be speeding up by the day? Why do I feel that she is running as hard as she can in the direction marked, “NOT MOM. NOT DAD.”

I’d like to make myself believe, that planet Earth turns slowly. . . .

More teenagers are picked up. Cars block my view of my daughter. I duck once behind the steering wheel as my daughter runs down the sidewalk to hug another friend. Well, I pretend to be picking up something off of the floor on the passenger’s side, but I keep my eyes on her. I can’t not. I keep thinking how so much of being a parent is letting go and then letting go again.

I get another text, “Almost here?”

I answer, “Here.”

I don’t answer, “I’m in the parking lot. Come across,” because I know that will embarrass her and also that she’d have to carry that heavy book bag and purse and flute that much further. So I put the car in reverse, back out, then drive through the parking lot, circle by the high school again, and pick my daughter up at the middle school, as if I am just arriving.

As I drive by the high school (where my daughter will be next year already), Adam Young is still singing, “I’m weird ‘cause I hate goodbyes. I got misty eyes as they said farewell.”

I just keep on letting go. I mean that I keep on praying that God will give me the wisdom and the strength to let go.

Because my dreams are bursting at the seams.

Blessed are the poor in spirit. —Jesus, Matthew 5:3, Sermon on the Mount

Failure is not a fun topic. The word comes from an Old French word faillir, for “to be lacking, miss, not succeed.” At least in our Western culture, “being lacking, missing something, and not succeeding” are not cool.

A lot of money is cool. A silver Mercedes is cool. A summer home is cool. A successful business is cool.

And why not? But the love of success to the exclusion of remaining open to learning is like the love of money to the exclusion of all else—both can limit my soul.

Fortunately, I’ve never had to worry about a lot of money or a lot of success, but I have had to worry about perfectionism, which on the surface looks like the opposite of failure, but is to my mind (or has become to my mind) synonymous with “being lacking, missing, not succeeding”; for how can a person learn if he or she does not feel free to ever make a mistake?

That surely shows a lack of awareness, a missing the point of being alive, and a failing.

I used to be a perfectionist, and in some ways, once a perfectionist, always a perfectionist. You could say I am a recovering perfectionist then. But I have at least unmasked perfectionism for the ongoing failure of learning that it is.

I wish when I had been a teenager that someone had told me what the etymology of perfect is (not that it probably would have helped my stubborn self that much, but still).

Perfect comes from the Latin prefix per- for “thoroughly” and facere for “to make or do.” So literally perfect means “to do [something] thoroughly.” It does not mean to not make a mistake.

To do something perfectly means to do it over and over until you get it right or to do it over and over until you get it at least more nearly close to excellent than if you had done it only twice.

I know from watching my mother sew that to sew thoroughly requires much concentration and—even with her talent and experience—much ripping out of seams and re-sewing. So to do anything thoroughly is a revisionary process.

Perfect, then, means doing something often because you want to do it well. It does not mean doing something right the first time, necessarily, or even the second or third time, or even, I would dare say, the 1,000th time.

I am so conscientious (I prefer that word to “OCD”) that I have no trouble with this concept when it comes to writing. I always love to say that “writing is revising” and that “good writing isn’t written—it’s rewritten.”

But I say that with a gut-felt appreciation of its being true in my life as a writer. I have to revise countlessly. Once an elementary school student asked me, “How many times do you revise a book?”

I said, “As many times as I kiss my children in a year’s time.” In other words, too many times to count.

I can handle the psychic pain of writing and its necessary revising. It can be stressful and is always hard, but it has its deep inner rewards; and also writing is just me struggling with my self.

Where I have trouble with “doing things thoroughly” is more often in relationships, if you know what I mean. Pain often makes it hard for me to patiently redo what I must redo if I am going to love those I love.

So I’ve had to accept lately that failure to communicate or to get along helps me identify where I need to grow up, especially in my relationships with those I love most. By “grow up,” I mean places in my soul where I need to “redo” my love for my self so that I can love those I love better.

I always love those I love, but sometimes I show it well and other times I totally blow it.

A dear friend sent me something recently about the refining (redoing) process of our souls that reminded me of a passage from the fourth-century Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Macrina. Gregory was the younger brother of Bishop Basil of Caesarea and Macrina the Younger. Here’s what Gregory said about how his sister, Macrina, had handled hardships of soul:

As gold is heated in many furnaces, one after another, so that any impurity not separated out in the first furnace can be separated out in the second, and so on, until all remaining impurities are removed in the final smelting, I watched my younger sister, the nun Macrina, as her soul was refined by grief. She knew many earthly losses until her heart became absolutely pure. Like the best athletes, she persevered. She never let difficulties break her spirit. Macrina worked at her faith.

I would hope that I would work at my relationship with my soul and also at my relationships with the ones I love in this persevering way, until they are purified into something only quite joyful and loving and caring.

But often I am afraid that I forget, at least, that part of the process of smelting is that hot fire, and that’s how “being lacking, missing, not succeeding” feels to me often. It is uncomfortable and searing.

If I could only remember that what I call “failure” is part of the revisionary process of love, of doing anything thoroughly. And what is love but the most “thorough” act we can do.

I’m asking God to teach me how to just hang in there and accept it all, including the necessary heart-felt pain of the smelting.

A student in my upper-level medieval literature class e-mailed me her thoughts recently on what she calls “faith-resting.” She was following up on the class in which we discussed Psalm 46:10 and “resting” in Christ as an activity (or a non-activity, or both) on which medieval Christian authors are always focused. Because this student is one of those for whom writing is as natural as breathing and who also revises as naturally as she writes, I include a passage from her e-mail, rather than summarizing it:

I was thinking about the concept of “resting” that we had talked about in [class] yesterday, and then I read your “Resumes and Rest” blog on the same topic. One image kept popping up in my head, and I thought I’d share it with you because I thought you’d appreciate it.

My senior year of high school, I had a Sunday School teacher who taught me what he called the “faith-rest” concept. “Faith-rest” happens when believers are content, confident, and peaceful (or “resting”) in their faith. To illustrate it, he would always describe this scenario: you and Jesus are sitting in a little boat in the sea. Somewhere far in the distance is a beautiful green island, and you want to get to the island. The way the boat is facing, Jesus can see the island, but you have to turn all the way around to see it. If you face forward, all you can see is him. Jesus is steering the boat, and you’re rowing. All it would take for you to reach the island is for you to row and Jesus to steer. But you’re not sure that you want to row. You want to steer because you think you know where you’re going. So, you drop the oars and take up steering, and Jesus quietly lets you. You try rowing and steering together, but you end up paddling in circles. Once you’ve tried thousands of ways to steer and row at the same time, or perhaps do neither, you realize that you need to let Jesus steer, and you humbly row, keeping your eyes fixed on him. This is “faith-rest.” You row, and he steers.

This image of me rowing and Jesus steering always comes to mind when I think about resting. Sitting in a boat with Jesus, talking, laughing, and rowing slowly and steadily seems like the most peaceful, restful thing in the world to me. I like how simple the concept is.

If you knew this student, this passage would mean even more to you because she is mature, funny, diligent, brilliant, and personable. She is the kind of student one could picture studying at Harvard for graduate school.

So now I have a new image to hang my soul’s hat on—I just need to keep on rowing on a daily basis.

Selah.

A good dictionary will tell us that humility has several different meanings: The first is “the quality of being humble,” which makes me look up humble: “not proud or arrogant, modest”; the second definition listed for humility is “having a feeling of insignificance, inferiority,” and the third is “being courteously respectful.”

So humility can mean anything from “not arrogant” to “feeling inferior” to “being polite,” but that lexicographical diversity doesn’t help me know what the goodness of humility could look like in my life, so I get out the Bible and Andrew Murray’s humility and Benedict’s Rule as practical guidelines.

In the Bible I read that I am supposed to “walk humbly with . . . God” (Micah 6:8), that I am supposed to confess my sin to God, that I should take being wronged patiently, that I should submit to authority, that I should be corrected graciously, that I should accept a lowly place, that I should be grateful for my blessings, that I should forgive, that I should love all people, that I should serve others, and that I should always value Christ above all else.

Andrew Murray writes that humility is a “continuous” and “entire dependence on God.”

And Benedict devotes his longest chapter (seven) to this spiritual discipline. He writes: “The first degree of humility is obedience without delay. This is the virtue of those who hold nothing dearer to them than Christ.”

I am thankful for such good teachers because over the years they have helped to correct my erroneous understanding of humility. I got stuck in definition number two: “a feeling of insignificance, inferiority.”

I used to think that humility was hating my self. No matter how many sermons I heard or how many books I read in which the virtues of my unique, snowflake-like soul’s beauty were extolled, I never quite internally got with that “God-loves-you-and-you’re-beautiful-in-his-sight” program.

I don’t know why, either. I suppose I could flatten myself against a wise counselor’s couch for a few decades and analyze my childhood and my psyche and come up with some sinewy ideas of “why.”

But I suspect that the main reason is that I am a rather tender-hearted human being and therefore I find plenty of reasons to feel uncomfortable with myself just because I am alive and breathing.

I mean—I sometimes forget about the plight of those in Haiti. How can I put one foot in front of the other while there is such suffering in Haiti? Sure, I can donate to the point of not buying cafe lattes at Starbucks for a few weeks, but still.

I mean—how can I for even a moment forget the hungry in my own town and drive down the highway to my various appointments totally immersed in the awesome sounds of Owl City, especially track seven of Ocean Eyes, to the obsessive point that my daughter said to me recently, “Mom, you know I like Owl City, but I’m kind of getting tired of it.”

I mean—I often make mistakes. I can be short with my husband or my children. I can complain about coffee stains left NOT BY ME on my white kitchen countertops.

And, even more incriminating, I often think wrong things inside myself. And I don’t mean “wrong things” in the sense of the-world-tells-me-they-are-wrong. I mean “wrong” in the sense that all human decency and all that is healthy and joyful in this world and the gentle and firm voice of Christ in me says, “Woah, Girlfriend, not good—let go of that poison. Why are you dealing in hatred [or self-pity or criticism of others or envy or grudge-clinging or fear]?”

But now I see that humility is not a total faith in my own lack of worth but is instead a complete dependence on God.

Humility is also not a lack of confidence. It is not self-hatred of any sort. It is also not inviting bullies to turn your heart into a shuttlecock and smack it laughingly over the net of daily life. No.

It is also not selling yourself short inside your soul in soundbites like this: I’m not smart. I’m stupid. I’m worthless. I’m pathetic. I deserve nothing good.

Now I see such thoughts as useless. They aren’t to be condemned as “bad”; they are to be neglected because they are boring and useless. Why did I ever find them interesting? They are as surely a sign of self-absorption as the ugly, strutting kind of arrogance is.

My friend D. W. told me once that if self-absorption were a stick, at one end we find self-loathing and at the other end, arrogance. But both are self-absorption. And neither is a particularly joyful state.

I used to think to myself, Well, at least I’m not arrogant, but now I see that self-loathing is just as awful. I don’t know why I ever found it attractive.

Humility is instead resting in Christ. It is becoming the nothing of love in order to receive the everything of God. It is true intimacy with the divine mystery who is a Person whom we can all know.

Humility is being willing to be taught. Humility is being willing to be open. It is being willing to forgive my self and others, too. It is being willing to remain vulnerable, no matter how often my own immaturity injures me and no matter how many times others accidentally or purposefully wound my heart.

It is so easy to close up then. But I want the humility of a broken, open heart. I crave the humility of the loving, aching soul.

So humility must also be servanthood, the willingness to serve others in love.

This servanthood is not the same as “helping” others. Who wants to be “helped”? I have been helped before when I was down and struggling.

I prefer to be “loved” every time. Love comes alongside you. “Help” comes from above, from a supposedly “superior” creature, but no human being is superior to another. We are all in the same boat, rowing against the wind, trying to love each other in the process.

I want, in short, yes, to be like Jesus, but also to be like my son, John. He is eight. When he was four, I would say to him, “John, you sure are handsome.”

He would answer without hesitation, “I know.” And then he was off to play or to be kind to his sister or to offer to help me take the clothes out of the dryer or to give me a hug, his admission forgotten.

I would marvel. I would contemplate why he could say that with such confidence and with such a lack of self-consciousness. In my friendship with God I have long longed to have such a combination of confidence and un-self-consciousness as my son has in the love my husband and I have for him.

John can answer in that simple but profound statement, “I know,” because he feels completely loved. He totally trusts his father and me. He feels safe in the knowledge that he is part of (yes, imperfect but) a very caring family.

So humility is accepting love. It is considering life from another person’s perspective. Humility is embracing that I am one member of God’s global, non-exclusive family.

Humility is not bitterly grimacing and putting up the neon “CLOSED” sign on my heart. It is accepting moment by moment that God loves me and being kind to my own self. It is also reaching out through my own pain as God nudges me, to love others. It is also not accepting abuse but respecting my self and having healthy boundaries because God loves me.

So “be humble” is an invitation to intimacy with Christ. It is also (to my student’s mind) a huge assignment from the greatest teacher, God. It’s like daily homework. Thankfully, the Holy Spirit is here to help me. Whenever I consider how important humility is and how much I have to learn about it, I realize that humility is the foundation of everything good in this world and that humility is another way of pronouncing the word love.

In class today, my upper-level college students and I were discussing Benedict’s Rule. I am always fascinated by what today’s Facebooking, texting college students find relevant in this timeless, wise work.

Students keep on raising their hands and saying how Benedict’s Rule is an antidote to our “overachieving” lives. Woah. The spiritual principles that Benedict describes are attractive to our brilliant new generation of digerati because these truths teach us how to love our enemies, how to accept God’s love for ourselves and for our own inner “enemies” (you know—our perpetual conflicts of soul that no one but God and we see), and how to become intimate with Christ and so know real peace.

Students are especially drawn to the longest chapter of the Rule, number seven, on humility. Benedict says, “The first degree of humility, then, is that a person keep the fear of God before his or her eyes and beware of ever forgetting it.” We discussed the two kinds of fear—the “alarming” kind and the fear that is “respect” or “reverence.” We are to “respect” and have “reverence” for God, ever mindful that he is Love and that “perfect love casts out all [of the alarming kind of] fear” (1 John 4:18).

In chapter seven, Benedict also recommends this restful approach: “Let us consider that God is always looking at us from heaven, that our actions are everywhere visible to the divine eyes”; what a cheerful difference that would make in our lives.

So I found myself saying to these awesome students that we spend all of our lives trying instead to make sure our resumes are fat and stellar, while our souls remain emaciated and dull, when all along God’s wonder and love are inside us, as Christ reminds us: “The kingdom of God is within” (Luke 17:21).

I told them that if my resume had a category titled “Rest,” it would be a thin category, with few bulleted entries, and that if I were being hired on my experience in resting in God, I would not be hired anywhere. I am not proud of this fact, but admitting it to myself and also out loud started me some time ago on the road of Learning to Rest.

This road is very different from my past way of living. My mode of “rest” has always been to work until I exhausted myself and then to keep on working. I call it “being conscientious.” Some might call it, “not obeying Psalm 46:10,” where we are given very specific divine instructions: “Be still and know that I am God.”

It’s the ultimate homework assignment from the ultimate Teacher: “Rest.” The due date is simple. I have from right now until I am dead to work on it, and I must work on it daily and keep working on it until I take that ultimate (as Mr. Gary Davis calls it) “dirt nap.”

How can we love each other if we have not yet learned to rest in Christ?

That’s the question I ask myself daily: If I learn to rest in Christ and truly rest, how much better will I get at loving God, my self, and others? I am willing to stake my life on trying to answer that question.

I am willing to make myself ultimately vulnerable and open to God in doing so.

Or, as Yoda says, “There is no try. There is only do.” Well, I should quote Yoda accurately. When Luke says to him, “All right, I’ll give it a try,” Yoda tells Luke, “No. Try not. Do. . . . or do not. There is no try.”

Of course, such wonderful, awesome impossibilities are made possible when one’s best friend is Christ, through whom anything is possible, with enough true grit and humility (Philippians 4:13).

All great writers love paronomasia. They are, you could even say, addicted to it.

Paronomasia is not chocolate. It’s just the fifteen-dollar word for “pun.”

And *ahem* it is easy to spell incorrectly because its etymology is para- for “beside” and onoma for “word.” It literally means to juxtapose two different meanings/”words” “beside” each other to create a pleasant vertigo of mind.

Here’s how it looks if we spell it phonetically but without using IPA: “pair-oh-no-MAZE-jah.” That’s cool because it helps us remember that sneaky little “OH” after the “pair” (of words that will be confused on purpose in a well-made pun) and features the word “MAZE,” which every pun creates in our minds.

Even my old dead friend and Benedictine monk from the tenth century in England, Ælfric of Eynsham, loved puns. Of course, his are not knee-slapping joke-type puns; instead, Ælfric uses word play in his sermons to help make his works both enjoyable and memorable for his congregation.

Ælfric’s punning style also helps him to communicate his positive message to his congregation: Jesus saves.

In order to assure his congregation that Christ is both Savior and Healer, Ælfric plays on the Old English word hælu. (Hælu means “salvation” and “health,” even “safety.”)

This works as paronomasia because the word in Old English for “Savior” is Hælend and comes from hælu.

If someone today cheerfully describes himself as “hale,” his adjective has its roots in hælu. Other present-day words that originate in hælu are holy, whole, and health.

Ælfric commonly uses the term “Hælend” for Jesus, meaning “Savior” and “Healer.” In one passage from sermon II, Ælfric plays off these various meanings of hælu, which are italicized and bolded here for clarity: “Hys nama is Hælend, for þan þe he gehælþ his folc, / swa swa se engel cwæþ be him, ær þan þe he acenned wære: / He gehælþ hys folc fram heora synnum” (“His name is ‘Savior,’ because he heals his people, as the angel said about him before he was born: ‘He will save his people from their sins’”) (John C. Pope II.95-97).

This statement could also be translated, “His name is ‘Healer,’ because he saves his people. . . . ‘He will heal his people from their sins.’” Skillful word play communicates the idea that Christ is the divine defender and the divine doctor of his people. (This passage comes from God of Mercy, published by Mercer University Press, 2006).

Other authors have loved paronomasia to keep their writing grounded. For example, E. B. White wrote that “a good farmer” has a good sense of “humus.”

Holly Bradfield, who is never left out of an intelligent conversation, pointed out this excellent pun: “Get that bird a glass of water—he’s perched!” (Magilla Gorilla on Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law)

At grammar.about.com, I found other examples of paronomasia. Did you know that there is a flower shop in Melbourne, Australia, named “The Lone Hydrangea”?

There is also a beauty salon in London named “Curl Up and Dye.”

There’s also: “Horse lovers are stable people.”

One of my favorites is “Seven days without a pun make one week.”

And, finally, here’s an elegant and eloquent use of a pun: “Peace is much more precious than a piece of land.” (Anwar al-Sadat, speech in Cairo on March 8, 1978)

One of the reasons I love my husband is because he is my best teacher. You may expect me to say that his agape love for me has taught my soul many freedoms, and that is true.

Sean has also introduced me to some of the best books of my life. You don’t soon forget the first day your husband said, “You should look that up in Brewer’s.”

I had asked him where did the expression “Mind your p’s and q’s” come from.

When he recommended I look the phrase up in Brewer’s, I was like, “Brewer’s?” We were newlyweds living in London in the West End district, within walking distance of the British Museum and the British Library.

“You’ve NEVER heard of Brewer’s?” He was plainly astonished.

“Uh, no.”

He went to a shelf in our one-room flat and pulled out a green hard-back book, Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable.

Let me digress here to say that everyone should live in a one-room flat in a country not their own their first year of marriage. In 1990, it meant that a) I could not call home and have teary conversations with my mother when Sean and I had a disagreement—too expensive, and b) I could not leave, go to another room in our “home,” and slam a door, ending any discussions. There was only one room in our second-floor flat.

Imagine that. Your first year of marriage in a one-room flat. No bathroom. No escape route. In a city of seven million where you have only a few new friends. Such a setup was a great marriage solvent.

My brand-new British husband, Sean, was twenty-four (to my twenty-nine) and was cuter than any original Beatle, and against a backdrop of seven million strangers and no rooms to retreat to and no mother to cry my heart out to, he kept looking cuter by the minute.

So Sean wanted to show me the joy of this wonderful dictionary. He turned to page 1063 and read the entry for serendipity:

A happy coinage by Horace Walpole to denote the faculty of making lucky and unexpected ‘finds’ by accident. In a letter to Sir Horace Mann (28 January 1754) he says that he formed it on the title of a fairy story, The Three Princes of Serendip, because the princes “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things the were not in quest of.”

And, by the way, “Mind your p’s and q’s” comes from “an admonition to children learning to write to be careful to distinguish between the forms of p and q (although no such admonition was apparently necessary for the equally confusible b and d), or to printers’ apprentices when handling and sorting type.”

When the Counselor comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who goes out from the Father, he will testify about me. (John 15:26)

Nevertheless, I am telling you the truth, it is for your benefit I am going away. For if I do not go away, the Helper will by no means come to you. But if I do go my way, I will send Him to you, and when that one arrives He will give the world convincing evidence concerning sin and concerning righteousness and concerning judgment. (John 16:7-8)

Our friends are some of our best teachers. I am fortunate and my life is inestimably blessed by kind friends who teach me on a regular basis. I have a very awesome friend who is an expert librarian, and she not only shares brilliant book tips with me, but also has a penchant for holding on to excellent phrases and for turning them over in her mind and appreciating them, the way some people do with a fine piece of gold jewelry. A superlative librarian values words, cherishes books, can multi-task, loves people, and knows how to nurture community.

I have a very dear friend who is just like this. She is always reading a good book, always treasuring words, always juggling budget numbers and projects and reports smoothly, and always caring for others. We met at Shorter College years ago, and now Kimmetha ‘Kim’ Herndon is the Director of the Samford University Library. And as anyone at Shorter or at Samford can tell you, Kim is an amazing knitter. I have the coziest booties to prove it, too.

Yesterday Kim introduced me to the invaluable phrase that’s the title of this blog: “Escalation Specialist.” She told me that she was herself introduced to this phrase during something as quotidian and as potentially stressful as negotiating the terms of a purchase over the phone. After her conversation with the entry-level customer service representative didn’t satisfy her questions, she asked to speak to a manager, at which point, she found herself talking to an Escalation Specialist.

Now, honestly, isn’t that a crucial phrase to hug to one’s chest? Escalation Specialist. I told Kim that I have needed that phrase my entire life. How did I live without that phrase for forty-nine years already? I especially needed it during my first year of marriage when Cuban me would take every “discussion” to the “next level,” threatening to turn any marital argument into World War Three. Meanwhile, my kind British husband would say things like, “Um, aren’t you about to start your period? Maybe we can discuss this later?”

I needed an Escalation Specialist.

If I had known that phrase in 1990, in London, as a newlywed, my husband could have teased me, “Hey, we need an Escalation Specialist!” and I could have laughed and dropped my tirade. Well, that’s in my vision of a perfect world.

I do need an Escalation Specialist when dealing with my teenager. I need an Escalation Specialist when encountering traffic in Atlanta as I feel my blood pressure rising when I know I left in plenty of time to get to a talk but still am about to be late because of a car that’s broken down on I-75. I need an Escalation Specialist when dealing with all situations and all people who set my nerves to jangling.

In short, I need an Escalation Specialist anytime I get upset in life. That would be daily. I mean—whose life is ever perfectly aligned with our expectations and hopes? Anyone? Not mine! Even though my mother taught me to count my blessings, I must admit that I also count my unfulfilled, why-hasn’t-this-good-thing-happened-to-me-yet expectations, perhaps even on a more regular basis than I do count my blessings.

To my mind, Escalation Specialist is another name for “Holy Spirit.” I mean that I am learning that whenever I feel my Cuban-brown face turning a bright cherry red or my heart beginning to thump because I’m upset, I turn to Christ’s Holy Spirit within me because He is my Escalation Specialist. He handles escalating fear within me, accepts and forgives escalating anger, understands and comforts escalating doubt, embraces any escalating confusion, accepting in love anything that escalates within my soul—He’s there for me, always.

So I am thankful that there is a wise and loving Escalation Specialist who’s taken up residence in my soul because the Customer Service representative who is my ego is sorely unable to cope smoothly with or resolve the thorny “negotiations” that take place daily in my life.

Kim had another good point. She said that along with an Escalation Specialist, she also thinks a Resolution Specialist would be nice to have on the job. You know—that way the crisis is not only heard and handled but is also neatly resolved, exactly as it “should be.” Ha. I agreed. It would be terrific if life were one tidy resolution after another.

Kim and I both know who the ultimate Resolution Specialist is, but the problem is that my free will is often stubborn and blocks those resolutions that Christ would like to facilitate for me. Still, I am thankful that I have the Holy Spirit as my Escalation Specialist because with his help, this wilful, prone-to-being-defensive, anxious middle-aged human being is moving in the direction of openness, peace, vulnerability, and love.

Thanks, Kim!

I like a good challenge.

I like a good challenge because one day I will be dead, and every day that I do not accept life with an open mind and a vulnerable heart, I have lost precious living time. The best challenge I have ever received from life is how to live with a broken heart without becoming bitter but remaining open and vulnerable and loving and, yes, . . . smiling as I go.

So an image keeps popping up in my mind. It is one of the benefits of having spent nine months of eighteen-hour days immersed in a dead man’s hard work—I mean The Cloud of Unknowing and The Book of Privy Counsel by Anonymous. I spent some 5,000 hours translating his classic writings on Christian contemplative prayer. I adore him, though he is very dead, having left planet earth some six hundred plus years ago.

The image is that of soft leather gloves. I love that image. I think of it every day when I go to my car in the cold of the winter morning. First, I put on my new leather gloves. I bought them at Lenox on one of the trips my teenage daughter cajoled me into making there. I could not resist them. They were so real-leather soft on the outside and so sleekly black and so wonderfully micro-fur-lined on the inside, and they were on sale hugely. So I treated myself to them, and my hands have been toasty warm all through this often unseasonally frigid January in Georgia. I hope they will last me until the end of my life, and I plan to live until 100, so that gives us five decades together, at least.

I have been thinking a lot lately about this particular line in the Book of Privy Counsel about how our souls and our identities should be as flexible and as malleable in God’s will as supple leather gloves are snug on my hands. In my translation of The Book of Privy Counsel (Shambhala Publications, 2009), I have worded it so: “He [God] wants your soul becoming as supple and snug to his will spiritually as a soft kid glove is to your hand physically.”

In the Middle English, this passage reads like this: “He [God] wil haue þee maad as pleying to his wille goostly as a roon gloue to þin honde bodely.” Literally, it is translated so: “He [God] will have you made as flexible to his will spiritually as a Rouen glove is to the hand physically.” (See Phyllis Hodges’s edition of The Book of Privy Counsel, page 168, lines 8-9.)

Our anonymous author is referring to the famous soft leather made in Rouen. Rouen was just across the channel from England, in northern France on the River Seine.

If you look to see how leather was made in the Middle Ages, it will give you pause to see all of those sharp instruments. I am not one for hairshirts because I think enough hurt comes my way when I just try each day to be an honest human being. Haven’t you discovered that, too?

But I couldn’t help but notice these words on that website: stabbing, scratching, stamping, punching, creasing, knives, shears, trenchet, whetstone, needles, hog’s bristles, pincers, and tacks.

As I said, I do not go out of my way to encounter knives of any sort, either physical or metaphorical, such as painful words said to me or injurious acts made against me, but, hey, they do happen; in fact, if I’m not careful, I will go so too-much out of my way to avoid figurative pincers, tacks, needles, shears, and trenchets, that I run the risk of becoming a hardened soul. Oh, then I would flunk Life’s greatest test, which is, it seems to me—Will I die bitter? I mean this—Will I become and live a bitter- and hard-hearted life?

Long ago I prayed to God that if he would deliver me from bitterness each day, that I would do anything to avoid the calcification of my heart. That is why I am hanging on to those words from Anonymous. My heart must become like a fine leather glove from Rouen. Broken. Soft. Pliable. Malleable. Flexible. Loving. Open. Vulnerable. Broken but open. Broken but not bitter. Broken but smiling. Broken but strong. Broken in but not broken down.

That’s the kind of challenge only Christ can make happen. But, hey, I love a good challenge. No superlative teacher gives flabby assignments. This is not a flabby assignment. Live by loving. Keep your heart open, no matter how many times it gets broken. Love as if you’ve never been hurt before. Even love those you do not like and those who have hurt you. Love life, too, even though circumstances such as illness and reverses happen to us all.

Life is still always good. God is still always love. Find the ability to become a smiling broken heart.

Because I want to be a good student of God, I am accepting this assignment and diligently turning my soul to carrying it out. Thankfully, my Teacher is kind and knows where my weaknesses are and comforts me right there, where my heart most needs love. He encourages me daily, even when I slip and fall in spirit or get down about the slow pace of my progress or depth of the darkness of my understanding.

But here is the promise from God: “I will give them an undivided heart and put a new spirit in them; I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 11:19). I think of this verse every time I put on my leather gloves.

Here is the chapter from my translation of The Book of Privy Counsel that contains this image (I also included the two footnotes).

Chapter 16 from The Book of Privy Counsel (by the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing)
On the joy that is Nothing
From Carmen Butcher’s Cloud of Unknowing with the Book of Privy Counsel

What is this joy like? It keeps your mind from worrying. Nothing will upset you. You would run a thousand miles just to talk with someone else who’s felt this longing, only to discover once there that you’ve got nothing to say to each other because no matter how much you want to say, you can’t say this Nothing. It’s ironic that the topic you most want to discuss leaves you speechless. This joy teaches you an economy of words. Though you are a person of few words, each is deep and warm. Your speech is so mature and full of life that even your shortest sentence will contain a world of wisdom, but anything you say will seem stupid to those who ignore their souls and live only in their intellects. Your silence will be gentle, your speech constructive, your prayers private, your self-esteem pure, your behavior humble, your humor kind, and your joys as simple as a child at play.

You love to be by yourself and sit alone. Others get in the way of this, you feel, unless they’re interested in contemplating with you. You don’t even want to read or hear any books read unless they’re about the joys of contemplation. If this is true for you, then you can be certain that both the interior and exterior signs agree, proving that God is calling you to a deeper relationship with him.

Yes! It’s all true. You’ll see. But what if these vanish one day? I mean what if every shred of evidence you have and every intimate spiritual experience you’ve ever known (as described here) cease for a time? What if you’re abandoned? Or so you think. What if suddenly you realize that you’ve lost not only your new passion for contemplation but also your old dedication to your earlier ways of praying? You’ll feel as if you have fallen down a crack between the two when you lack each and yet remember and miss both. But don’t let your heart grow heavy over this. Don’t be sad or perplexed. Accept this change. Wait patiently on our Lord and on his will for you. Learn humility.

An analogy will help you understand my point. Think of it this way. You’re in a little ship crossing a vast spiritual ocean, leaving behind your focus on the physical and heading towards the life of the spirit.1 Along the way, you’ll meet countless overwhelming storms and endless temptations. You’ll feel alone and depressed, with nowhere to run for help. You’ll think you’ve lost God. Your affections will feel cut off from ordinary grace and special grace. But don’t get too upset. And don’t let yourself be afraid, even though you seem to have good reason; instead, trust our Lord with all your heart. At least put as much faith in him as you can under the difficult circumstances. Remember that God is never far from you. Soon He’ll search you out again and touch your soul more intensely than before, and you’ll feel the warmth of his compassion and contemplative grace.

Then you’ll think you’re whole, completely restored, and all is well, while it lasts—but suddenly, when you least expect it, it will all be gone again, and you’ll find yourself in that boat once more, feeling friendless and rudderless, blown in every direction, tossed here, flung there, not knowing where you are or where you’re heading. But even then don’t get upset, for he will come. I promise. He’ll come very soon, when He finds the time is right, and when he comes, he’ll set you free. Fearless, he delivers you from your sorrow and releases you from your pain, more powerfully than ever before. Believe me when I tell you that as often as he leaves, he will return, and if you handle the interim well (accept it humbly and patiently), you’ll discover that each of his homecomings is stronger and happier than the last. He does this because he wants your soul becoming as supple and snug to his will spiritually as a soft kid glove is to your hand physically.

His goings and comings stretch you, secretly testing your soul, gentling you to do his work.2 During a period when you think God is absent, your enthusiasm will also be gone. You think they’re one and the same thing, but they’re not, and never were. God is merely testing and improving your patience. In difficult times, remember this. Sometimes God may withdraw your joy, your enthusiasm, and your burning desires, but he never takes his grace away from his dedicated friends. I’m equally certain that God’s special grace can never be withdrawn from those who have experienced it and whose lives have been touched by it, unless they committed a mortal sin.

1. This ocean-and-ship analogy, so popular with mystics from the desert fathers and mothers on, is described in great detail by our anonymous author in his letter, Discretion of Stirrings: “I also want to point out that you probably don’t know your inner self as well as you could, but you will eventually. You just lack experience. You’ll understand your temperament and soul better after God lets you experience the ups and downs of life, teaching you much through them. They are a requirement of spiritual growth. No sinner gains self-understanding without them. Temptations, volatile emotions, and difficult experiences buffet us all, and the soul is like a little ship riding the highest waves, through storms and raging seas, until we find safe harbor. Sometimes we have good weather, when the Holy Spirit comforts us, and we’ll know we’ve reached the harbor’s shore when we arrive at the solid knowledge of who we are. Then we’re real, standing in God’s grace.” This translation is my own. See also Walsh, The Pursuit of Wisdom and Other Works by the Author of The Cloud of Unknowing, 135. See Hodgson, ed., The Cloud of Unknowing and The Book of Privy Counselling, 167, lines 14-16.

2. And sith he sumtyme goth and somtyme cometh, therfore doubli in this double werk wol he prively prove thee and worche thee to his owne werk. (“And since he sometimes goes and sometimes comes, therefore doubly in this double work will he secretly test you and work you to his own work.”) The rhetoric’s symmetry and repetition brilliantly communicate the anonymous author’s message here—that the disciple’s life must be a mirror image of the Master’s. Notice the sumtyme goth and somtyme cometh, doubli and double, and werk and worche followed by werk. The rhythm beats against the words in ways reminiscent of the tanning (and softening) of leather. See Hodgson, ed., The Cloud of Unknowing and The Book of Privy Counselling, 168, lines 10-12.

Once, having been asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, Jesus replied, “The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, nor will people say, ‘Here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’ because the kingdom of God is within you.” (Luke 17:20-21)

This morning at the early 9:00 a.m. service at church, the sermon contained the phrase that is the title of this blog, which is surely worth chewing on for many future hours, days, years, decades.

Hurting people hurt people.

The emphasis is on the “hurt.” Hurting people HURT people. So you have a present participle (”hurting”) used adjectivally to describe the noun “people,” and then take the same verb, “hurt,” and let it function as the actual verb of the sentence.

I guess if you wanted to construct its antithesis, you’d have to use the past participle for “love” as an adjective, to make this sentence:

Loved people love people.

It’s true, too, isn’t it? It is in my experience.

I was thinking how of all the human beings I am fortunate to spend time with on this short-lived ride called Life on Planet Earth, the best one has been and is my husband, Sean.

That’s not to say we go around calling each other “Sweetness and Light,” far from it. We have a real (by which I mean to say–”I took out the trash last”) relationship. And, actually, if Sean reads this blog, he will quickly point out that while I do gather up the trash and the recyclables (and sometimes successfully cajole our children into helping), I usually “let” him crush down the boxes (always from Amazon.com) and actually assemble the trash for the trash can because in the winter it’s just so dastardly cold out there!

Well, but my point is that my husband is both the smartest and the kindest person I’ve ever met. And his unconditional love has of all things on this planet helped me to know what love is. The details are only for me to know, but they are daily and many-layered and always growing.

But back to the “Hurting people hurt people” statement that our pastor made this morning. I think that is profound. I think it has the potential to soften my heart further when someone does something that I find—Woah—painful to my heart.

What if from childhood on, however, we were taught that pain can help shatter our egos and open us up to God? Then the “hurting person who hurts us” would become one of our best friends, always.

We are taught to circle the wagons around our fragile egos so that nothing can disturb either its equanimity (ha) or its strength (double ha). With guns or slingshots or bows and arrows or whatever weapons we have at hand (the jawbone of an ox?), we stand there, hands raised, against all “intruders” who threaten our ego’s status quo.

Woah.

Is it not true for you as it is true for me that my greatest growth in love has come from accepting pain well, even with a smile? I am not talking about something masochistic in spirit. No one wants to hurt.

Nor am I talking about becoming a doormat. No one should become a doormat to others’ cruelty.

I am talking about accepting unfairness well, not letting it torpedo our sense of joy and our sense of peace that should be founded on the everlasting love of Christ, which is always unshaken and unshakeable.

How can we find that? I think we forget who we are. We always ask, or I do, “Who am I?” Finally I have realized deep down (after decades of knowing this truth in my head only) that I am God’s daughter AND a member of the body of Christ. I am both loved by God in the most delicious and abundant way, and I am meant to recklessly love God, my self, and others, that is to say, to be part of community.

I find Christ and his tender-hearted, unshakeable love by sitting in silent prayer and smiling. I find it doing the dishes for my family. I find it by reading and studying the Bible slowly. I find it by memorizing Scripture. I find it by studying the Bible with commentaries in hand. I find it by worshipping with other Christians. I find it by being with my family. I find it by being with my friends. I find it by trying to be kind to all I meet. I find it by praying for others. I find it by remembering to eat healthily (mostly!) and by reminding myself to get sufficient sleep (when my nightsweats don’t interrupt that) and to get some exercise (usually in the form of daily walks). I find it by trying to think what others need. I find it by trying to help those who are struggling in some way. I find it by trying to accept help and love when I am in need and struggling. I find it by doing honest work as best I can. I find it by forgiving those who hurt me and by praying blessings for them (and meaning it). I find it by listening to others and feeling their pain and their joy.

There’s a point. Sometimes we forget that we are supposed to be happy when others accomplish great things. Who hasn’t known this pinprick of the innermost heart? Jealousy is a truly boring, growth-stunting emotion, though, that must be stopped at its first prick because if allowed a toehold in our hearts, jealousy can keep us all chained to the rock of no-compassion with a bird pecking out our livers. (You know about Prometheus and the eagle, right?)

On the other hand, sometimes we forget that we are not supposed to recoil when others hurt but that we are supposed to enter their hurt with them and feel it with them. There is much invisible healing when another person will enter my pain with me and just sit there with me in it.

Hurting people HURT people.

Loved people LOVE people.

Lord, help me be one of the loving ones.

Amen.

While anyone might think that that blog title is oxymoronic, thankfully, that is not true . . . yet. Despite my daughter’s having to put up with a forty-nine-year old mother who dresses like a candidate for What Not to Wear and who thinks that Moby is the first part of the title of a great American novel and not “a successful artist on the ambient electronica scene” (I did my research at Wikipedia—apparently the novelist Melville is, however, a distant relative), my daughter and I do still talk, for which I am constantly on my knees thanking God, literally. And also I am often on the road, literally, driving to Lenox with her in the passenger’s seat.

But you may also be sure that that blog title, “Conversations with a Teenager,” is also a red herring for you, dear reader, because there ain’t no way I’m going to share what we discuss. NO WAY. I am learning that to keep my big mouth greatly shut facilitates conversations.

Also, I think what a terrific sense of humor God must have because He gave peri-menopausal me a thirteen-year-old. Every morning when I take our daughter to middle school, I see car after car with this equally difficult pairing in it—late-forty-something parents driving thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds to middle school.

It is such a study in contrasts, and yet not. Both groups show a decided awkwardness in grappling with that question, “Who am I?” Furthermore, most middle-aged people don’t know anymore who they are in their bodies, for one reason or another. Either they are experiencing the joy of nightsweats or the ecstasy of migraines or the peace of hot flashes or the worry about those extra pounds or the too many gray hairs or the bad back or the aching hip, or they are questioning those familiar eyes as they stare in the mirror, mornings, asking, Who is that old person staring back at me? . . . and the list goes ever on.

Teenagers have a similar unease in their bodies, for entirely different reasons. If middle-age-dom is the gearing down and the wrinkling up and the shrinking in of forty-plus bodies, then teenagers know the awkwardness of being 5′7″ instead of 5′0″ all of a sudden, of becoming young men and young women, of losing their shapes as children and skyrocketing up, with all the aches and pains that the hormones of puberty bring. Wait—middle-age has all that, too, but in reverse.

So by our very natures, we forty-somethings and our teenaged friends are heading in entirely opposite directions. We are standing in a port about to board two different ships, one bound for Antarctica and one for Hawaii. Guess which is which.

Except surely we can still find common ground in listening and in silliness. I do know I score brownie points with my daughter for knowing who her friends are, what sports they play, what classes they share, and what after-school activities they are involved in. I know their names well, thank you. I pay attention to detail.

I also know much about my daughter’s taste in music, and I encourage her to teach dowdy-minded me about some group other than, yes, Pink Floyd. Okay, I love Pink Floyd, Sting, and Fleetwood Mac, but apparently there have been musicians since then, with names like Paramore, Owl City, Muse, Samantha James, Florence and the Machine, Death Cab for Cutie, and others blaring at me in, yes, American Eagle, and when I say “blaring,” I say that with insouciance, for I have actually come to love collapsing in their big brown leather sofa and watching the screen in front of me to learn what new artist is playing; so when my daughter comes out with some of those skinny jeans (said with equal stress on each syllable, I’ve been taught, not SKIH-knee jeans, nor skinny JEANS, but SKINNYJEANS), I can say, “Hey, I just heard Florence and the Machine singing ‘Rabbit Heart.’”

And, woah, if those lyrics aren’t gorgeous.

I have also noticed that silliness can heal a multitude of stress, which includes random dancing moments in the car when no one else is around us and Owl City is awesome in my CD player and earth is turning s-l-o-w-l-y. I love Owl City. When I am ninety, I will still be grateful for how Adam Young brought my daughter and me together over a genuine love of his music.

Well, between praying on my knees—NOT a new thing for me—and looking forward to and even planning regular trips to the Mall—very much a new thing for me—I am learning that prayer remains my best connection to my Best Friend and that Sephora is a makeup store at Lenox where you can buy not only these exquisite makeup brushes for jillions of dollars each but also these little sprays in silver bottles to clean them. (And don’t pull the makeup brush’s soft natural bristles when you are drying them; blot them to make them last longer.) (Oh, and by “Mall,” I mean any mall, mind you, from the decidedly low-key Berry Mall to Phipps, with so many points in between. Thank goodness for a GPS! Like Adam Young, it has nurtured my relationship with my daughter, helping me find any mall within the state of Georgia and beyond!)

So between knee-denting prayer and mind-bending hours spent shopping, I am navigating these years like anyone on a lurching ship would . . . awkwardly. And I keep admitting this fact to my daughter, too.

That seems to help.

Is anybody other than me totally enamored with the poignant stichomythia of texting? I don’t mean I love having to press a button three times to produce a “c” (because I gave my Vu upgrade to my daughter when she turned thirteen, I still have an older, press-four-times-for-z Samsung cell). I mean that I especially love texting’s poetically concise, “to-the-moment” lines alternating between two speakers.

Let me give you an example of this happening today between my friend Beth and me. I’ve known Beth for thirty-one years, and so our texts are usually very short and to the point, the way a spaghetti sauce gets after simmering for a long while; it’s reduced to its essential best taste as all the sweetness inherent in the tomato is brought into the spotlight. Here’s the example:

Me texting in the snowy car line at Rome Middle School: “How you?”

I watch the snow falling.

*30 seconds later* (Hear “30 seconds later” said in the French-type accent of the invisible narrator in Sponge Bob Square Pants.)

Beth texts back: “Good! You?”

Me still in the snowy car line, texting back: “Can you chat?”

Beth: “Sure”

The good, quiet pause indicated above by the asterisked “30 seconds later” always feels exactly like the good, quiet waiting I’ve done in my life with a line in the pond’s water and a red-and-white cork floating above. I feel at peace waiting on Beth to text back, or not. I know she’s there, and that’s all that matters.

If I’m just checking in, to see how Beth is, I especially appreciate how unobtrusive texting is. I think she might be busy, so I don’t call. I text her, to see if she’s around. Then, if she answers by texting me back, I might text her again to see if she’s busy or can we chat, does she have time.

If I don’t hear back anything after the initial inquiry, “How you?” I know that eventually Beth will text me back that evening or the next day or whenever her schedule lets up. After three-plus decades of knowing Beth, I’m convinced that she is one of the kindest people on planet earth and, that said, she will kill me for putting her into another blog.

Anyway, if Beth does text me back in a short time after my initial question, “How you?” I will sometimes ask can she chat, and if she is busy, she’ll text back, “Ltr?” We have this understanding. “Later” is always a possibility, for a garden variety of middle-aged reasons. (We also have an understanding that our calls are always immediately interruptible; if any family member calls, all either of us has to say is, “It’s Kate. Gotta go.” Or, “It’s Sarah. Call you back.”)

Yes, often chats hoped for now happen later also because each of us has a forty-nine-year-old life filled with kids and a husband and other To-Do-List stuff to keep track of. You know—toilets break, trees fall on houses, children have crises, adults have crises, and roofs leak, and I am only referring to the Butcher household here!

But my friend Beth and I also know that if we can have a chat now, we will, because somehow time seems more precious than it was when we were both freshmen at Shorter College riding around through endless days in Beth’s blue MG Midget convertible. We have this knowledge that neither one of us is getting any younger here at the edge of fifty, so we love chatting and catching up on our exciting lives—you know, I say, “Here I am in the car line,” and she says, “My son just got home from school and is throwing a snowball at me.”

Now that I think of it, Beth usually has more to contribute to the conversations. In this one in particular that happened today while I was sitting in the proverbial middle-school car line in a gathering snowstorm (which in the South means at least ten snowflakes have fallen), Beth laughed after I said, “Hey,” and then she added, “It’s funny you call just now because I’m sitting here in front of the fire at station five.”

And then I had a moment of mental vertigo because I heard “station” and thought for a half-a-second of the countless hours that I stood at a bus stop in Seoul with my family, waiting for a bus to take us all over that wonderful city. But, never mind my Pause of Confusion (or POC), for in the approximately 11,315 days of our friendship, Beth has heard many of these POC’s.

In this instance, the POC happened in my head because I had to re-play Beth’s comment on the widescreen TV of my aging mind: “It’s funny you call just now because I’m sitting here in front of the fire at station five,” and only for the briefest moment (I must say) did I picture my friend Beth at a bus stop (on a snowy day?) before I realized what she meant. This mental vertigo is partly occasioned by a constitutional aversion I have to sincere positive statements made in my direction.

Beth meant that when I called she was sitting in front of her cozy fire reading my book, Following Christ: A Lenten Reader to Stretch Your Soul, which just came out a few days ago, and that she was at station five of the Stations of the Cross; and that news made me feel as if the world was alright. If Beth is reading my book, all is well.

But because I have a hard time accepting very cool comments like that, even from such a genuine, tried-and-tested friend, I pretended not to understand Beth’s kind meaning and deflected with a joke: “You mean you’re at a bus stop?”

And she laughed to hear yet another one of my eternal remonstrations: “Silly, I’m reading your book.”

Then Beth added in a tone that sounded almost as if she were incredulous and arguing with someone over the book’s merits: “And I like it.”

I knew who that someone was, too. I knew all that Beth was thinking, so I teased her, “You sound as if you’re trying to convince yourself you like the book. You sound incredulous, as if even you can’t believe you like it.”

“Carmen, you know it’s just you’ve been so wishy-washy about it.”

(I notice her kind selection of diction there in the wishy-washy, not “You’ve been so ‘negative,’” or “You’ve been so ‘fault-finding,’” but “wishy-washy”; this is one reason I love Beth.)

Beth continued, “You know I’m arguing with those past lame statements you’ve made to me about it. I LOVE THIS BOOK!”

Beth is referring to my decades-old now streak of self-doubting. (Granted, a goodly portion of self-doubt makes conscientiousness and endless revising happen in writing, which improves a book, surely.)

But, that said, I am not proud of how often I have experienced the unbalancing effects of self-doubt. I am the Queen of Self-Doubting, even though I know that too much self-doubt is certainly not godly, not Christ-like, not fun to be around if you’re my friend, and makes me prone to working too hard to “prove” myself, which in turn leads to exhaustion and depression. I know that self-doubting is often a synonym for self-absorbed, too.

So I’ve tried to pray it out, fast it out, read-the-Bible-it out, and work it out. I’m still trying. I’m still praying. I’m still reading the Bible. I’m still working hard.

The publisher, mind you, has done an absolutely brilliant job with the book. Kudos to Paraclete Press! But I always read through a book going, I should have said it like this. I should have done it like that. Beth more than anyone knows that. She gets to hear page numbers and specific examples.

Well, Sean also knows it. The first time a box of author’s copies arrived in Seoul, South Korea, where I was teaching at Sogang University, I didn’t open that box for two weeks, in spite of my excitement over having a book published.

My husband finally asked one day, “What’s in that box?”

I was like, “Um, Incandescence?”

*Big sigh on his part.* “And you mean you haven’t opened it yet to look at your book?”

“Um, no.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m sure I’ll find mistakes I’ve made in it?”

“Do you want me to open the box for you?”

“I guess.”

So he did. A good husband like that is hard to find. I am grateful for him.

But back to the stichomythia of—not husband-and-wife dialogue, which I also love—but of regular texting with my friend of three-plus-decades, Beth.

My Hildegard-of-Bingen-like self-doubting and constantly-prone-to-worrying soul are two reasons I love the give-and-take of texting with Beth. Her very existence reminds me of the many good things about life—a priceless friendship is top among them. Beth also reminds me that Jesus loves me. I mean that she is kind to me and also that she often says to me, “God loves you. We have to remember that He means everything for our good.”

That may sound like a simple point, but it’s everything to me. It’s the point I most need to be reminded of.

Now you see why I love the simplicity and immediacy of the stichomythia of texting. It keeps a connection that is thirty-one-years YOUNG alive, leads to positive and supportive and hilarious (YES, especially hilarious) conversations on a regular basis, and keeps me in touch with a friend with whom I’ve walked through sunshiny and also life-is-difficult days.

So that’s why—when a text is coming my way, from Beth, saying, “What’s up?”—I always hope I’m not having to help my husband lug a new super-flush, low-water-usage toilet upstairs or to call the tree specialist about the not-very-light oak leaning precisely on our house or to hand my husband a shingle on the other side of the house where the roof leaks for no reason.

Because, as “iron sharpens iron,” this friend is truly a gift from God and makes my texting back, “Not much,” speak volumes.

Thanks, Beth!

Woah. The last time, dear friend, that I posted a blog was December 17, and I look at that date with incredulity because it is only twenty days ago, as chronological days go; and yet in my soul it feels like twenty years have passed.

Granted, that could partly be because I turned forty-nine over the holidays. It was one of my best birthday days ever, thanks to my husband especially, but, still, any birthday after forty gives me pause. I find myself considering time and the events of my life and thinking, Am I still here?

Is there anyone else out there who has the odd quirk of measuring time by the events in their soul rather than by the teaspoons of minutes and hours and days? Soul events are oceans of non-time, and when I try to put them into the human lingo we call “time,” I think how December 17 was really eons ago and also no-time ago.

Over the break I traveled many places without going anywhere. I can’t say that my soul travels smoothly always, but it does get places. I have decided that I prefer the bumps of an honest road than the gliding along on the arrogance of icy certainty.

Always.

Anyway, I emerged from the sometimes dark, much-soul-traveling holidays to having a box arrive on my porch a few days ago. I opened the box, and out poured light, literally in the form of the books inside from Paraclete Press. They have on their cover the brightest, most spring-inspired orange flower, thanks to IHS Designs and Sr. Mary Lane, CJ.

Yes, this year has started with the bang of having Following Christ: A Lenten Reader to Stretch Your Soul arrive on my doorstep. I fell in love with the cover at once. Mind you, I’d seen it before, but never on the final, published version of the book.

The title, when I read it, goes like this in my mind: Following Christ: A Lenten Reader to Stretch Your [and My] Soul because I need the wise words of these ancient Christian writers very deeply, for healing and for growth and (hopefully) for maturing into truly loving God, my self, and others better with more compassion, which seems synonymous with what we call agape love.

This devotional has the wisdom of the desert Fathers and Mothers, Francis of Assisi, lots of women (and guy) Christian mystics, Thomas a Kempis, Bonaventure, Augustine, Ignatius, Dante, AElfric of Eynsham, the “Dream of the Rood” poet, John Donne, and many others. It is meant to help us walk through the season of Lent, which this year begins on Ash Wednesday, February 17, 2010, and ends with Easter Sunday, on April 4, 2010.

I won’t say more, except that my mother called me today to say that she’d read the introduction and loved it (remember: she is my mother) and that everyone who’s seen the cover loves the cover.

Following Christ: A Lenten Reader to Stretch Your Soul can be ordered from Amazon.com or from the Paraclete Press website. Deep discounts are offered for anyone who orders multiple copies from the Paraclete Press website.

I have just finished talking with John Hall at WORD-FM out of Pittsburgh (101.5 FM, see John & Kathy). We were talking about Christmas and about my list of “top 5″ books to read at Christmas.

The sermons in these books are by the greats from different ages—St. Augustine, Martin Luther, St. Thomas Aquinas, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. But they all make the same point: It is amazing that God humbled himself and came to earth as a human baby.

As a soul in dirt mixed with stardust, I find it difficult to grasp that the divine Mystery, the ultimate Being, the Spirit of our loving God assumed what a friend of mine calls this “body of humiliation.” You know what she means. We are all so prone to break down, wear out, forget, do wrong.

In one of these books, St. Augustine calls the miracle of the incarnation the Verbum infans, “the unspeaking infant Word.” That gets my attention—the divine Word of John 1:1 born as a baby who has no words.

I work in words 24/7/365. The wordless Word gives me great hope that I can find the Way by trusting in Jesus with a childlike faith. I don’t have to write it just right or even live it just right (though I wish I could)—I just have to turn my stubborn will to God for help, for healing. For who doesn’t have a wounded soul?

In another of my “top 5″ Christmas books, Martin Luther talks about the accessibility of the divine naked baby. I think he means for us to notice that God made himself vulnerable to us. Isn’t that the hardest thing to do as a human? It is for me. Everytime I make myself vulnerable to God or to another person by confessing my weakness or admitting my mistake, I cringe first and keep on cringing. It is not easy to enter the manger of humility, to expose our naked need to God, to feel the straw of remorse puncturing our pride.

Luther’s sermon reminds me of the many times I have told God my ugly, immature thoughts and desires. I just turn around in my chair in my office and put my elbows on my knees and my face in my hands and *sigh* and look out the window at the fountain and the blue sky beyond it and talk to God, just as I am blogging to you. Only when I talk to God, I tell him everything. Everything. Then I ask to be forgiven and to become less tight-fisted of heart and more loving. I ask God to help me do the things I cannot do alone.

In another of my “top 5″ books for Christmas, Thomas Aquinas’s prayers focus our hearts on the Lord and help us become more intimate with Christ. In another, Bernard of Clairvaux focuses on the Christmas message of “brotherly love.” They remind us that our love must be active, that it must reach out to others in need and companionship. Love must be practical; it must act kindly.

In a book of Dietrich Bonhoeffer sermons, this German minister says that Christmas is best celebrated by those “troubled in soul.” I am one of those people. I am troubled in soul. I am in need of God’s healing touch. Daily. By the second. Every time I fail, I am reminded that only Christ can make me whole.

Therefore, this Christmas I am celebrating the birth of Jesus consciously, attentively, even desperately, in my heart, and with my family here. There are decorations and gifts and such here at our home, but there is little fanfare, just as there was little fanfare in the stable, where horses and cows munched their hay.

And there is vulnerability. I am trying to make myself as vulnerable to God as God made himself vulnerable to me by being born as a naked baby into a world of poverty, war, temptation, greed, and hunger. Hunger of all types. And loneliness. And betrayal. And misunderstandings. And heartache of every sort. I have to be vulnerable to all of these things, by which I mean—I must accept them in grace.

What Christmas says to me is that Jesus knows it all. He even knows that most desperate feeling of abandonment, for that little baby grows up to cry on a horrible cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” There are situations in this world where we turn to God in our desperation and have only that to offer him. He takes it, too, and gives us back an inexplicable peace.

The manger and the cross are superimposed images, in my mind. I don’t have one without the other. Both are images of humility. The first is the most non-celebrity event anyone can imagine. Cows don’t have cameras. Horses don’t Facebook. The second is the worst death imaginable and the most shameful in the Roman empire. From poverty to shame, Jesus—that little baby—will cover it all.

I also read in the Bible that Jesus was tempted as we all are, yet without sin. That comforts me tremendously. So he knows my every weakness and my every sadness, but he did not succumb; and so I can turn to him in my darkest difficulties of soul, for strength.

I also see that Jesus had friends, and here is where I am most grateful this Christmas as I celebrate the birth of Christ. As God-in-man, while on earth, Jesus lives out the joy of friendship. My friends are priceless. They go to depths in my heart that I can’t even put into words. They bring God’s mercy into my life when I cannot see the road ahead. They make the journey worthwhile. They stand by me when the way is hard. Jesus had friends, too, and he knows what I’m talking about.

This Christmas, I am asking God to help me do as Martin Luther says in one of his sermons: I want to celebrate Christmas every day of the year, not just once in December. I need the joy of this season on a daily basis.

I start by praying that God will make my heart larger, like the Grinch’s in that Dr. Seuss Christmas special.

So I bring my “troubled soul” to the manger and there lay down my burdens and my sadness and my sinfulness and my will as my only gifts, in front of that divine baby nestled there in the hay, for he is my savior, my best friend, and my counselor.

Amen.

My friend and an awesome musician, mom, organizer of great community-building activities, and ETC., Ann Boyd, sent me a-link-to-end-all-links in response to my last blog; it is such a terrific response that I post it for you, my Internet-savvy digerati friends here and here and here. Thanks, Ann!

I read looking for answers.

By the dozens, I read books, others’ blogs, student essays, articles by colleagues in academic journals, newspaper columns, online pieces—you name it. I am looking for answers, for peace, for rest for my soul.

Can you separate your thoughts from your feelings, your feelings from your thoughts? Shouldn’t all of our most analytical thoughts be kind and all of our deepest and most secret feelings worthy of Phi Beta Kappa?

No matter how well-written, how brilliant, how insightful, and how helpful a piece of writing is, reading filters experience. I do love that filtered experience, but sometimes I think the best blog would say: “Sit there. Be. Listen to the fountain outside your window.” Or even: “Stop trying so hard. Go get a cup of coffee. Talk with Gary Davis. Be.”

Stop looking for your self in words. Go live. Dare to be loving.

I never seem to have enough time. Now this is a funny statement because I always have the same amount of time every day, so why do I feel I am short of time always? No, actually, sometimes I feel as if I have too much time on my hands. When I’m waiting on something I want NOW, time is a turtle. That “something” doesn’t have to be world peace, either. Ever watch me in the Chick-Fil-A drive-through waiting on something as simple as a chocolate shake? It’s stupid to be that impatient, but I can be, on a bad day.

Regardless, it’s not as if one day I wake up, check my Time Chart to see “Today you’ll have three hours,” and the next day see “Today you’ll have 3,000 hours.” No. Every day I have twenty-four hours.

So apparently I have a time management problem. Or perhaps more accurately I have a time cherishing problem. My minutes seem either to slip away or crawl away. They rarely just are.

The best timelessness I’ve ever known is in writing. No. That’s not true. I remember time stopping seeing Kate for the first time, covered in that white vernix coating newborns have. Tears and time stopping seem to go together. And I remember time stopping when John got off that plane from Korea; he was in my arms, and I hugged him forever—he smelled like baby pee and sour-milk spitup and was brown and soft against my chest. Hugs and time stopping seem to go together. And I remember time stopping when my fiance, Sean, pulled me off a sidewalk in London’s Bond Street shopping district and kissed me hard in an alleyway near Garrard’s jewelry shop, and I kissed him back in a city of seven million reduced to two. Definitely kisses and time stopping go together.

If I cherished time more, wouldn’t timelessness be the norm? Timelessness always breaks in when I’m not in a rush, when I’m open to the cup of coffee I’m drinking or the toothbrush I’m holding or the son whose ear I’m kissing or the teenager I’m listening to. By being receptive to them, my soul dissolves in attention directed outward. Every day this and that is timeless. That granola bar. This friend talking. That lunch with Gary Davis. This crispy french fry Sean cooked. That student asking me about how to apply for a Fulbright grant. This Owl City Fireflies song about earth turning slowly.

Writing, when done right, is a constant dissolving. Loving is a constant dissolving. The question is how do we survive this dissolving.

As humans how do we stay vulnerable and also strong?