Since writing that last post I’ve been thinking about grace.  I’m wondering whether grace is something we need in experience, but not in reality.  To explain…

All of us experience the feeling of being bad at some point, mean or self absorbed or vindictive.  Rebellious in an unhealthy way.  Hurtful.  Like the spiritual says of grace, "how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me."  Very few of us feel deserving all the time of kindness or gentleness or love.

And yet…isn’t life a pretty…how can I put it…difficult challenge for all of us?  Don’t we all carry our own loads of suffering, our own satchels of wounds and accompanying fears, histories that are ours, but also the inheritance of all who have gone before us…with their loads and satchels and fears?  So on a level maybe deeper than surfaces sometimes, don’t we all deserve kindness?  We did not ask to be here (so far as I’m aware).  We did not ask to be situated on our plots of history, or to be forced to cope with the nature and nurture and worlds in which we spin.

The dear girl who was homesick on her first night from home, did she need grace for her misery–undeserved kindness–or simply love?  Tenderness and reassurances that she was fine, and she wasn’t trying to hurt or innconvenience anyone, and it’s okay to learn slowly that sleep-overs can be fun?

I’m wondering whether this isn’t true of something far more expansive than innocent little girls, spilling even into hatred and awfulness and meanness of every kind.  Could it be that the worst of us, the worst in us, doesn’t need true grace, which is something undeserved, but rather love, which I think is?  That in fact the absence or unfeltness of such love, at crucial points, and when we most need it, is why we become "wretches" in the first place?

Maybe experiencing grace–what we percieve as undeserved kindness–is a necessary step toward recovering a sense of what’s actually true:  we deserve kindness.  We are, in fact, okay.  Deeply so.  And the more we come to know it, the more our wretchedness transforms.  The more it starts becoming itself a source of love, which, I think, is what all of us deserve in the first place.

A few posts back I wrote about integration, how I’m trying to connect the stories of my life, stories that sometimes feel like stories from many lives, into one again.  I’ve spent a few hours here and there sitting with myself, letting memories from all of my years wash in and out and over me.  I have pages of sentence fragments now, little sparks of memories that I haven’t thought about for years.  I leave these feeling hugged somehow, like these stories have been for a long time like my 10-month-old son is now:  needing to make eye contact.  Needing that reassurance, often from across the room, that yes, Mama’s here.  She sees you.  That’s all.

One of these newly written sparks came from second grade, I think.  It was my first time spending the night at a friend’s house, and I was excited.  Devon was my friend’s name, and we played long and hard all Friday afternoon before the sun finally set and I creepingly began realizing how far away my house had become.  How much I wanted–no, needed–to see my parents before sleep.  How the light coming in from the streetlamps was different from the light at my house, and silhouettes were everywhere now, so many of them, none of which I could identify, let alone protect myself from, should that need arise.  I began to realize I would not wake up in my bed the next morning.

A yawning emptiness started filling me up.  My limbs got heavy.  Tears burned my cheeks.  And Deven, now sleeping peacefully by my side, slept on.  The silence in the house, sprinkled with unfamiliar sounds, felt like the foreignest of all foreign places, and me the only traveler for miles.  I had to go home.

And my determination grew fierce.  I was such a tender kid that I’m sure it took a good five, maybe more minutes to work up the courage to call home.  I didn’t want to bother anyone–here, or at my house.  But I finally made the call.

"Dad?"

"Yes, are you okay?"

I had begun to cry openly by then.

"I want to come home."

"Are you okay?  What’s going on?"

"I just want to come home."

"Is anything wrong?"

This was a hard one to answer.  No one had hurt me.  No one had been mean.  Devon’s family was asleep and Devon, bleary-eyed, confused, was standing in the kitchen next to me.  We had had a wonderful afternoon.  This was becoming embarrassing.

"N…o," I said, understanding justification was somehow needed, but having none to give, save that I was homesick and, well, just needed to come home.

My dad said he would be right over, and I waited a miserable ten minutes with my little backpack on my lap and Devon trying desperately to understand, why did I have to go?  I had no way of explaining it, and felt just awful for leaving, awful for wrecking a good day, and awful even more at the thought of staying til morning.  Leaving, by that point, had become the lesser of two evils.

"What happened?" Dad said when I got in the car.

"Nothing," I said, tears still on my cheeks.

"Are you sure?  I thought maybe something happened, and you couldn’t say on the phone."

"No," I said.  "Nothing happened."  He looked at me intently and knew this was true.  He seemed relieved.

My misery, however, had reached epic proportions, and no amount of my own pajamas and my own bed and my own street light coming through the blinds could take it away.  I didn’t sleep much at all that night.

The next morning shame clung to my chest, my hands, my feet.  I wanted to be very small, very tiny, tiny small, and have everyone forget I was born.  I squatted by my dad while he tinkered on the mower in the sun.

"Kristin?"  My mom’s head was peering from the back door.  "It’s Devon on the phone.  She’s wondering if you want to come play."

And for just that second, that moment when I understood that rainbow of words, the emptiness inside of me vanished.  The world started turning again.  The offender was pardoned, offered friendship, even, for the price of jumping ship.  I could not believe it.  I let go of my knees.

Shame kept me home that day, but the invitation stayed deep in the softest, most vulnerable parts of my heart.  It stays there still.  It stays there loving me, teaching me about grace.

On a day of conflicted thoughts about being American, conflicted feelings about freedom (whose? and at what cost?), my thoughts turn back to another highway experience, different from the kind I wrote about yesterday.

It was three or four years ago.  I was tuling along in my car–70?, maybe 75mph–on a patch of semi-full road.  A motorcycle cop passes me on the right, and cuts a diagonal swath across all four lanes.  All of us slow down, wondering which of us he’s caught.  But then he cuts his swath again the other way, slowing his own self down.  The cars ahead of him race on as he gets his speed, and consequently ours, down to something like 30.  We quickly realize he’s herding us, keeping the whole pack of us behind him with his slow, graceful turnings.  B–a–c–k, f–o–r–t–h, b–a–c–k, f–o–r–t–h.

And up ahead, on the now-empty stretch, I see chunks of furniture, splintered from a fall.  A second cop is working fast to get them off the lanes and onto the shoulder.  We’re only 20 or 30 yards off when he clears the last piece, and he and the cop on the bike salute each other as the cop on the bike speeds off toward the sun.

I cried.  Seriously.  It was that beautiful.  That perfectly orchestrated.  I’m sure I wasn’t the only one wanting to clap.  Catastrophic danger and silent, graceful protection overlapped on that stretch of burning asphalt, and other than those of us at the front of the pack, no one even knew.  I’m sure some were even peeved by the slowing speeds.  We didn’t ask for it, we didn’t even know we needed it, but help was there, at work.

I often think of that scene when the trajectory of things as big as history, as big as institutions, big as wars or countries or administrations therein–things I feel so small and helpless in the face of–look headed for (or seem smack in the middle of…) disaster.  I think of that scene and hope, deep in my most earnest places, that there are people and powers more seeing, more knowing, more capable than any of us alone can be, to help navigate the dangers that most of us can’t recognize.  I want to join in their work, too, and sing blessings along the way, more expansive than God Bless America, more generous than America, America, God Shed His Grace on Thee.  I want to help imagine and live into existence a world, rather than only a country, or subset within, that is land of the free–truly–and home of the brave.

So it looks as though my posts this summer are circumambulating (!) around the topic of faith change/worldview change and healing, and by circumambulating I mean winding, touching in and moving out from different angles of a core.

Wednesday I made a couple of points about self interest. Today I want to say more on the second one–the idea that I think it’s okay when we can’t meet others’ self interests. There are exceptions to this rule for sure, like when kids need to be fed, or neighbors need us turning our music down, or bosses need us showing up for work on time. I’m not peddling hedonism. The okayness I’m wanting to explore is something other than that. It’s about respect, actually, of the deepest kind, because I think it respects self at the same time as other people.

I want to lean back into talk of Christianity here. I certainly can’t speak for the whole thing, but I can for my experiences with a few subsets of it, mostly Protestant, mostly evangelical, and the challenges the structures in these places create for okayness with not meeting others’ self interests. Leaders’ self interests, specifically.

As I’ve observed it, there’s a combination in these places, a mixing of three things, that makes for a lot of pressure. I’m thinking here of pressure particularly by leaders, on leaders, which for the purposes of this conversation include anyone at all who volunteers or gets paid to do things at church. The combination is a) a belief in hell (defined as eternal, unrelievable torment) and the responsibility of Christians to help deliver people from that fate, b) a societal culture of busyness, where fewer and fewer people can sanely participate in church leadership in addition to everything else they’re trying to do, and c) a decline of interest in religion at all (partly because of ‘b’, but for other reasons as well), and the feeling like fewer and fewer promising-leader-types are pursuing or sticking with leadership in religious places.

Add these up and mix them around and I think what you have looks a lot like fear. Which makes a ton of sense. If we have a mission to accomplish, a terribly important one with eternal consequences, and the people who are best equipped to lead us are not interested or available to do so, a very real, very genuine crisis ensues. Maybe not unlike the feeling I had as a child when I lost my mom in the abyssal chaos of a large department store. By the time I found her again (or she found me), I wasn’t about to lose sight of her legs one more time.

Which corresponds with some of the pressure leaders feel to stay leaders. To maintain or increase church involvement and commitment to the mission. Fellow leaders don’t want to bear the increasing load of responsibility that declining church involvement represents, so the motivation to “keep those legs in view”–to keep our “mothers” and “fathers” operating as such–is high. When a “mother” or “father” hits a crisis, or enters a season of spiritual darkness, or needs time for whatever reason to step back, to make a change, maybe for good, they can get christened bad guys. Deserters. Traitors. Or simply huge disappointments. I felt some of all of these things in my moves away from church, and prior to that, toward others making similar moves. I got back what I gave, I guess.

But here’s what I think now: It’s okay to be afraid. It’s okay to be disappointed. And it’s okay to be stumped about how an important mission will ever get accomplished. But it’s also okay to be the one on the other side of those things, the one causing them (or at least thought to be). There is no inherent equals sign between shocking or disappointing or angering people and doing something wrong. In fact, and as history has demonstrated so many times, evoking such responses could very well mean you’re doing and being exactly what you need to do and be. Christianity orbits around such a story.

It takes courage to walk our paths authentically, courage to be who we are, owning and pursuing our convictions and the questions others may not want us asking, let alone finding anwers to. It takes courage to stick with our paths, too, long enough to see what they’re leading us *toward*, rather than only away from, and particularly when there are highways (thoroughfares of paths alligned) anywhere nearby. Highways are magnets, I tell you, if for nothing else than pulling out our insecurities.

But, as I’ve said elsewhere, I think authentic lives are ultimately the best tonic for everyone. I think they’re the best tonic for the people afraid their mission won’t get accomplished, and for the people who don’t think that mission is the one they want to live, and for the people who don’t give a rip right now about mission at all. Authentic lives honor everyone, I think, and maybe I’ll write another post or more exploring why I think that is. For now though, go read Christy. Her post is why I got this one out of my draft folder and am actually posting it. Her authenticity frees me to be that much more…me.

So that you know how much of my life these days isn’t spent on the kinds of thoughts recently stacking up here…