So about this opening.

Christian Scriptures talk a lot about God.  They talk a lot about people hearing God, worshipping God, speaking with and following God.  Tradition says these texts are inspired, too—are an authority for knowing what’s True.

And in this sense, I want to concur.  I want to stick with tradition.  And I want to talk about an opening that seems to me the heart of the Bible’s inspiration, the heart of Love, really, which is what will get us back to bodies, and what I think can help heal our shame.

Early biblical texts have God calling out a people.  Follow me, God says.  I want to bless you, and through you, everyone else too.  So Abram and Sarai start things off.  They leave everything familiar and follow.  From the very start you’ve got a Special People, and you’ve got a Holy will to bless everyone.

Time passes, and adventures do too, and pretty soon there’s wars being fought in God’s name.  Wars where the texts have God ordering them, ordering slaughter, destruction of entire groups to keep the Special People pure.  Mix with others and you never know what unholiness could happen.

Simultaneously, you’ve got provisions for the alien.  From the mouth of God.  Hospitality codes.  Honor codes.  The alien is not the enemy, God says.  In fact, the alien deserves kindness.  It’s a harsh world out there, a desert, if you want to put it that way.  Without your care they’ll die.

So there’s the Special People and there’s the plan to bless everyone and there’s the matter of racial purity and the sense that even aliens matter.  More than matter, they’re human.  In this, they’re just like you.  And you never know when you’ll need their care, too.

Time passes and the Special People get rich—the people who were slaves and wanderers early on.  They get rich and ignore the poor and take their Specialness for granted.  And the prophets come out scolding.  What do you think you’re doing? they say.  This inequity, this disregard for the vulnerable among you, this worshiping of idols—none of it’s God’s way!

So you’ve got the Special People and the will to bless everyone and the racial purity and the sense that aliens are part of us too.  You’ve got taking specialness for granted and abuse of wealth and power, and impassioned pleas (tirades) against such things.  You’ve got Special People nestled comfortably into their status, nestled at the “underlings’” expense, and voices crying out in the wilderness (or opulent abodes), “This is unholy!  This isn’t God’s way!”

Time passes and rich become poor.  “In” become “out” as the People lose temple and land.  There is much grief over what is lost, much confusion, much wishing for the good old days.  And angry words from prophets, saying This?  It’s actually your fault.  Forget Yahweh and He’ll chasten you.  Forget Him and He’ll send plagues!  He’ll take away everything you love and give what you barely can endure.  Forget Him long enough and you don’t want to know what He’ll do.  There are threats and there is blame and there is shape up or else.  And there is shape up and I’ll be wonderfully kind.  Bless you beyond measure.  A fearsome, fearsome God.

And more time and more stories pass.

And Jesus comes along.  A Special Person in every respect, but doing little by the book.  Or Book, rather, because different groups of Special People have determined an inspired set of laws, inspired interpretations of those laws, that make Jesus look, at least to many, more like Heretic than Holy, and the people he deems Special the very last, the very least of whom the People would expect.  To top his strangeness off, Jesus says, “I am the way.  No one gets to God except by me,” which by that point seems to mean no one gets to God except by widening the sphere of Special, widening the sphere of Holy and the sphere of the fall of grace, which ends up being a lot harder fall than the one from grace, because according to Jesus it’s God that does the falling this time, and it looks to a lot of People like God’s aim’s not too good.

And Jesus gets killed for this.  For his God talk.  For his politics, and his flattening of holy hierarchies.  He gets killed for being a man too many want to follow, and for the nature of that following, which doesn’t tip a tall enough hat to tradition, a tall enough hat to what’s expected of God’s People, let alone the people of Empire.

He gets killed.  Bang.  Or groan, rather, because he’s hung, up on a cross with criminals.  And he says, “Forgive them, they don’t know what they’re doing,” which again is that fall of grace, is that widening sphere of Love that holds the Jews and the Gentiles and the friends who ran away, who feared for their lives and in their flight began to grieve the most horrible grief of all, which is hope dying altogether.  The death of hope.

But the stories keep coming.  Jesus is alive again, and there’s people talking about him, and people getting changed by him—still, even after he died.  And there’s churches getting formed.  Institutions getting started.  And there’s books like Galatians, where people are scolded for obsessing over rightness again, books like James, where Love is more about acting than beliefs.  You’ve got Jesus stories getting told in the very contexts, among the very boundaried groups, his words seemed meant to undo.

This—this is inspiration as I see it.  Not a book transcribed from God.  Not a book where every story told is accurate depiction of God.  But a book that documents over so much time the way things are:  The way people look to and for God.  The way we feel special or unspecial, blessed or abandoned. The ways we protect our own, fear death, abuse wealth and power, make ourselves look good, or blame someone else when we can’t.  The ways we also hear that Voice, sometimes loud, sometimes hardly past a whisper, calling us out of ourselves, or at least the parts of ourselves that are afraid and self-righteous and elitist and…ashamed.  Out of our violence, that would put our very drives, our very elitism, our very need to be special at other’s expense, into the mouth of God.  Into the heart of God, which we turn around and make our standard for how hearts should be.

But that Voice.  It keeps calling.  It keeps turning upside down who we thought God would be.  It’s called from time immemorial, and seeds the whole Book, even as other voices, many other voices, do too.  There’s an opening along the way, I think, in individual stories, but also in the Story as whole, the human Story, to a Love that undoes violence.  And to what we often do to people who talk about, let alone try to live out, such a Love.

So as I see it, in this manner, in a strange and twisted sort of way, the scope of God’s blessing, or rather, the scope that people recognize of that blessing, truly is expanding through Abraham and Sarah.  The trajectory of the stories that got told and written down of them thousands of years ago, that unfolded into the ones from the last millennium, that partnered with so much adventure through time and speak in hearts today—the direction in which they point, and even sometimes lead, is toward an opening of God’s arms. Or rather, a recognition of the infinite wideness of those arms.  Like standing in a circle marked “God’s blessed ones”, watching what we thought were walls, or fences, or boundary lines around us, dissipate like fog in ever-widening circles.

And this—this recognition—is what makes possible the unbranding of shame I think.  The process—internal, alongside dear others, and as whole groups—that I think has to happen for us to know, not intellectually, but viscerally, that there isn’t anything inherently wrong with us.  With our bodies (since that’s, after all, what I’m aiming to speak of here).  That big boobs and long dicks and smooth skin and strong libidos and curves and muscles and hair in all the right places (and none of the wrong); that lack of disease and disability and early (or ongoing) abuse; that any of the things that make models look and seem to function like they do and standards for wholeness and sexiness and desirability what we think exist inherently—that none of this has anything inherent on the broader scope of who we actually are.  Which is real. Which is not standard.  Which is aging bodies of all shapes and textures and (dis)abilities and experiences and wounds and sizes.

I’m out of time and space right now to explain adequately what I mean by all of this, by this unbranding, and by the connections I’m trying to make between the opening I see in the Bible and the opening I think is necessary for shame to go away.  I’ll try to talk more on this next time.  I didn’t realize I had so much to say.

[Inspired by conversations on some of the blogs I read about heterosexuality, homosexuality, and the Christian tradition.]

In addition to so much else, bodies are sexual things.  At least for most of us, for a majority of our lives.  And there is something about our sexualness that’s close to our core, I think, something that makes sexual wounds run deep.  Deeper than bodies, even.  To be sexualized before we’re ready, or by the wrong people, to be molested or raped, to have unfulfilled longing, to have sexual parts that don’t look or work like we’d wish, to be thought undesirable by those we want desiring us, to be called, because of our desires, less than God’s ideal, or willfully depraved:  these are wounds that hit our core.  They hit the soft, impressionable places that tell us fundamental things about ourselves, the places where marks don’t quickly fade, where words, or even looks on people’s faces, are branding irons, and the flanks of our identities, our self-appraisals, unhelpably exposed.

And shame, in one form or another, is what I think the brands all say.  And shame is such an awful, awful thing, because it keeps us hiding, and therefore lonely—hiding sometimes literally, our body or our parts, hiding sometimes figuratively, our self-thoughts, our memories, expressions of our sexual beingness.  It keeps our wounds private.  It keeps us silent when we need to talk and urges us to silence those who do.  “Don’t bring that up,” we say.  It’s too hard to think about.  Too hard to see or deal with each other’s wounds, let alone our own.

I’m not a Christian right now in the ways many might define it, but my roots are there, and so is a lot of education, and it seems like the Christian Scriptures have a lot to say about related things.  In broad strokes, the Bible is a story of opening, I think.  A story of people opening, over time, and not in any straight or orderly fashion, to fuller understandings of love.  Or Love, rather.  And it’s Love that can unbrand our shame, I think.  It’s Love that can soften that marked up place inside of us, and impress it gently, tenderly, with something new.

I want to talk about this opening. 

I have a busy next few days, but when I get a chance to think after that, I want to put more words about this here.

I’m thinking about bodies these days.  Partly because I’m constantly carrying and feeding and wiping and changing and redirecting and cuddling a little one.  Partly because I’ve got an enormous bruise on the back of my left leg that makes me look like I got hit by a torpedo, and I can’t for the life of me think how. 

But partly because of this integration work I’m doing, and the memories I’m re-membering.  We are such bodied creatures, and how we experience life can’t be separated from that, I don’t think.

What I’m wondering these days is whether there are folks out there who love and accept their bodies wholely, and whose body experiences throughout life have by and large been good.  Do people like this exist?  And I’m wondering, of those whose body experiences have not been mostly good (and I know there are lots of these), but who have come to love their bodies anyway, how have they/you come to have such love?  Bodies have been, or at least have been experienced, as such a thorn in so many of our sides–such a source of frustration and anxiety and shame–that the question seems worth asking:  Where can we go from here?  The tall ones and the short ones and the fat ones and skinny ones and the ones with four limbs or three or none.  The ones with bad eyesight, and muscles that won’t work, and joints that ache in the morning and sometimes all day.  And the athletes and dancers, and the children whose energy won’t end, and the diseased ones with and without diagnoses, with and without anyone believing they have something wrong. The big busted and little busted and pimply and smooth, and horny and don’t-even-think-about-it-tonightness ones.  The ones shaped like pears and bean stalks and pregant ladies and bulldogs.  The ones who stoop because they have to, or stoop because of shame, which in some cases amount to pretty much the same thing.

All of us–all colors and frecklednesses and smells!–can’t forget the smells–and textures and amounts of hairiness and wherenesses of that hair:  Where can we go from here, if loving us, not who we aren’t, but who we are, is where we’d like to go?  We are bodies–yes, more than that, too–but we are bodies.  All of us.  How to love that, how to embody these bodies well, and open up space for those around us to love like that, too:  that’s what I’m pondering.

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.

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.

During the season that was the epicenter of my internal shifting–the religious and worldview-shifting I’ve begun talking more about here–I was in a state of constant dissonance. The worst of it lasted about three years, I think. It was dissonance between the me of my childhood/adolescence/early adulthood, and the me that was newly getting born. The two felt like totally different people, not the natural unfolding or growth of one, and when I finally found myself on the other side of the storm (abyss?), I felt like I had amnesia. It felt like my life before age 25 was mostly blank, and the people who had known me before that point were vestiges of some other lifetime, their attempts at interacting in the present with the me of my past things I watched as a third-party observer. “Now, I know I used to know how to answer this sort of question,” I would think to myself, “but I can’t for the life of me remember now.” I would hear people using my dialect of Christianese, and recognize it, but not have words to answer back. Sometimes I wouldn’t even understand anymore what the words meant at all.

The last five years (I’m 30 now) have been a lot about exploring the world anew–a world far more vast and full of Life and Light and Wisdom than it used to appear to me to be–and about building a new sense of self and identity. They’ve been about releasing the “I’m not this” way of defining myself that was so much a part of that tumultuous season of change, and trying to figure out who and what I actually *am*.

Which brings me to the point I’m really wanting to make, which is that I think even those of us who experience things that shake our worlds to pieces–deaths or illness or break-ups or life just going radically different than we ever wished or imagined it would go–even those who experience such things carry inside of them the worlds and identities that they used to inhabit. There aren’t two of each of us, or four or sixteen or a hundred (however many life-altering experiences we have); there is just one.

I think one of the most difficult parts of healing (or growing up, for that matter), the thing that takes the longest time beyond trust, is the process of integration, the process of finally sitting in the presence of all our former selves, and being able to say, “Hello, dear friends. You are all me.” Being able to recognize them as part of who we currently are, and have gentleness and acceptance, rather than shame or repulsion or feelings of alientation from the ones that embody such different values or drives or assumptions than we feel like we have now.

I’m in an integration phase of life right now, trying to learn how to hold in tension the me’s of all of my years. Trying to find ways to tell a Story about myself that holds all of these stories, that gives them all the sense that they’re Home.

For all the intensity of that last post, and the shards and threads bit at the end, I’ve traveled quite a ways from the center of that darkness. I’ve traveled to a land of much happiness, actually. If you’ve read here for any length of time, you know this. And this is precisely what I want to talk about today: the strangeness of healing.

What I find strange is the way that inner healing doesn’t happen all at once, all in one big chunk like the healing of physical wounds often appears to do. Last summer I cut my finger badly, and all year long I’ve watched that cut heal, first scabbing over, then releasing the scab, then becoming a dark red line that slowly faded to the color of the rest of the my skin. It’s appeared as a seemless progression.

Inner healing, though, seems different. Maybe there’s ways that it’s not, but at least as I’ve observed it, it feels like it comes in spurts. Or, maybe more accurately, like all the stages of the healing process stay inside of us, even when externally we’re living the scab stage, or just the fading scar stage, or the not even remembering we got hurt in the first place stage. The stage of open wound, or initial shock, or the early days of throbbing, mind-numbing pain–those stages mercifully don’t stay on the surface forever, but I think they live somewhere inside of us for good. And I really mean that–for good. Unless we could erase our memories permanently, I don’t see how they couldn’t.

So that’s what I’ve been trying to make peace with this year, or maybe the last few: that no matter how happy I feel, how healed and whole and glad for where I am and where it looks like I’m going, there will be times, even seasons, when those other stages of healing or woundedness will surface. It’s just part of how things go. Eventually I might not be surprised by this, and maybe after that, not annoyed. But regardless of how I feel about it, I think that’s how things go.

Some people think of the healing process like a spiraling staircase, where you simultaneously make progress upward or outward from the center of your pain while returning to the various stages of healing repeatedly, as the circle brings you round and round. And I think this metaphor works. I’m wondering, though, whether even that’s more linear than how we experience the process, and whether something else could help more with finding meaning in the midst of the yuck that resurfaces, in the midst of the WTF?! feeling you get when something you thought you were done with shows up again.

So here’s what I wonder: What if healing is like a magicians hat? What if deep in the darkest places of ourselves, at the very bottom of our hearts, all the pain of our wounds and our losses resides, the pain and the various stages of healing, the memories. And what if those things are not monsters, are not snakes or bears or lions trying to tear us apart or things we must cage or silence or muzzle, but doves. What if they’re doves that are ready, sometimes, to be released, ready to come to us as symbols of peace, maybe actual evidence of our movement toward that peace, and the process of putting our hands in our hats and finding them is not evidence of being stuck at all, not evidence of being permanently broken or weirdly addicted to pain, but rather evidence that more peace than we’ve known so far is on its way. And that the pain that is surfacing is not there to stay, but rather wants to fly away, out from our darkness toward light.

This, to me, is the realest, most wonderful kind of magic. This is the stuff that makes my heart sing, and my fists relax in a month when the bottom of my hat has been teeming with eager, bustling life.

Humor me for a second. Before I tell you what this post is about, I’m wondering if you can think of something you believe all the way to your toes. Like something really important. Maybe that your family loves you, or people are fundamentally good, or we’re living in the midst of unprecedented social change. That God exists. Think of whatever it is, whatever thing that you almost don’t need to talk about you know it’s so true, but maybe simultaneously can’t help talking or thinking or writing or preaching about. Just picture it. Hold it here for a second.

Now. Picture someone giving you the irrefutable news that that thing is not true.

I think of John Nash in Beautiful Mind in that scene where he’s been hospitalized and the doctor is talking to his wife about what it must be like to learn and comprehend that you’re schizophrenic, that those people in your life who are real like yourself, real like the ground beneath your feet or the sound of your own mother calling you by name—those people don’t exist. No one else sees them. Only you. What can you trust anymore, if this fundamental thing, this thing that helps you make sense of the world, or your life, or your work or marriage: when this bedrock thing itself can’t be trusted? I imagine very little.

Or rather, I don’t have to imagine. This was the experience of my early 20s. No, not being institutionalized for schizophrenia. Mine was the experience of pulling a thread, a little snag of something in my religious worldview, and watching the whole thing unravel, row after row, until much like that lamp I wrote about last time, only piles were strewn all around, wiggly threads freed from the straight lines and geometric shapes they had made only moments before. My world was pulled apart, and it confounded me that life itself kept on going, kept on turning like the earth was still in orbit, like the sun hadn’t just exploded and every means I knew of sustaining life and hope and meaning hadn’t just flung off into space along with it.

Not everyone loses something so important. Just like not everyone has a lover cheat on them, or a child die. Not everyone has awful memories surface, or gets a terrible disease.

But many of us do. And I guess I want to say a word, or a few, for how long it takes to recover from these kinds of losses. How working through the shock and the anger and the numbness and the disorienting, debilitating pain can take years, decades even. How learning to trust again—anything, let alone what’s associated with the thing that was taken away—often can’t happen in strides, but comes, if at all sometimes, in tiny little breaths, tiny centipede steps sometimes, and that anyone who tries to force it on us faster can make it come more slowly.

It takes a long time, maybe a lifetime, to trust again. A long time to honor the thing that was lost. And I think it takes a longer time yet to have eyes to see the things that weren’t lost, things that maybe just got hidden behind what was. To grow a stomach that can actually be filled on these things, a tongue that can taste their sweetness, even when the lost things still remain lost.

I’m standing among shards and threads of many colors, weaving back together my insides, my heart, even as I weave and build and search and find a life that has meaning, that once again feels filled up with God.

At the vertex of our couches sits a table, and on that table a lamp with a bead-fringed shade. The noteworthy thing, the thing that to this day confounds me, is the utter magnetism of that fringe. We cannot sit near it without touching those beads, handling them, spinning the whole shade so the row of them tap tap tap taps along our fingertips.

Needless to say, our baby likes them, too.

The problem for the baby is that we don’t want him grabbing the shade and pulling the whole lamp down. We’d prefer the toy upright (the shade spins better that way). This means he is left to reeaaachhh as far as he can from the arms of the couches toward those beads, only to brush them barely with a fingertip, maybe two, before switching hands and reeeeaaaaching as far as he can with the other hand in hopes of a better angle. If ever he actually grabs hold, one of us immediately loosens his grip and he has to start reaching again.

This is exactly how I felt for a long time with God.

While God hasn’t been a lampshade so much, a certain version of God has had the same draw. It’s the version you hear about sometimes at church—the one people sing about and give testimonials describing. The one in certain Bible stories. It’s a he, usually, and a lot like a person. Only more…spiritual. Super powerful. Super interested in all the details. He knows everything and loves everything…except sin, but even that he takes care of…and he wants people asking him for things, in fact likes this, because he loves giving people what they need and then some. Ask and it shall be given to you. If you worship him and honor him and listen for him and believe that Jesus takes totally care of sin, you’ll hear him (he’ll speak to you), and you’ll see him (he’ll do things obviously in your life), and you’ll feel how much he loves you, which is so much it’s almost funny. He’s like the dad and brother and friend and every once in a while mother you could only ever dream of having, all rolled into one.

I don’t know about you, but for me, there’s a lot of pull in that. I suppose there’s wistfulness, too, for a bit more privacy maybe, a day off from such unrelenting observation. But by and large it sounds nice. A lamp totally worth pursuing. Which is what I did.

I reeeeaaaached with all the Bible reading I could muster. I reeeeeaaaached with prayers and weekly fasts. I leaned over every armrest I could find, nearly to my detriment, joining prayer teams, planning study groups, doing missions (even in Africa!), leading worship, running kids clubs, running period (the body is God’s temple), moving to the inner city, earning seminary degrees, teaching Bible classes, ET AL, in hopes of catching the prize: Union. Oh, the thought! Handfuls, fistfuls, even mouthfuls of God! (If the baby had access, I’m sure the entire shade would be in his mouth.)

In all honesty, the longer I live the more it looks like that’s actually what I got. Or rather, never didn’t have, since God seems suspiciously inseparable from everything there is.

But defined a certain way, that prize was always just beyond my reach. It was visible, and that’s what was so maddening, luminous, even, in the light of so many songs and scriptures and heartfelt testimonials, but always either further than my fingertips, or taken from my hand the second I thought I took hold. This God, dear girl? This magnet planted smack in the middle of our living space? It’s only to look at. Because honey, if you do much more than that, the thing could fall down.

I’m here to say you were right (you being a voice I made up). It could and, well…did fall down. I got big enough and strong enough and finally grabbed that fringe tight fisted, and one excruciating, deafening crash later, I was lying, quite stunned, on my back among shards.

There’s a legend in Jewish lore about a universe preceding ours, one so filled up with God that it broke into gazillion pieces. POW! So filled, in fact, that the light itself broke apart. Now each of us is, or at the very least has within, a piece of that light, and lives among the mingling of broken universe and broken light. It is our world, and our God, we’re commissioned to mend.

Here’s what I wonder: I wonder whether that lamp I so tenaciously reached for, the one that seemed so totally whole and so totally desirable for so long, was already broken to begin with, already part of this universe we’ve inherited that needs mending. I wonder whether knocking it over was the only way I could ever come to know obviously what that lamp already was: shards of God-light and broken stuff mixed.

I can’t put that lamp back together (believe me, I’ve tried). I can’t have the God I thought I wanted. But what I can do is handle the pieces now, freely. There’s no danger of anything breaking. Those beautiful beads aren’t attached to a form anymore, aren’t set just so to catch light. But I’m thinking many of them actually are Light, or flecks of it, and I’m willing to spend a lifetime with so many others, picking through pieces not just of that lamp, but of our world, finding and being and putting back together God.