Monday of the Third Week of Lent: Prayer

The moment my baby boy was born he was placed on my chest where he rested quietly for the next four hours.  We were each attended to with him lying right there.  He gazed at me and blinked but mostly he was still and watchful as we began the process of seeing one another.  I did not experience childbirth as particularly painful; rather, intense.intense.intense, and demanding complete focus, relaxation, and calm.  I felt good when he arrived but I was admittedly exhausted.  It had been hard work.  Very hard work.  "Thank you Jesus!" were my spontaneous words when he finally emerged.

Three days later I stepped into the shower at home and the tears finally came, streaming until the water ran cold.  I believe tears are one of the body’s deepest languages.  There was simply so much to express…my entire life frame moving from pregnancy to labor to birth in a matter of hours, the profoundly cellular engagement every nerve of my body participated in during those hours.  There is no way to process any of it as it happens…you just move through it moment by moment and go about the integrating work later.  But that work happens on the go, blended with the early days of having a newborn and moving into a new life.  Over the coming weeks and months I would find myself at my wits’ end, depressed and feeling utterly lost.  It seemed nothing was the same and I was unfamiliar to myself.  I was tired, yes, although that wasn’t the hardest part.  My baby had a dream temperament but I was in the throes of an adjustment that felt more like crawling through thick mud at midnight.  There were some very, very dark days.  I recall one afternoon when my sweet babe was barely a month old, sitting with him in the bedroom, tears drenching my face and thinking, "I have died.  Something in me has died, and it's just going to be this way.  Maybe in a few years I’ll come back but right now I’m just gone.”

Richard Rohr calls the soul the place where the human meets the divine.  While my prayer upon my son’s birth was a two word offering of gratitude, my prayers during the ensuing several months were one word long.  Or less.  And some combined with words I rarely use.  And there were lots of those prayers.  I gave up mascara for the first few months because I cried so much.  I don’t recall exactly but I think the leaves had turned colors before my husband could leave for work most days without seeing me in tears.  But trying to feel God in the midst of the blur kept me closer to some semblance of self-connection even as I felt pretty unhinged.  Often crying was all the language I had, and I used it unsparingly.  I had to.  And I couldn’t help but do it.  I had to voice what was going on in some way.  And it helped remind me that I was actually alive, with a sliver of hope in my heart.  My soul was right there.

I don't have strong traditions around Lent, but this year Jonathan and I are reading through a collection of poetry, one each evening.  The poets range from Alcuin to Anne Bradstreet to Bob Dylan, and span several centuries with everything from slave spirituals to church hymns to modern day jazz lyrics.  We're loving it.  A couple weeks ago I posted a beautiful piece from Joyce Rupp and this evening I have to share George Herbert's thoughts on prayer.  Prayer can be a bit of a moving target...it's not an end in itself but it somehow seems prone to gathering moss along the way, becoming a 'technique' with a list of required elements, and often laden with expectation.  Herbert disallows that.  His list is a little more sunny than I’d like – there are some less “pretty” ways of authentically praying that he doesn’t mention – but I like it nonetheless.  There have been times when I’ve borrowed ancient prayers and times when I’ve cried out with a simple “Help” and times when my heart was simply known to God.  I’m confident we could all add our own lines to Herbert’s list...the varied ways in which people pray is limitless.  For me, this sonnet underscores the living nature of prayer, the breathing of it.  As I reflect this Lent on the past several months, I’m grateful – deeply grateful – for the voice of prayer, for the intertwining of rest and movement in life even when it feels stuck, and that prayer, even when all seems as dross, is yet dynamic as a reach toward hope and liveliness.

Prayer the Church's banquet, Angels' age,
     God's breath in man returning to his birth,
     The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth;

Engine against th' Almightie, sinners' towre,
     Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
     The six-daies world-transposing in an houre,
A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear;

Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse,
     Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,
     Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,
The Milkie way, the bird of Paradise,

     Church-bels beyond the stares heard, the soul's bloud,
     The land of spices; something understood.

Prayer (I) by George Herbert, 1633

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©2014 Mindy Danylak (except George Herbert poem)

10 years & 1 baby

Having a baby is like suddenly getting the world's worst roommate.

Anne LaMott ... Bird by Bird

Jonathan and I have had a pretty consistent tradition of doing something to celebrate our anniversary every year, be it dinner out or breakfast in, toasting with fizzy water on a picnic or bubbly on the patio, staying in town or exploring on the road.  I almost always write a card for him.  Two years ago I wrote a little piece on the occasion of our 8th wedding anniversary and shared it here.  This year we did something completely different.

Yesterday, Saturday, was our 10th anniversary.  It's the first time we've had an anniversary on a Saturday and we started celebrating Friday night with a bottle of bubbly, both of us hoping for an easy end to a rough day....baby boy received 5 vaccinations on Friday morning and was so out of sorts we skipped going to a dinner group of friends I'd been really looking forward to seeing.  So bubbles hit the glass and we smiled and kissed and toasted.  And before I got two sips in baby boy woke up.  A few hours later I woke up around 3 am to feed him and had a sore throat and stuffy nose, a full-on cold in the brew.  In the morning Jonathan made pancakes and I made oatmeal (I'm doing gluten & dairy free for the little guy...) and it was almost 1 pm by the time we got out of the house.  We stopped at Whole Foods for picnic food & took off for a park we'd never been to for a walk we'd never been on.  The clouds turned dark as we drove north and it started sprinkling just after we turned off the main road.  Ten minutes we later discovered that the bird sanctuary stroll we'd been looking forward to started a couple thousand feet down a gravel road past a water treatment facility, complete with treatment pools and the sheriff making an arrest.  We ended up eating our picnic on a table not far from the parking lot, camouflage fishing boats on the launch nearby, then strolled down the river for a little bit before coming home, where I crashed at 4 pm for an hour with a major headache and Jonathan kept the entering-evening-fussiness baby relatively happy.  I was back in bed by 9 pm with the finally-asleep baby boy while Jonathan babysat a book on data warehousing.  I even forgot to have someone take a picture of the 3 of us.  We plan to reschedule our 10th anniversary.

But in the meantime, I have this to say:

When we brought the little guy home, Jonathan carried him into the house and my sister got our bags out of the car and we set up shop.  And a couple days later all hell broke loose as exhaustion and hormones kicked in and breastfeeding appeared to be an utter failure and my body began to process having been through an unmedicated 12 hours of labor plus 4 hours of pushing out an 8 lb 11 oz baby with a 15 inch noggin.  I honestly never felt like it was more than I could handle, but giving birth to him was hard work.  Really hard.  And my body needed to say so.  On top of that I was super tired and completely overwhelmed.  So the tears started and they lasted for about five weeks.  I'm almost not kidding.

I'll share more of that story eventually, but I give those details simply to tell you that my husband is amazing.  Every morning I would eat the five-star breakfast my sister whipped up, feed the baby, hand him off to her, and then crawl, sobbing, back into bed, where Jonathan would simply hold me until I cried myself into sleep.  Jonathan was so tuned into me and himself, processing through his own experience of everything around our little boy's birth and listening as I processed through mine.  Our little roommate is entirely disruptive.  And entirely good.

I've heard women say they fell madly in love with their baby upon the moment of birth, but honestly I felt that more toward Jonathan than my baby.  I adore my baby, but my sense of need for and connection to Jonathan was primal.  We're both pretty independent and the downside of this is that it's too easy to live more parallel to each other than we'd like.  That took a monumental shift in the first few weeks after our son arrived.

As much as I love celebrating in a festive way, I feel like the real celebration of what Jonathan and I are (which I wrote about here) spoke its most powerful voice in those days when we were both simply trying to keep our heads above water and generally not being able to do so, but were instead able to simply be moved along the drift and tumbled through the waves to a better place.  I don't think there's any great honor in seeking out hard stuff for its own sake, but I do think that the most pivotal experiences in life are usually the most difficult.  At least, that's been the case for me.  And like our own personal development, relationships develop new bonds through those times too.

There is no one on earth I would rather be married with, creating life with, moving through reality with.  Happy 10th anniversary, my love!

Because it is the nature of love to create, a marriage itself is something which has to be created,

so that together we become a new creature.

To marry is the biggest risk in human relations that a person can take…

If we commit ourselves to one person for life this is not,

as many people think, a rejection of freedom;

rather it demands the courage to move into all the risks of freedom,

and the risk of love which is permanent;

into that love which is not possession, but participation…

It takes a lifetime to learn another person…

 

When love is not possession, but participation,

then it is part of that co-creation which is our human calling,

and which implies such risk that it is often rejected.

 

Madeline L'Engle ... The Irrational Season

Singing with Jamie

I remember the very first time I met my sister-in-law, Jamie.  She was sitting on the brick wall outside the north entrance to Seattle's University Presbyterian Church.  It was a chilly Saturday morning in early 2001 and she was helping out with a work day offered by college students preparing to go abroad for the summer.  I don't remember this, but I'm willing to bet she was holding a Starbucks Americano.  A few months later she, my brother Ned, and two others left for Turkey for the summer.  They came home with carpets and stories and Jamie's filled journals and Ned's newly pierced ears, dyed red hair, and Bono-style sunglasses, and both of them with stars in their eyes.  Shortly thereafter they started dating and I moved to Europe.  Ned called me a few months later when they were engaged in February.  Jamie and I talked on the phone a time or two and she sent me Crayola markers and cards she illustrated and a verse from Zephaniah:

 

On that day it shall be said to Jerusalem:

 

"Fear not, O Zion;
let not your hands grow weak.
The Lord your God is in your midst,
a mighty one who will save;
he will rejoice over you with gladness;
he will quiet you by his love;
he will exult over you with loud singing.

I will gather those of you who mourn for the festival,
so that you will no longer suffer reproach."

I get chills from the words and the song in my own heart is wet with tears.

Jamie and Ned were married the following August on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon.  They made promises and danced and shed tears and laughed and Ned spontaneously kissed the bride at the beginning of the ceremony, prompting a mock rebuke from their pastor that it wasn't time for that yet and charmed, delighted laughter from the gathered crowd.  Their lives continue to play like that.  Four children and eleven years later they are still singing, this time a song that mixes in sorrow but that rings clearly with their thick, abiding love for each other and echoes of profound living.  Here is her song this morning.  I love you, Jamie.

http://nedabenroth.blogspot.com/2013/08/an-update-from-jamie.html?spref=fb

On In/Fertility. And Children. And Being People. And All That.

A friend recently sent me an article about Anna Karenina. The timing was perfect, partly because I was in the midst of re-reading the book (before seeing the new movie, which I want to see for its fabulous costumes) but also because the writer's point about the idolatry of giving one's entire self over to a person dovetailed with things I've long thought – and have been recently thinking about again – about marriage and children.

Jonathan and I have been married for a little over 9 years.  I always felt that if we had kids it would be good and if we didn't it would be good.  There has always been a little underlying question there for us, but I wasn’t worried about it.  But since we didn’t have children over the years, I especially appreciated the women who got me – who understood my blend of openness to having kids, occasional uncertainty and fears about having kids, and contentment if we never had kids, all of it woven with awareness of both grief and celebration in either case.

Plenty of women feel it differently.  They’ve always wanted kids.  Or they got married and wanted to have kids.  Or some have never wanted kids.  For me, it’s not that straight, and while I didn’t want my fears to rule, neither could I “fake it till I make it”.  As I searched for voices that would resonate with mine, I found them hard to find.  I've heard polarized versions certainly but not mine.  So I’ve felt a bit of a compelling draw to see if I can articulate a few thoughts here in a way that describes my experience, creatively and maybe with a little humor confounds a few assumptions, helps illuminate something of the width of being God's in this world, and offers accompaniment for others. That oughta be easy enough, eh?

Jonathan remembers me talking early in our marriage about liking the idea of having 3 kids and he also remembers periods when I wasn’t sure I wanted to have kids.  I’ve always felt that mix.  Motherhood never felt like an imperative for me.  I've never been one of those women who felt like I had to have kids, that it's what I "was made for".  It wasn't something I was adamantly opposed to; but it also wasn't a centering point for me.  I knew that even if I was a parent one day I couldn’t see finding my sense of self in my children.  I felt the same way about marriage and still do.  I wouldn't trade Jonathan for anything, I utterly adore him.  But even as we are each transformed in our relationship, neither of us finds ourselves in the other.  Being married with him is not who I am in terms of grounded identity.  The same is how I see having kids.  If it happens, it happens.  If it doesn’t, it doesn’t.  It changes a lot, but the essence of who I am is not defined by that.  I turn to God for that.

But when I got married it seemed like kids were almost assumed.  Why else would you get married?  You might feel uncertainty around parenting but of course you’d have kids.  And voicing something beyond that was almost heretical when it was really only disruptive.  Truthfully, it really bothered me because those questions about motherhood don't usually start by asking about who you are; they start with wondering why you're not one, or when you'll become one, or don't you want to be one?  At a party earlier this year Jonathan & I got into a conversation with a couple.  The wife talked a lot about their sons, the husband his work.  After a bit she asked us if we had kids.  When we said no, the conversation literally stopped, I kid you not.  It was pretty uncomfortable.  I tried to fill the space for a moment or two with what we were involved in, but they were clearly done.  Neither of them had anything left to say.  It’s like parenthood becomes the central pin you’re identified around.  Absent that, you’re almost nothing.

Both Jonathan and I have been blessed by people who do not have kids and who are committed to caring for others in ways they couldn’t if they were parents.  I deeply admire and respect them.  What about them?  And what about people who can’t have kids?  If having children is so key as to be assume-able, what’s being said about people if they are childless (I hate that word) in either case, by choice or by chance?

While we weren’t "neutral" on the topic of wanting kids, neither Jonathan nor I assumed we would be able to have kids. We certainly didn't marry with a plan around having children. In fact, our pre-marriage conversation about kids fell sometime in the final few weeks before we got married – it was fine to not know numbers and timing and have a plan, but I thought we at least needed to know if either of us definitely didn’t want kids.  It went something like this:

Me:      So we haven't really talked about kids, do we need to?

Him:    I'm not sure.

Me:      Do you know for sure that you don't want kids?

Him:    No

Me:      Ok

End of discussion.

Those of you who know me well might find the brevity of that surprising, but that's really all there was to it. It was similar to our pre-marriage discussions about finances, community involvement, retirement, cohabiting, career aspirations, vacations, vegetarianism (ok, not really) and other kinds of Big Things you’re supposed to talk about before the vows.  And so we were married.  And honestly, over the years "kids" really came up relatively little.  We'd meet the topic here and there, and there remained unexplored questions, but neither of us expressed much urgency around it.

Because it’s who I am, I would check in every now and then to see what Jonathan was thinking. When he turned 40 he told me, "it's not that I'm dying to have kids right now but I don't want to turn 50 and regret never having tried." So we decided to try. For non-fertility related reasons, I'd been off birth control for several years and in that time had only one or two unexpected "I wonder if I'm pregnant" moments (I wasn't). For brief stretches during those years we tried getting pregnant but frankly being so focused on it really wasn't very fun, and I am not a good fertility tracker. Absent a compelling expression (like his directness when he turned 40), I was content sailing along in other streams. But he turned 40 and we got serious.  And several months went by. I eventually signed us up for information sessions at two adoption agencies and a fertility clinic.  We weren’t committed to adopting but it was an option and we wanted to explore it.  I’d never felt like I had to be pregnant to have kids (although I have thought a pregnancy wardrobe would be fun – the clothes are cute!) but it was an option too so we explored it as well.  The doctor at the clinic said, "here's what I think, here's what we'll do, and you won't be doing the same thing in a year."  I loved her.  For several reasons, we went that route instead of adoption.  So I knew that in a year we'd know:  we're either having kids or we aren't.  That was over a year ago.

I have friends who've given birth, who've adopted, who've never done either, who don't want to, who would love to but are single and don't want to be single moms, who have given birth or adopted as single women, who’ve been through termination of a pregnancy, who’ve given children up for adoption, who've gone through multiple miscarriages and multiple failed adoptions. Women whose stories around having kids are full of fullfilment and others whose stories are full of pain. Many whose stories blend a lot of both.

As we started this process last fall I felt a genuine curiosity about how it would be for us.  I didn't see it mostly as me becoming a mom, I saw it as us having a baby, and on a route that was familiar to us through many couples we know but experientially new for us.  Some of it was as easy and blasé as brushing my teeth.  And some of it was really, really hard.  Emotionally draining.  Physically uncomfortable.  I got tired of tests and procedures.  Very tired of it.  Anxious about a few.  Angry occasionally because it mattered to Jonathan too yet it fell to me to research procedures and schedule us for information sessions and appointment times and ultimately to put my body on the table.  He had his moments too...babies require two people.  There were times when I was ready to be done, when it felt like the damage to the soul was almost too much.  Toward the middle of summer as we talked about it one day Jonathan said he'd rather be with me than have kids with someone else, which was sweet and good timing and something I knew, but which I grasped the truth of with both hands because there were times when I didn't know how much longer I could keep up.  We didn't go as far as you could, but you can't undergo much around fertility treatment without some sense of being invaded.

The cycle of hope and disappointment can be devastating (for both men and women).  That wasn't the hardest part for me.  The hard part for me was the waiting, the staying in it.  And in that staying and waiting, I carried my uncertainties and fears and my full-on openness.  I tried not to leave anything behind.  Staying in a process whose end was somewhat clear but ultimately would be defined by us.  I didn't feel free to make commitments that might last more than 8-12 months, and that meant not doing a couple things I really wanted to do.  Trying to figure out the balance between putting some things on hold and yet not putting ourselves on hold – the heart of that personhood/identity crux.  Jonathan and I had decided where our limits were and that helped.  We knew we'd try some things but not others.  Some options simply felt more drastic than would meet their value to us.  But in the meantime we were going through this process that I knew we'd set aside a year for but could actually last longer than that.  Because you do enough cycles of everything and then at some point you decide you're done.  Or you take a break and re-tool for the next step, if you want to take the next step.  But even if you've paid your final bill from the clinic and deleted the medical assistant's phone number from your speed-dial, you know that unless a surgical procedure occurs there's always that off-chance of pregnancy and you wonder if you want to remain open to that possibility or if you'd rather just say "no" to it so you are free to say an unequivocal "yes" to other things.  It's a bizarre place to be, and it was the part that brought me to tears and exhaustion.

I'm married to a fairly placid man, and I mean that in the kindest sense.  He is sentimental and intuitive and cares deeply.  He also doesn’t express things with much volume, and even less under pressure.  It takes a lot of work to get him riled up enough that the more juicy bits come out.  And I know...I've tried many times over the years to push him to that tipping point.  At any rate, when he is ready to speak it’s always worth listening.  While I knew we both cared and felt invested in the process, I came to know that Jonathan & I also felt that in different ways.  It’s a little terrifying…the questions…“when will we know we’re done? and will we both know it at the same time? and what if we don’t?”  I knew that the year-end would bring a very different kind of grief for him than for me if it meant we weren't having kids.  We'd both feel it, but for different reasons.  There's no way to prepare for that, it was just a reality I began tracking with.  How to be together in our own ways.

A few of our family and close friends knew what we were in, and talking with them was usually good.  I knew that I could carry everything to them and they wouldn't look at me like there was something wrong with me.  Or I could not talk about it and they were ok with that.

One of the most gracious gifts came from my sister.  Six and a half years ago she had their second baby.  That summer when they were over for a weekend Mel and I sat in my sunny living room talking.  I’ve always admired how after she had kids Mel was still so actively interested and inquiring about people and the world.  I appreciate that about her deeply.  That summer, we were both at transition points, her with another baby and me with a shift in commitments.  From the outside it seemed like the perfect time to have a baby.  But I acutely felt a desire to not have kids during that period.  I struggled with how to describe my heart to her, my not knowing, my uncertainty.  In the midst of it all, she said the most loving thing anyone had ever said to me about it:  "Mindy," she said, "I think you'd be an amazing mom.  But if you never have kids that's fine."  Even though her words were what I knew to be true, I seriously felt like I’d been set free hearing her say them.  My sister has three kids.  She adores her children.  I knew she’d adore mine.  She loves being a mom and holds motherhood in very high regard.  I knew that it was something she would enjoy doing together with me.  And in that moment I also knew (again) that she loved me too.

Here's my bottom line:  I think that life is basically about creating life, in all the many varied ways that happens.  In the midst of everything, I always came back to that:  what is it for me to create life right now?  I felt like my constant prayer was “God, remind me who I am, who you are, and how that creates.”  Because even if somewhere in this process something "worked" and we had a child, it would be fundamentally altering, and I would be bringing myself along.  My heart, my soul, my energy, my living.  However life goes, with or without children, creating is vast, a realm wherein we get to hear and experience the voice of God in our very selves and others.  It’s a truly phenomenal thing to know that we matter that much!  A few years back I revisited the question “what is the voice of God in my life?”  I came to know that the voice of God is in my own voice, my own life, my own being.  As it is in everyone’s.  The person I am is completely and fully unique across all of place and history – no one, ever, has been exactly like me and never will be.  The individual person that I am, that I was created to be, matters.  Cosmically.  As I play out in the world, whether with kids or primarily in other ways, an en-livening is possible.  And THAT is stunning to me.

And that's what I wished was the dominant thread, the affirmation I wanted to hear. I know there are millions of women out there who say that they were made to be moms. And I can believe them, that they really do feel that way; but I also suspect that being a mom is like other meaning-ed undertakings in their life:  it’s on the path to becoming who they’re made to be. That's not to say their motherhood is not fulfilling or enriching or transforming or grounding.  It can be all that and more.  And yet it's not enough.  It'll never be enough.  It'll be powerful and influential and pivotal.  But if they had never been moms they wouldn't cease to be or make significance.  They wouldn’t be less of a woman.  Their story wouldn’t be over.  I know because of my own life, and because of the millions of women out there who would desperately love having children but who aren't/can't, and are still vitally alive and creating in the world.

It's now December, with Christmas just a couple weeks away. We put up a Christmas tree last Saturday afternoon and hosted the neighborhood shindig on Sunday night. The year allocated to tests and procedures has ended. And since I know you’re wondering, I’ll tell you:  we're expecting a baby in June!  And all that comes with it.  I am slow to excitement around most things in life, it’s not my immediate go-to response; but Jonathan was immediately on cloud nine and the whole thing is starting to become more real for both of us.  And we are both deeply happy.

And I keep thinking about all the things I usually think about and am dreaming about some endeavors I want to undertake.  I fully anticipate profound changes.  A friend was over at the house recently & commented that "it's finally going to look like someone lives here!"  You laugh at that being a profound change...  Messier though it may become, I'm pretty sure I still won't like stuff strewn all over the place.  (Except shoes....I'm good with shoes being everywhere.  As long as they're cute shoes.)  With all that and more, though, I'm also pretty sure my heart will remain drawn to the things God opens me to see in the world, and those will expand, simply because that's how life – and love – works.  It’s grounding and it’s moving.  There is always more to the story.

This baby that started growing a few months ago will forever be attached in some way to us but we are not the extent of its being.  In fact, we are barely the beginning.


©2012 Mindy Danylak

Easter

Holy Week is a lesson in how life is.  Some Christians emphasize celebrating the risen Christ and triumph over death, others emphasize his death, the darkness and the grave.  But love is both.  Both are real and important, for themselves and for each other.  I am by nature more optimistic than pessimistic, but I have also known more pain than I'd like to have known for my age.  I know it's both.  I'm feeling a little blah lately; and, even with that being said, I think this year I'm landing more in the celebratory mood around Easter.  Maybe I need it as the balance for where I am.  At any rate, this coming Sunday is Easter and I can't wait.  I've been looking forward to it for a year.

I didn't grow up celebrating Easter.  My family was quite 'religiously involved' but the group we were in didn't observe any of the traditional Christian liturgial seasons...Christmas, Lent, Holy Week, Pentecost, Ordinary Time...none of that.  Actually, I didn't even know there was such a thing as a church calendar until my early 20s.  No, we weren't Jehovah's Witness...it was probably not a group most of you have ever heard of unless you know me and we've talked about it or you grew up in or around it yourself.  There's some information out there but it doesn't convey the experience.  I'll share more of my story someday when I get around to writing it, but for now I'll just say that it was a Christian-esque group with some idiosyncracies that included not paying attention to the church calendar.

So the group didn't do Easter.  I knew that many people celebrated Christmas as a religious holiday, although we celebrated it as a fun family holiday.  But Easter was a mystery, almost entirely off my radar, and we didn't do anything around it.  I vaguely remember two of my aunts talking about their families gathering for Easter...the big dinner and the family photos and all that but I never understood what the big deal was.  A couple years Mom hid plastic eggs full of foil-wrapped chocolates around the house but it was a little odd.  I understood gathering for Christmas, because we did that.  But Easter?  It felt like any other Sunday to me.  I barely noticed that it was Easter at all, let alone that it meant anything.  My relatives were all in the same religious group as us so I figured it was just something they did for some reason that my family didn't do.  I let it go and never wondered about it.  Then we left the group in 1995 and it was sometime in those years, so probably in the early 90s, that I realized that on Easter Christians celebrate the resurrection of Jesus.  But realizing it, even observing it every year, didn't mean I developed an attachment to it.  Until last year.  Before that, there were a just couple years that stood out as significant Easter seasons for me.

2002.  I was living in the Czech Republic that year and took the train up to Krakow for the weekend with Brooke, Megan and Priya.  We attended mass at the Dominikanie Krakow (Dominican Church and Monastery) then walked up to Wawel Castle.  Poland has been a santuary for me...it had been a rough couple years and the gorgeous, sunny, warm Krakow afternoon, in the company of dear friends, and under the canopy of a very old church and traditon, was just what my battered heart needed.  We wandered through Josefov where a few boys threw water balloons at us.  I think Brooke threw one back.  Polish tradition.  The city was alive with people -- people in church, people walking, people dressed to the nines, people just wandering around, out and about enjoying the day.  At the castle I sat down on a low stone wall, watching people and writing, enjoying the sunshine and the Bach Unaccompanied wafting from the music shop across the lawn.  I was going through a period of deeply missing Mom and it was hard to connect with the liturgy; but the liveliness all around me sank in...the transcendence of God.  I felt the truth of Easter...the exhasution and the relief...the beauty.  I brought home a double-cd set of the Bach.

2003.  The year Jonathan and I got married.  We went to church on Easter Sunday.  I wore a lime green silk dress.  I love that dress.  I still have it.  I bought it on a sale at Talbot's on my way to my friends Matt and Sharon's wedding in Portland right after I moved back from the Czech Republic in summer 2002.  Jonathan also taught me that spring how to dye eggs in the (his) Ukranian tradition.  Pysanky.  He actually got college credit for it and does amazing work.  His brother came to visit this past weekend and we dyed eggs most of Saturday.  Jonathan puts on Rachmaninoff Vespers, we cover the table with brown craft paper, and we work.  Eggs are fragile.  Sometimes the shells are left in pieces, the insides running all over your hands.  Getting good at the craft necessarily involves becoming ok with brokenness.  You have to love the creating, not just the final piece.

A few weeks ago we drove to Portland to visit our friends Alex and Jessica and we went to church with them on Sunday.  It's a fairly small, very unassuming little building.  Warm, friendly people.  We sang old hymns and all the people prayed and I was captured by the amazing cross hanging on the front wall...grape vines stretched out, wrapped with these intricate hand-knit roses of varying sizes, in the most amazing red you've ever seen.  And I remembered.

Last year we went to Walla Walla, my hometown, for Easter weekend.  Jonathan and I don't go to to church much right now.  That's another story too and you shouldn't read much into that.  I just say it to provide a contrast - my church in Walla Walla is a special place for me.  When we're in town we almost always go.  It's the church my family started going to shortly after we left the old group.  I feel at home there.  I have history there and people there.  I moved away from Walla Walla a few months after we left the group, but that church has always felt like mine.  I'd heard about their tradition on Easter but never been in town for it.  You take a large wooden cross. You wrap it in chicken wire. At the end of the service all the kids walk up the center aisle.  As each child comes forward they give their flowers to an adult who tucks the flowers here and there into the chicken wire, and as the congregation sings the cross blooms.

It moved me beyond anything I expected.  I sat there singing and as the cross bloomed I felt breathless.  There were dozens and dozens of children, and within seconds the line of kiddos filled the sanctuary.  One of the adults tossed my sister and me a glance asking for help.  We started taking flowers from the kids' hands, anchoring the stems under the chicken wire.  By that time the flowers had been clutched in little hands for a long time and they weren't in the greatest of condition; but it didn't matter.  I sang and watched the congregation as I took the flowers and bloomed the cross, and something inside me found familiarity.  I saw my mom's close friend Kathleen sitting out there and thought, "yes, something is coming full circle here."  It was like I was going through my first communion or something.  I found Easter.  Easter now had a participation that gave it a personal, experiential meaning for me, one that was rooted in beauty and creativity.  It's where elements once living are cut down and then give life again.  It's where I participate with my body and my soul, singing and watching and blooming.  It's where profound Love is honored and remembered and celebrated.

So we're going again this year. We will visit with my family and take care of our 2 year old nephew while my sister and her family go celebrate my brother-in-law's grandpa's 90th birthday for the day. Then Sunday morning we'll get up and go to church. We'll go to the early service. Usually we go to the later service because getting everyone out the door for the early service is just asking too much. But on Easter we go early. The kids each carry a little fistfull of flowers cut from their (or the neighbors'...) lawn and climb into the car and off we go.

I will take my blah-ness with me.  I'll take my tiredness with me.  I'll take my losses and my questions with me.  And I'll take joy.  I will find rest and comfort, energy and pleasure, meaning and depth.  I'll find Love and Beauty.  And at the table on Sunday afternoon, I will look around me and be profoundly grateful for Life.

"Love" by George Herbert

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
   Guiltie of dust and sinne.
But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack
   From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
   If I lacked any thing.
"A guest," I answered, "worthy to be here."
   Love said, "You shall be he."
"I the unkind, ungratefull? Ah my deare,
   I cannot look on thee."
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
   "Who made the eyes but I?"
"Truth, Lord, but I have marr'd them: let my shame
   Go where it doth deserve."
"And know you not," sayes Love, "who bore the blame?"
   "My dear, then I will serve."
"You must sit down," sayes Love, "and taste my meat."
   So I did sit and eat.

Daily Bread

"Food is nothing less than sacrament."
-- Leslie Leyland Fields, "The Spirit of Food"

I'm not much of a baker...yeast freaks me out.  But I love cooking, and meals are a favorite way for Jonathan & me to spend time with people.  I always light candles and I know that the typical tea-light will last about 3 hours.  When friends are over, we rarely leave the table before the tea-lights have burned to silent pools in their holders.

I'm reading a book right now called "The Spirit of Food."  Each chapter is written by a different person, sharing stories about the intersections of faith & food in their lives.  Some chapters are better than others.  But I love the Introduction.  It makes my very soul water.  I've read lots of these lately -- The Spirit of Food edited by Leslie Leyland Fields; Take This Bread by Sara Miles; Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver; and others.  They make me feel alive.  And they make me want to plan meals & invite friends & track down the best-tasting whole ingredients possible.  Flavors & tastes fascinate me, plus it's just relaxing for me to chop an onion or mince garlic or stir a pot or flip french toast...and I love eating with friends so it works well!

My sister Melody is an incredible cook.  She doesn't just understand gourmet, the science and the art of ingredients & mixing and combining, she was born as part of the definition.  There are some people who learn & others who are.  She is both.  She is a student and a natural.  I've learned a lot from her over the years.  She puts together meals the mouth remembers.  I love watching her kitchen turn into a tornado of flour dustings and spices and heavy knives on butcher block cutting boards, pottery bowls of spiced shrimp in the oven and mixing bowls of sliced peaches on the counter and double boilers of melting chocolate on the stove, her 3 kids swirling around the room.  Sometimes, preparing for holidays or special occasions, we all eat dinner and then put the kids to bed, cooking more later in the middle of the night, talking all the while.  The best conversations happen at those times.  A meal at her home is a thing of delight.  It feels like home to me.  It feels like her.  It feels like love.

I'm not a fancy cook.  I don't have the patience for it.  But I have a version of her passion.  I like watching prosecco bubbles climb the edges of a flute, or hearing the sizzle of a shallot in hot olive oil.  I like the oily pucker of an olive and the relief of sea salt on chocolate covered caramels.  I love how sage and rosemary permeate a kitchen or fresh basil perfumes mozzarella.  I love the artistry of a table & making sure each person has space.  I like the forethought....thinking about who's coming & what they like & don't like, how I get to become more creative as a cook for friends who have allergies or are vegetarian or who are Muslim so don't eat pork.  I love to anticipate.

When we have friends for dinner we start with a toast.  As people gather toward the table Jonathan pours.  Each person gets a crystal shot of pomegranate vodka and we raise our glasses at the same time.  I love hearing Jonathan offer a toast at the beginning of the meal.  A couple weeks ago it was a twist on Julius Ceasar's "veni, vidi, vici" (I came, I saw, I conquered) -- he told this little story & ended by toasting with "I came, I ate, I stayed" (in Latin).  We were having dinner with 2 couples, old friends and new friends.  It was the first time the 6 of us had all been together so it was perfect!  A few years ago at a dinner with 3 couples who didn't know each other, Jonathan whipped out the New Testament & read that story of Jesus cursing the fig tree, and then toasted "for faith that can wither fig trees." !!  That one made me nervous because it was so off the wall but conversation never lagged and now I recall it with a smile.

When I think about my growing up years, family circles around the kitchen table, or company in the living room, dessert & coffee in hand, invariably pop to mind quickly.  I grew up with groups around the table & loved it.  We had people for Sunday dinner virtually every week.  My mom didn't especially love cooking but she cared widely for people.  I learned from my mom about hospitality, about blends, about thinking about who would be present, about caring, and about ways of expressing myself in the midst of all that.

Conversation happens at tables.  Life is shared.  Cooking & eating is creating & creative space for me.  It's narrative.  It's creative.  It's life and conversing.  With every meal there's a story to create, a story to experience.  The arc unfolds across the duration of the meal, each person at the table helping write it.  The story cannot be controlled, it can only be joined in.  Life and faith are no different.

Next week I'm having a cooking class in my kitchen with a few friends.  We'll learn a few kitchen tricks and drink a glass of wine.  Women who love cooking will be right at home, and those who consider themselves inexperienced & hopelessly lost cooks will go home with a trick up her sleeve & a guaranteed successful meal she can make at home.  But mostly we'll do it together.  We'll prepare a meal together, and we'll eat it together.  Together being the operative word.  I don't mind being alone.  When I'm by myself I eat things like bread & cheese with sparkling water.  Spinach leaves wilted with a drizzle of warm olive oil.  Snap peas tossed in a pan with a little garlic.  A scallop wrapped in proscuitto, roasted in lemon zest & black pepper.  Being alone is no excuse for eating badly.  Food speaks.  But eating it together is better.

"This is the first salmon of the season.  You all know the tradition that fishermen kiss the first fish.  Anyone do that today?"  My oldest son rolls his eyes, wanting only to eat.  I hurry on.

"I'm going to read something before we start."

I pull my Bible onto the table, and before anyone can resist, I begin:
"This is from the book of Job:

But ask the animals and they will teach you,

Or the birds of the air, and they will tell you;

Or speak to the earth and it will teach you,

Or let the fish of the sea inform you.

Which of all these does not know

That the hand of the Lord has done this?

In his hand is the life of every creature

And the breath of all mankind.

Everyone listens, watching the food.  I want to say far more, to deliver a sermon, but I stop, knowing the wafers of fish on our tongues will deliver its own message."

-- Leslie Leyland Fields, "The Spirit of Food"

Remember

Last Saturday, Seattle Police Officer Timothy Brenton was shot & killed as he sat in his patrol car on the side of a neighborhood street. His funeral procession was yesterday morning. The two-hour procession covered several miles & involved over 1000 vehicles and law enforcement officers from across the continent. Images from along the procession route are very moving...saulting boy scouts, grieving citizens, honor guards, drums and bagpipes, dark vehicles moving slowly through the morning drizzle.

I always feel a momentary pause well up from my deepest heart when I see funeral processions. The ritual and tradition of acknowledging death has been a powerful thing for me, ever since early childhood. I honestly do not remember the first funerals I attended - I was probably still a baby. In the religious group I grew up in (which my family left in May 1995 when I was 20), we went to lots of them. There were a lot of old people in the group, plus that's one of the things the people in that group just do a lot of (funeral-going). There was plenty about the content of those funerals that was lacking, preachy, and frustratingly impersonal; and there were plenty of funerals we went to simply because culturally in the group that was what you did; but all the same, funerals became very normal and non-frightening for me. In the year or two before we left the group and since then, funeral-going has become a very different thing for me.

My mom's name is Marion Diane Dahlin Abenroth. Everyone called her Diane since Marion was my gandmother's name too. She was born November 20, 1948. Next week marks the day my she died, November 13, 2000. Ten months after her death, I checked into a small hotel in a little town a couple hours north of Seattle and proceeded to write down every detail I could recall of Mom's death and the days surrounding it. The writing process I went through was highly intentional, ultimately good, very relieving, and wrenchingly excrutiating; and remembering it all...those days around her death & those days when I wrote...is painful. There are books to write about all those days, and each day leading up to & following them. But for purposes of this writing, I'll simply share pictures I carry from the day of her funeral. Her funeral was November 18, two days before her 52nd birthday, at the Presbyterian church my parents had been attending for a few years. My sister & I watched through the windows as car after car drove into the lot. Over 500 people attended the service. I bodily remember walking down the center aisle to the front pew of the church...Dewight, Melody, Me, Dad, Ned. I distinctly remember the five of us standing up in that pew at the end of the service while each person filed past Mom's rose-covered casket. In the midst of our own grief, I think my family were the comfort-providers, simply in standing there, acknowledging reality, looking each mourner in the eye and holding their hand momentarily as they walked past.

Although the two are intertwined, I think sometimes I feel more myself in moments of mourning than I do in celebration. I could stand being better at celebrating - that's one of the things the group I grew up in was not good at. But I'm grateful that marking death & grief feels organic for me because in our culture it seems the harder part. I remember the day we picked out Mom's casket...it was a Wednesday morning & I had a raging headache...standing in that room in the funeral home, feeling utter disbelief at what we were doing...I remember telling Dad, "We should NOT be doing this." We had to but everything in me resists having had to. The week seemed blurry...sort of on auto-pilot, but the day of the funeral I felt grounded until the end when I just wanted everyone to leave my family home and go away. But after that... I felt like the world should stop. My very mother had died and everyone was just going on with life. There were a blessed handful who remembered, who mentioned, who waited, who spoke...who still do that.

I didn't want to wear black for a year but I understand something of that tradition. It's difficult for Americans to be present in mourning. It is granted such a brief allotment of time in the rhythm of our days, and it's relegated to the realm of privacy. I can relate to people's confusion around what to do, what to say. But the failure to even simply say that to one who is grieving bothers me because more often than not the default then is silence. Not expressing uncertainty, not acknowledgment, but silence.

Last month I attended my uncle's funeral in Spokane. The funeral home is next to the cemetery where my maternal grandparents and other family members are buried so before the service Jonathan & I drove into the cemetery and made our way quietly to their section. I got out of the car and walked to Grandma's grave. I stood there in the barren, freezing morning and felt profoundly grateful that, even with the inadequacy of our efforts, we humans do this kind of thing. Every culture has its way...varying of course from people to people...but we humans do not fully just ignore death and the dead, and when it does happen that way we feel like something is very wrong. Life matters. Death is real. Pausing helps. Traditions can be supportive & healthy. These kinds of rituals and observances always make me feel the fundamental beauty and sacredness of mourning & remembrance.

©2009 Mindy Danylak

The Invitation

The Invitation

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living.
I want to know what you ache for
and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.

It doesn’t interest me how old you are.
I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool
for love
for your dream
for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon...
I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow
if you have been opened by life’s betrayals
or have become shrivelled and closed
from fear of further pain.

I want to know if you can sit with pain
mine or your own
without moving to hide it
or fade it
or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy
mine or your own
if you can dance with wildness
and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes
without cautioning us to
be careful
be realistic
remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true.
I want to know if you can
disappoint another
to be true to yourself.
If you can bear the accusation of betrayal
and not betray your own soul.
If you can be faithless
and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see Beauty
even when it is not pretty
every day.
And if you can source your own life
from its presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure
yours and mine
and still stand at the edge of the lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon,
“Yes.”

It doesn’t interest me
to know where you live or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up
after the night of grief and despair
weary and bruised to the bone
and do what needs to be done
to feed the children.

It doesn’t interest me who you know
or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand
in the centre of the fire
with me
and not shrink back.

It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom
you have studied.
I want to know what sustains you
from the inside
when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone
with yourself
and if you truly like the company you keep
in the empty moments.

© Oriah Mountain Dreamer, from the book The Invitation published by HarperSanFrancisco, 1999