We go through our days, along our paths Out from our homes Through our neighborhoods Into the world Into the worlds of our families friends and neighbors. Into the worlds of those who are alone those who are in danger, sorrow, and all kinds of trouble those who are sick, friendless, and needy.
We go through our days, along our paths Into our shared world Aware that we all ache, at times, To fall at your feet and beg for help To come up behind you and touch only the hem To be healed.
We go through our days, along our paths Into the holy reality that you are already there In the homes of our family, friends, and neighbors In the hearts of those who are alone In the wounds of our danger, sorrow, and trouble In the lungs of the sick, the friendless, and the needy, Into the holy reality that you are already there Waiting for us to find one another as you bring our healing see one another as you paint our hope love one another as you inspire our laughter, Into the holy reality that you are already there and that our healing and the healing of our families, friends, and neighbors and the healing of those who are alone is a communal healing.
We pray today, and tonight, and in the morning That as we go through our days, along our paths, As we try to make our way to you, That you would interrupt us with our neighbors inspire us with their faith engage us in your healing, and encourage us to live into a communal healing.
In the name of our walking, waiting, and interrupting Jesus we pray, Amen.
While it was expected, the news of TuTu’s death was loud and sudden. The hours after however felt oddly silent. Like the audible nothingness following a tornado or an explosion. It sounded as though had I dropped something, it would echo infinitely when it hit the ground. I found myself walking circles around my house, then driving aimlessly around town, as if I couldn’t figure out where I was or how to get home.
TuTu was the last of my living grandparents to go into the life to come. To have lived most of my life, adult life even, with all of my grandparents is a rare gift not lost on me. On my mom’s side, my grandfather and namesake Donald (or Dabo) was a polymath and my grandmother Mama 2 a fashionista. On Dad’s side, my grandfather TaTa was the quintessential American working man. And then there was TuTu.
I have been trying to think of the best phrase or word to describe her, Ohna Jo Jordan—known though to most children and adults as TuTu for at least the last forty years—since she went home on hospice several weeks ago. I’ve noticed over the last few days that the word I landed on in the knowledge that this very moment was coming is being used regularly by many others to describe her.
TuTu, my last grandparent, was a firecracker. She was a short, red, singing, smiling, blonde firecracker.
She was a firecracker at church, the only person I’ve ever known to be a full-time, go-to Sunday School substitute teacher after she “retired” from actually leading Sunday School programs and all kinds of other groups. When she was caring for my granddad in his last days, she would faithfully drive up to First Baptist with her tithe check in hand every single Monday, marching in and dropping it off, talking to her multiple friends in the office, then studying the prayer board while taking notes before she left.
And know this: if she added you to her prayer list, it wasn’t an act of southern kindness or religious best practice. It was in fact a very real and personal call to arms for her. In a passing chat, I would tell her about a friend going through hard times or waiting on significant news, asking her to pray for them if she thought about it. A year later she would call me specifically for the purpose of getting an update on how that person or family was, and how she needed to pray for them moving forward.
She told a story of being around 5 or 6 with some kind of degenerative eye issue that was rendering her blind and had resulted in doctors telling her she would live her life without sight. One evening in the 1930s she decided that a certain prayer at a certain place on that certain night would bring her sight back even though the Great Depression offered little expendable income to get the gas needed for her scraping-by family to drive her out of town for that to happen. Sure enough, someone had a car and was willing to drive her and my great-grandmother a few hours to the church she insisted on going to for prayer that very night. She explained why she was there and was prayed for.
Her sight returned in that moment as she tells the story. She would go on to describe staring at the brilliance of the car’s dome light as my cousin Paul remembers after insisting it stay on the whole way home, and eye doctors continued to tell her throughout her adult life they couldn’t believe she could see with all the scarring in her eyes. They didn’t know she was a firecracker, though. She was determined and no doubt had an impact on the people who took up her challenge to pray for that certain thing at that certain church that certain evening.
It seems apparent that this experience, one among many, shaped her view of what was possible in prayer as well as what determination and speaking up for what you wanted could bring to your own life and the life of others. It and her telling of it seemed to make both God and imaginative possibility remarkably real.
In flipping through her contact book a few days ago, I noticed she’s added several of these friends I’d once asked her to pray for with their phone numbers and email addresses to its pages. No doubt she followed up with them in case my update answer wasn’t generous enough with the information she needed for her war. She often shared a whole friendship for years with these friends of mine, adopting them as her own grandchildren and keeping pictures of all of us framed on her walls or desk. Their Christmas cards lined her tv cabinet year-round.
Just like those of her grandkids.
Soon after she was married at age 16, my grandfather told her she should drop out of high school and take on her new role as a housewife. In 1947, the firecracker was not having it. Absolutely not. Likely with a red face yet gentle tone, she let him know that would not be the case. She finished high school and went on to take college courses all the way into her final decade of this life.
I suspect that decades of the marriage filled with love they shared following this early incident also shaped what my grandfather TaTa knew she could do when she decided she was worth it and determined, whatever she was told by others. Firecracker. Perhaps this is why, in his final days, my uncle Tony says my granddad asked that she, not a preacher or deacon, himself, or anyone else, pray for him. He was wise to her ways and her firepower.
She loved Lifeline Blood Center, where she worked many years as a secretary for two different Executive Directors, and she would often let me come to work with her. Having set up an enormous desk for me (I’ve learned just today tfrom my cousin Amy who is clearly more intelligent and shared this same experience on her own, that this was merely the conference room and conference table) with Lifeline posters of blood cell cartoon characters and markers, making me feel like I was saving the world by spending hours coloring these posters in this office of hers (that I believed she ran… and in some ways she likely did) where she always made clear magic was happening every day.
In this way, she clearly shaped how I began imagining the meaning of a “job” at an early age. And those with whom she worked there continued to check in on and share life with her for the rest of her life… long after her retirement and everyone’s moving on to other things. She had adopted them as her own children and grandchildren, so they were sure that they were the most talented and important people in the world.
She helped open the doors at the very beginning of ComeUnity Café in downtown Jackson several years ago, then in her 80s. She would greet each visitor at the front door and explain the novel concept of a real restaurant offering healthy, fresh, delicious meals to all regardless of one’s ability to pay, and where labor counted as dignified and respectable cash in exchange for delicious and gourmet food.
She did this in between volunteering nearly full-time for several years at Area Relief Ministries answering phones and doing data entry in Excel spreadsheets to ensure Room in the Inn, a program that facilitates hospitality and generosity between local churches and those who are homeless in the community over a hot meal and warm bed, could continue. The staff at both of these incredible organizations adopted TuTu and she adopted them. “My girls” she would often say about Andrea, Nichole, Nicolé, Lisa, Brandi, and Annie. She talked to my friends in León, Nicaragua and Cape Town, South Africa without my knowledge or presence on multiple occasions. All were adopted as grandchildren, so they were from then on treated as such.
Volunteering at ComeUnity Café and ARM was likely ‘retirement’ number five or six for her. Before this iteration, and after she happily worked fulltime as de facto home health for her husband in his last days during her late sixties and her seventies, she had already audited college courses on the New Testament with undergraduates, complaining only that she couldn’t take the test (after reading the textbook the first time before class ever started). She ultimately adopted all the students in those classes with her—and often the professors—as her own grandchildren. She participated in other Geriatric Social Work classes as a requested participant to share her thoughts on the course material. (“It doesn’t feel as sad or lonely as they say it should,” she once confided to me about the stages of development covered in the course). These students—and their professors—were also adopted as grandchildren. So she saw them all as the most important people around doing the most important work imaginable.
When I was teaching university classes, she managed somehow to adopt nearly every student I’ve ever had in class, following them on Facebook and sharing—I’ve only learned in this last month––regular and private words of encouragement, prayer, wisdom, and support for them as their lives developed. Later on as her health started to deteriorate, at her request, I would hold blown up, life-size pictures of her face next to mine at graduations for students to see as they walked by since she couldn’t be there.
She would record inspiring videos for them for me to share before finals week (where she also sent multiple, huge boxes of chocolate for them), but I did not know of her ongoing communication with them until just the last month or so.
In reality, this has ultimately resulted in a decade of students moving into careers of human service and social justice adopted as grandchildren to whom she was secretly generous and faithful and present for critical years. And I’ve only just found this out.
These newly added grandchildren of hers have been sending messages of grief and stories of hope and impact from the work she did in their lives over the span of years. I’m learning why she would refer to Facebook as “work” when saying she “had to get back to work” these last several years before standing at her laptop on the kitchen counter to talk to her Facebook friends.
It’s true that whatever roles she played over her 89 years, the largest and primary role I ever knew was that of grandmother. She would sign Valentine’s Day, Birthday, Christmas, St. Patrick’s, Easter, Boxing Day—any holiday she knew of—Hallmark cards mailed like clockwork with a crisp five-dollar bill in each signed, “I Love you, TuTu. Your GRANDmother!” with all the letters of ‘grand’ capitalized and often underlined. I keep them in an easy-access drawer in the kitchen.
She made sure I had no question of her love and support for me, that I was her GRANDson as she would also write, and she my GRANDmother. I’m learning only now that she made sure a host of other people knew this to be true also. I’m learning her impact on me was true of most of her grandchildren, born to her or adopted by her.
There’s not enough time for the stories I’d like to tell. Like so many good Southern Baptists, she would go along with the pretense that alcohol was evil when she was in public. So when I would sneak over to her house while she was at her weekly beauty parlor appointment, hide a frozen Daiquiri or Piña Colada in her freezer, then call later telling her to check the freezer and pray… She. Loved. It. While I don’t think she ever actually drank any of them, she loved that they were sneaky and funny and she loved being in on the joke. “Somebody has been bad in my freezer,” she would say randomly, months later, making a sneaky grin followed by an innocent, ignorant, questioning face. Then that burst of red-faced laughter.
Another time we drove up north to see my youngest cousin Casey play the phantom on stage, and later that evening at a hilarious (as usual) family dinner with my family and my uncle and his family, TuTu ordered a glass of white wine, drank two sips over the multiple hours we were there, and then sincerely asked the server for a to-go cup so she could take it back to her hotel room.
I could go on and on and on about her laughter, her singing, her insistence on growing in knowledge, moving aggressively toward thoughtful racial and social justice, comments on the meanness at the heart of the current president’s policies, actions, and comments, making fun of until she finally cleaned my dirty garage, threatening another of her grandsons if he was mean to her great-granddaughter…but there’s no time as we would never be able to leave here today.
So know this: TuTu was a firecracker.
And know this too: truth be told, today is very hard for me. I grew up sitting on our “family pew” at First Baptist Church in between these four grandparents every single week for over a decade. One by one they have moved on and up into the next life, leaving a sharp absence and deep shadow in their assigned seats on that pew. First, the American working man moved on, then the polymath, then the fashionista, and now this week, my TuTu. The firecracker.
In those silent moments after I received the news of her death from my dad earlier this week—the moments after the tornado, the explosion—the imposing and thick silence felt particularly lonely. It felt as though I was now sitting starkly alone on this once-full pew as the last of my incredible grandparents had gone to whatever is next, all leaving incredible legacies, rich histories, and unfillable shoes. It felt like I was alone on this obviously empty pew, and that if I were to drop something it would echo infinitely when it hit the ground.
But in the hours and days that have followed that loud silence, it wasn’t quiet for long and hasn’t been at all since then. As I’ve been forced in my aimless wandering to look around and listen, read emails and texts, receive flowers and letters and cards and chicken salad and coke zeros, the pew I felt so suddenly alone on has become quite overwhelmingly crowded. The whole section is now full and it continues to spill over.
There’s been a growing swell of loud chatter on and around this pew I’ve come to realize is actually filled with all of her children and grandchildren, those few dozen born to her and those hundreds adopted by her. She is still very much here, still very much inspiring, igniting, booming, and encouraging as the firecracker she has always been in the lives of people her own age all the way down to her year-old great-grandbabies and the loved GRANDchildren raising them. Her presence is so deeply missed, but it is also incredibly, deeply felt.
The firecracker is still here and among us.
Because of her life and the way she lived it with great prayer, gratitude, musicality, laughter, spark, and determination, in her honor and memory, may her children, her grandchildren, and her great-great-great-grandchildren live in peace and hope into the beloved community of the kingdom of heaven.
Never before have I screamed as loud, or as often, in my own home when I am the only human in the building as I have in the last week plus.
And my throat is sore.
And it’s been the last 48 hours where I’ve realized my rage is in many ways turned inward. I’m angry with myself. I’m angry for my cowardice. I’m angry for the ways I am able, as an upper-middle-class white male, to have the language of sorrow without the reality of risk when it comes to issues and conversations of race, religion, politics, and power.
So when I scream, knees bending and legs falling to the nasty kitchen floor multiple times, night after night, I’d like to accept that I’m mostly screaming at myself. I’m furious, heartbroken, exhausted, and… and… but I’m screaming alone, in a home by myself where no one can hear and no one will expect it.
Perhaps that’s why shooting a force of voice and growl and tears and volume from a deep place seems like something that should help, but doesn’t.
And it hasn’t.
It has not helped.
And while the art of blaming someone else is a craft I’m quite skilled at and perhaps am spiritually gifted in, I am feeling more sharply tonight that I am ultimately falling into tears on the dirty tiles of the kitchen floor with guttural screams yelling at myself more than anyone else.
So I would like to apologize.
Friends of mine who talk to me in the flesh ever, whether occasionally or often, are not offered the luxury of wondering how I think or feel about certain issues, causes, people, politics, etc. I learned many years ago that I am or can be a quite exhausting friend in these ways.
I’m okay with that.
They know it. Because they know it, I’m argued with sometimes. Sometimes, often really, I am intentionally NOT invited into conversations about issues of race, policy, poverty, wealth, religion, power, justice, politics, etc. because I’m going to be “that guy” and there’s really just no time for that.
I’m okay with that too.
So why the apology?
I’ve still been lying. That’s why. I’ve been sitting next to you in church and I’ve been trying to be as quiet as possible because I don’t want to upset YOU by speaking out about your hatred toward some other group of human beings. You won’t call it hatred, you will call it holiness or doctrine, which you and I have both known is nonsense but it’s appropriate in these parts so you are used to people nodding and not saying anything.
So I’m sorry I didn’t say anything.
I’m not sorry to you, by the way. You were fine all along. But you were operating within a ‘spiritual world’ in the US south that allowed you permission to think God was on board with your racism and sexism.
And I’m sorry about that.
I am very, very sorry.
Not sorry to you. I’m sorry to every man or woman of color, every man or woman of the lesser, whether gay or poor or, hold your breath for the worst yet, any “liberal” man or woman.
I am very, very sorry. To you, black woman. To you, gay man. To you, “liberal woman” or “crazy-leftist” man.
I am very, very sorry. I’ve been able to slide past these comments of hatred from bishops, small group members, elders, choir members, church founders, big donors. Since I’ve been able to stay under their radar, I’ve been able to stay quiet.
But you’ve died.
But you’ve been starved.
But you’ve been hated.
But you’ve been ridiculed.
But you’ve been badmouthed.
But you’ve been called less-than, other-than, not-than.
And since I could slide by,
I’ve been hoping to find ways to
cleverly
wisely
cautiously
gently
speak to the issue without losing my place of privilege.
For that, I apologize.
But apologies can be as
empty as
using tear-gas to take a photo-op
in front of a church building
holding a Bible
that says I’m running away from
the kingdom of God.
So I am sorry.
To my sisters and brothers of colors,
to my sisters who love sisters
and my brothers who love brothers,
to those who are living and finding beauty in ways they’ve been told
can’t be honored by the God of
beauty and the God of
choosing power in those who are told they do not belong…
to you,
I am sorry.
But my apology runs the risk of emptiness
just as my association with ‘good’ runs the risk of being co-opted
if I’m not willing to be excluded with you for simply honoring your belonging.
When you are excluded, I’ll take it as an invitation to us both.
I won’t slide by anymore.
So I’m done fitting in under the guise of thinking
I might be of more help ‘from the inside.’
I’m struggling with going to church,
because too many of those in the church feel too safe spewing hatred at you.
They now spew hatred at me.
If you can’t be a part of my ‘church’
then I cannot either.
If you cannot be treated with dignity and justice and respect from the church,
then I cant be a part of that ‘church’
I’m sorry it’s taken me this long;
I’m sorry it’s taken me an unacceptable amount of time.
I’m sorry it’s taken me far more than 8 minutes and 46 seconds.
To the elderly man and woman who spew hatred on social media
to entire worlds of people different from themselves,
if you are what my church is,
then I am not a part of this church.
To the put-together professor, homemaker, clergy, banker, or lawyer,
if you are not willing to put your name next to the implications
to lives of those of color, of poverty, of immigration status, of sexuality…
then you are letting me know that you are not willing to put your name with me.
I won’t need you to leave.
I won’t try to get rid of you.
I’ve learned over the last 30+ years that churches don’t do that well.
I’ll go.
I’ll consider it an honor to move toward the margins
and find a home there with those
honored by God for the mere fact that you
in your confusion
have decided aren’t as worthy as you.
I’ll be calling you
and writing you
because I’ve not been telling you the truth about
what I’ve heard you say and what I’ve seen you do.
I’ve been too gentle as you’ve been racist.
I’ve been too silent as you’ve been hateful.
I’ve been too self-protective as you’ve been granting benefits.
I’ve been too grateful as we’ve been blindly privileged.
I’ve pretended my gentleness, silence, self-protection, and gratitude
are part of a longer, wiser, more cautious game.
They’re not.
They are only part of cowardice.
I should have told you.
I should have told myself.
I’m sorry I’ve waited this long,
in an attempt to save something for myself
while it continues to cost the lives of others,
So
I’ll be calling you
and writing you.
I want to make sure we have the chance to talk it through.
I want to make sure you are given the space to tell me I misunderstand your stance.
But tiptoes won’t be walked on around you and your answers anymore.
You’ll be asked to speak it clearly
because the lives of too many people have been lost
while I’ve been trying not to put you on the spot.
If that means whatever I thought you and I shared together,
I’m sorry for just now realizing that I’ve been playing a game all this time.
For that I’m so, so, so very sorry.
And it can’t happen anymore.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. They’ll learn what it was all worth to begin with.
Children in cages.
Babies in barns.
Bassinettes in the rushes.
Infants in mangers.
Kings as refugees in tent cities.
And while the facts are always true,
the lies are always powerful.
And the narrative built on lies makes clear:
there’s no room for the dark-skinned baby boy,
whose parents are doing their best,
to follow the laws of the empire
while raising a child in light of the goodness of the kingdom.
So hardship, anxiety, and finally the gift of birth
is met with “no room,” “no space,” “no acceptance,”
on this side of the cage,
the barn,
the rushes,
the mangers,
the tents,
the wall.
+++
But also,
the women and men
who do everything to
show them,
tell them,
hold them,
say their names,
tell their stories,
and promise to them
by actions
embraces
laughter
and the locking of knowing eyes,
that they are loved.
One face of one child,
on any and every side of
any and every
wall,
law,
race,
religion,
possesses the image
of the Divine
in all the
perfectly fashioned ways
that
can
change
the
world.
You are dared to look in the eyes
of any child
born on any side
of the rich man’s argument
and say he is not
fit to be the king of the universe.
And he is [
obviously]
remarkably]
unquestionably]
stunningly]
perfectly]
good.
So obviously,
acceptance, room, space, or not,
thanks be given to God.
I generally skip the first few pages of new moleskins. I think my early, unattended ‘logic’ suggested I come back to address the initial page when I knew exactly what should be penned to shape the rest of the pages to follow. It was as if the beginnings seemed so crisp that to ink them wantonly would at best fail to live up to first page standards––or at worse would render less than in all the other lined pages to follow.
So blank it was.
And blank they remained.
For nearly two decades back, every journal I’ve ever owned still bares blank pages hiding any hint they were ever used; a couple of turns later reads the actual first entry.
The first entry three pages in can be found with its own strike-throughs, misspellings, and coffee blots.
Today I started a new Moleskin for the first day of the new year.
The chair isn’t just empty now, with its cushion recently turned back over to the “company side;” the chair is at present more like a shadow, hollowed out in form, a two-dimensional image in a three-dimensional space. A grayed out chair in an otherwise room of color that sits right by the door as I walk in.
+++
“Join me in the kitchen” was a command I thought would be funny to teach my new pup, Jacob, starting January 13, 2018, which was the day I drove his tiny little body home from about 45 minutes away, his pouting at and playing with me the whole way home. He learned that phrase quickly, and from anywhere in the house, if I was cooking, grading papers, watching the news, or showing him off to someone else when I said “Jake Jake! Would you like to join me in the kitchen?” he immediately appeared. Sometimes he used the ottoman as a step, but most of the time he leaped directly into the club chair in the kitchen, circled twice, and then sat on his hind legs with his face eagerly pointed toward me waiting for a good reason.
Having lost an incredible dog after twelve years, then soon getting a new puppy only to lose him ten days after bringing him home to some rare disease, Jacob’s presence in my home became holy when he finally arrived following these losses.
I named him Jacob with the expectation that he would make his name true; I would become “laughter” as he would be “the son of laughter.”
When I came home every day, he would hear my car and be standing in the kitchen chair just inside the door with his hind legs on the cushion (not the “company side”) and his front paws on the armrest licking with excitement before ever making contact with my nose. If I didn’t stay in that spot long enough, he would jump off the chair then back on repeatedly, pretending to pout until I gave him the length of time he required.
He pulled his thirteen-year-old sister’s tail between his teeth until she would wrestle with him.
He insisted on sleeping under the covers at the foot of the bed, often in the night ending up on his back with all four legs pushing straight up against the sheets making his own personal tent to include his body, my feet, and his kneck wresting over my ankles. I loved it, and it made me laugh every time.
My sneezes and farts were a matter of immediate concern and need for investigation, usually beginning with a jump as if we were being robbed and ending with a look of judgment from his tilted head, his nose to my nose.
Whenever he saw me cry, he got as close as he could, licked away a few tears, and then leaned in until it stopped. Me laughing sent him on a looping rampage through the house carrying whatever toy still squeaked.
These kinds of little things, on dark or heavy days, made the coming home worth it. On good days, they were reminders of some of the inherent good in life. He had made me laugh, and had become the son of laughter.
+++
I yelled “Jacob, would you like to join me in the kitchen?” this morning as I was making coffee before heading to work. He didn’t come running.
I knew he wouldn’t, but it seemed like I had to try. A magical thinking of sorts.
He didn’t answer two nights ago either after he had snuck out of the carport door as I was getting something out of my trunk. He didn’t answer when I yelled around the house for him the thirty seconds after I came back inside. He didn’t answer when I started walking up and down the street.
He didn’t answer when I saw his still, shadowed frame, left side against the glowing pavement in the very center of the intersection, lit in the yellow light of old street lights and shadowed by three college-age students, crying, asking me as I swerved into the intersection and lept out of the car, “Is this your dog, sir?”
I got down on my hands and knees in the middle of the intersection, things becoming slow motion, hearing but not having any idea what the college kids behind me were saying through their own tears.
I’m remembering now kissing the top of his nose and snout. Brushing the hair on his ears between my fingers and wiping bloody snot away from his nose. I cradled his head in my hands like I would first thing in the morning if I were to wake up before him. Nothing else seemed to matter.
Hey, bud. Yeah. Hey, it’s me.
I’ve got you.
That’s right, I’m here holding you.
I’ve got you, buddy.
I’m right here, my love.
I’m not going anywhere.
When I said “Hey it’s me,” I know I saw from the top of his still but still breathing frame a light in his eyes appear as he recognized it was me who was holding him, forhead to forehead, hands and knees on the bloody pavement beside him.
This moment was holy too, I suppose… I’m not convinced, though. I don’t want to let shit off the hook too easily with piety.
+++
A towel appeared. I wrapped him awkwardly and answered every bystander’s mumbled question, no doubt helpful ones, with silence as I climbed into the driver’s seat of my running car while still talking to him, now holding his bloody body in a bloody towel in my bloody lap.
I don’t really remember driving to the Emergency Animal Hospital, but I do remember slamming on the horn as I pulled in and parked just before slamming into the building. I opened the door as they unlocked it with the buzzer and met me in the lobby.
I looked down at my little ten-month-old lifesaver’s face for the first time since we were forehead to forehead in that intersection, looking for his eyes which have been an answer to prayer and promise of his namesake since January 13 as he has made me laugh and find gratitude more times than I can count. When I fund his eyes, he did not find mine. He wasn’t there anymore, and in that moment it felt like I wasn’t either.
“He’s gone,” I heard myself say. “He got hit by a car, and now we’re gone.”
As I’m transferring my towel-wrapped little buddy’s body to the tech’s arms, I hear myself saying, “Is he gone?” These last hopeful shreds rushed out as if were it simply offered out loud, the circumstances could perhaps change and the answer I already knew to be true would be reversed.
The vet’s stethoscope was placed on my little buddy’s chest once, twice, and the third time the vet looked up over the rim of his glasses as he shook his head “no.”
Jacob was gone.
And so was I.
They started talking or asking questions or telling me something…the two techs and the vet. I heard the words “or cremation?” which was when I stopped caring what they were saying. The selling in my eyes was blocking me from responding with either anger or answers. Reflexively, I shook my hands and walked back into the lobby, sitting down to see his precious blood on my pale legs and arms as my eyes filled completely with the red and white blurs of a tremendous loss.
+++
Two days later, after an unknown time of staring into nowhere, I find myself turning around to look at the chair hoping I was sleeping somehow, or had been dreaming something, and that Jacob is actually sitting there with me in the kitchen.
In a profession that requires patience, expectancy, and hopefulness, many things are waited on for long amounts of time. We wait for things beyond our abilities to wait for them.
So the ability to iron clothes, vacuum floors, mow yards, install light fixtures––they become therapeutic.
At least they do for me.
To start and finish a task that allows me to back up from, look at, and see physical characteristics of its completeness… its finished-ness… it’s healing in a way. In a vocation that requires a long waiting for things unseen, and bearing a faith that pushes hoping for the ridiculous even farther, hope and wait, hoping and waiting, are the honored things.
But they are the things cursed under, and often not under at all, our breath.
+++
I cracked two paint brushes in half tonight.
In an effort to both gain satisfaction from crossing off a to-do list item from my list as well as to prevent my mind from ruminating on certain frustrating circumstances, I smothered my ears with these new headphones, cranked up Ludovico Einaudi, and got to work. Having repainted the walls of my kitchen a few months ago, I started carefully repainting the trim.
Crisp antique white.
Against the “water swirl” bluish-white of the kitchen, a Lowe’s knock-off from an $8 sample of a fancy shade from London’s Farrow & Ball, there’s not much contrast, but high gloss against flat paint should be quite striking.
Clean lines. Smart joints.
Between coats two and three, however, I cracked two plastic brushes in half. I chuckled at the first but slowed at the second breaking.
In an effort to calm my spirit and ease my mind, my anger and frustration and fear and anxiety managed to make their ways to my right hand and wrist where they released themselves in the crack of cheap paintbrush I was using to assuage my own anxieties.
And then in a second cheap paintbrush.
Finding clean lines and smart joints and perfect outcomes and positive news is a daunting task. The profession of social work leads one to find those things in places and things other people, students, or clients.
The search pushes itself into ironed shirts, swept floors, and painted molding.
The stress pushes itself into the cracked handles of two cheap paintbrushes and the profane-ridden mumbles of my midnight comments to two dogs and a poorly-informed and poorly-responding Alexa dot.
But the reality remains… when I’m ready for it as well as when I’m not. The world goes not well, but the kingdom comes. We do the things we know to do––successful or not––because we can’t not do them. We iron our shirts, paint our molding, break our brushes, and curse our innocent dogs.
And having experienced anything other than hopefulness, like wrestling with emotions and under the realities of frustration, anger, depression, sadness, isolation, grief, loss, and silence, there have been few honest words that could be defined as hopeful.
And to project a facade of hope is as offensive as the realities that attack hope itself.
So there has been and in many ways remains quite a season of silence. A season of either hopelessness or silent hopefulness.
Either way, a season of silence. On my end at least.
I’ve heard a great deal from the people in my world: from my history and my past and my world. They’ve been everything between furious and dismissive to piously, self-righteously, “prayerfully,” “worried” about me and my “soul.”
And yes, worried about my “eternity.”
When asked about the refugee, the immigrant, the oppressed, the poor, the person of color: they have no concern.
They’ve not been worried about the present-day life of the neighbor who doesn’t look like me (us), talk like me (us), explain religion like me (us), or… ultimately… the neighbor who is not white like me (us).
But I am a source of concern for these “brothers” and “sisters.”
It’s been difficult to write hopefully.
I wish I could wag a finger and wield a glare at myself for pushing beyond the truth to prove a point, but that luxury isn’t afforded anymore. When a president was elected to the highest office who began his campaign with racist, untrue, and hate-filled remarks about Mexicans, I was told to “chill out” about the response to this un-American position on diversity, human dignity, and individual initiative… I was told this only by those who identify as evangelicals.
When I spilled out concerns about a man who stated: “I hate the thought of black people counting my money” as well as “when you’re famous, you can do whatever you want; you can grab ’em by the pussy,” I was told to think about unborn babies. Told to think only about unborn babies. When I talked about babies born into poverty or what policies and practices actually reduce the occurrences of abortions, I was told it was “fake news” and the conversation had to move back to shopping or gossip.
When I struggled as Dr. Ben Carson was video/audio-taped saying that sometimes you have to put your faith and your Christian principles aside for the sake of politics, I was told I was being irreligious or simply lying.
When I said I could not stand or support or accept a man who celebrated sexual assault, proudly proclaimed his racism toward any human being created in the image of God whose skin wasn’t pasty white or bronze-tanned, or bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy,” I was told I could not possibly be a Christian.
To write hopefully, much less most hopefully, has felt impossible over the last many months.
And now in the last forty-eight hours, the President of the United States has suggested that we should only allow immigrants from predominantly-white, European countries to grace us with their presence in this country.
The President of these United States is suggesting that those who save us in emergency rooms, those who fight for us in the US military, those who rush into burning buildings and die rescuing our families, those who teach our children third grade math or senior-year Oncology and graduate school public health, and those who operate on our grandparents are from “huts” and “shithole countries.” And we don’t want any more of them here.
And then the decision to dig in to and spin these comments rather than confess the hateful, lymbic, ignorant shadows of them and beg for forgiveness. No need to beg for forgiveness; those who claim to follow the human being of table-turning and death-defying faith work hard at defending or excusing these realities. The more common response is a cloudy blend of eye-rolling, huffing, “waiting-for-proof” for the hundredth time, and pretending that obvious fact is a shadowy conspiracy.
The most common response is, “Well I don’t know about all that, I haven’t paid any attention, but I support him.”
These “shithole countries” are the same places I’ve been asked by Sunday School teachers and youth ministers to visit on ‘mission trips’ and to donate to for “missionary campaigns.” I grew up with photos of these––in the words of the President of the United States––I grew up with photos of these folks from “shithole countries” taped to my wall and fastened to my neighborhood lemonade stands as both an attempt at advocacy but more an attempt at guilt-driven capitalism (in the name of Jesus, of course).
The last I’ve heard from old Sunday School teachers and youth ministers was that the promoter of this hatefulness was the person their Jesus wanted and insisted that I vote for. Local and national evangelical, particularly southern baptist, Christian university professors and “theological” or “ethical” polymaths worked hard to find ways to excuse, explain, or defend standing with something and someone who more explicitly than almost ever before acted, spoke, and believed against most of the sermon-on-the-mount ways of Christ…sadly, or opportunistically…in the name of that very same Christ.
So yes, it’s been difficult to write hopefully, to write anything about hopefulness, much less to write with a sense of hopefulness above and beyond anything else. I cannot lie.
And of all the things I feel, I’m not most hopeful.
So what does it require to remain most hopeful when the loudest, self-proclaimed Christians blindly or apparently-blindly defend a sexual assaulter and racist xenophobe who says he is “Christian” and promises economic growth for the richest among us? What is there to do to hold out hope when old friends claim over late night beers around a fire that “blacks” should get out of the country or “everybody should get over it” when the highest office in the land spews racist and Christ-antithetical hatefulness toward anyone who can consider being “other” before heading back to an emotional worship service the next day?
Presidents of “Christian” universities waste no time in the courts, in the papers, or on social media outlining who is not accepted by the king of the heavenly kingdom for their loves or their politics, but have a hard, pressured, or “I don’t recall” time saying anything definitive about much less against the KKK, white supremacists, racism and classism, or those who teach, live into, and most dangerously love and therefore fear the blasphemy of a celebration of wealth, power, and accumulation rather than the hope of a doxology, generosity, and shared abundance.
I’ve wanted to, and have worked to find the ability to do it, but it’s continued to be difficult to write hopefully, much less hopefully more than heartbroken or harrowed.
Youth ministers have posted, spoken, and confirmed support for sexual assaulters and racist pedophiles.
Friends have let me know, via distance and disembodiment, that I can’t be a Christian.
Old family friends have pushed (privately and publicly) piously-decorated support for a human being who is, in all ways of both word and action, antithetical to the king and his coming kingdom. But my own religious ancestors-in-present of evangelicalism are the pale group who put him there, work to defend him, and spiritualize his hatefulness toward the least of these.
And they have all continued to push, or “prayerfully encourage” me to fall in line.
Or at least be calmer or quieter if I’m not in Orwellian-step with the rhetoric and propaganda.
Hopefulness has been a distant courtier; but hopefulness has been a persistent courtier.
And so to honor the best of my youth ministers, my Sunday School teachers, my old friends, I’m obligated to keep seeking Christ and his kingdom––the kingdom of the least of these and the last in line––I’m pushed, in honoring a memory of those relationships that are apparently no longer based on the same values, to believe what I was taught by those very folks at their best about a new way of living and being in the world.
The world does not go well, but the kingdom comes.
So for me, it’s for Christ and his kingdom. Hopeful or not, this is what I, at my best, am called to follow and working to lean into. Difficult or not, we bend the arc toward the beloved community.
Here I am in an empty church. In it, between the rows of pews, on the tile floor, under the silent cross, I walk along a boundary, a place in between heaven and earth. The Celts called it thin space….The church calendar calls into consciousness the existence of a world uninhabited by efficiency, a world filled with the excessiveness of saints, ashes, smoke, fire; it fills my heart with both dread and hope. It tells of journeys and mysteries, things “seen and unseen,” the world of the almost known. It dreams impossibilities: a sea divided in two, five thousand fed by a loaf and two fishes, a man raised from the dead.
It ordinarily ends in this specific corner of that specific room.
The very first evening ended in that space;
this one did too.
Time lies but this corner does not.
Suddenly new yet very familiar.
Children asleep,
dinner settling,
dessert in process
with a final matching mug or glass.
A chair is pulled up closer, but not too close,
even distance in inches matter.
A reachable circle for the conversation,
and the laughing,
and the impressions:
the toothless, tooth-brushing PSA.
the self, that one time in the middle of that one story.
that customer who opened with the confusing concern.
that student.
that voice.
that dynamic with those relatives.
that signature characteristic.
and the repeated jokes:
likely jokes not actually funny,
but jokes always grow into their own funny the later they emerge in the evening.
It is a treasure buried in the middle of a field, though;
true every single time.
Safe now, later in the evening,
smelling like people smell at the end of the 14 hours
when spare deodorant is actually not in the glovebox,
and the meeting sprawled too late to manage a swing by any corner store
on the way to this specific corner.
Safe now, later in the evening, after a perfect meal over which the melody of
perhaps some shared camaraderie,
perhaps some shared hilarity,
perhaps some disagreement,
perhaps some agreement of disagreement,
perhaps some thick and layered asking of what the hell we are doing,
perhaps some thick and layered asking of what the hell we are trying to do,
and what it is we are trying to chase after,
after all…
where were we?…
Safe now, later in the evening, after a perfect meal over which the perfect melody of
a treasure buried in the middle of the field.
Noticed now,
in this specific corner of that specific room.
Laughter and my own genes have left me sweating.
Food and beer have left me full.
Humanity and honesty,
Pretense prevented by exhaustion,
leave me speaking thanks out loud in between audible laughter
while driving home with a 14-hour smell that is not very funny.
After noticing that I’m sitting in this specific corner of that specific room,
the loud response in my cloudy thoughts is a refrain that continues to say,
most hopeful 