Spirit Face; Rocket Pants

One of things I struggle with most in life is the time I spent trying to live as an Evangelical.  I'm still working to integrate that part of my life into the larger whole of my personal history.  Even worse than discomfort I feel about this history, however, is the discomfort I feel when remembering how unkind I was toward the Evangelical church when I was working to extricate myself it.

I remember very clearly one Sunday morning, sitting in worship, and the preacher that morning was telling a story about his five year old daughter.  They had been out for a drive, she was strapped into her car seat in the back seat of the car.  It was early spring and as this little girl looked from the bright blue sky to the melting snow in the ditch she exclaimed, "The sun has power!"

After telling this story to the congregation, the pastor asked with passion, "Do you know this means!?"  From my seat four rows from the stage I shouted out, "That your daughter is developmentally normal for a five year old!?"

Whether he didn't hear me or chose to ignore my remark, I'll never know.  Instead, he went on to share about his daughter had spoken this deep, theological truth, that the "Son" has power, referring to Jesus.  While it's true that the person doing theology in the recalled exchange was this man, not his five year old daughter, it is equally true that my pointing this out mid-sermon was unkind and rude.

I was really angry with the Evangelical church at that time.  This does not excuse or justify my behavior in anyway.  I behaved awfully.  A lot.  For a really long time.  There was a lot of fringe in the Evangelical context in which I tried to make myself fit - and the fringe just didn't work for me.

I finished my last post by stating that all the fringe doesn't matter.

This still holds true for me, but it warrants a bit more exploration.  The material nature of the fringe doesn't matter so much, but the fringe itself serves a very important purpose.

One of my friends is a motorcycle rider, which provides me an entertaining mental image as I know this man pretty exclusively in a professional context - dress pants, button down shirt, sports jacket more often than not.  Really shiny leather shoes.  A 6'4" dutchman with a shock of white hair and blue eyes.  The idea of him riding a motorcycle just isn't something I would have imagined when I first met him.

One day, he came into the office talking about getting decked out in biking leather from head to toe and mentioned the fringe on his bike gear.  I honestly cannot imagine this man wearing that much leather, let alone fringed leather.  Until he explained the value of fringe - with much more significant than hailing the glories of terrible '80s fashion trends.

"It makes the rider more visible to other motorists," he said.  The fringe draws the eye and the attention of what are otherwise too many distracted-by-boredom-on-the-highway drivers.

This got me thinking about all the fringe we attach to our faith traditions and experiences.  The fringe is profoundly unimportant in its form.  The material nature of the fringe does not matter.  What the fringe does - catch the attention of those of distracted-by-boredom-on-the-highway-of-life as we go about our daily routines on auto-pilot - is pretty spectacular.  It catches our attention, sometimes only for a moment, and directs our attention to something more.

When my friend the philosopher died several weeks ago, I was visited by a deep and profound sadness.  I miss him and I miss our conversations.  I miss the moments of clarity that pointed me to something more in our dialogue.  I remember the last time I saw him, this philosopher friend of mine.  I said my good-bye, gave him a hug, a kiss on the temple, and then I stepped back and looked at him. He looked at me.  I wanted him to know that I saw him, that I saw him, and that I love and value who he is and everything our friendship is.  After several moments, he gave me a wink - he knew.  Nothing more was said.  I left and he died 9 days later.

A memorial service was held for my philosopher friend three weeks after he died.  There was a strange confluence of events in the course of the service; rather a lot of fringe, if you will.

The pastor of our church was asked to lead the service.  I was asked to offer the pastoral prayer and lead the Lord's Prayer.  There was no discussion of themes or topics, though in preparing the pastoral prayer, I did read the reflections that would be shared by family and friends.  The pastor opened the service with a eulogy, weaving Mary Oliver's "The Summer Day" through a review of the philosopher's life.  And then beautiful scriptures were read and stories were told.  We came to the end of the service, the pastoral prayer and Lord's prayer before the benediction and postlude.  I read Mary Oliver's "Messenger" as the prayer.  An interesting confluence.  Some fringe.

On the inside cover of the service bulletin, the philosopher's family had included a prayer offered by his three year old granddaughter and a picture of the philosopher created by his four year old grandson.  The picture included the grandson's description of the philosopher - "His face is blue like the sky because he has a Spirit Face now; and his pants are orange like a rocket to help him get to heaven."

Spirit Face; Rocket Pants.

Fringe.

It caught my attention.  It directed my attention to the Truth of things beyond, something more.

I still struggle at times with immediate discomfort in the context of Evangelicalism.  The form of their fringe is discomfiting.

And....  Their fringe does not point to something more, for me.  And it does for others.  What the fringe does is so much more important than what it looks like.  Because sometimes it looks like the drawing by a four year old who describes Spirit Face and Rocket Pants - a deeper Truth.

Love. Forgiveness.

I seem to be having nightmares more frequently of late.  Last night I wasn’t hungry, but I wanted to eat.  I didn’t know what I wanted.  I knew what I didn’t want – I didn’t want protein, carbs, fat, or sweet treats.  I didn’t want food.  But I wanted to eat.  I did not eat.  Instead, I watched an episode of Babylon 5 with David and went to bed after a glass of milk.  This was a compromise on my part – I was no longer full from dinner and it tasted delicious.

 

And last night I dreamt again about my sister.  This time it was the tennis ball.

 

I must have been 12 or 13.  It was after she moved home from foster care and before my parents reunited.  And some stupid fight broke out over a tennis ball.  A tennis ball that didn’t have an owner and with which I was playing.

 

And of course, this was utterly unacceptable to her.  And she demanded that I give it to her and to the neighbor who was her best friend at the time.  And I refused.  I knew she would try to take it anyway.  She always demanded anything she wanted and if she wasn’t given it, she simply took it.  Always.

 

So it was with the tennis ball.  She demanded it.  I didn’t want to relent this time.  I wanted to stake my claim.  It didn’t belong to anyone.  I had been playing with it first.  I wasn’t done with it.  I had been enjoying myself.  I wanted to continue to play.

 

When I wouldn’t give it to her, she hit me.  And she kept hitting me.  She hit me until I was lying on the floor in the fetal position, curled around that tennis ball, unwilling to let her take yet one more thing from me.

 

And so she left.  She and her friend left the house.  And just for good measure, she kicked me in the eye on her way out.

 

And she kicked me so hard that the blood vessels in my eye ruptured.  And the white of my eye was stained with ruby spots of blood.  And my mother was at work until 11:00 that night.  So, when she returned home the next morning and I told her what had happened and had her look at my eye, of course it was my fault.  I should have just given her the damn tennis ball.  And besides, what was I talking about?  My mother couldn’t see anything wrong with my eye.

 

But I went into the bathroom and looked again.  And there they were – those red dots of blood.  And sure enough the neighbors asked what happened to my eye.  And people at church on Sunday asked what had happened to my eye.  And no matter how many times I made my mother look at my eye, she couldn’t see it.  There was nothing wrong.  Why hadn’t I just given my sister the tennis ball in the first place?

 

My sister continues to do the same thing today – always striving to take from others what she wants, believing that she can’t truly have it for herself if she does not have it all.  If I am happy in my relationship, she finds some way to disparage it and to claim that her own happiness in her relationship is greater.  If I take pride in my academic accomplishments, she insists that they amount to nothing of value in this world and that she has accomplished what truly matters in life – reproduction.  If I take pride in my vocation, this sacred and holy work that I love, she declares that my faith tradition is invalid and she alone has divine knowledge that is worthy of being held.  If I hold to my faith and tell her with all genuineness that I am happy she has found a faith tradition that is meaningful to her, she switches faith traditions, enters into my own, and declares how much more she is getting from this community than I ever did.

 

And I’m tired.  I am not in competition with her and I’m tired of being set up for a competition that I have no interest in.  And I’m tired of the continual reworking of the story when I tell her I won’t compete and I’m happy that she’s happy and that nothing in my life is a poor reflection of her, just as nothing going on in her life changes my own experiences.  It still never stops.  She still demands all the tennis balls, never mind that she has no tennis racket and never learned to play the game.

 

I woke up this morning with an idea in my mind that was, all at once and in equal measure, both wonderful and terrifying. 

 

It was this: I never have to see my family again.

 

I never have to see my family again.

 

I never have to see my family again.

 

This, of course, breaks the first rule of my family – loyalty to your family is everything.  It also means stepping outside the bounds of the second rule of my family while appearing to keep in holding with it – inside the family, every man, woman, child for themselves only.

 

I have my own life in a place far away.  I have a new family that I am building with D – one built on love and respect and the belief that there is enough for everybody and nobody needs to hoard it all or to deprive everyone else.  I never have to see my family of origin ever again.  Though I would, in fact, happily spend time with my mother or either of my brothers circumstances permitting, of course.

 

There is something liberating in this truth and yet the power to make such a bold decision overwhelms and terrifies me.

 

It used to be that when I meditated, I focused on the movement of my breath.  “In.  Out.  In.  Out.”  Lately I have been trying something new.  Two thoughts that carry on, distinct and separate, but wholly entwined and dependent on one another.  “Love.  Forgiveness.  Love.  Forgiveness.

 

I have been focusing on these ideas as I try to enhance my capacity to love others and to extend forgiveness to those who have hurt me.  Today, I breathed in love and I breathed out forgiveness.  My mind was drawn to the possibility (the glorious possibility) that I can choose to never see my father or my sister again.  I brought my focus back to my breath.

 

Love.

 

Forgiveness.

 

And I began to cry.  Choosing not to allow abusive and bullying people into my life is an act of love for myself.  When those bullying and abusive people are family, I would have to forgive myself for breaking the family rules.  Love.  Forgiveness.  In.  Out.  Love.  Forgiveness.

 

And the possibility that just maybe there are tennis balls enough to go around.

Falling In Love is a Risky Endeavor

I was seven and my sister was eleven when Star Wars, Episode VI, Return of the Jedi aired on network television (NBC).  Our whole family had been looking forward to it and we were all going to sit down and watch it together.  We had previously watched Episode IV and Episode V, A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back respectively, when they had aired on network television in previous years.

The thing about Start Wars is, I enjoyed.  And enjoying anything was dangerous in my childhood.  It was an open invitation to abuse from my sister.  I still remember her long flannel nightgown with the ruffled hem and her copper-blond hair with the frizzy tight curls of an ‘80s perm.  My own hair was platinum blonde until middle school and continued to grow in progressively darker as time went on.

I don’t remember any specifics of this – just knowing that my sister always found an excuse to quash my joy.  She could never stand to allow anyone to be happier than her.  In fact, she could never stand to allow anyone else to be happy at all, regardless of how happy she was.  Not much has changed in the past 28 years.

When I was young, sleep was my defense mechanism.  I could sleep through anything.  I slept through an extraordinary amount of domestic violence that my father enacted against my mother.  Beatings, humiliations, at least two attempts at murder.  My siblings witnessed all of these – I only saw the aftermath of the majority.  I slept soundly and deeply and nothing could rouse me until my mind and my body told me it was safe.

What I remember most from Star Wars, Episode VI is the Ewok Village.  I wanted an Ewok more than anything.  As an adult I can’t really remember what purpose they served the film and, with a hefty dose of cynicism, I suspect their sole purpose might have been a marketing ploy – one more way to sell kids on the idea of having their own piece of the wider galaxy and one more way to get parents to part with $20.00 for a toy that cost $0.20 to make.

As an adult, I’ve tried watching Star Wars at least four times.  None of my friends can believe that I didn’t fall in love with the movies growing up – just like they did!  What no one seems to realize is that being the focal point of so much abuse from my sister made falling in love with anything a risky venture.  

Every time I’ve tried to watch any of the Star Wars movies as an adult, I’ve fallen asleep within 15 minutes of hitting the “Play” button.  It does not matter how awake and full of energy and verve I was when I sat down.  The music and the opening credits and introduction of Luke Skywalker and I’m fast asleep.

D is equally as horrified by this gap in my film knowledge as every other friend I have.  This is, for him, a fatal flaw.  It’s not a deal breaker.  But it is a fatal flaw.  With the new Star Wars movie coming out next month, he’s determine to rectify what he sees as failure of in my upbringing and introduce me to Star Wars all over again and help me fall in love with Star Wars like he did and like so many of my other friends did.

And I’m trying.  I managed to stay awake through the entirety of A New Hope.  I don’t really remember much of it from that viewing two weeks ago.  It was after watching Episode IV, however, that D settled on a theory for my failure to connect with and deeply love these films: it’s the music.  So much of what makes Star Wars what it is is the soundtrack.  If I could just let myself experience the music, if I would just open myself up to it, I could find some glimmer of the love he has for it.

So, we tried.  Or rather, I tried.  We sat down the other night to watch Episode V, The Empire Strikes Back.  "Remember," he said to me, "pay attention to the music.  The music is what makes the movie."

To stay awake past the three minute mark, I paid half attention to the movie and half attention to a game on my phone.  When I ran out of lives on this “match three” game, I handed my phone to D and tried to give all my focus to the screen.  

To keep myself awake, I tried to connect the dots of what was going on on the screen.  What were the gaps, would they be filled in, how much did I remember, how much did I forget, would any of these questions be answered?  D grew frustrated with my incessant questions as I spoke over the dialogue of the movie at some critical junctures and asked me to at least hold my questions until each scene I was questioning had ended.  I tried.  I barely kept my eyes open.  

I couldn’t tell you now, 20 hours later, how it all ended.  I just don’t remember anything after the tauntaun and Yoda.  Though typing this now helps me to recall Luke’s foolish rescue venture, the trap, and his fateful final scene with Darth Vader, losing his hand, jumping to his possible death and being saved by Leia and Chewbacca in the Millennium Falcon.  (And I only know the name of this ship because my best friend named her car in college after it and I was humiliated publicly for not getting the reference).

I couldn’t lift my legs sufficiently after the movie to make my way to bed with any kind of ease.  Upon making reaching the summit of our staircase, I headed to the bathroom, peeled my contact lenses from my weary eyes, and brushed my teeth.  A few minutes later, I crawled into bed and fell fast asleep and deeply asleep, my body curled around D’s pillow for comfort.

When D came to bed about an hour and an half later, I did not notice.  I woke up several times in the course of the night, restless and uncomfortable.  I was surprised to find him beside me and to find that he had reclaimed his pillow in the process of making his way to bed.

What I remember most from what D calls “anxiety dreams” and I called “nighttime resurrections of my nightmarish childhood” is flashes of images.  That frizzy permed hair.  The ruffled hem of that flannel nightgown.  Pain in my body and the feeling of having my soul pillaged.

Of course I can’t connect with Star Wars.  Falling in love with anything is a dangerous affair.  Of course I don’t connect with the music.  I don’t really connect with any music.  She stole that from me, too.

But I’m learning how to fall in love again.  And this time I know that it’s safe.  So maybe there is hope for Star Wars.  But D shouldn’t hold his breath.

Spiritually Homeless

It's a burden that's been weighing on me heavily this past month. A loss that went unrecognized by many and other losses that went unrecognized by all, including me.

When I started my summer unit of CPE, I wasn't particularly excited. I was overwhelmed and terrified and fully expected to fail. Horribly. Again.

And then it went on and it felt right and I was confident in my place and comfortable with my role and I knew that I was in the right place because I could effectively evaluate the results of my work and they were good enough (though my supervisor recently told me that my "good enough" surpasses anyone else's "excellent"). I became excited and began to plan for the future.

But as the summer moved ahead, I grew frustrated and angry and felt lost. I was grieving. I was grieving the loss of the one person I wanted to be at my CPE graduation more than any other. The one person who was supposed to be there but couldn't be. And oh, how I appreciated those who did join me on that day or who celebrated from afar, yet it was his absence that hurt, deep in my marrow.

Once I realized I was grieving, the anxiety and frustration and anger disappeared. "Ah...." I said. "Hello, old friend. So, you're back. Welcome."

And grief and loss and I communed in the space of love and acceptance that I'm working really hard to build inside of myself.

Then, though I was exhausted and overwhelmed and not quite ready (because if you've taken CPE, you know, a week off is just not enough), I started my residency ten days later.

I was delighted to learn at the end of that first week that I had gotten my first choice in clinical placement for the first unit. Wahoo! The mentor I had hoped for was the mentor I wanted. To be honest, I wasn't clear initially why I wanted this mentor, only that I knew I had something to learn that only this one could teach me.

On my first day I asked about my mentor's level of comfort working with someone from a faith tradition that is radically different from their own. I was born and raised UCC; my mentor is from the Evangelical Free tradition. My mentor said they knew this question would come up and there was no point avoiding the elephant in the room and shared a bit of their view on working collaboratively in patient care. I asked how they had developed this viewpoint and they indicated their own time in CPE as they sought to become a Board Certified Chaplain.

I was surprised by a number of things in this conversation - the first that my supervisor seems to believe that my faith is as radically different from theirs as one can get; second that my supervisor seemed to think my question was addressing some awkwardness in the realities of our theological differences; third that my supervisor left no space for me to respond; and fourth that I went home and cried. A lot. Because I came to understand another dimension of my loss.

While it is true that the UCC is denominationally extremely liberal, it is also the case that being congregational in structure, one is likely to get anything from liberal-we-barely-acknowledge-Jesus-and-may-as-well-be-UU to plenary-verbal-inspiration-women-don't-belong-behind-the-pulpit-and-gays-can-worship-somewhere-else if one simply pops into a random UCC church on any given Sunday.

I grew up somewhere between the two extremes, but certainly far closer to the second than anything that could even be defined as the radical middle.

During college, grad school (the first round) and immediate following (the first round) and before (the second round) of grad school, I attended a couple of varieties of Evangelical churches, pending on where I was at in the country at the time. And I deeply loved all of them.

Until....

Until Tim died and his death, which followed several other traumatic losses in the course of a couple of months, undid me.

Until I was grieving.

Until I was aching and desperate and lost and confused and clinging to Jesus but asking, "Why?"

Until I was told over and over and over again that I shouldn't be grieving because....

Because I had only known Tim a short time.

Because if I just had faith.

Because Jesus.

And it was invalidating and shaming to be told that my grief was unacceptable and indicated some moral or theological failing within myself to be deeply grieved that the first person in my life ever to love me (as I experienced it) unconditionally had died instantly.

And the problem was, it wasn't just some of the people I shared my grief with in the Evangelical church; it was all of the people I shared my grief with in the Evangelical church.

Though I had been raised UCC, I had fallen deeply in love with Jesus in the Evangelical church, and I never had any plans to leave it.

But my grief was not welcome. My heartache was not welcome. My anger with God was not welcome. My disappointment in Jesus was not welcome.

And as I experienced it, if any part of a person is not welcome, the whole of the person is rejected.

So, I lost this community that had been the foundational influence in the growth of my faith in God and my love of Jesus for over a third of my lifetime.

I left the faith that had rejected the wounded and broken parts of me and I returned to the UCC where my grief was accepted, where my pain was acknowledged, where my anger and disappointment and frustration were affirmed. In some places. With some people. At some times.

And I still grieve. And I still feel anger and frustration and disappointment and untenable anxiety until I can identify the grief.

While I feel that people ought to be accepted exactly where they are at, just as they are, I do not feel the same holds true for theologies. And just as I would call out people on their behavior that is harmful or damaging to other people, I believe in calling out theological positions that are harmful or damaging to people.

So, while I dearly love my evangelical and conservative Christian friends, I love parts of their belief systems and I utterly despise other parts of their belief system (and I suspect this confuses and frustrates a LOT of them).

But a lot of this blog post is just sort of there and it's a very long way to say that I feel spiritually homeless at present. I go to Temple on Fridays and I miss Jesus. I go to church on Sundays and I do not like the Jesus they have to offer. (Because it's the same Jesus who utterly failed me when Tim died).

And so I grieve.

The Kindness Epiphany

It was a painful kind of day, Thursday.

The day had not started painfully. The day had started beautifully, full of hope that smelled of iris and honeysuckle; ripe with love that was full and soft and sweet as mango picked from the tree at its peak. I opened my heart to another and with hands outstretched, offered myself to them. I felt no fear. Only certainty that the step I was taking was right and good and lovely.

I did not receive a response. But then, I did not need one. I had offered myself freely and completely as a gift. No strings attached. Should that gift be rejected, I knew there would be a sting, but I was also fully confident that such pain would be survivable and I would be better for having risked the gift of love in the first place.

Then, I went to the place of interruption. At first it was okay. I knew I would be okay and I was still brimming with the joy of having stepped beyond my self-imposed fortress and invited another to see me.

But then, in a small, cold room, full of other people, I was confronted with the memory of that interruption of death into life which had so disabled me for so long. I was confronted with the interruption that had kept me from talking about the interruption. And it was in my chair.

A place of comfort and continuity and safety in a situation so full of people that the anxiety of not being able to attend to the presence of all at once could only be mitigated by that seat in the room so that I could focus on each speaker directly and still hold  the whole in my periphery -- as much for my own comfort in not being startled by sudden movement or noise from behind and to have a clear view of egress, as by my desire to attend to those who might want to speak but may not have been seen by anyone else.

My chest began to constrict painfully with anxiety. Because I was not able to mitigate it by taking a place of security that would allow me to pay attention to what was being said, I stood apart. It seemed there was no safe room for me in the circle. I thought briefly of asking to have my need for this space honored, but quickly rejected it, as a previous attempt at engagement about the chair had ended in derision and previous engagement with the particular individual now occupying the only safe place in the room had ended in a verbal attack so violent, I defended myself vociferously for fear I would be swallowed whole by the feelings of shame that erupted when confronted by the dichotomy of being asked for vulnerability and being verbally run over and diverted in every instance in which I chose to say those alien words that strike fear so deeply in my heart my throat closes off and I can scarcely breathe: I need....

Twenty minutes and report was delivered and we were free for 15 minutes until the start of the next activity which would be safer. I retreated to a quiet space and reminded myself that what felt like an attack was not; what felt like an intentional denial of my safety was not. I tried. But my muscles had started to ache and my joints were getting stiff. Pressure was building in my eyes.

And then the questions. Ten people all asking. Yet, whenever I would answer, they didn't seem to hear; when I would try to clarify, someone else would begin speaking and I would be shushed for interrupting their interruption. Falling silent, I would wait until they would finish so that I could go back and say, "I need you to understand, that's just the presenting symptom. I want you to see and know the source that underneath it all it's really about this and I've been trying and trying and trying for weeks to tell you this most important part of who I am and I'm trying and trying and trying to trust you with the single most sacred thing in the world to me because it's here, in this time and place that that sacred experience and the loss of it is making it impossible for me to connect because it's bigger than I expected and I didn't know if you were safe, but I was told you were and I'm trying! I'm trying so hard to trust you with this so that you might see me and then judge me or not, but if you do you'll at least be judging me for who I am, not for who you think I am, and if you don't judge me, if you just accept me, then I'll know that I'm safe and I belong, if you would just let me explain."

But by the time the other person had finished talking, another jumped in, and then before I could clarify, I was asked another question and I tried to hold it all together, but now my anxiety is so high that my fingers are aching so badly I can barely think of anything but the sensation of pins stabbing through my knuckles and the fire in my fingertips and I can't look to the person on my right as they ask their next question and still see the person on my left because I had chosen to edge a few inches out of that safe space because I really do trust you even if you don't see it, and now I'm trapped and I can't retreat and the questions just keep coming and there are so many voices in the room I can't begin to understand how I can possibly answer whatever the question was while other people try to explain the dynamics and I am told, "But what's important isn't what anyone else said or did. What's important is that you understand why you responded that way."

"I know exactly why I responded that way," I say. I've been trying to tell you for four weeks and no one will listen or let me find the words, in the moment, to clarify and then the moment is gone and there isn't a chance to go back and I'm being attacked with these questions that won't let me go back and now I feel like an electric current is running through my whole body just under my skin and it hurts and  the back of my throat is closed so tightly I can't swallow and I can barely breathe and I want to throw up because my stomach is roiling and I can hear the blood rushing in my ears and my brain feels like all of the electricity running beneath my skin is ending there and it's building until I can feel everything in me begin to short-circuit.

"Can you tell me why then?" a gentle voice asks me. And I know somewhere in the recesses of my mind that this voice is one that will hear, but I feel like a wounded animal, caged and beaten and desperate to be left alone to heal and recover.

"None of your business," I say with cold finality. And then silence. And I know that it's bad. I know that I've thrown away my chance to be understood. That gentle voice looks taken aback, surprised that I would pull so violently away at this moment. I've been trying for weeks to tell you this most important part of what this experience is for me and no one has listened. Everyone has spent an hour in an all out assault against me, nine to one, and now, now that I am at the end of everything, you ask me to open my heart that I've desperately been trying to show you for a month. You ask for the vulnerability everyone has actively rejected at every turn.

Beaten, broken, bleeding, I can't process the gentleness in that voice. All I know is that I am alone in this place where no one has been willing to know me; I am beaten and terrified and will do anything to protect myself; and opening my heart one more time hoping again that this time you might understand is not possible.

In that moment, I do not hear the gentleness as an earnest desire to understand. I hear it as a call to submission before you deal the fatal blow. "Tell me so that I can finally destroy you entirely."

"None of your business."

Surprise.

I am wrong.

I have to make this right.

But there isn't time.

And there are more voices and we're being ushered out, and I hope, I fervently hope, maybe next time I can make it right. I can go back and explain. I can tell you that I know you asked for all the right reasons and I missed it and I want to tell you so that you'll know because I want you to know, because even if you don't accept it, it's important for me to say it to you so that I will know that I have taken the risk and offered myself and regardless of the outcome, I know there is joy in the offering. I want you to know the joy of knowing who I am and I want the joy of knowing you. I want to start over. I want to begin again and I want to tell you, "THIS (the relationship, the life that was interrupted by death that left me incapacitated) is what I hold most dear in life and you deserve to know this, because we are all going to be living with this sacred experience in the next seven weeks and it's going to be here and you are going to feel it and you have a right to know what it is."

Shortly thereafter I learn there will be no next time.

Maybe with the intense trauma response I've been living with for the past four weeks it's better. I know that it's physically and emotionally safer than continuing without change. But I wanted the chance to make that change.

I want the chance, now that you've finally asked me, to tell you that this is a very painful but very welcome interruption. I want the chance to tell you that I don't know how to be in this space of welcome pain because I've spent my whole life trying to mitigate pain. I want to ask you, "Will you walk alongside me in that as we journey in this place together?" I want to tell you, "Wherever you're at in your journey, I'm willing to walk with you, too!"

But there will not be a next time.

After it all, I went to a movie. I entered the theater through a side door and saw kiosks in the lobby. They only take cards. I wanted to pay with cash.

I approach the customer service counter and ask the woman behind the counter where I can get a ticket. "We've got the kiosks right there," she said with a smile and a gesture.

"Oh, no. I mean, I wanted to pay cash. If possible. I have a card. I can certainly use it, I was just hoping...." I feel flustered and unsure.

"Cash payments can be done outside," she tells me.

"Oh. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to bother you," I tell her, realizing that once again I'd made a mistake. "I didn't realize... I'm not from here and the set up is different...." I want her to understand that I tried. I really did try. I just didn't understand.

"I'm not really supposed to," she says, picking up on my distress, "but I'll let you pay here just this once. Since you didn't know. In the future, though, just remember cash outside, cards in."

"No, really, it's okay," I tell her, beginning to cry at having inconvenienced her and overwhelmed by her willingness to break the rules for me. "I'll just go outside to pay." I turn to leave the desk.

"No. I'd really like to. It's okay. I just know that not everyone would, and I wouldn't want you to be turned away again."

Tears are streaming down my cheeks now, and the delicate skin just beneath my eyes begins to sting as the saltwater hits the microscopic tears that the abundance of tissues used earlier in the day have left. "I'm so sorry," I sob to her. "I don't mean to cry. You haven't done anything wrong. I'm just having a really hard day."

"Oh, honey," she says, "I don't know what's going on, but I do know for sure it'll get better. Eventually, it always does. And I'd like to help you have a better day. I really want you to go to the movie as my guest. No charge."

"I can't...I don't...It's too much...Thank you," I say as she hands me the ticket.

"I'll say a prayer for you," she tells me, a sure sign of where I am in the country. "Theater 16, just to the right. It'll be just a few minutes until they start seating."

As I walk away, humbled by this unexpected generosity, feeling worse that I've so inconvenienced someone with my tears that they felt the need to care for me in the only way they could, I heard Jesus, clear as a bell, ask me, "Do you really believe that you are so undeserving of kindness?"

I begin to sob in earnest now and make a hasty beeline for the family restroom where I can keen and wail with the pain of this softly spoken truth. Perhaps if I were to believe that I do deserve kindness, from myself and from others, then I could accept invitations to know and be known as the gifts they are and not reject them as fiery arrows of attack from an unknown entity.

Now I know. I know that it is my own deep sense of unworthiness that has kept me from being able to declare, "Here I am, world! I trust you to treat me kindly, because we all deserve a bit of kindness, including me! But if there's a misunderstanding, it's okay, because I trust it isn't intentional and just maybe if I'm willing and you're willing we can figure it out together. But if we can't, it'll still be okay, because I know who I am, and that is enough."

I want to go back. But it simply isn't possible. All of the unspoken words that have filled me up for the past four weeks are spilling out of my fingertips with no one left to witness.

Today, I Quit My Job

I lied to you and I am sorry.

It was always my intent to leave without telling anyone other than my boss, and so when it happened, and you knew it might, and you asked, I couldn't bear to tell you that, yes, I was leaving. I did not want to face it.

So, today, I quit my job. I gave my notice two and a half weeks ago and today, I walked out without a word to anyone else that it was my last day.

I lied to you, repeatedly. I am sorry that I lied. I did not want to face it, the end, the fact that I would not see you again. Magical thinking - the belief that if a person hopes for something enough or performs the right actions that an unavoidable event can be averted.

If you've ever read "The Year of Magical Thinking" by Joan Didion, you might understand. It's like her husband's shoes. Though he had died quite suddenly, Joan wrote that she found herself unable to get rid of them when she was cleaning out his closet. Though she was able to remove his clothes and other personal effects after he had passed away, she could not get rid of his shoes because he would need them when he came home.

It was a bit like that for me. If I didn't tell anyone I was leaving, it wouldn't be real and I wouldn't have to feel the pain of loss: not seeing you every day at work, not talking about our lives at those times when we could catch a moment to chat, not seeing your smile, not reaching beyond my comfort zone to touch you in a gesture of friendship that is bigger than you might realize....

If I didn't tell you I was leaving, I wouldn't have to miss you or think that you might miss me.

Magical thinking. If I can convince you it isn't real, then it can't hurt me.

I lied. I'm sorry. I hope you'll forgive me.

The Conditions Are Right

The conditions were right.

That's why you died.

It was not because I messed up or made a mistake or failed.

It was not because God was punishing me.

It was not because God does not love me, or because you did not love me, or because I deserved to lose you, or you deserved to be lost.

The conditions were right.

You spent the whole of your adult life battling an eating disorder. I do not know the specifics. I never asked. Maybe you were bulimic at some point and used food to numb yourself and worked out to keep the weight off.

Maybe you were just a compulsive over-eater and you never compensated and you just used food to numb yourself until you were 550 pounds.

I only know that by the time you came into my life, you had been in therapy and you were making healthier choices and you had lost a couple of hundred pounds. You were still obese. You were still working to reach a healthy weight.

But that didn't matter.

The conditions were right.

You were fifty and that means you'd had at least 32 years of adulthood in which you'd abused your body and who knows what your youth looked like.

So, your heart was not healthy. And in one moment, it stopped. And there was nothing that could be done to start it again.

The conditions were right. It did not matter that you were white, male, upper middle class; that you were a block from the ER when it happened and you received medical attention within seconds of the event.

The conditions were right.

The conditions were right.

Your heart stopped. Your body shut down. With no blood and no oxygen, your brain died. You died.

You died because the conditions were right.

It had nothing to do with me, though it affected me terribly, because I am not the center of the universe, neither cause nor effect, and I do not have the power to control such mundane things as when people die, and because much as I would like to believe that I am so all-important God would, in fact, be interested in punishing my sins so severely as to take you from this earth because I made a mistake, I know this simply is not true. I am not so powerful. I am not so all-important. I am not so proud as to believe that I am the cause (in any way at all) of your death.

The conditions were right.

And that is hard to believe and to accept because it seems so random and meaningless.

It is easier to believe that I can apportion blame in some regard because apportioning blame means I can identify the cause, the contributing factors, the reason for it, and if I can identify those things, then I can prevent the next big catastrophe by being good enough which means perfect, which I can surely never be.

The conditions were right.

I had no control over the conditions that led to your death. I have no control over the conditions that do or do not lead to anything else in this world.

What I control is the choices I make, the behaviors I engage in, the way I engage the world.

I can control what I eat and how much. I control how much I exercise. I control (to the extent that I can) how much sleep I get. I control how much stress and anxiety I have in my life.

I could not control your choices, because if I could have, you'd have eaten granola that night instead of two chocolate bars.

I cannot control the choices anyone else makes either.

The conditions were right.

And you died.

And at some point, the conditions will be right for someone else in my life to die. And it will have nothing to do with me. Just as your death had nothing to do with me.

This is not punishment.

This is not the result of an angry God who does not want me to make mistakes or be anything other than human, which is to say fallible.

When horrible things happen, it is because the conditions are right.

When the good things I want to happen do not, it is because the conditions are not right.

I may never know what conditions are necessary in every circumstance to produce the best outcome (from my own limited perspective). But I can acknowledge that the conditions were right for the outcome produced and the conditions were not right for any other outcome.

And I can look at the role I played in those situations and I can decide whether or not I will make changes in the future, not because doing so means that the outcome in similar future circumstances will be dependent upon my doing things differently or the same; rather because I want to be able to say, "This is an area where I recognize a need for growth and these are the ways I am going to make different choices for myself because I want to grow in these ways" or because I can look back and say, "I am proud of who I am and the choices I made in those specific circumstances and I would do it all again."

The conditions were right.

And while I would surely make different decisions than I did in the days leading up to your death, because I know you died not because I made a mistake but because the conditions were right, I would make those choices based on what I know to be the best choice for myself and my life, and not because the weight of the whole world and the issue of life and death reside on my shoulders.

The conditions were right and it had nothing to do with me.

The conditions were right.

But the conditions were also right for you to be who you were to me for the limited time we had. For that I am grateful. In that, I wouldn't change a thing.

Everything happens for a reason. Everything happens because the conditions are right.

Good, bad, or indifferent. What happens happens because the conditions are right.

So, here we are, six years later. Six years after the right conditions led to a fatal heart attack. Six years after you died.

You did not leave me. You were not taken away from me. You died. You died because the conditions were right.

And because the only conditions I can affect are my own, I choose to believe that I will see you again. I choose to believe that I carry some portion of you with me. My memories and the love I have for you. The relationship has not ended. It just looks different.

I can still love you and honor you. Because those are the conditions that I control. And when it comes to choosing to love others, and especially you, though I may not do it well or perfectly or consistently, the conditions are always right.