The Zoopness: "To Sir, With Love"

The ghosts I’ve let down, the commandment I can’t keep, the insufficiency of grace, and the love that finds us anyway

Our culture is full of words that have become so overladen with multiple meanings and insinuations they’ve essentially come to lack any real substance or utility for me --- woke, Christian, progress, conservative, optimize, Great, pro-life/pro-choice, bless. I try not to use these words because one of my core primal desires is to be understood, and meaningless or inflammatory words are not conducive to understanding. But boy can I get caught up in the word salad sometimes.

Bless is the hardest one for me. Because sometimes I truly don’t have another word for what I mean, but it also makes my bones cringe. Mary Oliver said that she’d trade chance, luck, coincidence and serendipity for the word grace. I like all those words and agree with Mary, as always, that grace is the best amongst them. She comes to me in dreams sometimes and walks with me in silence. I’m grateful every single time, that when I feel so desperate and afraid, this woman whose words have connected me to God and nature and myself for decades comes to me to just be quiet. Grace.

Grace was the organizing framework of my faith for the first 40 years of my life. The world was terrible and beautiful and broken and redeemed and we got to participate in the magic that shows up sometimes. And I mostly still believe that. But grace has come to mean such a specific and individual thing in our culture. It implies unworthiness, transaction, and too often supremacy. That person is struggling and I offer them grace. Saved from our wretchedness. Eventually too many ideas on a single concept, and during the pandemic, it/I broke under the weight. I saw every single person I loved struggling, in ways tiny and enormous, and I prayed for the grace to show up with compassion for them and myself and the world. And the prayer was just fundamentally not answered. The grace did not come. People suffered and endured (endurance is its own form of grace, I know, but not the kind we ever choose) --nerve endings got shorter and scarcity mindsets got bigger and grievances grew larger and separations widened and beauty dimmed.

And in that dimming and doubting and utter darkness was the biggest gift I’ve ever received. To learn what’s on the other side of grace. Beyond what I could imagine or fathom because I’m not entirely sure how human of a concept it is. Grace is the currency of humans and a very human God. Mercy is the currency of the cosmos – the God that’s bigger than whatever our idea of Him or Her is. Grace is the finger pointing to the moon, but Mercy is the Moon itself. “

I understand that it’s borderline blasphemous to be denouncing grace on Holy Saturday, so I want to be clear that’s not my intention. I love grace – it’s warm, and forgiving, and solid, and clear. It’s the tension of the cross, held in suspension. But mercy is the aftermath. It’s the eternal and unshakeable goodness at the foundation of the universe that makes every physical law true while superseding every single thing we think we know or believe.

I lost faith in humanity during the pandemic. I lost faith in myself. I lost faith in our collective goodness and I had absolutely no vision for how we were going to undo this mess we found ourselves in. I stopped believing Love was sovereign and wondered how far outside of God’s time we had traveled. We seemed so unevolved — a herd species committed to its own destruction, following AI and greed and fear straight over the cliff. An apex predator scared of its shadow.

But I remember now. It was never dependent on us. Because Mercy is sovereign here as soon as we have eyes to see and ears to hear and hearts that remember where we came from. The kingdom of God is now or never and we’re found as soon as we stop pretending that any of this is easy, or makes sense, or has an answer. We enter the mystery of slow time and confess to each other our confusion and humanness and wonder. We remember that we are made of genuine actual star dust, that we walk in the longest line of fighters and survivors and believers and hopers. We remember that we arrived here perfectly known, intimately and individually, called by the Ever-Inviting Voice that is so small and quiet, but never tired. Loved unconditionally by the force that put the stars in the sky and brought the mountains to the sea and that will hold us all together long after our individual light as gone out. Life finds a way.

Blessing.

To be part of a story larger than whatever individual story is being written by my own singular life. To see through the illusion of the false self and the small narrative and believe the things I encounter along the path have purpose beyond me. To remember that Love is the most magical, expansive substance in the entire universe and that when I release my grip on the hollow, tiny things that were never going to save me anyway, I get to take the hand of Creation and step into the dance.

--

Every single person I know has at least one part of their story they’d give anything to write out or take away: Insurmountable loss; pain too great to bear; choices made in the dark; love not expressed when the moment called for it; abandonment, betrayal, shame.

The people I look to now are the ones who teach that the Way of Life is bigger than any single loss, regardless of how big it feels, and that we belong to each other. People of great wisdom and patience who appear with humility and in the spirit of friendship – happy to walk slowly even though they’ve been further down the path and know the smallness of my fears and confusion.

One of those teachers was Professor Peter Walshe. He taught South African Politics at Notre Dame and he died last month at the age of 91. The night he died, I had a dream that I was writing an exam for him, and I felt the same sense of pressure and inadequacy I felt then of wanting to prove to someone I admired that I was worthy of his instruction and his time. Professor Walshe had eyes that sparkled. He carried an ancient briefcase and his lecture notes looked like relics from the Great War. To have him as a teacher was a blessing. An invitation into a larger story of prophetic justice that connected apartheid South Africa to Oxford University to union halls in South Bend, Indiana to rural northern Uganda. I remember the moment after I graduated, throwing away my notebooks from his class, thinking I wouldn’t need them again. One of the great regrets of my life.

But if I close my eyes, I can see him clear as day in DeBartolo Hall telling me and my friends with his utterly gorgeous accent that the fundamental purpose of Christianity is to throw out wider and wider nets of community. In the final telling, no one is left out – there will be no in group and out group. No winners or losers. Just everyone, united in our eternal goodness, cured of the belief that there wasn’t enough to go around. W/hen the things we use to point to our separation and superiority--- the color of our skin and the shapes of our bodies and the details of our practice --- have all faded away, and our bones have returned to stardust and our spirits stand together. Why not reach for that now?

It's the vision of the Beloved Community that kept me returning to the church long past the time my individual faith had expired, and long before it was restored.

And when I feel shame and remorse for the lessons – blessings – I’ve been given that I don’t seem to know how to make good on and wonder if my teachers are looking down judging my inadequacies and failed attempts and overwhelming fear, it’s that vision that reminds me they weren’t ever interested in right answers. They were interested in the questions and the way I live them out.

The most repeated commandment in the Bible is “be not afraid” and I personally thought that was bullshit for a very long time. I was incapable of talking my body out of fear. Panic attacks and migraines and medical emergencies and world-shifting events decimated my ability to complete the stress response in my body and find calm. And I couldn’t understand why God was asking me to do something he knew I was incapable of.

But in that doubting and confusion, I came to understand the commandment doesn’t come from the mind or voice of a drill sergeant or an old school coach yelling at us to suck it up and push through the fear and purify ourselves of weakness.

It’s the voice of everyone who has ever loved us – every healed and whole teacher and parent and friend and saint… it’s the voice of Jesus on the cross and Mary at the foot of it. It’s the voice of heaven saying: There’s nothing that you’re going through that I haven’t already seen. There is no fear or wound or loss that is bigger than my Love. You are surrounded. We’re right here. You don’t walk alone. You are caught in the net. Hold on.

The recipe for renewal is still here. We haven’t lost it. It’s encoded into our DNA and echoed by every spring blossom.

When we’ve reached the end of our own resources and don’t know which way to go, we are allowed to fall to our knees and cry for mercy. The path unfolds and blessings appear. Trust them. Step closer. Cast your net and be caught by it. Be free.

—

A Ritual to Read to Each Other, William E. Stafford

If you don't know the kind of person I am

and I don't know the kind of person you are

a pattern that others made may prevail in the world

and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,

a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break

sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood

storming out to play through the broken dike.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,

but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,

I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty

to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,

a remote important region in all who talk:

though we could fool each other, we should consider—

lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,

or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;

the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —

should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.