To “house” means just that; it means not to suppress or repress or extinguish anything we are giving house room. It does not mean having one’s psyche all tidied up, marched to order, everything understood. Those neatenings and straightenings reflect only an obsessive hygiene, a self-defeating urge to surface perfections. Housing means space, awareness, making room in consciousness for all the unknown presences that exist in us, between us, among us.
I wrote about my special relationship with time in the last post. Underneath that relationship is a very old basic thing called fear. I don’t think of it like this always, but whenever I’m in the future in my head, it’s a way that my fear is working me over. My fear takes me away from right now.
If you find yourself questioning or querying tomorrow; if you notice that your mental preference is for the days ahead; and if you think more about tomorrow than now, you may be subject to unnoticed fears. You may not but you probably are.
Fear should be normalized by the way. It’s not wrong to be afraid. It may eventually lead to wrong. It may get to be wrong. But the experience of fear starts as an experience of honesty. To say that you’re afraid, to notice that fear, is an expression of reality that is actually holy because it is an expression of deep authenticity.
Are you in the future because you’re forward-thinking or because you are a prophetic person? You may be subject to a darker side of that gifted expression. You may be prone in your inner self to fear. Try not to judge it. Sit with it. Take it in as a moment and a feeling. See what it tells you.
I heard the other day–it was a Monday–a radio host say to us in the audience, “We’re going to get to the weekend soon.” I looked up from what I was doing. I took a breath and muttered a question I knew the answer to. “What day is it though?”
I hadn’t been at work long enough to forget. It was Monday, just ten after nine. We had our daily morning meeting. I had been in the office for an hour, maybe less. It was essentially the first music I listened to as I looked over prospective students’ application to our clinical pastoral education program.
As I said, I looked up. I stopped reading. I re-stated what I’d heard her say. “Don’t worry. We’re going to get to the weekend soon.” I thought: it’s Monday and you’re already telling us that it’ll be okay and that we’ll make it to the weekend. The next weekend.
I have a tendency to move quickly. I experience myself as decisive so that when my mind is finished with a thing, with a relationship, with a decision, I act. I tell people close to me that I have always had a special relationship with time. I speed up when I should slow down. I take my time when I should speed up. But I don’t generally believe in dragging my feet after deliberation, discernment, and so forth.
But this sister, on a Monday, was pushing our eyes beyond the moment, beyond the week, and toward a distant future. I wanted to tell her to slow down, to take a breath. I wanted to believe that her week, like mine, possessed wondrous gifts no matter how hard life really was.
I tell you, life is hard. It can be worse, but even if life isn’t worse, it may just be bad. It may push you to look beyond the moment. Slow up though. It’s 9:10am on a Monday. Who knows what noontime will bring? Be there when it comes. Don’t be in some distant future. You’ll miss the moment. And you’ll miss every one between 9:10am and then.
What I mean is that what makes “white” theology “white” is that it does not do its work pentecostally; that is, it does not do it from within the distinctively Jewish-Christian horizon of the miracle of speech, the overturning of nationalism, the theological refounding of identity within the person of Jesus of Nazareth. It is unable to speak the truth of the God of Israel in a language–and therefore in a cultural and political orientation–that is not its own. It has been unable to fathom how another reality sacramentally and iconically bears God. This inability–the stammering of whiteness–infects its overall vision of the human person and leads to a repression of all other identities that it creates and then in binary fashion sets itself against.
J. Kameron Carter, ending a chapter on Frederick Douglass and offering what is a seminal and spirited explanation of theology from an historically informed and biblically and culturally sensitive location. I read it as part of a course I’m taking on African American Political Theology. The chapter itself dives into how Douglass, a key voice in American political inquiry and history, engages in a repetitive “symbolic construction of racial and national identity” as a critique of American religion and religious practice.
I used to hear a phrase people would use when they would need something done and they’d know the person for it. It may have been in a movie. “I gotta guy” was the phrase.
It was and is a way to point to who’s around you, who’s available to you, who’s a resource to step in when you need someone. I don’t think I’ve heard it used in an especially gendered way. It’s less about a guy and more about help.
Everybody needs help. Whether you use language about guys or girls–and I’d suggest using those kinds of words less and less. Whatever words you use, though, how do you acknowledge your needs, your limits, and your resources?
Do you have a guy? Do you have a team? Do you have access to people who are helpful? Helpful is a key word because you can have people around you or available to you and they not help.
Take a moment and thank God for who’s around you and who’s helping you. Take another moment and survey critically whether you need new people, different people near.
There’s only courage and power in adding to the number of people around you who are helping you. Do you have a pastor? Do you have a spiritual director? Do you have a therapist? Do you have a friend?
These people can be helpful. Family can be helpful but they have a different job, right? Family is more than helpful! But when it comes to having help, who’s among that circle for you? Who’s there for you?
I was walking from lunch on a bridge in the hospital. When I do this, I’m usually behind people and I’m usually in front of people. In other words, I’m in a line of people walking on a bridge. We’re all going from one part of the hospital to another.
I was walking from lunch the other day, behind a man. I remember him being on the phone, though I may have made that up. He kept a steady pace. Sometimes people walk slowly. Sometimes people stop abruptly, aware that they’re in the wrong place. This man was walking steadily.
After we crossed the bridge and stepped into the main building, he turned and said to himself–or to the person on the phone if there was a phone and in my memory, there was a phone on his ear–“I’m turning around to see where I parked. I have to look back to make sure I know where I’m going.”
Of course, he meant he had to make sure he knew where he’d be going, when he returned to the parking structure. There are multiple bridges to cross at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. He, like so many other patients or visitors, didn’t want to get lost!
I knew instinctively that the man was offering me something important. I muttered to myself a line about having to look back in order to look forward. “Sankofa” came to mind. There’s so much room ahead to get lost, isn’t there? Sometimes you have to turn around and look back to see where you’ve been. And sometimes looking back is also, at the same time, about looking toward your coming future.
There may be unknowns ahead. That’s likely. But there is also a very deep, abiding, resilient knowing in your future. You have been somewhere before. You already have a sense of direction. You know some things. Look back. What’s behind you will tell you that.
I’m reblogging this from 2016 to mark this meaningful moment in the liturgical year. It’s written post the event and I’m repurposing it to look ahead to this Wednesday.
On Wednesday, all day long, me and a group of chaplains were going about the hospital saying a version of the same thing. “You were created from ashes and one day you will return to ashes. Turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ. Repent and believe the good news that God loves you and longs for you to be whole.”
I’d ask for the person’s name, look her or him in the eye, and pronounce these words so that each word was clear, pronounced. And for each of us, me and the individual, we heard the echo of our limitation in life. We heard that we could respond to the good news and that we were going to die.
I have acknowledged two Ash Wednesdays in a hospital, and it’s a deeply sobering experience. Level 1 Trauma Center. Downtown Chicago. All kinds of people. Many different reasons for their hospitalizations when they’re patients. Just as many different stories when they’re on the staff. And my role—with other spiritual caregivers—is to remind them of their wonderful and simple createdness while also reminding them of their eventual end.
I have thought, on more than one occasion, about dying. Not all the details of my death. But the broad vague fact of it. You can’t flee from it when you see death a lot. When you’re alongside a doctor who checks for a pulse and who tells a wife that her husband of five decades is taking his final breaths. Or when you walk with people on the cusp of it. Or when you listen to last breaths being taken and released. Or when you hold all those tears of loved ones whose burdens are unutterable.
The contemplation of death is a prerequisite for the minister. The articulation of some hope in the midst of it is as well. Part of our articulation is in the hope hinted at during Ash Wednesday. We hold both life and death in our mouths. And we pronounce that both are true, that both are to be accepted as (now or eventual) gifts.
It’s not a conversation starter, this ashes to ashes business. It’s not something you want to open the day with. And yet it happens to hundreds of people. It’s the one day I’ll see people as Christians. Non-Christians don’t get “ashed”. Catholics almost certainly do, and many Protestants will as well. Dark crosses become an acceptable part of the otherwise identical uniform. Some wear that chalky cross and some don’t. I tell myself that these are the people who are more closely aware of their ends. They know their limits. They realize that death is coming.
And the coming of death for the Christian, ashed or not, is a confusing experience. We don’t welcome it because we love life. Yet we don’t see it as something worth running from when it comes since “to die is gain.” And of course as I’ll say in upcoming posts, the experience of grieving after loss is another long matter.
Forget about objectivity. It’s a fallacy and a send-off. There is no such thing as being general. There isn’t a general individual on this planet. Why would you try to be?
Rather than trying to be what you cannot be, general, consider a more natural option: being biased. When you’re biased, you lean in a direction. You turn and set yourself. You head to a place.
Be slanted in a direction. Go somewhere that’s different, that’s unique to you, and that sets boundaries that are consistent with who you are with your different, unique, and special self.
You’re already biased, even if you don’t want to be. You’re interested in things and disinterested in other things. You wake dreaming about this and not that. You pray about some matters and ignore others. All of that means that you are facing a direction.
It’s absolutely true that you should question your biases, unearth the stories of your prejudices, and interrogate your acts of ignoring what is good. This is not a post about that kind of criticality. This post is a post about you being who you are and not some poor made up version of someone else. You were made to be you.
Go ahead and be biased. The worst that can happen is that find out that in the process of being you actually lived.
We walked in and the smell of feet enveloped us. Particular feet. Lots of feet. Mostly children’s feet. We were in an indoor play park, Urban Air. There were children everywhere.
Trampolines and rock walls. Balls, the ones I call vomit balls because of a time I was at Showbiz when they shut the section down after a kid threw up in them. I heard the fun of dodge and basketball ball. There was a hint of cheese baking and I remember looking around and thinking about how certain kinds of cheese, also, smell like feet.
Bryce was excited and it took nothing to be alert to him, his eyes darting from place to place. He was ready to ask for freedom as he waited in line and while I called Uncle Winfield who had his entry ticket.
As the play went underway, Dawn and Sister Vicky talked and coaxed boy two through the only area he was sized to meet. Me and Winfield chatted. We weren’t talking about work but our conversation made me think of it.
I was ready to walk back to the car and sit in the quiet. Winfield was lovingly telling me to lighten up. There were too many of other people’s children. I couldn’t keep an eye on my own. Of course, I secretly distrust how they’ll handle themselves in such situations. Brooks had already met a few injuries that week so I was anxious.
“They’re out of school,” Winfield said. “They need a place where there are no rules. This is that place.” I wrote those words in my head. They were for the moment and they were for me. I imagined them on one of Winfield’s blog graphics or on his Facebook page.
He has a way of correcting me. In other moments, I tell him things he isn’t hearing too. But in that moment, I tried to relinquish my anxiety about these children I didn’t recognize, I tried to play, I tried to get into a space with no rules. Brother Winfield was right.
So I tried to imagine where I could play, where I could run, where I could laugh and not worry about my sons breaking bones or coming to me crying or hungry or dysregulated. And then I got up because it was my turn to monitor Brooks who we didn’t by a band for because I wasn’t paying for him to enter the fun zone where he couldn’t really play on the big toys. He needed a monitor while on his little rule-less slide and it was my turn.
It had been a few days but the complaint of almost everyone was about the cold. In Texas and apparently to Texans, cold was a word that applied to what in Chicago would be mild echoes of spring.
To my mind, it wasn’t cold, but it did become dangerous. It was dangerous because in Forth Worth everyone drove everywhere. So when the temperatures dropped from the balmy near 50s to just under freezing, the roads iced.
Windshields carried that fuzzy film that meant you had to turn the car on for a day to defrost it or spray the chemical stuff we didn’t have in the rental or scrape the ice manually which is what I end up doing.
We were told that they had no salt. Grammie and Winfield told us about sand and we did see one small salt truck. Neither of those helped on most roads and we were met with many very slow drivers. Grammie mentioned black ice. I turned up the music as I drove. I kept thinking about how cold it wasn’t. I relaxed a little as I got a behind-the-wheel sense of what was.
Still, it was on the way to the Potters House of Fort Worth where we would see a half dozen accidents, closed roads, and police blocking entry ramps. When I drive in those conditions, I drive for others. In those moments, I feel like I drive well, even if stressed because I can’t control the movements of people I assume are silly kids. I take a deep breath. I shake my head at the swift, jerky motions of cars, and I adjust to what I see.
I remember the conditions were dangerous but not so much because of the weather or the streets but the people. If people don’t know how to drive when the roads are slick, they’ll drive the way they normally do. And we saw that as I counted those accidents to the sounds of Meta Washington’s Sunday radio show.
Conditions matter. They impact performance or they should. When a driver acts like they don’t, there will be crashes, likely injuries, and a lot of hassle. That’s what we saw in Fort Worth on the way to and from church. Pastor Winfield told the church to be safe, to slow down, to take care. It felt like the kind of reminder that fit a lot of situations in life.
The thing I remember about those first days, the thing I mostly remember at this moment, is the nights and how long they felt. Not that first night because I was in the airport taking a very late flight when my aunt called me about my Pops death. That first night, I nearly dropped into the bed after negotiating our first flight with Bryce. Carrying things takes a toll on the body, and even holding the news of my father’s death, sleep took me in for those next hours like an attentive lover.
I sensed something, some knowing, less than a week prior. I had a burst of conviction to see him. I knew I would travel the week of Christmas. I wanted to see him though. I felt like I had to. I had been driving down to Arkansas, at least, monthly since his stroke. The last visit was literally a last-minute decision. I got a car, drove the 10 hours, and was pressing a button on the door of a specialty hospital after winding through Google’s crazy directions which took me through unlit roads from the interstate in very dark country.
I won’t write about that moment. But I will say that six days later when he died, that dark night driving came back to me. It’s the dark, lengthy nights that sit with me when I first get into the memories of my father’s death, the bitterness of it, and when I start to get back to the other recollections of his life.
The nights where I lay in the bed crying and wondering why the world wasn’t doing the same thing, wondering how anybody could sleep after the death of my father. The nights where I had no soul company, where I couldn’t relate to anyone, and where my reality was so unique, so different from my four brothers or from my mother. The night where I knew there were people near me but where I felt so far away.
My father’s death was an entrance for me into a qualitatively different depth, one I would gladly give back if I could. It was the one grim event in my adulthood that has framed the rest. His death brought a reference point for all my subsequent dark nights. There is more to say. There will be more to say, and there will be nothing to say, many moments when there is absolutely nothing to say.
I will be with you in the darkness. I will be with you from a distance and I’ll be with you occasionally up close. You, like me, won’t be alone. You’ll be cloaked with others even when you’ll feel that particular separation that will lodge somewhere in you far down. You are anything but alone.
Michael Washington 