Posts by Michael

I am a husband, father, minister, and writer.

May 9, 2014 by Michael

Where Wounds Become Insignificant

When a wounded child climbs into its mother’s lap, it draws so much strength from the mother’s presence that its own wound becomes insignificant. So too with us when we climb into the lap of our great Mother God. Our crisis soon domesticates and comes into a peaceful perspective, not because it goes away, but because the presence of God so overshadows us.

When I read this in Forgotten Among the Lilies, I thought of Eliot, next to Bryce, slipping at the table Sunday, nearly falling to the floor but stopping as his ear clipped the chair. Hard enough to sting. Hard enough to crack the little eruption that is a child’s pain magnified by surprise and other people’s company.

I had one of his arms to lift him. Maggie came over to pick him up because he was crying by then. He complained about the pain and Maggie took him in her arms, his head to her shoulder, and convinced him by her hug that he would live through it.

He calmed as long as she held him. Then he cried again, trading his mom for his dad. David, master of redirection with the boys that he is, turned Eliot’s attention with a high-pitched question.

The image of a child in pain. The image of a mother, then a father, and a few onlookers. It seems like these words are easily seen.

May 7, 2014 by Michael

What I Fear

A news story about the United Nations and the Roman church’s response to sexual abuse of minors and an article about the Texas teacher who assaulted her students by giving a boy a birthday lapdance. I read those stories before I sat to write. Of course I thought of how me and Dawn have been troubled over the ways we will shepherd our son through his natural social disposition toward a more realistic humanity because of the world’s wrongness or, the world’s distortion and because people in the world are wrong and distorted.

When I think about teachers harming students and family members harming students, it makes me shake my head in disgust. Raising a child, a son in my case, is such an experiment in trust.

I think of those boys and girls who were molested–even if only in a psychological way, although such molestation always joins other kinds–and how their skies have fallen, been severely limited, or turned perpetually bleak.

What I fear is my son’s absolute proximity to children who are hurt, victimized, ignored, unseen, underfed, and unloved. I fear the unnoticed ways all our children are hindered because of the stupid decisions of a person, a family, an institution, a culture which promotes poor ways of parenting as a society.

There is only so much a parent can do. There are so many things that a father can’t control about his child’s path. There is so much trust inherent in bringing home a baby.

I’d love to see my son protected and I will do everything I can to preserve his life, his whole life, his happy life, his enriched humanity. But I do fear that I will change him and his budding openness to people in general because of the specific people who don’t deserve his beautiful self.

May 5, 2014 by Michael

Taken By Laughter

The picture of you sitting on a bright orange seat, across from Grammy, mimicking her. “Deep,” you said, repeating your best impression of her as she offered an impression of someone else. You were so tickled, so taken by something that made you laugh, that held you like a loving embrace, that wouldn’t let you go for a long minute.

I was there, next to you, taken by your laughter. And it was the highlight of the day. Remembering it makes me thankful because the whole thing comes right back in my ear and in my eye. You curling up in stitches.

May 4, 2014 by Michael

Creating Saints

I’ve been thinking about the creation of saints, the way saints are made, and it’s been a head swirl of a time. I’ve been both captivated and sullen, giving my ears to the interviews between Charlie Rose and leaders in the Roman church, for instance, and struggling with questions in my own ministry of what a saint looks like and how many we have and who is so far away from the word that they themselves would laugh.

It’s a basic question. After all, I spend my days doing ministry. I spend a lot of time pushing, coaxing, praying, encouraging, and teaching people–all because our work is about creating saints. Not in the Roman tradition of course. There are no robes, no newspaper articles, no banners or flags or printed billboards. There aren’t interviews of all the people these saints have met, notes about every conversation, explanations of the details of their miracles.

There are miracles but they’re boring, unseen miracles. They are the daily events that God must be underneath but that Presence is so far that is silly to call them by the same name. They’re too terrestrial, these miracles. But we make disciples in churches. We talk to people and recognize the gifts that only God could implant. We create saints.

And creating saints in my way of practicing is both encouraging and debilitating. It’s draining and fun. It’s hard and people are ungrateful while, at the same time, in some other way, there’s nothing more interesting and full and enlivening.

Creating saints brings no cameras or coverage. There is hardly any notice of this mundane task; even colleagues may not notice or understand since our services are so specialized and context-bound. There is less fanfare.

Creating saints means dinners away from family, vacations at weird times when they come, taking days to recover from an experience of self-giving, or never having normal Sundays, even while Sunday is the momentous occasion of remembering what it’s all about. Creating saints is waking up with someone’s name on my tongue, someone who’s life was given to me in 2 hours and in a way that it’ll make me intercede at odd hours. Creating saints means insomnia and isolation because of confidentiality and appreciation for a long laugh that my son just can’t control.

No one wants to see that on television. It would be too boring, too close to real human experience. It’d be better to read a good novel. At least you could close the book and move on.

May 3, 2014 by Michael

Allergies

Puffy eyes, a dripping, sniffling nose, tiny and multiple bumps that remind me of hills on his face. It’s either an allergic reaction or an allergy, which is the same thing, isn’t it?

In some ways, the canvas of my son’s beautiful face made only more beautiful can be fixed by something diagnosed, something prescribed. In other ways, the rumple in our lives that comes with spring is a reminder of how this wonderful son has things happening in him that I’ll never see, never be able to control, never be able to change.

Seeing him helps me see that as he grows, I must grow. Grow to surrender that daily lie I live into so well: that I control any of this experience called raising a child. I have a part and I’ll play it. But there’s someone else in control. That’s the hope and that’s the worse feeling in the world.

November 8, 2013 by Michael

Pressing Pause

I’m writing this more for me than for the folks who visit these posts. I’m not able to maintain the blogging habit these days, clear from the length between the last post and this acknowledgment. It’s a small failure to state it so clearly, but the lingering of my blogs hurts just as much. Perhaps I’ll return after my clinical pastoral education or after the dryness under my words has been refreshed.

November 8, 2013 by Michael

Michael Washington

Reflections on the Spiritual Life

Author / Michael

Posts by Michael

Where Wounds Become Insignificant

What I Fear

Taken By Laughter

Allergies

Pressing Pause

Pressing Pause