.ground.

For You are the ground.

The ages to You are only seasons.

You look on the near no differently from the far

and if they've learned to plant You more deeply

or build more grandly upon You

You barely feel it. You hear

neither sower nor reaper

when their footsteps pass over You.

-Rilke

Book of Hours I, 60

as are all things.

One of my best friends once wrote this:

"...The last four months were hard. But if a semester is the cross, as are all things, then maybe the last four months saved my life. Maybe all those other things taught me to see my One thing better."


Prayer this semester didn't look anything like what I have known it to look like before. I couldn't journal. I couldn't sit in a coffee shop and follow any train of thought long enough to feel like I was praying. The cheerfully-voiced and neatly patterned prayers I said with friends in the cafeteria before meals bore little to no resemblance to the way God and I were actually talking.

Me and Jesus, the me and Jesus we have been since I was 12, wasn't happening. I didn't know how to talk to Jesus in a world that lets little girls get raped and beaten and abandoned. Not in a fake, "Well, I just don't know how to talk to you if you're going to be like that" haughty way. I mean I literally did not know how to talk to Him in this new world in which I found myself. Sometimes I'll try to tell someone that I feel 'different' since HNGR and I don't know how to explain it. Because we're all different, all the time. We're different every year, sometimes for good and sometimes for bad. But I don't mean like I grew, or even I regressed. Sometimes I feel like my entire foundation that I stood on has been taken apart and put back together and I'm standing on something I don't even recognize. Now that I can breathe a little bit more I'm realizing that what I'm standing on is still pretty good. Sometimes I get these tiny glimpses that it might even be better. Stronger. But I had to learn how to do all these things on it that I knew how to do before, but the ways I knew how to do them don't work here. And the main thing that didn't work, was praying.

Praying with the expectation life is going to work out just beautifully didn't work. That sucked, but it was good. That was a wrong foundation I'd had. That's not how God works, and it's not how He's ever said He was going to work. I'm not sure why I thought otherwise, and it's been- it is- painful rearranging that. But it's good.

And, praying with the knowledge that God is good, didn't work. Because I wasn't so sure about that all the time anymore.
That sucked, and it wasn't good.

I didn't know how to pray without knowing that God is good, which means I didn't even know how to pray about the fact that I didn't know God was good. And so praying (and pretty much everything else, actually) felt terrifying.

So prayer this semester felt like it almost never happened. Because it didn't happen in any ways I had known to recognize.

Prayer this semester, instead of feeling like I was "keeping company with God", instead of quiet times in Starbucks or Caribou or long letters to God in my journal, was a lot of long walks, in the snow, by myself, with my iPod. Sometimes if it was cold or too late at night instead of walking it was driving, through my neighborhood, through the campus, going the speed limit and using turn signals, going slowly and mindlessly over the same route again and again as I tried to line my heart back up, in the quiet, for just a minute with the God I was missing.

Prayer was chopping vegetables. Really. So much so that I once heard a housemate confess to her boyfriend that she "kind of love[d] it when Emily gets depressed because we get a good soup". Prayer was hymns playing in the background as I focused on the purpose of peeling and chopping and stirring and found peace in the rhythm and the use of my hands.

Prayer was reading Rilke out loud before bed with my roommate and being able to, yes, line my heart up to these words. It was lighting a candle for five minutes at night as I asked God to bless the girls at Mosoj Yan- candle-lighting is something we did on the HNGR retreat which I found helpful.

Prayer was interceding for others, which I didn't do enough out of sheer laziness, but which by some beautiful miracle did not hold the difficulty that attempts at casual conversation with God did.

Prayer was and is, in an incredible gift of grace, the liturgy. It is going to church and saying and singing the same words every week, and in recent months being blessedly able to affirm them more and more. It is the gratitude that rises up in me that, in my inability to tell God these truths about Himself out of any spontaneity or warmth or even sense of friendship, I can sing them and raise my hands for an hour on Sunday mornings and get to tell Him them in that way. That I can find myself more and more knowing that I do believe these things, and that this liturgy, this church, is providing a way for me to affirm them before my own emotions or abilities are going to let me do so on my own. Oh, how grateful I am to get to praise God through words others have written and songs others are singing when my own heart is so confused and cold.

Prayer has been, greatly, others praying for me. That is something I think I underestimated the power of in these past seven months. People have prayed for me and that has been important.


Mostly as I have looked at myself and my interactions with God in the past seven months I have felt ashamed. Who am I to not pray? To not know how? To be so faithless? Clearly, to feel so far from prayer must mean I am far indeed. And how does this show gratitude to Mosoj Yan and the work they do?

But recently I have been realizing a bit more that it was a good thing for me to learn that prayer that does not look like journaling in a coffee shop and leaving with the feeling of peace, can still be prayer. That crying myself to sleep, God still heard me. That prayers lifted by others on my behalf and the behalf of my girls, do something powerful. And that if walking in the snow and chopping vegetables until my fridge was too full enabled me to be in front of God, then He was happy to meet me there.

I'm not very proud of how I lived the last seven months, but good things came out of them.

Mostly this year I felt like I couldn't see "my One thing". But maybe in His great and crazy mercy, He let me go for long walks and chop vegetables and rely on others' prayers, to teach me something about walking on without clarity or feelings of peace or any pride. Maybe He let me rely on the prayers of the church to teach me about the power of community worship, of the history of the big-C Church, of the importance of repetition for our souls, of the power that is in praising Him by choice and even by rote when we feel cold and dry.

I hope and pray that maybe in the long-term, these will be things that will let me see Him more.

If a semester is the cross, as are all things.

I am praying again, Awesome One. You hear me again...

Christine and I have been reading from Rilke's Book of Hours to pray together at bedtime. We found this one about a week ago and both loved it so much that we've read it three times since. I connect with it more every time I read/pray it...

...With my half-mouth I stammer You,
who are eternal in your symmetry.
I lift to You my half-hands
in wordless beseeching, that I may find again
the eyes with which I once beheld You...

It’s here in all the pieces of my shame
that now I find myself again.
I yearn to belong to something, to be contained
in an all-embracing mind that sees me
as a single thing.
I yearn to be held
in the great hands of Your heart–
oh let them take me now.

Into them I place these fragments, my life,
and You, God–spend them however you want.

-Rilke

oh, sinners, let's go down, down in the river to pray...

I am, you anxious one.

Don't you sense Me, ready to break
into being at your touch?

My murmurings surround you like shadowy wings.

Can't you see Me standing before you

cloaked in stillness?
Hasn't My longing ripened in you
from the beginning
as fruit ripens on a branch?

I am the dream you are dreaming.

When you want to awaken, I am that wanting:
I grow strong in the beauty you behold.
And with the silence of stars I enfold
your cities made by time.

-More Rilke. I'm loving him.

Things which are helping me pray right now: long walks, chopping vegetables, poetry.

Why am I reaching again for the brushes?
When I paint Your portrait, God,
nothing happens.

But I can choose to feel You.

At my senses' horizon,
You appear hesitantly,
like scattered islands.

Yet standing here, peering out,
I'm all the time seen by You.

The choruses of angels use up all of heaven.
There's no more room for You
in all that glory. You're living
in Your very last house.

All creation holds its breath, listening within me,
because, to hear You, I keep silent.


-Rilke, Book of Hours I, 18

Only in the realm of Praising should Lament walk...

We took my host siblings to the airport yesterday morning. After several years of living with my host parents while their parents worked to support them, they were finally able to move to Spain to live with their birth family.

I got home last night and walked into the living room, where for the past four years there have been three excited kids playing a loud game of cards or fighting over what to watch on the TV.

My host mom lay alone, on a mat on the floor. The TV was on, but she was staring at the ceiling. I called her name, and she turned and looked up at me with swollen red eyes.

I went and laid down next to her, cuddling up to her back.
How are you.
Sad.
Me too.
Sad. Come, eat.

I'd stopped at a friend's after work and eaten there, but you don't say no to food in Bolivia, and you don't deny someone who's just lost three of her children a chance to be a mother. We walked into the kitchen and she poured me tea and put bread on a plate. We sat down.

She said, It's quiet.
Yeah, it is.
No kids.
Nope.
No laughing.
Nope.
I waved at every airplane that passed by today. (She laughed self-consciously). I thought, maybe it's my babies.

I looked down at my plate and bit my lip hard to keep myself from crying. It didn't work. Tears fell on my bread and I half-stifled a sob.

I watched as my host mom's face, that I've almost only ever seen cheerful and laughing, crumpled. She put her hand to her mouth and sobbed, bending over her plate. Tears ran into the deep wrinkles on her brown cheeks. Even her two long gray braids hung sadly, it seemed, twisted together haphazardly today.

Dimelsa and I were always together. Every day.
I know.
My babies.
I know.

We cried, sitting together at the kitchen table.

After a few minutes I asked apologetically, Did I make you cry because I started crying?
Yes.
Sorry. (Pause). My mom says it's good to cry sometimes. She says it's good for your body, it's good to cry when you're sad.

My host mom nodded.
Yes. Oh, and how is your mother? Is she well?
Yes, she's well.
Please send her our greetings.
I will.

(Even still crying, I laughed to myself. That's so Bolivian, to ask after my family and send greetings in the midst of deep grief).

No more crying. We shouldn't cry. They're not dead! They'll come back!

I looked up, startled at this somewhat abrupt proclamation (though true, I guess).

OK. No more crying.
How's your bread? It's good tonight, isn't it?
Yes, the bread's delicious.

She kissed my cheek. I kissed hers and said good night and went to bed, and she and her husband slept alone in their bedroom for the first time in four years.

"...Joy knows, and Longing has accepted,—
only Lament still learns; upon her beads,
night after night, she counts the ancient curse.

Yet awkward as she is, she suddenly
lifts a constellation of our voice,
glittering, into the pure nocturnal sky."

Ask the questions...

So, normally, when we have a paper to write for school, the traditional thought process is that it´s going to be about conclusions. Right? We all know the drill. Thesis statement, expand on three supporting facts, wrap it all up with a nice conclusion paragraph...

Yeah, so, every month for HNGR we have to write a 5 or 10 page paper responding to some quotes from our assigned readings for the month. I finished my August one on Saturday and sent it in.

My final 6 page paper had FIFTEEN question marks in it. Almost every single paragraph ended in a question mark... and the one that didn´t ended in the sentence, "I don´t know" (and was preceded by a sentence which ended in a question mark). And we´re not talking like, question marks at the end of rhetorical questions I used to make my brilliant (conclusive) points... The paper had fifteen question marks because that´s what the responses of my heart AND mind are to the readings this month, and to the specific quotes on which I was writing. Questions, questions, and more questions. A few conclusions ("God cares about the poor??"), but I´m slightly scared to make them because they´re DEFINITELY going to lead me to even more questions ("So what do I do now?").

After I sent the paper to the HNGR office, I sent a personal email to Dr. Robinson, HNGR´s faithful director. Basically just pointing out everything I just wrote here- uhh, I feel like normally I try to make statements when I write papers! But I´m not in a place to do that right now. Is that okay?? Is that normal? What the heck, please?

He wrote back that yes, it is fine and even great that everything here is leading me to questions- quote from his email, "I think the hallmark of a liberal arts education is not to provide you with the answers, but to teach you to ask the questions. This is also, I believe, the essence of the life of faith...". I love that. (Maybe because it´s also the essence of the life as the daughter of two psychotherapists! ;-)).

And he included this quotation from Rilke:

"...Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart
And try to love the questions themselves
Like locked rooms and like books
That are written in a very foreign tongue.
Don’t search for the answers,
Which could not be given to you now,
Because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is, to live everything.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps then, someday in the future,
You will gradually, without even noticing it,
Live your way into the answer."

OK then. I´ll keep asking them. And trying to live them, even if falteringly.

(This entire interaction, by the way, is a really good example of why I love Wheaton professors SO much. They really are just that amazing.)


OK, so I wasn´t planning on including this part, but, I just decided that I´m going to!... here´s one of the quotes I was responding to, and a few of the questions I am asking, in my paper and my heart.

“God always takes His stand unconditionally and passionately on this side and on this side alone: Against the lofty and on behalf of the lowly; against those who already enjoy right and privilege and on behalf of those who are denied and deprived of it". -Karl Barth. How do you react to this?

Bits from my paper:
"My first reaction to this quote, and to all other ones similar to it in other pieces of writing and especially in the Bible, is to be really freaked out." (Yeah, I used the phrase "freaked out" in a formal essay. How great a writer am I, not.)
"...Deep down, don´t my lifestyle decisions say that I believe that I am “different” from the people I see here? That somehow, my “needs” are different- I just need more. Or even that I secretly believe that I deserve more??"
"...And when it comes to “identification”, if my life is structured around avoiding suffering, how am I going to be able to truly identify with those who suffer?"
"...Do the poor know my Lord in a way I don’t… are there sides to Him they get to see that I cannot?"


And in case anyone´s wondering what these readings are, there have been several but the biggest one was:

Missions and Money by Jonathan Bonk
as well as The Scandalous Message of James: Faith Without Works is Dead by Elsa Tamez.