Holy Week

Two years ago, when our daughter was two-and-a-half, we took her to the community Maundy Thursday service. It was held at a Lutheran church that I love dearly because they collectively look away from their watches and phones for as long as it takes on Sunday morning (or, in this case, Thursday night) to go through all four readings of the day, to chant at every opportunity, to kneel and bow, to get the bread and wine into the hands of every congregant, to offer healing prayer and sprinkling of water no matter how long the line or how late the hour. 

My strange, religious self, though uncomprehending, loves all this ritual and its eschewal of clock-watching. Our 2-year-old daughter, though she didn’t watch clocks either, was not as eager as I was for the long, slow service on that Maundy Thursday. We made a few trips to and from the nursery, but she didn’t want to stay there. She opted for the sanctuary, with me, where she proceeded to color and talk and wiggle and whine. 

Maundy Thursday services remember Jesus’ last evening spent with his disciples before his death the next day, on what is now called Good Friday. Many Maundy Thursday services rehearse two of Jesus’ last acts in particular: a meal of bread and wine, and foot washing. Churches do foot washing in a number of different ways. The Lutheran church that hosted that year’s service invited folks forward to strip off socks and shoes and take a seat at one of the wash basins. Then one of the pastors washed their feet.

I asked our daughter if she wanted to have her feet washed. She wasn’t sure. “It’s up to you,” I said, “but if you want to, you can. It’ll feel nice.” 

She followed me forward and watched as I took my turn at the basin. I do not particularly like this practice; I am exceedingly ticklish, my feet especially, and sometimes it’s all I can do to avoid kicking whatever poor soul is doing the washing. Plus, I have weird feet. But I do it anyway, for the same not-quite-clear reason I do a lot of religious rituals, because I trust that something about the practice will form me in ways I probably can’t even predict. 

I survived my foot bath; more importantly, so did Pastor Ken, the lucky washer assigned to me. And then I asked our daughter again if she wanted a turn. She still wasn’t sure, but I told her she could sit on my lap and this seemed to make her feel a little better. We returned to the basin, and I sat down again, this time presenting her perfect feet to be washed. She sat quietly while Ken poured the water and washed and patted them dry. And then I helped her back into her shoes and we returned to our seats.

It was a sweet moment, for sure, but there were another 30-plus minutes of service to go. We made it. Barely. And then we went home and gratefully to bed.

But our daughter talked about Ken washing her feet for an entire year. An entire year, until it was Maundy Thursday again, and we got to go back to the Lutheran church, and she got to sit again on my lap in front of a basin. She remembered all year long.

Other parts of Holy Week--Good Friday, the day we remember Jesus’ death; Holy Saturday, when we try to resist drowning out the silence of a godforsaken world; Easter Sunday, when we celebrate the unlikeliest day of the Christian year by madly claiming that Jesus beat out even death--made impressions upon our 2-year-old too, though admittedly not so deeply as the touch of hands and water on her small, smooth feet. But she remembered all of it. She didn’t necessarily remember the story; she certainly couldn’t articulate all the meanings (as if any of us could), but she remembered the deeply sensory experiences of the rituals of this holiest week.

In this way, our daughter, as usual, gives me hints about the rest of us, myself included. Surely she is not the only one deeply imprinted by ritual; she just happens to be more transparent in her memories and thought processes. (For instance, for that year, whenever we would mention Pastor Ken, she’d make the connection out loud: “The Pastor Ken who washed my feet?”) Surely I am imprinted by my own rituals too. And maybe that’s a hint to why I keep them when I don’t always know what they mean, or if I like what they mean, or if I believe what they mean.

If our daughter's experience hints toward the power of ritual, it also offers a warning: I’d better make sure that the practices of our every day--the things we do again and again, often without thought--are offering the kind of formation I want in my children’s lives. I don’t just mean church. I also mean toothbrushing and bathing, snuggling and spacing, greetings and goodbyes, mealtimes, bedtimes, all the sometimes-mind-numbing incessance of our days. If she remembers the once a year water on her feet, surely the patterns of our life--our sitting down, our rising up, our sleeping and waking--are literally forming who she is and will be. 

We will do it imperfectly, as we have been reminded all through Lent and every day, but may we strive to do it all with the cool gentleness of water on skin, hands on feet, with love.

Lent

I feel a little like I’m skipping Lent this year. I didn’t mean to. As a matter of fact, I selected a Lenten discipline, albeit a modest one, for the first time in years. I planned to read a Psalm every morning--with my children and husband on the days we are home together, and in the seclusion of my office on the days I head off to work before breakfast. We are on day 19 of Lent (day 16 if you don’t count Sundays) and I am on Psalm 6. Six out of 16 is only good if you’re calculating a batting average.

First, I had trouble keeping up with Lent because my kids were sick. Then, because I was. After that, we were in wash-all-the-laundry, scour-all-the-surfaces recovery mode. And then we were readying ourselves for a trip to visit my grandparents, one of whose health recently got much more fragile. We got back from our trip a few days ago, and I’ve been consumed each of those days with trying to find a way to wedge in a nap. I’m worn out.

None of these are excuses, not really. None of these things has so taken over my life that I couldn’t read a measly Psalm at some point during each day. They’ve just helped me do something I’m prone to do anyway: forget.

There’s a line in one of my favorite poems by one of my favorite poets that says, “When I forget my prayers, they will / bundle up and go out on their own / across the street, down into the basement, / into a small town with no mayor where / there is a single swing in the park.” I hope my prayers have been out without me, swinging in the park and meandering down the side streets. I have a hunch that this may be more than wishful thinking, in part because I think (I hope) we humans have prayer built into us: our heartbeats, our breathing, our sighing, our sleeping and dreaming. And in part because I think this is one of the great gifts of liturgy and the faith community: the liturgy and the community hold the seasons for us when we fail and forget. No matter how much I ignore and neglect Lent, I can’t ever really skip it because it doesn’t depend on me. It happens with or without me and somehow folds me ever back in.

And then there is this: I can't really skip Lent because Lent is really damn hard to skip. Lent, as a time of penance and self-denial, seems to barge its way into our lives invited or not, named or not. This winter has been brutal for pretty much everyone I know. We are sick. We are grieving. We are fearful and lonely. We are reeling from hurt after hurt, loss after loss. We are living Lent.

Psalm 6--my psalm of the day, delinquent though I may be--says, “Have mercy on me, Lord, because I’m frail. Heal me, Lord, because my bones are shaking in terror. My whole body is completely terrified! But you, Lord! How long will this last? Come back to me, Lord! Deliver me! Save me for the sake of your faithful love!”

And I hear our voices: My grandfather. My grandmother and mother and aunt who are caring for him through the long nights. My friend who is grieving the death of her husband, missing him so much it hurts to breathe. My friend who longs for a baby. My friend who longs for a break. My husband, who carries the losses and hurts of so many, bound up with his own. Everyone I know who has been sick several times too many this season, which is pretty much everyone I know. Even my children, whose small, sweet lives are already offering them tastes of the loss and death that are all around them.

And me. Have mercy on me, Lord, because I keep skipping Lent. Have mercy on me, Lord, because I can’t skip it even if I try.

Ash Wednesday

*fair warning: curse words below*

During my last year of college, I saw a wonderful counselor and spiritual director named Kristine. I was wrestling with questions of faith, as usual, and I was also wading through some complicated history and trying to tend some old, deep wounds. Kristine was exactly the woman for the job: warm and gentle and kind (everything I was fearing life--or maybe even God--wasn’t), and maybe even more importantly, she knew exactly when to say “shit” and “fuck.” I adored her. 

On Ash Wednesday of that year, I went to the service at my church. The songs, readings, and prayers were all telling the hard truth that Ash Wednesday recalls: we are dust; we are made from dust; we return to dust. This does not just remind us that we’re mortal, though that would be enough. It reminds us that we live like dirt. We act like dirt. We love like dirt. It calls us to mourn our failings and to turn from them, to change. And as I sat in the Hope Church sanctuary, cavernous and beautiful, stark willows adorning a bare altar, I thought, I do not want to have made God sad. And I felt sad.

And then I felt startled, then repelled--almost sick. Contrition left a bad taste in my mouth. I wasn’t sure I liked God enough to care what he thought about me. I didn’t want to care. I didn’t want to bow or apologize or submit. The last few years and all my work with Kristine were about learning to be strong, to claim my own truth, to stand tall, to learn when to say “shit” and “fuck.” No way was I going to start ducking and self-flagellating now. The time for that was past.

The next day was my appointment with Kristine, and I practically ran to her office. Squirming, I told her about the service and my repentant feeling. And then I told her how I wanted nothing to do with it, how I wasn’t ready to go there.

I expected one of her usual pauses, a glance out the window, a searching look at me, a gentle smile, a tempered absolution interwoven with some wise advice.

Instead, she shrugged. “That’s okay,” she said brightly, as though it were the most obvious pronouncement ever. “God isn’t into force or coercion. You can only be where you are.”

A year later, on Ash Wednesday, I wrote her from across the country and told her how much I loved the service at my seminary that day. In our strange, austere chapel, with the space of another year and the permission Kristine had given me again and again to imagine a God of gentleness, I found Ash Wednesday delicious and true. We are dust, God knows: we are dirt. Ash Wednesday and the 40 days of Lent leading to Easter invite us to remember it, to mourn it, and ultimately to accept it.

In the last five years of parenting, counting pregnancy, some things about Ash Wednesday and Lent have once again become more difficult. Much of me still rebels against any expectation of submission, even to a supposed omnipotent, perfect, benevolent creator of the universe. Plus, God and I don’t talk, really. Whereas a lot of 20- and 30-somethings describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious,” I’m kind of the opposite: religious but not spiritual. I do the religious thing--go to church, observe the seasons, undertake the practices--but I usually don’t know how to make the leap into my own mind and life. I think prayer is bigger than words, but I think so partly because I need it to be: I don’t know how to pray with words and I very rarely do it. So a penitential season that asks me to examine my relationship with God--well, it still makes me squirm.

But in other ways, parenting has made Ash Wednesday and Lent seem endlessly appropriate. Quite simply, I am confronted every day with my fallibility. There’s nothing like a preschooler in what seems to be her first adolescence and a toddler into climbing and screeching to bring me face to face with my own limitation. When I yell at my son, I am dust. When I grip my daughter’s arm too tightly on the way to a timeout that lasts too long, I am dirt. When I physically and emotionally limp through the day because my sleep was interrupted six times in two hours, I know: to dust I will return.

When my daughter was a few weeks old, I was reeling from hormones, sleep-deprivation, a spent body, tender breasts, dizzying anxiety, and the realization hitting me with the force of a freight train every other minute that my whole, whole life was different now and would be forever. One afternoon, we managed to leave the house and brave the world. We stayed out too long, but I didn’t want to nurse her on the go, not yet, so I popped her seat in the car and gunned it home.

By the time we arrived, she was furious and hungry, so furious and hungry that she couldn’t latch on to nurse. After half a dozen laps around the house, some bouncing and singing, some cursing, and some false starts, she finally settled, nursed, and dozed in my arms.

Then it was my turn to cry. Sitting on the lumpy futon in our ugly living room, tears streaming down my cheeks, baby sleep-nursing, I told her, “Oh, baby. I’m going to fail you every day.”

It was a moment of melodrama, but only sort of. It was also true. I love my children deeply and even think I’m a pretty good mom. But I do fail them every day. I am dust. I am dirt.

Ash Wednesday and Lent are honest about this. So, most of the time, are mothers. But maybe a whole 40-day season that asks--and by asking, gives me permission--to confront my propensity to fail can release me from the guilt that so frequently laces my life.

Maybe I can summon Kristine’s beautiful nonchalance. Of course I fail. Of course sometimes I can’t quite face it. Of course sometimes I can.

Of course I am dust. Fuck. And it’s okay.

Transfiguration

We are a few short days from the start of Lent, the dust-and-ashes season of preparation before Holy Week, when we walk through the last days of Jesus' life. But before we get ahead of ourselves like Walmart selling Cadbury eggs in February, we pause, this Sunday, for one of the strangest days of the church year: Transfiguration Sunday.

The Totally Weird Transfiguration

In the story of the transfiguration, Jesus takes three of his disciples, Peter, James, and John, up onto a mountaintop alone. And then something weird happens. The Gospel of Mark describes it this way: "And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, talking with Jesus."

Peter responds clumsily, saying, ""Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah." The writer of Mark seems to almost apologize for him: "He did not know what to say, for they were terrified." And then they are swallowed by a cloud and chastised by a booming voice--"This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!"--before, in a blink, it is over.

We don't hear anything about what happened after that, before they descended the mountain. Did they stand around staring at each other? Did James and John rib Peter for his stammering offer to pitch some tents when Moses and Elijah made their time-traveling visitation? Did the wine and sweat stains reappear on Jesus' clothes; did the hems become dusty again, or did he make out with a free dry-cleaning? Who spoke first, and what on earth did he say?

The next thing we learn from the writer of the story is simply this: they descended the mountain.

Transfiguration is located at the end of the season of Epiphany, which makes sense. Jesus' blinding white clothes and altered appearance (Matthew's gospel tells us his face was also aglow) were their own kind of light bulb moment, another revelation of who Jesus was. And in case we were as daft as Peter--thank God for Peter--the booming voice spells it out. "This is my son. I love him. Listen."

Peter, James, and John know Jesus. They have traveled and talked and eaten with him for many months. They have shared bread, swapped stories, griped. They have learned how Jesus acts when he's tired or hungry, when he gets a cold, and when his mother shows up. They know his best gifts and graces and his most maddening habits. And he knows theirs. But on the mountain, he changes. He is transfigured. And at once, they can see something new about him, a different, powerful, also-true revelation of who he is.

Sometimes I think parenting is like the work of spiritual disciplines. Not that I should know: I completely suck at spiritual disciplines. I don't just mean I get too busy making wholesome breakfast smoothies and appliqued shirts for my children and occasionally forget to do my morning devotion. I mean I suck at them. I practically reject them outright. For instance, when my husband, who is a pastor (and a good one), invites the church into a week or month or season of spiritual discipline--a prayer practice, for instance--I pretty much immediately think, nope. Long ago, I tried really hard to be spiritually disciplined. I had this mistaken notion that, in response to or because of my practice, something should happen. I should feel something or hear something or know something or change somehow. I didn't. And even though I know now that I was mistaken, I'm still oddly hurt that nothing happened. Nursing this hurt, and then ignoring it, has made me a tiny bit bitter. And so I don't like to try spiritual disciplines. The suggestion makes me want to run from the room, and then eat dark chocolate, and then watch reality TV.

But the work of raising children, I've found, seems like a kind of spiritual discipline, one a hell of a lot harder than the ones I was practicing in college. Every day, I have to take care of my kids, whether I feel like it or not. Every day, I have to dress them and feed them (more than once?!) and hug them and sing to them and put them to bed. Occasionally, I have to bathe them. Always, I have to work at the gestures and vocal inflections and attentiveness that assure them they are loved. And still there are a million, zillion other tasks: nose-wiping, teeth-brushing, toe nail-clipping, hair-detangling, cup-refilling, booger-disposing, vomit-cleaning, antibiotic-dispensing, question-answering, toy-retrieving, pacifier-finding, and so many, many more. People who heartily remind parents to "love every minute" should hang out for five minutes in my favorite Facebook moms' group, where a bunch of wonderful, honest, loving moms routinely confess to each other that, as it turns out, we just realized, we don't actually like kids at all, especially our own.

I think the work of parenting--the often mind-numbing, eyeball gouging work that can somehow wrack me with worry and bore me to tears in a matter of minutes--is like a spiritual discipline because it is what we do, again and again, like it or not, to form us into who we hope to be. We pray or fast or receive communion or go to church or read the Bible (or so I've heard, ahem) because we hope those practices will shape us in life-giving ways. We keep on caring for our kids because it is a practice of love, because it actually, we hope, makes us more loving parents who can better love our children. The work of parenting is what forms us into people capable of parenting.

And then. Then, because we have done the work of the discipline, because we have worked every day--even if clumsily and fallibly--at loving, we might be gifted with transfiguration moments. No guarantees; absolutely no one-for-one payoff. But maybe, after being present through days and weeks and months, we will be blinded by new visions of our children, moments of glory and grace that teach us something new and dazzling about who they are. A moment later, it will be over. And we will have to descend and get back to work.

The other day, my daughter was talking to my mother. She was in a silly mood, excited to talk to her Grams, and all of a sudden, she was a comedian, dead clever in a way I didn't know she could be. This afternoon, my son was playing with his beloved cars, as usual. But in a moment, I looked over, and he was driving the tiniest car down the "road" made by our coffee table's design. He was silent and focused, perfectly attentive to the smallest details of his work. He was an artist, crafting his own tiny, fascinating world.

My daughter got off the phone and whined all the way until bedtime; my son soon pegged me in the head with a puzzle piece and then cried because throwing it hurt his finger. So back down the mountain we went.

But like the disciples who saw Jesus in a new, brilliant way, I too get to carry the moments of epiphany as we head back into the streets and villages, as we get back to the hard, everyday work of learning to love.

Epiphany

My 9th grade English teacher was a vocabulary badass. She assigned words (“copious,” “masticate,” “defenestrate”) to individual students whose job it became to teach the class their definitions in a memorable way. When we got to the word “epiphany,” I had heard it before. 

For me, because I had grown up in a pretty liturgical United Methodist Church, “Epiphany” was a season. Catholics and Orthodox Christians and most mainline Protestants celebrate the day of Epiphany on January 6, the first day after the 12 days of Christmas. Epiphany remembers the wise men (who were probably astrologers) visiting the baby (or possibly toddler) Jesus. They follow the signs in the stars, which tell them a new king has been born, and they find him: Jesus. The sort-of-bastard son of a poor woman, living far from home and about to have to flee farther still, to Egypt, because the sitting king, threatened by this baby, wants him dead. 

However, none of this was much help to me in English class. I was pretty sure Mrs. Barnes’ definition wouldn’t have anything do with gold, frankincense, or myrrh, let alone jealous, murderous kings or tiny, glowing babies.

An epiphany--my classmate taught us that day while flicking the classroom lights off and on in a completely annoying way--is a lightbulb moment. A sudden flash of knowledge, a bright vision of clarity. 

As it turns out, this does have something to do with the Epiphany we celebrated at Christ United Methodist Church. Epiphany is so-named because it is considered the day when the lightbulb went on, when Jesus’ identity as God’s son, the king, was illumined for the world. The season of Epiphany, of living in the light of this revelation, continues until Ash Wednesday, which falls this year on February 18, but often falls much later. But that’s a conversation for another time.

I am a person of faith. Sort of. Truth be told, I’m often not sure what I believe. I guess that makes me something of an agnostic, but I don’t usually claim that title because I’m not even sure enough about being unsure. I grew up United Methodist, as I’ve said, but then I journeyed through nondenominationalism, Pentecostalism, fundamentalism, and Reformed traditions before enrolling in United Methodist seminary and becoming a Presbyterian at age 23. 

Three years later, I married a United Methodist pastor. I can’t say I ever thought I’d be a pastor’s wife. As a feminist and a person ambivalent about faith, it’s a role I am always learning how to define for myself. 

In addition to my United Methodist husband, I have an Orthodox sister, almost-Catholic parents, and other close family members who are Lutheran, Missionary Baptist, Mormon, and Evangelical. 

And then there’s me. Though faith was such a part of my childhood, though its patterns and practices have formed me from before birth and continue to structure my life now, I have often felt uncomfortable with it. 

Put another way: I am not a person prone to much epiphany. 

This is true of my life as a person of faith; though for years I sought holy visions and listened for voices from the clouds, I have never really found anything of the sort. It is also true of my life as a parent. When my daughter was born, I didn’t make it to the swooning-with-love moment until weeks later, in the car, listening to an odd and irreverent Ben Folds song. It made me think of her growing, mine, over time, and I was suddenly spluttering and crying and trying to tell her that she was making me into a mother, and that it was one of the most painful transformations I’d ever undergone, and that I loved her for it. So much.

My daughter is now four-and-a-half, and I also have a son who is 20 months old. My love for my children is as powerful as I always thought it would be, but mothering them also involves a lot I didn’t anticipate: heartache, annoyance, boredom, fury, mind-numbing incessance. 

And church. A lot of church. Despite my poor record with epiphany, despite my uncertainty about my own belief, both of my children have been baptized at beautiful services in churches where their father, my husband, was pastor. Both were baptized by their grandfather, my husband’s father, also a pastor. They have been to more church services than most people get in all of childhood; they have logged more hours hearing hymns or sermon test-runs than I can count. They are pastor’s children, God help us.

So why? If I don’t know what I believe, if I’m not a person prone to the light and clarity of epiphany, then why build my family’s life around these weird, old practices and this unlikely, ancient story? Mostly because I don’t know how not to. Despite all the moments I’ve wanted to leave the life of faith, despite all my moments and hours and days of unbelief, I can’t seem to stop coming back. This story, this calendar, this marking of time, like it or not, has a kind of hold on me that reaches all the way to my children. 

As people, we have liturgies. We mark time. We like patterns because they orient us. Doing some of the same things over and over again helps us know where and who we are.

So now I am embarking on a year of reflection. Each liturgical holiday and season this year, I will wonder about what it has to do with parenting, especially parenting young children. I do not know what I will find. I am not expecting epiphany; maybe I will be surprised. But mostly, I have found that knowledge (dare I say revelation?), whether about faith or motherhood or anything else that matters, is more of a coming-to-know, a slow move toward light over time.

Truth be told, I feel a little more at home in the dark days of Ash Wednesday and Lent that wait a few weeks off. But for now, I will try to walk in the flickering light of Epiphany. It is a season of light before darkness, clarity before confusion, revelation before obfuscation. 

One of my daughter’s first words was “light.” In every room, no matter where we were, she would point, awe on her face, and whisper, “Light!” I remember thinking, Someday I want to tell her about herself as a baby: “You always pointed out the light.” I thought maybe this was some unique characteristic, some herald of her life and personality to come. But three years later, my son does precisely the same thing, with precisely the same reverence and awe. Maybe it is in all of us, this wonder at light. Maybe it is even in me.