House Hunters
In
August of 2003, I graduated from the University of Northern Colorado with a BA
in Psychology, married a man I had met just six months earlier, and then loaded
up a small moving truck with my new husband, my cat, and a lot of crystal we
would later use to eat spaghetti out of, to move to Rochester New York to begin
seminary at Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School.
To
the seasoned ear all of this may sound like it was a very bad idea. In many
ways you are absolutely correct. In many ways the move to Rochester could be
defined as an absolute disaster. But in the fashion of a young love’s
recklessness, it is the memories from this experience that I often take refuge
in when the complexities of the world around me feels as though it may swallow
me up.
In
Rochester, John and I lived in a small studio apartment on the seminary campus
where most of the other students resided. The linoleum floors and cinder block
walls were not pretty to look at but they also didn’t function all that well at
keeping the heat in. These three months introduced me to a long term coffee
addiction, feminist theology, Tracy Chapman, and the reality that cheap chicken
comes with skin and bones.
While
I did not have enjoyed pulling skin off my chicken before cooking it, I did
enjoy the quiet space Rochester provided for John and I. Time to lay with John
as we read the radical ideas of Christian theologians and harsher historians.
Time to swing on the chair hanging from the huge maple tree just outside the
seminary’s grand entrance and talk together about who said what in class and
why they might have said that. Time to drive to nowhere in particular with no specific
purpose other than to see what we could see; turning leaves and the weak tides
of spontaneous lakes. It
was a romantic time to say the least although I was too innocent to recognize
it as such.
If Christmas is as Charles Dicken’s describes in A Christmas Carol,
“as a good time-a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know
of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to
open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they
really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures
bound on other journeys,” then I might say that for me, Rochester, was the
Christmas of my life. For none of us in Rochester had much but what we had in
heart and house we shared fully and without reservation and because of this,
the three short months in Rochester became for me my definition of what it
would always feel like to arrive home.
Our Scripture for today comes from Matthew 2:13-15.
13 Now after they had left, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” 14 Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt, 15 and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, “Out of Egypt I have called my son.”
For John and I, I imagine what the manager was for Mary and Joseph, Rochester was to him and I; a place to meet each other for the first time, to breathe, to be seen and
known not only for who you were but for who you were to become. And so to leave
this place, even under the necessity that was presented, to another uncertain
destination must have been a tragic shift in an unfolding narrative.
For,
truly, if we didn’t understand with a deeper part of our Being, that this
journey was indeed the will of God, I believe we would see these too as a
string of bad choices and reckless decisions. As the commentary from this
passages suggests, their journey from the manager “marks the beginning of the dark
days between promises and their fruition.
While most of us are not here seeking refuge from a
country torn by war or famine, I would hope some of us are here as spiritual refuges,
seeking refuge from a world who has broken a part of us so deep within that we
have been unable to locate that torn piece of our soul which waits on us to be
mended. This is the purpose of Christian community; to mourn and rebuild those
things which the world has taken away. Where will we take refuge in the New Year?
This question I find is delicately intertwined with that which we find
ourselves taking refugee from.
My
2016 was rough. Some things being rougher than others for reasons beyond what is
presented on the surface. Our car died and we couldn’t replace it, my mother fell
and faced a long recovery, chronic mental health issues that came to the
forefront, a painful breakup with a friend who had become very dear to me… and I would be happy to leave it behind if I wasn’t
as old to know that these rough things follow us beyond the boundaries of place
and space; that you can move houses or leave countries, you can change jobs and
even names, but it will be that which travels with you that will mold these walls
and windows into a manifestation of the home that resides within. A house is
just somewhere we go but a home is the space in which we live. It travels with
us.
At
one point after telling my story to a colleague she paused and then said, “I don’t
know how you are still standing.” In
truth, I wonder how any of us are still standing. My rough stories may be
different in content but they are the same in weight as all of our plot twists.
It is these things from which we seek refuge; a spiritual refuge in which we
struggle to make sense out of the places we find ourselves that we might use
this meaning to climb back out of whatever hole was dug by us or before us.
Then
in November, innocently reading a book by Kristin Neff on Self Compassion, the
house I had unknowingly built to keep myself standing lost its foundation. I
read these words, “Where is that written contract you signed before birth
promising you would be perfect, that you’d never fail, and that your life would
go absolutely the way you want it to?” She continued with, “it’s absurd, and
yet most of us act as if something has gone terribly awry when we fall down or
life takes an unwanted or unexpected turn.”
I
was still standing, yes, but at what cost. At the cost of self-blame paid for
the illusion that I was in control. That everything bad that had ever happened
in my life was the result of some simple mistake I made and if I could just correct
that mistake in the future I could avoid the tragedy of an imperfect life. And
yet, sitting in my lap were a plethora of problems I would never be able to fix
and this, I thought, OH THIS, this is what life is supposed to be, SERIOUSLY? And
then grace. And tears. And the realization that this is the way life is,
swollen and tender, tragic and unpredictable and covered, drenched in a sticky
sap grace that hold all of this brokenness together.
If I
look back on my time in Rochester there were harsh realities that caused us to
flee to a place more familiar. We couldn’t find jobs, we ran out of money, the
seminary entered into a phase of financial crisis. We left because returning to
the place we began felt an inevitable occurrence. Yet it isn’t the
disappointment of the circumstances that surrounds the memory just and so it
will be for 2016 which too was covered in manger moments; friends who reminded
me my worth when I felt none, doctors who showed kindness, serendipitous
coincidences showing up and keeping us afloat. I will remember the miracles
however small of my manger scenes; the arrival to unexpected places and the embrace
of unpredictable people we now call friends.
Yet
the spiritual goal would be to need no refuge; to find these moments not only
as nostalgic memories but to experience them in real time, as they occur. To
witness the miracles in our midst, to the excavation of tragic turns to uncover
the divine presence, is the practice of the spiritual life. I look back on
Rochester in the same way I know look back on my time serving the people of
Evergreen United Methodist, in the same way I one day will look back on serving
all of you here, at Hope United Methodist. With tenderness and joy; as if these
all were manger moments leading me to the next refuge in an often unwelcoming
world.
In Brene
Brown’s book Rising Strong, her words
describe to me what it means to practice Christianity when she writing, “When
our intentions and actions are guided by spirituality-our belief in our
interconnectedness and love-our everyday experiences can be spiritual
practices. We can transform teaching, leading, and parenting into spiritual
practices.” In our lives, cultivating Christmas requires us to embrace the
manager moments, moments of awareness of the beauty that surrounds us as a
result of where our reckless love delivers us.
What
if, this year, we lived as though our ending too is written, and in whatever shape or form
is takes, that ending is reflective in the fruition of a life that is worthy of
story and belonging? What if we believed we were worthy of God’s reckless love
and cleared out the blame that clutters the guiding stars of our dark nights
and left the spiritual place we have always known to live as God believes we
should? To discover again the feeling of falling and rising, of risking and
losing, or loving and even dying but to live as if we were worthy of this life
gifted to us. And what if, as TS Eliot so poetically predicts, “The end of all
our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the
first time.” This is what it means to arrive home; to be stable in our
worthiness before Christ to ride the waves of unexpectedness and to rise again
after the hits of tragedy not because it’s easy or because we should but
because we are worthy, we are worthy of love and belonging in this life. What if
we practiced being Christian and in each moment we honor Charles Dickens advice
to “honour Christmas in our hearts, and try to keep it all the year. To live in
the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive
within us. That we will not shut out the lessons that they teach!”
So here’s a suggested takeaway from 2017 from one broken person to another. Like the bread that will be broken in just a few minutes, like Christ that is broken for us, we too are broken for him. Every time we risk loving someone and get hurt, every time we share our story and get shot down or misunderstood or misrepresented, every time we do the best that we can and it isn’t enough, every time we lose our temper or forget the check or resist forgiveness, we are broken for Christ because we are holy practitioners of a faith that offers us the grace in each and every moment to identify the manger moment and see the beauty of the choice to absorb the pain and rise again. So in 2017 live like you are broken, like you were built to break, and build something with the pieces that reflects the discovery that even broken, even at your very worst, you are worthy of love and belonging in this place.
