Category: healing

Just Gotta Write

What I realized years ago is that writing is how to scream in a socially acceptable way.

I’ve been thinking of late that I need to write a book where every entry begins with, “I Am Not A Nice Person.”

It seems I frequently wake up thinking of starting an entry with that statement, followed by lots of annoying thoughts that have been buzzing about my head like nasty little kamikaze planes. I wake up certain that, if anyone heard all the complaining and frustrations clogging my poor little brain, they’d agree wholeheartedly that I’m not so nice. Sadly, much of my writing through the years has been nothing more than me complaining. What I have figured out, though, (through writing, thank you) is that dumping all those complaints onto paper for all these years has done me – and everyone around me – some good.

Honestly, I write because I too often wake up wanting to scream.

So, perhaps more accurately: a blog entry today should read simply, “Gotta write.” It will do me (and the people around me) some good.

Seriously, if you know me, you should count yourself fortunate that most of my furiously scribbled pages and pages have been purges no one else will ever read. I’ve spent the majority of my writing time getting my frustrations or anger or complaints off my chest, out of my mouth and thus, (mostly) out of the earshot of those around me. My husband has learned that my being in a bad mood and complaining is quite often a sign I am not writing. 

So maybe, I thought, instead, a blog entry today should read simply, “Gotta write.” It could do you (and the people around you) some good. Perhaps you – or someone you work or live with – is simply a frustrated writer.  

Writing is simply therapeutic.

Let’s be clear, though, there’s being a writer and there’s being an author.

Writing for therapy isn’t the same as writing because you might want to share your stories. The first is for your eyes only, a way to get all those thoughts and frustrations and even giggles out of your head to make room for some clarity or joy or discovery or a story to share. The second is a craft, i.e., what you do to the rare few of those rants and raves that warrant a second glance. Some will be worth a second look and perhaps the effort to fashion them into something another person might be keen to read or gain a personal benefit from the effort. This doesn’t matter as much because there’s honestly great overlap there.

Lots of people around me tell me (now that I’ve published a book and they’ve read it, thank you) they also have stories they love to share over meals, on the bus or while waiting in line, but are stopped by the thought of sitting and typing or writing them out. Simple enough, I tell them, use those easily available programs or apps that allow you to dictate, then go back and edit. For myself, I truly prefer the feel of graphite on paper, I explain, but that means I have to then go back and type up what I’ve written. So I have been using a Remarkable, an electronic pad that lets me use what genuinely feels like a pencil, then converts my scribbles to text. “Oh, my writing is too sloppy,” is the excuse most folks offer for why that method won’t work for them. I write quickly and in cursive on mine and, yes, some editing is necessary but the system works pretty darn well and I’m nearly finished with a second memoir written on the tablet.

“I can’t seem to find the time,” I hear. Years ago, though, I read about how helpful it could be for writers to simply buy some cheap spiral bound notebooks and every morning with coffee just scribble three pages. There’s a book and workshops and support for folks who want to use this method and I recommend them, but the gist is simply to write. You can start every morning with “I am so mad at….” or “I cannot understand….” or “I remember….” Just write is the idea. Write the first sentence over and over if you need but fill up three pages. You may not ever look at those pages again but your purpose is not to write the great American novel. It is simply to write. To get what’s in your head on paper. To grease the wheels. To make it easier and easier and more and more addictive to write than to not write. And to get whatever is annoying you off your chest.

This follows the discipline suggested by the writer and teacher Natalie Goldberg of writing three pages a day- scribbling, really, without allowing my brain to edit while I dump what’s on my mind. “Writing Down the Bones,” by Natalie Goldberg .(https://nataliegoldberg.com/books/writing-down-the-bones/.)

Goldberg teaches about getting those “first thoughts” on paper by keeping your hand moving and not letting yourself have time to edit, not stopping to criticize yourself or correct your feelings, simply to get those thoughts out of my head. The process is similar to keeping the wheels of a wagon greased. Whether you write for yourself or for others, this or some kind of discipline that involves putting pencil or pen to paper is, in my opinion, the place to start. Goldberg also points out the act of writing regularly teaches us to listen to ourselves, can help us overcome our doubts and affirms for each of us the value of our lives.

Often what I end up with after scribbling as quickly as possible in a cheap notebook  amounts to nothing more than a jumble of frustrations but that allows me to get it out of my system. That way, I don’t bore others around me with complaint after complaint and I don’t repeat myself all day because, I suppose, my subconscious knows it’s out of me. This is similar to writing lists for myself. I can go to sleep at night without worrying about what I need to do tomorrow because I’ve deposited those tasks onto a written list that’ll be waiting for me by the side of the bed when the alarm rings.

I also know where I can find it if I need to complain more. Again with the complaining. In all seriousness, writing out what I think helps me know what I think, discover how I feel, remember better, understand myself better and even uncover ideas about how to actually do something about what makes me so angry and frustrated, something more than simply grousing.

Whatever helps you write helps you write.

I read a quote some years ago declaring that the best discipline for any writer is to read. Gonna have to disagree. I respectfully disagree. The best discipline for a writer is to write. If you want to be an author, there are further steps. Find a continuing education course on the craft of writing or poetry or songs or memoirs. Next best: get your butt into a writer’s group. Writing to be an author is after all a craft and the steps to any kind of writing you want to publish are many. There is nothing to be brought to the crafter in you, though, if you don’t actually write. I don’t manage three pages everyday but I scribble enough to provide fodder for all kinds of stories if I want to use them.

Seriously, writing is simply therapeutic.

More critically, writing saves my friendships, my marriage and my sanity and, on occasion, helps me figure out how to help.

Last week, my furiously scrawling carried me back to those “Weekly Readers,” those newspapers designed for school-children. You remember? Where we learned about preventing forest fires, about how littering made others so sad, especially that American Indian chief with one single tear rolling down his cheek? Remember trying to wait patiently as the copies were passed out. Remember how we eagerly but gingerly turned each page to learn about how seatbelts saved lives, about the Civil Rights Movement or Rachel Carson or the value of community service?

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Those little newspapers were both welcome departures from math problems and verbs and adverbs AND they presented as gentle guides to create better neighbors and friends. Through them, we all became more aware of poverty, child labor, the dangers of tobacco smoking, and racism, among so many other issues.

Why do I find myself remembering and writing about Weekly Readers? You know why. Because so much of the progress we were inspired to help bring about over the past 50 years has simply been erased or rolled back at a terrifying speed.

Good God, if we keep going, the next logical outcome will be another Executive Order banning handicap accessible restrooms because they discriminate against the “able-bodied.”

You remember what things were like back then, before so many of the “woke” ideas helped make our world a better place, don’t you? My mother could not get a job, a bank account or rent an apartment without her husband’s or her father’s permission, for just one example. Um, not willing to go back.

Today, those newspapers would likely be considered anti-American. How dare they, for example, teach us about global warming, slavery or trying to normalize women and minorities in leadership, business or science roles?

The power of the Weekly Readers was they helped turn us into informed and empathic citizens, people who cared about one another and who recognized that we needed one another to be the best we each could be.

I am wondering now, if there isn’t some way to bring those back and deliver them right to the children at their homes? How subversive is that? Maybe Dolly would help. That’s the kind of idea that surfaces when I write. I want to know what comes to mind for you? Share. Let’s collaborate.

For now, next time you – or someone you know – thinks all you do is complain, go to the corner store and buy a cheap notebook. Choose a pen or pencil that feels good in your grip and start writing. Every morning. Only, make yourself a deal. Just write and know that most of what you write for a while, maybe for a long while, will just lay there scrawled in cheap notebooks. Don’t expect great things. Just write about all the things that you can’t stand – you may never get it all out of your system but you and everyone around you will thank you for leaving it on the page. You may not ever want to use any of that but, then again, you might.

Maybe you will be the one who come up with some ideas about how we can stop what appears to be a national temper tantrum. 

Ever notice how our leader always SCREAMS his posts on social media? What if we could get him to write BEFORE he shared?

Seriously, doesn’t it lately feel like so many people are simply pouting because they don’t want to share anymore or be nice or take turns? Faithfully writing out my three pages has helped me share with others what I think without screaming at them.

What I realized years ago is that writing is how to scream in a socially acceptable way.

I too often wake up needing to express my frustrations with the world, perhaps now more than ever. So, I am convinced the world is a better place because I leave most of it on the page. Less anger is spewed, less frustration gets passed along, less whining and complaining and criticism.

I DO think more about how to take action, though, and I’m a bit clearer on what and why. I remain certain that if people in my life knew how much I spewed, well, they’d be sure I wasn’t such a nice person. Because I write, though, at least some people like me most of the time. And occasionally, I figure out something to say that is helpful, useful, perhaps even wise. Through writing, I am learning that my superpower may be that I see and feel and cannot pretend the emperor is dressed. That’s what writing does. Honestly, it’s subversive.

And that’s what so many of us need right now to help us keep our sanity.

Now more than ever. I saw a meme last week that showed a woman holding up a sign that read, “We should all receive Oscars for acting like everything is okay.”

Every damn thing is not okay, let me assure you, and, depending upon where you live and who populates your family, maybe it never has been. So start writing about it. Get the screaming out in a way that doesn’t hurt anyone else. Figure out what you think. Let the rest of us know you’re with us, that you see, too, and especially, share any ideas. I’m seriously considering a Weekly Reader reboot and I’m gonna ask Dolly to help. 

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Here Lies Jimmie’s Arm: A Pastor’s Tale of Smalltown Challenges

(Includes an excerpt)

With your support and encouragement, Here Lies Jimmie’s Arm, my first book, is out and ready for consumption.

Click here to go to my Amazon author page. From there you can Follow the Author and be the first to hear about new books.

Or, point your phone’s camera to this QR code to be taken to the book’s page. (Available in paperback or Kindle download.)

Be sure to leave me a review if you liked what you read!

An excerpt:

From “The Women’s Kitchen Jug Band.”

Lela, Rebecca, Molly and Sally were all part of this impressive gaggle of hardy women who had lived long enough and worked hard enough to say they didn’t really care what anyone else thought any more, though they were not shy about telling you what they thought. What they “thought” often and vocally was that “Mildred was goin’ to hell.” That was because Mildred, who lived across the street from Lela, never let the shadow of the steeple at church fall across her path, even though she was mobile and still drove when she wanted. 

The first time I tried to visit Mildred, I called to ask if she’d mind a visit and she proceeded to cuss me out and tell me with every imaginable expletive why I needed to leave her the #*#* alone! Then she stopped and took a breath, but before I could apologize for bothering her, she asked, “Now, who IS this?”

“Your new preacher,” I offered. 

“Well, damn.”

Like many of the elderly I visited, Mildred, who was even tinier than Rebecca, and even more impatient with the younger folks around her, complained about the same issues every time. She also told me about her “constitutional.” Her need for me to know her bowel habits was, strangely, not unusual for this congregation which was, admittedly, mostly populated with folks old enough for regularity to be an issue. Nevertheless, I never knew so many people in one congregation who needed their pastor to know they were regular. I was not prepared for that. I expected they’d share what they were ashamed of or when they’d strayed from the straight and narrow, but not this. If I’d had a bingo board to take to every visit, “regular bowel movement” would have been the center spot. Mildred was no different. 

I learned quickly to move to another topic in those visits. If I’d been willing, I could have shared what was working or not working for others in the congregation and even wondered if I needed to copy those old timey door-to-door peddlers and carry with me a big black valise filled with stool-softeners, laxatives and Pepto-Bismol. I decided instead that this line of conversation was simply a warped reminder of my responsibility to keep boundaries and not share what was not mine to share. I chose not to take the bait in those conversations.  

All of these women, at different times, worried me to no end, and the challenge was to try to talk them down off those ladders at their age. Mildred prided herself on a perfect lawn, and no one could do it as well as she could. She was so tiny, though, that the brand new “Yardman” riding mower she bought would not start for her because she was not heavy enough for the seat to register that she was actually riding the mower. Undeterred, she doctored the spring system and drove around her steep and hilly lawn at least twice a week during the warmer months while the neighbors cringed and begged her to let one of their sons help her out. Her own son would not help, however, so she was damned if she would let someone else’s son show him or her up. She would not stop mowing, not even after she tipped the mower because she found a new gopher hole. One tire dropped into the hole but kept going even after Mildred fell off. Thankfully, it did not get far before it rested against a small tree and burned itself out. The jolt sent Mildred tumbling and she found herself stuck, headfirst, in a hole. It wasn’t a tight hole and her head had fallen into it so she hadn’t gotten hurt too badly. She would have easily been capable of extricating herself from the offending hole except she didn’t have the arm strength to push herself back upright and so she had to wait, head first in that hole, listening to her precious mower burn itself out against the silver maple tree until one of the neighbors smelled the engine burning and came over to see what was what. That neighbor got cussed out, too. Mildred was nothing if not consistent.

A couple of years later, Mildred died, still alone, and still cussing out anyone in her way, but also still quite regular. All she wanted was a short graveside service and that was certainly her choice except that she died during the coldest February I could remember. Only the Kitchen Band ladies attended and, as was to be expected, each dressed “to the nines” to send Mildred off to her fiery eternal home. Because the only people who would be attending on that frigid morning were these ladies in their nineties, I was grateful the funeral home was prepared with a small tent and some space heaters. I assured the Directors I would keep things brief, and only included a prayer and Proverbs 31. “Who can find a virtuous woman?” In retrospect, I had to admit Mildred had only sparsely shared about her past issues so talking about her as an excellent wife might have seemed disingenuous to the women who knew her well. At the time, though, we all were simply grateful to recite the 23rd Psalm and The Lord’s Prayer and be done with it. Unfortunately, as I took a flower from the pall and broke it up to crumble onto her casket, while I prayed, “Ashes to ashes,” a foul and acrid smell made me choke. I looked up to see one funeral director frantically trying to swat sparks while the other gagged. Rebecca, who’d ventured too close to the heater, had decided friends don’t die every day, so she would celebrate the occasion by resurrecting her fox fur stole, its head hanging where a nice brooch ought to have been. The beady eyes of the dead fox haunted me throughout the short service, but it was the smell that was most memorable. It was not just the smell of hair burning, which is foul enough; it was seventy-year-old fox hair we were smelling, an odor that stayed with me for days. I know, as we moved as fast as we could to get the ladies back into their cars, Mildred was either cussing up a storm or, perhaps, cackling gleefully. Maybe both.

Not convinced? How about some advance reviews?

“Here Lies Jimmie’s Arm is a treasure of a book, especially if you have ever attended a small church. The author describes her experiences growing up and becoming a pastor with much humor and great style. The reader is drawn into the dramas of small towns, small churches and in some cases small minds. How she survives and thrives and laughs along the way is truly brilliant and entertaining.” ~ Nancy B. 

“Very readable. And engaging. These pieces welcome the reader into this country setting, with all its charms, peculiarities and characters. The author juxtaposes the troubled histories of her parishioners with her own, inviting readers  into a novice pastor’s inner thoughts, worries and fears. Should be required reading for all would-be pastors.” ~ Charlie M

What’s ‘Just enough’ Christmas?

Christmas swings like a pendulum do….

My paternal grandmother, Arbaleta (Grandma Leta), and maternal grandmother, Marie (Grandma Ree), could not have been more different creatures, and this was never more obvious than at Christmas. At first glance, it seemed to me that they were polar opposites when it came to wintry holidays especially; in retrospect, it is evident they were each on opposite points of the pendulum that has come to symbolize Christmas for me. Generation after generation on both sides of my family seemed to be unconsciously caught up by the wild swings of this holiday pendulum, a reactionary arc between a resounding “Yes!” to Christmas and its counterpart, an adamant “Hell, no!” 

My Granddaughter’s depiction of our favorite activity: swinging. She is so wise….

Finding Healing Around Christmas

Maybe your family needs some healing around holidays as well. Sure, it seems strange to talk about Christmas amidst all the paper and ribbon and cookies and tinsel, but it is, in fact, the best time to step back, recognize struggles and disappointment and start our families on paths to peace with Christmas; maybe along the way we could even figure out what’s “enough” for joy. I offer this reflection then to all our families because we cannot find healing if we do not know our family’s wounds. Here’s hope for discussions about upcoming celebrations: may they be intentional, loving and truly joyful for all.

Marie as a young woman.
Marie, George, & their three daughters, 1940’s
Arbaleta and husband, Freeman (Mac)

For me, it seems the best place to start is with the grandmothers. Both of my grandmothers were born around WWI; each married during the Great Depression. Neither had, as they say, “a pot to piss in,” not while they were growing up and not while they were young mothers. Both worked hard to support their families outside the home as well as in. Dad’s mom, Arbaleta, had two children, a boy and a girl, nine years apart. Mom’s mother, Marie, had three daughters all close in age. 

Arbaleta’s husband, my Grandpa Mac, fell from an electric pole when he was young and wasn’t supposed to ever walk again, but did, in great part because Arbaleta would not let him not walk. She reportedly insisted he move his legs and even moved them for him for months as physical therapy until he could walk and work again. While I was never close to Grandma Leta, I have always admired the steely determination that these actions showed.

Marie had a husband who was always on the road as a truck driver, mostly because the bus or truck driver jobs close to town weren’t well-paying. He died of a massive heart attack at age 50; she lived another 30-plus years and married her high school sweetheart, then outlived him and married another kind man when she was eighty. At that wedding, the minister declared what we all knew, “Marie is a hopeful woman!” Grandma Ree, as we called her, was the quintessential kindergarten teacher when teachers still had time for nature walks, ironing leaves between sheets of waxed paper, and silly songs. Thus, she was the kind of grandmother I aspired to be: she played games with us, prayed for us, encouraged us and defended us when necessary.  For most of her life, she modeled a love of learning: she earned a master’s degree, helped “plant” two churches, became an accomplished painter and was memorizing her favorite Bible verses in her seventies because she was losing her eyesight.    

Marie as a teen.
A painting by Marie for an art class while working on her Master’s. A local Spanish-American War vet sat for the class.

While I know little of Arbaleta’s childhood except poverty and hardship, I know Marie helped her mother run a boarding house after her chiropractor father divorced her mother, something which mortified both women.

That I’m aware of, Arbaleta seldom left her home after we were born. At least we never saw her leave her home, though, as far as we knew, she was perfectly capable. Our collective memory of her is of her seated on the sofa in her silk pajamas. Every time we visited her, we would wave to her from a few feet away as she perched on the sectional sofa in the corner, surrounded by shelves of various sizes and shapes of cacti. In one hand she held a lit cigarette, ashes threatening to crumble onto the silk, and the other hand held the ever-present bean bag ashtray (you know, the kind that has the bean bag on the bottom and the colorful aluminum tin bowl on the top.) That I can remember, she never once kissed, hugged or touched us in any way, shape or form. And, though she was pleasant, there were no memorable conversations, just the cloud of cigarette smoke that circled above her. 

As for Christmas, well, I can’t remember there being much of it in their home at the edge of a Kansas golf course where she and Grandpa had retired. Ironically, I’m not aware Grandpa played golf, though my Dad did well into his eighties. As far as Christmas goes, Arbaleta represented the point in the arc where celebration was merely tolerated. Every few years, our parents would tote our gifts to their house to open on that rare occasion we woke up there on a Christmas morning, but the mood in the house was that Christmas decoration was, well, perfunctory. There was a tree and maybe a wreath, but evidently, for Grandpa and Arbaleta, a tree and some lights outside were “just enough,” though I suspect they were only put up to satisfy us. If overcoming poverty was Arbaleta’s life goal, she met it, thus the home on the golf course as well as the purchase of a new Lincoln every year. Secular or religious, it didn’t matter; Christmas was a formality, expected, tolerated for the children. Christmas dinner involved polished silver and store bought sweets, if any. “Please wait until you have permission to touch.”

Arbaleta died when I was seven and, suddenly, the focus of Christmas on my father’s side of the family shuddered and swung hard to the opposite extreme. Her daughter brought in Christmas every year from then on with a vengeance, lovingly, but with an overwhelming force. Every year, my aunt seemed to be competing for best Christmas ever, ostensibly in response to her own mother’s lackadaisical attempts.

While certain treasured and expensive statuary graced my aunt’s mantle for Christmas, for example, every year, the Christmas tree itself, usually the biggest tree I’d ever seen, sported a different theme with new, all handmade ornaments. I often asked when she started making them, sure she must have begun the previous New Year’s Day. She also made most of our gifts; they were always of Pinterest quality and I treasured several sweaters she knitted for me, for example. 

As if it were necessary, she also became an amazing cook and thus, Christmas visits always involved impressing us with recipes for new dishes. Ironically, my mother didn’t want the recipes and my mother’s mother, Marie, didn’t need them; my mother was too busy leaning into that dysfunctional pendulum that was swinging back to the starker side, likely in reaction to her mother’s seasonal excess. 

Marie, my mother’s mother, was on that same swing of the pendulum as my aunt, though I believe Grandma Ree went all out for her Christmas celebration for different reasons. Her husband, Grandpa George, also died when I was seven, but that did not slow Marie down in life or around the holidays. From the moment you opened the door into her home at Christmas, the scent of pine and wild berry candles carried you through room after room of greenery, holly, bells, poinsettias and new figurines or miniatures each year. Also new each year were the sweetbreads and cookies and homemade candies, all awaiting our discovery after hugs and kisses were exchanged and the coats and mittens and caps were piled onto a bed in the back of the house. 

Grandma Ree with her brother, Mother and Sister, c. 1960’s.

A Family Nightmare

While Marie’s response seemed to me to somewhat resemble that of Arbaleta’s daughter, the driving force behind Marie’s likely unconscious Christmas reverie gone amuck was a well-kept secret, a family nightmare. On two separate Christmas Eves, during her childhood and youth, Grandma Ree had lost family members to suicide. I was, of course, an adult before I was made aware of that history or the details: one drank poisoned alcohol and one shot himself, both on separate Christmas Eves. Of course, the grief and shock of their actions was complicated by their (conscious or unconscious) efforts to ruin Christmas forever for some of their family.

How painful were their memories of the holidays?

Before we assume that Marie’s attempts to reclaim Christmas was the reason for the pendulum’s extreme movements, though, we need to recognize that some calamity in earlier generations drove those men to choose Christmas Eve to end their lives; we have to ask how painful were their memories of the holidays that drove them to risk also ruining the holiday for their spouses and children? How far back did the pain begin and what don’t we know about that? 

In other words, it’s not likely either man, both of whom must have been suffering and feeling hopeless, started the family on that path.

The result, though, seems to have been an unconscious struggle to compensate. Those grand swings between holiday excess and hopelessness left subsequent generations still unconsciously at a loss to figure out what’s enough celebration. Further, while we can understand what might have spurred Marie’s need to excel at Christmas, I’ll likely never know what caused Arbaleta’s lack of enthusiasm for the holidays, and so I’m left simply to marvel at the overwhelming force of her daughter’s frenzied Christmas efforts. Sadly, or thankfully, no one now has picked up that mantle and the extended family is so fractured as to make these discussions nearly impossible.

I offer these reflections then to my nuclear family as the beginning of some discussions around conscious choices rather than wild reactions.

How does a family figure out what’s enough Christmas when the family’s history is, well, fractured? My own efforts were often emotionally unsatisfying; not only were my mother’s Christmas efforts headed for the stark extreme in reaction to her mother’s and her sister-in-law’s excesses, but they were complicated by my general lack of interest in cooking or baking except when absolutely necessary. 

It was my ex-husband who started me thinking about some of our responses to holidays years ago: he protested the idea of Valentines’ Day for example, saying we could and should give one another cards or flowers or candy at anytime of the year and not just one day chosen by candy and card companies and florists. Yes, we can, I agreed wholeheartedly. But do we? Of course not, I pointed out. To his credit, he came by his dislike and struggle with holidays honestly and thus brought his own reactions to our holiday table: his birthday is the day after Christmas, and he was one of six children. His Christmas gift always came with a declaration that, “Oh-that’s your birthday gift too.”

Over the years, I certainly have struggled with holidays, whether it’s decorating or preparing a feast or just planning. Don’t get me started on birthdays for children; too many of those ended in my tears from exhaustion and a sense of failure. Did I tell you about all the “Pinterest Fails?”

All these things and more (all these things and more) that’s what Christmas means to me, my love….)

Stevie Wonder

Plenty of us struggle with the holidays, though, whether because of grieving a loss or knowing you’re the only one who can’t afford the gift exchange. I’ve tried over the years to make our gifts for Christmas but again, I know too many of my family members and friends were less than thrilled with the results. Mea culpa. We tried spreading the Christmas holiday over several days to lessen the wild two-minute frenzy of Christmas morning. We tried taking Christmas to the mountains; we tried staying home. We wondered what would happen if our family just gave up one Christmas and had lots of little ones? Could that not translate into lots of chances to do or give or be kind to one another? So many of our attempts at intentional Christmases revolved around not expecting one or two people to create a magical holiday that only left them in tears and exhausted.

We’ve finally begun to incorporate some activities intentionally. Instead of china and crystal, we copied someone else’s snowman place settings, something the granddaughter and I could share. Last year, we started some silly story telling. This year, we introduced Karaoke and I am trying to reclaim the joy of baking by helping my granddaughter learn; watching her “knead” the goop she bought at the store made me think. Lo and behold, she discovered the joy of yeast and how it rises and how the baker must punch down the dough, then knead it. Her eyes grew wide after she made a fist and punched away. “That is soooo satisfying,” she said. A keeper. 

In case you’re wondering, religion did not seem to figure at all in the wild reactions to the holiday through the years for my extended family. While Arbaleta was, as far as I know, agnostic, and Marie was a strong Christian, neither of them addressed or seemed to include the religious holiday in their efforts to reclaim or dismiss Christmas. For our family, that’s a different pendulum altogether. I personally love a good candlelight Christmas eve service singing and the idea that God came to be with us as an infant. Nevertheless, culturally we continue to struggle with all that Christmas celebrations have become for generations and we cannot heal from pain we do not acknowledge.

For our family, the faith and religious rituals are different pendulum altogether. I will never know why my Grandma Ree did not incorporate more of her personal faith into the celebration. Personal experience suggests she was treading lightly with agnostic family members and, as is true for many families, also celebrated on different days with different parts of the family, balancing church events with home. Nevertheless, culturally, we continue to struggle with all that our secular celebrations of Christmas have become for generations, often leaving us to begin another year frustrated, sad, discouraged. That is where we can start, but we must look collectively at this because we cannot heal from pain we do not acknowledge.

The best time, I believe, to reflect on how we celebrate Christmas is when we are all together…and we’ll before Christmas comes around-unexamined-again.

For my family, I continue to try to reframe Christmas in light of the history I bring to the holiday. I guess I hope through reflections and questions to step completely back from that wild, reactionary swinging between excessive celebration to indifference and even disdain. 

I think one key is that we focus on the children, but with respect for their needs and not our own needs to give them the best holiday ever! 

They get tired; we pay attention. They want to dress up; they don’t want to dress up. Quiet time, dancing in the kitchen time, gifts that involve us engaging with them. I’m not saying we’re the best with children ever or that ours are happier than any other. What I am saying is that like in so much of life, the children around me ground me. What they need is so often what I need. Let’s sing Jingle Bells, yes, at a gathering, but we mustn’t forget the bells themselves and our need to jingle them to make the song come to life.

A little percussion goes a long way and when we sing “Jingle Bells” there need to be jingling bells….A five-year-old taught me that.

Music must also be a source of holiday joy for many families. I’m jealous of those who manage a musical gathering but hopeful that might be in our future as well. Certainly with percussion everyone can participate! The idea of introducing music brings us back, though, both to the need for sensory awareness and to the idea of joy and reverie throughout the year. In order for there to be music next year, we need to practice throughout the year – often and, by practicing, remember the things that do bring us joy without wearing us out. I write this and share it now, after the holiday blitz, planning to share it with my family, to start the conversation we can have in anticipation of next year. I am curious to hear from them, and find out if they are aware of, or experiencing their own pendulum of Christmases, maybe even unknowingly riding that pendulum right now. I’m hopeful that with some lowered expectations of ourselves and a little yeast, we just might be able to rescue the holidays from the extremes of that dysfunctional pendulum my family rode for far too long AND decide for ourselves what is “enough Christmas.”

 

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Of Hiking, Floods and Fragmented Memories

In the previous Post called The Boulder Fields of our Lives, about hiking Longs Peak and working at the YMCA of the Rockies, I ended by explaining that our summer work (and “Hikemaster” Course) were cut short not long after we scaled the 14,000+ foot Longs Peak because of a natural disaster in the canyon below us. A few days after the climb, a year’s worth of rain fell in 70 minutes and the Big Thompson River below our camp washed out nearly everything and everyone in its way.

“On July 31, 1976, the skies opened up over the Big Thompson Canyon, setting off the deadliest natural disaster in Colorado history that claimed 144 lives and caused $35 million of damages.” (https://www.coloradoan.com/story/news/2016/07/29/big-thompson-flood-killed-scores/87524858/)

Fragmented Memories

For decades now, because my memories of being just above the “500-Year Flood” are so fragmented, I have not told the story of being there, which is unusual for me. Most days, I am known to bore anyone close enough to listen with a story or two; I usually can’t help myself. The stories I have not told then generally are ones I cannot remember OR ones I do not want to remember. Only after writing about climbing Longs Peak, as I looked at the photo of me and my climbing companion, did it occur to me that the story of that summer was not complete without talking about the flood.

“The chaos along an otherwise trickling Big Thompson River killed 144 people, five of whom were never found, and carved out a chapter in the history books as Colorado’s deadliest natural disaster.”

https://www.coloradoan.com/story/news/2016/07/29/big-thompson-flood-killed-scores/87524858/

Both the hike and the flood were, for lack of a better word, watershed moments for me, but the lessons have been realized slowly and in fragments. To better remember those days, I looked at a couple of television news reports of the flood, but they were recorded decades after the flood. Strangely, the lack of technology at the time affected both the before and the after, the event and the memories. The only phones in 1976 were landlines and, so, warnings came only through emergency personnel going door-to-door; at least one first responder died trying to warn others that night. Only a few black and white photos are available as well, making attempts at remembering as cumbersome as the warning system had been. Nevertheless, I have felt driven to try to piece together a coherent memory of those days and, as I researched and read and poured over old photos online, I read the words of one Colorado disaster preparedness official. She said,”We learn the most from chaotic events.” As I have tried to remember and reflect, I think that she was right; we do learn much from chaos, but we have to work to find those lessons.

First, setting the stage for our story….

After my freshman year in college, I went to the mountains near Estes Park to work for what I thought would be a summer of fun. Once there, I was surprised to find a sense of peace that I had not expected. I was, for the first time, hopeful that I might actually be able to find a peaceful and stable home once I could support myself. I surprised myself, in fact, by making some plans to continue working at the camp in the fall.

Though I kept journals off and on, little remains of what might have been written that summer. I do remember that, on the back of placemats, during lulls in our work, I sometimes wrote letters or journal entries; most of them are lost, but the only one I have found from before the flood surprised me. I wrote:

  • Tuesday, July 20, 1976

    “Storm clouds have mingled with the mountain peaks since sunrise; we here in the valley are enclosed, shut away from the crowds that would disturb us….peace of mind must certainly follow. Here, in my room, I am lulled into a tranquil mood by the clouds every day. Even when my work day is long and busy and even frustrating,” I wrote, “…the calm is inescapable.”

Calm was something I could not claim before that trip and safety was not a place I remembered.

At that point, the clouds covering the tops of the mountain peaks around us (The highest peak in our area was Longs Peak at more than 14,000 feet in elevation.) were benevolent. I wrote: “These clouds draw your thoughts. Constantly changing, first ringing, then entrapping the peaks, they are playing quietly and are a source of constant amusement.”

I worked days in the bakery and often used the back of placemat/maps for journal entries and letters.

Those “playful clouds” would soon turn deadly, though. During our Hikemaster classes that summer, we learned to appreciate the danger of the storm clouds that often came up quickly in the mountains. On July 20, though, I was simply calmed by their presence and movement. I needed that calm desperately; the family life I would return to was chaotic, unpredictable, traumatic. The rules changed daily and nothing that occurred in my home could surprise me anymore. The overwhelming feeling that I had carried with me when I tried to escape to the mountains from a tumultuous family life was fear. Fear and anxiety wore me out and, I know now, the trauma, fear and stress are why so many of my memories are fragmented at best.

And now, a word about trauma….

Trauma is destructive. Like the different kinds of skin cancer, trauma can create a wound that burrows deep or spreads outside of you, like when you fear for your loved ones in such a depth as to make others question you, call you hysterical even. And yet, because you have experienced trauma, you know. Accidents DO happen. People, even people you trust, DO harm one another. Your parents did not protect you. No one saved you. Nothing, not even seeing another day, was guaranteed. All the worst, all you feared, was indeed possible, did happen. And no amount of reassurance from others can repair that trust completely; we can learn to manage the fear but we never know when some sound or smell or person or newscast will bring it all rushing back.

Like a broken mirror, trauma shatters both our sense of self and our memories. Too many of my memories lie in shards on the floor and picking through them, trying to piece them together, trying to make sense, to have some timelines or events make sense is most likely why I write.

Even the effort to capture the memory of that time is fragmented: all that remains are three pages written by that seventeen-year-old me as I tried to capture what I saw and a couple of newspaper pieces I wrote after I got a job working at the local paper and my editors learned I’d been in the “500-year Flood of ’76.”

The morning of July 20, 1976, though, I was feeling calmer than I ever had, safer, more at peace and, to my surprise, I was enjoying even the colder weather on the mountains. I have long been known to dislike the cold intensely, so as I read the words I wrote, I am struck by what I believed I had found there: a home and place where I was being trained to pay attention to my surroundings, to know my own capabilities, and how to prepare for and help others in disasters. Wanting to help others is one response to trauma. I know I was hopeful that I might at the very least return the next summer to be Hikemaster and even one day make my home near the clouds.

I wasn’t able to stay, though, and thus much of what I remember, even as I try to piece it together, still seems fragmented and lost to me. Like most of my co-workers, I went home soon after the flood, and immersed myself in college classes. I never saw any of my coworkers again and I never spoke to any of them afterwards either; those relationships simply ending undoubtedly contributed to a sense of loss.

Now, as I try to access any memories of that time, I am left with the handful of days afterwards, days when all of us above the canyon were trying to figure our what was happening below us. Even though we were aware, we did not want to talk about how we ourselves inexplicably had escaped being swept up.

That first day, though, we didn’t know what was going on below us in the canyon.

Like the many campers along the river, we were enjoying the scenery. The Big Thompson River was one of the jewels of the area, a mighty source of income because of all the tourists it drew. Most of the year, “…the water runs only a few feet deep and fifteen to twenty feet wide…happily rushes over rocks and gurgles through pools as it descends 8,000 feet from the high range to the south Platte on the prairie. The water is clear, numbing cold, and playfully sparked by the sun.” (Big Thompson: Profile of a Natural Disaster by David McComb, Pruitt Publishing Company, 1980.)

  • Saturday, July 31, 1976

    Today is unusually rainy.

    Normally, storms approached Estes Park and the YMCA camp from the south; thunderstorms, while normal, are of short duration, with clouds often enveloping peaks by 10 a.m., which was why hikers needed to climb summits of the various peaks in the range in time to skedaddle back down below the treeline or risk becoming a lightning rod.  Our Hikemaster course is teaching us a great deal about safety and we are training to lead hikes, which would mean teaching tourists about safety as well. Too often, though, tourists in the park dismiss any safety preparations or climbing instructions with disastrous consequences. The tourists we met traveling up to the summit the day we climbed Longs Peak weren’t interested in safety tips.  As we were headed down to the timber line, we passed, for example, a woman in a summer dress, wearing tennis shoes and carrying a purse on her arm as if she were headed to a party. They would be fine, they told us, and they waved us on. They had evidently never seen a person who’d been struck by lightning. Unprepared hikers found their way to our camp often enough though and several of our coworkers are among those trained to rescue hikers.

We did not know at that time that many of our Hikemaster instructors would be called upon to help flood victims the next day.

The storm was approaching from the East, though, we noticed, and it just seemed to camp above us, a thunderhead with no high westerly winds to move it. Reports were that during that Saturday evening, twelve inches of rain fell, about the normal annual rainfall amount for the area. Estes Park and the YMCA are above Lake Estes on the Big Thompson River, but, just below us, the unrelenting water from several tributaries gathered debris and swept down the canyons, both restricted by and guided by steep walls. By the time the waters reached the North Fork and the Big Thompson, there was already enough force to destroy bridges. All along the canyon, this storm surge ripped up everything in its way, including homes and campsites, swept up by a water level estimated at nearly twenty feet above the normal. Reports I read later told of at least one emergency worker dying in his attempts to go door-to-door to warn people.

We Learn from Chaos….

One of the innovations that came out of the Big Thompson flood was a national warning system for floods and other national disasters. That, with the advent of cell phones has greatly reduced the number of deaths in floods.

  • Sunday, August 1, 1976

    The camp is secluded from the world as usual, except for the hymns and local newscasts being broadcast on the radio in the bakery. Rain falls steadily still and a heavy fog had settled on Big Thompson Canyon. Four of us went by van higher up into the mountains to a lodge to feed some visitors. While the lodge was only thirty feet higher than the camp, it was eerily sitting just above the clouds and driving on those narrow roads on the sides of those mountains felt even more dangerous than normal.

    Sitting in the lodge’s kitchen after breakfast, we listened to the radio to learn when we could expect some sunshine. Mountain thunderstorms seldom lasted even more than an hour or two, so this second day of fog and rain was disconcerting. The announcer became somber, reading a report that surprised us: “The Big Thompson River had overflowed its banks in the narrow canyon leading to the valley and four persons were reported dead.” We became quiet, not having known that the storm was dangerous. The cook was worried about his family, knowing they lived near the flooded area. The storm, we heard, was stationary, and we could look forward to more rain.


    A lightning flash warned us we needed to take the van back down the mountain before trying to drive became even more treacherous AND before the van started attracting electricity. We warned the visitors in the lodge not to drive anywhere or even to go outdoors because they’d be lightning rods.

    Throughout the morning, as we worked back at the bakery and kitchen, we listened to any news reports coming over the radio. We worked silently through the day as the reports began to seem unreal; the number of dead grew to more than sixty before evening. We began to slowly comprehend the devastation that was apparently just below us. No one wanted to ask if it were just dumb luck that we were above the deadly flood and others were below it. The folks in charge were not sharing much information; maybe they didn’t want us to panic. No one really was surprised to learn that our phone lines were down. That was not terribly unusual, but the announcement added to the somber mood and hushed tones all day. The frequent updates on the radio and our director forbidding us to leave the YMCA property kept us all close to the kitchen even long after our own shifts had ended. Only the maintenance crew left to take the trash but the normal 30-minute round trip took hours and they returned with widely varying reports of the flooding just 1500 feet below us. If any of my coworkers or those in charge were afraid, I did not see it.

Monday, August 2, 1976

  • Monday, August 2, 1976

    This morning, the fog is even lower than before, which meant rescue helicopters were grounded. Several refugees have been brought into the camp in the night. So forlorn, they are wet and cold and dirty. They wait for some coffee and a blanket; dirty pillowcases in the hands hold the few belongings they were able to salvage. They are lucky, though; hundreds more are still stranded. Many more are missing and most are expected to be dead. Still there are no phone lines available and a trip to Denver, normally a couple of hours, would take six or seven and that was only if you had a four-wheel drive vehicle. Technical climbing skills are needed now for rescuers because roads are washed out in the canyon and the only way out is up over the cliffs.

  • Tuesday, August 3, 1976

    For three days, we have heard little about what was happening below us, except by the radio. I suspect now they were trying to prevent any kind of panic; we also did not know what the rest of the world thought about our fates, either. We were surprised to find for example, that our parents had heard mostly dire reports about Estes Park and the YMCA camp above it being unreachable and even obliterated. Some men we didn’t know came to get us today and told us we were going to be calling our parents via ham radios set up. The instructions to “tell your parents you’re still alive” stopped me for a moment. I had not known nor had I had a moment to worry what they might be thinking at home.

The overriding feeling it seems was somber but also a bit bizarre. For one example, our local radio station published a newsletter/bulletin we could see every morning, and next to the names of the dead each day were that day’s baseball scores.

Rumors

Rumors abounded. One account said all manner of snakes, also apparently trying. to escape the waters, were chasing survivors up the sides of the Big Thompson River canyon.

There was one report of a baby, who became known as Baby Moses, stranded on a rock in the rushing water.

One newspaper wrote: “After it opened, the refugee center at Loveland High School became a source of personal details as survivors, some with nothing more than the clothes they had worn into the canyon, told how an evening of cards with friends was interrupted by rushing water and a mad dash to scale slippery rocks. Throughout the first days rumors were abundant. There was one report of a baby, who became known as Baby Moses, stranded on a rock in the rushing water. One national publication called to verify that the baby had been rescued by a woman who lassoed it while riding a white horse. But no one could substantiate any of it, and The Coloradoan reported it as an example of the rumors.” (Big Thompson: Profile of a Natural Disaster by David McComb, Pruitt Publishing Company, 1980.)

“We learn the most from chaotic events.”

Disaster Preparedness Official in Colorado

I Learn from Chaos

For the longest time, I realize now, I felt profoundly disillusioned after that flood; the safe home I thought I had found, in fact, was as treacherous as any place could be.  I was not able to stay and create a home there that I was seeking because of the flood and damage. It took me years to acknowledge that and even longer to name the terror. I could not risk feeling that terror then; none of us could afford to name the terror that was just below us. 

I certainly had seen the power and wisdom of what we had been taught while learning to hike safely on those granite peaks. I cannot necessarily agree that we “learn from chaos,” but I can admit that I learned from how others around me operated in the chaos. 

Over the years since I left the camp, I know that I consciously incorporated lots of those lessons into my life. When you hike, take only pictures and leave only footsteps. When you journey, make sure someone knows where you’re going and when you should be back. When it’s cold outside, layering is the key to staying warm. If you’d asked me before what that summer taught me, I would have acknowledged all of that readily. I also spent a lot of time the next few years in jeans, hiking boots and denim shirts. I even decorated any space I inhabited with topographical maps. I started jogging in order to build up my endurance. I even tried caving because I was not near any mountains.

Mostly, trying to remember any part of that time has shown me that I had learned and incorporated lessons from the flood into my daily life much more extensively than I realized. Being just above the flood and watching how others navigated that danger, in fact, would inform and guide me for decades, if only because so much of what we’d learned in our classes had been especially effective in the midst of that chaos and tragedy.

There is wisdom and, often, survival, in choosing to be careful, and to work together. We learned to look before you step over a log or rock, make sure you pack what you need but only what you need, and, naturally, respect the power of nature and especially of water. In life lessons, those translate to being intentional, learning when enough stuff is enough and admitting to ourselves that we are not the most powerful force out there.

When my parents showed up a few days later to take me back to Missouri, they said I was different. The summer had been grueling in a number of ways, but I had learned so much that would inform every step I took from then on, would help me create the safety I craved whatever path I chose. I don’t doubt that the summer has helped me feel brave enough to continue to travel and explore new places, albeit with safety ever in mind.

Until now, I hadn’t talked or thought much about that time. I chalked it up to being forced by circumstances to abandon the path I had begun to enjoy so much. I felt for the longest time that I’d had an adventurous summer but it was over and so the memory and the possibilities were simply filed away like a summer fling; they were simply not relevant going forward. What I didn’t recognize was that I was on another trek, one that would last my lifetime and what I learned during that summer was helping me all along to find my way, help me create the safety I craved. I say “create” rather than find because all that I learned that summer helped me slowly realize that the safety I sought I had learned to carry with me. “Safety” would be wherever I found myself when I paused long enough to look up from the path.

I will continue to unpack the backpack, to try to remember the story of those days and others still dark. I can recognize one truth, though, folded neatly like a bandana in my jeans pocket: chaos and danger will be all around no matter where I travel or where I land, no matter where I make my home. Because of that training, though, I have tools, guiding principles and more confidence to continue exploring whatever path has been before me.

For Combat Veterans, Memorial Day is No Picnic

For those who survive combat and return home, the duty to keep the memory alive of the ‘true heroes’ can become a lifelong, sacred mission lived out daily.

Conversations with veterans of war will teach you one thing quickly: for many, the only true “hero” is the one who didn’t come home. Thus, for so many combat veterans who have lost a battle buddy, a friend, even an enemy, in war, the duty to keep the memory of the “true heroes” alive can become a lifelong, sacred mission lived out daily.

Sadly, Survivors’ Guilt is one of the main contributors to veteran suicides that continue to plague this country. Living with the fact that you survived when so many others did not then means Every Day Becomes Memorial Day. 

For many combat veterans, the survivor’s guilt, or the belief that you have done something wrong by surviving a traumatic event when others did not, can be debilitating and disturbing. Survivors of all sorts of traumas will question, feel guilty, and often even begin to believe their survival makes them somehow responsible for the other person’s death. 

“Why did I survive?” 

“I stepped one way and my buddy went another. He took the bullet.”

“I switched seats with another pilot and he was killed. It should have been me.”  

“If I’d leaned forward, I would have been the one hit, not him.” 

The grief of losing those under your command or knowing that another person died saving you is a particularly heavy burden. Especially plaguing for so many combat veterans is the reality that they were responsible for taking the life of a child, whether a combatant or just an innocent bystander.

Even just returning when so many others did not, though, can feel like too much to bear. Thus, remembering and honoring the “real” heroes with some kind of meaningful ritual or task that honors the fallen then becomes the new mission.  

Eddie G.

His Sergeant Major brought Eddie G. to my campus ministry one rainy day in 2011. He’d already deployed into combat as an engineer three times and he was only 25-years-old.

“Got any work our guy can help with?” Eddie stood by his truck across the parking lot, out of earshot.

“Well, I was needing to make this entrance accessible. Probably a ramp….” I nodded to the young vet leaning against his truck.

Seems Eddie was sleeping in that truck. He was not allowed to see his daughter or go home. Sergeant Major was running out of ideas and Eddie was not the only vet in crisis in Clarksville, which is adjacent to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, home to the 5th Special Forces Group and 101st Air Assault. At that time, the base was dealing with more active duty suicides than any other U.S. military base. Eddie was just one of many vets in crisis but he’s the one Sergeant Major brought to see me that day.

“You need something built; Eddie’s your man,” said Sergeant Major. Eddie had been building bridges for combat transport. Never having done that, I could not and did not at the time realize the frustration and grief of building a bridge to transport your unit into combat only to watch them be destroyed almost immediately. Too often at the cost of the lives of your buddies. “He just needs a task. To be useful. Helpful.”

And just like that, a hurting vet was building a ramp for our campus ministry. He showed up at an ungodly hour the next morning in the pouring rain. For the next four days, our only conversation was me asking him if he wanted a cup of coffee or needed anything. He never needed anything but the coffee. I’d stand out there with him, attempting to make some small talk but everything I said seemed pretty lame.

He worked silently. Alone. In the rain. For four days. Didn’t need any help. Didn’t want to talk to anyone much. I watched him a lot those four days, wondering about how we could help him. I called another, older veteran I knew and asked him for suggestions, ways we could help this guy who worked so methodically, silently, almost prayerfully to build a ramp to make our building accessible.

“Leave him alone, and let him build,” my friend said. “You ARE helping him.”

For four days, Eddie worked in the rain, silently, taking only the occasional break to smoke a cigarette and stare at the ramp as it took shape. The day he finished, he sat for a couple of hours, I guess, in his truck, smoking and looking at the finished ramp.

I was afraid to let him leave, afraid he needed so much more, but painfully aware I didn’t know what that might be. I went out and took some pictures and he said I could send them to Sergeant Major and he’d get them. I said thank you and he stabbed his cigarette out, then said goodbye. As he turned to leave, though, he added so quietly I almost didn’t hear it: “At least nobody is gonna blow this up.” I never saw him again. I pray he found another project.

“Survivor’s guilt is a complicated kind of grief and treating it needs to be very individual,” says counselor and combat veteran Lantz Smith, former Executive Director of Soldiers And Families Embraced (SAFE), a free counseling program near Fort Campbell.

Often, he says, the kind of complicated grief carried by war survivors is never finished. Certainly, he says, there seems to be no straight progression through the many stages of grief, and little hope of the grief ending neatly with any sense of closure.  

“Quite often,” Smith says, “survivors of combat are more afraid of forgetting than anything else. Their fear is that NOT feeling grief intensely is dangerously close to forgetting, and forgetting would be unforgivable.”   

Ask any combat veteran and they will tell you whose memories they personally are keeping alive.

In his invaluable book, “Warriors Return,” Dr. Edward Tick of Soldier’s Heart explains, “Survivors shape their lives and suffer their nightmares as ways to not break faith with the fallen. Canadian Lt. Colonel John McRae’s World War I poem, ‘In Flanders Fields,’ reads, ‘If you break faith with us who die / We shall not sleep…’” 

Poppies are still reminders of those who have fallen in conbat.

“Civilians taking oaths of military service become bound to serve and sacrifice no matter what is asked of them, even unto killing or being killed,” says Tick. “Combat also binds, producing an intense intimacy between brothers-and sisters-in-arms and with foes. Survivors often take oaths to remain loyal forever to those with whom they have shared the experience of hell. They strain to honor the memories of their fallen, prove themselves worthy of their sacrifices, and fulfill last promises, such as delivering messages home,” he explains.

Tick, Edward, PHD, Warrior’s Return: Restoring the Soul After War, Sounds True Publications, Boulder, Colorado.

Helping these survivors find ways to remember a fellow service member’s death without constantly emotionally reliving the trauma is the challenge for trauma counselors.  

The New Mission

While many combat veterans will never finish the healing process after they return home when their brother- or sister-in-arms did not, they can find ways to make peace with and live with this new mission in life. Memorializing is one effective method, says Smith. Like Eddie G., for example, they can build something that will not be destroyed.

Memorializing means creating places and activities to hold part of the grief and help the veteran find a healthy way to keep alive the memory of those who have fallen in battle.  

One veteran, a fighter pilot, was haunted by the way he could take another life while staying “above the fray,” and be an anonymous danger to those below him. His memorial? He has loaded as many pennies as he can in a large bowl; each one represents a life lost in a bombing raid.

He regularly picks up the weighty reminder because, he says, he needs to feel a physical weight to accompany the emotional burden of those whose lives he took, who shared the hell of war with him but who did not ever see him. He feels the weight of this grief and does his part to remember the weight of war.

A sailor who cannot “unhear” the voices of those who could not be saved from drowning becomes a counselor to help those who are drowning emotionally like he once was.

Some veterans find help for the guilt of surviving by sharing it in music or stories. Ancient cultures are said to have brought warriors home and, after a time of cleansing, asked them to tell the rest of the community everything they saw and felt and all that they did. When they finished, the community then helped them carry the burden of their memories and guilt. Sharing is also a way of keeping a memory alive, of honoring the fallen.

Aaron Voris, combat veteran, attending a SAFE songwriting retreat. Used with permission.

One young soldier, who was wounded himself when he returned, was haunted by the memory of having to carry the body of a small child to a burn pile after a battle. He knew nothing about her, and her family could not be found. Perhaps they did not survive either. For the longest time, that memory was disturbing and his greatest desire was to drive the pain of that moment from his mind.

With the help of a counselor, however, he chose to see the memory not as a haunting spectre but as a desire to be honored and remembered. That child – whoever she was – deserved to be honored and remembered, too, and, he realized, there might be no one else to do that. Remembering this innocent victim of war was his new mission and embracing that gave him some peace. He gave her a name and then he planted a tree dedicated to her in the field behind his home. He tends to it and hopes she is at peace as well, knowing she was remembered.

“If you break faith with us who die / We shall not sleep…’” 

Canadian Lt. Colonel John McRae’s World War I poem, “In Flanders Fields.”

These rituals will never erase the profound sense of loss or the survivors’ guilt, but they can keep the veteran from turning the grief and guilt inward in destructive ways, Smith says.

Veterans build raised gardens to provide hands on therapy “giving life,” rather than taking it .

Finding Meaning in Survival

Rituals also serve as regular reminders that survivors were likely spared for some reason. These acts and memorials become the new missions that can help combat survivors bear the duty of remembering.

I believe Eddie was deep in thought the entire time he was building our new ramp, promising his fallen buddies that each nail driven and each step taken on this ramp was a reminder that war was not all there was and that those who fell would be remembered and honored every time someone entered that campus ministry building.

Accepting their new mission, embracing this sacred duty to remember and honor, can, with the help of families, friends, counselors and ministers, ease the survivors’ guilt enough for today and help them cope with the fact that, once a combat veteran returns home from battle, every day becomes Memorial Day. 

Thank a veteran next time you see him or her but remember, they don’t think of themselves as the heroes. In fact, it may disturb them to be called a hero. “Thank you for your service” is enough. Even better, how about we all just take a minute and reflect on why we have designated a Memorial Day in the first place?

This is first of a series of posts about war, loss and healing.

I am a veteran, retired United Methodist Minister and co-founder of Soldiers And Families Embraced (SAFE), a non-profit offering free counseling to combat veterans and their families.  In 2011, at the height of the US military’s largest scale armed conflicts since the Vietnam War in Iraq and Afghanistan, I served as the campus minister at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee, which is adjacent to Fort Campbell, Kentucky.  At the time, more than 17,000 Soldiers were deployed into combat from the fort, which had the highest suicide rate of any other base in FORSCM.  Veterans, their spouses and their children began bringing to campus the effects of multiple, year-long combat deployments, including Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Traumatic Brain Injuries.  In response, with the help of a veteran studying social work, we began a free and totally confidential counseling program based on the story of Lazarus emerging from the tomb, still wrapped in the trappings of war and death.  SAFE continues today providing free counseling to those affected by all wars.

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You Can Have My Seat on the Mourner’s Bench

Rituals are meant to be the beginning of the healing process, not the end of it.

Rituals can be powerful for healing, and we need them to help us heal after loss and tragedy. That memorial service we hold when someone dies? It is for the living, not the person who died. Those impromptu memorials after shootings? They help us come together to start the healing.

Rituals are just the beginning, though. This is especially true when our own behavior is part of the problem, when we keep doing the same things and expecting different results. At that point, our rituals are pointless and empty. Visiting a shut-in about once a month for nearly a decade taught me this.

By the time I started preaching, James (I changed his name for this post.) and his wife of close to 60 years were both homebound shut-ins and so were on a rotation of homes for the pastor to visit after worship. Visiting their home was ever the adventure, though.

The entry of the home was a strange mix of antebellum and 70’s influences. A folding metal lawn chair leaned up against one of the original plaster columns that framed the ten-foot-high wooden doors, for example. Heavy enough to kill you if they fell on you, the doors were never allowed to completely close as long as I knew James; opening them would have required at least two grown men. A makeshift screen door was all that separated visitors from the cluttered yard and the porch strewn with more folded lawn chairs, some dead potted plants and a half-empty bag of mulch.

The first time I visited, after knocking several times, I gingerly pushed the screen door open and started towards the voice of a television newscaster beckoning me from the farthest end of the great entry hall. On my right, was a set of partially closed doors, and from them I could see Jame’s wife, whom I also had not met, but whom I was told was not interested in visitors. I later did manage to introduce myself and be admitted to her room but that was apparently only out of necessity: I was allowed in long enough to change the channel on her nearly-antebellum black and white television for her. I was only in her room long enough to realize that, though she was hooked up to an oxygen machine, sitting next to her on the bedside table was a pack of cigarettes and a full ashtray. I declined to empty the ashtray for her, and she waved me out of the room.

I passed two more sets of floor-to-ceiling wooden doors on either side of the great hall before arriving at what must have originally been the site of the grand staircase. Evidently, the top floor of the old home had been caving in, so James’ predecessors had lopped it off before moving it to the current site facing a four-lane highway. The opening to the old stairwell had been boarded up with thin, dark paneling, creating a wall for a now-enclosed back porch. From an opening on the far left I could see the shadows from the television news cast flickering. I peeked around the opening to see the now rather annoyingly loud black and white television, a tv tray lined with medicine bottles and half-opened packages of lemon cookies, and James in a recliner.

He looked up that first visit and asked, “You the lady preacher or are you here to check my sugar?”

“Lady Preacher,” I offered and he pointed to the ottoman next to his recliner, the only other piece of furniture I could see in the dark, enclosed porch under the stairwell. Sitting on the ottoman meant I was looking up at James as we chatted, as if I had been relegated to the children’s table at Thanksgiving.

In my eleven years serving that church, James sat in that recliner for every conversation. The trajectory of our conversations and our relationship, however, determined the seat I would be offered. My perch progressed over the years from the lowly ottoman to a metal and vinyl kitchen chair and eventually to a second recliner, the offer of which required clearing away a years’s worth of mass mailing ads and cookie wrappers. My own recliner. I though I had arrived.

Preaching “Scripturally”

Even after my graduation to adult seating, though, our struggle continued. Over the years James’ oldest son indicated that James did not believe I was preaching correctly. I was not, in James’ words, “preaching Scripturally.” Though James did not actually attend and only heard secondhand about my preaching from his son, evidently, when his son told him about my sermons, James’ complaint remained the same. “Not preaching Scripturally.”

Years would pass before I would be able to grasp the kind of preaching he would consider “Scriptural.”

Every sermon I preached began with a Scripture passage, intentionally allowing the text to speak for itself. I trust the Scripture to tell us something about God and ourselves. I didn’t always like what I learned but I respected it, so I knew James’ accusations either were incorrect or misinformed. His son had reassured me he was reporting my sermon Scripture choices and preaching points, so neither of us realized for some time exactly why James consistently was disappointed. It took me years to realize that, for James and likely for many others of his upbringing, church was supposed to “convict.”

Someone went to the mourner’s bench or church had not broken out.

From the moment you entered the sanctuary apparently, church was meant to be a frightening experience; God knew what you had done all week and before the sermon was over, an honest-to-God, bona fide pastor would have directed your miserable self to come forward and sit on the hardest bench, a single bench at the front of the sanctuary, the one without a back, the “Mourner’s Bench.” There you were expected to confess that you were a sinner – lower than a worm on really bad weeks in spite of being a baptized believer. You were directed then to confess, then you were forgiven and then the congregation would sing, “Shall We Gather at the River” or “Just As I Am” before heading home.

Take me to the real church. Find me a mourner’s bench. God knows what I did all week.

This process, I learned, what James would call “preaching Scripturally,” would render backsliding baptized members “Good-to-Go” for another week. Sadly, though, it was usually then a week of the same damn behavior that had made you feel so guilty the week before, but it was fine because you could count on the Preacher to help you confess and be forgiven all over again the next week. That was apparently how folks knew they’d been to church.

Sure, not everyone went to the mourner’s bench every week but someone did or preaching had not really broken out.

By the time I got there, it didn’t matter that there was no longer a mourner’s bench in the sanctuary; the expectation was still that sitting in the pew on a Sunday invited guilt and shame and the preacher must offer a chance to ask for forgiveness so folks could feel better about themselves for at least a few days.

Full disclaimer: this is not Methodist theology.

For James to feel like he’d “been to church,” he would need to go through the whole ritual, to confess and be forgiven before he was good to go. Then, though, he apparently felt that he would be free to live his life however he wanted…until he needed to come back and do it again.

Nothing in his life changed after that ritual. It was empty. This is the kind of empty ritual that God does not want, we are told in our Scriptures. As much as God loves a good ritual, even God does not seek or require ritual simply for ritual’s sake without any change in behavior. 

In Isaiah 58, “God mocks people who seek God as if they were ‘a nation that acted righteously.’  God accuses them of saying they want to be close to God, but ‘you do whatever you want…oppress all your workers… quarrel and brawl…hit each other violently.’  In classic Hebrew style, [Isaiah makes God sound] like a Yiddish grandmother saying, ‘Oy vey! You call this a fast? Enough with the thoughts and prayers, already!’ (58:5)”

Harnish, Jim, https://jimharnish.org/2022/05/26/is-god-fed-up-with-our-prayers/

Isaiah 58 is tough to read.  God rejects empty piety. God rejects our “lying down in the mourning clothing and ashes” while we still oppress, quarrel and brawl, rejects us going through the rituals but then continuing the behavior that caused us to need to mourn in the first place. More to the point today, God calls us to concrete actions, not simply thoughts and prayers:

“Isn’t this the fast I choose:

releasing wicked restraints, untying the ropes of a yoke,

setting free the mistreated, and breaking every yoke?

Isn’t it sharing your bread with the hungry

and bringing the homeless poor into your house,

covering the naked when you see them,

 and not hiding from your own family?

With God’s command comes God’s promise:

Then your light will break out like the dawn,

and you will be healed quickly….

Then you will call, and the Lord will answer;

you will cry for help, and God will say, I’m here.

Isaiah 58

God loves a good ritual, but even God does not seek ritual simply for ritual’s sake without any change in behavior. 

A few weeks ago, a second-grader fell at a school in the Nashville area, less than an hour from the Covenant School. She stumbled and fell, sadly, during an active shooter drill, cutting her knee and scraping her elbows, after the teacher had screamed at the children to “Run!” A sweet gesture from another child helped ease the pain and panic in that moment: one of her classmates stopped, helped the distraught child get back up and ran with her to the safe gathering spot.

The good news: her friend didn’t leave her behind.

The horrible terrible very sad news: our response to people who take AR-15’s into schools is to step up active shooter drills.

For God, our rituals mourning all of these shootings are empty and meaningless if we continue to do what we do and wonder why things never get better.  As a nation, we’ve gotten pretty good at this, though, acting as if our stint on the mourner’s bench is sufficient.

After the Covenant shooting, a large number of Nashville neighbors including many clergy colleagues participated in actions beyond candlelight vigils and prayers and leaving stuffed animals and flowers and balloons at an impromptu memorial. Thousands staged a sit-in and even marched on the state capitol. The overwhelming message to the politicians who would not consider bans on assault weapons was “Save your ‘thoughts and prayers.'”

With no apparent policy changes, though, the best efforts are still empty rituals, something we are sadly proficient at in this country.

We mourn, but we still can legally purchase an AR-15 and make up for it by telling our children to learn to run faster.

The horrible terrible very sad news is we still think the best response is teaching children to run faster and hide better.

Maybe you believe the problem is guns. Maybe you believe the problem is certain types of guns.

Maybe you support more police in school or arming teachers.

I know I want people to understand there can never be enough equipment for any SRO to combat an 18-year-old in a Kevlar vest and a helmet with an assault rifle. 

Maybe you believe the problem is broken families, no prayer in schools, the lack of mental health care, or children who come to school having never sat down with an adult to read a story book. The truth is, it’s likely some of all of these but focussing only on mental health care without limiting access to the weapons that leave small bodies in shreds is mourners’ bench behavior. That renders our thoughts and prayers empty.

What is critical here is that we do not make our rituals empty, that we do not sit on the mourner’s bench and cry and pray and then go home and keep doing what we have been doing. Because that is making a mockery of our faith and rituals.

Whichever side you fall on, God asks what are you doing to help fix it? Are you just making more room on the bench?

To lament, to pray, to mourn, and then to change nothing is to miss the point.  It is, in fact, to fail–to fail our children and to fail our God.

At the very least, educate yourself. And by that I don’t mean just read what people write who agree with you. Read what people write who don’t agree with you. Learn the actual issues in your area. Every state has different issues and different laws. More than anything, listen to people who disagree with you.

Everyone of us is afraid and sad and none of us has answers that will work for each situation, but God calls us to work together to keep our children safe. Look up your community’s Peace and Justice Center and join in. No Center? Look into starting one.

Grieve, pray, then do something that shows you have truly taken in the gravity of the situation; but for God’s sake, let us not keep acting as if nothing has happened.   

Our children

need us to

figure it out.

  1. Nancy Bradshaw Avatar
    Nancy Bradshaw

    Challenging piece about an horrific plague on our land. What are our lawmakers thinking? They hear the voices of the people and yet do little to address the problem. I need to do more, I know. Letter writing is just not getting it either. Thanks for your focus on what’s going wrong in our world.

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  2. Martha Ann Pilcher Avatar
    Martha Ann Pilcher

    Amen!

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  3. D-Day Promises, Guilt and Forgiveness – Emptying The Backpack Avatar
    D-Day Promises, Guilt and Forgiveness – Emptying The Backpack

    […] a previous post, (“You Can Have My Seat on the Mourner’s Bench,”) I introduced James, (not his real name), who struggled mightily with ongoing guilt and grief […]

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  4. D-Day Promises, Guilt and Forgiveness – Eighty Years Later – Emptying The Backpack Avatar
    D-Day Promises, Guilt and Forgiveness – Eighty Years Later – Emptying The Backpack

    […] a previous post, (“You Can Have My Seat on the Mourner’s Bench,”) I introduced James, (not his real name), who struggled mightily with ongoing guilt and grief […]

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Of Pakistan, Chewing Gum, Chatty Cathy Dolls & Valiant Efforts

A favorite talisman from Pakistan. I loved how all the different sizes nested one inside the other. I’ve carried this painted wooden toy with me for nearly sixty years now. Cracked and repaired, broken but still beautiful, a cradle of memories.

When I was seven, my brother, who was eight, my sister, who was six, and I got dumped in our grandparents’ laps, a harsh ending to what had begun two years earlier as a grand adventure, meant to last a lifetime.

Once it was announced that Dad had secured a coveted engineering job overseas, we had all been celebrities at one festive send off after another from Springfield, to the unknown and mysterious West Pakistan, (now Pakistan). The biggest Bon Voyage event, where each of us had been presented with brand new suitcases to go with our brand new outfits for the journey to the other side of the earth, reflected how impressed friends, coworkers and neighbors had been when Dad had secured the contract.

That the way to Pakistan involved so many shots for so many illnesses was annoying, but, for me, the memories of those jabs are overshadowed by those of international flights on Pan Am where the pilots brought all the children on the flight into the cockpit and each of us received a souvenir Pan Am flight bag and our own set of pilot’s wings. I remember buying a doll in Tokyo, where I was convinced that I could speak Japanese because I could speak to the sales clerk. I remember arriving in Karachi to be served warm milk and runny eggs and that we slept twenty-four hours before driving to our new home in a walled compound in Northern Pakistan. I remember much about our time in Pakistan, but I do not remember the trip home.

Thoughout the two years we were there, Dad was likely excelling in his work, but, before the contract was completed and we could be posted at yet another overseas project on another continent, Dad was forced to break his contract and return to the states on short notice, with little or no money, no job and much anger.

So, just a few days after boarding a plane for home, the three of us children found ourselves seated in a row on the edge of the bed in a motel halfway between our grandparents’ home in the little town of Waynesville, Missouri, and wherever Dad had found a job. The motel bed was low to the ground; our toes just touched the linoleum and we were each individually toeing the floor and pushing the old bed up and down, causing the box springs to creak softly. Next door, we could hear our parents and grandparents arguing loudly. We did not know then the three of us would not be going to the tiny apartment Dad had managed to find. 

I clutched my Chatty Cathy doll. Bless her heart, she’d stayed with me throughout our time overseas in spite of looking like she had mange because my little sister had taken a pair of scissors to her black hair. My sister clutched a stuffed monkey who had a permanent grip on a plastic banana. She had already given up the doll she’d been given, one who giggled when her arms were squeezed, and who likely ended up in another child’s arms, looking like she was just out of the box with that curly, blond hairdo intact. Don’t think it didn’t cross my mind, though, to experiment on her with scissors. Maybe my sister was just more angry at that time than I was. 

New Clothes, a Bon Voyage Party, Poufy Hair? Pictures courtesy Jodi McCullah All Rights Reserved

“Say goodbye to your children!” my father had hissed moments before all three of us climbed in the back of our grandparents’ sedan. Mom’s eyes were already glazed over though; she wasn’t responding. She had said nothing while my father had been yelling for weeks, it seemed, most recently in the next motel room, in front of her parents, who also were silent. We couldn’t hear any of those angry words at all, only loud voices, then we each flinched as the door to our motel room had swung open and we saw our parents standing there.  “Say goodbye!” 

Grandma Ree and Grandpa George seemed just as dumbfounded as we were, I think, and were really in no financial position to take on more, but to their credit, they put the three of us into the back of their tiny dark blue sedan anyway.  Driving away from that motel, each of us rode silently, wide-eyed, tacitly agreeing it was better not to ask. 

His Adventure; Her Nightmare

On our way home from Pakistan, we’d each been wearing a new pair of leather shoes made from a cobbler in Pakistan. Even finding shoes while we were there became an adventure for my father who savored every side trip to a bazaar and whose shopping addiction devoured cameras and jewelry and handmade rugs and carved tables with ivory inlay for playing chess. Being there while the country was at war with India was a nightmare for our mother, though; after my parents ventured to the bazaars, she had nightmares about the children who had been purposely maimed in order to make their begging more lucrative. By the time we left Pakistan, Mom had begun obsessing about keeping the windows covered with foil for nighttime blackouts, long after it was necessary. 

The civil engineering position Dad had secured with this company overseas was his dream and meant to last his whole career; he had not planned to have to return to southwest Missouri with his family at all, certainly not as a quitter. This contract was his chance to escape small towns and small minds, and that dream was not meant to die a quick death because his young wife discovered the balm of alcohol and realized that some men could be sweet. Mom, bless her heart, had been thrust into a world she had never contemplated and one she was vastly unprepared to engage, understand or master. Dad, on the other hand, had served overseas in the Air Force and, when he returned, he invested in National Geographic in order to know more about the world he had only tasted in his two years in Puerto Rico. This job had been his chance to immerse himself in adventure and travel.

A small-town girl who had never left Missouri before, Mom continued dutifully each day to don a crisply ironed dress and heels while struggling to learn to oversee servants, like the first one, a “Bearer.” The Pakistani manservant who did not speak any English was in the house all day, and ironed and cooked unrecognizable meals for us.  He didn’t last long. A gardener, a “Mali,” was required, if only to keep up appearances in the European-style neighborhoods built by the company that had brought so many engineers and families from all over the world. We knew, though, that walking outside one morning to find the gardener, proudly holding up the cobra he’d caught in the yard where her children played was too much for Mom. She began to unravel. Our father held out, though, and doubled down on social activities, including starting a Boy Scout troop, in hopes Mom would adjust. Instead, she discovered the alcohol that had never been allowed in her home growing up. She found the mathematics of rum, to be precise. One drink made her feel good, two made the barbed wire on the compound walls fade, and four drinks made all the lizards and maimed children and strange men in the house just slip away for hours and hours. 

A Church Wednesday Night Meal in Mangla, West Pakistan
Pictures courtesy Jodi McCullah All Rights Reserved

We never saw Mom drink, though. We were in bed every night by seven p.m. We never saw her drink and we never saw our father much at all.  For the two years we lived in Pakistan, our father kept twelve-hour work days and so our paths did not cross for two years, except on the occasional family shopping outing. During those two years was the only time we had allowances and every few weeks, the family would venture to the compound’s shopping area where we could find a Pakistani furniture store, a European-style restaurant complete with a dessert cart filled with petit-fours, and a toy store, where we were happy to spend our allowances, most often on comic books since there were no Saturday morning cartoons. We had no television at all in our home there, in fact, so by the time we left after two years, we had amassed more than three hundred Archie, Superman and Richie Rich comic books and often participated in a robust trading circle with other neighborhood children. Once, though, we all three saved our allowance to buy a pale blue scooter that we could see high up on a corner shelf in the toy store. We visited that store several times without buying any new toys or comics, simply to be sure no other children had purchased that little scooter high up in the corner.  We were struggling not to run or pull on our father’s hand to get to the store when the day for purchase finally arrived. Together, the three of us proudly plunked down our rupees onto the counter and watched, holding our breath, as the store owner pulled the scooter down and dusted it off.  When he rolled it around the corner of the counter, however, to present that blue beauty to us, my older brother and I realized that the scooter, heretofore only viewed from afar, was too small for either of us. Only our little sister would be able to enjoy it. There was no going back, however. The store owner was beaming at having sold the toy that had taken up his store’s top shelf for months and our father would have been too embarrassed to halt the purchase. Typical of our relationship, though, my brother and I did not commiserate; we were silent as our feet dragged on the dusty road going home. Our sister stayed on the sidewalks with the scooter but I do not remember her using it very often after that, which only added to our disappointment. 

Photo by Erik Mclean on Pexels.com

Other than the occasional shopping trip, church and the bowling alley, we did not see our father. Even at those venues, we did not interact with him. Our understanding was that, like the other engineers who worked long hours building that dam, our father was excused from many family activities. When we did participate as a family, like at the bowling alley, the children went off unsupervised mostly, so we still didn’t see our parents unless we were causing a problem. Dad was apparently a minor celebrity at the bowling alley, though, often bowling perfect or near perfect games. Our time there consisted of ordering tuna fish sandwiches and zombies to drink at the adjacent grill and watching, fascinated, as the Pakistani workers reset the pins after each throw of the ball.  No automated pin replacement there. 

Though I was very young, I remember a lot about when my Father was helping in the beginning years to build Mangla Dam in West Pakistan, now Pakistan (as opposed to East Pakistan, now Bangladesh.) Most of our old photos from that time, however, are lost. I do remember that strange juxtaposition of Western and Pakistani. We attended a British school where I learned some Urdu and to add an “e” in the middle of judgment, (i.e., British spelling) a bowling alley and we enjoyed a wonderful series of public pools. We also explored some historic sites and went to school with children from all over the world, including Pakistan. (See Wikipedia, Mangla Dam and Mangla Dam Memories on Facebook.)

Otherwise, the three of us were on our own outside of school hours. The compound was large with an American side and a European side and a bus that drove around both sides all day.  On any particularly boring day, the three of us would simply climb onto the old, repainted school bus and ride down all the streets of both sides of the compound, cooled by the hot wind coming through the open windows and fascinated by what our neighbors might be up to that day. I am still amazed that we were simply allowed to wander at five, six and seven years old. In Pakistan.

The entire adventure seemed a contradiction in terms, characterized for me by the fact that we lived in a compound surrounded by a stone wall with barbed wire and cut glass on the top but where the gates were always open and unguarded.

There was an open gate at the back of our own yard, in fact, and from it, we could see a small village where, we were told, women slapped cow dung onto the walls of the homes to dry to be later used as fuel for the fire. Every day, we could hear the calls to worship; they were haunting and beautiful, a call to an Islamic understanding of God that serenaded us as we walked to our Christian church potluck supper. For some of the year, the dust on the side of the road was a fine and deep silt and we would slide our feet through it as if it were snow; other times, during monsoon season, there seemed to be nothing that was dry.

Unsupervised. In Pakistan. At age 7.

That we were largely unsupervised outside of school hours made sense to someone I guess. Until the injuries began. First, my five-year-old sister got stitches trying to climb up a ladder to dive off of the high dive at the crowded community pool. Then, I nearly drowned just a few feet from my mother in the same pool; another mother noticed me struggling to keep my head above water and grabbed me. Mom was busy chatting. There was a broken arm, then stitches for me. Twice. This time, however, neglect was not the problem. I had become the target of choice for my older brother who gleefully ran his bicycle into mine, causing the pedal to tear into the fleshy part of my lower right leg, leaving white tissue oozing down my shin. He later threw a cutting board at me, just missing my eye socket but also requiring stitches. We may never know if another parent intervened or if our father walking into the living room to see our mother kissing the neighbor, but there came a day when Dad sat all three of us down on the edge of a bed in our shared bedroom to tell us our mother was ill and would be “going away” for six months or more. It had been decided we three would wait for her there, in Pakistan.

That’s when the wailing began. Paid mourners could not have been louder or more dramatic. At the time, we were terrified, but we were also resolute, huddled together eyeing that dark and dangerous chasm that seemed to open up before us. We did not know this man. No way were we letting Mom go quietly. We did not stop crying until Dad returned to the room hours later to tell us we were all going home. 

Our relief was short-lived, though; once my father dragged Mom away from that motel, we did not see or hear from our parents for months and months. The timeline is vague for me but I remember attending three schools in second grade. So, once we were settled in my grandparents’ two-bedroom duplex in Waynesville, I took to running away, searching for her. From school, from my grandparents’ home, even from church services, I escaped, watching for unsupervised moments and unlocked doors, taking advantage of crowds and distracted adults, always looking for my mother. 

Grandma Ree and Grandpa George. Good people who loved fiercely.
Pictures courtesy of Jodi McCullah All Rights Reserved.

More than once, because Grandma Ree was exasperated, I was simply allowed to stay home from school on my grandfather’s day off and we watched cartoons and ate Oreos while he ironed the work shirts he wore driving trucks. Grandpa George seemed to me to be the only adult who was not angry with me; I remain convinced that was because he understood my quest. 

Once, after I’d run away from school, the school principal found me. He and a teacher picked me up in a car after they’d driven all over that little town looking for this wayward seven-year-old. 

“There, there,” he said, offering me a piece of gum in a green wrapper folded around shiny foil, very much a treat then.  Defeated for the moment, I cooperated and got into the old car, only because I’d been wandering for hours and it was getting dark. Offering me a stick of gum, though? Did the adults around me really think that would fix this? I remember looking at him as if he were clueless. It would be years later, though, before I could be proud of that seven-year-old slapping that piece of gum from the principal’s hand in the back of that car, and even longer before I could appreciate the courage it had taken for the three of us to stand up to our father. 

We all paid a price, though; we would never have back the mother we had known. When we saw her again, she was subdued, defeated. She had endured shame, therapy, even, we were told later, shock treatments, all because her dream was not his dream. She was not unlike many women of her day, praised for obedience like a child. For the rest of his life, though, my father was on notice. I’m not certain to this day that we accomplished much, but our little rebellion was uncharacteristic of us and I am proud to be able to look back and say that those three little souls refused to go quietly into the darkness. 

.

Drawing the Circle Wider: Prison Ministry and Family

The last time I read the Scriptural passage about the woman who insisted Jesus heal her even after he likened her people to the dogs under the table, it made me think of my youngest son. And jails.  For several reasons.

"Leaving that place, Jesus withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon. Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” 
But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.” 
He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” 
But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” 
He answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” 
Then Jesus answered her, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed instantly."  Matthew 15:21-28

First, my son is a lawyer, working as a public defender.  He’s the guy who gets assigned to people who don’t have money for a private attorney when they have to appear in court.  He thinks it’s a hoot that he can call his mom whenever he wants to and say he’s headed to jail.  Haha.  

Second, he LOVES to argue.

And third, he likes rules. To be specific, he likes knowing where the line is.  When he was younger, we’d tell him the rules and he would make us hold that line.  We’d tell him not to step over that line and he’d put his toe right up to it and ask, “You mean this line?”  For the longest time, his constant testing of our boundaries and rules for him was frustrating. After a while though, we realized he really DID want to know where the line was because rules helped him feel safe, helped him know where he stood.  That may be WHY he became a lawyer, that love of rules.  He ate all that up, all those laws and statutes, just his cup of tea.  So he likes being a lawyer, at least most of the time, likes helping folks who find themselves in trouble but can’t afford a private lawyer.  

We’d tell him not to step over that line and he’d put his toe right up to it and ask, “You mean this line?”

So most of the folks he defends have very little means and many of them don’t get bailed out while they wait for their day in court.  That’s when he calls mom and says he’s going to jail.  It’s been frustrating for him often but every so often, it is also quite rewarding.  For one exxample, a couple of years ago, he was visiting a young client at the jail and the client asked how old my son was.  He shared that he was in fact turning 32 on that very day and the client was floored. “You mean you have to come here on your birthday?” he asked. “Are you gonna get to have a party or a cake later?” he asked. “Probably not,” my son said, shrugging it off. He didn’t think about it again until he saw the young client again a couple of weeks later and the client, in his twenties, pulled a folded up napkin from the pocket of his orange jumpsuit and unfolded it to reveal a cookie.  “This is for you, man,” he said.  “Because you didn’t get a birthday cake.  I saved my cookie from lunch for you.”  My son was speechless, which is significant for him. He’s never at a loss for words.  

Photo by RODNAE Productions on Pexels.com

It’s not a stretch, though, to say that most of us are not terribly comfortable with courts and jails and prisons so I don’t feel like I’m bragging when I say my son is comfortable going to jail because his mom went to prison.  No no – don’t get me wrong.  I went to prison the way he goes to jail.  

When I was in seminary, we were offered classes that met in Riverbend Prison, classes that were populated half by seminarians and half by inmates.  We studied issues surrounding prisons, legal systems, punishment and forgiveness.  I did that for the entire time I was in seminary, every week, and I can tell you I learned a great deal and came to know about a dozen of the prisoners pretty well – guys in for everything from murder to arson to rape – all of whom were taking the same graduate level classes the seminarians were taking.  When it came time for me to graduate, then, I was invited to continue visiting by getting on the visitation list of one of the inmates.  When you visit Riverbend, like lots of state prisons, you visit during set hours in a large open room and there might be as many as fifty inmates also having visitors in the same room, all seated on molded plastic chairs, all attached in groups of twos or threes. At the corner of many of the sets of chairs are the all-valuable tables.  Tables are at a premium and desired because, all around the walls of the room are vending machines for snacks. Most of the foods in those vending machines are cheese and peanut butter crackers, tuna fish sandwiches and peanuts and candy. None of the items appealed to me much, I realized, because the daily food I had was better and more varied than those offerings. To the men who lived there, the stale hamburgers were a real treat.

Photo by Erik Mclean on Pexels.com
Photo by Erik Mclean on Pexels.com
Photo by Erik Mclean on Pexels.com

Visits generally were on the weekends and lasted several hours; if an inmate had visitor privileges (and those were earned), they could possibly see family or friends who’d been approved by the prison system on Friday evening, Saturday morning and/or Sunday afternoon, for example. Visitors were subject to body searches and metal detectors and not allowed to carry in much, not even key fobs and certainly no phones.  The nice thinga bout the open room was that you can easily visit with several inmates at the same time and that’s what some of us from the classes did.  Usually on Friday night or Saturday morning, we’d go to visit one of the inmates who had been in the class and be able to see several of them and catch up on their lives and share about ours. 

While I always visited as a friend and not as a minister, the inmates always asked about my ministry and the church I was serving and, for a couple of them, it eased the loneliness of not receiving visits from family.  One thing we had learned was that inmates who served their time and then were released were 5-10 more successful staying out of trouble when they got out if they had continued to have relationships that were positive.  So, we particularly focussed on being supportive of those whose families were not involved in their lives and didn’t visit or call. 

Some of us spoke to one or more of the inmates by phone as well.  They were allowed to have up to ten people they called and most looked forward to having someone to call on occasion to break up the monotony if nothing else.  I agreed to be on the phone list of one of the inmates, who is, by the way, not eligible to be released for another decade, if he lives that long.  It was safe.  For an inmate to call you required a LOT of paperwork and clearances and then when they called, you heard a voice say, so and so from Riverbend Prison is calling you, do you want to accept the call?   I was careful and the school and the prison were careful but I know it still made people nervous who knew me. That included, not surprisingly, my parents, who were at that time retired and who worried alot about me anyway. 

Mom and Dad were especially struggling with my being friends with inmates because neither of them had ever even  met someone who had gone to jail, not even for a DUI, and they didn’t even know anyone else who knew anyone who’d gone to jail.  It was too foreign a concept and just not acceptable. So one weekend I went to Missouri to visit them and told them I was visiting an inmate and he was allowed to call me, they were angry.  I assured them that inmates could NOT call cell phones and they only had my home phone number in Tennessee so they could not call me while I was at my parents home in Missouri.

For an inmate to call you required a LOT of paperwork and clearances and then when they called, you heard a voice say, so and so from Riverbend Prison is calling you, do you want to accept the call?  

Nevertheless, while I was there with them, while we were arguing about whether or not this was acceptable behavior on my part be friends with some guy who was sitting in a prison cell, the phone rang and my mother answered, then handed me the phone angrily.  It’s your criminal friend, she said. I took the phone trying to answer while also explaining to them that it couldn’t be him because he couldn’t call me at their house when I heard the voice on the other end say, “…an inmate from the Greene County, Missouri, jail is calling.  Do you want to accept the call?”

I realized suddenly that call was not coming from my friend in Tennessee but rather from my brother, who apparently had been arrested the night before.  And suddenly, the inmate in Tennessee – whom they were sure was dangerous and not to be trusted – was sitting on a hard metal bench next to my brother, their son, in a jail cell. And just like that, the circle of their care and compassion grew a whole lot larger.  

My own circle of care and compassion grew exponentially because of my time visiting prisons. When I was sent to another church, turned out that nearly one quarter of the folks in the church had family or friends who had served or were serving time and it helped my ministry greatly that I knew first hand what it was like for them to constantly to worry about the safety of their loved one, to struggle financially because of lost income, to struggle not to be ashamed of what another person had done, to wonder how things would be when they returned home.  

Those families were grateful when their pastor talked then about visiting the prison regularly. For the first time, their pastor was there with them when they sat in the visitation gallery on Christmas Day or Easter or celebrated with them when their son got his GED in prison, sharing hopes he could change the path he was on.   Their pastor seemed to speak the same language and was one of their people, one who at least accepted and cared about their “kind.”

All of that is what leads me to one of the most troubling aspects of this story in Matthew 15: how the disciples AND Jesus treat this woman, who is not one of them, not one of their “kind.”

We find first that Jesus refuses even to answer the woman, then denies he has anything that she could possibly want and then even likens her to a dog.  This is definitely a troubling passage.

 We may believe that Jesus was “truly human,” but usually we don’t want him to be too human. So over the years, people have tried to clean up this story. But Matthew doesn’t clean up this story.  He lets us see this encounter in all its unvarnished glory.   

The woman is a Canaanite woman – and she is NOT one of Jesus’ “people”. But he is in her part of the world –  Tyre and Sidon. This is her home.  

Nevertheless, this woman seems to know who Jesus is. She has tracked him down in order to ask him –  to beg him –  to heal her daughter who is tormented by a demon. This is a desperate woman and apparently,  comes at Jesus shouting. The disciples want nothing to do with her and want Jesus to send her packing. 

She isn’t going anywhere, though. She may not be “their kind,” but she somehow knows enough about this healer to find him and call to him in the language of the Jewish prayer: “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David.” She has come prepared to fight for her child, it seems. 

Even so, Jesus isn’t even impressed by her using the language he knows is not hers. “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel,” he tells her, and still she doesn’t give up.

 “Lord, help me,” she begs. This is where Jesus says what we really wish he hadn’t said, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” But this woman is feisty and stubborn.   Having a special needs grandchild, though, means there’s one thing I have learned about people who know their children’s lives are in danger –  they will get in your face if necessary – they do not care if you do not like it.  That’s their baby and the hair on the back of their neck stands up every time someone or something threatens that child’s safety.  The life of this woman’s daughter is at stake. She does not back down at all but throws Jesus’s words right back at him: “Yes, Lord,” she says, “but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.”  

And all of a sudden, just like that, Jesus changes his tone. He says, “Woman, great is your faith!” 

Interestingly, she hasn’t made any confession of faith, though. There’s no sign she’s been converted or planning to become a follower. She simply told him what she had heard – what many in the region had heard – that there had been by that time more than one instance where thousands had been fed when they came to see this healer, this rabbi called Jesus.  “I’ve heard that there were enough crumbs to feed thousands,” she seems to be saying.  “You can’t tell me there’s not enough for me and my daughter.” 

That’s what I believe Jesus finally heard and that’s why he not only changes his mind,  but he changes his mission. “For saying that,” he says, “you may go — the demon has left your daughter.”  And just like that, the circle, the line, that defines his mission on earth is widened to include everyone.

It is disturbing to some folks to think of this episode, such harsh words coming out of Jesus, but one thing was clear that Matthew wanted his listeners to understand: in that encounter, Jesus was converted – he understood something he had not understood before – and the circle of his mission and ministry was much larger than he had realized before.  The Kingdom of God had been revealed to him in the face of the Canaanite woman. The Canaanite woman taught Jesus that she and her daughter and so many others like her deserve more than crumbs. After this encounter Jesus went on to feed those who had not yet been fed, went on to include everyone in God’s kingdom to come.

We saw here something that ought to surprise us, certainly surprised me the first time I saw it: Jesus drew a line – as surely as if he had used a stick to draw a line in the sand and said, this, what I am sent to do, is not for you.  I’ve done enough. I am tapped out. I gave at the office.  I don’t have any more energy to help anyone else, to get to know anyone else, to include anyone else in my circle.  He dismissed her and not in a kind way at all.    

IF we are pushed, we will get ugly too, though; we’ve been known to let others see our disdain for that person who does not deserve any help or who needs to go somewhere else to find it.  “WE” don’t know people who go to prison and we don’t want to….

At least not until one of them is sitting next to our child in that jail cell and suddenly our circle is a little wider than we knew.  Any time this happens, it can be frightening, and it can feel like we are out there where we don’t feel so safe any more, and we might be really unsure about how this is gonna go.

If we look again, though, really look, chances are good we will see God in that cell, sitting there with all of them, sitting next to our child and all of them will be sharing cookies.  Amen

4 responses to “Drawing the Circle Wider: Prison Ministry and Family”

  1. Nancy Bradshaw Avatar
    Nancy Bradshaw

    Jodi, sitting here on the deck of a cruise ship. My eyes are watering and not from the sun but from the eye opening beauty of this piece that you wrote which reminds me that Jesus was certainly human as well as divine and that the divine is also in me , in you and all humanity. We just need to be reminded. Thank you for doing just that. ❤️

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    1. Jodi McCullah Avatar
      Jodi McCullah

      You are a poet, dear friend. Thank you.

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  2. a. getty Avatar
    a. getty

    Amen.

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  3. Nancy Avatar
    Nancy

    Your ability to unite seemingly unrelated life experiences with a scripture and a message is your special craft, priceless. I bookmarked this weeks ago and I’m glad I came back to it. Forever faithful are we, Amen.

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