memoir – Page 3 – Emptying The Backpack

Wrestling with God

People often assume that, because I am a pastor, my relationship with God must be bucolic, nurturing, all green pastures and peaceful waters. They are surprised then when I tell them that my relationship with God, in fact, more closely mirrors the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel. (See Genesis 32, or better, go back and read the whole story of this trickster who became the father of the 12 tribes of Israel.)

I refer them to this story because while I would love to say God and I are just great buddies and I, like Mary, sister of Martha, spend my days sitting at God’s feet listening and learning, the reality is much more that I wrestle with God and often, the wrestling feels like a life and death struggle.

Rapids

About five years ago, my two sons and I went kayaking on the Harpeth River on a rainy 4th of July. We were the last group of people allowed to get in the water because the rain had been coming down so long that the river was starting to rise. Those who ran the kayaking and canoeing outfitters were concerned and so they stopped letting other people get in the water. It was still manageable when we got in, and all three of us have a lot of experience with canoeing and kayaking, so we felt quite comfortable–even if we were soaking wet.

Almost immediately though, really before we could even get settled in our kayaks, we had to make a quick decision at a split in the water – a stretch of rapids either way but we had no time to think and no time to weigh the two and find the safest. My youngest son went right and my oldest and I went left. Within seconds, I watched in horror as my oldest son was sucked underneath a pile of brush that had collected on the side and then, almost as quickly, only had time enough to take a breath before I also got sucked under the pile of brush myself.

I remember being clear I did not want to be carried any further under that brush pile, because, well, there did not appear to be a way out on the other side. I, of course, immediately lost my paddle and kayak and just focussed on not being pulled any further under. I did know which way was up and managed to grab onto a branch, but I was not strong enough to pull myself to the surface. I remember that I kept holding onto the branch and was especially grateful when I realized it was living and attached to the riverbank. I could not find any way, though, to push myself up and get my head out of the water. I remember kicking and kicking and holding on until quite suddenly I found a foothold and pushed up until my head came out of the water and I felt a hand grabbing mine.

I was not underwater for a long time, but the time that I was underwater went by slowly while I was struggling, and I remember two thoughts as I was kicking and searching for a foothold and trying to push myself up: the first thing that I was thinking was I didn’t know where my oldest son was and I was really scared he was underneath the brush; and the second thing I was thinking was honestly that I might not get out of this alive. I was under water and struggling long enough to have time to think I might not make it.

As it turns out, I was not the only one thinking that, though, because I found out a bit later that my youngest son — the outdoorsman and most experienced of the three of us, the one who has survived several brushes with death that mom doesn’t want to know about, that son apparently had enough time to stop trying to retrieve my paddles, to yell to his brother, “Mom is not coming back up” and to start sprinting for where he’d seen me go under.

Apparently, though, his brother, who I’m so grateful as able to quickly surface, was already trying to reach me and when I finally found a submerged log with my foot and was able to push up and reach up, that son grabbed my hand and pulled me on up and out. And that all happened in five minutes or less of putting our kayaks into the water! My heart still races just thinking about it!

Praying, Not Praying….

Now you might hope that, in the midst of chaos and a frightening situation, that a preacher would be praying, right!? And, I’d really like to say that I was praying but I don’t remember that. I do remember being calm, even when I thought I might not make it. I remember being focused and I remember doing what I knew to do, focus on finding a foothold to push myself out of the rushing water. I remember being fully present in each moment. I remember pushing again and again and I remember hoping it would work. I remember that I kept trying and that I kept reaching. And when I felt that hand grab mine, when my sons pulled me out of the water, absolutely soaking wet, I remember taking a really deep breath.

Afterwards, once I felt the relief of seeing both boys safe and sound, I think I felt worse for my oldest son who — Poor guy — had just given up cigarettes a few weeks earlier. He looked like he needed one. As for my younger son, well, he got a taste of what Mom had felt so many times with him and his brushes with danger and death. I remember registering that it must have been serious because it was highly unusual for him to be worried but he was so worried, he ran!

I remember being grateful that my oldest son was above the surface trying to get to me the whole time and grateful to see his face when he pulled me out. Quietly, with little conversation at first, we set about trying to retrieve our paddles and whatever gear we had. Much was washed down the river and gone. We found what we could see in the rain, secured that gear to the kayaks and got back on the water because, as drenched and drained as we might have felt, there was no going back up the river – there was only one way home.

I remember we floated in silence for a bit until my youngest son turned to me and asked, “Don’t you just feel so alive right now, Mom?”

Well, yes.

And No.

I was far more exhausted than I normally would have been, considering we really had only been on the water for a few minutes. But I also could say I could not remember many times in my life when I have felt that present, and that much in the moment, and that keenly aware of and focussed on what I needed to be doing.

I felt quite shaken, I told him, but grateful though I was very clear that it never needed to happen again!!

All that is to say, I felt like most people do in a terrifying situation. While scary movies are quite popular with many of us, most of us do not actually like being in danger. In fact, we have a high need to control that kind of chaos; we certainly do not like it. As far as most of us are concerned, it is God’s job to make the chaos stop and God’s job to restore safety and help us feel comfortable again.

Wrestling is Biblical, Turns Out.

In Gospel Medicine, Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor says, we think that’s how we can tell when God is present–when the danger has been avoided. When your heart stops pounding and you can breathe normally again? That’s when God is present, right? We believe we know that God is there when we’re not afraid anymore. “It is an appealing idea,” says Taylor, “but unfortunately the Bible will not back it up. As much as we’d like to think God is in the ‘keeping us from danger and chaos’ business,” in fact, she says, “much of God’s best work takes place in total chaos, while we are scared half out of our wits.” (Taylor, Rev. Barbara Brown, Gospel Medicine, 107-8.) Great.

In the Genesis saga where Jacob is wrestling with an angel, Jacob certainly did not want to be fighting for his life. But this story is where he does exactly that. When we find Jacob there, it is twenty years after Jacob left his family because he cheated his older brother, and lied to his father, and took his older brother’s birthright, inheritance, AND blessing and then had to flee.

“Likely he only knows which end is up because he can feel the dirt on his back or the gravel in his face as they roll and tumble and cling to one another all night, apparently evenly matched. We know he felt afraid for his life, thought he was likely going to die, in fact, which means he was keenly present and aware of every moment and every move because the next move, the next moment, the wrong move, could mean the end of his life on this earth.” (Taylor, Ibid. )

Jacob refuses to let go of the angel until the angel gives him a blessing and the angel changes his name to Israel, which, of course, will be hugely important, but also leaves Jacob wounded, limping for the rest of his life, which means always vulnerable in that day and time.

This story is perhaps my favorite story in the Bible. In fact, when folks ask me to explain my relationship with God, I tell them this story because while I would love to say God and I are just buddies and I, like Mary sister of Martha, spend my days sitting at God’s feet listening and learning, the reality is much more that I wrestle with God. Sometimes I question God, sometimes I get angry with God, sometimes I am grateful and feel blessed. But it is not usually a serene and peaceful relationship. I also love this story because it describes so well how so many of us experience life: crises, and relationship troubles, and illnesses, and accidents, seem to pounce on us when we are not looking. and all we can do is hold on tightly and try to come up for air when we can.

Faith, For Me, is Holding On, Ever Hoping.

Rachel Naomi Remen, an oncologist and author who struggled all of her life with her own Crohn’s Disease, and who has endured lasting, debilitating pain and multiple surgeries, talks about Jacob and striving with God in her book, My Grandfather’s Blessings. First, because she was a child when her grandfather told her this story, she says she was puzzled and wondered how anyone could confuse an angel with an enemy. Her grandfather pointed out, though, that the wrestling was not the important part of the story. The important part, he told her, is that everything has a blessing for us, and we can receive blessings even–and perhaps especially–in the times when we are clear we are not in control. Our task is to keep striving as best we can to understand, keep striving to learn, and maybe even, like Jacob, keep negotiating but we keep holding on.

Rachel Remen says, “How tempting to let the enemy go and flee. To put the struggle behind you as quickly as possible and get on with your life. In fact, though, it turns out that very often the struggle IS your real life and all the time we spend quietly, serenely, calmly is just the quiet before the storm that is our life. Perhaps,” says Remen, “the wisdom lies in engaging the life you have been given as fully and as courageously as possible and not letting go until you find the unknown blessing that is in everything.” (Remen, Dr. Rachel Naomi, My Grandfather’s Blessings, 27. )

This kind of wrestling is not pretty, though. Most of us shy away from this kind of struggle because it is so embarrassing to be so clearly overwhelmed by our lives. I am sorry to say I have struggled a great deal in my life, sometimes because of tragedy or trauma and sadly, just as often because I have allowed trauma to set the rules and too often closed myself off from healing or relationships.

When I do struggle, and it seems that I do nearly every time there’s a change I need to make, I have found it necessary to forget about how I look or how I present to others, as much about whether or not my eyes are swollen and red as about whether what I say makes sense to someone else. I have learned not to expect myself to sound rational or even be able to defend what I am feeling or thinking, only to hold on and not worry about frogs in my pockets or mud on my forehead or if anyone else understands right now. Every attempt, every time I push or grasp for words to explain what feels life-giving and what doesn’t, every move is more proof I am alive and I do care and still hope and, God willing, will reap a blessing from the effort.

As my sons and I floated down the river that day, I’d love to say I felt somehow triumphant, that I had gleaned some grand lesson the world would want to hear, that God had spoken to me and sent me back the land of the living to share some great wisdom that would make all of our lives better or more meaningful or help us cure cancer.

Instead, I was drenched, defeated and deflated but that didn’t matter because I was just grateful to be near enough my boys to touch them, to call to them, and to hear them call back to me for another day.

We Do All Have A Story

Part of unpacking the backpack I’ve carried now for more than six decades is recognizing that there are so many stories. Yours. Theirs. Ours. Everyone’s. We all do have a story and much of my life has been about sharing stories. One of my favorite jobs revolved around being assigned to interview a wide variety of people whose stories I was then tasked with telling.

This image is from a card created to benefit Room In The Inn in Nashville (roomintheinn.org.)

(So many of my favorite books, by the way, have been short story compilations or books about stories. As I unpack this backpack, the books I’ve held onto, often referred to and found worth rereading will be topics of entries. Below is one of my long time favorites. Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., shares wonderful stories and I have quoted her more than a few times in sermons.)

My Grandfather’s Blessings: Stories of Strength, Refuge, and Belonging, by Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., (Riverhead Books, New York, 2000) has long been a favorite, in part because she not only tells wonderful stories, but she also encourages and celebrates us all recognizing our blessings in hearing one another’s stories and in telling our own.
As you can see, this copy has been well-used.

I love stories.

Stories about trying to grow disease-free strands of chestnut trees, trees that have their own stories, by the way! (They used to grow in the south to be massive but now can only manage to sprout bushes. Grow, little trees, grow!)

Stories about small town festivals and cowbirds and killdeer who protect their young by pretending to be injured to draw predators away from nests.

Stories about how you refused to let anyone else tell you how to live your life, stories about first loves, stories about sitting with dying.

As, I unpack my backpack here, I’ll tell those and others, stories about travel to Japanese temples in caves or about stumbling over statues intentionally left lying in the middle of bridges in Rome.

Stories about Lazarus stumbling out of the tomb and how that image helped us find ways to help our friends and neighbors who have stumbled as they tried to come back from combat and wars.

Songwriters and poets are some my favorite storytellers, often as much for what they leave out and let us fill in ourselves. The embroidery below I did years ago and, if you’re a John Prine fan, you know that is a line from one of his songs, “Everybody,” where he sings that: “Everybody needs somebody that they can talk to, someone to open up their ears and let that trouble through….”

Some stories are more compelling but none is more important than another, only more important to me or you and only in a certain time and place. All of our stories need to and deserve to be told. Even the ones we regret. To be sure, some are more fun to tell than other and some are the kind of story that, while you’re in the midst of the story itself, you know this is gonna be epic…if we survive.

One benefit of hearing and then telling your stories is how your stories spur me to remember and tell my own, whether they were stories about nearly drowning or stories about all the mythology around pregnancies (and the tendency people have to warn you or tell you about the worse-case scenario when they see you sporting a swelling belly) or some of my earliest stories, which were about running away from home or trying to make sense of chaos using a child’s vocabulary and point of view.

Stories. We all have them, we all need to hear them and we all need to tell them. I’ve got lots so this is just the beginning. Might want to sit down. This could take a while. You go first.

Lessons From the Ocean

Full disclaimer: I love the ocean. I will likely write about it often.

I breathe better when I am near the ocean. I flourish when I am warm and can bury my toes in the sand. I used to feel guilty about wanting to be at the ocean all of the time until I finally found others like me. People used to call me lazy when I talked about how I was looking to find work near the ocean, near the beach, near the waves and the driftwood, as if only being willing to brave the cold and wind and aches and stiffness of winter made you a responsible and mature adult.

Suffice it to say, the ocean will be one of the topics I will write about here. Perhaps some of my unpacking thoughts will speak to you.

If you have ever tried to body surf, or even if you have ever been knocked down by a wave, you know how powerful waves can be. I have sported my fair share of bruises earned when a wave has knocked me down. Some waves are so powerful that they will send you tumbling back onto the beach, rolling and rolling head over heels until you lose momentum, as if you were Jonah spit back up onto the beach by the whale, as if the ocean were done with you and wanted you out.

Grief can bowl us over as if it were a wave. Once it initially recedes, we may struggle to stand again even as the water, powerful and relentless, rushes back out into the vastness of the ocean.

Perhaps you’ve experienced this, trying to stand again while the sand and shells and rocks and debris under your feet sinks and sucks your feet into the muck.

Strange to anticipate grief but smaller instances of grief are warnings of the power of grief to come. Nothing to do but to attend to the moment and focus on the feel often the knees- sin and hands-sinking in the shifting ground under me.

Too often I cannot recover enough balance and find a sure enough of a foothold to raise myself above the next wave that often quite rudely washes over me and requires me again to seek some sure footing. What I have found, though, is that, too often the only answer is to sit in the sand and swirling waters and take a breath as the grief washes over me.

Try not to gulp, I warned my granddaughter, when she was learning to body surf. Keep your mouth closed; If you scream at the wrong moment, you will know what anchovies taste like.

When the grief and swells are too strong to fight, they recommend you curl up in ball and not fight the current of a rip tide. If you are in shallow enough water, you may find the surf still to strong to allow you to stand. In that case, just sit. After a moment, there’ll be a lull in the swells and a chance to right yourself and get onto-your knees again, then your feet.

When I was a child, my brother, my sister and I were introduced rudely to the tyranny of waves. Beautiful and calming from a distance, exciting and great fun when you know how to ride them, the swells of the ocean came as a rude surprise to my siblings and I. Aged five, six and seven, dressed in new outfits for travel overseas, my father directed us to chase that wave back into the ocean for a photo op with his brand new SLR. We’ll never know if he was aware of what would happen; he’d never admit it but the youngest of us didn’t realize soon enough and the resulting photo captured her shock of the cold and surprise at the wet as a wave swept over her. To this day I don’t remember who grabbed her to keep her from falling fully into the wave. True to our family, though, dynamics, she’s never discussed the moment, never indicated even if she remembered it, never revealed whether or not it was traumatic or simply a not so pleasant memory.

I certainly remember the look on her face, the question, “Why did you let this happen?”

“Why didn’t you warn me?”

Most days, memories of my childhood are simply like the gentle wake of the outgoing tide; they lap at my toes and remind me of how far I have been blessed to come from those days.

Most days, I recognize that the memories, after years of work, are harmless, never gone but not threatening to knock me down and no longer able to sweep me out into the deep.

Most days, the memories are not so powerful, now, though, as is often the case with trauma victim, on occasion the wave that washes over is certainly chilling and a shock to the system.

As an adult, I camped one weekend on a beach in Big Sur California, with a friend, a fellow soldier, a Captain in the unit whose members wore a green beret. Overlook for this anecdote the fact that we were not allowed to date, a Private First Class (enlisted) and a Captain. He was, for me, I realize now, a protector, safe and able to navigate dangers that still frightened me. He was also I realize as I write this, a warrior who decided to become his own protector first. I am sad to say I will probably never know now what trauma drove that for him. We might have been able to help one another more consciously had we been able to share. As it was, we were simply a refuge for one another for a time.

After a bit of a hike, we discovered, on that trip decades ago, a driftwood shelter on the beach, perfect for two of us to sleep inside and so we took shelter during a gentle rain and slept peacefully. Until morning. Slightly before dawn, I awoke to his arm suddenly over me, directing me not to move, holding a bundle of clothes over my head (I know now that was to keep them dry.) I am, to this day, amazed at the training that enables that kind of quick thinking, by the way. As the chilly wave receded, he jumped up, scrambling out of the shelter and further up the beach before the next wave overtook the little shelter, me his willing shadow.

Aware of the chill that would quickly set in, he was, true to form, able to build a warming fire for us and dressed me in the (oversized for me) warm sweater he’d managed to grab as wave had first washed over us.

These two events share more than the cold waters of the Pacific Ocean off of northern California. (That first experience occurred on the San Francisco Bay).

Together for me, these experiences mark a formal progression to an awareness of choices, choices in how to live, how to parent, how to love, choices it has not seemed that either of my parents ever reached themselves.

My father had been a boy scout and became a boy scout leader but never shared any of what he’d learned about safety, precautions or survival. His guiding principle seemed to come from early poverty, both poverty of resources and poverty of love. My mother once declared that no one ever taught her how to take care of herself so her children could just figure that out themselves, too.

I am grateful I realized I did have choices.

For the longest time, I thought my only choices were to be like one or the other parent. I am grateful to this day for a doctor who said simply, there is more for you than the life you live at home. You will have other choices, entirely different choices, she said. Because of her simple statement, I have lived learning to expect and then accept those choices that could help me survive and even thrive in spite of the waves that have periodically threatened to wash over me in life.

The choices I have discovered have been for my own “upbringing.” I am the first to acknowledge that I have been slow to mature emotionally, but that was not from lack of effort. My choices have also been about how to parent i.e., whether to repeat my parents pain and pass it on, as they did, or try, albeit likely still lacking, to teach my children at least something about self-care and caring for others.

Sometimes the self-care is just about sitting still while the sand and shells and swirling waves threaten to pull you down more and certainly do not allow you to get to your feet right away. Sometimes the self-care is to admit you cannot yet stand. Sometimes the self-care becomes caring for others as you teach them how to sit still in the grief and the waves and even sit still with them, teaching them to power of sharing the moment and the powerful self-care to be found in caring for one another.