storytelling – Emptying The Backpack

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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Eyes to See

I lived in Japan for three and a half years. Both of my sons were born there. The whole time I lived there, I studied and practiced speaking Japanese. In fact, I had known for a year I’d be moving there so I had started trying to learn the language a full twelve months before ever stepping foot off the plane in Tokyo. My husband and I lived the entire time in an apartment building where we were the only “gaijin,” the only foreigners. In fact, we were often the first foreigners our neighbors had ever met even though there were in fact many foreigners living where we lived – in Himeji, a castle town on the inland sea. This is all to say that we spent our days immersed in Japanese; we learned quickly how to ask for what we needed or just to be able to understand what others were saying because, while most Japanese studied English in school, they learned to read it and write it but not necessarily to speak it. Teaching Japanese to speak the English language was what foreigners like us were hired to do. A common belief we encountered throughout our time there was that gaijins could not learn the Japanese language any more than they could learn to eat sashimi, nori or yakisoba. While we (and most of the gaijin we came to know there) loved the food, we still encountered regularly the declaration that we could not possibly eat, let alone enjoy, the cuisine.

Even funnier was the fact that, more than a few times, we spoke to a neighbor in Japanese, only to be told in Japanese that we were not speaking Japanese.

On a spring morning, I was part of a field trip up into the mountains to eat, of all things, roses prepared in a variety of ways, from batter-dipped and fried to jams. This was with a group of women I to whom I taught English every week for three years. I generally did not speak Japanese to them, but they’d known me long enough to have seen me converse with others who weren’t my students. Standing next to a couple of them, I could hear them talking about me in Japanese. I turned to them and said, in Japanese, “You know I can understand what you are saying, right?” I know I said it correctly because two other students snickered at their friends getting caught and the woman I had addressed turned red. Still, she turned to her confidante and said, “Good thing she can’t understand Japanese.” She could not see how anyone other than a person born Japanese and raised in Japan could possibly speak the language. This was not true for all our neighbors, but it happened, even after we lived next door to them for a couple of years, had worked alongside them, shopped in their stores, enjoyed holiday meals in their homes and gossiped together in the neighborhood’s public bath. Depending on the day, it was either humorous or annoying that a handful of the folks we interacted with regularly simply never could see it though. It went against everything they had been taught and they simply could not imagine, could not see that ever being possible.

They did not have eyes to see.

Photos by (from L to R) Noelle Otto, Omar Alnahi, Pixabay on Pexels.com

Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them.

And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. Then Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”

He did not know what to say, for they were terrified.

Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!”

Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.

As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.

Mark 9:2-9 NRSV

Jesus referred fairly often to us having eyes to see and ears to hear – meaning usually us being willing and able to see something new, a new way to see, because this life, this journey, this faith God offers us through Christ is meant to transform us, to help us to see, hear, understand and ultimately be different. This requires that we enter into that relationship ready and willing each moment to be surprised and to change how we see what is in front of us.

We are in good company if we often find that difficult to do. We simply cannot easily change what we “see.” When I was exploring being called into ministry, I was asked, “Do you see yourself preaching or serving communion?” I simply said, “No.” I had never seen a woman do any of that and could not even imagine it.

Here’s the difficult truth about life in Christ: you cannot enter into that relationship and expect to be unchanged; you cannot experience the transformation that is possible without being willing to see differently, even if that means seeing something that is surprising, or bewildering or that you do not know how to explain.

In Mark 9:2-9, we read, “He changed in front of them.” Transfigured is the word that we have become used to reading here. Transfiguration sounds more holy somehow, more theological than to say simply that he changed. But the Greek word here is where we get metamorphosis — or change.

So what happened on that mountain? Evidently it was something they couldn’t really explain. It remains hard to say what happened, except by repeating the words that we read there. He was transfigured; he was changed before them. What they were used to seeing they no longer saw; and something they had never seen before suddenly appeared to their frightened eyes. We can be sure it was confusing and we can be sure they had choices just like we do: try to forget what they just saw, try to make sense of it or simply move closer because that is where we will be transformed by the renewing of our minds.

“The Gospel of Mark tells us that Peter was so terrified by the transfiguration that he did not know what to say. The Gospel of Matthew reports that Jesus touched the disciples because they were overcome with fear at the transfiguration. And the Gospel of Luke records that the disciples were terrified after they entered the cloud along with Jesus, Moses, and Elijah. All three Gospel accounts record the transfiguration as an experience that was not shared with anyone else for quite some time.”

(Feasting on the Word, Year B, Vol. 1, loc 16361, Kindle Version.)

By the time Mark was writing these Scriptures, he had already witnessed the crucifixion and resurrection. He already knew the end of the story. When our three disciples were on that mountain, though, they did not know what to think and they were just as happy not to have to share the story.

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Mark wasn’t even on that mountain. He didn’t see what Peter James and John saw. They weren’t supposed to tell so maybe they didn’t. They certainly would not have understood it at the time and if they indeed told anyone, whomever heard it would likely think they’d been drinking strong wine.

Perhaps it would have seemed a lot less crazy AFTER Jesus had come back from the dead to see the disciples. Maybe then they would have had “eyes to see” and could have believed this story and so many others.

He had told them already though. He had told them he’d be raised from the dead. They didn’t believe it apparently.

He’s no pilot…is he?

In “Remembering the Night Two Atomic Bombs Fell—on North Carolina,” a story in National Geographic, we not only learn about a piece of seldom-told history, but also find an example of not having “eyes to see.”

Seems that sixty years ago, at the height of the Cold War, a B-52 bomber from Seymore Johnson Air Base, near Goldsboro, North Carolina, was carrying two 3.8-megaton thermonuclear atomic bombs when the plane disintegrated, killing four of the eight crew members. The plane crashed in a fiery mess, but not before jettisoning the two bombs, what the Air Force would call “Broken Arrows.” Somehow the bombs both landed without exploding or this event would be a whole lot more well-known than it is.

(All quotes from this story are from National Geographic, Bill Newcott, 1/23/21, told by eye-witnesses and Joel Dobson, author of a book on the subject (The Goldsboro Broken Arrow.) https://apple.news/AZQ4ng5GNQQ65TcanqBG4yg.)

What the people of Goldsboro did not know then was that their little air base had “quietly become one of several U.S. airfields selected for Operation Chrome Dome, a Cold War doomsday program that kept multiple B-52 bombers in the air throughout the Northern Hemisphere 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Each plane carried two atomic bombs.”

“A few weeks before, the Air Force and the plane’s builder, Boeing, had realized that a recent modification—fitting the B-52’s wings with fuel bladders—could cause the wings to tear off. Tulloch’s plane was scheduled for a re-fit to resolve the problem, but it would come too late.” The plane started rolling and tearing apart and [The pilot] knew his plane was doomed, so he hit the “bail out” alarm.”

“Of the eight airmen aboard the B-52, six sat in ejection seats. Adam Mattocks, the third pilot, was assigned a regular jump seat in the cockpit. The youngest man on board, 27-year-old Mattocks was also an Air Force rarity: an African-American jet fighter pilot, reassigned to B-52 duty as Operation Chrome Dome got into full swing. At this moment, it looked like that chance assignment would be his death warrant.”

Mattocks’ only chance was to somehow pull himself through a cockpit window after the other two pilots had ejected.

“He was a very religious man, and telling the story later, said he looked around and said, ‘Well, God, if it’s my time, so be it. But here goes.’”

“It was a surreal moment. The B-52’s forward speed was nearly zero, but the plane had not yet started falling. It was as if Mattocks and the plane were, for a moment, suspended in midair. He seized on that moment to hurl himself into the abyss, leaping as far from the B-52 as he could. He pulled his parachute ripcord. At first it didn’t deploy, perhaps because his air speed was so low. But as he began falling in earnest, the welcome sight of an air-filled canopy billowed in the night sky above him.

“Mattocks prayed, ‘Thank you, God!’”

“Then the plane exploded in midair and collapsed his chute.”

“Now Mattocks was just another piece of falling debris from the disintegrating B-52. Somehow, a stream of air slipped into the fluttering chute and it re-inflated. Mattocks was once more floating toward Earth. Looking up at that gently bobbing chute, Mattocks again whispered, ‘Thank you, God!’”

“Then he looked down. He was heading straight for the burning wreckage of the B-52.”

“Well, Lord,” he said out loud, “if this is the way it’s going to end, so be it.” Then a gust of wind, or perhaps an updraft from the flames below, nudged him to the south. Mattocks landed, unhurt, away from the main crash site.”

“After one last murmur of thanks, Mattocks headed for a nearby farmhouse and hitched a ride back to the Air Force base. Standing at the front gate in a tattered flight suit, still holding his bundled parachute in his arms, Mattocks told the guards he had just bailed from a crashing B-52.”

“Faced with a disheveled African-American man cradling a parachute and telling a cockamamie story like that,
the sentries did exactly what you might expect a pair of guards in 1961 rural North Carolina to do:
They arrested Mattocks for stealing a parachute.”

Nothing else made sense to them – they could see no other possible explanation. They did not have eyes to see.

“Of the eight airmen aboard the B-52, five ejected—one of whom didn’t survive the landing—one failed to eject, and another, in a jump seat similar to Mattocks, died in the crash. To this day, Adam Columbus Mattocks—who died in 2018—remains the only aviator to bail out of a B-52 cockpit without an ejector seat and survive.”

The guards that night could not see it though, could not see how this man could be the pilot of a US bomber.

What can WE not see? What can we not accept because we cannot explain it, cannot see it, cannot imagine it being right?

We do not do this alone. We stand together in open-mouthed wonder at the fullness of the Christ we worship; together we marvel at something we didn’t think could ever be, things we didn’t think we could ever see. The Good News then is that we don’t have to explain everything, only to follow and be willing to follow somewhere that perhaps we can’t explain and can’t understand, trusting the promise that we will have eyes to see, and we will be transformed, if we will follow.

D-Day Promises, Guilt and Forgiveness – Eighty Years Later

Because coming home is just the beginning….

In 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 about his past actions. For years, I didn’t have a clue what those might be.

I did not know what troubled James, only that he was miserable, but when the Lady Preacher came by, he focussed on how I wasn’t preaching or leading worship in a way that would help him feel like he’d “been to church.” Apparently, as I explained in that eariler post, he was convinced that IF that Lady Preacher could dish up some good old-fashioned confession, that would fix things for him, at least temporarily.

My job, as he saw it, was to offer him a chance to relieve his guilt (for at least a week) through confession and some time on that mourner’s bench. There was no mourner’s bench at Wartrace UMC by the time I was sent there as pastor, though, and, unfortunately for James, I was not on board with the kind of spiritual bloodletting he seemed to want.

Wartrace United Methodist Church circa 1850
where a split log bench wih no back was reportedly the “mourner’s bench.”

Sadly, though, James, perhaps more than anyone at Wartrace needed his Preacher to see how guilty he believed he was, to convict him and then to help him leave that guilt on there, even if he never actually graced the church with his presence. I tried a few times to reprise my sermon from my perch on a sticky metal kitchen chair on his back porch, but the sad truth was that even if James had been able to feel forgiven by God every week, even if he had felt Scriptural preaching wash over him every Sabbath morning, he was in grave danger of never being able to forgive himself.

For years, I was unaware this was what he felt he needed. I would visit him regularly but we were not speaking the same spiritual language for the longest time. Until I preached about D-Day.

Wartrace United Methodist Church,
Greenbrier, Tennessee
(Photo Property of Rev Jodi McCullah) 2023

I finally learned why James was continually unhappy with my preaching on a sticky Sunday afternoon in June when I was directed to lift some old blankets and newspapers and take a seat on a sagging recliner in the corner of the porch at James’ house, a corner too dark and hidden even to be seen before. James had decided I was to be trusted finally, not because I had finally made him feel like the worm he thought he was; rather, on that sweltering Sunday in June, his son had called right after worship let out to tell Daddy that the Preacher Lady had shared a D-Day story in her sermon.

D-Day Promises

I had told the story of Rev. Herman Yates, a retired pastor connected to the church; he and his wife had moved there a few months earlier. He had never preached at Wartrace, not even in revivals, and he and his wife were homebound, too, but Wartrace claimed him because he’d grown up in the area. He was on my list of shut-ins to visit, and he had given me permission to share his story on the first Sunday in June. Herman, a sergeant in the United States Army on D-Day sixty years before, had joined other NCO’s who strapped on flimsy orange and white vests with large crosses on them in order to lead their platoons’ landing crafts and soldiers onto the shore. Eyes and throat burning from the acrid smoke, trying to drown out the screams, they were halted time and time again by the force of nearby explosions. Herman and the other Sergeants moved methodically forward, though, careful to move slowly enough for their men to follow and, of course, he said, slowly enough to be a perfect target. When I met him, Herman was able to tell the story calmly after relating it hundreds of times from pulpits across the area. He told powerfully of how he had bargained with God that day that, should he survive, he would dedicate the rest of his life to preaching. God took him up on the deal.

For those unfamiliar with World War II, “The D-Day operation of June 6, 1944, brought together the land, air, and sea forces of the allied armies in what became known as the largest amphibious invasion in military history,” according to the Eisenhower Presidential Library. “The operation, given the codename OVERLORD, delivered five naval assault divisions to the beaches of Normandy, France. The beaches were given the code names UTAH, OMAHA, GOLD, JUNO, and SWORD. The invasion force included 7,000 ships and landing craft manned by over 195,000 naval personnel from eight allied countries. Almost 133,000 troops from the United States, the British Commonwealth, and their allies, landed on D-Day. Casualties from these countries during the landing numbered 10,300.” Combat would continue for nearly another year in Europe. (eisenhowerlibrary.gov)

Knowing what little I do about the massive undertaking that was D-Day, I have long been amazed at the instructions Herman received that morning before the terrifying landing began. “If you make it to the beach,” Herman’s orders had been to “go to the ‘big’ tree, turn right and meet up a mile down.” Herman and at least a few of his platoon somehow safely made their way onto the beach, somehow found some trees still standing on that battlefield, and somehow chose the right big tree from among many. Herman always knew how all that happened and how he had survived the rest of the war. He went on to serve churches for some forty years.

James was proud, he said that Sunday, proud I’d shared Herman’s story. For the first time since I’d arrived at Wartrace, sitting in the old recliner, I did the math and realized James was shaking because he’d been there as well. Tragically, though, James’ story was neither heroic nor admirable.

“I sent them all out there,” he said with litte introduction, “out there to die.” He paused and looked at the flickering television screen, his only constant companion for years. “One by one,” he continued, “the boats went out. We heard and we knew. We were wishing them a safe journey. We knew though. We didn’t know how many, but we knew, we knew. We were safe, right where we were.” He wasn’t in danger but he was painfully certain that his actions were killing soldiers – his own soldiers – on that beachhead as brutally as any bullet or exploding shell. After he shared his story, his voice trailed off and he mumbled to himself for a bit before I made a pitiful attempt to be helpful.

An estimated 20 percent of all combatants historically suffer from the effects of “combat trauma.”

Soldier’s Heart

nostalgia

“to be broken”

shell shock

“The affliction (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) has had many names over the centuries, demonstrating that it is a condition accompanying not just modern wars but all wars. Its cluster of symptoms was first diagnosed as ‘nostalgia’ among Swiss soldiers in 1678. German doctors at that time called the condition Heimweh, and the French called it maladie du pays; both mean homesickness. The Spanish called it estar roto, ‘to be broken.’ Civil War Americans called it soldier’s heart, irritable heart, or nostalgia. In World War I, it was called shell shock; in World War II and Korea, combat fatigue. ‘Soldier’s heart’ indicates that the heart has been changed by war. ‘Nostalgia’ and ‘homesickness’ bespeak the soldier’s anguished longing to escape from the combat zone and return home. Estar roto describes the psyche’s condition after war—broken.”
(War and the Soul: Healing our Nation’s Veterans from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, by Edward Tick, Ph.D, p. 99)

I doubt James heard anything I said that afternoon. I’d like to believe I offered him some kind of relief from his guilt but I’m pretty sure my words were wasted. I couldn’t do what he wanted, couldn’t agree with him that he should feel guilty, couldn’t acknowledge that he was indeed as guilty of killing Allied soldiers as any German bullet, bomb or soldier. I toyed with the idea of offering him one of the confessions we regularly used from the hymnal on Communion Sunday, but not one word I could think of was gonna do.

In every house of worship in the nation, veterans of wars are in the pews. Many have spent decades grappling with grief from their wartime experiences. Few of them feel like their part was heroic or admirable. Maybe they “won,” but too often, they are leary of telling us how ugly the “winning” was.

Evidently, James had been needing to visit that mourner’s bench for decades, so maybe telling Herman’s D-Day story created a space for James, as if we gave him permission to risk sharing the shame he felt. Perhaps being able finally to tell his story out loud was the confession James craved. Like too many combat veterans, though, he needed not only to share but also to not be shunned.

Years later, I would sit in a veteran’s retreat and listen to veteran after veteran tell their combat stories, usually with trepidation. So many were like the Iraq war veteran who shared his story of killing “anything that moved” from the helicoptor he piloted. That veteran believed himself to be a “monster” and was certain he should no longer be allowed in our midst. Like this combat veteran and so many others, James needed to tell his story and not have anyone, as one veteran feared, “run screaming from the room.” He needed to know I didn’t see him as a monster and that I would still visit, still speak to him, still consider him part of the flock. He had been needing to visit that mourner’s bench for decades, and telling Herman’s D-Day story gave him permission, at least in his mind, to risk telling his story out loud. Maybe Herman knew what would happen when I shared his D-Day story. God certainly did.

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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.

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.

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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The First Time I Ran Away

Always a Fashionista…gotta love the boots.

When I was five, I ran away from home. Of course I didn’t get far. My world then revolved around a quarter-acre yard in Springfield, Missouri, on a corner lot, two blocks from my elementary school. We lived a short drive away from where I was attending kindergarten at our First Baptist Church and near enough to some train tracks that I knew it was bedtime by the train whistle every night. The little three-bedroom, one bath brick house on Marlin Street had a fenced-in backyard, a sand box, a metal clothesline and a weeping willow tree, all seemingly perfect for three children under six. Its feathery leaves hung to the ground, draping around the trunk with just enough room under the canopy for a five- year-old to hide and imagine different worlds than were to be found inside the little house on Marlin.

For the longest time, I couldn’t tell you why I ran away on that particular day. I often wondered if it hadn’t been that I didn’t want to go back to kindergarten. I went on the afternoon shift, so we basically had an hour or two of ABC’s, singing, and a snack in the gymnasium of First Baptist Church before we took a nap. I already could read and write some when I got to kindergarten, so there was no struggle for me there.

There had been a memorable first day spent on the vinyl chair in our kitchen trying to learn to tie my shoes. “Little boys and girls who can’t tie their own shoes are not big enough to go to kindergarten,” I’d been told again and again. “They’ll send you right home.” I had spent the morning of my first day of kindergarten tying and untying my red plaid tennis shoes, both my mother and me praying I’d avoid the shame of the teacher calling my mother to bring her little “baby” home. We needn’t have worried. Not once did I ever have to tie my shoes while at school.

Perhaps, on that morning, I simply didn’t want another perm.

My mother struggled daily with my full head of “straight as a pencil” “dirty-brown” hair because it was constantly tangled. Every day, we’d have the same conversation about brushing the underside of my hair, that thick mat next to my neck, and every day I would stare at her as if I were hearing the laments and reprisals for the first time. My hair may have been the bane of her existence but her brushing my hair is the only physical connection with her I remember. Her brushing it angrily. Her trimming errant bangs until the top of my head was nearly visible. Her trying to make it curl. Her finally chopping the hair off rudely, at a strange angle because she was done with it, as fed up as I was with trying to tame that mane.

Mom had been introduced that summer to the “home permanent.” I’d never been to a salon even to have my hair cut. Mom cut our hair herself with her sewing scissors, black handled shears that were never sharpened or oiled, as far as I could tell, so they’d pull when she hacked away at the thick bunch she’d grab in her left hand and chop with her right hand. I remember staring into the bathroom mirror blankly. I hadn’t cared that she cut it because of how horrid it looked, I realize now. I cared because she said, as she was sweeping up the hair from the floor, “Now you can just brush it yourself.” She would no longer brush it for me. I think I would even in that moment have agreed to another permanent like the one that had failed so miserably and sent her to her sewing basket for the shears.

I can still smell a home perm a mile away….

The day before, the permanent had required a couple of hours of me seated on that sticky vinyl chair in our kitchen while she rolled strand after strand in metal-curlers, the kind with bristles meant to grab and hold the hair long enough for the chemicals to alter the makeup of your hair and teach it to curl like those golden locks on Shirley Temple If the rolling of the curlers wasn’t bad enough, the chemicals made my nose burn and my eyes water and the bristles on the curlers pricked my scalp. Then, once the solution had been applied and wiped off my neck and back, I was told to take my daily nap. Whether we slept or not, we “napped” every day so Mom could have time to herself, a practice I appreciated when I had children. Only on this day, because of the perm, I was relegated to a rug on the floor by the washer in our laundry room. I could have no pillow for my head because we didn’t want to ruin a pillow. Were we worried about ruining my head? Also, no pillow meant any attempts to rest my head caused dozens of tiny needles to prick my scalp, but sitting up and trying to read sent rivulets of stinky solution dripping down my neck and back. I would not rest well that afternoon.

Sadly, the perm did not “take.” My hair rebelled. My mother was furious, disgusted, as she yanked curler after curler off only to watch the long brown strands defiantly continue to hang as straight as pencils. She was crying. I was crying. She’d been trying to prepare me to participate in a Girls’ Auxiliary ceremony at our church where her teenage cousin would be “crowned ” a princess. The Girls’ Auxiliary was the church’s alternative to the Girl Scouts, designed to encourage girls to learn Scripture, study the lives of missionaries and participate in ministries like collecting monies for children India and China. To the program’s credit, many of us certainly were inspired by godly women like Lottie Moon. My cousin had completed the requirements for attaining the “Princess” rank and there was to be a ceremony at church. I was tasked with carrying a paper gold crown on a pillow to be placed on her head. Mom wanted me to represent the family well, to look pretty and be a shining example of the next generation of princesses.

But my shock of brown hair refused to do its part. And mom was fed up. She’d gotten the shears out just as her aunt called and offered to come over and help. Her aunt had three daughters, all teens, and somehow managed to fashion a dainty pony tail for the ceremony.

The next day, however, the shears returned and that was all she wrote. My hair would not cover my neck again that year or the next. Not until I learned to brush it myself. I could not for my part, see the point. I didn’t care about my hair being pretty, which may seem ironic, since I was teased incessantly by my father. He was annoyed that I was so attached to my white straw hat, white gloves and white wicker purse, all gifts from grandparents the year before for Easter. He thought I wanted to be “a little lady” because I carried my purse with the gloves inside it and donned my little white straw hat with a yellow ribbon nearly every day for most of that year. I didn’t participate in outdoor activities anymore with my brother or sister that year. I preferred instead to go outside in my hat and carry my purse to sit under my tree and pretend I was somewhere else. It would be years later when I’d realize why I wanted to be anywhere else.

Of course, picture day came soon after the cut.

At the time, I just remember being grateful I could pull that straw hat over my crooked bangs. That afternoon then, while mom was sweeping my hair off of the bathroom floor, and I was supposed to be on my bed for naptime, I pulled the hat down over my ears, shoved my gloves into the purse and snuck out the screen door from the laundry room, careful not to let it creak or slam shut.

I had left a note on my bed that I expected her to find, a note that simply said, “I am running away. Jodi.” Then I went outside and sat under my tree, my back against the trunk, legs stretched out towards the backside of the house, the branches drooping and fingering the ground as the breeze tried to cool the afternoon. Then I waited. I waited for her to find my note and come running frantically out of the laundry room into the carport, searching. I waited for her to scoop me up and hug me and exclaim how relieved she was that I was safe. I waited for her to carry me inside proclaiming she would never let me go, maybe even to bake cookies for me. Just for me.

I waited, and, then, worried she wouldn’t be able to see me under the tree whose branches drooped to the ground, I moved to the sandbox. And waited some more. When the heat got to me, I moved to the back door that led to the laundry room and perched on the steps, clutching my purse, waiting to be found. I’ll never know how long I waited, but eventually I got tired and gave up. Then, slowly so as to not make the screen door squeak, I peered into the laundry room at the ugly rug that still stank of permanent solution. I crept past the opening to the kitchen and found no one, so I crept to the bedroom I shared at the time with my sister. She was asleep on her bed. My brother was asleep across the hall in his bedroom. Even my mother lay sleeping on her bed; drugged by the heat and disappointed by the day.

I guess I was sure Mom must have seen the note and ignored it, so, ever the quick thinker, I crossed my name off and penciled in my sister’s name on it instead, then fell asleep. It would be years before I’d wonder why I hadn’t just crumpled the note up, why it hadn’t dawned on me that my little sister couldn’t read or write at the time. As it turned out, the note was still on my bed when I awoke from the nap, so I folded it up and tucked in into my white wicker purse where I carried it for the rest of the summer.

Shopping Cart Fiasco – Learning to Listen to Yourself

When our two adventurous boys were toddlers, their father, Mick, the bearded, brown-eyed singer I’d fallen in love with a decade before, demanded I stop being constantly worried about the survival of our off-spring.

“They’ve made it just fine so far,” he said one warm evening outside Kroger, punctuating his point by, rather roughly, I thought, depositing our two-year-old, Spencer, into the basket of a creaky shopping cart.

In my defense, I countered silently, we had thus far prevented any plaster casts or spidery-black sutures on those precious cheeks because of the diligence and quick reflexes of their mother and the fact that the two-year-old, in particular, bounced well.

The first time I’d left my husband alone with Arlo, our first-born, to play at the park, I had not realized I needed to explain to him that the rubber, wraparound baby swings were for one-year-olds like our son or that he was nowhere near big enough to sit on a sagging rubber seat meant for an older child and hold onto a chain. Our beautiful brown-eyed boy got his first bloody nose that day. My husband read my mind.

“It’s not like he broke his nose when he fell from that swing,” Mick countered while helping the now four-year-old into the cart. Arlo wrapped his arms around his bent knees and lowered those eyes onto the patches on his jeans, happy he wasn’t going to be expected to walk but pouting because his father had said no toy aisle.

I frowned at the squeaking of the wheels as we pushed the cart towards the sliding glass doors. I pointed to the two-year-old, and commanded, “Sit.” He sat.

“We know better now than to leave them alone with anyone else,” he said, both of us remembering our last visit to his parents in this now well-worn argument. His mother had suggested a fifteen minute stroll down to the dry creek for some time alone only to discover on our return to the house that Spencer had burnt the palm of his chubby little hands because no adult was paying attention.

“I wasn’t there though,” my husband continued his line of argument. “Even when I’m here with them, you worry.” He pointed out to the busy parking lot. “I see,” he said, “cars and parents and grocery carts out there. You,” he said, sweeping his arm across the parking lot like Vanna White, “you see death everywhere!”

He wasn’t exaggerating.

I did see death everywhere, especially in parking lots. We had spent the past four years in a small Japanese town where there were few cars and the biggest danger for a child was being smothered by too much attention. Back home, however, new dangers lurked everywhere.

“You just go shop. Alone,” Mick suggested. “I’ve got them and we will get home a whole lot sooner if you just pick out the apples and chicken alone. Okay?”

He abruptly parked the cart by the magazine rack. “We’ll be right here. We’ll be fine. We can be home soon if you don’t come looking every time you hear a child crying.” I slunk away under the weight of his disdain, clutching a plastic hand cart and thankfully-short grocery list scribbled on the back of an envelope. He was right. I did not need to assume every crying child was yet another example of Mick being distracted at just the wrong moment.

I first heard the clatter of metal on the tile floor as I left the cereal aisle. Someone has knocked one of those end displays, I told myself, honing in on the bone-in chicken breasts at the meat counter. I chose a shrink-wrapped package whose price sticker showed it to be family-sized, then turned towards the milk display. I wrinkled my nose as a sour smell hit me: milk had been spilled at my end of the store. I skirted the spill, and reminded myself of my goal. I had focussed and was still going to focus, I told myself, pushing the cart away from the sound of a child crying at the other end of the store. “Not all crying children are mine, not all crying children are mine,” I sang to myself to the tune of the “Wheels on the bus.” Whoever they are, they are with their mother and my boys are fine, I reassured myself.

One gallon of two percent secured, I headed to the express lane. I set the items on the grocery belt and tried not to look towards the gathering crowd near the far end of the store and the self-checkout. I smiled to myself, proud of progress, then stopped the cart abruptly, and leaned back to look around the endcap filled with M & M’s and sugar-free gum to see my husband holding our two-year old. The four-year-old had a firm grip on his father’s thigh and a store clerk was dabbing Spencer’s face with a cloth. Leaving apples, chicken, milk where I had neatly organized them, I forced myself not to run. Mick looked up and apologetically. The four-year-old did run and I scooped him up without breaking stride. I looked at the overturned cart and then at my husband in horror.

The store clerk backed up to let me assess the two-year old; he would have a bloody and swollen lip but no teeth damaged, no need for stitches and neither had broken any bones, it appeared. A miracle.

“I was looking at the magazines,” Mick explained. “Arlo must have reached over for the children’s books and made the cart fall over. They’re okay, see?” Mick turned Spencer’s chubby, snotty cheeks towards me.

I set Arlo down, put the crying child on my right hip and sighed as he wiped his nose on my shirt. Arlo grabbed onto my left hand, then looked back at his father as we started for the door. Mick took the bags of groceries from the manager who apparently had followed me from the 10 Items or Less checkout. “Did you pay…?” Mick’s voice trailed off behind me and I heard the manager encourage him to take the bags and go, please.

I kept walking.

“Never.” I said, without breaking stride, not really caring if anyone heard me.

“Never tell me again how to be a mother.”

D-Day Promises, Guilt and Forgiveness

Because coming home is just the beginning….

For years, I was unaware this was what he felt he needed. I would visit him regularly but we were not speaking the same spiritual language for the longest time. Until I preached about D-Day.

D-Day Promises

An estimated 20 percent of all combatants historically suffer from the effects of “combat trauma.”

Soldier’s Heart

nostalgia

“to be broken”

shell shock

“The affliction (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) has had many names over the centuries, demonstrating that it is a condition accompanying not just modern wars but all wars. Its cluster of symptoms was first diagnosed as ‘nostalgia’ among Swiss soldiers in 1678. German doctors at that time called the condition Heimweh, and the French called it maladie du pays; both mean homesickness. The Spanish called it estar roto, ‘to be broken.’ Civil War Americans called it soldier’s heart, irritable heart, or nostalgia. In World War I, it was called shell shock; in World War II and Korea, combat fatigue. ‘Soldier’s heart’ indicates that the heart has been changed by war. ‘Nostalgia’ and ‘homesickness’ bespeak the soldier’s anguished longing to escape from the combat zone and return home. Estar roto describes the psyche’s condition after war—broken.”
(War and the Soul: Healing our Nation’s Veterans from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, by Edward Tick, Ph.D, p. 99)

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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.

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.

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”

Nancy Bradshaw

April 17, 2023

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
  
  April 17, 2023
  
  You are a poet, dear friend. Thank you.
  
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a. getty

April 19, 2023

Amen.

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Nancy

May 7, 2023

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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Boots in the Trunk

Some of the greatest moments in life, I believe, are when you find out you are not the only one who does “that.” You’re not the only kid in class who likes to blow bubbles in her chocolate milk or the only student who questions why you should wear a dress to school on picture day when you hate wearing dresses and no one ever sees your dress because you’re always in the back row for pictures. Once, on a phone interview for a job in Florida, I mentioned that most of my friends “up here in the north” seemed to believe that living in colder climates builds character and people who want to live in warmer places are just lazy. The employer simply said, “Come on down; you’ll find plenty of hardworking folks here; they just happen to like burying their toes in the warm sand.” I remember thinking, “I’ve found my people.”

One of my most affirming moments occurred a few years ago while watching a movie that was set in southern California. A woman was sitting in heavy Los Angeles traffic on her way to work when the road began to shake and seemed to begin rolling. Her first response, once all the motion ceased, was to pop open her trunk and change from her fashionable black pumps into a pair of hiking boots. She evidently kept in her trunk for just such an emergency, or at least the character did. She must have known she’d likely have to walk through streets filled with debris, and the boots were just one of the survival tactics she’d either learned firsthand or been taught. She was prepared.

I remember nothing else now about the movie except that I wondered if she also kept some water and maybe a first aid kit and snacks in her trunk. What I loved was that she wasn’t some hiker out on the Appalachian Trail for weeks; the character must have been created by someone familiar with earthquakes who understood that we never know when or where we’ll need to run for our lives. It would be several years later before I would learn that boots in the trunk was a common response for survivors of trauma and abuse. I don’t know if the woman in the movie was supposed to have grown up with a scoutmaster for a father, or if she was a trauma survivor, but she embraced the boots in the trunk. She didn’t think it was weird.

Boots in the trunk, a “go” bag by the bed…

I was a teen when I realized not everyone slept with a “go bag” next to the bed in case a speedy escape became necessary in the middle of the night. After five decades of being teased by others for it, though, I was especially grateful to finally learn that lots of other trauma survivors sleep with shoes under the bed, a wallet or purse with meds, money and that handy Swiss Army knife by the bed, so that in an emergency, they do not waste precious survival and escape time locating footwear or a flashlight. Finally, I could stop being embarrassed that I preferred to sleep in something I knew I could wear outdoors in case of a fire or an earthquake or tornado. I could stop hiding the fact that I think about not wanting to have to run into the dark barefoot and thus be even more vulnerable in a crisis. My “go bag” has been a reasonable and healthy response to the lessons of my childhood where I was taught to be afraid of the dark and it is also a reflection of a strong instinct to survive. Instead of being embarrassed that I startled so easily, I became proud of my Swiss Army knife and I became grateful for those survival instincts. Plenty of children do not get out.

Escape Artists

I know some people who were abused or whose childhood was traumatic seek vengeance and long to hurt the one hurting them, and even hurt others in an attempt to ease their own pain, but my instinct has always been to escape. When my siblings and I were young, they seemed unaware that following the rules meant escaping the belt or the hair brush. As we grew older and taller, I knew to stay well away from my parents’ and even my siblings’ arguments because they so easily slid into the violent responses we’d seen modeled. I mostly escaped broken bones and stitches by escaping as a child and teen. Later, I applied the same tactics to job losses and failures and broken relationships because I knew when to escape, and how to – most of the time – make an exit before the explosions.

Because I could escape, none of their crazy dust landed on me. I know without a doubt that is one reason I survived and got this far. Too many children who grew up like we did never get very far from the crazy, never get too many steps out the door. Maybe that is because they had not managed to stay arm’s lengths away as children and teens; maybe their scars left them less equipped to walk away when they were old enough; maybe their backpacks were just too heavy to carry another step.

Sadly, few if any adults were able back then to recognize this behavior as a survival technique and, thus, necessary. I once attended a junior high church retreat. Our parents sent us away to every camp and retreat that was offered. My brother and sister hated those camps. In contrast, I eagerly grabbed a bag and hopped into whatever car was taking us away from whatever house we were living in at the time. At that particular junior high retreat, though, the girls’ leader accused me of being like a “wolf.” Because I was being quiet, she accused me of preparing to “pounce, to attack,” when the opportunity arrived. I’m really not sure what kind of attack she thought I was planning. I remember just staring at her while she accused me of cooperating with some kind of evil. She was only half wrong, though, which meant, of course, that she was half right. I wasn’t preparing to pounce, though; I was preparing to escape, trying to figure out when that might be necessary. Sadly, it felt like escape was too often necessary and, after a while, became a way of life.

I wasn’t preparing to pounce, though; I was preparing to escape. Sadly, it felt like escape was too often necessary and, after a while, became a way of life. Photo, 1964.

A counselor once asked me how I had survived the turmoil, upheaval, illnesses and chaos of my home. Since I’d already told her about how often I had simply walked away, I was confused. I know now she wanted me to relate to her how I knew when to get the hell away from my mom or dad or brother or sister or myriad boyfriends. The fact is, in the beginning, I became a girl scout. Well, actually a boy scout. Okay, both. Being a “girl scout” meant being good. Being good meant usually no one noticed me and, if I followed the rules, usually no one would hit me. I would certainly never give them a reason to hit me.

Being a “boy scout” meant being prepared. Since we had moved so many times before I was sixteen, it wasn’t like we didn’t have practice packing. I kept my bag and shoes by the bed because they kept me feeling like I had some power to escape if I needed. I knew when to leave because I was what counselors called “hypervigilant.” I watched folks around me like a hawk. That was what concerned the youth leader at the junior high retreat; she did not recognize the behavior as a survival tactic developed over time in response to threats; it was somehow easier for her to imagine a teen as evil than to consider one of the parents in the church might be a predator, I guess.

Live Like a Refugee

The more I worked to find healing over the years after I finally escaped my family home, the more I found like-minded souls who also seemed to move about more than others. My first husband and I were both nomads when we met. “You Don’t Have to Live Like a Refugee” by Tom Petty was the soundtrack of both of our lives at the time. We had both been traveling quite a bit when we separately landed in a writing class and met; even nomads and escape artists settle down for the odd semester. By then, we’d both traveled all over the US and overseas and had both served in the military. We decided to settle down together, to create an alliance, to have each others’ backs; we might have imagined at the time that we’d be more settled, but we found then there were some things about being nomads we still liked and so we promptly moved to California, then to Japan, then to Tennessee, anywhere but where we grew up. So much for no longer being refugees.

Photos by Jodi McCullah. All rights reserved.

Changing Tactics

There came a time, however, when I no longer had the luxury of escape, of running, because our two sons meant there were others I needed to protect and escaping might mean leaving them behind and that was not going to happen. Needing to protect others complicated escape plans, for sure. We taught our boys never to climb up a play structure if they could not make it down without help, to meet up at the back gate if there was ever a fire and we would not let them sleep upstairs until they were big enough to climb out a second story window onto a porch roof and then jump down to safety. Protecting them changed everything. I’d explain it by talking about driving over the huge bridges spanning the Ohio and Missississippi Rivers. We had to drive over both of them at the confluence of the rivers near Cairo, Illinois, every time we went north. Driving over those bridges was frightening enough for me personally but became hellish when I had children and their safety became most important. For myself, to calm my fears as I drove into the monstrous structures crossing those wide and churning rivers, I had developed a bridge survival plan in case the car somehow went into the water: wait for the car to fill up, open the window to swim up and then try to float on the current until I could get to land. With two small children, however, that plan would no longer work. Suddenly, I would need to take two precious little persons with me through that drill and, well, there was not a good time to try to talk to them about that plan and besides, it would most assuredly traumatize them so I prayed extra hard instead that the bridge engineers had done their jobs well and other drivers would keep their distances as we crossed over those bridges.

I still slept with my shoes next to the bed AND I taught my boys as much as possible about safety, but the reality was that escape to survive was no longer always an option. I often still “see death everywhere” as my ex-husband used to say, meaning I am one of those safety-conscious folks that drive some folks crazy. Loving children has helped me learn to stay connected rather than seek escape, though, to find trustworthy people, to ask for help and to allow trustworthy others to help me. Over the years there were a number of folks who definitely helped me when I needed it; reminding myself of their support and encouragement has helped me trust that I can find others and allow them to help, too, if necessary. I needed to learn to choose relationships with trustworthy people and to develop alliances, to stop just trying to survive. I needed to open myself to the possibility that there might be more.

Getting older helped: I started wearing more sensible shoes all the time so boots in the car weren’t major safety concerns anymore!

Why, though?

Watching my responses over the years, though, I know, has perhaps caused some folks who know me to think I’m just paranoid or hypersensitive for no good reason. This blog is, in part, an attempt to explain that behavior to those who do not understand. Writing about what has been in that backpack for so long is also for my tribe, for all those other folks who also were awakened in the night by a touch that taught us to be afraid of touch. We share this because we know “just in case” has come before.

I still struggle to say I am proud of all of this. I wish we were still innocents. I wish we did not know what we know. I wish we had different stories to tell. The things we feared, though, were real for us and we did not have the luxury of going through a day without being hypervigilant, without knowing firsthand that sometimes the unthinkable does happen. Sometimes, for some people, the darkness IS dangerous. To survive then, sometimes you do what you gotta do for the time being and, once it’s safer, you can work on growing, healing and learning other ways to take care of yourself. I am grateful, then, for all of you with boots in your car and a pack slung over your shoulder. Maybe it wasn’t always pretty, but we made it.

Because we were prepared, and we escaped, we can live into new possibilities; we can embrace the reality that the frightening place we came from is not all there is out there. (Photo by Jodi McCullah, 2023. All rights reserved.)

As I was writing this, I wondered why the photo below spoke to me and now I realize it’s because what’s around that corner in Venice promises to be beautful and hopeful and exciting. I celebrate all those survival skills, including learning over time that we will find what we need, AND learning to let ourselves ask for and accept help. Good news: there ARE others who do “that.” We are not alone and there are those who love us anyway. Embrace your backpack then or your boots until you don’t need them, then thank them for getting you this far and go see what’s around that next corner! You’ve got this!

Category: storytelling

Just Gotta Write

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Boots in the Trunk

Boots in the trunk, a “go” bag by the bed…

Escape Artists

Live Like a Refugee

Changing Tactics

Why, though?

Leave me a comment: what was in your survival kit?

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