A friend with a life-long career in nursing and educating medical professionals recently said that rejoining the post-vaccine world would be akin to returning from war.

And of course everyone is returning from both the same and different war, and mostly at the same time. I’ve been thinking about that article going around on the pandemic phenomenon of “languishing,” and how there seems to be a pretty good amount of anxiety about things “returning to normal.”

It’s hard to hope again, or even to know what to hope for. It’s hard to want our “old lives” back, to gear up for all the human interaction and stimulation and overwhelm that has fallen away. Or at least has become a different kind of overwhelming.

Like always, I’ve been turning to poetry because it’s my emotional home. And there’s something helpful in Galway Kinnell’s poem, “St. Francis and the Sow” that’s been on my mind.

I’ve also been working on this little collection of jewelry pieces about hope, and yet most of the pieces are a bit dark. Then I realized it was akin to what Kinnell writes, specifically about what he calls “reteaching a thing its loveliness:”

“The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;”

I believe that we are having to reteach our hearts their loveliness, their ability to love, to hope through their exhaustion. And to be witnesses for each other as we do that. That doesn’t look beautiful or sparkly; I think it’s quiet and a bit somber, and that’s okay.

The rest of Kinnell’s poem about the sow is so wonderful:

“…as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.”

The long, perfect, loveliness of sow. St. Francis was an extraordinary witness to earthly beauty in weird places. I believe that if we can be witnesses to one another, reteaching ourselves our loveliness, we can figure out what comes next.

The Hope Collection | Wild and Holy | 5/21

I recently saw, on a “thoughtfulness and positivity” type of Facebook page, a quotation attributed to C. S. Lewis: “Do not let your happiness depend on something you may lose.” It had a gazillion “likes.” My first thought was how remarkably unhelpful such advice was; my second was that there was no way C. S. Lewis actually wrote that. In fact, he did not.

Well, he did, but only to craft a philosophical position disagreeing with it completely. He actually went further than disagreeing with it; he said that is an impossibility. Much like my gleeful hatred of typos, seeing quotations, and in this case, really meaningful quotations, taken out of context causes me angst. This stuff is important! It’s C. S. Lewis, for Pete’s sake. But really, it is important, and I’ll try to explain why.

Lewis was discussing St. Augustine, and Augustine’s devastation at the death of his friend Nebridius. In response to this suffering, Augustine comes to the conclusion that such pain is the result of loving anything but God. Hence the quotation: “Do not let your happiness depend on something you may lose. If love is to be a blessing, not a misery, it must be for the only Beloved who will never pass away” (C. S. Lewis, “The Four Loves,” p. 110).

But here is Lewis’s initial response to this way of thinking: “Of course this is excellent sense. Do not put your goods in a leaky vessel. Don’t spend too much on a house you may be turned out of. And there is no man alive who responds more naturally than I to such canny maxims. I am a safety-first creature. Of all arguments against love, none makes so strong an appeal to my nature as ‘Careful! This might lead you to suffering.’”

TL;DR He does not actually believe this.

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One of the few moments of uncut childhood anguish I can recall my kids experiencing was when one of our cats died. My son Noah was around 9 years old, and I don’t remember him caring about the cat that much. But when I told him that she’d died, he was overcome with a kind of pure, crystalized grief. It was a palpable force. With his sweet face distorted, he cried, “But I loved her!” It wasn’t about the cat. It was one of his first undiluted realizations that you will lose what you love; that your love costs. That it is simply no protection against…anything, really. It was heart-rending.

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In the discussion of Augustine, Lewis reminds us that, as Christians, “We follow One who wept over Jerusalem and at the grave of Lazarus…There is no escape along the lines St. Augustine suggests. Nor along any other lines. There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken.”

And then this: “If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell. We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to him; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it” C. S. Lewis, “The Four Loves,” pps. 110-112).

This last line is such a surrender: “So be it.” The reason, or at least one of the reasons that it’s important to get things like this thought process from Lewis right, that we have to see beyond what throw-away quotation someone posts for “likes,” is because people like C.S. Lewis teach us how to live. Their hard-won wisdom is shared so that we can have some chance of managing being human. This matters.

So does this, an excerpt from Mary Oliver’s “In Blackwater Woods:”

She is teaching us how to be human. How lucky we are to be offered such generous help with what, much of the time, can feel breathtakingly difficult. How very lucky.

Easter 2021

I used to say that I was grateful that I was drunk enough not to remember being booked at the police station on the night of my DUI. It was Good Friday, 2014. I don’t remember how I got home. I don’t remember how the first person I talked to–my divorce lawyer–found out about the accident. I only remember two things:

When I drove my car into the window of the building I hit, I saw an older Latina woman with a floor mop in her hand, and her face was frozen in fear. I felt sorry for frightening her. And I remember the voice of my friend Ann on the phone the next morning. She’d seen the story of the accident in the newspaper, and she called and said, “Leslie,” her voice containing a well of pain, shock, and compassion. Hearing her voice felt like a hand reaching into the muddy blur of humiliation and terror I’d woken up in, and it remains, to this day, the single greatest act of kindness I can recall.

My rehab counselor laughed the first time I told her that I’d driven my car through a window at a McDonalds. She laughed really hard. We both knew it wasn’t funny, but there’s a very dark humor that permeates addiction and recovery, and her laughter opened up a few molecules of space between me and the accident. Suddenly there was a tiny chink of light. That little fragment of light was enough for me to keep going.

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While I don’t remember much of the time after the accident, I do remember the day before. I remember the red wine and the Xanax I used to numb the feelings that came with knowing another woman was living in my former home, the home where my sons lived, in the kitchen where I’d cooked family dinners, in the bedroom I’d painted a warm gold. In the bed I’d slept in, and where I nursed my youngest son in the months after his birth. I felt discarded like a paper doll, with someone new slotted into the life I’d worked so hard to create.

I’d become untethered, which was ultimately to become the thing that gave me back my life, my freedom. But at first it was simply too painful to feel. So I drank, a lot and often. It’s not interesting.

People do all sorts of things to make meaning out of the disasters in their lives, and I’m no different, except I usually have a line from Kurt Vonnegut running in my head that describes most of life’s crises simply as the inevitable accidents that will invariably happen in the very busy place that is earth. Truth be told, that’s a lot closer to how I feel about life, but that doesn’t preclude making meaning out of it.

Photo credit: Kate Toth

The meaning of the accident for me will always be this: I had an experience of excruciating suffering and I was given the privilege of surviving; I was given the gift of renewal. The black eyes and bruises from the accident healed. I made reparations. I prayed to be worthy of forgiveness. I learned to live without numbing my pain, minute by minute at first, then hour by hour, then day by day.

The meaning of the accident will always be this: I learned, in my cells and my spirit, that we experience both betrayal and acceptance; both abandonment and assistance, both crucifixion and resurrection. And the crucifixion is never the end. It is never the end. We are always invited into Easter.

I don’t know of a greater gift, a more human lesson, offered in the midst of the most miraculous divinity. I truly believe that the resurrection is for all of us. Jesus didn’t leave Mary Magdalene alone in her weeping. He called her by her name and offered her reassurance. He told her that the crucifixion wasn’t the end; he blessed her with his resurrection and helped her to become new.

Today we get to celebrate this same blessing, and even if it only opens up a tiny fragment of light between us and our pain, sometimes that is enough.

Photo credit: Kate Toth (www.katetoth.com)