Last weekend we visited Emily Dickinson's house in Amherst, Massachusetts. It is beautiful and the staff is knowledgeable. My favorite detail was the pine cone placed on each chair where visitors may not sit. The Dickinson poem after the photos seems appropriate since the table where Hope is dining will only seat one.
Welcome to July's Spiritual Journey Thursday. Please leave your links in the comments and I will round them up. We skipped the first Thursday in July because it was a holiday, but also because I had forgotten I had even signed up to host this month. It was on my calendar, but I hadn't looked at it. I'm in the part of the summer when I don't know what day it is. Also, we are traveling (we were in seven states yesterday), and completely out of our routine. I have a reminder on my phone to take my daily medications, but it's on the Uganda time zone (EAT: East African Time), so although it is set for 5:30 AM at home, here it appears at either 9:30 or 10:30 PM, depending on whether we're in Eastern time zone or Central. Oh well. I see it in the morning, swallow my pills, and call it good.
All of this fits well with the theme I chose for this month: I don't know. That is the theme, not my statement about it. I don't know. The older I get, and the longer I walk on this path of faith and trust, the fewer things I am 100% sure about. I used to have answers for many more questions than I do now. While I knew I didn't understand everything that happened to me, I figured that someday I would. I'm not so convinced of that any more. My life isn't a novel where there I can be guaranteed a satisfying dénouement; the story could be told in many different ways, but to make it a clear narrative, humanly speaking, you'd have to leave out large quantities of inexplicable junk. And I'm often left mystified about what to do next. Every moment is brand new, and all my years of experience making tough decisions and figuring out the upcoming path don't necessarily help with today's dilemmas.
Here's a quote from Emily P. Freeman's latest book. (Yes, I've been quoting from it a lot lately. I really recommend it. It's called How to Walk into a Room and you can read more about it here.) Emily talks about different kinds of fires in chapter 5, and asks: "What kind of fire is this anyway? Is God standing by, ever the expert, bearing witness to the refining, making space for new, good growth in this planned, controlled burn? Or is this a fire that has caught God by surprise? Is this a fire of destruction, taking the waste and the wellness alike? Sometimes our questions don't reflect facts, reason, logic, or good theology. Sometimes our questions reveal our lack of faith, our fear, or our confusion. Ask them anyway. God has what it takes to sort it out."
Below I've posted a video of an a cappella group singing the song "I Know Whom I Have Believed." Each verse is a list of all the things the songwriter doesn't know, but then each ends with a Bible verse, 2 Timothy 1:12: "I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I've committed unto Him against that day." My list of things I don't know would be a bit different, but I can hold on to that thing that I do know: God is still with me and can hold all my questions and help me navigate each day. Even if I never figure out any of the answers.
Back in 2010 I used the metaphor of a GPS when I wrote about dealing with family life after the earthquake in Haiti displaced us. I still think it's a good metaphor. In the borrowed car we're driving on our summer odyssey, the GPS is built in, and the car helpfully tells us where we should go next. But if we turn off the path, on purpose or by mistake, it's immediately recalculating, trying to give us a new suggestion. "Make a legal U-turn," the voice calmly counsels. And I love the little excited lilt when it says, "Turn left at the end of the road." As though the end of the road is going to bring some exciting surprises. And maybe it will. I don't know.
From Henri Nouwen's book Lifesigns: "'Do not be afraid, have no fear,' is the voice we most need to hear. This voice was heard by Zechariah when Gabriel, the angel of the Lord, appeared to him in the temple and told him that his wife, Elizabeth, would bear a son; this voice was heard by Mary when the same angel entered her house in Nazareth and announced that she would conceive, bear a child, and name him Jesus; this voice was also heard by the women who came to the tomb and saw that the stone was rolled away. 'Do not be afraid, do not be afraid, do not be afraid.' The voice uttering these words sounds all through history as the voice of God's messengers, be they angels or saints. It is the voice that announces a whole new way of being, a being in the house of love, the house of the Lord....The house of love is not simply a place in the afterlife, a place in heaven beyond this world. Jesus offers us this house right in the midst of our anxious world."
Here are links to other SJT contributors' posts:
Patricia's beautiful post shares some things she doesn't know, and the way her IDKs inform her prayers.
Denise also shares what she does about the I don't knows in a post filled with goodness.
Margaret didn't know, but then she acted anyway. Way to go, Margaret!
Leigh Annhas written aboutwisdom, as she's been studying the Biblical book of Proverbs."Chapter 8 taught me that everywhere I look, wisdom is calling out," she writes. "But what keeps me from not seeing it or keeps me in the I don't know? Am I taking the time to search for wisdom or to notice it. Sometimes, it's easier to just say, 'I don't know.'"
Ramona wrote about the ultimate I don't know, death. Beautiful, Ramona!
Bobreminds us that it's OK not to know. Because God knows.
Carol tells us about the uncertainties she's been facing lately. So many difficulties, and yet Carol has found wisdom in them!
Karen has a wonderful description of her VBS experience this week!
This week my husband and I watched a funeral on Facebook Live, a funeral for a married couple, missionaries both in their very early twenties, killed in gang violence last month in Haiti. The young man used to be in a playgroup I went to with my child years ago -- but not that many years -- in Port-au-Prince; while we moms, including his, met together, our children would play and learn Bible stories. At the funeral, one of the pastors read a poem he'd written where he grieved these two, and don't we so often turn to poems, from the Bible or elsewhere, when there's an unbearable loss? So I wrote one too, not so much because it helps as because I'm not sure what else to do, except to pray for those dads, who both spoke with tears in their voices, and those moms, whose grief is so deep, and all the others who have lost these two particular young people. And to pray, too, for all the thousands and thousands and thousands of Haitians who have lost more than I can imagine, their homes and their livelihoods and their country and worst of all, the people they loved, in the last few years.
Funeral
I know the flamboyan trees were covered with red blossoms when it happened because it was May in Haiti and I know the sound of gunshots and the sounds of grief in Haiti
The sounds of grief in Missouri are not quite as loud and unrestrained as they lay to rest two young people who loved Haiti but the grief is just as real We don’t grieve as those who have no hope, they say Death didn’t win, they say And of course those things are true but you can’t help crying as you look at their wedding photos from just two years ago and as you think of the two thousand five hundred people already killed in the first three months of this year in Haiti
I know it was a beautiful day when it happened because it’s always a beautiful day in Haiti
Our topic for SJT (Spiritual Journey Thursday) for June is Looking Back, Looking Forward. On Thursday you'll be able to see the roundup of everyone's thoughts here, on Karen's blog.
This is the perfect time for me to look back and look forward, since next week we'll be finishing school for the year. This year was not Haiti-level challenging, but it did have its very difficult moments. (Of course most of those stories are confidential.) And even though we're a long way from Haiti, the Haiti struggles continue to be on our hearts and minds.
I'm planning on coming back to this same classroom next year; this will be my third year in this job, at this desk, where I sit typing now. So the looking back and forward are less dramatic and heartbreaking than some of my recent transitions. It really is a gentle shift to summer break, and then back to work in August. And for that I am extremely grateful. (Hooray for non-dramatic and non-heartbreaking!)
I've been working on getting my curriculum documents updated. That's a good way to see the big picture, the goals for the whole year, the material we cover in sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh grade. Next year I'll teach a full-blown AP French class to twelfth graders for the first time (I've had students take the exam before, and do well, but this time the whole course will be focused on getting kids ready for the exam next May.)
I recently read Emily P. Freeman's newest book, How To Walk Into a Room. Here are some words from that book as I think back and forward at the end of this school year. Back over this year, but also back over the last few years.
...there's one thing no one can take from us, one thing we will never leave behind, one thing that is not confined to any past room, current hallway, or future room -- that is the person we have become and are becoming. Hints of our next right thing can usually be found in our last right thing. I have always found this to be true. The sacred things we mark from the ending will be brought forth into our beginnings, not necessarily because of an external thing we bring with us but because of the person we have become. When things end, we come forth changed. We would do well to take some time to pay attention to these changes, to mark them, to honor them and see how they might lead us forward.
As much as I wish everything could be held, named, and either left behind or brought with us, there's a final category that might show up in endings that could keep us from experiencing closure. And that is what I call the "lost" category. It's the smoky, ungraspable, wordless, impossible to categorize absence of a thing. In every ending -- happy, sad, or indifferent -- something is lost. But because something is often also gained, that's what we are encouraged to focus on. We work hard to name the gifts and positive summaries of those gains. We are prone to want to count the blessings, to name the lessons, and to share all the ways our pain has been used for good. Maybe there's nothing necessarily wrong with that desire, but it can keep us from grieving what deserves grief. Something is always lost. And it's important to let the lost things be lost. Honor what you cannot name with space, compassion, and time.
Here's some of what I lost:
I lost Room 23, my classroom for fifteen years in Haiti. I lost that bookshelf full of the professional books I'd gradually brought, a few at a time, in my suitcase from the US. I lost the classroom library of kids' books I'd lovingly chosen. I lost my name on the door, my fingerprints on every surface. I lost the me that taught there.
Instead, I got Room A2, my classroom for two years, and counting, in Uganda. I got the Petit Nicolas and Astérix and Bill et Boule books, gathered by others, the textbooks and dictionaries I didn't select. And there are things I've added: the francophone flags coloured by last year's fifth graders, the ABC pictures I coloured and used to line the walls. A is for Avion, B is for Bateau, all the way to Z is for Zèbre. My handwriting fills the drawers, my voice echoes through the room.
I spell words in the British way now (see, in that last paragraph?), the way I learned - learnt - to do in school, but haven't done for a long time. I have two years of stories that happened here in A2, funny kid stories and some sad ones too.
But I still miss Room 23. I miss my Orangina can where I'd put a sprig of bougainvillea. I miss my clipboards and my systems, honed over years. I miss the tree outside and the Haitian birds that perched there. Most of all, I miss those voices, all those children I taught. They have all moved on too, on to high school, college, adulthood. But if I were still there in Room 23, some might have come back to visit. I might even have taught their children; that had just started to happen when we left Haiti. That room was full of my prayers, prayed with and for my students, prayed with and for my colleagues.
"It's important to let the lost things be lost," writes Emily P. Freeman. Goodbye, my lost Room 23. Does anyone remember me there? Hello, Room A2. What awaits me here, next year? What prayers are still to be prayed? Who will I be?
It's Saturday morning here in Uganda, but it's still Friday some places, so here's my Poetry Friday contribution.
If You Know, You Know
There are so many things I don’t know and I long for more explanation of the hashtag. #iykyk, they type, smugly, but I don’t get their references. The things I know are pretty much useless to anyone but me, such as the exact quality of the petrichor on Church Street in Kampala on a Saturday morning in May.
Book #27 of 2024 was The Vacationers, by Emma Straub. I thought this was entertaining.
Book #28 was The Lazy Genius Way, by Kendra Adachi. I listen to Kendra's podcast (it's one of the few podcasts where I never skip an episode). The book is the underpinning for her lazy genius mindset. Really good.
Book #29 was A Morbid Taste for Bones, by Ellis Peters. This is the first installment in the Brother Cadfael series of mysteries. Brother Cadfael is a twelfth century monk. This was pretty good, and I think I'll try at least one more in the series.
Book #30 was Small Things Like These, by Claire Keegan. This is a quick read, set in Ireland in the mid 80s around Christmastime. Although short, it packs a punch.
Book #31 was The Kitchen Front, by Jennifer Ryan. The premise sounded really great to my book club when we picked it, but we didn't love it.
Book #32 was Wallace Stegner's Crossing to Safety. I absolutely loved this story of a long friendship between two couples. I read some Wallace Stegner in college, and I thought that I had read this one, but I hadn't. I'm definitely going to read some more of his books.
I've been privileged to live in three of the world's great cities (Nairobi, Port-au-Prince and Asunción, Paraguay) as well as spending time in many others (including nine weeks in Paris as a college student). I just moved to a new city: Kampala, Uganda. I've also lived in smaller towns in three countries. In all of those places there have been difficult days, but I've never found a city or town yet where God is not, and I don't anticipate finding one in the future, either. The name of my blog comes from the song "Love is Always There," by Carolyn Arends.
