Circles

I don't know enough about how the weekly verses are chosen to understand why there are two gospels for today: the story of the birth of John the Baptist, and the story of Jesus' encounter with the thieves crucified on either side of him, one asking him to prove his supremacy, the other asking to be remembered at the time of the world's salvation. Perhaps it makes sense that on the Sunday before the start of Advent, we should encounter two gospels that reflect, in a way, the whole of Jesus' life, from his birth, foretold through the miraculous signs surrounding his cousin John's birth, to his crucifixion. The circle continues and returns to the image of rebirth in the Easter story, and each year, we live through that life over and over again through the church calendar.

I am focusing today on the image of circles. Sometimes, the circular nature of our lives remind us, again and again, of how we must learn and relearn the same lessons in new ways. Our country faces the same kind of lesson as we relive war after war, mistake after mistake. I'm thinking about the circular nature of a 20-year case of the LA 8, immigrants who were arrested in 1987 either for raising money for Palestinian relief organizations and spreading word of the plight of the Palestinian people or for terrorist activities, depending on who you believe. For twenty years, these men have waited for a final word on their fate, finally delivered this week--they are free to live in the U.S., free to become and remain citizens or at least to have permanent residency. Their case is full of circuitous outcomes, a continual return to core questions about freedom of speech, about what it means to be a resident of this country, of any place--questions that continue to be as central, if not more so, to the political reality of our country in 2007 as they were in 1987.

On a more macro level, I'm thinking of the brief residency of Jesus' life on earth, and of the all-too-brief lives of people I have loved, particularly at this time of year, when I remember Thanksgiving holidays of the past: my mother's last Thanksgiving in her bed in the office-turned-sick-room in our home, how my little cousin Alex, now an attorney, toddled to her bed and handed her a red balloon; earlier Thanksgivings during which my mother made her apple and pumpkin pies, which are still famous in Ikaria, where she taught her sisters-in-law about this American delicacy. I used her recipes on Thanksgiving day this year, remembered her as I worked the dough, poured in the fillings.

I'm thinking of my aunt Katina and my uncle Vangeli and all the others now gone who were once with us at the table. I'm remembering that Katina died suddenly around Thanksgiving, and we were so accustomed to her making the turkey that, on that Thanksgiving, no one knew for sure where she had ordered it, where to pick it up. For months afterwards her daughter found gifts tucked away for the upcoming Christmas holidays; she had to guess at the rightful recipients of each. Now, one of my youngest second cousins, Alex's sister Katie, named for my aunt Katina, is finishing high school, and recently I dreamed a Thanksgiving that never happened, a dinner in which she and her grandmother had the chance to laugh together as grown ups. My aunt's all-too-brief residency on the earth means that she is missed, that my cousin never knew her well--but also that she lives on in each of us, that we never take for granted her impact on our lives.

I am thinking also of my most recent Thanksgiving just a couple days ago, which included some 25 people from Korea and Germany and Eastern Europe, as well as from a multitude of U.S. states. Oh, what abundance, what generosity, what a feast! I feel lucky to have been part of it. My friends who hosted could have done it a different way, could have invited a small, exclusive group of people with whom they were particularly close, but they chose to open their home and table and lives more widely, ever more widely. This is all the more amazing considering that several people were last-minute adds to the guest list, and that my friend is pregnant with her fourth child.

There is a sense of that same kind of extravagant welcome in both gospels for today. When Gabriel visited Zechariah to tell him that he would soon be a father, he refused to believe his elderly wife Elizabeth could be pregnant. They were old; it simply couldn't be, even if an angel came to deliver the good news. From the day of the announcement until the day of John's birth, Zechariah was unable to speak. He regained his voice only after writing, "His name is John," when the religious leaders were questioning Elizabeth's choice of a name for her son. When his voice returns, the new (elderly) father sings a song that reflects not his personal joy, but the joy of his people--recounting the story of the Israelite's salvation from their enemies, and, in the end, placing his own son in the context of that story. He understood, as many elders do, the circular nature of a people's history, as well as the role we can each play in any story.

And in the story of the two thieves, Jesus says to the one seeking redemption--a man guilty of his crimes--"Today you shall be with me in paradise." I wonder about this man's life. We know only that he was a thief, but what did he do, and what political decisions were made along the way to land him on the cross, when Barabbas, another thief, was released on the same day? And what prompted the man to say to his counterpart, Don't speak to Jesus like that--he's not guilty, and we are. In the end, his life comes full circle, and he experiences Jesus' forgiveness in the last hours of his life. The voice is a powerful tool that can be used for ill or for harm, to witness love or to ridicule, to spread hate or exclusion. We have a choice of how to use ours, how to connect to the circle of our lives and the lives of those around us.

One year ago, I was really struggling with depression, barely making it through the day. This year I am feeling lucky and blessed and truly grateful--the gratitude is natural, not forced. I am reminded that very emotion and fear and struggle is impermanent. The abundance of the Thanksgiving table does not last. The grief and fear after a loss do not last, at least not in the way they existed in the moments in which they were felt most deeply. And yet all of our losses and joys come back, over and over, as we continue to experience the circularity of our lives.

But one thing is permanent, and that is love. There is always love in the world, love seeping into our lives from multiple directions, reaching as deeply and as widely as it can reach; we have only to let it in, let it in. It comes in different forms, but always love circles back into itself, the story, the feeling, the response familiar. We can choose to live in and through that love or outside of it; we can choose to stand in the center of the circle, arms open, accepting love, or to walk its curved path, giving love, or to live outside of it altogether. May we all find comfort in the center when we most need comfort and challenge in the path when we most need challenge. May we recognize love and redemption and hope for what they are.

Finding the Right Words

I decided that starting Friday, the day after I was officially chosen to be S's parent, I would tell anyone who asked me directly that I was planning to adopt a 14-year-old girl, even if the person was not someone I knew well. Most people who know me at all know I'm in the process of adopting, but I have only told a few the details of my decision about S. Although it's not a "done deal" yet, it is time for the community to get used to the idea--and in a small community like ours, S is likely to have contact with many people who live here in one way or another. And, in any case, more people may know about my adoption than I think--I have no idea how many people from my community are reading this blog (though I suspect not many, as most of the people who respond to it via e-mail are friends living in other places).

This weekend, I ran into a community leader who knew I had been planning to adopt, and I told her my plans after she asked. Her first question was, "Is she white?" I was offended, but I also felt sad for her--she didn't realize this was an inappropriate question, or at least the wrong way and time to ask about S's race. I said, "Yes. I was open to adopting a child of any race, but I was aware that there would be additional challenges in this community if I adopted a child of color." The woman went on to tell me about friends she knew who were adopting out of foster care and were open to adopting siblings. Because of this, they are more likely, she told me, to get white children. The implication was that white children were what they preferred, but that they would settle for a child or children of color if that's all they could get. It was a strange conversation, and I listened to the story without knowing what to say.

Then, another woman I knew walked into the conversation, and the first woman asked her, "Have you heard Argie's good news?" I relayed the news, and the second woman was truly happy for me. She asked, "Have you met her yet?"

I said, "No, that's the next step. And, it could be that after meeting, we'll decide this isn't right, but so far, it feels very right. We have communicated only once, through her therapist."

There was a moment of silence then. The first woman, the community leader, asked me then, "You mentioned a therapist. Has she had a hard life?"

I was dumbfounded by this question. Has she had a hard life? What 14-year-old living in foster care has not had a hard life? And then I realized, even an educated community leader may not be able to fathom the kind of life S has had. Even someone whose job it is to help people in crisis may not have any idea what it means to adopt an older child.

Of course, on some level, I knew I was going to need to educate the community about foster care adoptions when I had a child. I've already started that process with my circle of friends and with others in the community with whom she will definitely interact. I've already been subject to all kinds of inconsiderate comments. But most of the people with whom I have spoken have some sense of what foster care means--that children who are taken from their families have been abused or neglected in ways most of us cannot really imagine or understand. It was strange to realize that this knowledge would not be common sense for everyone, especially people in positions of leadership in the community.

This morning I read the gospel, in which Jesus tells his disciples that they will be persecuted in his name. He says, "They will deliver you to synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors, all on account of my name. This will result in your being witnesses to them. But make up your mind not to worry beforehand how you will defend yourselves. For I will give you words and wisdom that none of your adversaries will be able to resist or contradict."

Before I go on about this passage, I want to make one thing clear: I don't mean, of course, to compare the process of educating the community about foster care to the torture the disciples faced in a time and place when following Jesus was a crime. We don't live in that world, at least not in the U.S. In some ways, our world is more complex, because many Christians, if not most Christians, are following Jesus in hateful, exclusive, or easy ways--they are more likely to be the ones doing harm in the world rather than the ones being harmed, and they are certainly not risking their lives for their beliefs. (I include myself in this group, of course; although I strive not to be hateful or exclusive or to live an easy faith, I know I do all of these some of the time, as most of us do).

But I was struck by Jesus' statement that God would give God's followers the words to say, words that won't be resistable or contradictable. When I relayed the story about my encounter with the community leader to my sister, she said, "It's too bad you didn't think to say, when she asked about S's race, 'does it matter?'" Of course this would have been a good answer. It would have forced the woman to think about, and communicate, what she meant. It might have opened a conversation about the racism in our community and how we are all complicit and called to do something about it. Instead, I gave her an easy out.

I hope that as time goes on, I'll be able to hear and know the right words, the words God wants me to say in situations like this. In today's epistle, St. Paul provides a somewhat harsh indictment of certain members of the Thessalonian Christian community who are not working, not contributing to the community's well-being. It's important, of course, to have humility--none of us are working hard enough--but this reading, too, seems relevant to my encounter this weekend. Like all people of faith, I am called to high expectations. I need to expect myself and others to the hard work of contributing to the community. In terms of my encounter this weekend, it would have been OK to say, "Isn't it sad that you even have to ask about my child's race? That shows how much work we all have to do to make this a more affirming and less racist community, one in which every child can celebrate and learn about who they are."

Someday I hope to have the kind of strength I need to make such statements honestly and openly, to think of what to say and how to say it in the moment. But even if the right words don't come in the moment, we can all be powerful witnesses to God's vision of the "new Jerusalem" we all have a responsibility to help create, as described in today's Old Testament reading: "They will not toil in vain or bear children doomed to misfortune; for they will be a people blessed by the Lord, they and their descendants with them...The wolf and the lamb will feed together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox, but dust will be the serpent's food. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain."

Unfortunately, even if everyone put down their arms, so to speak, and stopped doing things that are destructive or hurtful, this would not be enough. There is so much healing that needs to happen to make up for the harm we've done in past generations, the harm we're doing today. We are called to attend to both the past and the future at once, in each moment of our lives.

Perhaps this is the mystery of parenting in general, but specifically of parenting a hurting child. We have to help them learn to do no harm, to stop the cycle of hurt that is so much a part of all of our lives, of our society, of our world. We have to help them learn to be participants in their own healing and in the healing of the world. We have to help them to view the possibility of a future world significantly different than today's.

National Adoption Day

Yesterday, I learned I had been chosen to be S's parent. I had been conferencing with students all day, starting at 7:30, and I was in the last conference of the evening, around 5:30, when I got the call. Last night I e-mailed a big group of friends, too overwhelmed to figure out who to call. I got a couple phone calls in response, and a friend and I went out to eat. I had a beer and tried to talk about how I was feeling, which was relieved, overjoyed, scared shitless, and sad for the other family, all at once, without much success. Then I went home and prepared for another long day of conferences.

Now, I wait while S. learns about me, decides what she wants to do next--talk on the phone, meet where she lives, meet where I live. Anything could go wrong, of course--we could not get along in person, she could decide she doesn't want to be adopted after all and would prefer to be moved again to another foster home (her fate sometime before April if the adoption does not work out)--but I am hopeful, and incredibly grateful.

Tonight, just before heading home, I checked my e-mail for one last time, discovering through an e-mail that it is National Adoption Day. This week I will pray for S., for myself, for the other family, for all of the families who are waiting, adopting, have adopted, and for all the kids, too.

Venturing Across the Tracks

We had come to the end of a path in the woods, to a chasm of trees below us, and in front of us, a narrow railroad bridge. I don’t remember where we were, exactly, or whose idea it was to cross that bridge, but I do know that Jen went first, putting one foot in front of the other, steadily.

Kris and I were more cautious. I went next, giggling from nervousness, and Kris, behind me, said, “Don’t even think about laughing, or you’ll fall, and if you do, I’ll reach out toward you without thinking and fall right along with you.” This only made me laugh harder. “I’m serious,” Kris said, and I could hear a little trembling in her voice.

When I stopped laughing and steadied myself, I realized Jen was already far ahead of us. She was humming to herself, swinging her hips. She had always been the bravest one among us. The image of her walking steadily across that bridge is seared into my memory. She is wearing one of her signature hippy skirts with black combat boots and a ratty t-shirt. Her fingers dig into her sides as she walks, the only sign of fear in her body, but she goes on, swaying. I tried to pick out the song she was humming, but I couldn't.

I kept needing to stop, to hold out my arms and close my eyes. I felt dizzy, but also elated. We were about 1/4 of the way across the bridge, Kris and I, when we heard a deep voice magnified through a megaphone: "Ladies, this is the police. Turn around and go back. This is an active track. You are endangering your lives." I couldn't seen anybody, and for a second, I wondered if this was a joke--but then I heard the screech of a police siren, which the officer turned on and off, briefly, probably to quell any doubts we might have of the severity of our situation. (We later learned that there was a country road not too far away from which the railroad bridge was clearly visible).

Kris and I struggled to turn around. Breathing hard, we shifted our weight almost in unison, then put one foot in front of the other until we were off the bridge, a few yards away from it. “Maybe we’re in trouble,” I said. “Maybe we should run.”

Then I heard the officer repeat the command and turned to look back. Jen was continuing her treck across the bridge, almost as if she hadn't heard him. As I tried to locate her—a tiny, thin white imprint against the thick, green foliage—I noticed some of the leaves were growing yellow around the edges. Even from this distance, I could see she was still moving steadily, swinging her hips.

As I watched, I couldn’t help thinking that I wanted to be more like her—more comfortable in my body, maybe, or less careful, more fearless. “Holy shit,” I said to Kris. “She’s gone.”

Kris and I waited in silence, wondering what to do next. We were young then—24, I think—and in a few weeks, I was leaving Cincinnati forever. I’d been in the city for only two years, but they were important, intense years. I’d begun to face the pain and losses of my childhood, come out of the closet, started my first “real job,” fallen in love, fallen out of love. Kris and Jen had been my closest friends and confidants through all of these changes.

In a few minutes, we saw Jen climbing confidently up from the valley, grinning. I wasn’t sure whether to be in awe at her audacity or angry at her for how thoughtless she’d been. “What the fuck were you thinking?” I asked her. “We could have gotten arrested!”

“Haven’t I always been able to talk my way out of trouble?” Jen asked. "All it took was a little flirting.” I tried to imagine Jen's encounter with the officer, but I couldn't. What had they said to each other, how had it gone? As I was thinking these things, Jen said, quietly—and I will never forget this—“It wasn’t that I wouldn’t stop. It was that I couldn’t."

We were silent then, standing still, the three of us, in those woods with the sun coming down through the leaves in small, hand-shaped patterns on the ground as if to press this moment into our memories, to bless it.

I tried to take in what Jen had just told us. She had been just as terrified, if not more terrified, than Kris and I. She had been so terrified, in fact, that stopping was out of the question. Standing still would have reminded her of how far we were from the ground, of the possibility of a train hurtling towards us—so all she could do was keep going, following the rhythm of her step, over and over, so as not to fall.

After awhile, we headed back through the woods, ending up at a United Dairy Farmers (a Cincinnati-based gas station), where we ordered Slurpies. Later, we posed on the stoop of my apartment complex, wagging our blue tongues at each other’s cameras. On some level, we knew the afternoon had been all about saying goodbye privately as only the closest of friends can do, without words, without sentimentality. But we couldn’t have imagined the trajectories our lives would take after that moment.

Jen would leave her lover, marry a man, divorce him, marry another man. Although she still lives in the same neighborhood and works for the same company, she has lived her life against the grain in every other way, choosing love and wonder over fear, pressing through each terrifying moment instead of stopping, just as she did on that bridge that afternoon.

Kris was the most closeted and seemingly most fearful of the three of us, but she has lived perhaps most courageously. Eventually, she fell in love, and, with her partner, has adopted four children out of foster care, including two with Down’s Syndrome.

And me? After leaving Cincinnati for graduate school in Phoenix, I fell in love, fell out of love, left Phoenix for a tiny, rural town, fell in love, fell out of love.

And now—S. On Thursday, I will find out whether a group of social workers I barely know have chosen me or another family to parent a 14-year-old girl named S.

When I decided, bravely, I like to believe, to leave a six-year relationship that seemed to be going nowhere, even though we loved each other deeply, I spent a year moving through the world as Jen did that afternoon the bridge—head down, not looking, pressing forward on pure instinct. In that time, as I stared at my shuffling feet, imagining every worst-case scenario, I slowly discovered that it was possible to hum, to swing my hips, if only slightly. I began to realize I had a lifetime’s span and depth of wisdom, of blessing, to give a hurting child. I had begun, in Cincinnati, to heal from my childhood, to grow into who I was, and despite the grief and the losses that followed, I had become rather good at helping others—friends, students, family members--find their own way. It was time to make a permanent commitment of this gift.

When S’s profile came to me, I had looked at dozens, if not hundreds, of profiles, trying to make sense of whatever truth about the child was embedded between the lines of the three or four paragraphs and photograph I received via e-mail. I was tired of sending off my home study and waiting, hearing nothing for weeks or months. It was as if I were standing on that bridge, hurtling parts of myself over and over into the chasm. Somewhere, there was a country road, and the bridge was visible from there, but I couldn’t see the people driving by, couldn’t imagine what the social workers reading about my life were thinking. I longed for a megaphoned-voice; any news, positive or negative, would have been welcome.

And then, I got the call: I had been chosen. But to be sure, I took my time, and in the meantime, other families also sent in home studies for S. Now, months later, I have learned all there is to know about her, at least on paper, and I have searched my heart and chosen her, really chosen her, to be my daughter. I could look back, wish I’d been less careful, wish I’d said yes earlier—but it is too late for that, and anyway, I have no regrets. I had to take my time.

When I was considering S., and before that, when I began to tell people I would adopt, and even before that, when I left my relationship, bought a home, started my life over again, some of my friends told me it would be easier, safer, to go back, or at least to wait until the autumn winds thinned the trees and I could see where I was going. Some did so out of love, and some out of an unconscious desire to keep things from changing, from evolving. If my life could change so radically in just one year, then their lives, too, were bound to change just as radically, and this was a scary possibility to face. Like Kris and I, they settled for walking in the opposite direction, repeating messages of safety, of reason, or watching from a distance.

But others realized they couldn’t walk beside me--there was only so much space on the track--so they called out to me occasionally, maybe touched my back or took my hand, but always briefly, carefully, because they knew I needed to move at my own pace. Some simply stayed put in the early autumn sunlight--and when I needed them, all I had to do was double back. Now, these friends are waiting beside me, breathless. The leaves are thinning. The sun is pushing, shadowless, through the bare branches of the trees, toward the earth.

On Thursday, I’ll have an answer, and, one way or another, S will have a family.

I want to be casual about the next two days. I want to drink Slurpies and take silly pictures and laugh about Jen’s propensity for flirting, Kris’ propensity for following the rules. But in my heart of hearts, I know now as we knew then that things will never be the same.

If I am not chosen, I will have to double back to the friends, far and near, who are waiting for me where I started, who have been there all along, hoping for the best for me. I’ll have to begin again, not because a megaphoned-voice is telling me I must, but because that’s sometimes what’s required of us to move forward—to face a familiar bridge again, with new wisdom, new humility. This time, as I send off profiles and begin the wait again, I’ll know how to press my feet between the rails, how to hold out my arms to keep my balance, who I can trust to be waiting when I double back again.

And if I am chosen? Even then, my life will be all about doubling back and starting over. Sometimes I will be leading S, and sometimes she will be leading me, but always I’ll strive to practice what Kris and Jen taught me that day so many years ago: to walk carefully and carelessly at the same time, to move with others rather than trying to move for them, to trust the natural rhythms of time and space and laughter, of leaves and sunlight, of chasms and bridges that are, at once, beautiful and dangerous.

Family

Haggai 1:15b-2:9
2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17
Psalm 145
Luke 20:27-38

I remember encountering this verse for the first time as kid. It terrified me. I didn't like Jesus' answer to the Sauducees' question about marriage. They are trying to trick Jesus, as always, with questions that will prove he isn't as smart or as knowledgable as his followers believe--so they ask him about the afterlife. If a woman has seven husbands, marrying each in succession after the previous husband dies, whose wife will she be in the next world?

Jesus answers that in the next world, we are all God's children, and so there will be no need for marriage. I didn't want to believe this. If marriages wouldn't exist in the next world, then what human relationships would exist? This seemed especially perplexing when I thought about my mother. Whenever I met her again in the next life, I wanted to encounter her as the woman I'd known her to be, to be loved and cared for in the same way she had loved and cared for me as a child. It didn't occur to me that, hopefully, by the time I died, I wouldn't be that child anymore, wouldn't need my mother to be who she had been.

Now, as an adult, I have no idea what I believe about life after death. I do believe the dead are still alive, in our memories, in our bodies, in the way we live out what we learned from them, and what they learned from the people who taught them, raised them, loved them, and so on, back through the ages. In this way, even when the memory of a person has died--that is, when all of the people who actually knew that person have also died--even if all evidence of a person's impact on earth is gone, their legacy is still lived out in those who somehow descend from their influence.

As I continue to contemplate what it will mean to mother a teenager who has spent the last four years in foster care, I realize that this legacy of influence is not always positive. It is up to each of us to remember and live the legacy of those who raised and taught and loved us by choosing our paths carefully, so as to honor the good in them and to reject whatever was hateful, harmful. In other words, we are bound to the people we encounter in our lives, no matter the duration or the impact of their influence, in mysterious ways.

I know, for instance, that my grandmother was not only influenced by her parents and siblings and those in the village in which she was raised, but also by the myriad of people who welcomed her when she came to the U.S. and who saw her on a daily basis at the grocery she ran with my grandfather, at the Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church in Akron, at the Greek community get-togethers. And so, all of those people, many of whom I've never met, never even heard stories about, live on in me, because in some small way, she must have been shaped by them. My children, and even those who take my classes, who get to know me as a friend, will also be shaped in some way by those who surrounded her, because I will pass that influence on to them--I am doing so even when I do not realize it.

And so I think Jesus' answer can be read not as a story that tells us our relationships on earth won't matter in the next life, but as a story about how all our relationships matter, how family is more expansive, perhaps, than what we might imagine in our earth-tied, human lives.

Yesterday I was talking with a friend about recent changes in relationships in my own life. He reminded me that relationships are sometimes cyclical, though the cycles may vary widely in their length of time, and that people ease in and out of our lives, their touch sometimes light, sometimes intense. These were words I needed to hear--both because they were comforting and because they were wise words for someone considering parenting a teenager whose love for me, and mine for her, will likely also move in cycles depending on the day--even if there is a constancy, a stability, underlying the relationship.

Family is bigger than the biological and marriage-based ties that connect us; the people who matter have to expand beyond our homes and our neighborhoods if anything in our world is to change--if any hurting person is to find love. But the form those ties will take will vary widely, as nothing about human relationships can ever remain the same.

The bible tells us again and again that nothing is constant, as does our physical world. Yesterday I spent a relatively warm day raking leaves and taking down the garden, throwing several dozen green tomatoes along with their vines into the compost. Everything else in the garden had come to term, has been eaten or frozen by now, except that some of the tomato plants came to fruit too late to be enjoyed. Still, there is next year, and the year after, and the year after that. "One generation will commend your works to another; they will tell of your mighty acts," the psalmist writes. "The Lord upholds all those who fall and lifts up all those who are bowed down." So it has been, and shall be, as part of a human family cared for by God.

Dreaming of Trees

Habakkuk 1:1-4; 2:1-4
Psalm 119:137-144
2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12 andLuke 19:1-10

What does it mean to welcome another human being into one’s life? This question is at the root of the story of Zacchaeus the tax collector. Zacchaeus climbs a tree as Jesus is passing in the midst of a crowd because “he wanted to see who Jesus was.” This is a laughable image, to say the least—a grown (though very short) man scurrying up a tree. He was risking embarrassment, no doubt, by doing so. What did he expect to gain, anyway, from a glimpse of Jesus? The story is too brief to offer an answer to this question.

Somehow, Jesus sees Zacchaeus. He looks up and says, “Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today.” And so Zacchaeus welcomes Jesus—but he doesn’t stop there. He goes on to give half his possessions to the poor, making amends for the greedy life he’s lived up to that point. He promises to pay back anyone he has cheated “four times” the amount the person lost. And Jesus says, “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost.”

I am considering adopting a girl who talks often about climbing trees. Nobody knows exactly why she is so interested in doing so—she is too old for this activity, and is not particularly coordinated or athletic. And yet, again and again, she speaks dreamily of climbing.

I dreamed recently that I was standing below the tree, looking up at her. We locked eyes but it was as if we were both frozen in space and time, unable to reach each other. The process of responding to her profile (she’s an older child than I’d anticipated adopting) and learning about her has been long and difficult, and still, it is not clear if she will ever come to live with me.

Of course I would never claim a literal connection between my dream and this story. I would never claim to be a Jesus figure who is able to save her—in fact, it’s exactly the kind of vision about adopting from foster care that I want desperately to avoid. I had to search my heart long and hard when I started this process to be sure I wasn’t trying to be a hero, wasn’t expecting to be the maker of miracles.

And yet I do think the communication between Zacchaeus and Jesus can tell us a lot about what human connection is about, regardless of the type of relationship. Zacchaeus takes a risk when he climbs that tree, just as the child I’m considering adopting did when she chose to be considered for adoption, to risk leaving a relatively stable foster home for something more permanent and whole. The risk is about embarrassment, about shame—but it is also about hope, about being willing to look at one’s surroundings in a new way, about inviting change.

Jesus had to look up to see Zacchaeus. He had to be paying attention even in the midst of a crowd—to look for the one person who most deeply needed his love. And what did Jesus do when he saw Zacchaeus? Did he ask him what he was doing in the tree? Did he offer him salvation? No. He responded by asking for what he needed—namely, a meal, a place to stay. It is not until later that he claims for Zacchaeus the family to which such a sinner could never belong—the family of Abraham, the chosen people. It is not until Zacchaeus accepts his request, offers to change his life, that Jesus offers the full measure of his holiness in return. In this story, the seeker (Zacchaeus) is the one who fulfills the needs of the one being sought (Jesus). But this honor of giving what he has leads to a radical change in Zacchaeus—and in his ultimate salvation.

In my last post, I wrote about unconditional love. This story could suggest that life-changing love is actually conditional—that it requires two people to open their lives to each other, to give whatever they have for the benefit of the other. But consider what Zacchaeus offered (food and shelter for one day) compared to what Jesus offered (salvation, wholeness, membership in a family). Also consider that Jesus offered these things only because Zacchaeus invited him in.

As Christ’s body in the world, we are both Zacchaeus, the seeker, and Jesus, the one who is sought. We are both the one in need and the one who fulfills needs--sometimes in the same moment. The story shows us that we need to risk silliness and shame, risk the ridicule of others, to see holiness clearly. We need to respond to holiness as we would to any living thing—we need to listen to its needs, to feed and shelter it. We need to respond to holiness with unbounded, heartfelt repentance. We need, also, to offer what holiness we have generously to the world. Sometimes in the same encounter we feed and are fed, we love and are loved.

But we know from other stories that Jesus’ encounters did not always go this way. Some of hte people he healed ran off without showing gratitude. Some turned on Jesus when they had trouble hearing his words. Still, Jesus went on, encountering new people, forgiving those he knew best as readily as strangers, speaking truth to power.

There can be brokenness and pain in even the most profound encounter. There can be deep, abiding change in even the briefest brush with another human. Maybe Jesus’ story, in its entirety, is meant to teach us to cherish BOTH each encounter on its own AND the story in its entirety, to recognize both the light and the darkness in every relationship, however long-standing or brief. Perhaps Jesus’ story, in its entirety, suggests that we must respond to others’ needs AND speak out about our own, and that these two impulses are not always mutuall exclusive.

A friend and I recently decided to take a break from talking heart-to-heart about our lives. At almost the same moment, we realized that our reaching out to each other was actually impeding our ability to move forward with our own lives. This was a good lesson for me in what it means to love profoundly—to be able to cherish encounters that have changed me while also recognizing that each relationship changes as time passes, and that such changes do not diminish what each person has learned. In time, I will probably better understand our mutual need for a break in new ways—but for now, I need simply to breathe in its mystery.

I think about what this story might tell me about my adoption journey, and I don’t know. I am both Zacchaeus, climbing the tree, “going out on a limb,” and Jesus, looking up to see a person who is despised by the world’s standards as a child of God. But Jesus’ encounter with Zacchaeus, like the friendship from which I am taking a break, were brief, demanding attention at a particular time in the lives of two people but not a longstanding commitment. Or perhaps it did. My friend and I have likely been changed by each other in ways we haven't even yet realized. In the gospel, after Jesus left Zacchaeus’ home the next day, Zacchaeus had to decide whether to act on the promises he’d made as a result of the encounter. If he followed through, he must have given up his livelihood, sought out a new career, faced his enemies, who likely did not trust him, even after he’d paid back what he’d stolen from them. In short, he was in for a hard road—a road that would reveal his commitment to a man he’d never see again.

And Jesus? Eventually, his insistence on loving the most hated people cost him his life.

So, the story comes back to unconditional, radical love, life-changing love. It comes back to acting on impulse born of integrity. It comes back to following through, to asking for and receiving both tangible love (food, shelter, family) and less tangible holiness (salvation).

Zacchaeus’ decision to climb that tree was a sudden decision—there was the crowd, there was Jesus, and he wanted to see him, but couldn't. But it was no doubt rooted in some period of reflection on this man, Jesus, and His message. What would Zacchaeus have done if Jesus had not looked up at him, had not demanded a place at his table? Would the mere sight of Jesus have changed him? And where would Jesus have stayed that day, where would he have eaten, if Zacchaeus had not responded by climbing down and offering an extravagant welcome? We do not know. We will never know. And this, too, is part of the lesson. Being awake in the moment means we are willing to see in new ways, to radically change, to feed and shelter others, to ask for the food and shelter we need. It means we hear each other and our own hearts. It means we are living lives grounded in love given as well as love received.

It means we go on climbing trees, regardless of our ages or abilities or life experiences or what anyone else will think of such silliness, such risk.

Duty and Love

Note: I wrote this a few weeks ago, but just now finally got my computer at home up and running again, thanks to the help of a computer-savvy student...and hopefully I'll be posting weekly again!

I was finally ready, I thought, to come back to this blog, after an exhausting month of multiple professional and personal challenges, but when I read the gospel for October 7, I became physically distressed. Jesus tells his disciples, “Suppose one of you had a servant…would he say to the servant when he comes in from the field, ‘Come along now and sit down to eat?’ Would he not rather say, ‘Prepare my supper, get yourself ready and wait on me while I eat and drink; after that you may eat and drink.’ Would he thank the servant because he did what he was told to do? So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.’”

This passage bothers me for multiple reasons. Perhaps most viscerally, I have known too many women who have lived to serve their husbands and their children, soullessly and bitterly cooking, cleaning, scolding—women who were never thanked by anyone—as well as women who were abused by those in their own homes, trapped in a life of servanthood they could not escape. How could Jesus, who worked so hard to subvert the power dynamics of his society, use such a metaphor for living a godly life?

The answer to this question came to me this week through two sources: Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and a wise sentence spoken to me by a woman who adopted three older children whom I sought out for advice.

Wilder’s book was my favorite novel in high school, and one of the few books I actually owned prior to starting college. I couldn’t remember why I had liked it so much, so I decided, when I recently rediscovered it on my shelf, to read it again. It felt almost eerie to hold the book, which literally fell apart in my hands as I read from it each night this week. I was startled to realize that I recognized my own handwriting in the margins, which has not changed much. Not only that, but the types of notations are similar to those I make in new books now—astericks, random phrases that don’t make much sense on a second read. No matter how I try, I’ve never found a better system for marking up my books—I am always drawing stars in the margins when I am struck in the deepest places in my heart, and the size of the asterick generally reflects how much I was moved. Apparently this is a habit I’ve had for 20 years.
In any case, I remember reading it greedily multiple times in high school. (I can tell I marked it up more than once by the fact that some of my notes are in black pen, some in blue pen, and some in pencil). This time, I found it a slow read, and I read it a little at a time over a week, sometimes having to review what had happened in earlier pages. But I’ve found it hard to read anything lately. I am struggling with the adoption process in more specific ways now, and I am finding it hard to focus on much else. Still, I was determined to read something for pleasure, a feat I haven’t managed in quite some time.

The book is a story of five people who die when a footbridge collapses near Lima, Peru. I was most drawn to the story of the Marquesa, an older, wealthy woman who is a drunk, and her servant-girl, Pepita. The Marquesa has had a very conflicted relationship with her daughter since her youth. Even after her daughter grows up, marries, and moves across the sea, the Marquesa continues to write to her regularly, sometimes dredging up old conflicts, sometimes complaining of her lack of love, sometimes demanding to know if her daughter loves her at all, sometimes bragging about her own happiness in life in order to prove she hasn’t been hurt by her daughter after all.

Pepita, an orphan girl, is sent to live with the Marquesa by an abbess who has been charged with her care. The abbess sees in Pepita the spirit of an abbess, and she sends her to the Marquesa to learn obedience and unconditional love. However, her plan is to eventually bring Pepita back to the convent to become her successor. Pepita serves the Marquesa kindly and selflessly, but the Marquesa barely acknowledges her.

One evening, during a trip she is taking with the Marquesa, Pepita writes the abbess a letter. She explains that she is miserable, that she wants to return to the convent, but that she also realizes there must be some reason the abbess has sent her to live with the Marquesa. The Marquesa finds the letter and reads it. She is stunned by the honesty and purity of the letter, by the girl’s desire to live lovingly despite her misery. After reading the letter, she invites Pepita to eat with her for the first time, but the girl, frightened by the invitation, refuses, saying she needed to get the evening fire ready in the Marquesa’s room. The Marquesa asks if she has any letters to be mailed the next morning, and she says she does not. When the Marquesa presses her, saying she knows of the letter she’s written to the abbess, Pepita confesses that she has decided not to send it. It was not a brave letter, she says.

The Marquesa is deeply moved. “She longed to be back in this simplicity of love, to throw off the burden of pride and vanity that hers had always carried…she remembered the long relationship [with her daughter], crowded with the wreckage of exhumed conversations, of fancied slights, of inopportune confidences, of charges of neglect and exclusion…”. And so, she writes her daughter a new kind of letter, the letter that is destined to be her last. In this letter, she expresses a pure, unconditional love. After completing the letter, she goes to Pepita’s room and sits beside her while she sleeps. She resolves to treat Pepita differently, to learn from her. She says, “Let me live. Let me begin again.”

And the next day, both the Marquesa and Pepita die in the bridge’s collapse.

The novel opens the question of whether there is such a thing as fate, whether tragedies happen for a reason, but that question remains unresolved at the end. This story, one of three in the novel, might suggest that the timing was good for the Marquesa. She has made her peace with her daughter without having to endure the response, whatever it might be. She has resolved to live a better life but is not tested in her ability to carry it out. But what of Pepita, who dies lonely, who is never able to use her gifts of service for a greater good, who never receives the Marquesa’s promised new attention?

But that is not the end of the story. At the end of the novel, Clara, the Marquesa’s daughter, pays a visit to the abbess to show her that last letter. The abbess, who knew the Marquesa’s hateful personality well, is stunned. “Now learn,” she says, “learn at last that anywhere you may expect grace.”

Grace is a loaded word in the Christian tradition. Beliefs about grace have fractured denominations. They provided an easy out of sin for some and have been for others a much-needed road to forgiveness. I don’t think, in fact, that I understood the word in its purest form until I re-read this novel, this line in particular. Now, the meaning is clear: grace is a light in the darkness, a small piece of hope in what is otherwise for many a meaningless and empty life. It is also about surprise—about wonder. The abbess, who has made a life of serving the poor, is moved by the words of the Marquesa, who lived most of her life bitterly and meaninglessly.
I felt grace recently when talking with an adoptive parent, who said to me, “If you want to do this, to adopt an older child, you have to be prepared to love your child even if she can never love you as much as you love her—even if she can never love you at all.” Perhaps Jesus meant the same thing in his parable—he wasn’t talking about cruelty or abuse, but rather, of living a life that rises above thanklessness and bitterness, that requires less.

The Marquesa, after all, learns to love unconditionally by letting go of the past, by sending off the gift of her letter and then turning to the present, resolving to live there, to see the wonder and abundance of her life. The adoptive parents I spoke with recalled many happy times with their adopted children, even though the children never loved them in the way they had hoped to be loved.

I do not know whether I am capable of this kind of love. In our psychology-obsessed society, many of us who have been through therapy have learned all about co-dependence and boundaries. Don’t get me wrong—I know that many women have covered for alcoholic or abusive spouses and have ruined their own lives and sometimes their children’s lives as a result. I know the danger of caring for someone bitterly, greedily, at the expense of caring for oneself. And I also understand the importance of boundaries—we have to know how our own feelings and responsibilities and inner and outer resources are separate from those of others.
But we also have to know how to love unconditionally—how to say over and over to others, I love you, even if you can’t love me back. This is God-love, real love, but it can become destructive when it is accompanied by martyrdom, lack of self-care, or living in the past or future instead of the present.

Perhaps boundaries are not so much lines drawn in concrete as they are love letters sent across the ocean that are written with true, whole love, without any kind of need, any expectation of return, like the Marquesa’s letter. I felt this kind of love when, long ago, I handed over a book of my favorite quotes to another girl who I suspected needed them more than I did. I can still remember the little blue journal with the tattered cover that I carried with me everywhere in either a jean pocket or a little wallet. It was small enough that it did not draw attention, and I can remember pulling it out in the bathroom stall, in the privacy on my own room, in a little clearing in the woods where I sometimes went to think. And then, suddenly, I no longer had it. I made a half-hearted attempt to create a new one, but I never had the energy to go through old library books or my well-worn bible and find the quotes again. I never saw my friend, a girl I'd met at summer camp, again, and I never learned whether the book of quotes had been of any use to her.

So it was a moment of grace in the purest sense of the word when I got to the last four sentences of Wilder’s novel and found there a quote I can almost see scribbled on the front cover of that little book, the last thoughts of the abbess after Clara’s visit: “But soon we shall die and the memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for awhile and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”