On the Other Hand

Laura Brown, a character in The Hours lives in an affluent 1950’s Los Angeles with her husband, and young son, Richie. She is pregnant with her second child and has thoughts of suicide. She will, soon after the baby is born, leave her husband and young children, all of whom adore her. Her son grows to adulthood, moves to New York, becomes a poet, and become terminally ill (didn't see the beginning of the movie so don't know if it’s AIDS or cancer). To his friend, Clarissa, he characterizes his mother as monstrous. After all, what kind of woman could leave her children like that? Especially when she threw it all over for a job as a librarian in Canada.

Laura’s son, now known as Richard, commits suicide by throwing himself out of his apartment window. It falls (no pun intended) to Clarissa to organize his funeral. The door bell to her apartment rings. There on the doorstep stands Laura Brown, now probably seventy years old, hair in a bun, wrinkled face, with a congenial expression. She is nothing like Clarissa has imagined. She finds her warm, genuine, and still very much Richard’s mother. In fact, when Clarissa says, as she stares at the woman on her doorstep, “You are Laura Brown,” Ms. Brown replies, “Yes. I am Richard’s mother.”

The two women have a conversation in which Clarissa asks Laura about her choices. She starts by asking whether Laura has read Richard’s poems and his novel. Laura replies: “He has me die in the novel. It hurt, of course; I can’t pretend it didn’t hurt. But I know why he did it."

Clarissa offers, “You left Richard when he was a child.”

Laura is matter-of-fact in her acknowledgment: “I left both my children. I abandoned them.” Then she explains: “There are times you don’t belong and you think you are going to kill yourself. Once, I went to a hotel [where I thought about suicide]. Later that night I made a plan. The plan was I would leave my family when my second child was born. "

“That’s what I did. I got up one morning, made breakfast . . . went to the bus stop, got on the bus. I’d left a note. I got a job in a library in Canada. It would be wonderful to say you regret it. It would be easy. . . But what does it mean? What does it mean to regret when you have no choice. It’s what you can bear.” "

Then Laura said these words which caused me to pause: “It was death. I chose life.” By “it,” I think she meant her life as she knew it and as she envisioned it stretching out in front of her."

Which brings me to the other hand of the should-I-stay-or-should-I-go question.

For so many reason, marriage is good for us. We live longer, our children are better adjusted, our earning capacities increase; we can even become better people married than we do alone. In theory, Laura’s marriage to Dan Brown, a good man, should be a source of happiness, especially when the idea of Laura, just the very thought of her, is what carried him through the war. He tells his son, as they eat the birthday cake Laura has baked for him: “I used to think about bringing her to a house, to a life . . . pretty much like this. And it was the thought of the happiness, the thought of this woman . . . the thought of this life . . . that’s what kept me going. I had an idea of our happiness.”

Laura doesn’t have that same idea. This marriage and this motherhood is not “life” for Laura Brown. The hours of her life fill her with a sense of sadness and hopelessness so pervasive the only solution she can think of is her own extinction. (Hold comments about post-partum depression, latent lesbianism in a repressive 1950s sexual climate, and “buck up, things are always a bit rough in the first few years.”) For me, when your own death (or somebody else’s) seems a release from your present life, where you are is not a good place to be. Sometimes the only way to change that place is to go somewhere else. Move your X marks the spot to a different part of the map. Take those around you with you—if they will. Or go on your own.

That evening, Laura sits on the toilet, silently weeping. Her happy, oblivious by choice or by nature, husband is seen in the background through the open bathroom door, entreating her to “Come to bed, honey.” It is there, on the toilet, that she draws the line and makes her plan. From her demeanor, this is not a choice made without pain. She is mourning her choice, and the consequences she knows will follow. But, there, in the bathroom, she chooses life, which, for her, means leaving her husband, her children and becoming a librarian in Canada. The other was more than she knew or thought she could bear.

Sometimes the bravest thing is, as Virginia Woolf says, “to look life in the face and to know it [and yourself] for what it is.” And to choose to live—whatever form it takes. This could mean leaving your childhood church where, for some reason, you are unable to reach God, and making your own tracks until you are able to recognize and hear a divine voice. It could mean cutting off ties with a family member. It may mean leaving a marriage which has been the site of tremendous unhappiness, in which the injuries and dysfunctional patterns go so deep that all is left is exhaustion, and in which thinking of the years stretching ahead creates such internal bleakness that stamping books in the middle of a Saskatchewan winter sounds like mojitos on the Mexican Riviera. It should not mean a metaphorical burial in the suicide’s corner of the community graveyard. But it might—because the some of us don’t know how to process ambiguity very well.

As the fifty-something widower lady looking for an apartment in Paris said on House Hunters International, when she saw exactly what one million U.S. dollars could buy in the seventh arrondissement, “This is not what I expected; not what I expected at all.” Sometimes, the first steps on the path that leads back to life are just that: not what we expect at all.

A Window in the Skies

The Book of Common Prayer contains all different kinds of prayers. There are prayers for the world, prayers for the Church, and prayers for the national life, including prayers for the Supreme Court. There’s a prayer for the celebration and the blessing of a marriage that goes like this: “Give them wisdom and devotion in the ordering of their common life, that each may be to the other a strength in need, a counselor in perplexity, a comfort in sorrow, and a companion in joy.” That’s just beautiful.

Another one of my favorite prayers is found in the Prayers and Thanksgivings section: “O Lord, support us all the day long, until the shadows lengthen, and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Then in thy mercy, grant us a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last. Amen. “

Here’s another prayer, uncanonized and unarticulated, but which tends to work if I can utter the words: “Help me to see.”

________________________

In Charles Frazier’s newest novel, Nightwoods, set in North Carolina in the fifties, we meet Luce, a twenty-something single woman who, having experienced perhaps the worst of what her small North Carolina hill town has to offer, takes a job as a caretaker of a now unused but formerly grand summer lodge. She sleeps in the great lobby in front of the fire place on a cot, while the three floors of guest rooms and servants quarters go unused. She dresses from the trunks that have spent decades in storage, and spends most of her time in a solitary wandering of the hills. Then the county welfare worker drops off her nephew and niece, whose mother, her sister, has been killed in their presence. Consequently, they like to start fires. Luce is their only living relative with the capacity to care for them. So they move into the lodge with Luce. A few months later, Stubblefield, the nephew, having inherited the lodge from his uncle, intrudes upon their life in the hills.

He recognizes Luce as the beautiful teenage girl who sucked on a Popsicle the entire time she paraded up and down the side of the town swimming pool during an impromptu beauty pageant almost a decade ago. He noticed her then, and thought about her after. She is changed but still intriguing. He asks her about her life, why the lodge, and whether she is lonely:

She pointed out that weather was plenty interesting to watch as it passed over you, and it had entertained people for many thousands of years. And not just immediate weather but also the larger movements of the seasons. You had to learn how to feel the long flow and not get hung up on the day-to-day. Big swellings and recedings, upturned and downturned sweeps linked in slow rhythms built from millions of tiny parts—animal, vegetable, mineral—not just temperature and length of daylight. For example, the way a rhododendron changed throughout the year, month by month. She claimed she observed and learned nearly a hundred such parts of the local world. She said, Imagine holding every bit of it in your head at one time, this whole place, down to what salamanders are doing every month of the four seasons. She put the bunched tips of her fingers to each temple and said, Boom. Then spread her fingers and lifted her hands in a gesture of explosion.

Charles Frazier, Nightwoods, Chapter 6.

I lay on my bed reading that passage on a Sunday afternoon about two weeks ago. The idea trickled down on me that God is able to forgive with such apparent ease because he holds the entire picture of us in his head all at the same time. The beginning and the end of me are present tense for him. I jotted down on a piece of paper, “Forgiveness is largely about vision. The capacity to forgive is linked to the ability to see. God forgives because he can see.” I thought how useful it would be to be able to see like that.

Sometimes, I run into people I cannot see. By that I mean, that I’m not been able to understand them or their actions. They remain foreign creatures to me. This doesn’t normally happen. As Kevin can tell you, I can empathize with just about every situation—which empathy alarms him at times. I read about women sentenced to six years for shaking their babies or forcing them to drink wheat storage buckets full of water, and I can understand how you get there. I think Brady Udall’s resolution of The Lonely Polygamist is just about the truest description of the braid of love and duty ever. Now, I don’t want to be loved by that lonely polygamist; he’s too lumpy. But I could feel him and his heart. And, there are days when a polygamous set-up makes great practical sense. I could never home-school my children in a million years, unless we were wealthy enough to make school one long field trip coinciding with the locations of medieval castles, WW2 battlefields, and Bushmen creation narratives. But I can see how you would want to do that, for a number of reasons—none of which work for me.

Yet still, sometimes, there are people I just don’t get. When that happens, and I have to live with them or work with them, there’s normally an expletive that bursts in a frustrated bubble in my brain, accompanied by a mental motion that looks sort of like the garbage can sucking in an email message just discarded on an iPhone. Gone. Goodbye. From then on, I look slightly sideways at them, like they’re a specimen.

If I’m in a really good frame of mind, or the situation requires that I can’t remain so detached, sometimes other words sidle into the bubble, “Help me to see them.” By that I mean, “Let me see what you see when you look at this person . . . because right now, I can’t see anything redeeming about them.” I understand now, after reading the passage from Nightwoods, why these words would be an inclination. Because in them is the way through. It’s why Moses is taken up into the mountain and allowed to see the children of Israel from a vantage point he has never had before. It’s why Jehovah tells Abraham to “lift up thine eyes” so that he can see the promises.

If I lift up my eyes, just as Abraham did, my eyes are opened. The gift to me is the person’s days, weeks, and entire seasons in my head at the same time. I see not only the color of this particular tea rose/person (which to my uninitiated eyes is a really vile bright pink) but also its life cycle, its attack by aphids the summer before I bought the house, the premature dying off this season but the vigorous growth next spring. If I am allowed to see as He sees, with a creator’s invested eyes, I can see the whole person, not only as they are, but as they have been, as they can be and as they will be. If I can resist coloring the temperature of that particular day and the action of that particular moment with a significance it doesn't have; if I can manage to “hold every bit of [the person]” in my head “at one time,” I think I might just explode with the vision of them. Patience may actually become genuine; forgiveness unfeigned and readily at hand; the individual days enjoyable.

Not only for them but also for me.

Should I Stay or Should I Go Now

If I go there will be trouble

An' if I stay it will be double

A woman I know claims to have had three marriages—all with the same man. There is the marriage when they were young, combative, volatile, restless, when her husband was climbing, building, stretching, his energy threatening to consume her. That was the marriage into which their children were born. Then there’s the second marriage in which their children were raised. It was the time in which she learned to draw boundaries, to claim the mother ground within her and to stand fast. To let him be what he is and learn to live with his very nature, and to find her own life. Now, there’s a third marriage—they’re older, the children raised and lovely; her husband’s inexhaustible supply of energy seems to have settled to a steady flow; he’s divesting himself of his companies, talking retirement, and she’s talking about it in some beautiful, foreign shore, like Majorca, or Monterey Bay, or Rio de Janeiro—if only her dogs didn’t have to go into quarantine for six months. We’ve always believed they’ve loved each other; now, they seem to actually like each other.

____________________

In the novel Divining Women, Kaye Gibbons presents the dilemma of two people who enter marriage with assumptions they thought were so perfectly clear, they never needed discussing. But, when the husband takes his young wife to India for an extended honeymoon because the husband “wanted to see what they thought mattered in Calcutta,” the marriage is doomed. In Calcutta, the husband discovers that what matters in Calcutta is “not whether the fricassee was prepared right.” He remembers, “so many things made an impress on me. Manners meant dignity and not causing another person pain. But I was certainly causing my new wife pain. Poor thing, she hated it, and hated me for taking her. I was leaving her asleep in the mornings and walking out to the river and weeping. I wished I’d found out everything I did before I married her, but we all learn what we need at the right time, when we can bear the news. If she and I had been able to let one another be, things would have worked out differently.

The wife, however, cannot forgive him for being who he is. She “was determined to make him pay for, as she described it, one day marrying her in high Episcopal style, with the promise of including her in the exquisite Washington society he had always known, and then announcing right after ‘that strange honeymoon trip to India, of all places,’ that he was now ready to explore some nontraditional interests he had been hoarding. . . . She was angry that he could not simply be satisfied with the vision of the two of them floating forever on a river of inherited family money. By her lights, he could work in the mornings, managing investments, have lunch at a club, and then come home and tell her how handsome she looked in her new clothes. She had everything sorted out.”

The young husband tried to tell her, “he had not duped her or misled her.” But “she would not let herself understand that he was only searching for an identity beyond his family’s wealth and position. He could not make her see that he would be a happier man if he could satisfy his vivid curiosity and that they were both blessed that he had the means to do it while keeping her beautifully clothes and shod.” He tried to explain “a hundred times in a hundred ways that they could each do everything they wanted to do, individually and together, that he had realized how unfair it was for one of them to wither while the other thrived.”

I’m of the mind that when we marry, we marry a creation, fired mostly by the hopes and dreams which started long before we ever stopped at that library table on the fifth floor of the Harold B. Lee. Then, as the husband in Diving Women said, we learn things about them and they learn things about us, “when we can bear the news.”

My question is, “What does it mean to ‘bear the news?’”

__________________

I’ve often thought that I agreed to be married to Kevin more than once. The first time, I did it publicly, kneeling across an altar, and promising to give myself to him and create a union with him. The other times were just between me and myself. Those moments when, looking at the situation, you agree again, in your heart and mind, to be married this new particular way. You know, when you see that, no matter what you thought and hoped and dreamed, he will never sing you to while he plays the guitar and the two of you stare into the flames of a campfire he has started himself. I remember one night when we had been married about eight months (which means I was about seven months and three weeks and five days pregnant), we were awakened to footsteps on our roof. I nudged Kevin, and said, “Go out there. See who it is.” He replied, without hesitation, “You go out there. I don’t want to go out there.” Moments like that, when the heart of a lion you always imagined shows itself to be, in this particular situation, the heart of a lion cub. That’s when you think to yourself, “Hhmmm . . . That’s how it’s going to be.” The corollary is one of two possible responses. Either, “I suppose I will agree to live with that.” Or, “That I cannot do.”

The incident on the roof is small compared to finding out your wife is cheating on you, or your husband has a longstanding addiction to pornography that he cannot, and seemingly does not, want to break. But I think the question one faces is the same: “What do I do now?” I know there are some people who have said, only half in jest, “If you cheat on me, I’m cutting it off.” But, I’m not so sure the next action in a marriage when you run up against the line you’ve drawn is a given. You don’t have to stay—as you might feel pressured into by your faith. You don’t have to leave—as you might feel advocated by your parents and close friends. You can choose to leave or you can choose to stay. Either choice is a valid choice. Perhaps not the choice that would be made by your husband, or was made by your mother who encountered something similar, or that is advocated by your local minister who, in a spirit of full disclosure, is mandated to advocate for the preservation of the marriage and the family. But either choice is a valid choice. Neither one is an easy choice or the end to all your troubles. Both choices have work attached to them.

Here’s what I would think about if I were at what I thought was a marital crossroads:

1) I take me with me.

I do know that if I left Kevin today, I would take with me my insecurities; my almost pathological need to eliminate all financial risk; my weird wiring when it comes to intimacy and sexual fulfillment and its direct correlation to the size of my stomach; my shoe fetish; my seeming inability to pack away laundry and throw away old issues of Sunset magazine because I might need to know the location of the west’s most beautiful secret campsites which have now been revealed to 235,000 readers and which, if I’m married to Kevin, I’ll never need anyway; my longing to be somewhere else other than where I am that rears its ugly head every few months; and my inarticulate love for him in the face of his actually requesting to be told by me that I love him. I’ll take all of me with me. And, when or if I start again with somebody else, it will be with me still. That’s the news of me. So, even if Kevin did go out and hire the entire Laker Girls team, I’d still be taking me with me if I left. (Just to put the record straight, in our marriage, it is far more likely that it would be me hiring Michael Flatley and his flock of Riverdancers.) And this man, flawed as we both are, loves me and the junk in my trunk.

2) The news is not altogether unexpected, and cuts right into the heart of our own frailties.

As much as we try to pretend we are shocked at what our spouse has done, the news is, more often than not, not altogether surprising. Their acts seem to be attached by a nylon cord right to the very center of our own frailty. Their act/tendency is what we have seen and refused to name because by naming it, we have to acknowledge that there is this thing about our spouse that really makes us feel nervous, unloved, unwanted, threatened, or even fearful. I have found that there are certain qualities in Kevin that I am attracted to, which, in their unadulterated, pure state also happen to unnerve me. I’ve come to understand that, in some strange cosmic algorithm, we choose partners whose strengths cut into our weaknesses, and who will force us, just by being who they are, to move out of our comfort into new and better ways of being—if we so choose.

3) Most acts don’t have automatic consequences, especially not the ones we want to be affixed.

There’s a legal concept called strict liability. It means that once the act is done, the punishment is affixed. It doesn’t matter if you didn’t mean to do the act or you didn’t know the act was a crime. If you do it, you’re guilty. For example, speeding is a strict liability crime. It doesn’t matter if you thought the speed limit was 85, and so kept it at 84. All the police officer needs to do to prove you guilty of speeding in a 65 mile per hour zone is clock you going over 65.

Adultery doesn’t work that way. Being the wife of an adulterer does not mean you get out of the marriage free. Nor does being the husband of a shoplifter or a manic depressive. There aren’t many strict liability crimes in the gospel law reporters. Nor have I found a gospel sentencing guideline that mandates that some acts are just so much worse than others. What makes a seeming inability to turn away from pornography more abhorrent than a woman who refuses to give herself willingly and joyfully to her husband, choosing instead to lie in the bed made for her by some abusive male in her past. Tell me why an inability to stop spending on credit cards to fill the emptiness inside is less troubling than the man who is still playing Modern Warfare 3 at the age of 37. The impact on the other spouse is equally as painful in each circumstance. However, when it comes to sexual improprieties, our community seems to think that the particular piece of news of infidelity is an instant get out of jail free card.

If, in the face of our spouse’s infidelity or unceasing bad moods and inability to love and appreciate us or our long-standing unhappiness, we choose to leave a marriage, the choice is actually ours. That’s an important distinction to make. Their act might have driven you to ask the question, “What do I do now?” The answer to the question is not an automatic “This marriage is over.”

4) The invitation to become “even as I am” is never more meaningfully issued than in a marriage between two equally flawed partners.

At times, it would appear that the choice before you is completely clear. It’s those times when your stomach’s heaving, and your mind recoils at what has been done. At this moment (and in those other moments where the rage will rear its head and infect your present), you want to rip his head from his shoulders, kick it down the stairs, and then stop to bandage the wound. At this particular moment, the need to inflict equal pain to the pain you feel is probably the overwhelming urge, followed by waves of an almost self-pitying, “How could I let this happen to me? How could I have been so blind? I’ll never be able to trust him again. ” Even in this moment, when face to face with your partner’s frailty, that has, it seems, ripped through the heart of you, one very real option is to stay and to learn, with this person, what it means to be married “for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, for time and eternity”.

In reality, ninety-nine percent of what the human mind can conceive of doing is forgiveable, and the doer redeemable. Even by us. Christ forgave the adulterer a.k.a the cheating spouse—real or virtual. He embraced the unbeliever, a.k.a. the non-church attending spouse or the one who left the fold even when she promised she wouldn’t. He welcomed the thief a.k.a the spouse who takes what is not his; and forgave the betrayer and his accusers, a.k.a. the spouse who puts other interests before his/her family and the spouse who believes every false rumor and innuendo. Christ forgives them all. He does not refuse them membership in his church, or entrance into his temple. He allows their lives to go on, and continues to bless them in accordance with their efforts and best intentions. The quality of His mercy, like Portia describes, “is not strain'd/ It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven/Upon the place beneath.”

This concept of Christ’s mercy is what I would think long and hard about the most. Because, long after Christ and my spouse have worked their issues out, I might be standing, with my arm raised, waiting to be called on to offer my opinion as to the injustice of it all and the appropriate punishment. I would be waiting for the pound of flesh that is never taken. And I would have missed completely the invitation to become even as He is.

In The Merchant of Venice, Shylock, tired of being persecuted for being a Jew by the Christian merchant Antonio, writes a contract the breach of which allows him to take a pound of flesh from Antonio. Salerio, his friend, asks Shylock why he would write such a contract. What would he do with a pound of flesh? Shylock replies: “To bait fish withal: if it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge.” I suspect there’s many a good woman who stands with her broken marriage contract in hand waiting for God to take his pound (two would be better) of flesh out of the man who broke her heart and broke up their family. And she keeps on waiting. God, it seems, allows the man to go forward with little or no apparent consequence for his actions. It’s rather a conundrum to find oneself in: watching as a man who promised to love you and honor you and be faithful to you breaks his promise, then gets only what appears to be a disciplinary slap on the wrist, while you are left with the kids, and he remarries—in the temple! Hardly seems fair; his probation doesn’t seem equal to the pain he caused you. Yet, on he goes, while you stand helpless to stop his progress and unable to gain fitting revenge.

The conclusion to Portia’s speech on mercy is particularly poignant here: Mercy “droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven/Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest: It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.”

__________________

I suppose what I am trying to say is that at the moment where we see clearly the particular news of our marriage, there is a very real opportunity to step forward into a new space, to stay and work through this with the one person to whom we have bound ourselves in a union larger than our present, individual feelings and needs. I don’t believe that extending mercy means we have stay. It’s not mandatory. But there is always contained within the act of one who hurts us, an invitation to forgive. When it’s our spouse, the invitation to forgive includes an invitation to stay. And, if we do, I sense that there could result from that decision a kind of union that many of us perhaps never reach. Imagine the relationship that is forged between those who chose to remain married, and honestly work through each other. Imagine the intimacy, the depth of feeling. It could be, I think, a sweet, deep and powerful life together.

Title: “Should I Stay or Should I Go,” by The Clash.

O, Holy Child of Bethlehem

It’s always been a portent moment for me when the nurse places one of my newborn children on my chest. It’s been a moment of meeting—but not for the first time. Any woman who’s been pregnant will know that you know what the particular child is like before they’re born. After nine months, you know them well. Julia pushed back against my poking her, almost as if she wanted to play. Adam rolled over, in one huge roll, about every three hours, like a tidal wave in my belly. The moment when that little body was placed on my chest, and I felt the weight on my breastbone, my words were always something to the effect of “Well, hi. There you are. Welcome.” Finally, a face to put with the person I had come to know under my ribs. A helpless, wrinkled, red face, and squirly, squirrely body, just beginning, just the promise of a life.

Mother’s pride aside, objectively speaking, there’s not much to recommend a newborn baby, especially if it’s not yours and it hasn’t been born by C-section. The head’s a little crushed, maybe even pointed. The fingers and toes, while perfect, can look alien. The legs are so skinny and slightly bowed from being curled up around the head. The belly’s distended. The eyes are swollen shut. And the hair can be outrageous. Then, for the first month, the baby doesn’t really do anything except cry, eat, sleep, need to be changed. Repeat every two hours; three if you’re lucky.

You don’t know when they place those seven-pounds in your arms what that little body will turn into. I didn’t have any idea that Christian, who once thought he was a dog for almost a year, when presented with the choice, would choose not to participate in team practice on the Sabbath. I had no way of knowing that Seth’s skinny, and I mean, baby bird skinny little body would hold a heart that will play on his hands and knees, even now at 14, quite happily, with a three-year old for hours. Could we have foreseen that Adam would notice? He notices need, hurt, unkindness, loneliness, and is troubled by it and wants to solve it. When they place that little body in your arms, you can’t possibly see the grandeur of the spirit that you and your husband created a body for. At least, I didn’t see it. When they were born, I couldn’t see the fullness of any of these four. I couldn’t see their glory, their power, their strength, their brilliance and beauty. I couldn’t see what being their mother would make of me. They were just babies.

Yesterday morning, I was driving down the diagonal after enjoying a very peaceful seven in the morning Christmas shopping expedition to University Mall. As I rounded the corner and came down into Provo, I was thinking about what to say this morning. The thought came to me, “How fitting that He, Christ the King, comes to us as a baby.” A wrinkled, turkey-legged, alien-fingered baby—if he was like just about every other baby ever born, with not much to recommend him, and more work than apparent reward in the beginning. Was it possible to know that in this baby, “the hopes and fears of all the years were met in him tonight?”

Some of those who saw the baby Jesus knew him for what he was—the glory of the people Israel. In Luke Chapter 2, Simeon, a man “just and devout” had confirmed to him through the Spirit that he would not see death before he “had seen the Lord’s Christ.” About 5 weeks after Jesus was born, Mary and Joseph brought the baby Jesus to the temple to be presented to the Lord. Simeon took the baby in his arms and blessed God, saying: “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace . . . for mine eyes have seen thy salvation which thou hast prepared before the face of all people. Simeon was not the only person to know the baby. Anna, a prophetess, who spent her days in the temple fasting and praying, saw the five-week old baby, and “in that instant gave thanks likewise unto the Lord.” But most of us don’t have those eyes to see. We see only a baby, or the promise of the good news.

We don’t know, until we have lived with Christ and his gospel of peace, of repentance and forgiveness, of good will and compassion, the full force of his power and glory. We cannot possibly know the blessings of repentance, the joy of human love, the power of obedience and priesthood. We cannot see what the Father, through Christ, can make of us, if we will. I believe it will not be revealed, unless we are willing to let the Christ child enter our hearts; not Christ the King, but Christ the baby. There’s something about a baby, its important little weight, its trusting grip that moves us, that creates a wanting in us to keep it with us always.

I once wrote to Seth, while his body was just a zygote in my womb, that I was so grateful to find out he was there. I explained to him that his father and I had prayed for another child, prayed so hard that every day turned into a prayer. That months, then years had passed without the answer we wanted. That our wanting had turned into waiting. Then, quietly, softly, without trumpets or brass bands, Seth had taken up lodging. I told him I hoped he would stay, that he would grow strong and healthy. I promised him that I would do all I could to keep him with me.

Philip Brooks writes, “how silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given, so God imparts to human hearts, the blessings of his heaven . . . no ear may hear his coming, but in this world of sin, where meek souls will receive him, still the dear Christ enters in.” I see that moment of the Christ entering our hearts like the moment we see our children for the first time, when our hearts open and they become part of us forever.

The message for me this Christmas is that if we will allow the Christ child to enter our hearts, we begin a journey that will reveal to us Christ the King in his power and majesty. By the Christ child, I mean the simple truths of the gospel. It’s not a fancy, impressive theology. It’s quite simple: love your Father in Heaven; love your neighbor; do good to those around you; repent; repeat. Just like taking care of a baby. If we will allow his simple truths, that because he was born, we shall be saved from our sins; that he is the light of the world, to lodge in our hearts, we can be new creatures in him. It might not be right away. Just like raising children, the process takes time. But the first step is opening our hearts to the Christ child to see that the “peace and goodwill” promised by the angels does, in fact, come first through the baby who lay in the manger, and then through the man who hung on the cross.

Phillips Brooks wrote a fourth verse to O Little Town of Bethlehem that captures for me the prayer of my heart this morning: “O holy child of Bethlehem, Descend to us we pray; Cast out our sin and enter in; Be born to us this day; We hear the Christmas angels the great, glad tidings tell; Oh come to us, abide with us; Our Lord Emmanuel.” May we open our hearts and give room for the precious weight of the Savior in our lives, take that holy child and his promises to our breastbone just as we cradled our own children in their first hours, and live with him, grow up with him into peace and goodwill.

Title: from, O Little Town of Bethlehem, by Phillips Brooks

Wrestling with Angels and Demons

I will completely upfront about this: My daughter, Julia, went to high school with Brandon Davies.

I remember watching Brandon run up and down the court at Provo High, when it looked like he had borrowed his grandfather’s size 17 feet, socks and shoes, and was trying them on his 6 foot 4 inch body for a Halloween skit. In my mind’s eye, I see him sitting in the hot tub, lounging around the pool, and hanging with Julia in the Courtyard of Provo High. I see him shooting hoops with six-year-old Adam in Gym 1, tolerating a rug rat who couldn’t even heave the ball up to hit the net. We watched the Super Bowl together at my brother-in-law’s house and Brandon plowed his way through carne asada, guacamole, and more Sweet Tooth Fairy cupcakes than is healthy.

Brandon’s a sweet and gentle soul. We don’t really make them any other way here. Adopted by a single mother, he’s been raised by committee and community and incredible resilience in Provo, Utah. Having won the gene pool lottery, and grown to 6 foot 9 inches with the wingspan of an albatross, and the demeanor of a golden retriever, he plays basketball for BYU. Make that, played basketball until two days ago, when he was suspended for having violated the Honor Code at BYU. He is, at most, barely 19 years old.

For the totally disconnected from current events, the BYU men’s basketball team is currently ranked third in the country. Prior to Brandon’s public whipping (thought the village stocks went out along with Puritan witchhunts), commentators and bracketologists had the Cougars possibly securing a No.1 seed in the upcoming NCAA tournament. Within hours of BYU administration making the announcement that Brandon was suspended, it was national news. I looked up from my workout on Wednesday morning to see film of Brandon as the background for the ESPN morning show. I was horrified. I still am.

Brandon is, for me, the blemished lamb sacrificed on the altar of policy and public relations. I am utterly unable to find any genuine concern for the individual amongst the decision that purported to save Brandon Davies’s soul and BYU’s reputation by dismissing him from the third-ranked basketball team in the nation in the final week of the season. In the process, they blindly, callously exposed this poor child to the scrutiny of millions.

Could they not see what would happen? Are they so without imagination as to not realize that this man-child, with the gentle heart and soul, would be analyzed, dissected, speculated about, and run up and down every talk show and online chat board? Are they so committed to procedures and consistency that it is impossible to contemplate a kinder, gentler way to discipline, one that takes into account the totality of the circumstances? If that were their child, would have they acted so ruthlessly? Does God really require such sacrifice?

Honor Code Office and other suited officials, meet me in the lobby of the Kimball Tower or whatever glass building you take refuge in these days, to explain this process. You have no clergy-parishioner privilege that would preclude you from answering such questions. Explain how it is—without divulging any personal information—that such a decision is arrived at. What harm would there have been in waiting until the end of the semester, waiting until Brandon can privately make his penance?

I was and am still horrified at the shortsightedness of an administration that would expose this child in such a way. It’s humiliating enough to make your slow way to a bishop’s office in the back corner of the church house and pretend you’re there to talk about Tithing Settlement or an Ecclesiastical Endorsement. But to have your attempt to make a right way through life exposed to millions because the policy manual calls for a certain action, and calls for it now, is horrific, medieval and certainly not Christian in any shape or form.

I’m sure I can anticipate the justifications that were made: These are sacred funds; these are the rules; these are the promises each student makes when they sign the Honor Code; he signed the agreement saying he wouldn’t do whatever he did. (And I don’t know what it is or care, for that matter. But one thing I do know, there’s thousands of other freshman at BYU who having those same learning experiences.)

1) Sacred funds.

I publicly promise that my tithing funds can be used in the education of 19-year old boys who are making their way through life, learning how to use their bodies and minds for good, making and admitting to mistakes, making those adjustments that turn them into more reasoned, seasoned and disciplined adults. The same sacred funds are, after all, used to pay for the treatment of pedophiles, porn addicts, abusive spouses and parents, and gamblers (many of them BYU students and alum) through LDS Family Services. I don’t know of any more sacred way to use these funds than to make a place of education where a teenager can be taught and mentored along his way to adulthood with space and tolerance built-in for error. I’m sure there are others who feel like I do: our sacred funds can be used to pay the tuition of those children who don’t quite know how to be perfect yet. Here’s hoping when they are the bishops and branch presidents of the next thirty years, they will show an equal compassion and tolerance for my children and grandchildren’s frailties and flailings.

Just in case you’d actually like to use my tithing to build a chapel in Voortrekker’s Rus, South Africa, make a separate fund, like you did with the Perpetual Education Fund. Call it the “sinning-but-hoping-to-get-it-right-one-day” scholarship fund. I’ll put my money into that. I’ll make a special contribution every month, writing it in under “Other” on the Contributions slip. I’m sure my children will fit into that category when their time comes to be a freshman in college.

2) Have a policy; can’t make an exception blah blah blah!

Policies, procedures and rules are lines in the sand. They can be altered, redrawn, or erased altogether. Policies, and especially procedures, are just best attempts at making principles flesh. Rules are ways to make us feel safe about ourselves. If we follow the rules, then we know we’re in the right way. Neither policies, nor procedures, and especially not rules, are set in stone; all are of our own making. They have not been revealed, nor are they engraven on tablets of gold. There are always moments in which rules are suspended—even God’s lower laws give way to the application of higher laws when miracles take place.

In bankruptcy law, when a debtor petitions for Chapter 13 bankruptcy, the court determines whether to confirm the repayment plan by looking at the totality of the circumstances. There are a myriad of factors the courts can look at to determine whether to grant a petition, and not every factor has to be considered. Sometimes, courts get lazy and fail to really look at the totality of the circumstances. They apply several factors in an analysis that looks more like a formula than a really in-depth analysis. The holdings of those courts which take a short-cut in their analysis can be sent back for a review that considers the total circumstance of each, individual debtor. Using a totality of the circumstances analysis, the outcomes are not easy to predict. Each outcome is individual to the petition.

It's far easier to apply an equation. But the law does not allow it. It's hard to perform a totality of the circumstances analysis. It requires the judge to put thought and effort into the deliberation, to examine without preconception, and to allow for individuality. Seemingly inconsistent decisions will need to be defended, if appealed.

I promise you, the rest of the world is able to live with the ambiguity and differing end results that a totality of the circumstances analysis brings. I would expect different treatment, even if just in timing, for Brandon Davies than for Tiffany Rogers, age 18, from Sandpoint, Idaho, majoring in Math, and living in Liberty Square, who lines up every home game for admission to the All Sports Pass student section. Tiffany doesn’t have to figure out her life in the public eye. She can sleep with her boyfriend, indulge in online gambling, cross-dress, snort cocaine, get raving drunk or even, evil of all evils, get a tattoo or a second ear piercing in Park City, then make her confession to her bishop in the make shift bishop’s office in the Testing Center. She will not be exposed; not held up for examination. Not discussed on every sports channel across America, and at the circulation desk of the Law Library.

Tiffany is not Brandon; Brandon is not Tiffany. And BYU is bigger than both of them, and can embrace and allow for difference in the application of the principles of confession, repentance and forward progress. Like the ark that crosses the Jordan, the gospel of Christ and the university that supposes to embrace its principles does not need the steadying hand of consistency, of rules to make sure that the university is not caught harboring fugitives from perfection on its sporting teams.

3) The Honor Code

The Honor Code does not make BYU unique. BYU is not the only university with an Honor Code. For example, Haverford College, a liberal arts college with Quaker roots, has one. It’s administered by the students, and created each year by common consent in an all-student caucus.

Perhaps what makes BYU unique is the heavy handedness with which the Honor Code is wielded, like a Sword of Damocles. Do you know that it’s a violation of the Honor Code to take the shopping carts off the Creamery premises? The Creamery is a little corner market that abuts the residence halls. The signs attached to the carts actually threaten to turn the offenders into the Honor Code Office! For using carts to take groceries home.

The Honor Code system and the application of punishment as it now functions at BYU deters the living of an honest, seeking life. It encourages lying, covering up and living with deceit by any BYU student, or faculty for that matter, who represents the university in any capacity. I can imagine that athletes, performers or any other student who is excellent in any way, soon realize that they will have to keep their normal, course of life errors and off-track moments to themselves for the four years it takes them to graduate from this university.

While they’re here, they’ll have to keep their stories straight and their issues under wraps. Any other honest attempt at reconciliation is sure to meet with the modern-day equivalent of a public whipping and then banishment from the village. Sort of like a shunning really. (Dwight would be proud.) So, athletes, dancers, cheerleaders, and Vice-Presidents carry with them the effects of sin—the remorse, the self-doubt and loathing, the inability to completely move forward without looking back—until they leave. The hope is that they still feel to make right once they have left the institution that, out of any institution, should have allowed them to do so within its walls. After carrying the heavy load for so long, it starts to feel normal, the way life is. It’s hard to imagine a different, better way.

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The God I know, and the one I hope Brandon knows, is a God of exceptions. Not only is He exceptional, defying predictability and process, He makes exceptions. His prophets, whom he continues to use as prophets and kings, commit adultery. His disciples, even the one upon which he builds his church, deny their Savior. His people try his patience and build golden calves. Yet, he stays his hand. He is not a God of rules or of consistent outcomes. Perversely, we, who call ourselves his people, take pride in an external, consistent application of the law.

A certain woman, taken in adultery, was brought by the Pharisees before Jesus. They told him, with what I am sure were very earnest faces, “Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act. Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou?” We all know what Jesus said, as he drew and redrew lines in the sand.

On hearing his reply, each man, “being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one.” I can imagine the weight of the stones the scribes and Pharisees had secreted in their pockets suddenly became very heavy. If I were one of those Pharisees, committed as I would have been to the strict observance of the law and the avoidance of any contact with things gentile or unclean, I would have looked for some private corner in which to empty my pockets. It would have ruined my public image to be seen relenting in the “strict observance of the law” and avoiding the application of the “multiplicity of ceremonial rules” to which I normally devoted myself.

And while I am emptying my pockets and counting my own sins, the crowded village square empties until it is no-one but Jesus and the woman. In a motif as old as time and as timeless as every act that ever wanted righting, Christ and the woman have an intimate exchange about her heart and his perception of her and his faith in her ability to move on: “Go, and sin no more.”

The conversation is as these conversations should always be: just the two of them. No Pharisees, no scribes, no press, no public whipping, no stoning, no flagellation.

Surely there was a better way?

[There is no song that reflects what I feel. Perhaps a funeral dirge, with a lone bagpiper, piping my sorrow and disillusion]

Let Me Ride on that Long Black Train

“Between stimulus and response there is a space.”

Standing in front of the shoe racks at TJ Maxx blows my brain. I act like somebody under the influence. Somehow when I get in front of shoes, new shoes, all in my size, in so many different colors and shapes and feels, my heart beats faster, my face breaks out into a smile all on its own. Without even knowing what’s happening (isn’t that the language we all use when we want it not to be our fault?), I’m taking off my tennis shoes and pulling up my sweatpants to try on the Naughty Monkey electric blue platforms. (And with what am I ever going to wear those? The turquoise bustier?)

Sometimes, there’s nothing quite like an hour in TJ Maxx trying on shoes to lift the spirits. Julia and I went one lunch time, and ended up trying on every 9.5 shoe on the rack. The more ridiculous the better: the thigh-high, black suede pointy-toed boots with ankle chains, yes! The purple Converse with 70s peace emblems, you betcha! The taupe Jessica Simpson five-inch wedge with striated gladiator straps that wrapped around Julia’s ankle and calf so that she looked like she was wearing a fish! We were guffawing when she grabbed those off the rack. Then she put them on. We both tilted our heads, and said, disbelievingly, “You know . . . those are kinda cute, actually, in a really weird way.” But, onto the BCBG zebra-striped Mary Janes with waffle sole.

When I’m with Julia, I can be the responsible parent, and leave the store with only the black Spandex sliding shorts we came in to buy, with maybe a cute black casual jacket thrown in because the one she’s been wearing for two years is now a charcoal grey she’s washed it so many times. But, when I’m on my own . . .

I know the Madden Too pumps with the wavy back detail will fit my feet like a glove. I don’t even really need to try them on. Ditto for the Madden Girl black-and-white tiger print platform peep-toe with maroon heel and a maroon leather rosette on the toe. Not so sure about the AK red square-toed with the gold buckle. Sometimes, the square toes cut across the ball of my foot. Wish I could wear those ballerina slippers from Ralph Lauren, but my arches are so flat, my feet splay out like a retired mallard who’s served lunchroom for the past twenty years. At least they did last time I tried on a pair like that. But, hang on . . . maybe . . . Nope. Still flatter than flat. And are these really Fossil biker boots in a really impractical cream? Hyperventilate . . . rip off the dove grey Bandolino puss-in-boots ankle booties.

I may be exaggerating, but not by much.

Time slows down; an hour feels like fifteen minutes. I emerge from the Maxx, sweaty, hair flyaway, slightly queasy, like I’ve just eaten Thanksgiving dinner. I always have at least two pairs of shoes I do not need but that make me happy to see on my feet clutched in my little paws.

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What is it about me, when the shoe is on the foot, that I do not stay at “Oh, that looks good” and just enjoy the sight of it, and the snug feel of the leather against my instep? I just about always engage in a dialogue of commentary and negotiation. Despite my promises to myself when I pull up to the store that I will only look, I’m almost helpless when I go inside and stand in front of those racks. The colors, the designs, the shape of the heel, the gleam of the patent, the buckle design so artfully placed, and the drape of the leather on the boot. I know I’m going to buy something.

I do have that moment of mental and emotional balance, when the shoe is on my foot, and I’m looking at it in the little mirror that’s angled beneath the bench, when I see it and think, “Oh . . . that looks good.” Then the thoughts come and I’m off down the slope: “It’s only 19.99. I don’t have quite this color of orange. (How many orange pairs of shoes does a person need?) It’s only 19.99. It looks so cute. What’s one pair of shoes? I’ve worked hard this month. I can spend a twenty spot or two or three on a pair of shoes.” It’s hard to put up much of a fight when the voice inside your head is your own. Consequently, I try to limit my TJ Maxx episodes to less than one a month.

For each of us the impulse is different. I’ve shared my shoe obsession. It’s almost laughable, and relatively inexpensive. But still, at the end of a TJ Maxx binge, I feel foolish. Like I’ve been caught eating frozen custard straight out of the carton, with a soup ladle, while I lie on my bed on top of clean, crumpled laundry watching Premier League Soccer on a weekday afternoon.

There’s a definition for this kind of behavior. Health professionals define this as “impairment in behavioral control, craving, inability to consistently abstain, and diminished recognition of significant problems with one’s behaviors and interpersonal relationships.” It can also manifest itself in cycles of relapse and remission. That’s the definition of addiction.

The hard part about giving this a name and a set of symptoms is that then a person who likes French sandals on QVC, or crack mainlined, or Russian girls with horses, or chocolate mint chip by the gallon, or blackjack at the high roller tables, or cutting their arms above the cuff level, takes refuge in their disease. Once there’s a definition with symptoms and causes, there is no way to be other than diseased. The sufferer, or victim, or body possessed by evil spirits, has no choice other than the cycle of abstention and relapse. When, after a period of time in which we’ve been so very good and under control, the urge hits, with a renewed ferocity, to click through, or shoot up, or eat out of the five gallon bucket, or run the credit card, or reach for the blade, and we give in, it’s to be expected. All part of the disease. Abdication. Inevitable.

I’m almost certain I don’t buy that. By that, I mean the notion that relapse is inevitable. (I do buy the notion that close proximity is almost more than some can bear. That merely being in a home with the Internet is like a magnetic force for some. But inevitable? That I can’t accept.) Inevitability violates the basic tenets of agency and free will. No action is inevitable. There is always a space between the invitation and the action in which we get to decide our response. Granted, some of us have made that space so small, we’re actually Pavlov’s dog. But there is still a space.

Perhaps the hardest, gut-wrenching work of building a soul is that work that’s done in the infinitesimal space between impulse and action—denial, restraint, keeping a promise, deciding to be Lot instead of her. The hardest work is sitting in front of the computer looking at the screen and knowing that if we put our hand on the mouse and click on a few links, it will take us to what our body, our mind, even our spirit seems to be craving at this moment. Yet, we stay our hand. Or we listen to the voice in our head, which, irritatingly, sounds like the voice we love the best (our own), telling us something about just this once, won’t hurt, deserve it, horrible person, good person, useless to resist, can’t help it, how bad can it be, addicted. And off we go, tumbling down the rabbit hole into a black oblivion, from which we’ll emerge hours later, flushed, hair in an electric halo, clutching whatever version of crocodile T-straps, size 9.5 rings our bell.

Even if we capitulate, we will confess, if pressed, that there was that moment when the thought did cross our mind that perhaps this was not the best . . . . In the space between impulse and action, we hear clearly the question and we know the appropriate response. For a brief moment, we see clearly the path before us. There is a moment of repose—always—before the battle begins.

It’s before the reasons, the justifications, and the release of hormones, taste buds and chemicals flood our brains to influence us. It’s before we sit down at the computer, before we pull up to the front of the store, or open the fridge. It’s where the thought first crosses our mind. It might show like a bat flitting through on the first fingers of dusk. Or, if we’re deep in the trenches of unrestrained desires and impulses, it comes pounding on the church doors like a stranger begging sanctuary. In those moments, we might feel compelled to grant entry, giving in to the lie that there is no other way. But, if we’re honest in heart, there is always a moment of rest, in which we are neither acting nor acted upon. In that moment, we get to choose again, anew.

Title: from “Long Black Train,” by Bill and Maggie Anderson.