It’s like that little bow of my head snaps me out of the horrible trance I allow myself to get lulled into each day, in which I forget that everything and everyone is magic. Including me. Namaste.
Hard
This way of life—living out loud—is hard. It’s good, in many, many ways, but it’s hard too. Most of the people who read my stories don’t know me, but many do. And it’s tough, sometimes, on the people who know me. It’s hard on my family and my friends. Sometimes I wonder if it’s hard on my poor neighbors, who have to know SO MUCH about us. When I see them outside and they say, “How are you?” it’s funny, because they already know. It makes us closer and further apart somehow. At this point, when I meet someone new, I know immediately, by her face, whether she reads my work. When someone invites me to coffee, I want to say, “Perfect. Could you bring along four hundred extremely personal essays about your life so we can start on even ground?”
In many ways living out loud is the hardest on me.
I mostly love writing. It serves me, heals me, and satisfies the creative cat constantly clawing at my insides, trying to get out. It helps me make sense of things and holds me accountable to myself.
Recently I wrote an essay about my hopes and dreams, and I included in it my belief that my fourth child is in Rwanda. This is the response I received from one of my readers: “Hi Glennon
. . . may I make a gentle reminder that you DO have four children? Please don’t discount the one you chose not to raise on this earth. I’m wondering if that’s part of your desire to adopt, to make up for that decision?”
My, my, my.
First—let us be clear, this person had every right to have this response. Most of my readers have agreed to an unwritten rule that we don’t use the truths I tell against me. But no one’s forced to follow this rule. I walk onto this field every day without armor or weapons, by choice, and so the risk is that every once in a while, someone will shoot. It happens. It hurts, and it always, always makes me want to quit writing. But I don’t. When I want to shut off my computer, take my life back as my own, curl up into a protective roly-poly ball, I don’t. I come back to the page because I want to keep loving and remaining open, even though neither love nor openness is easy.
Love is not warm and fuzzy or sweet and sticky. Real love is tough as nails. It’s having your heart ripped out, putting it back together, and the next day, offering it back to the same world that just tore it up. It’s running toward pain and grief and brokenness instead of away from it. It’s turning the other cheek ’til you get whiplash. It’s resisting the overwhelming desire to quit, to save yourself for yourself. It’s exhausting and uncomfortable. Sometimes it’s ugly, like using your bare hands to search for gold in piles of crap.
I try to live my life the same way that a carpenter who lived two thousand years ago lived his. Once he stood on a hilltop and explained how to love well to a huge group of people hanging onto his every word, shocked by the countercultural ideas he was suggesting. And they recognized what he was saying as the Truth. He wasn’t telling them anything new, actually. He was just reminding them of everything that was already written onto their hearts.
The first time I read the things Jesus said about love, it all rang so true to me that my heart about exploded. It rang hard but true. Jesus said that when someone hurts you, you should love that person, and you should turn the other cheek over and over and over again. Seven times seventy times, I think. I’ve been writing for over five years, so I’ve got to be getting close to that number. Let’s just say that the four hundredth and ninety-first reader who tries to hurt my feelings is going to get his ASS KICKED.
But the person who questioned my desire to adopt is not lucky five hundred and thirty-nine. So, since my Jesus insists, I must turn the other cheek. The beautiful thing about turning the other cheek is that it forces you to break eye contact with the person who has slapped you, and this little turn changes your perspective. Now, all of sudden, you are looking away, forward, to something better, more beautiful, and your heartbeat settles, and your palms stop sweating.
So here I am. I’ve turned. I have a new perspective. I have tried to do what my friend Meghan often suggests, which is to “listen for the love” in what’s said to me. And so I’ll try to address this reader with love.
I have no doubt that my abortion has something to do with my desire to adopt. As do my parents’ teachings that we belong to each other, and Sister’s passion for the powerless, and my gift at mothering, and the extra money and other resources that God’s given me to share, and my faith, and my relationship with my husband, and my teaching experiences with underprivileged children, and on and on and on. My dreams are the sum total of everything that has ever happened to me, everyone I’ve ever met, every book I’ve ever read, every friend I’ve loved, every mistake I’ve made, and every song I’ve sung. So I would be silly to pretend to be certain that the two, abortion and adoption, are entirely unrelated. Everything is related to everything, obviously.
What begs to be addressed here is the reader’s suggestion that through adoption, I’d be assuaging my guilt for my abortion.
Please, let me be clear: I don’t have any shame about my abortion. None. I know that’s hard for some people to hear, because in some circles, if you are a Christian and abortion has been a part of your life, you are supposed to beat your chest and gnash your teeth and repent and then join crusades to end abortion by any means necessary, and speak through tears to large and small groups of people and swear to them that abortion was the worst mistake you’ve ever made and explain that you pray for your dead baby in heaven every night. THEN your sinner-self will be embraced and used as a poster girl. Literally, likely.
But I won’t say or do any of that, ever. Because none of that is true, for me. I know it’s true for some, and I respect that each has her own path. But it’s not true for me. I did the best I could at the time with the resources I felt I had. I’ve apologized, yes—but mostly to myself. I feel sad for the lost girl I was, and I am fiercely protective of that precious me who had to go through that scary day and the days that preceded and followed. Far from ashamed, I’m really quite proud of her for making it through. I don’t feel ashamed. I feel forgiven and whole, and I know that God never let go of my hand before, during, or after my abortion. God and I are clear on this issue.
As Maya Angelou says. “I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.” Amen. There is no room for shame or regret in my life. I’m too full. I am too forgiven, too adored, too fully loved, too full of ideas and dreams and passion to waste my precious life pretending to be crippled by something that is imaginary, like shame. Shame is an illusion. It disappears so easily.
I have confused feelings about the abortion issue. I think that “issues” like abortion are really just “people,” so it’s best to think of them as such. One at a time. One person at a time. I don’t feel shame about my abortion. But I don’t love abortion either. And/Both. I think there are probably better ways.
But I also think that if you really, really hate abortion, it might be nice to volunteer at a Boys and Girls Club and become a mentor, to offer a kid another way to experience love and connection so she doesn’t go looking for it in the wrong places. It might be wise to try to jump into the mix before it’s too late. I think the picket lines at the clinics might be a little too late. Offering unsolicited suggestions to a writer who had an abortion more than a decade ago is certainly too late.
As for me, in keeping with the one-person-at-a-time theory, I think that if a young friend confided in me that she was pregnant and was considering an abortion, Craig and I would hold her and tell her that she was loved and that she had many choices.
We would tell her that she could live with us, and we would make sure she was taken care of, physically and financially, and that if she wanted to keep the baby, we would help her start her life.
We would also tell her that if she didn’t want to raise the baby
, we’d raise the baby for her.
And if she decided that abortion was the only way, we would hold her hand and love her through it and demand that she know that she was as loved and adored the moment after the abortion as she was on the day she was born.
The only meaningful thing we can offer one another is love. Not advice, not questions about our choices, not suggestions for the future, just love.
What D'Ya Know?
I ran into an old friend yesterday who told me that she reads my stories and loves them. She said, thank you so much for writing. Instead of squirming and making up a million reasons to reject her gratitude, I replied, “You are so welcome.” Learning how to gracefully accept criticism and compliments is hard, but I’m trying.
Then she said: Do you ever worry that you might share too much? Do you worry that when you need to go back to work, no one will hire you because of your festive past?
Wow. Nope. Never worried about that.
I rushed home and yelled up the stairs: HUSBAND! Do you ever worry that when I need to go back to work, no one will hire me because I’ve told the world all about my festive past?
Husband: I mean, I’ve considered it.
Me: Why didn’t you ever mention anything to me?
Husband: It was too late.
Me: Oh.
Hm.
It seems that I may have rendered myself eternally unemployable by telling the truth.
I just have one thing to say about this: ARE THE UNEXPECTED BLESSINGS OF WRITING JUST NEVERENDING???????
I could die of excitement. I might have to start writing about a few things I haven’t even done just to seal the deal.
Retired! Retired! Forever retired!!! Yoga pants forever!!! Joy.
On Profanity
Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.
—Mark Twain
I receive plenty of mail from concerned readers about my occasional use of profanity. They believe God is offended by it, so they are too. I love my readers, and when they are hurt by my writing, I think hard about that.
Maybe God is up in heaven keeping lists of bad words and tallying how many times we say each one. Maybe those arbitrary four-letter words that are different in every country, culture, and era are the unwholesome, crude talk that the Bible insists we avoid. Maybe.
Or maybe God’s actually referring to the most harmful kind of talk in which people of light can participate: gossip talk and ungrateful talk and racist and sexist and classist talk and sarcasm and snide, dismissive, apathetic remarks and maybe even nasty phrases like more and not my problem and us/them and looking out for number one and the scariest phrase of all, the deserving poor. As if there is any other kind of poor?
Or maybe he’s talking about language intended to exclude people. Religious talk does that sometimes. Religious words can be used to make some people feel in and other people feel out. If they’re used that way, to suggest that some people are “God people” and others aren’t, then I think religious words become profane.
And you know, if four-letter words are used in a way that helps a sister express herself, tell her truth, make her art, relate to other people, get it OUT, then I think Jesus would dig it. I really do. I think Jesus likes REAL, whatever form in which it comes. We’ve each got deep wells of profanity inside us—deep enough to keep us busy bailing our own wells before dipping into anybody else’s.
I heard a radio sermon recently given by the minister of one of the largest churches in the country. He was passionately insisting that Christians should protect themselves from secular music. He used the example of rap and discussed its profanity with disgust. He said that adult Christians should stay away from it at all costs, or it could corrupt them.
It really got to me, that sermon.
Sometimes I listen to gangster rap. Don’t laugh. I like art, any art that is true and raw and real, and sometimes rap fits the bill. Sometimes as I listen to a song, an angry song, about poverty and dead ends and the hopelessness and the violence that are the inevitable results, I think, Jesus would love this song. I don’t think he’d cover his ears and turn up his nose and run away because of the crudeness. I don’t think the coarseness would offend him. As a matter of fact, the people who were a little rough around the edges never offended Jesus. The shiny perfect Pharisees did, though. He called them vipers and white-washed tombs. Poisonous. Perfect and shiny outside, decaying on the inside.
If Jesus were that pastor, I don’t think he’d tell his people to turn off the radio. I think he’d tell them to turn it up and listen, even if it made them uncomfortable. He’d tell them to listen to the stories of people who’ve been oppressed and marginalized and are crying out for someone to hear them and step in. He’d say, “Sounds a lot like the Psalms, doesn’t it?” And instead of allowing his followers to comfort themselves by creating false groups of us/them (they are so bad/we are so good; we must not become contaminated!), I think Jesus might ask them to listen to the despair and anger and to ask themselves, How am I part of this problem? What can I, as a neighbor, do to help level the playing field? Jesus didn’t say: “Love your neighbor, unless he offends you.” I’m not sure that being offended is a luxury that people who’ve been commanded to love each other can enjoy. Otherwise we are in danger of becoming people who were born on third base, peeved that those not issued a ticket into the ballpark refuse to complain sweetly enough.
I just think that if this pastor was so very upset by poverty and the agony it causes, maybe instead of suggesting that his well-off congregation flee from it, he might have suggested that they skip the mall and lunch after church and use the time and money to serve some meals to the poor instead. Maybe they could have gone to meet some of these gangsters. Maybe they could have headed to the prisons or streets, like Jesus did, instead of walking away.
There was a town in Jesus’s day called Samaria. Jews did NOT go to Samaria. Samarians were the “others” back then. Morally questionable, you know. Samaria was the wrong side of the tracks. Jews would add lots of time to their trips just to walk around Samaria. But the gospels are careful to mention that whenever Jesus traveled, he walked right through Samaria.
Always right through it, that Jesus. Rolling deep with his entourage, the twelve disciples. Laaaaiiiid back. With their minds on their manna and their manna on their minds.
Jesus actually met one of his favorite people in Samaria, someone he used as an example of how to love your neighbor—the Good Samaritan. Maybe gangster rap is like Samaria. Maybe “profane” blogs are. Maybe a lot of places we avoid are. Maybe there are people we can learn from in these places.
A minister recently sent me this quote: “The problem with the faith pool these days is that all the noise is coming from the shallow end. I waded into the deep end, and that has made all the difference.”
It’s easy to spend time in the shallow end of faith. It’s not a real commitment. You can just hop in, stand around in tight circles, and people-watch. You can examine your nails, read, reread, and catch up on all the gossip. You can talk and talk and talk and come to a great many conclusions and decisions and still maintain your hairstyle and even avoid smudging your makeup. This is important because you never know when someone will pull out a camera. You can spend an entire comfortable life there, really, just standing around being heard. You never even have to learn to swim in the shallow end. Good times.
I think the reason we don’t hear from the people in the deep end as often is because they’re actually swimming. In the deep end, you have to keep moving. It’s hard to look cool. It’s tiring and scary even, since it’s just you and your head and your heart in the silence of the depths. There’s not much chatting or safety in numbers in the deep end. You have to spend most of your time there alone. And it’s impossible to get any solid footing. You just have to trust that the water will hold you, and you have no other choice but to flail about and gasp for air and get soaking wet, head to toe.
There are
these monks called the Benedictines, and they live in monasteries all over the world and follow the Rule, which is a set of ideas about living in community written by St. Benedict a long, long time ago. I study this Rule before handling conflicts in my heart, friendships, home, and art. Here’s one of my favorite parts of Benedict’s Rule:
“Persevere. Bear with great patience each other’s infirmities of body or behavior. And when the thorns of contention arise, daily forgive, and be ready to accept forgiveness.”
If you are someone who considers cursing to be a weakness, please bear with us cursers with great patience, and daily forgive us. If you are someone who considers intolerance for cursing a weakness, please bear with us with great patience and daily forgive us. Persevere. Try to see through to the God in us. Swim in the deep end. As St. Benedictine says, “Listen with the ear of the heart.”
Gifts Are Bridges
Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
—Howard Thurman
I think God gives us each a gift or two so that we have something special to offer to others. But sometimes we make the mistake of assuming that the things we’re good at are common to everyone. We don’t recognize that our gifts are unique and therefore worth offering. For example, I am a good writer and a good listener. When my friends think of me, they think, “Glennon—she’s a good writer and a good listener.” But I never knew these skills were unusual until one afternoon in my friend Michelle’s kitchen.
We were talking about an upcoming party and I said: “You know, Michelle, parties stress me out because everyone brings delicious fancy dishes to share and I don’t really even own any dishes to put a dish on even if I wanted to make a dish. Which I don’t, by the way. So sometimes I avoid gatherings just because I’m too annoyed about all the dish bringing. I mean, even stopping at the store for a bag of chips seems overwhelming to me. I don’t know why. I have a sign in my house that says, ‘WE CAN DO HARD THINGS,’ and sometimes I think I should add a second one below it that says, ‘BUT WE CANNOT DO EASY THINGS.’ ”
Carry On, Warrior: Thoughts on Life Unarmed Page 15
