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I came to the Anglican tradition as an exhausted, falling-asleep-while-reading-the-Bible-non-praying-new-mother.  I needed help. I seemed to need visual aids and props to live out my love for Jesus and to receive His love for me, guiderails for the sake of longevity for my prone-to-wander heart.  In my new church, I found the faith-sustaining frame of liturgy, a tradition of Jesus followers who, on a weekly basis, called me to Scripture reading and heart-wrenchingly rich prayers along with confession.  I found a profusion of beauty and a symbol-saturated daily life.  I found the church calendar which invites me to “inhabit the story of God” (Living the Christian Year, by Bobby Gross).  My fragile faith felt sustained; maybe there was a chance that I would still be pursuing God at eighty.

My husband and I have four children between the ages of 6 and 13.  Our calendar year now coexists with a surprisingly baroque Christian Year.  Now, with many years under our belt of family ceremonies and celebrations, the children eagerly anticipate and contend for the traditions we have grown into. Some attempted traditions never came to life.  Some traditions require a revival and restart.  Some traditions have become so deeply a part of our identity that I wonder if they could ever be removed.  “Giving up Electricity for Lent” is one such tradition, an idea planted in a seemingly random conversation with friends some 14 years ago

During Lent we are invited into the gift and privilege of fasting.  We let go of something that creates more room for God, more room to listen to Him, more room to love Him better, more room to love others, and less room for distraction, less room for the things that become “dressed-up” idols.  Each member of our family gives up small, but costly, habits during Lent (desserts, coffee, hair gel), but what most significantly defines our 46 days before Easter is electric darkness and silence.

First, what this does not mean: We do not go off the grid. We leave on: the fridge, the A\C or heat (depending on variable Texas weather), the gas, the water. On Sabbath/Sunday, once a week, we watch a family movie.   Now, what it does mean:  For only two hours a day we have access to the computer, dishwasher, washing machine and dryer.  For 40 days there are no electric lights at all.  Appliances and the computer are quiet most of the day.  We do not listen to recorded music. This means lots of candlelight and daylight, lots of silence and darkness, lots of room for God and each other.

We have written much about this experience in our journals, how hard it is and the glimpses of life and truth we drink in. I could write about the ways in which our expectations of encountering God were met, exceeded or dashed.  I could write about the extensive verses in Scripture about Light and Darkness. But here I’ll just share a few of our Lenten Darkness observations:

1. We bump into furniture and drop things a little more, especially at the edges of tables and counters.  One might be reminded of episodes of the Three Stooges.
2.  Fasting electricity, it turns out, means fasting from light, noise, information, and easy entertainment…eyes, ears, mind, heart are all quieted.
3.  Dusk and sunset take on special meaning and beauty.  We have a heightened awareness of the light coming through the windows.  The reflections and shadows on different surfaces feel significant and precious.
4. Darkness in the city isn’t very dark.  Ambient light envelops us.
5. The best candle holders are the ones from Little House on the Prairie, a taper candle holder with a base plate and a finger loop. Tapers produce the brightest light.
6. The morning becomes especially welcome. There’s an anticipation of sunrise…light
7. The constant call to productivity as well as the ability to “get things done” fades and only the space around the candle or lamp is lit.  It is a call to presence (books, stories, conversation).
8. You cannot sweep or clean thoroughly by candlelight.  I appreciate the cleanliness possible with light.  Dust, dirt, spots and wax drips are more generously tolerated for 46 days.
9. We’ve gained a greater understanding of the significance of the solstices and those whose lives are directly shaped by the natural rhythms and forces.
10. Small children cannot manage wax candles (can teenagers any better?), so there is an intimacy and bonding in the night routines done in each other’s company.  There is something magical and charming about all four children brushing their teeth to candlelight.
11. Lent becomes missional in that I am able to talk with joy and freedom about Lent and Jesus to my most avid environmentalist friends and colleagues and students who are antagonistic to the church.
12. We sleep better, deeper.

This fast is only a rail, a prop, a visual aid.  But it provides a healing limitation that turns our hearts towards the Father, Son and Holy Spirit who in love are winning, wooing, crushing, and making us new.

We are not prepared to live this way for the other 319 days of the year, but you know Easter is coming by the way our children are preparing by counting candles and discussing creative ways to make their own music to replace KMFA.  Oh, yes, Easter is coming!

I love Ash Wednesday because it reminds me that I will die.

I am a product of a culture obsessed with youth and beauty. We honor the young and ignore the elderly. We worship comfort at the expense of wisdom. We refuse to consider that each of us are constantly moving closer to our own deaths. And we convince ourselves that we have control over the reality of living and dying…until the cancer, the terror, the tragedy.

I don’t know what it is about pregnancy, perhaps those millions of years (until this past century), when a woman’s body knew that giving birth meant the possibility of death. Maybe my body and my brain still haven’t connected over the existence of modern medicine and the rarity of death in childbirth for the average American woman. And so I’m feeling in these final days of pregnancy like my womb has switched on an awareness-radar, saying: Love everything! It could all end soon! The world is suddenly brighter and more fragrant. August is charming even as he whines while I’m on the phone. I’m seized by a need to stroll instead of hurry. What a strange thing to have hormones telling you you’re risking your life, possibly dying, and doing something so significant it could change the world.

So tonight, I will sit alone in an Ash Wednesday service, preparing myself to stand before a priest of the gospel and hear the words that ring the bell signaling the Lenten season: Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. I will feel near to death. Not like it is a monster coming at me, but like it is a sleeping terror I am allowed to approach.

The older I get, the more often I know people who have lost those they love. I’ve watched two friends lose siblings tragically in the past two and a half years. I spent the month of June two summers ago with a woman whose husband had lost his life to brain cancer when her children were preschoolers. Now they’re teenagers.

I know it’s possible. The tragedy could come to me. I could be the tragedy. There’s something to sitting alone with that thought on this first day of Lent, for a mother and a wife who is never completely alone, to approach the bowl of ashes and feel them pressed into the skin that covers my brain. I am made of this. I will be this again.

The ashes tell me that I am broken. I am human, not a god, not a marvel, not a woman of accomplishment. They tell me that whatever I do with my life, this body, in all its beauty, will be the same lump of ash as the vilest criminal in prison. The ashes make me look at myself: thirty-one years old. Have I lived long enough to have become the woman I want to be? Have I loved completely?

I want to ooze hospitality in my life. I want to see the people around me as Jesus. I want to care. I want to carry peanut butter and jellies in my diaper bag to offer to those begging just blocks from my home. I want people who meet me to sense peace in my presence. I want my son to joyfully remember his childhood as full of color and kindness and rich love. I want to patiently listen to my husband instead of storing up bitterness until I lose my temper.

I’m thankful that the ashes are about more than my own death. They’re about the death of the God whose brokenness and ultimate restoration heals my failure, who brings purpose to a life that could easily be written off as ordinary.

Last year, as I sat through our Ash Wednesday service, I watched a couple carry their ten-month-old baby with them to the pastor, who marked not only their heads but their little girl’s as well. I watched them carry her back to their seats, a bit shocked at the sight of ashes on a baby’s face.  I couldn’t help but consider their intentions. Were they reminding themselves of their child’s own brokenness as well? I thought: August will die. At some point he will die.

As I write this, he is asleep in his room, snuggled up with around 12 different stuffed animals. My other son, the one whose feet press into my side long enough for me to measure a length that simply should not be (those things are not going to fit on the birth certificate), is waiting for our God to give him a little shove out of me. He’ll breathe oxygen for the first time and scream at the injustice of life outside of my warmth. He will be fresh and beautiful and it won’t take long before he will be scarred.

It’s Ash Wednesday. So let these ashes remind us that what we need is not the avoidance of age, the fear of our own endings, but the glory of healing, of purpose, of life lived fully.

It’s Thankful Tuesday. It’s the day before Lent begins. Be thankful. And tell us about it.

My husband had a work thing that night. So I had packed August into the stroller and he and I had walked the five dark blocks to our church in San Francisco. I stood in the balcony, watching files of people moving toward the ashes. I knew that most of them were entering into a 40 day regeneration, a time of preparation for the celebration of Easter. And I knew that I was entering into a new life, a life of mothering two people. I was going to learn the secret of how one woman can hold two children and love them both with the same fierce burning. And I wasn’t giving anything up for Lent–thankyouverymuch–except for my sleep.

After my pastor marked my head, spoke my name: “Micha, remember that you are dust and to dust you will return,” I walked down stairs to the child care room. My son was there playing with friends. He ran across the room to me, his smile slowly shifting into a look of concern. “Mommy, what’s on your head?” he said.

I told him. I told him about the ashes, that they remind me how I need Jesus, how Jesus loves me. Then we were in the stroller in the cool air, walking past alleys and the porch where the homeless guy with the grocery cart always stayed. I held my pepper spray close by while we moved our way home. Then through the heavy wrought iron door, then into the lobby and up the stairs and finally to our apartment. August sat on the bench beside our door and I knelt my front-heavy body onto the floor to reach his feet. Our eyes looked at each other. August reached up to my forehead and ran his thumb along my black mark. He made the same mark on me that I’ve made on his forehead hundreds of times before at his bedtime. The secret physical blessing I touch him with, down and across: the cross. He looked at my face again, his thumb dingy with ash. He said, “You’re beautiful, Mama.”

Yesterday, my pastor, Cliff Warner, spoke from Mark 9, the story of Jesus’ Transfiguration, a word from the Greek that actually means “metamorphosis.” Jesus became Glory, right before the eyes of his disciples. Do you know what happened at the end of Mark 8, six days before Jesus allowed his disciples to experience that full display of his Godness? He foretold his death and resurrection. He pulled the crowd in close to him so they could hear his words: “If any one would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it” (verse 35).

As we enter into Lent this week, hear the words of my pastor. “The call to take up our cross must be accompanied by the splendor and the majesty of Jesus,” he said yesterday. That’s why these two passages are together. If we go into Lent demanding sacrifice of ourselves but lacking any vision of Christ’s beauty, we miss the miracle. We are just black ashes on an oily forehead. The power of Lent is in the grace poured out. We offer the Lord these forty days because we believe God loves us. We believe that when we let go of control, we will see more clearly the movement and the beauty of Jesus.

“Lent sacrifice must be accompanied by majesty,” Cliff said.

And last year I stood in the dimly lit hallway at 8 pm with my then two-year-old, who saw the mark of death on my face and called me beautiful. And that is what Lent is, my friend. It is the sacrifice, the cross in our skin. But it is always greater than what we offer. What we offer becomes magnified in the light of the God who reflects the sun in our presence, who is making the sad become untrue, who is taking our broken souls and rebuilding them into the people we were always meant to be.

Sacrifice and Majesty are sisters in the story of Jesus: Brokenness and Grace. Ashes and Beauty. The very pregnant and the newly born.

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(My New Year’s resolution was to read one poem a day. Every Friday, I share one of those poems with you.)

This week I read Rainer Marie Rilke with my writer’s group and discussed one of his poems from The Book of Hours (which I should really read). All that discussing Rilke got me a mood to read back through his selected poems. I don’t remember reading this poem when I read him in grad school. But, this time around, it struck me.

Rilke, who wrote at the turn of the 20th century, was Austrian and wrote in German. This is a translation. Once again, I’m blown away that such emotion can be conveyed in poem when it’s not even in its original language. His images are something special.

[You who never arrived]

by Rainer Maria Rilke, trans by Stephen Mitchell

You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don’t even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of the next
moment. All the immense
images in me–the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and un-
suspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods–
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.

You, beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house–, and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced upon,–
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back
my too-sudden image. Who knows? perhaps the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening…

I have a super smart friend here in Austin named Meghan. She’s new in town as well. She’s an attorney and she’s new at her firm and  has been expected to work obscene amounts of hours. She has a two-year-old. We were talking about our completely different daily experiences with motherhood: how she’s balancing her demanding working life with her mothering life; how I’m learning to be grateful instead of guilty for my life at home. Meghan used to stay home with her son during his first year. She struggled with the same sense of  guilt: Was she really contributing to her family? What was her value?

She had a friend who spelled it out to her like this:

If you were to hire someone to provide the same level of care for your child, a nanny who worked 10 hours a day playing, cleaning, getting him down for a nap, feeding, teaching, reading to him…what do you think that would cost you? You do have a job.  

I’ve been thinking about that myself. If I were to hire someone to care for my two children with the level of care and dedication and commitment I have, for a ten hours a day, seven days a week, I could be shelling out $50,000 a year. Then add taxes.

That’s $3,000 a month.

I may not be bringing any cashy cash into the home, but I’m starting to think of myself as someone who provides. I’m not just a greasy haired jammie wearer arranging playdates. I’m a provider.

Of course I believe my work is important. There’s a reason I chose to stay home and there’s a reason I continue to. But, just in case you stay home and you’re like me and have days where it feels like your life at home is something that smarter women laugh about far away behind their executive desks, while wearing “smart” suit jackets, I hope you’ll sit down and do some math and determine how much money you would have paid someone else to do your job today.

Sometimes, those of us SAHMs need to think of our time at home as a real job. A real job allows breaks and rest and conversations at the water cooler. A real job has a stopping point. If you feel like you don’t get a chance to take a breath. If you don’t feel like you have someone after those ten hours of work to share the burden with you. Why don’t you pull out the calculator, friend?

Stay-at-home-mom, I’m not saying you should become crazy about your invisible salary. I’m just saying you should give yourself some grace and, if you have a working husband, so should he.

Working mom, I’m talking to you, too. You should give yourself some grace as well. You work hard and then you come home and work hard. If I had my way, you’d arrive home to sparkly bathrooms and already prepared healthy meals every evening. But, I hope you remember, you’re being asked to work two jobs. Give yourself a break if it’s all a bit hairy these days.

And now I’ll just link to these shoes one more time, because, come on.

“When the time comes for one of the divine offices to begin, as soon as the signal is heard, everyone must set aside whatever they may have in hand and hurry as fast as possible to the oratory, but of course they should do so in a dignified way which avoids giving rise to any boisterous behaviours. The essential point is that nothing should be accounted more important than the work of God” (Rule of St. Benedict, Chapter 43).

As much as I read about monks and write about monks and want to practice monkish habits, most days I’m reminded very quickly of my non-monk status. There’s a reason monks can stop whatever they’re doing (their daily jobs and chores) when they hear the calling of the bell. They can set down the plunger, wash those hands, and walk the length of the monastery to the place of worship. They can do it succinctly; they can do it with purpose.

Those of us in the land of jobs and children and commitments find this Benedictine practice a bit more challenging. I’ve been struggling for almost three years now to know what it means for me to be summoned to prayer by the hours of the day.

For a while, I imagined my days as carved out into a liturgy of sorts, separated into meals and playtimes and snack times and bedtimes, each moment from one to another was supposed to be a sort of bell chime, calling me to “the work of God.” Doesn’t that sound beautiful? Snack time is not just snack time, it’s a time to stop, readjust my heart, remind myself that i have love to offer my children only because I am loved by my Creator.

That idea has slowly evolved as I have. At first I was strict with myself. Being called to the work of God demanded my opening the Bible or my prayer book, directing myself to specific types of prayers at specific times. Then it became a burden, another task I couldn’t complete, another way to forgo grace.

See, snack time is rarely a moment when I sit my children at the table and they patiently wait their turns for cheese and grapes. Usually, Brooksie is scooting around the living room with his snack trap full of cheerios, leaving his own little Hansel and Gretel trail. Usually, I’m throwing a bag of goldfish at August in the backseat of the car, on the way home from school, in hopes that carb-loaded, fake cheddar crackers will keep him from a premature (and unsuccessful) nap.

Usually playtime is outside at the park or in the driveway and I’m engaged in drawing terrible chalk drawings (worst mom-artist ever!) or cheering for the boy on his bike or chasing the baby who’s heading for the street.

There are no bells chiming. There is no one calling me to prayer.

I could go on. I could talk about exhaustion by the time it’s dinner (which I’ve done before) or exhaustion in the early morning (which I’ve done before).

But what I want to say is this:  I’ve never really “succeeded” in what I pictured would be my practice of the hours, but that doesn’t make me a failure. It just means it’s taken me some time to realize what I was missing in the gift of the work of God. (What I was missing was grace.)

Maybe I became so fixated on the “setting things aside” part or the doing away with “boisterous behaviors” (ha!). I wanted to be the woman who could really stop. Who could see the day swinging into its next sacred space and walk with it into the Holy. I wanted to be able to set down the construction paper and glitter and hold up my hands to receive. I wanted to push my kids in the stroller on the way to the park and stop on the sidewalk just long enough to hear God speak goodness to me.

Those things are possible. But not because we tell ourselves to work harder at “hurry[ing] as fast as possible to the oratory.” They are possible because we receive the good news that we are just as much a part of the work of God as the monk in his midday chants, as the pastor who sits in the afternoon with the sick. We do not become a part of the work of God because we can get there fast or because we can focus our entire mind on the scripture.

We join in the work of God when we choose to receive the good news that God loves us in this moment: this snack time in the car, full of unhealthy cheddar bites, this play time in the driveway, this wiping of the counter. St. Benedict describes the greatest work of his monks as being the calling they have to worship: the chanting and reading of the scripture, the praying of the Psalms.

Can we not receive that calling as well? The work of God is not a calling to do more and struggle more and feel ourselves buried under the weight of our prayerlessness. The work of God is a calling to respond to the God who offers grace in all things in every moment. It is the calling to respond to the God who loves us and redeems what our hands are doing and our mouth is saying and mind is thinking. So that, yes, snack time is a reminder to pray, to offer thanks to the Holy God for this holy moment of red lights and goldfish and tired bodies on the way home from school.

So if your kids are sitting pleasantly at the table to receive their grapes and cheese, by all means, open your Bible to the Psalms. And if you are in sitting in a meeting with your boss who has never appreciated an hour of the time you’ve given to your job, by all means open your hands under the conference table to receive from the Savior who loved more than a human is capable of loving, who understands the ache of being unappreciated. I will join you both–oh mother with the pleasant children, oh employee at the conference table. I’ll be at the red light with my hands open too, receiving from the Savior who knows what it is to live with less sleep than a body demands.

Hurry! Hurry to the work of God, friends. Hurry, even though there’s no where we must go. We only receive. See, that’s the secret: me at the stop light, you at your conference table, you at the park, you behind the counter steaming lattes, you folding sweaters and stacking. Open your hands and we will receive.

Hurry. We trust the grace that’s waiting. We long for the arms we’re running into.

Every Wednesday I write about my practice of St. Benedict’s Rule

The Sacred Vessels of the Altar, The greatest possible concern, On rising immediately, It should normally be short, Seven Times a Day, Lord open my lips, Humility, When it is best not to speak, When love is obedience, A reputation for holiness

I love Valentines Day for its heartfelt kid-ness. I love handmade valentines. I love candy and cookies. I love little children and stickers and the sweetness of making a Valentine for someone because they’re your friend. I also think that once Valentines Day becomes about kissy kissy relationships circa 7th grade, it loses all its earnestness. Though I think there are plenty of other days to celebrate your significant other, I’m not a total Valentine grump. I did buy my husband a present. It’s just that his present happens to be a $10 variety pack of old fashioned root beers (which I will share with him the next time we eat a burger…) And, we will celebrate tonight. He will cook me my favorite pasta…the one he used to make me when we were dating and he hardly knew how to make anything else. We’ll watch Breaking Dawn because I haven’t seen it yet and because his watching it with me is the greatest romantic gesture he could possibly make. But, mostly, today the boys and I will celebrate Love with lots of sugar and construction paper, just as St. Valentine always intended his day to be celebrated.

In that spirit, I have a full list of Thankfuls for today. This past week was emotional and good and hard and rich. I’m grateful for…

• My grandfather’s miraculous recovery from his broken hip last week, his being released from the hospital into rehab. A conversation with Meemaw on the phone and being reminded of her deep love for him, getting to see a bit more of her heart and her commitment to him.
• Being able to give my 90-year-old grandma (the other one!) some much needed snuggle time with Brooksie this past weekend. (We drove to Dallas Friday afternoon and came back late Saturday night for a day-long visit.)
• My sister-in-law and my mother were almost in a terrible, terrible car accident  this past weekend. It’s a miracle that they weren’t hurt. It’s a miracle that, despite my sister-in-law’s car skidding across several lanes of traffic and refusing to start (in the middle of two interstate lanes), they were safe and surrounded on all sides by the cushion of grace. In a week that was overwhelming for my family in several ways, it’s a gift to have such a tangible reminder of God’s good care.
• Brunching (can that be a verb? a super snobby verb?) with a table full of friends from college on Saturday while I was in Dallas. I love how after all these years of wishing I could be close enough to actually see my Texas friends, I am. It’s such a joy.
• Speaking of Texas, look at this baby and the Texas flag in my husband’s office. Had you shown me this picture a year ago, I would never have believed it was possible.
• Being stuck in traffic with Melissa, one of my college roomies, for an hour and a half and getting way more time than I planned for to talk to her alone.
• Jesus’ promise that his yoke is easy and his burden is light, not only for ourselves but for the people we love who suffer physically or emotionally. Easy and light. There is so much rest in “easy and light,” isn’t there?
• Brooksie’s new favorite word, ball. “Bah bah bah bah bah,” he sings while he crawls around in search of one.
• Sunday morning pancakes
• August’s little book about St. Valentine, who risked his life to perform weddings when marriage was forbidden by Claudius the Cruel. Did you know that?
• Chuck E. Cheese with friends Sunday night.
• Finding August asleep in his room with a Thomas the Tank Engine Valentine book on his face
• My friend Trisha’s handmade Valentine she gave me yesterday (I put it on my fridge)
• Talking about poetry at Writing Group Monday night
• My friend Andrea’s new book will be released this week! (More to come…)
• And, of course, a warm cat in my lap while I type

It’s a very Valentine-y Thankful Tuesday. List your thankfuls, people!

“If I am appreciated for what I do, what I achieve, I am not in fact unique since someone else can do the same, and probably do it better than I. When my estimation and value of myself depends on what I can produce with my hands or with my mind, then in Henri Nouwen’s words I have allowed myself to be ‘a victim of the fear tactics of the world’. This is the self that so often leads me into activity to prove my value. But if productivity becomes my main way of overcoming self-doubt I lay myself open to rejection and criticism, and so to inner anxiety or depression. I am constantly checking myself and my achievements. So my productivity really only reveals how much I am driven by fear of not being up to standard and by an insatiable desire to justify myself. It is only when I am loved not for I do but for who I am that I can become myself, unique and irreplaceable.”

-Esther de Waal, Living with Contradiction: An Introduction to Benedictine Spirituality

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Wallace Stevens is another poet whom I really ought to know better. But, ain’t gonna lie, he’s difficult for me. Any time I read a poet who obviously knows more than I do, I tend to shut down. I want to feel something, not learn something. (I’m an ENFP! Sue me!) So, he’s among the intellectuals who sit in my bookshelf taunting me because I have to look up so many ideas to even understand what they’re getting at. (Robert Lowell: Collected Poems, I’m looking at you, you massively big, hardback mocker.)

However, this poem-a-day thing is freeing me to face my taunters, because all I have to commit to is one poem. One poem! Wallace, you and I could be friends. Especially because I love your images. They’re crystal clear and cutting and I love this poem because you’d have us believe it is about the lack of color, when all along color is the secret force at work.

Gray Room

by Wallace Stevens

Although you sit in a room that is gray,
Except for the silver
Of the straw-paper,
And pick
At your pale white gown;
Or lift one of the green beads
Of your necklace,
To let it fall;
Or gaze at your green fan
Printed with the red branches of a red willow;
Or, with one finger,
Move the leaf in the bowl–
The leaf that has fallen from the branches of the forsythia
Beside you…
What is all this?
I know how furiously your heart is beating.