To Liam on His Twelfth Birthday

As I think about this last year, the first place my mind travels is out west. I envision you climbing rocks everywhere we went: the Oregon coast, Yosemite, Joshua Tree. If there was something to be explored, you were out there chasing after adventure. It was like your spirit was going to bust out wherever you went. As a parent, it was sometimes frightening. You have this knack for charging off without a sufficient amount of forethought. Yet there is this spark in that fearlessness that I hope ignites something amazing in you.

This has been a year of uncharted territory for you. You started middle school. You performed in your first school play. You hit bumps of anxiety. You continue to run deeper into adolescence. All of these treks have been exciting, scary, difficult, annoying, and life-giving for you. I can see the tug-of-war going on in you everyday between wanting to still be our little boy and wanting to be more independent. Even as you continue to pursue the latter, you will always be the former. Your mom and I will never stop caring for you or loving you.

Is it ridiculous that this is your last year before you’re a teenager? Of course it is. As I have told you and your brother many times when you try to bait me into an existential crisis by pointing out how old you are, I know how time works. Yet I can still close my eyes and see you as a baby or as a fedora-wearing toddler or this mischievous kid. There is a voice recording that has been on my phone for over nine years in which a three year old you tells a wonderful meandering story. I know how you got from there to here, but I would be lying to say that there is not a small pang that make me miss all that you have been.

Ash Wednesday hits different in a hospital. “Remember you are dust and to dust you will return” seems painfully obvious in a place where so many people die. I half imagined a doctor or a nurse responding, “Yeah, I’m well aware.” This is a place where it would be hard to forget that we are dust.

I found myself wondering how different this remembrance would be in a church if the imposition of ashes was done not by pastors in robes and suits, but nurses in scrubs, doctors in lab coats, or children in hospital gowns. Would that be too over the top? At the very least it would be more difficult to shake the reality of our finitude and fragility.

For some of us, the fragility of life is not that far from our minds. Every news cycle can seem like another chaos monster careening out of control. And I realize not everyone feels that way. It’s getting a bit harder for me to understand why, but it is the reality whether I know why or not. Yet in the midst of this chaos, I take some solace in the fact that we are all dust.

Twenty-seven degrees is cold. There has never been a moment when I saw that the temperature was in the 20s and thought, “Oh boy, let’s go outside!” Yet it is funny how a few days of temperatures in the early adolescence can make 27º feel almost pleasant. It was that cold this morning as I walked into work and I found myself thinking, “This isn’t too bad.” It is fascinating how quickly our bodies can adapt to what at one time was the abnormal. I think that our spirits do the same.

This season is a weird one for me. This is the eighth Sunday of the year and I believe that I have been to church once; back in early January. It is almost certainly the least that I have been to church since I was a fetus. And since my mom was in church regularly during that time then it might as well be the least that I have been to church ever.

The irony is that this absence is due to my presence at the hospital providing spiritual care. On Sundays, I hold a pager, check the network for consults, make rounds, and sit with folks navigating peaks, valleys, and everything in between. Sometimes, these encounters are just chitchat. Many times, it is a sacred experience. Even when God is not mentioned, the divine has this way of showing up in the room. What I experience on Sundays is not exactly church, but it’s not not church either. I’ll often experience community, a passing of the peace, an exchange of wisdom, and sometimes prayer.

So…it’s been a bit of a week. There was yet another school shooting in our area, which has torn open wounds for people who have experienced these tragedies before and scared anew children in schools including my own. On the national front, it seems that calling on people to protect the frightened and vulnerable is seen by many as a radical leftist agenda rather than, as I have understood it, basic human decency.

Of course, there have been other things good, bad, and in between. Everything is not lost but, Good Lord, the dark clouds loom ominously and I feel tired. You might feel tired too.

I would like to give you some sort of rousing speech about things being darkest before the dawn, but we don’t really know how long the arcs of history bend. I’m reminded of my favorite Frederick Buechner quote, “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.” I actually quoted that to one of my sons this week talking about the shooting in Antioch. But, you know, it’s okay if you feel a little scared. You are a person after all (I said this to my son also).

So we’ll go from Buechner to the mid 2000s arena rock banger “All These Things That I’ve Done.” Not the lyric “I’ve got soul but I’m not a soldier” though there is something in there too. But simply this: “If you can, hold on.” Throughout scripture, people are encouraged to not grow weary in doing what is right (Galatians 6:9-10 pops into my mind immediately) even though said weariness is warranted.

To Be Loved, To Be Seen, To Be Heard

Today has been a weird Christmas Day. Not bad, just different and strange. I got to have a lovely Christmas morning with E. A. and the boys. We opened presents in our living room and listened to our holiday playlist. I got to see everyone’s faces light up at different gifts. I got to lay against my wife on the couch as she read and laughed as I played video games with one of my sons. Then I went to work at the hospital and I will be here until Boxing Day afternoon.

Yet I got to eat Christmas lunch in the cafeteria with my cohort as all of us worked full shifts today. We gathered in our normal circle in our CPE room and learned from each other like we do three times a week. It was my day to share my statement of ministry, which is our statement of what we think effective spiritual care is to each of us. I already knew that my statement delved too deep into the theological at the expense of the experiential. I wrote about Christ as our guiding example, about “God with us” and the ministry of presence, the Greek word kenosis and the way we approach serving others with humility.

All technically good practices but my educator asked me where I was in this process. It was a good example of what Christians should strive towards; it was a good general statement. Yet where did my story intersect with all of this?

The first reading for the Third Sunday of Advent is Zephaniah 3:14-20 and this is a short story about why part of that verse always stops me in my tracks.

Taylor Swift once famously sang that when you’re fifteen and someone tells you they love you then you’re going to believe it. When I was fifteen, I was gangly, unsure of myself, and generally did not think that I mattered that much. I do not know how the conversation started that led to Zephaniah started, but I do know where it ended. One of the staff members at the camp my family ran (also that summer, a professional theater troupe; long story, different story) named Lauren encouraged me by reading this verse:

The Lord, your God, is in your midst,
a warrior who gives victory;
He will rejoice over you with gladness,
He will renew you in His love;
He will exult over you with loud singing
as on a day of festival.
—Zephaniah 3:17-18a

Nearly thirty years later, I distinctly remember hearing this verse for the first time. And it was probably the perfect time for me to hear it. A few years later, I probably would have waved it off because Christians way too often decontextualize passages meant for the people of Israel and make it about us feeling good. I wasn’t there yet, so Zephaniah stuck with me. I guess when you’re fifteen and someone tells you God loves you, you’re going to believe it. So, thank you for that, Lauren. Context or not, that verse always reminds me that God loves me.

Peace is the movement of Advent that often sounds the most hollow. Hope is an anticipation. Joy and Love are traces of which we receive many glimpses. I guess it is true that we might receive glimpses of peace as well. Yet I sometimes wonder if those glimpses are just respites born of privilege; a peace that comes from being fortunate to be born into a life not knowing hunger, war, or prejudice.

No justice! No peace! This was one of the cries in the Summer of 2020. Covid had locked all of us down which left us without distractions when the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others came across our newsfeeds. Tens of thousands donned masks and carried signs of protest. From bullhorns we heard it declared that none of us were free unless all of us were free. No justice, no peace. Summer 2020. Winter 1955. Advent 2024. Winter, spring, summer, and fall ad infinitum.

Peace is often the desire of a person who is sitting in a hospital room with their dying loved one. Typically they desire peace for the beloved with tubes connecting them to machines. They do not usually ask for peace for themselves. Folks will ask prayers for all kinds of miracles, but it seems that most know that being at peace with the loss of a loved one is a bridge too far. I am not even sure that most people would take that peace even if they could. It is true that time heals many things and the years may ease the sting of loss, yet there is no complete end to grief. Complete peace is just out of reach. Though the beautiful flipside of this reality is that no end to grief means that there is no end to love.

Hope

This is the first Sunday of Advent and for many a church the theme of this day is hope. I have spent a good portion of the day thinking about hope. I think hope is often relegated to wishful thinking or starry eyed optimism. One hopes they can do well, hopes for the best, hopes that everything will work out. This hope can be dashed, lost, or given up. For hope to mean something in this world it has to sustain a barrage of blows. Hope has to be more than wishful thinking to survive.

Working in a hospital has made me realized all the more how tenuous our grasp on hope can be. Hope has to be fierce here. And even if that hope is undeterred by bad diagnoses, surgeries, and the ominous cacophony of life-sustaining machines, those hopes can still find themselves sometimes crashing into the cold reality that a loved one will not be okay. At least, not okay in the way we hope.

There is a song on Vampire Weekend’s latest album called “Hope.” I really like the song, but I wonder if I should. The plaintive refrain is “I hope you let it go / I hope you let it go / The enemy’s invincible / I hope you let it go.” Sometimes I hear those lyrics and it is a comfort to me. Other times it feels like it is just waving a white flag in the face of an unfair world.

One of the funny things about being a chaplain resident is that my life is very much intertwined with a piece of 1990s technology. If a member of a medical team wants to contact a chaplain about a patient—especially if it is an immediate concern—they page us. I will hear a chirpy beep, check the number, and call back to see how my assistance is needed.

My initial reaction to that pager was fear. Actually, my initial reaction was amusement. Then as I started my first shift on call, I was anxious. I did not know what was going to be on the other side of that chirpy beep. I just knew that it was not going to be easy and that was scary.

In a weird way, I have come to appreciate the pager because I am required to answer it. It’s my job. I cannot run and hide from it. If a chaplain is needed and I am on call then I have to dial that number. I have to show up in that hospital room to try to listen to the emotions and needs of that patient or family member whether I am ready or not, whether my last visit was deeply meaningful or horribly awkward. You get the page and you show up.

Taking Up Our Cross?

“If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?” - Mark 8:34b-36

This verse is one that is baked into my spiritual journey. If we are to truly follow Jesus then we must take up our crosses. We must be willing to lose our lives. I cannot tell you how many Sunday morning and youth group sermons I have heard about that topic. It was a verse that we remembered and printed on t-shirts. It was our calling.

And I’m not sure if any of us did it.

I am not second guessing the sincerity behind any of the people who have quoted that verse in earnestness (including yours truly), but those stakes do not really present themselves to a white, middle-class American kids. As much as martyrdom was a hot topic for late 90s evangelicals—I owned and regularly perused a copy of Jesus Freaks: Stories of Those Who Stood for Jesus myself—it wasn’t really on the table in South Carolina.