Holding Light and Tight

Previously posted under TinyLetter

Hello, friends!

I’d like to be honest and tell you that I’ve had a rough draft of a newsletter sitting for a week. Anyone with a writer’s bone will tell you that, even if it feels important, if it feels incomplete then that’s that. This might sound silly but it would be like sending out a body without a head or leg or arm. Ya just know something vital is missing!

All that to say, the time is mid-morning and I am currently sitting out on my deck. It’s warmer than I would like for September and there’s a teeny tiny bug with a bouncing ability that’s keeping me company. It landed on my arm for a little while and, at first, I almost flicked it away. But I thought better of it and instead chatted with its beady little self, noting it probably meant no harm, and let it hang tight if she’d like. I think I felt the spirit of Mary Oliver enter me at that moment; all wise and generous with the things that grow, flutter, buzz, and bounce. 

In light of the draft that sits and waits, I do want to share something from it — specifically from Mary herself. Listening to a podcast in a 2014 interview, the poet said:

“What one does end up believing, even if it shifts, has an effect upon the life that you live, the life that you choose to live or try to live.”

So, here’s my nugget for today: Wherever we find ourselves in these really hard days, my hope for us is to see the shifting of our beliefs as something beneficial and healthy. Wherever we land, even briefly, stand in place and breathe; hold the tension and its contradictions. That space will hold us, too, and help us along the way as we find where we “choose” or “try to live.” I recall at one point in my own faith shifting, I began asking, “What do I do with Jesus now?” As of today, I am asking, “What do I do with church now?” As someone who feels so fundamentally shaped by the Church Body, this question is so hard to hold and wait with. 

I see an unveiling of a Western Church so rooted in systemic racism and theology, an obsession with pastoral notoriety, self-help sermons over self-reflection and other-centered action. Crazily enough, I know we are finding the Spirit move at protests and communal gatherings that neither mention God nor take place in a church. It’s incredible and difficult to fathom what’s next for the Western Church world. But like Rilke told the young and wandering poet:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.”

Here’s to learning the hard work of loving “the questions themselves” and holding light and tight at once.

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xo bre