Author Archives: Emily

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About Emily

midwestern belle, Episcopal priest.

What I Really, Really Want

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We’re in a cultural moment of permission. And it’s awful.

This morning I woke up feeling better. A few days ago my toddler started spouting snot and coughing like a smoker. Yesterday I followed suit, with a headache, body aches, and nausea to boot (all of which the toddler might have, too, but course he can’t tell me). Conveniently, I’d gotten sick on a Saturday and my husband took over administrating our life with minimal fuss.

By yesterday evening, I was moaning to friends that my hope was gone and would my life feel like this forever?

But today hope dawned anew. I feel better. Not 100%, but I feel certain I will survive this cold. The toddler and I were already planning to stay home from church, even before I fell ill. But you know what immediately popped into my mind when I took in the facts that I could again stand steadily and that I would be home with just one child underfoot for 5 hours?

“I could get so much cleaning done.”

Cleaning is how I often work off nervous energy, it’s how I grasp a surface-level peace, it’s how I feel accomplished without actually doing any demanding intellectual or emotional work. Also, after a Saturday with the family at home, at the end of the first week of school, there’s a lot of… disorder… to restore.

What I really, really wanted was a clean house, and I had the energy (maybe, just enough) to spend so I could get it. I can get exactly what I want. Why should I hesitate? The desire in my heart and body, the thing that will make me feel happy today, something that will help my other family members feel happy too, something that won’t hurt anybody, and indeed, is practically virtuous, couldn’t possibly be wrong. Could it?

I wonder if you can see a bit of what’s wrong with this situation. I’m hardly off my sickbed, but I’m wanting to use my first blush of health to scrub floors and pick up toys and take out the trash. Is that really the best use of my energy, of my time? Even though it’s what I desire, what I really, really want, is it good for me?

It’s not. And not just because it’s Sunday (though, it being Sunday, the Lord’s day, is a big part, even the root! of it), but because what I want at any given moment is not a good measure of whether I ought to pursue something.

I’m seeing more and more people, even friends, using “what I want” and “what makes me happy” and “how I feel fulfilled” to be the measure against which an action is judged — things much bigger than cleaning on a Sunday morning — and I am worried about where these big decisions based on something so fleeting and fickle as “my happiness” and “what I want” will lead both individuals in their lives and our entire society.

For my part, the root is that Sunday is the Lord’s day, which means that it’s a one-in-seven-days reminder that I am not in control, that I am not the be-all-and-end-all of my own life. It’s not that I can’t flick a light switch on The Lord’s Day, or have some fear of retribution, but just like we know that working out is good to make our muscles strong, and persevering in a challenging article or conversation makes our minds strong, practicing an awareness of my own limitations (in the face of God’s no-limitations) helps keep my desires in check.

I rest on Sunday, I resist my desire to clean to be reminded that I can’t do it all, I can’t even clean up my own life on my own. I need God’s support, God’s guidance, God’s mercy, God’s love to even exist. Much more than a clean house, I need a clean heart, and that’s not work I can do on my own, either. The mess of toys and clothes and books and even dust and crumbs, can wait for tomorrow, and can remind me that I have to trust God to do the most important cleaning in my life — the cleaning that gives me the deepest peace and accomplishes the most important intellectual, emotional, and spiritual work.

Feast of the Transfiguration

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Scripture

Have you ever tried to take something away from a toddler? Phew. Jacob is getting old enough to be aware of his desires and to express them with much zeal, and if he offers a book to me but he doesn’t want me to actually take it from his hands, he will throw himself on the floor, face to the ground, and sob. He hardly speaks 3 words, but how he feels about something being forcibly removed from him is abundantly clear. 

I wonder how we feel when something is forcibly removed from us. We probably feel about the same as Jacob does, though we express it differently. When our health or physical able-ness drains away bit by bit, or is ripped out from under us in one fell swoop, when the community or relationships that moored our lives drop out at the bottom, when reality is so changed that we hardly have words for the new world that we are shunted into – we might be mad, we might be sad, we might feel hollowed out and dry-mouthed and as if we are strangers, in a strange new land. 

I don’t believe that God rips our health from our hands, or that God is the one who drags us away from the life we love, or that God is responsible for the changes of our circumstances. He isn’t the one to blame when cancer strikes or when divorce happens or when addiction takes hold. These are evil things that prowl at our doors and claw into our homes because of the brokenness of this world. These are sad facts of what reality is in this fallen life. 

And the real problem is denying their power over us. I don’t really need to tell you this – you have seen in your own life the way that abuse distorts a human heart. You have witnessed with your own eyes the way that cancer and terminal illness wastes away precious people. You know the destruction that death and dissension and denial itself wreaks on us. We know that the battle is really within us. That evil isn’t just all around, but that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. And this battle can often feel like it is against our very selves; that the grief we feel consumes us, that the anger wells inside of us without end, that the pride and the despair and the wrongs done to us and the righteous indignation and the terror of insecurity isn’t just something to fight against, but is knit into our very souls. 

And that’s what makes it so hard to let go of. The anger is not us, it is an emotion that passes. The grief is not us, it is a wound that can heal. The despair and the righteous indignation are blankets to protect us from the searing heat of life. The terror of insecurity is our signal that we’ve put our eggs in the wrong basket. So we cling to these things because they at least feel better than what we fear might happen or might be required of us if we were to let them go. These things, our grief, our anger, our despair, in a way, they keep us safe, the hem us in by making things stay the same, by making us stuck. If we are planted in anger, we do not need to change. If we are in a siege against insecurity, we cannot possibly move outside the walls. If we are sleeping in our grief, we need not be roused to another unpredictable day. And yet, what kind of life is that?

See, God doesn’t take our grief out of our hands, we must offer it to him in order to transform it. He won’t forcibly remove the sins we hold dear, even though he is God, and he could do it if he wanted to. 

I wonder whether one of the reasons he doesn’t do that is because, just like a toddler, if it’s taken from us, we cling to it all the more, we refuse all the more to release its power over us. If we don’t recognize in ourselves that we need to let go, give it up, nothing God can do will change our minds. 

We must always ask for a soft heart, a heart of flesh, in order to surrender those demons; we can’t even do that without God’s help. We must ask to be released from them. And that’s exactly what happens in the passage after the Transfiguration in Luke.

Hear the Word of God: “On the next day, when they had come down from the mountain, a great crowd met him. And behold, a man from the crowd cried out, ‘Teacher, I beg you to look at my son, for he is my only child. And behold, a spirit seizes him, and he suddenly cries out. It convulses him so that he foams at the mouth, and shatters him, and will hardly leave him.’” (Luke 9:37-39) 

This man offers up the suffering of his son. He begs on his behalf for deliverance. Somehow, physical illnesses seem easier to give over to God than the griefs in our hearts. But the anger that eats us up and the denial that corrodes our minds is no less fatal than diseases that afflict the body. I wonder if that’s why there are so many stories of Jesus healing people of demons and of mental illnesses Scripture – those internal battles are important to God, just as much as our flesh and our bones. 

So I believe it is not at all a coincidence that the story immediately following today’s Gospel lesson on the Transfiguration is a story of healing a boy’s spirit and mind. 

In the Transfiguration, we learn that God reveals new facets of himself to us all the time, and we see that we are always changed by close encounters with the divine — just like Moses in the Old Testament lesson. In prayer, we offer up bits of ourselves, and God takes whatever it is we deign to offer him and he transforms it before he gives it back to us.

So in today’s passage, Jesus goes to the mountain to pray, and in his humanity, on our behalf, offers himself to God — we see this by looking, too, at the passage before where he speaks of his death, as well as the subject of the discussion between him, Elijah, and Moses.

All of this happens in front of Peter, James, and John, and then, God in Jesus gives back to us a revelation of his glory and he answers these men’s questions about who Jesus is by showing them Moses the redeemer, and Elijah the great prophet. Jesus himself the fulfillment of these promises, embodying and enacting the relationship between God and humanity in the confines of his very flesh. 

Jesus and his disciples go to pray, and what does it say that the disciples do? They’re weighed down with sleep, that sweet bliss of unconsciousness, right? I wonder if the same might be said for our desire to be asleep to, to deny, to not look at or acknowledge the wounds we cling to, and the pain we grip, and the grief we hold so close. What might it mean to be awake as we pray? 

How might God be revealed to us if we open our eyes wide in the presence of God, despite temptations to doze off to the truth of ourselves? What might we see if we are attentive to our internal surroundings, to our hearts, as we approach God’s presence? Scripture tells us that these beloved disciples were heavy with sleep, “but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory.” Not only that, but the were enveloped by a cloud, they heard a voice from the sky, they were struck silent by the experience. In a word, they were changed. 

My  beloved Brothers and Sisters, may we have the courage to offer ourselves to God, to be awakened to the truth of ourselves, to have hearts soft and malleable for the Great Potter, and to joyously await the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. Amen. 

What does the Holy Spirit Sound Like?

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This week, a very dear friend of mine died.

We’d met back in the summer of 2010 and spent many long summer nights in conversation; he and his wife came to our wedding, he took us out for my thirtieth birthday. He could have been my grandfather, but he was also a dear, dear friend.

For almost the last month, he had been popping into my mind, “Oh, I must write to him!” I’d think. At first, I resolved to send a letter — I love stationery, and I have plenty of it, and it’s becoming a lost art, you know?

But the weeks wore on and I didn’t sit down to pen my planned missive. The thought popped into my head: “just send him an email, it’s something, it’s better than nothing, he’d love to hear from you.” So I resolved to send an email. I’d sit down at my laptop and type something out.

And another week went by.

Still, he pulled at the corners of my mind. So one night while I nursed my toddler to sleep, I tapped out an email on my phone. Subject: “Hello from the Deep South!”

A few days later, I hadn’t heard back, which was not at all like him. I went so far as to look through my sent folder — no copy. Somewhere my email had gotten lost between my toddler’s bed and my friend’s inbox.

I persevered (this was a lot of effort, looking back!). I re-wrote the email another night while nursing again. This time it got through and he answered within 24 hours, as was his wont.

And then, 72 hours after that, he was dead (a post-op pulmonary embolism).

You can imagine how terribly grateful I am that I listened to that little niggling voice and persevered through demanding children and disappearing email drafts. The peace I am now enjoying in grief is so, so much better than the empty grief that regret would have borne (which thing I’ve also experienced in previous deaths).

What does the Holy Spirit sound like? How do we know when we’re being poked by God? When is the prodding providential?

Well, part of this is what spiritual direction teaches us; listening with others together, whether it’s in a group or one-on-one, to how God most often talks, getting to know God’s voice. As we grow in familiarity with the sounds and tone and cadence and humor of the Lord, and as we practice responding to those spiritual sounds, the resonance grows louder in our lives, I’ve found. Our response time dwindles as we recognize God’s movement and begin even to dance with this partner, not just taking instructions as if we are in an electric slide, but joining a waltz with this divine partner leading our every step.

Wiring, Again

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So this morning was weird.

It felt normal, hopeful, a Saturday of fun. Then I took my kids to get some cinnamon rolls and I fell apart.

They were wiggly (at 6, 4, 1, was this a surprise?), they were grumpy (the 6 year old had insisted on a long sleeve shirt. In July. In Louisiana. It was 89 degrees at 8:30am. The 4 year old? He’d pulled a Joey Tribbiani with no fewer than 5 tees. And the 14 month old is on day 7 of a summer cold). I was worried they’d break the water glasses, I was worried they’d run into people, I was worried they’d get germs all over everyone’s food.

I was not able to access calm or steadiness. I reverted to stern and fierce and threaten-y. But I think it was more than that.

I felt all jittery and amped up. I came home with them and had a headache. I was tired, I was light-headed, I my body felt tense (especially my face & jaw). I sat down for a few minutes. Then I started yawning.

Yawning is my tell.

It’s my downshift, when I’m coming out of an over-alert state and beginning to reboot. I don’t know why I got so worked up this morning (sometimes I can figure it out: an anniversary of some sort, a thing someone said or did that reminded me of another time a similar thing happened and its impact on me, something I smelled or something I did that reminded my body of another event in the past), and I may not be able to ever identify it — that’s frustrating, sure — but the important thing is how we respond when we come to notice.

It’s what I’ve learned through yoga; a timeless truth that finally made sense to me when applied physically. There might be a stretch you’re doing, and it’s way harder than it was last time you did it. Maybe you’ve been working that muscle out and it’s sore. Maybe you’re exhausted from the week and everything just feels harder. Maybe you pulled the muscle while opening the fridge earlier and you didn’t even know it. We might be able to pinpoint the origin, but we also might not be able to trace its provenance.

Here’s the question: does it matter?

Does it matter where the difficulty has come from? The truth is that it doesn’t matter, not really. Sometimes the reason for something gives me some comfort in dealing with the problem, but when the rubber hits the road, the problem just is, and the solution still needs to be found and executed.

So: I never figured out why I was so agitated and activated this morning. But what I did do was apologize and reconnect with my boys after my harshness, and I took deep breaths and massaged my tight jaw and ears and scalp. I scanned my body and noticed the tightness in my stomach and the ache in my head, and just acknowledging those things, spending a breath or two giving my brain’s attention to these body symptoms, helped to start untangle and relieve them.

We don’t always know why we feel what we feel, and that’s okay; the healing thing is to acknowledge the truth of what’s happening, so that we can let it go. Even if I don’t know why my body and brain had such big responses to the morning, I know I must be processing something, and there’s such great freedom in noticing it and letting it go. Then I don’t have to hold or carry the agitation any more, I won’t need to process this particular bit of jittery tension again, it’s gone (I am of the belief that if we don’t process it by acknowledging its presence, the tension will just stay in our bodies and minds, stuck and stirred-in to come up again at another time. We do get do-overs).

Rewiring & Redemption

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Donnie & Momma on the lake

I’ve been noticing this year how we get do-overs. Our experiences echo to one another if we are willing to sit humbly and quietly with the deep marks and the meaning that our nervous systems ascribe to the events we go through. Maybe the first time you were in a situation, it didn’t go well, you didn’t show up the way you wanted to, you weren’t ready, you couldn’t ride the wave. You crashed. You felt defeated. You went under.

And then, years and years later, it came back and you got another chance. I want to tell you about one of those times for me.

Four years ago this past Monday, I gave birth to Donald Grady. It was a rough birth, a rough pregnancy (my grading rubric is not nearly so harrowing as many, just hot and nauseous and miserable and biggest weight gain and a fever/illness at the end — requiring induction). I got an epidural, which I’d been hoping to avoid, and while I didn’t cuss (as much as the first time) through the labor, it was not a victorious-feeling day. It was a day that felt defeating, as if I was not able to mother him the way I wanted to through the big moment for us both.

This past Sunday (a day before his birthday), I got a do-over.

McDon (his desired title) had gone out on the boat on Saturday and watched the big kids get pulled in the tube (raft? whatever that thing is). He demurred when offered a turn.

Sunday morning before we left, we got another chance to go out on the water, and this time he wanted to go, if he could be with Momma. So, on to the tube I scrambled.

(Sidebar: I’d skiied the day before and decided that the memory of water skiing in my 20s was WAY BETTER than the reality of skiing in my 30s. I am way more fit than I was then, but wow, the “fun” wasn’t nearly so fun and the fear was very much bigger and what on earth do we do this anyway??)

The boat sped up and Donnie held on. I was deep breathing (to soothe my sympathetic nervous system) and low moaning (to vibrate my vagus nerve) and focusing on the shore line instead of the waves that buffeted the tube with each bump, and consciously releasing the tension in my jaw and my legs and back. It was awful. I hated it. I forced a pleasant(?) expression on to my face and chatted with Donnie. And that’s when I realized it: I was getting a do over.

This was another time that my child wanted my companionship and leadership to lean on and experience something new. This was another time that was uncomfortable for me, that I wanted to be somewhere else doing something else. This was another time that no one could substitute for me in my child’s life, he wanted me, specifically, and it was a chance to show up and be present and use the tools I had to be a soft landing and a safe support for the adventure he longed to encounter.

Of course giving birth isn’t really comparable to a run around the lake in an inner tube on a Sunday morning — we weren’t even dumped off the float! — but I don’t think our nervous systems need an exact replication in order to rewire and to learn and to heal.

So here’s the thing. We never know when these opportunities will crop up, and we surely cannot manufacture these moments (though perhaps we can shake them free in therapy, maybe). So what are we doing in the meanwhile, every day, habitually, to make ourselves ready for when we might get a do-over?

What habits or practices are you using to grow your nervous system strength?

How are you sharpening your senses to notice when a do-over moment is happening?

How do you want to show up for a do-over moment, and what do you need to be ready?

I’d love to hear the answers, and if you’d like to talk more about how to attune these figurative muscles, I’d love to talk. Reach out!