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the whole story

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The told story is not the whole story.

We tend to grasp onto moments as the whole. In a culture obsessed with tiny tweets and shiny surfaces, it’s easier to outrage or comfort ourselves with sound bytes that echo the thoughts between our ears, daily dulling our curiosity. We take the smallest sliver for the encompassing everything.

But look closer. Deeper. Longer.

What you see or hear or read is never the whole story.

We hear this exhortation to empathy often now, in our dealings with loved ones and strangers alike. To remember that so much hides below the surface, that you never know the depths of another’s struggles.

But every story holds this same mystery.

Take one small line from Scripture.

Did you ever notice that Mary and Elizabeth spent a whole trimester together? The Visitation was not a mere afternoon or a split second of joy. It lasted three long months.

Mary remained with her about three months and then returned to her home.
(Luke 1:56)

A single line that opens up a world of possibility. What was the whole story beneath the told story?

Mary and Elizabeth must have talked about everything, these kindred spirits in a cruel world that whispered rumors and disbelief about them.

They must have marveled together—this elder sage and eager young woman, one at the end of her unexpected pregnancy, one at the beginning—in awe of the impossible that God was working before their eyes, under their skin.

They must have helped each other, preparing for babies they could never have imagined, soothing each other through whatever anxieties or aches they carried along with the children.

They must have prayed together, imagining the labors ahead, asking God to protect them in this most dangerous work asked of women, trusting that the Living God who brought them to this surprising place would guide them through to new life.

Scripture shares the slimmest story of what must have been a rich and life-changing sojourn, over months and months.

The joy of their initial encounter—Elizabeth crying out, John jumping with joy, Mary proclaiming a powerful, prophetic prayer to the God of justice—was only the instant of first meeting. The start of a long conversation.

What came next was not passed on or written down, but it remains part of the story. As much as the silence between the notes makes the music.

The Visitation by Steve Bird

Over the next few days before Christmas, we will hear familiar stories. Joseph’s dreams. Mary’s pregnancy. The angels’ song. The shepherds’ visit.

If we assume we know these stories, if our eyes glaze over and our ears tune out, if we picture them as flat scenes with stock characters, if we mistake them for cute illustrations in children’s Bibles, or if we expect them to provide an eyewitness account of historical facts, we have missed the point entirely.

The whole story is meant to challenge us, change us, convert us. It is meant to upend everything we know—including our easy interpretations and our comfortable lives.

Our task is to push below the surface and stop listening in default mode.

Do yourself a favor this Christmas, and let yourself fall into the whole story. As you hear the Same Stories again and again, the ones you know by heart, listen with untamed ears. Dig into the footnotes, explore the edges of the scene, let your eyes land upon a line you’ve never heard before.

Imagine what it might mean about God, to deepen a story you think you knw, to wonder what the untold rest might hold. Imagine what it might mean for the people and stories you encounter each day, if you stopped seeing them as the whole, if you humbled yourself to know only a part.

Whatever we are given as the told story is only an opening: the invitation into the holy whole. Which is mysterious. Which is hidden. Which is also imaginable—and herein lies the invitation.

I can never know the whole story. But I can imagine the wideness of God at work. That is the opening of prayer.

Remember that grade-school textbook illustration of an iceberg? Only the tip visible above the water; the hulking monstrosity ballooning below. Enough to sink the most powerful ship.

Whenever we take the surface for the total, we run a dangerous risk—of complacency, ignorance, judgment, and misinterpretation.

Of Scripture. Of strangers’ situations. Of others’ lives. Of anyone’s actions.

Whatever you hear, read, see, or believe, consider it a beginning. Not the entirety or the end. An important distinction, rooted in humility.

The told story is never the whole story. But what potent possibility.

We can only imagine.

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About Laura

I’m Laura Kelly Fanucci. Mother, writer, wonderer. This space is where I explore mothering through writing. It’s where I celebrate how God shows up in the chaos of raising children. It’s where I love to build community with readers like you. Read More…

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thismessygrace

thismessygrace
Nearly 20 years ago (!) these crazy kids graduated Nearly 20 years ago (!) these crazy kids graduated from Notre Dame. Now we’re thick in the midst of life-with-kids, celebrating middle school & preschool & everything in between. 
 
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Rules: Open to the U.S. only. Entries will be accepted until 6/11/22 at 11:59 pm CT. The 2 winners will be chosen at random and announced on 6/12/22. Per Instagram rules, this promotion is in no way sponsored, administered, or associated with Instagram, Inc. By entering, entrants confirm that they are 13+ years of age, release Instagram of responsibility, and agree to Instagram's terms of use.
“How did you do this?” I want to ask her. “H “How did you do this?” I want to ask her. “How did you let your heart break a thousand times?”

I want to call my mother and ask her impossible questions, to probe her heart that held five children and let each of us go in the hardest ways. But I know what she will say, “It’s hard. But you’re doing a beautiful job.” She can’t give words to the deepest yearnings and groanings. None of us can.

I wish I could ask my grandmothers, each of them gone for decades now, each of them matriarchs who raised big broods of their own. I never got to know them as an adult, but I have heaps of questions: How did you do it? How did you not lose yourself or your way? Or did you, and that was precisely the point?

I want a whole book of answers to impossible questions, and none exists. So I send my thoughts to the mothers of faith whose short stories, mere snippets on pages, have sparked small lights to guide me along. To Sarah and Ruth, Hagar and Rachel, Mary and Elizabeth. Every unnamed anguish the holy ones carried, every treasure of love they held in their heart.

Is it any coincidence that birth often brings both cries and screams, laughter and joy?

We hold it all within us. We cannot give words to the enormity of what it means to mother.

I sit outside a coffee shop two blocks from my children’s school on a sunny afternoon, the last day of the year. I wipe away tears for the natural nostalgia, but I also feel the gutting grief welling up from my own wounds of motherhood to know a deeper truth: marking milestones with love and longing is nothing compared to the gaping loss of not having your child here to break your heart in a thousand tiny ways.

So I resolve again, a hundred times again, to let this vulnerability become the strength that keeps me fighting for all children to have what I want for my own: life, love, health, safety, support, opportunity, community, hope. This is how parenting asks us to change. To let the particulars of our lives stretch us to love more widely.

I once thought “to mother” meant to have and to hold.

Now I know it also means to let go.
Many of you asked me to save these suggestions I s Many of you asked me to save these suggestions I shared after the school shooting in Uvalde.

Remember: we can’t do everything, but we can each do something.

Just because we can’t eradicate evil overnight doesn’t mean we can’t take small strong steps toward change.

Any work for justice and peace is long and hard. But we can build this work into our daily lives in concrete ways.

Look at the children in your life. What would you do to keep them safe and alive?

Start there. Let your life and love lead you.
When women meet, the world changes. Today is the When women meet, the world changes.

Today is the Feast of the Visitation. A day when we remember the meeting of Mary and Elizabeth.

Two women pregnant with new life, blooming with prophetic power.
Two mothers called to change the world.

What would happen if we gathered together like this today?
How could the world change if we made Mary’s song our own?

“He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.”
(Luke 1:51-53)

Imagine if we stayed in this holy space—not for a moment’s meeting, but for months together—to gestate the dreams God was waiting to birth through us.

Imagine if we let ourselves be filled with the Holy Spirit to shout out with loud cries.
Imagine if we lifted our souls with prayers of justice and joy.

Imagine if we gave each other strength and service, courage and compassion, as we kept asking how to answer God’s call in our ordinary lives.

When women meet, the world changes.

If you want to know how to fight for justice for your children, for your people, for this world, look to the Visitation.

The mothers will show us the way. They already have.

(Image from the “Windsock Visitation” by Br. Mickey McGrath, OSFS, commissioned for the Monastery of the Visitation in north Minneapolis.)
Here’s what I wish I would have heard preached t Here’s what I wish I would have heard preached today on the Ascension.

Right now is a time to be prophetic and pastoral, a time for each of us to ask how God is calling us to act.
I am writing this to us next week. When our right I am writing this to us next week.

When our righteous anger will have quieted down. When the white-hot fury pulsing through our veins will have subsided. When the news cycle will have moved on.

Do not forget how we felt tonight.
Stay angry. Flip tables.

We cannot live like this. Literally—our children are dying. Our elders are being murdered. We have accepted violence as—a way of life? An unfortunate side effect of freedom? A helpless shrug?

No. I am not resigned.
Stay angry. Flip tables.

Remember how it felt today to hear the news and feel the world crack open—again, for we have heard it a hundred times now. Remember how you felt sick to your stomach. How the children around you glowed, alive and fragile, miraculous and vulnerable.

Remember how you wanted to do something, anything, how you wanted to act, how you wanted to stop and scream for it to end, how every cell in your body cried out that this was evil and unjust and horrific and cannot continue.

Press into that memory like a bruise.
Stay angry. Flip tables.

The only way anything changes is if we change. Change what we believe. Change who we support. Change how we vote. Change where we give. Change how we act. Change how we speak. Change how we pray.

There are no easy answers to terrible, complex problems—which is what gun violence in the US has become. But the lack of easy answers makes it all the more urgent and vital that we press into our righteous anger and say NO MORE.

Stay angry. Flip tables.

I am writing this for us, for tonight, for next week. And I never want to write it again.
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