I carried one book with me across the country last week, Phyllis Tickle's The Shaping of a Life: A Spiritual Landscape. I stuffed it in the airplane carry-on with the children's coloring books. I read it by cell phone light while the toddler snored next to me. I curled up with it on the hotel bed while the city hummed and honked through another DC afternoon. I read it in Michigan where I grew up and Indiana where I went to school. I read it between reunions with family and friends. And one single chapter haunted me. Phyllis writes about the Scripture story that defined her life, faith, and identity. The one story that she discovered as a young girl, the story that became her variation on a theme, weaving its way through decades of life and work and prayer. What was my story? I turned this question over and over in my head, wondering whether there was a single Scripture story that gave patterns to my life. I envied the unity and clarity of Phyllis' vision of the world, … [Read more...] about what’s your story? the Scripture that defines us
story
the only story we know how to tell
He slid three pamphlets across his desk toward us. "You have to pick one of these for your pre-wedding retreat." They all looked the same. Glossy photos, smiling couples, cheesy quotes. I was tired from this tedious meeting of wedding planning and a long day of work. I really didn't care which one we picked. "Most couples I work with didn't like the first one. I don't know anything about the second. But the third one's supposed to be good. It's long, but it's worth it if you can make the dates work." I looked at my fiance. He shrugged. I shrugged, too. "I guess we'll take the third." . . . The terrifying thing about hindsight is how arbitrary certain decisions can seem. We picked that retreat because the dates worked. Yet after the obvious impact of our parents' long-lasting marriages, I am certain that nothing has influenced our own marriage more than the choice we made that sunny afternoon in the deacon's office. When we picked one brochure instead of the other … [Read more...] about the only story we know how to tell
what’s the soul of a parent?
When I was a child, I got obsessed with figuring out what we all had in common. Call it the curse of Catholic school. All those lessons on how we’re all made in God’s image. I remember riding home on the bus, swinging my skinny legs off the sticky vinyl seat, trying to figure out exactly what that meant – what magical thing we all had in common that made us reflect God. First I decided it must be eyes. Everyone had eyes, I figured. And you learned a lot from someone by looking at their eyes. So maybe that’s what we all had, that made us in the image of God. But then my grade school self remembered pictures from National Geographic of people with disfigured faces, people who might be born without eyes, or might have eyes that didn’t work. That didn’t seem very image-of-God-like. I scratched eyes from my list. Next was arms. I was pretty sure everyone had – nope, then I remembered that man on TV with no arms, playing his guitar for the pope. He had to be made in God’s image. Arms … [Read more...] about what’s the soul of a parent?
rhythm, metaphor, and mama’s heartbeat
In the days leading up to the writing workshop, as I planned and packed (and wasted time worrying about how I would be away from the nursing baby for a week), I envisioned the chance to spend a week writing as a world apart from parenting. No requests for snacks, no cries for milk, no laundry to fold, no meals to prepare. For a few precious days I would get to be a Writer, not a mother-who-occasionally-writes. How wrong I was. Because not only was my writing shot through with my children and my identity as a mother, and not only did others around the table bring poignant and painful reflections on their own roles as parents, but the very craft of writing we worked to hone returned us time and time again to the early years of the parent-child relationship. In the book we used for the course, Words That Sing: Composing Lyrical Prose, our teacher Mary explained how our basic sense of rhythm, the cadence that carries our sentences, was set by our mother's heartbeat: the steady … [Read more...] about rhythm, metaphor, and mama’s heartbeat
