Around the Family Table

There’s always been room for one more chair at the table. For several years, we held at fifteen around the tables stretching out of my grandparents’ dining room. Then boyfriends came, who turned into husbands, and added one, then two chairs. Now the arrival of the next generation brings new lives to the table. There’s never been a question of how we’ll fit everyone—we just nestle in a little tighter and slide another chair into place.

What fond memories I have of this scene—the cheerful bustling of the holidays, the laughter. We always seem to forget which way to pass the food, sending the bowls of corn and mashed potatoes into a jumbled cross-armed handover. Four or five conversations simmer at once, with some able to dip into all of them.

Over the years this family has pulled others into its fold, like some sort of very friendly amoeba. It’s a family with open arms, willing—and eager—to pull another person into warmth of being known, being loved. And the thing that’s so beautiful about it is that I don’t think it’s even a conscious or “intentional” decision.

I know I am running the risk of putting my family on some sort of pedestal—which is hardly my intention. But in an age in which so many of my generation face strings of divorces, family factions who will not speak to each other, aunts, uncles, and cousins strung across the country, and grandparents they see at best on Christmas or Thanksgiving, I feel so blessed to have a family that is functional, intact, and likes each other the majority of the time. I know that it’s a rarity.

It’s not completely idyllic—we all have our quirks and foibles, and we aren’t immune from the occasional familial spats, disagreements, and frustrations. But we know that the next holiday will find us squeezed around that same table again, engaged in the same antics as we have year after year. We’re family.

And what of the family of God—Christ’s beloved church?

Read more

We Are But Creatures

Ash Wednesday is her favorite point of the church calendar.

Why?—Because with the gentle smudge of dark ash on her forehead, through the murmured “from dust you came and to dust you will return,” she is reminded that she is but a creature.

Does this bring you comfort, friend? Do you find comfort in your creatureliness?

We try hard to hide from it, in a culture (and all too often a church) that shrinks from death and weakness. We prop ourselves up with the latest treatments, the latest offers of medicinal immortality. We resolve to try harder, to be better—or to at least conceal the blemishes of our broken hearts, flawed decisions, or mortal bodies. Without saying it outright, we flee from our creatureliness, wanting to look anywhere else than at our limitations, our failings, our inadequacies. Though we may not lay a claim to being God, we would at the very least like to forget that we are creatures—that we are but dust.

Weakness is a place few march into willingly, with fanfare announcing the arrival. No—I find myself at the door, carefully steal glances to one side and then the other, and while all heads are turned, slip in, gently closing the door behind me, hoping my entrance went unmarked. In my preoccupation, I fail to notice that so many others near me stand at doors of their own, furtively entering into this same arena of the human race, marked by weakness, pain, and questions.

Many would find this discussion depressing, an unnecessary meditation on what often seems a bleak reality of existence. They would hardly claim these thoughts a comfort. Others claim that we must claim victory and power, losing sight of the truth that we follow not only the Risen Christ, but the Crucified Christ as well.

Read more

Counting Out the Bills

Sometimes life offers us parables better than those we could invent ourselves, offering us pictures, stories, glimmers of grace, offering us a language to speak of the Gospel in fresh ways unsullied by dry repetition. Friends, we never move past this hope of the Gospel; we never graduate from it onto “bigger and better things.” It calls us deeper and deeper into its mystery; its riches are unending.

Scott and I recently watched a documentary about the work of his boss, Marian, in fighting slavery in Nepal. He sat with low caste Hindu slaves and their owners, listening to stories of how they and their families found themselves enslaved. For many, they sold themselves into slavery in order to pay for medical bills or because their circumstances were so dire that slavery was the only alternative to watching their children starve. Some were there as a result of debts that deceased fathers or grandfathers had accrued, which they had to work off in their stead. The price of these human lives, the sum of their debt, typically $100-300 U.S. dollars, was a price insurmountable to them. Tears came to my eyes as I watched Marian counting bills one by one, the exact amount they owed, into the slaves’ hands, and their extreme joy and disbelief as they handed the bills to their owner and shook hands with him, finally freed. Marian helped these families find homes and work, either in the form of land to farm or supplies to start a small business. His request in return: that they live in such a way as to never allow themselves and their families to become slaves again.

This picture evokes what is one of my favorite words—redeem—which quite literally means “to buy back.” Someone, like Marian, takes an interest in and has compassion on his fellow man, who is in great need, enslaved or indebted, powerless to do anything to free himself, and he takes out his own money and gives it to the slave master. It is not his debt to pay; it is of no consequence to his own life and freedom, but he makes it his business to pay the price required for the freedom of a man, a woman, a child who is enslaved.

Read more