the new space (a welcome)

Hello, wonderful readers!

Before I forget - I wanted to let you know I'm blogging over in a new space now, to go with the newly graduated self and the new adventures that follow.

My new blog is called the wild love: you can visit it here.

A few of my recent posts over there (just in case you're curious):

It's not just a song

dear hilary: miscellaneous treasures

He is more than glorious: a letter to preston

I'd love for you to come spend time over there with me!

Love,

Hilary

on graduation day (an ending, and a beginning)

I pray quick with you, while Cat Stevens sings and my roommates brush their teeth and apply one last coat of mascara, while we smile and laugh and shake our heads at the strange new reality that settles in today. Today, we begin again the journey. Today, we let the soft winds of the past capture our college experience, and we step out into the new present. 


I pray that God would give us all the grace to see His hand moving over the waters, even when it's tempest and storm, raging hurricane or eerily calm sea. I pray that His presence would be profound, and immediate, as we trip our way across the stage, across the future. Because oh how He loves us, coltish and eager, always trying and tripping and new. How He delights in us, in the very being of us.

I pray that we would remember the past with fondness, seeing the selves we had to have been. I pray that this poem would resound strong in our hearts:

Thanks, Robert Frost (by David Ray)

Do you have hope for the future?
someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end.
Yes, and even for the past, he replied,
that it will turn out to have been all right
for what it was, something we can accept,
mistakes made by the selves we had to be,
not able to be, perhaps, what we wished,
or what looking back half the time it seems
we could so easily have been, or ought...
The future, yes, and even for the past,
that it will become something we can bear.
And I too, and my children, so I hope,
will recall as not too heavy the tug
of those albatrosses I sadly placed
upon their tender necks. Hope for the past,
yes, old Frost, your words provide that courage,
and it brings strange peace that itself passes
into past, easier to bear because
you said it, rather casually, as snow
went on falling in Vermont years ago.



I pray that the love of Christ would dwell in us. I pray that these four years of learning would be caught up in the work of the Kingdom, used to bring healing and restoration, used to build up the brokenhearted and love wildly. 


And oh, dear ones, who might walk across a stage today or who walked across one years ago? You who journeyed with me through all of these 300 posts and unsure words and brave, difficult living? I pray that you would be reminded of the deep, deep love of Jesus in all places today. I pray that you would sing of the Truth. That you would know all that is beautiful, and rest in all that is good. 


Thank you, thank you, a thousand times. Thank you for the love of Christ poured out here. Thank you for the challenge. Thank you for you. The great, inconceivable gift of you.


love,

hilary (today, a graduate)

know Him and make Him known, letter thirty-five, hilary to preston

On Tuesdays and Thursdays around these parts, Preston and I write letters back and forth. We share the wonder of mystery, grace and our encounters with mercy. We hope to hear from you in the comments and imagine with you about this walking out in faith. Read the letter I'm responding to here.

Dear Preston,

By now you know that I'm ending my time on this blog. I don't know if we got to talk about that, somewhere between theology of the arts and teaching, between moleskines and meditations on Blair and Chuck and Serena (she needs some serious character development, that one), but it's true. I'm leaving this space on Sunday and I'm starting to write out the wild love. It's so strange to think about, leaving a blogging space I feel so comfortable with, leaving behind the 320 posts, the five minutes of last spring, the first post that got a serious number of hits or someone retweeted or commented on...

But somehow in all of this leaving I felt the tug in my heart towards this new wild love space. The title even came to me as I was sitting, thinking about whether or not I would really like blogging somewhere else. And I thought to myself, what would I even call it? And then the name. The wild love. Because that is what we are called to live. 

That's what these last four weeks of living have taught me, Preston. That love should be wild and free and given away. That we should share ourselves. That we should not waste time pretending to be self-sufficient, but smile as we offer our neediness and recognize it in each other, laugh that we are helpless and small and dependent, and then hold each other's hearts.

So I'm going to make a new space over there, and journey along in the new, post-grad world, and I really hope that you come along, too. I'm so excited about the new space, but also so nervous and unsure of what it will be and how it will be different. So much change, and so much the same. I think that balance is where the beauty is revealed.

In a devotional that the whole student body received this week, they offered the prayer of general thanksgiving from the BCP. I love those old words. And I read it with eyes towards next year and wild love. The prayer begins,

"Accept, O Lord, our thanks and praise for all that you have done for us.

We thank you for the splendor of the whole creation, for the beauty of this world,

for the wonder of life, and for the mystery of love."

Give thanks for the mystery of love. Can you imagine? Giving thanks for all that we don't understand about love, for all that defies reason and expectation, for everything it demands in the dark and without explanation? The beauty, and the wonder, and the mystery. 

And then it ends, 

"Grant us the gift of your Spirit, that we may know him and

make him known; and through him, at all times and in all places, may give thanks to you in all things.

Amen."

That we might know him and make him known. The prayer of thanksgiving becomes the prayer of transformation. Because we give thanks for the mystery and beauty, we can pray also that He would live in us, and we in Him, that we would know Him and make Him known. We give thanks that we might know Him. 

As it all ends here, it all seems more beautiful and more fleeting. As I walk across the Quad, around the pond, pack sheets and towels and clothes into duffel bags, as I type out the last few posts into this blogger window - I want to give thanks for the beauty, the wonder and the mystery. 

I want to know him and make him known. 

Perhaps that's the wild love of next year. And all our years beyond it. Perhaps that's the command and the hope. Perhaps, after all, that's the real work. 

(wild) love, and grace and peace to wonder, and rejoice, 

hilary

Dear Hilary, Love, Hilary: Only a Glimpse

Dear Hilary,

I hit a wall in a friendship with someone not long ago. I wanted to connect, to reach out beyond myself and towards them. I wanted to make them feel at home in my heart, and I wanted to know the real answer, the messy and uncertain answer, that lies beyond what they say to just anyone. But they didn't let me in. They held me at arm's length, kept me at a distance. They were quiet. And now I'm at a loss - I want to know them, really know them. I want to be a part of their beautiful story. But I don't know how to enter that space. Can you help me, Hilary? How do you coax someone out from behind their walls?

Love,
Eager to be friends

Dear Eager to be friends,

The short answer to your question is: you wait. The long answer to your question is: you wait. The middle sized answer is, yes, you know this - wait. 


It's that simple, and that difficult. Since we've done the simple, maybe we should talk for a brief, fleeting moment about the difficult. What's difficult about this waiting, this sitting outside someone's heart and wondering if they're going to emerge, or if the doors and windows are locked tight? What makes the "no" they gave you sting so much?

I think there are probably a thousand answers to this dilemma of yours, and I can't pretend that mine are the wisest or the most beautiful, the most elegant or the gentlest. But I empathize with you, with our hearts and minds colliding with other people's locked doors and windows, with an eagerness to be near to someone meeting a hesitation on the other side. It's difficult because you're eager, sweetheart. It's difficult because what you're impatient for is a good thing.

You've recognized something in them, something beautiful, something true. You've been compelled by their mind or their heart or both, you went on a walk around Coy Pond and imagined being friends - really, truly friends - with them and holding their stories in your suitcase heart. You caught a glimpse of their glow and you want to be close to them. 

That's a good thing, love. It means you're paying attention to what is miraculous about people. Your eager heart is anxious to invite everyone inside. It's wild love. It's good. But at the same time it is good, it might not be time. And in love, timing is everything.

I don't mean timing as in - can you stay friends long distance, or you just met three seconds ago and you're leaving so it's all over, or you're moving to Antarctica or something. No, I mean the timing of our hearts. When we're ready to be vulnerable, to draw near to each other. When we feel the tug together. When we are willing and able to unlock doors and windows, to let our glow, well... glow.

You can't rush people into being ready to share their glow with you. You can't demand that they reveal the hidden treasures of their heart. You can't force someone you care deeply about to care at the same time, in the same way, in the same place... The "no" and the distance is difficult because your heart is hanging on the end of the line. The "no" is difficult because you see what it lovely in them and you want to rejoice in it. The "no" is difficult because you worry that it means you're not worthy enough or deep enough to contain the glow they carry inside them.

But can I tell you something, Eager? It is not a question of whether you could carry their heart. It is a question of whether or not you are meant to carry their heart right now. And you can't force or rush the answer to that question. 

The answer is "wait." Let the glow emerge in its own time, in the time that is right for who you are and who you want to become. Don't try to persuade or sweet talk them into letting those walls down - let time and wind and rain and laughter bring them down all on their own. Concentrate on loving what you do know about them, enjoying the wild gift of them... and make your heart warmer.

Wait, love. And while you're waiting to discover what you're going to be, whether you are going to be friends or lovers or simply two strangers who smile at each other? Give thanks for the glimpses of the glow.

Always, give thanks for the glimpses.

Love,
hilary

the secret i have to tell you, dear hearts.

... I'm ending this here blog.

Well, maybe changing is a better word.

You see, I graduate from college in just a few days. A few days and I'm off into a new beautiful terrifying real world of jobs and questions and love and laughter and summer nights on the beach and long winters.

And to enter the new season, I want to make a new space, a space to share my heart with you. A space to share all the crazy thoughts that tumble out of my head. I want to share what I see, and how I dream, and journey with you {if you'll come along}.

The new space is going to be over here: http://thewildlove.wordpress.com/. I'll start blogging there full time on May 20, 2012.

Why the wild love?

Because it's how we live. Or how I imagine and dream we could live. With hearts opened wide to receive the world. With selves who love fiercely, and passionately, and truly.

I'm so excited to start sharing and writing in a new space. I hope you come along for the ride - I promise to still be me, still be messy and unsure and to wonder out loud about all the same things.

He calls us to live out wild love. I'm praying that this new space, so very much at the beginning, will help me live that love.

And to say thank you for this blog, and for the person you've helped me become, here are ten of my favorite posts in no particular order (I'll still do a letter to hilary and a letter to preston this week, though):

1. One Step at a Time (It's Like Learning to Fly)
2. and you arise (a five minute post)
3. the ache is His, too, letter twenty-nine, hilary to preston
4. why I babysit (a letter to my charges)
5. the unexpected gifts
6. You are not invisible (I come back inside)
7. Dear Hilary, Love Hilary: Praise for the Water
8. on an unexpected feeling (a five minute post)
9. be brave enough to be empty, letter nine, hilary to preston
10. Dear Hilary, Love, Hilary: The Beautiful Brave Things

I love you all, dear hearts. I love that I've gotten to share a little bit of my heart with you. Thank you for carrying me.

I hope I get to see you over at the wild love soon.

love, always.
hilary

we will hear what we are, letter thirty-three, hilary to preston

On Tuesdays and Thursdays around these parts, Preston and I write letters back and forth. We share the wonder of mystery, grace and our encounters with mercy. We hope to hear from you in the comments and imagine with you about this walking out in faith. Read the letter I'm responding to here.

Dear Preston,

Isn't it strange, this ache we feel for the departure we must have known was coming? I graduate in nine days - you in just two - and I'm sitting on my bed angry at the idea of leaving, as if it was a surprise tucked into my acceptance letter, a clause I didn't read. You're going to have to go from this place, it says, and I want to rebel, insist that no, we can always be here where it is safe and familiar, where it is challenging and messy, where hearts have emptied and overflowed.

But then the thunderclap, as you put it, and the sweeping in of departure. And we'll never come back here, will we? Never as we are now, and the place which seems so familiar will bend with the seasons and look different when we happen upon it in ten years. Among the great and varied changes of this life, it's places changing we forget about most. Baylor and Gordon will change; the green of the quad and the presence of the coffee shop on campus and the feel of the chapel pews and the long sidewalks leading past the baseball field to the track - they will weather new conversations and new feet, new adventures and heartbreaks. These places we love most will not stand still just to watch us move. They, too, will journey on towards their fullness. The places, too, will become more fully His.

I'm deep in Rilke, deep in the goodness of those words. After all this, it is Rilke who reminds me, in his gentle way, to trust and behold and marvel. Can I share just one small thing with you, because it's too beautiful to leave on a page in a book?

"Orchard and Road" (Collected French Poems)

In the traffic of our days
may we attend to each thing
so that patterns are revealed
amidst the offerings of chance.

All things want to be heard,
so let us listen to what they say.
In the end we will hear what we are:
the orchard or the road leading past.

All things want to be heard. I wish I had learned this four years ago, when the stars clamored from the night sky, when the trees whispered, when the people I passed on the sidewalk looked longingly at me, waiting to be recognized. I wish I had learned to listen to what they were saying. I missed them. There are a thousand images I might have captured, rendered permanent in words or in the silence between words; a thousand people I might have loved, a thousand books I might have read, a thousand cool rainy nights I might have walked and prayed and thought.

But in the end we will hear what we are. What does he mean by this? By listening to the world, we will hear what we are. We who are so in-between, who yearn beyond the world but root ourselves in the world - how can we know what we are?

We are leaving, Preston, and the departure aches in places I didn't know existed. In the traffic of my days I attend to that ache. I listen to what it says: it says I have loved. It says I have given my heart away. It says what I am is human, and to be human is to ache and love.

Today and tomorrow, I'm praying that you would hear what you are in the traffic of your day: that you would hear about how you loved, and rejoiced, and ached. That you would hear how you belong to Him. That you would hear the orchard, and the road leading past.

Love, and every grace,
Hilary

Dear Hilary, Love, Hilary: The Front Porch of Your Heart

Dear Hilary,

I'm graduating. There, I said it. I hate saying it. I'm leaving people that I love. I'm leaving relationships that are new and fragile, that have had life for so little time. What if they fall apart? What if when I leave, I can't keep all these people in my heart, or in my life? What do I do when I have to say goodbye and I know it's the end, and the chances of seeing them again are so small, barely even real? They're going. I'm staying. We're all leaving.

Love,
Leaving

Dear Leaving,

For a long time now, I have described my heart as a house. I talked about the rooms I build for people, according to what I know about them. Some rooms are living rooms with soft white couches and lots of blankets, rooms for the people I love to curl up and be safe. Other rooms are decorated like jungles and are filled with unexpected treasures, because those people love to adventure and imagine. And still other rooms are kitchens where we sit at old wooden tables and drink tea and tell stories. I want my heart to be like coming home to people. I want to carry hearts in my heart. I want to love by building a place for you, with your name on it.

The beautiful thing about this metaphor is that it helps describe the agony of departure, and the hope. Sometimes people move out of my heart. I come back to their room and discover that they've packed boxes, erased their name from the door. I walk through the empty space and I remember, and it breaks my heart. And I know there are people I've hurt in the same way, packed my own boxes and moved out without telling them, without a word of goodbye. This is heartbreak: to discover that sometimes, we cannot live in the hearts of those we love. Sometimes, we must say goodbye. 

So here you are, in the house of your heart. And there are boxes everywhere, people shuffling, unpacking, repacking, sitting on the floor and laughing or crying or drinking red wine straight from the bottle. There is no certainty who is going where. There is no certainty whether the people you love now will be there forever, and I urge you to accept this as a part of it all. A part of living, even a part of loving.

So I come to my words to you today: let people linger on the front porch of your heart. 

Leave your lights on. Make sweet tea and lemonade and let the people you love, who are so new to your life, pull up chairs or a bit of dusty floor and stay for a while. Don't rush them out because you're afraid they'll break your heart with their leaving. Don't hide from people. Don't overplan how each conversation will go and what you will say and do.

Instead, spend these next ten days on the front porch of your heart, and love fully the people who are there. Maybe they will move into the house in the next six months. Maybe you just get ten days with them. Maybe it's something in between. But let them sit with you on that front porch and love them.

None of you yet know whose heart you will carry for how long. None of you yet know who you will become to each other. It's terrifying to think that you could care for someone who won't be in your life later. That will always be true. But it's also always true that they are worth knowing for those ten days. People are worth sitting with on the front porch of your heart, always.

So let them linger there, and love them fully. I promise the home of your heart is richer and more beautiful for it.

Love, always,
Hilary

i pray for peace of heart, letter thirty-one, hilary to preston

On Tuesdays and Thursdays around these parts, Preston and I write letters back and forth. We share the wonder of mystery, grace and our encounters with mercy. We hope to hear from you in the comments and imagine with you about this walking out in faith. Read the letter I'm responding to here.

Dear Preston,

When I woke up late this morning, only fifteen short minutes to race through clothes and shoes and coats, water splashed across my eyelids and books hastily gathered, I remembered this prayer. I found it years ago when I was convinced God meant me to be Catholic, and I wanted to verify that there was beauty in the Catholic Church - the beauty of prayer life, of meditation, of slowness.

Almighty and Eternal God,
Give me, I beseech You,
the great gift of inward peace.
Command the winds and storms
of my unruly passions.
Subdue, by Your grace, 
my proneness to love 
created things too much.
Give me a love of suffering for Your sake.
make me forbearing and kind to others,
that I may avoid quarrels and contentions.
And teach me constantly to seek after
and to acquire that perfect resignation
to Your Holy Will
which alone brings interior peace.
Amen. 

The prayer is for "peace of heart." Isn't that beautiful? How rarely do we think of peace as the great gift? How rarely do we beg God for it?

I have to confess to you, these last few weeks of school feel anything but peaceful. They are swelling with urgency and with ending, with the harsh tick of the clock, with the insistent reminders of countdowns and "senior formal" dress shopping and plans for reading day. I'm swimming through the hours wondering how there could ever be peace amid these last few weeks.

And to confess even more, I don't know how to want to pray for peace. My whole life I've loved the hurricane. I love the passionate, intense, everything-is-caught-up-in-everything feeling. I love the rush of feeling you get when you start to consider, and wonder about, everything that's going on inside your heart and head.

But it's not by harshness that our God subdues my proneness to choose His creation over Him. It's not be strict, unloving commandments, or by anger or wrath. He subdues what is unhealthy in us by grace. He offers us Himself and His love as the answer to our winds and storms.

I don't know if there is anything more beautiful than this kind of grace. The grace that teaches and leads. The grace that walks onto the water and rebukes it. This, this is the One who teaches us peace. 


And a windstorm came down on the lake, and they were filling with water, and were in jeopardy. And they came to Him and awoke Him, saying, “Master, Master, we are perishing!”

Then He arose and rebuked the wind and the raging of the water. And they ceased, and there was a calm. But He said to them, “Where is your faith?”

And they were afraid, and marveled, saying to one another, “Who can this be? For He commands even the winds and water, and they obey Him!”

I know His name, Preston. I'm only at the very beginning of knowing who this is who commands the winds and storms of my unruly passions, but I can hear Him command them. I can hear His grace rebuke the wind and the raging water. 

And today, I pray for you. I pray that God would give you the great gift of inward peace. I pray that His grace would command your winds and storms. I pray that the love of Christ Jesus would astound you with its depth and breadth and height. I pray for peace of heart. 

Love,

Hilary

Dear Hilary, Love, Hilary: Trust The Poets

Dear Hilary,

How do you trust your gut? Is our intuition right about things? What if it deceives us, what if my heart deceives me, says one thing and means another, promises I'll be okay when I'm not? What if I ache in one moment and laugh in another? And all the while I can't tell whether what I'm doing is good for my heart or terrible for it? Have you ever been afraid of breaking your own heart?

Love,
Heart Thumping

Dear Heart,

You are a dear heart. So bold and blunt. So unsure. So full of life that you can't help but let these questions tumble out of you and onto the page. You sound so much at the beginning of learning lessons about your heart, and what it can bear, and how to know that.

I've always been a little afraid of breaking my own heart. I've done it enough times now to know the feelings - a slow, steady ache that works its way up through my hip bones and my lungs and rests there, inside my ribcage. I know how my head starts to remind me of how stupid I was, how the decisions I made were my fault, how this awful twisting inside my body is the result of my own foolishness. I know how the stories start to spin around like small hurricanes and suddenly everything looks wrong, looks like it hurts, looks like it is broken.

So, dear heart. You who are bold and blunt and afraid of breaking. My only advice to you is to go slow. Do not be quick to tell yourself you know the ending to the story. Do not be quick to blame yourself for the ache. If the ache arrives, welcome it - it has something to teach you. It can soften you and make you tender. It can give you courage. You write in such dichotomies - good versus terrible, saying versus meaning, ache versus laughter.

I don't think those are ever as separate as we wish them.

Our hearts are built to hold inside them all the uncertain and the certain, the good and the terrible, the ache and the laughter. We need not tell ourselves to feel only one thing, or to banish difficult emotions when we see them coming. They, too, belong to us. I don't think we're meant to be governed by these feelings, whether easy to bear or difficult. I don't think necessarily our hearts should be dictators. If anything, they are gentle leaders, leading us out towards love and towards compassion.

I trust my gut because ultimately? Even the most agonizing experiences soften and shape us. Even the things we do not believe we can bear become a part of who we are. And we cannot know what those will be, we cannot know what will happen tomorrow or the next year or the next decade. So we must hold the future lightly, and love the present fiercely. Trust that if you are yearning for the truth and living out love, then you have nothing to fear.

I titled this column to you, "Trust the Poets" because they're the ones who teach me this lesson. They teach me how to peer inside my own heart and love what is there, whether it is easy or difficult, whether it is joy or ache or both together. I think the poets, the real ones, have always called us towards more courage when it comes to this. Courage to love fully. Courage to trust the unseen. Courage to let our hearts break and bend and expand.

Can I leave you with this poem, one that I fell in love with not too long ago? I think it will help you.

Love, all of it,
Hilary

As Kingfishers Catch Fire

BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

I say móre: the just man justices;

Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —

Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men's faces.

the ache is His, too, letter twenty-nine, hilary to preston

On Tuesdays and Thursdays around these parts, Preston and I write letters back and forth. We share the wonder of mystery, grace and our encounters with mercy. We hope to hear from you in the comments and imagine with you about this walking out in faith. Read the letter I'm responding to here, and another beautiful piece by Preston you must read here.

Dear Preston,

Peace I leave with you, my own peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not be afraid. 


I read your letter and then your life, unmasked, before I had the chance to sit down at my own computer to type back to you a small piece of this week, of this bigger journey of grace, of hunger. And when I read your life, unmasked, and I thought about what I can possibly say, because what your words point to is delicate and unsayable (yes, Rilke's words sit next to me) - and I am insufficient.

Your heart hurts because you love your thesis in deep and unsayable ways. You gave yourself to the work, as we are commanded to do. You stretched farther, and challenged yourself, challenged others to envision something beyond the traditional thesis, beyond the traditional so-called scholarly way. You forged a new path. You cleared branches and stumbled over unseen rocks. You were captured by a vision of something good and beautiful, and you followed it.

And I tell you the truth, that this will indeed be honored in unexpected ways.

I wonder if we who study and wish for ourselves academic titles and honors and responsibilities, if we forget how God sees us. I know He delights in our very being, in our existence. I know He delights to see His children inch pieces of the puzzle together. I know He delights when we learn. But I don't think that delight is measured very well by academic honors. By grades or comments or critiques. I don't think God's pure delight in how you journeyed towards Him over the past year is measured by any of the measuring tools we love from our perches in this strange ivory tower.

He delights to watch us be. He has been delighting all along. And so I whisper to you, and slip this note through the URLs and the trackbacks to you: He who takes great delight in you will honor your work. 


For there is no waste in God's economy. Even our aches are His. Even our broken bones and disappointed hopes. Even our falling down. He gathers us up, our fractured and chaotic selves, and delights in us. Nothing has been wasted; nothing has been lost. I'm convinced of this. I'm convinced that even though everything I say is insufficient, He is not.

The ache of this is His, too. And He offered us peace in the midst of our fears. He offered us His own peace, not as the world gives but as He gives. The ivory tower cannot give peace. It can give the most tentative, fearful, hesitant, we-could-lose-it-at-any-second affirmation. But it cannot give to us the peace which passes understanding.

He holds our aches and offers us peace. And I pray that you hear Him in these next days, still with His offer to give not as the world gives, but to give you His own self.

He who delights in you will hold and transform your ache into something beautiful. He will honor your faithfulness. He will bring peace to your heart.

May He be ever near you now.

Love,
Hilary

Dear Hilary, Love, Hilary: Lean Closer

Dear Hilary,

I grew up as a Christian. I love it. I love the church I go to. I love the people, and the way they recognize me and show me grace. I love the winks from the moms who knew me in pink and white sundresses talking into a gourd as if it was a phone, and have watched me grow into the person I am now. But as I head out into the world, as college ends, I wonder how to stay with this. I guess from reading your blog that you are a Christian, and that you love the Lord. How do you stay with Jesus, Hilary?

Love,

A bit adrift

Dear “A bit adrift”,

I wrote on this here blog once about my quiet story. A story about grace, and obedience, and the long hard road of walking towards Christ. I wrote that story because I wanted to remind myself how I’m in love with God. I wrote it so that when I wanted to stray most, I would stay near to Him.

I write to stay near to God. I get on my knees in strange spontaneous moments in my room at 6:30 in the evening and clench my fists hard as I pray. I lie in bed, trying to fall asleep, and ask God all sorts of questions about my day, about the people who have touched my life, about the things I love most. I talk to the ceiling and then to the wall, and then to the inside of my pillow. I ramble. I listen to music.

And I think you must lean hard into the wind and the rain of your life, instead of away from it. When you sit through difficult conversations – the ones where people are hurting and angry and your words don’t really heal them – and say, “Where is God?” I think you are asking a good question. When you look around you at the pain of the people you love, the pain in your own heart, and ask God, "Why?" it's a good question. When you're tired and frustrated and angry, and you ask God, "Who are you?" you are asking a good question. But when you ask, love, lean towards an answer, not away from one. Ask, “Where are you, God?” and believe that He is going to answer you.

I don’t think there is anything really miraculous about staying with Jesus as you leave old places and enter new ones. It’s always and ever only a story about grace, in the end. How He gives you the privilege of knowing His people, and journeying with them. How He comes close to you in the agonizing moments of disappointment and the fullest moments of joy. How you know His name because He called yours first.

As we head out towards the world, sweetheart, I think we stay with Jesus by letting His grace keep us close. I think we stay with Jesus by falling a little in love. This is a story about wind, and rain, about strange new things and beautiful hard things. This life of yours is gorgeous and full of grace.

We stay with Jesus by leaning closer.

Love,

Hilary

Why I Kick Off My Shoes (for family)

His tears are hot and angry when I come home late that night. My day (and my woebegone overly-emotional self) evaporate when I see him curled in the big brown easy chair. Mom and younger brother #1 have briefed me on the situation - the beloved iPod snatched out of his locker, the headphones so carefully, carefully saved for and explained and prized gone. And so younger brother #2 sits in the chair staring at the Bruins and I gasp for words like a fish gasping for water.

"I'm so sorry." 

It's completely insufficient and we both know it, his eyes narrowing and his body twisting away from me as I try to hug him to no avail. And then my ends fray and I start trying to talk him down from justice in his own hands tomorrow and talk about confronting and how he wants to act before he thinks anymore and I yell, not loud but insistent, that this isn't safe, to talk this way, and it's dangerous to do this and he shouldn't...

And I realize as I spew the words out of my mouth that my youngest brother is braver than most adults I know. Because every day he wades through adolescents who are fearful and from their fear pours mean words and backtalk and gossip and anger and whispered rumors. And it wasn't so long ago that I was there too.

I remember how friends became enemies on the 4 minute bus ride home, because they "didn't want to talk to you anymore" and how easy it was to tell that secret but swear in the hushed slumber party hair braiding circles that no, you'd never tell. And the next day the secret was gone and I wondered too, like my brother, why God let it happen, and why He didn't stop it? Why? And I remember the wounds on tender teenage hearts, when so-and-so decided lunch was not a time to speak to you and I ate alone, or hid in the computer lab doing work. And I remember tearful diary entries when he or she chose someone else to be their girlfriend/friend/lab partner, or how I too often clung to the group instead of holding my hand to the shy ones in the corner the way I thought about, holding out love and curiosity and friendship.

So after he stalks to his room, angry and reeling, I do the only thing I feel like my heart tells me to do. I kick off my shoes. I peel back the covers. I crawl in. I put my arm protectively around him and I say, "I'm here, and I love you." We lie there for a while, the hum of the fan a gentle music. And I watch him, and am amazed that I have the privilege of being in his life - that the word sister can be what he calls me.

I kick off my shoes and I drop my purse and make my arms as wide and warm as possible, because my brother is brave. Because when words falter, the most I can do as his sister is kick off my shoes and snuggle into bed with him, and stop what I'm doing in my day and stop everything, just so that I can say "I love you" to the bravest among us.

In the world where everything logical falls apart at the first touch: the little child in the manger is the only giver of Life, the whole Kingdom of Heaven is a mustard seed, and the infinite is only ever found in the smallest moment - this is the world where kicking off your shoes and crawling into the sibling space and whispering I love you is the only thing to do.

May we love one another.

Love,

Hilary

He keeps me tender, letter twenty-seven, hilary to preston

On Tuesdays and Thursdays around these parts, Preston and I write letters back and forth. We share the wonder of mystery, grace and our encounters with mercy. We hope to hear from you in the comments and imagine with you about this walking out in faith. Read the letter I'm responding to here.

Dear Preston,

I prayed for you yesterday, wet hair flying behind me as I part scurried, part meandered, towards work and the long afternoon. I prayed that you would be unselfconscious, just as Madeleine L'Engle says we should we when we are truly in our art. I prayed that your words would flow freely and that you would speak only, and always, the good words that never return void or empty.

I was thinking as I fell asleep last night about this one time that I helped my mother in Sunday School. At our church the 3-6 year olds are together for the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, a wonderful Montessori-style, contemplative, independent working room with things to touch and smell, work that requires hands as open as our hearts. There is one of the Good Shepherd and the sheep, with real carved wooden sheep in all different sheep colors, and a man carrying a sheep on his shoulders.

This particular week, I had been rubbed raw by difficult conversations and too much thinking. I'd been inside my head, trying to reason my way out of a problem, trying to fix my feelings, talk myself into being happy again.

And a hand, sticky with bits of glue and purple construction paper, found mine. "Let's see the Good Shepherd!" she proclaimed to me, pointing towards the small table. I let her take my hand and lead me to the small table where she could sit on her knees and I scrunched down, sitting cross-legged. She opened the small wooden gate and began to parade the thin wooden sheep in and out. They bounded over each other and frolicked, a few of them tripped as they came leaping out of their sheep pen. I read to her the simple words from John. How the sheep know his voice. How they follow the Good Shepherd. She paraded her sheep in and out, and they talked to each other a bit. The Good Shepherd and his small smile, lamb on his shoulders, finally led them all back inside.

And because the atrium (that's what they call the classroom) is a place where work becomes prayer, and the Holy Spirit inspires answers from the littlest ones, I asked a last question, "Who is the Good Shepherd?"

She looked at me, almost disbelieving I would ask her. "JESUS!" she shouted back. "Jesus is the Good Shepherd!" Oh. My heart, all raw and aching, stopped. What a sight it must have been: a four year old girl walking wooden sheep around a table, and an eighteen year old girl, hand on heart, who can't catch her breath at that answer. Oh. Jesus is the Good Shepherd. 


He keeps me tender this way, Preston, through the simple answer I so often avoid. He keeps my heart in the palm of His hand. Jesus is the Good Shepherd, who carries the sheep. That day, looking at all those wooden sheep in their parade, I realized that sometimes I'm the one on his shoulders.

He is strong enough to carry us. I forget that. He is strong enough to keep us tender in our raw moments, tender in our sadnesses and joys and singing.

He carries me on His shoulders. 

And behold, He makes all things new, and He lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit, for ever and ever and unto the ages of ages, Amen.

Love (and prayers for the presence of the Good Shepherd),
Hilary

Dear Hilary, Love, Hilary: You Carry It With You

This week I'm linking up with the wonderful Joy over at Joy in this Journey. We write life, unmasked to share the raw and real about our lives. We write to tell the stories of the mess and the beauty. Won't you come share your stories, too?

Dear Hilary,

Do you ever feel like things just... happen to you? Like you're standing still, in the middle of a crosswalk in downtown Chicago and the cars are whizzing by? I graduate in four weeks. I walk across a stage and out of a life I've had, and it feels like what I do here, as I inch nearer and nearer to that stupid stage, I'm just watching things happen to me with no idea how or why, or what they mean. And I'm scared out of my mind that none of this life I've had here will mean anything.

Love,
Graduate

Dear Graduate,

The woman who single-handedly changed my belief about life and writing, and getting on the floor and doing it anyway, is (as you all know), Dear Sugar. Her other name is Cheryl Strayed, and she writes beautiful books, that you should probably read. I reread some of the things that she wrote when I was trying to think about what to say to you today. So many of us, not just when we graduated college, wonder about whether any of "this" life will come with us when we leave. If I leave Dallas, TX for Paris, France, will any of Dallas come with me? If I leave childhood behind, if I go to a private school, if I break up with my boyfriend or girlfriend or fiancé, if I become a lawyer or a pediatric nurse or a potter, will any of who I was before I was {blank} come with me?


Sugar says this:

The most terrible and beautiful and interesting things happen in a life. For some of you, those things have already happened. Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will.



She's right, Graduate. Whatever happens to you belongs to you. It really does. If it's painful conversations about honesty and truth, if it's afternoons learning how to skip rocks on a pond down the street from your house. If it's terrible. If makes you ache. If it's beautiful. If it makes you sing. Whatever these four years of this school have held? You will always carry that with you. 


So too with the people who now whizz by you as you stand on the downton crosswalk. Some of them, you'll need to open your hands and let them leave in a bigger way, let the relationship change in bold brush strokes. Some of these people you'll continue to walk alongside, across continents and time zones and the aching and the singing. Some of these people will surprise you how they enter your story, and allow you to enter theirs. In all of it, it didn't just "happen to you." It is the one life you have. You carry it. 

I'm tempted to tell you that Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a letter to you (even though he didn't, exactly). But he wrote to someone who was thinking and worrying just like you are. It's Letter Eight. Go read it. Let his comforting words about the world that is not against us, about trusting what is difficult and loving what seems impossible carry you, too.

These next four weeks fly, with terrible and beautiful and interesting things that will happen to you and to the ones you love. You will become more of what you are meant to be. In these next four weeks, in the four after that, in the two hundred weeks after that. Do not be afraid of losing its meaning, because the meaning will go with you.

You walk across a stage and into your life. The precious, difficult life you had before. The meaningful life. Let Sugar and Rilke and me remind you: you carry it with you. You always will.


Love,
Hilary

The Visible Love (The Second Sunday of Easter)

Almighty and everlasting God, who in the Paschal mystery
established the new covenant of reconciliation: Grant that all
who have been reborn into the fellowship of Christ's Body
may show forth in their lives what they profess by their faith;
through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you
and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.


That we may show forth in our lives what we profess by our faith. I roll those words around on my tongue. Show forth in my life, what I profess by my faith. But what do I profess? What should show forth in my life?

And I turn open the crisp pages of Rilke, looking for an answer, something, to build these last four weeks of college around.

And Rilke writes,

"Ever again, though we've learned the landscape of love
and the lament in the churchyard's name
and the terrible, silent abyss where the others have fallen;
ever again we walk out, two together,
under the ancient trees, ever again find a place
among wildflowers, under heaven's gaze." (Uncollected Poems)

And I can hear the midst of our Easter celebrations a call towards more visible, profound, daily love. A call to walk out together under ancient trees and relearn the landscape of love. 


Isn't Easter about how all things are made new in Him who is no longer dead, but alive? Doesn't this Resurrection life change the landscape of our love?

I want to show forth love in my life. I want to write letters to people who I hold close to my heart. I want to walk around the Quad on a Tuesday afternoon just because it's a beautiful day, and there is enough time to do beautiful things. I want to find a place among wildflowers.

I want to write more poetry in these next four weeks and laugh loudly with my roommate early on a Sunday morning. I want to have my heart stopped at another writer's words. I want to wear cowboy boots and a red sundress and drink iced tea and lemonade with the people who have shaped my life. I want to cradle a mug of chai and look at you and realize that of all the good gifts in all the years, there isn't anything quite like the gift of knowing you. 

(mandie sodoma - I'll never be able to say enough thank you's for this picture)

Can we relearn the landscape of love in these next four weeks?


Because this Easter life, this Resurrection joy? It's about living visible love. These next four weeks will fly, and we'll wear the robes and march down the bright green lawn, out towards our future. These next four weeks we can fill with worry, with anxious plans and second guesses. We can fill them with misunderstanding or hurt, with broken bones and egos and hearts. And perhaps those things will always arrive, despite our best efforts.

But we can also live these next four weeks loving each other with fuller hearts. We can live like kites set free on the breeze, joyful and unafraid. We can choose life over plans, people over post-it notes, knowing our hearts over double checking our to-do lists. 

Come with me, and find a place among the wildflowers, and live the Easter life?

Love,
Hilary

because I'm foolishly in love, letter twenty-five, hilary to preston

On Tuesdays and Thursdays around these parts, Preston and I write letters back and forth. We share the wonder of mystery, grace and our encounters with mercy. We hope to see you in the comments. Read the letter I'm responding to here.

Dear Preston,

The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia. There is such a beautiful and good call and response hidden in there, such a good, and beautiful echo from priest's proclamation to congregation's singing. I love that in the Easter season all the hymns are filled with Alleluia. After hiding that word from our vocabulary in Lent, how joyful it is to shout it, and whisper it to each other, and pray it?

I'm so glad that the time with your friends was filled with joy. I think I can understand a small part of that, because when I'm with my family I'm reminded that God is absurdly generous with His people. He gives us each other for the journey, and each other for the long hard road of obedience. He gives us tables filled with friends and family and ice cream sundaes on Easter night. He gives us long conversations that take hours over chais, where we learn the contours of our beating hearts. He gives us each other, Preston.

And then, just when the gift is too much for my small hands to wrap around? I realize He gives us Himself.


And I'm foolishly in love with Him. I'm in love with how He appears to us in baptism prayers over infants, and on the long run around Coy Pond in the grey early morning light. I'm in love with how God's goodness cannot really be dissected, but entered. I'm in love with His faithfulness. How He promises to be with us always to the end of the age, and I keep turning around to find that He is keeping that promise.

Preston, God found me in Mississippi this weekend in a small Orthodox church. He stirred inside me and instead of anxiety, which I usually feel, He brought peace. I stood off to the side, my black pencil skirt and flats feeling out of place in the colorful church, my hands kneading into each other. There wasn't much I knew in the service. But I sang anyway, my voice quivering.

And God said, Hilary, I see you. 


My heart stopped. How did He know that I felt so out of place? How did He hear me asking myself the question of if I'll ever really belong to God, really belong in church? How did that unasked question get answered?

But again, He said, Hilary, I recognize you. 


We find and learn that peace about peace by being still. We let His voice speak over our dark spaces and our bright ones. Sometimes I am not willing to let God give me peace. I think chaos is so much more exciting and interesting - I think it makes me more intelligent, to be chaotic and questioning. I think it makes me more "authentic" and "cool."

Maybe we learn that peace about peace by being foolishly and helplessly in love with God. Maybe we learn to accept His gift of Hilary, I see you by smiling widely to ourselves on the plane rides and the coffee dates and praying our love out loud.

Love, and every Easter blessing, and may His love abound and abide in all places,
Hilary

Dear Hilary, Love, Hilary: Resist the Chaos

Dear Hilary,

I have this story about me and the Eastern Orthodox church. It's a story about impatience and eagerness and rebellion and love. It's a story about Mary, and icons and mercy. It's a beautiful story - hard to tell in some places, but good. And I felt a pull for the first time over the weekend back towards Orthodoxy. I don't know what it means. I'm scared of returning but I want to run forward. I want to become the right thing. I want to understand if this is what I'm supposed to do, if this is what God is calling me to do. But I don't want to mess it up again and rush in and out or think I know what I'm doing when I don't. What should I do, Hilary?

Love,
A sort of catechumen

Dear Sort Of Catechumen,

Some day I want you to write a book about your story. It sounds like what Dear Sugar calls your second beating heart - the thing inside you that calls out and demands to be recognized. The thing you cannot escape, however much you try. Orthodoxy entered your life; it changed you. It's okay to let the change be a beautiful and real part of your story. It is right that your story about Mary and eagerness and impatience and mercy and rebellion and icons and love is the story you're longing to tell us. And, sweet girl, that is the story I want you to tell us. 


But you aren't really writing to ask permission to tell the world the aching and beautiful story of your journey with Orthodoxy. You're asking what to do if a journey you thought was over isn't. You're asking, "What happens if I was done, but God was not?" The pull back towards Orthodoxy is the collision of your spirit with a beckoning from Him. And you want to know how to move forward.

Resist the chaos.


I hope that doesn't sound too harsh, love. I don't mean it to. But I do mean to speak freely and fully here, and I do mean what I say. Now is the time to be still. Now is the time to resist that delicious internal chaos we all love to make when a new possibility presents itself to us. That chaos will make it impossible for any real movement.

I'm willing to guess that a part of what happened in the first part of your journey with Orthodoxy is that you were not quiet. You let that delicious internal chaos run rampant over your decisions, your eagerness first toward and then away, over your conversations and longings and prayers. And that is the story you must tell yourself now, as a reminder that sometimes the only way forward is to stand still and let something else move inside you.

You do not need to worry about making it clear all on your own. Your anxious questions about "messing it up" or wanting to "become the right thing" are trying to take over the clarifying work that God already is doing and is capable of doing. He doesn't need you to tell Him if it's clear enough that you should be Orthodox. He doesn't need you to decide if you should be. He doesn't need you to hesitate because of your story. He doesn't want a chaotic heart.

He just needs you to keep still.

The "right thing" to become is one of Christ's sheep. The "right thing" to be running towards is the Son of God. The real pull behind every smaller one is a pull towards God. He loves you, Catechumen. That's the beginning and end and middle of the story.

In the Orthodox Church they pray for the catechumens during liturgy. Among the prayers they offer to God, they say: Save them, have mercy upon them, preserve them, and protect them, O God, by Thy grace.


Let His grace pull you forward. Let His voice be still, and small, and clear.

Resist that delicious chaos, Catechumen, and again and again in peace keep praying.

Love,
Hilary

The Miraculous Naming (Pascha, Easter Sunday)

At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus.

  He asked her, “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?”

   Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.”

  Jesus said to her, “Mary.”

   She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, “Rabboni!” (which means “Teacher”).

 Jesus said, “Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”

 Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news: “I have seen the Lord!” And she told them that he had said these things to her. - John 20.14 - 17

Today, the Risen One appears, glorious in the Resurrected Life. Today, He tramples down death by death  and wins for us the victory over the grave. Today, dear friends, He brings us new life!

And as we sit in our pews and around our dinner tables, as we smooth our ties and skirts, as we shuffle feet in their new sandals and clink our wine glasses - He calls us each by name. Today, as we celebrate, the Good Shepherd whispers into our hearts that He knows us. That He recognizes us in this bright new life. He names us - and the naming is the life.

Mary did not recognize Jesus when he found her. And it is a finding - he meets her, he encounters her. She is weeping for the loss, for the promise she believes has been broken by death. Where have they taken him? She wonders to the angels. I imagine her searching, anxious, looking in every direction while tears stream down her face and her hands knead into each other. Where have they taken him? Where is Jesus? 

And He comes to her. In that deep moment, the mystery shakes the universe. Just when we most believe that he is gone, he comes to us. Just at the moment I bring my eyes to the icon of Christ in blessing at the right side of the altar, in McComb, Mississippi, in the small Orthodox church? Just at the moment when I most believe I will never belong, He looks back at me. He comes to us. 

Jesus said to her, Mary. Jesus says to me, Hilary. 

And we turn, Mary and I, crying, "Rabboni!" "Teacher!" And we cry out in joy and fear and trembling. We fall to our knees at the sight of him. Because He names us. Because He knows us. Because He comes to us. 

And today, with Mary, I cry out to you: I have seen the Lord! 

And He has given me life. 

And the most blessed Pascha to you. 

Love,

Hilary

He is washing our feet, letter twenty-three, hilary to preston

On Tuesdays and Thursdays around these parts, Preston and I write letters back and forth. We share the wonder of mystery, grace and our encounters with mercy. We hope to see you in the comments. Read the letter I'm responding to here.

Dear Preston,

I write this to you at 5:20 in the morning, sitting in Terminal A of Logan Airport. I'm on my way to visit my mentor, who I've written about before, who's down near Jackson, Mississippi. It's a strange quiet grace to be sitting here, listening to The Low Anthem through my headphones and the rambling guitarist sitting twelve feet away. And I'm rereading your letter, thinking about the gap between what we think we know of this world, and what it is, what it must be. I think we forget the grace of imagination, because we put so much implicit trust in what we think, what we reason out from observation, what we deduce from the narrow avenues of our senses and data collection.

But imagination is grace to us, too, because my heart is unknowable to you, and yours to me, and yet through these words, we know each other. Imagination is what helps me see the woman next to me scrolling through spreadsheets, or the woman on the other side reading with her lips pursed, and realize they are whole, many-dimensioned and miraculous. Imagination, when it has its rightful place, teaches us to keep our hearts open to learning, because there is never a moment when the Truth ceases to surprise us.

The liturgy is the work of the people - imaginations as well as hearts as well as minds. The liturgy holds us wondering at this mystery. The liturgy reminds us that what we know is so small and dusty. You're right - we'll never have enough evidence, enough observation, to escape that shuddering, breathtaking moment of imagination and trust. This, this, Lord. This I believe.


And today is Maundy Thursday, and I realize all over again that it is this I believe: The God of the universe washed the feet of his disciples. The One who made us gets on His knees, pours water, scrubs off dirt. He didn't wait until we were worthy of that kind of love. He gets on his knees knowing where He is going. He gets on his knees already the offering. Preston - He got on his knees to wash our feet. 


Imagination is a grace to us, because I can't get my fingers around that kind of love. I know the love that is quid pro quo. I know the love that holds hands walking down the street. I know the love that listens close and patient, the love that repeats truth in dark moments. I can even get my mind around the love that trusts a separation and a departure is not the end.

But He got on his knees before the disciples and washed their feet. He loves with that kind of love. He loves with the aching humility and patience. I do not know what this is. But I know in the space between my heart that says Lord, I believe you and my mind that puzzles, He fills with grace.

Today, may you hear again how He cherishes you. May you remember that He is washing our feet. May your heart be filled with the grace to wonder at His love.

Love,
Hilary