Six years. Feels like longer, because sometimes it's hard to remember life before us.
Marriage
is hard. In some ways it feels harder than parenting because there's
not even really the benefit of biological instinct to help your way
through some of the hard stuff. In six years there's been plenty of
that, plenty of moments when it felt like the ground was going to open
up and swallow us whole but every time we've been able to claw and
scratch and work our way through it to sturdier ground. The foundation
under our feet has never felt stronger, and the view from here is pretty
great.
This was a big and crazy year, and he was the rock
through all of it. Job changes and stress
and craziness and through it
all he was always right there to hold me, make me laugh, leave some
little silly token of affection to brighten up my day and my workspace.
This is the man who taught himself to cross-stitch on Youtube so he
could recreate the Hawkblock as a Christmas present. I'm still not sure
how he's ever going to top that one. I've said before he makes me
believe in better endings. He makes me want to be a better person not
because he's ever tried to change me but because he loves me where I am.
I took my wedding vows very seriously, and I'm grateful for
every better and I'm even more grateful for every worse - and there'll
be more of both to come no doubt - because they're
the mile markers on
the journey that's brought us here. Six years and I love him more
today than I could possibly have imagined then, because of everything
that's happened in the space between. Happy Anniversary, M.
If you don't think ritual matters in how we process death and loss,
I'd urge you to take a close look at the coverage today from the
Netherlands, where the first bodies from the MH17 crash were received at
Eindhoven Air Base.
Ritual gives us process in the midst of chaos and despair, it gives us context and community with which to experience our grief and loss, and, ultimately, find the space to begin to heal.
Forty
hearses left the base, each carrying a single coffin. They traveled to
the town of Hilversum, an hour and a half's drive away, where formal
identification will occur. The overpasses were lined with people by the
hundreds, tossing flowers, shedding tears.
Ritual provides us
with an outlet for our personal grief, the grief we share. It gives us
community to cry with, it gives us arms to lift us when our knees give
out, hands to hold ours when we feel close to shaking apart.
At Eindhoven today, a lone trumpeter played The Last Post, a military song for those lost in war. A nation stood still. Church bells tolled, and the world mourned.
I am old enough that I was on the tail-end of “duck and cover” drills in
elementary school, a practice that felt as terrifying to me then as it
does ridiculous now. I remember the Cold War, could work my second-grade
self into all kinds of anxiety over the possibility of nuclear
annihilation, the big dark THEM that was the Soviet Republic
obliterating us all. Terrified, despite the fact that the threat was
largely theoretical.
Sting released “Russians” in 1985. I was
seven or eight at the time, and I remember one of our teachers playing
it for us and while it is perhaps a little overly trite in its messaging
the lyrics have stuck with me over the years. There’s no such thing as
a winnable war, Sting sings, it’s a lie we don’t believe anymore.
I
was lucky enough to be in the room when the Wye River Memorandum was signed in 1998, pressed
against a back wall watching history unfold before me. (It was maybe
the first time I really fangirled Joe Biden.) Arafat and Netanyahu and
King Hussein, President Clinton and Vice President Gore. There was a
palpable sense of accomplishment in the room, measured hope.
Or maybe I was just a young, idealistic kid who wanted to believe, desperately, in resolution. Because sixteen
years later it’s hard to remember what that hope felt like. There are no
easy answers, there is an abundance of armchair quarterbacking, and
image after relentless image of parents mourning their children. My
heart aches, from this place I live where that kind of violence is still
largely theoretical.
Unless you've been living under a rock, you've heard that the Supreme
Court heard arguments this week about a Massachusetts law that requires a
35-foot buffer zone at abortion clinics. If I were a betting woman,
I'd say that SCOTUS is going to overturn the law, and rule in favor of
anti-abortion activists. But that's conjecture, I guess, neither here
nor there.
I started volunteering as an escort in college, and
continued providing that support at women's clinics for many years
after. I could tell all kinds of stories about those experiences, but
that's not the point of the current exercise.
Nine years ago this
coming May, I sat in the parking lot of one of the few clinics left in
the state of Wisconsin where you can get an abortion. I was a little
over a month pregnant, I was a couple of weeks away from being
unemployed with very little savings to speak of and no job prospects,
and I was completely and utterly alone. I had no idea what I was going
to do, what I wanted to do, but I knew I needed to think about all of
the possible ways that pregnancy would, or wouldn't, play out. To say I
was emotionally distraught was an understatement.
I sat in my
car for several minutes shaking, tearing up, and that was before I saw
the people standing with signs, shouting things at other women, some
with partners, many without. The things they were saying were
unbelievable. I'd heard them all before, but not like this, not when I
was vulnerable myself. I was terrified, and I wasn't even there to have an abortion.
Then
a woman and a man appeared, older than my parents but younger than
grandparents, standing between my car and the protestors. She handed me
a tissue as I got out of the car, tucked in next to me as we headed
for the doors and talked about the weather, or the upcoming weekend. To
be honest, I don't remember. I remember how gentle her voice was, the
silver in her hair, how much safer I felt for the presence of the quiet
man who took a defensive position behind us. In the midst of all that
hatred was this oasis of kindness and compassion that got me to the
clinic doors and then back to my car again later.
If you know me,
you know how this story ends, but this isn't about that decision. This
is about who we are as a people, how we treat our fellow humans. I
have identified as a Christian for most of my life, and the people who
were the most Christ-like at that clinic that day? They weren't the
ones judging from the sidewalk, terrorizing already terrified women in
every way they knew how. They were the men and women who put themselves
in the line of fire to provide shelter, to provide comfort, to provide
safety to total strangers and I will be forever grateful.
Whatever
ruling the Supreme Court hands down won't change what is fundamentally
wrong about the tactics demonstrated so consistently by the
anti-abortion protesters at these clinics around the country. Hate and fear don't win hearts and minds. If you
want to end abortion, then you need to go back a whole lot further in
the cycle to address the root causes. You need to commit to a whole lot
of work around social justice and education, to a ministry of reconciliation and love. Or you can go the route
of bullies and cowards, and stand on a sidewalk demonizing those
already in pain. What's a good Christian to do?
