The Boring Writings of Saint Justin Martyr

I’m trying to be a better girlfriend.

So when J. asked me to read one of the office readings from the Liturgy of the Hours I did not roll my eyes and I actually read it. Like a champion.

Keeping score in a relationship is highly discouraged so I didn’t rack up what should have been at least 25 points.

In the reading, Justin Martyr informed me that Christians gathered on Sundays. He explains that they read the Gospels and a leader encourages them to virtue and then prayers and thanksgiving is given and the people say Amen and receive the Eucharist and offerings are made for the poor.

Boring.

This is all extremely normal. There is no novelty in this reading.

This is what I do on Sundays. It is about as interesting as reading about the sequence by which I wake up, get dressed, brush my teeth and then make eggs.

Except for the fact that it was written in the second century.

Christians were praying and worshiping in the same way that I am. That before the internet, the printing press and the English language itself, this rite was practiced by the people who knew the sound of Jesus’ voice, how tall He was and the texture of His hair.

It is all at once profound and exciting and completely ordinary.

It’s like falling in love.

Your life will never be the same. You will never be the same. You will cease to be amazed when your beloved punctuates his conversations with the most profound and simple words in the English language: I love you and your life will always be measured by before you fell in love and after.

We measure time with before and after Christ but our knees are not always inclined to bend at the profundity of His name.

As I read and contemplated the ancient Saint’s words I was struck by how the best things in life are the regular routine occurances and the rites of passage which knit humanity together.

I am overwhelmed by what a blessing it is that the the news reports only the bad stuff because new life, falling in love and Jesus becoming flesh in our Churches is routine.

It would make for terrible ratings to report on the most profound, the beautiful, because the greatest, most life changing blessings are given routinely and abundantly.

Because love is routine.

And that is the best thing about it.

Big Feelings in Little Bodies

“Hold Still! It’s like a bird’s nest! I can’t believe this!” Every morning of first grade my mom would take a dainty hair brush with a beautiful floral design and violently rip the hair from my scalp or, as she called it, get me ready for school.

There was a girl in my class who, I reasoned, did not undergo this particular brand of maternal torment, because, she came to school with messy hair. One time, the teacher had us sit next to each other and that girl had the nerve to kick me and then scream when I told her off. That’s what I call “not my fault.”

My teacher gave her a special pencil case that had a hair brush and pretty barrettes in it and the teacher’s aid would do her hair before our “morning meeting.”

I remember discussing all of this with my mom in a fit of rage following a particularly savage beauty treatment, “Allie’s mom doesn’t brush her hair!” My mom explained to me that not all moms brush their kids’ hair and that can make the kids feel sad. When I came home after the kicking, my mom told me to be nice to her because she had a lot more challenges than I did.

I was allowed to go to her birthday party but my mom didn’t drop me off. She stayed the whole time. I remember remarking to my mom that “Allie’s mom is nice and I’m surprised because I thought she didn’t love her.”

I don’t quite remember the rest of the conversation or how I tried to articulate the confusing dynamic that I was observing. I imagine my mom muttered that I was “very perceptive” which was a common refrain from my mom, usually followed by “But don’t talk about those things outside the house because that is family talk.”

A bit of unsolicited advice, educate your kids on the concept of “family talk.” It saved me from sharing my insightful perspective on the world; such as, the music teacher was mean and should probably get married so that she could turn nice and that fat people yell more.

I was always intrigued by human behavior.

The Allies of this world are my people now. The kids with the big problems and big feelings to match. The kids whose feelings are bigger than their bodies and those powerful neurotransmitters build up inside like shaken up soda and they kick the girl with the stained shirt and pigtails next to them.

Their little bodies can’t contain those big feelings.

Adults you see are much different, while first graders are on average 45 inches tall, we are on average 67 inches tall, which is of course, much taller, much less vulnerable. While kids have absolutely no control over their lives, (if their hair gets done, when they shower, where their family can afford to live, if a pandemic breaks out, if a family member dies, if they are diagnosed with a chronic illness, who their teacher is, if their friend is nice to them), adults, have far more control, we can control exactly if and when we shower and do our hair.

Some of the best advice I ever got was in a marriage class. Put a picture of your spouse as a child in a prominent place in your house so that you never forget that they were and are a vulnerable child. This way, you remember how to speak to them.

Picture everyone as a vulnerable child, because, they are.

Our worlds have shrunk these past few weeks and we have shrunk along with them. Instead working under our illusion of control, we have become small, around 67 inches on average. And our feelings are too big for our bodies.

Perhaps, that is a part of this sacrifice that we remember, someone gave His body up for us so that He can bear those big feelings with us.

Normal is Not for Christians

I’m talking about families here, people.

Those of us that have the privilege to safely wait out the Corona have maybe had one or two homicidal thoughts towards the people we love the most.

Of course, I would never actually poison them, that is why I make sarcastic comments and roll my eyes.

You see, this is normal.

It is normal for the Boomers to blatantly reject emotion and insist that hard work will cure my grief. It is normal for me to assume the moral high ground and scoff at their low emotional intelligence. It is normal for us to be terrible listeners because we have heard this story and subsequent complaint roughly 8 thousand times.

And you know what? Normal relationships are not for Christians.

Statistically, divorce is normal, pre-marital sex is normal, porn is normal, abortion is normal and so is the general maltreatment of women.

Christians have no problem mounting the high horse and pointing out the splinters in “today’s society.” No sir, normal, is not good enough for us.

Good.

Now, about that beam.

Christian relationships cannot just be without the aforementioned sins. They have to involve virtue and sacrifice, biting our tongues and keeping our eye rolls in check.

Dismissing the imperfections that are bubbling up in our relationships as “normal family stuff” and “just human” is a rejection of an opportunity to grow in love.

So don’t say that.

Grow.

Protecting Thomas

It might be my professional training, or maybe the resonance of the story, but I have a subtle sense dissatisfaction with the “doubting Thomas” story.

The story I heard in CCD was pretty one dimensional. “Thomas doubted Jesus. Don’t doubt Jesus.”

Everyone I know in the world doubts Jesus.

A binomial understanding of doubt is not representative of my experience as a Christian and I assume the same is true for Thomas.

He was still with the apostles. He still defined his identity as a member of the group who defined themselves by Christ. He did not reject all of Christ when he rejected the resurrection. In the Bible I’m reading, Thomas still looks like a Christian from the outside even if his heart cannot accept the Living Christ.

The minister-therapist in me wants to know why.

Because I don’t think Thomas doubted out of a lack of an intellectual belief. Eleven witnesses is enough to convince even the greatest cynic.

Still, he refused to believe.

because of fear.

Thomas had seen his Lord his friend his hope fail. Everything that he staked his life on had disappointed him. If he believed in the resurrection if he rejoiced, he risked it all being taken away from him again.

The researcher and author Brene Brown asserts that joy is one of the most vulnerable emotions. Many of us experience a sense of foreboding joy:

I am so blessed too have my grandparents… it will be so hard to lose them.

I love Sunday brunch with my friends in the college cafeteria… we only have two more before we graduate.

I love my sister… I hope nothing happens to her.

We shackle our own joy to hypothetical suffering and do not allow ourselves the freedom to rejoice. We are waiting for the other shoe to drop.

I imagine Thomas wide-eyed watching the Lord enter Jerusalem and realizing that Jesus was the messiah. Perhaps, his doubts evaporated and he was finally able to rejoice for love of his friend in the hope of salvation.

He unshackled his joy.

But within the week, he was crushed.

He resolved never to hope or rejoice again. His friend was naked and murdered… and so was his hope.

Still, in that same week, his friends urge him to rejoice. Perhaps, because they can’t handle the trauma. They say Jesus had risen from the dead but there was not way the shackled of joy could ever be released for Thomas. The chains were greater than ever and he was weak with grief.

He recalls what they did to his friend,

“Until I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger into the nailmarks and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”

Jn 20:25

Because I can’t believe, because I can’t hope again, and because I am so broken by this loss, I am too afraid of my heart breaking to believe in the resurrection. Because this joy might be taken from me and I can’t go through it again. I’m scared.

And a week later, Jesus greets him and commands him to quiet his pounding, aching, fearful heart and says,

“Peace be with you”

Jn 20:26

Thomas, do not be afraid to break your heart! See how mine was broken for you?

“Put your finger here and see my hands, and bring your hand and put it into my side, and do not be unbelieving but believe.”

Jn 20:27

Blessed are we who have not seen but believe.

We who have hope and rejoice despite the vulnerability of our flesh and our hearts.

Blessed are we who quiet our hearts and do not fear what love demands: the capacity for heartbreak and loss.

Blessed are we who believe in love.

Blessed are we who believe that love is strong enough to raise the dead.

May Christ break the shackles on our joy and bring us peace.

What’s Driving Me Crazy

I do not like quarantine in my room, I do not like it with a broom.

I do not like it in my sweats, I do not like it with my pets.

I would like to go outside, then my feelings, I could hide.

I wonder how I have grown during our time in quarantine so far?

I no longer have the option to justify my existence by the things I do for my patients or the effects of my actions in ministry, or the degree that I was supposed to receive.

Am I valuable because what I do and what I produce or am I valuable because of who I am? 

Of course, intellectually, I can produce the theologically correct answer, it is my identity as a created being that gives me value, but, as I am without the things that make me feel valuable, I am realizing how this truth has not traveled from my head to my heart.

I feel good when I do good things, which is good, because, I am not a sociopath, which is something I am proud of.

But, feeling good because I have done good does not mean that I am good. 

It means that I feel good.

My  behavior, conscience and emotions do not determine my worth.

I am realizing that it is not only my missed graduation which is truly difficult, it is the absence of the people and activity and achievement, the good things, which I had inadvertently staked my worth on.

It’s not only the burning love of ice cream parlors, libraries and Thursday wine and Bible night that is making this so difficult; it is being forced to deal with the spiritual and psychological struggles we have always had but have been able to drown out and numb.

How many people busy themselves with good things to drown out the sin and anxiety and insecurity and loneliness?

Perhaps, the space that has been created in my life will create space on the road between the head and the heart and we will learn who we are.

Trying to Easter

Sitting in my cramped bedroom/ home office/ library/ workshop/ gym, grasping for the few jobs that remain in my field while I anxiously await my not-graduation, it is pretty easy to wallow.

And then it’s Easter.

This was all well and good during Lent because it fit. I felt like I could lean in and make sense of this during Lent.

But it’s Easter.

The uncertainty and subsequent anxiety has taken the fun out of rejoicing.

Indulging in a peanut butter egg while writing ANOTHER cover letter is a far cry from the fudge and rum in coke my grandparents give me at our family celebrations.

But here I am sitting on my twin sized bed remembering the sweet sweet days of “earning potential” and “40% projected job growth.” I had opportunities and leads and a little bit of certainty.

Uncertainty.

It leaves me wondering about my journey, my career, my location and suddenly all my uncertainty and market analysis and cover letter writing has taken the place of morning prayer and the frantic pace seems to scream “This is not the time to rejoice!”

But it’s Easter.

But Easter did not bring certainty.

Jesus didn’t rise and write up some canon law for us or really tell us what to do at all.

He told us that he beat it.

He beat the uncertainty of death with love and so all of the uncertainty of my life and this Church and those apostles will bolster our faith and spark dependence on the one Who loves.

And it is for that reason I will learn to rejoice.

The Space Between Easter and Groundhog Day

One of the my favorite moments of my career so far. is when we played charades with a child on February second in order to have him guess what holiday it was.

My supervisor hid in her sweater and ever so slightly peeked her eyes out of it, then she made a panicked face, screamed and hid again.

“EASTER! my patient shouted without a trace of doubt in his voice.

I cried tears of laughter as I imagined our savior daintily peering out of the tomb and scanning his environment with apprehension at the possibility of his shadow.

I could only be amused by this because that is not who Christ is. If it was, the conflation of the Victor and the varmint would amount to a painful memory.

The magnitude of the power of the resurrection barely occurred to me during the workday at a job I loved, with restaurant leftovers waiting for lunchtime in the fridge.

It occurs to me now.

The job I love evaporated and I had to leave without saying goodbye. Everything feels truncated and broken; the life I lived ended abruptly and I will not return.

My life cloaked in loss, my mind occasionally flickers to the resurrection during this Easter season. My muscles tighten and posture straightens with the tenacious memory and anticipation of the triumph of death and return to life.

Because Jesus is not a Groundhog.

Failing Lent

I do not want to hear anyone say “I failed Lent” one more damned time.

Oh, you didn’t keep your commitment to minimize Netflix? Well guess what, Karen!? You don’t need me to tell you that the GLOBAL PANDEMIC presented some unprecedented circumstances.

Lent has one purpose. It is to get you closer to Christ through penance.

None of us are short on penance.

In fact, if you are anything like me, you may have noticed some areas where you have an opportunity to grow in virtue.

Let’s say, for example, you have not left your house in a couple of weeks and your are feeling particularly down in the dumps on a rainy Friday. You may smell the sweet, sweet smell of pizza baking in the oven.

You bounce into the kitchen ready to drown your sorrow in cheese only to see the ugliest “food” you have ever seen. Maybe this “pizza” had weird black things your mom claimed were “sun dried tomatoes”  and maybe the onion to everything else ratio was 1:1.

Perhaps you realized half way through the eating of the “pizza” that what little sauce their was came from a tin can which had been refrigerated for a week and a half following a power struggle between your mother and sister.

And maybe you can’t even get an alternative meal because your family is mostly a bunch of ravenous carnivores and all that’s in the fridge is meat and its Friday in Lent and you’re trying to get through JUST ONE WEEK without breaking that simple rule.

Now, you could refer to this as the “Botulism Pizza” incident loudly on the phone with your friends for the next two hours or you could thank your mom and offer up your hunger and stomach pain for everyone who is suffering in the world right now.

One choice builds up the body of Christ and the other is hilarious but not actually helpful or sanctifying. I chose the latter.

Maybe, during Holy week, I choose to grow in virtue amid the challenges I face and I stop trying to white knuckle my way through giving up dessert.

What if I realize what is actually important?

It’s important to love my family as they are instead of loving who I want them to be: people who care about the flavor of food and whether or not its poisonous.

It’s important to lean into my mortality in spite of the crippling fear that in a month, I might be mourning some of the most important people in my life.

It’s important to realize how far I have to go before I actually trust God enough to believe in heaven

It’s important to say yes to this invitation to change into someone who might be recognized as a Saint.

Praying When it Kind of Feels like the Apocalypse

We love psalms insofar as they can be neatly hand-lettered and pinned on Pinterest but we reject the ones we do not like. No one is thinking up the perfect hand lettering arrangement and right amount of swirls to frame:

Awake to punish all the nations;

Spare none of those who treacherously plot evil

Psalm 59:5

But it is these psalms that we need. In the darkness of the threats of North Korea and mass shootings and hurricanes and fires, we need the fullness of Christianity, not an Instagram post.

The fullness of Christianity does not sweep the angry psalms under a rug. No. We bash children against rocks.¹ We are outraged. We want to wipe evil off the map.

As well, we should. We should stand infuriated at the dictators who want to end us and who sit pampered while children starve and women are forced into prostitution. Our hearts break with the victims of the Las Vegas attack and our fists clench at the thought of the perpetrator.

Instagram Christianity won’t save us.

God is not in heaven twirling His beard and waiting for enough people to distractedly say the rosary before he intervenes in our affairs. Prayers are not spells. We can’t just say enough of them to get God to fix Korea. No. God is waiting to come down to us. He is waiting to be invited in so that He, the suffering God, can suffer with us and teach us how to suffer better.

But how?

How do I even begin to pray in the middle of my fear and heart break?

“Let the spirit change their hearts…” just doesn’t do it for me anymore. I am mad. I am scared.

I am scared for my father, the cop. I am scared for my sister who is going to a concert next month. I can scarcely think about my oldest and closest friend, a missionary in Korea.

I simply do not have the ability to utter some quiet prayer when evil is banging on my neighbor’s door.

God does not want false piety. He wants an authentically human experience.

We need the gritty psalms. We need the psalms of a people praying for deliverance. We need the sharp words of the oppressed.

We need the words that God himself inspired for the times that we desire to wipe our enemies off the map.

Remember the God who hung dead and bloody and tortured where Jerusalem could see him. Remember that God. He knows confusion and injustice and heartache. He knew the senselessness of death. He gifted us the psalms. He inspired the words:

How long will you [God] judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked?

Give justice to the weak and the fatherless;

Maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute

Rescue the weak and the needy;

Deliver them from the hand of the wicked.

Psalm 82:2-4

Let us use God’s own words and unite ourselves with Him as we cry out in fear and anger.

We do not need to make our prayers more idyllic or nice. We need true prayer so that God can lift us up. A well-designed quote from an epistle is beautiful but it is not enough.

Let’s stop trying to play the “nice Christian.” Jesus didn’t come to be a “nice Christian boy” he came to be a suffering human.

Let us die to ourselves and our pride so that we may accept our anger and brokenness and fear.

Let us glory in the cross.

 

¹Psalm 137:9

Photo by Andrew Gaines on Unsplash

Professional Detachment in the Christian Context

There is an extremely strange, paradoxical thread woven through my education as a future clinician. I am to connect with my patients and understand them and life situation. I am to care for them as I would for my own family but if I become too attached, it will be my downfall.

I have been prepared time after time for the gritty reality of human suffering. I have been molded into the kind of woman who will take a suffering person into her own hands every single day.

But Valerie, remember professional detachment.

Compartmentalize.

How do I stare into the eyes of a man who’s stroke stole his voice before he could sing his toddler to sleep and then go home and sing my own daughter to sleep as though nothing is wrong, as though my weary, crackling voice is not the greatest privilege in the world? I don’t know how to detach.

I don’t think I want to.

I have been tortured by the knowledge that the sweet girl I work with is going home to drug addicts. Lord, help me if this stops affecting me. I do not want to stare into the face of human suffering for a paycheck. I will not be the clinician void of love.

With this mentality, they say I’ll be destroyed. They say I need to be detached. I need to remove my heart from my sleeve and stick it in a vault somewhere where my patients can’t worm their way into it.

Maybe they’re right. Perhaps I have given way to my youthful idealism and I don’t know about this so called “real world” everyone keeps warning me about.

They try to explain this paradox to me with the words sympathy and empathy. Apparently, there’s a difference. Every professor says it differently but one of them is feeling bad for people and one is understanding people feel bad and helping them. There’s more nuances but I’m tired of trying to understand these artificial separations when in my estimation, the answer is far simpler.

Maybe the emotionless love for my patients doesn’t need to be solved by a numbness of the heart. Perhaps, detachment is not the answer at all.

I believe that I should love my patients and that I should feel for them. I want to become invested.

Yet, my attachment will not be to them.

I, the Christian clinician will attach myself to Christ. I will be able to go home at night and talk to my family because my patients at the hospital weren’t my patients to begin with.

All along, they were the Divine Healer’s. They are His children, His wounded and I am a participant in His healing mission.

I get the privilege of encountering His passion as I do my evaluations. I receive a great gift when patients trust me in the most vulnerable moment. As a participant in this healing ministry we call healthcare, I am not shouldering the responsibility of my patient’s well-being I am only demonstrating an eternal love that existed long before and long after my shift.

I do not need to be detached from my work, I need to be attached to Christ.