Sweatpants don’t suit me. Never have. But people love them, especially people stuck at home for months freed from fashion standards in workplaces and public spaces. For teleconferencing, a single crisp shirt will do. That one shirt and an absence of anything too personal—handwritten notes, self-help books, a jar of Vaseline on a shelf. Nobody needs to see these. That we can even consider spending half the day half-dressed proves the engines of vanity are being retooled. Consider hair. When the pandemic began, absolutely no one was having their hair cut, not even people who could do it themselves. We were stunned. Any tending of appearance seemed petty and irreverent. Besides, it seemed impossible in our emotional state. These days, the concerns of dressing from head-to-toe have been replaced by a new vanity, one more insidious than before the pandemic. The corner thumbnail of myself in conversation on screen is like the mirror I am lucky to escape from after fixing my hair every morning. This real-time image of myself reflects my reflection to me, and I can’t help but glance… and glance… and… The distraction of wanting to and NOT wanting to see myself at the same time intrudes on conversations and strategy sessions and sincere inquiries of concern for your wellbeing. I can’t hide from my self-aware-self-consciousness anymore. Which makes me ask: what is it for—this concern for appearance and how I show up for the day, for you in that day, even if you will never know what kind of pants I’m wearing? Why get dressed? Why get all the way dressed up, tending the body, donning jewelry and a matching over-shirt, the handprinted one I found with my son when Comic-Con was in town two years ago? I dress up—even now—because I still believe looking my best gives a welcome gift to the world, even the incidental world of UPS delivery drivers and neighbors bringing their garbage bins back from the street. Yes, the world I see every day is small—family-members and the two friends who are germ pod-mates. What do they notice when they see me? They could care less what I look like! They barely notice anything. I do love them, but it’s discouraging. What’s the point of wearing a mini-skirt if no one really sees my legs? Which is the point, of course: I hope to be seen. But not only for the obvious reasons. Colorful clothes and hair held up high with a flame salmon elastic are also a way I express my appreciation for YOU, you who are beautiful however you appear, you whose smile I crave. You who will sometimes smile because of me. I miss your smile. I miss the smiles of my friends, of the familiar folks who work at the drug store, the food market, the dress shop where I used to stop in just to visit with the women, to turn and share the way my garments fall just so, just so for you, my friends, just so to celebrate our life, here, together. Now, there is so little of that. But I keep getting dressed up. I put goo in my hair to draw out the curl. And I miss you. Karen Jessee Please consider leaving a your thoughts below for other readers,
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Wouldn’t it be a huge relief, a way out of a perennial problem, if we—the healthy, the functional, the ones who seem un-sick, the un-needy—had times during the week when people knew ahead of time we want them to come visit? Their presence would be balm and buoy for us. We would be edified by their very selves and by their perspectives on a world we are cut off from. We would certainly feel appreciated because of their visits. We might even feel loved.
Then, during overlapping visits from a variety of friends, we could watch the intertwining of our lives, different pods of community intersecting in un-orchestrated ways. Even better would be not having to ask for help. The magnetic “Visiting Hours” broadcast would round up all the people who genuinely care. And I know they are there; I will always benefit from seeing them. The sincere and engaged friends and associates—they care even if they don’t visit, it’s true. Often enough, I fail to drop by friends’ homes just for love, especially on my own initiative. I say I am respecting their privacy. But I know how difficult it is to ask for needed reassurance or a healthy distraction from worries and woes. It requires willingness to reach out and admit, friend by friend, “I need time with you.” This is difficult to say. The temptation to not want to impose on folks by asking them to come over is as compelling as the feeling I don’t want to impose on others by coming around unannounced. An exhausting, fruitless hypervigilance can arise on either side. I don’t like admitting need. It exacerbates a vulnerability I already feel from being needy. Calling friends with a plea to come visit risks discovering I might be even more vulnerable than I know. One horrible blessing of being physically injured or ill is that people can tell we need them, even if we hate to admit it with all the vehemence of psychic protest we can muster. Need is not ours to manage when it’s visible. But what about invisible suffering? What about losses and grievances and existential doubts and grief? These are troubles which can lay me up for days plastered to the couch, heavy as sand in a blanket. It’s obvious to me I don’t feel well. Under these circumstances, reaching out to the people who would visit if they only knew seems impossible. Needing to express my needs simply adds more sand to my blanket, pressing me ever more firmly into the couch. So, what if I had visiting hours? Let’s make them 9:00-11:00 on Mondays and Wednesdays, and alternate weekend afternoons. What a relief! Karen Jessee Love is patient. . . Love bears all things.
—1 Cor 13:4, 7 Love can be understood as a kind of space, a spaciousness with room enough for us to be our whole selves and for others to be who they truly are, not the cardboard images we have of them, the 2-dimensional pages of them we bind, fluttering, as if in a book. We can become no more than libraries if we’re not careful—shelves full of the books we think other people are. But ideas we have of a person are not that person, and even if they were we couldn’t read them. Every person is written in their own unique language. Perhaps what happens as relationships grow and mature is that one person trains the other to read and understand and even speak their own unique language. Under the best of circumstances, this is extremely challenging, both the teaching and the learning. I think of my children as I write this. For years, I thought I was teaching them to speak my language. Now, during their adolescence and young adulthood, it has become clear they were demanding I learn theirs. I try with all the might I can muster to learn. Still, I’ll never be able to read them. They are not actually books. It’s an imperfect system, conceptualizing people. We store them like favorite or despised literature within the stacks of our memory, catalogued by preference or under duress, depending on who we are or who we have to pay attention to. Honestly, it’s probably more loving not to store people at all, at least not for long. Love suggests it is better to know people where they become real, holographic with light, dynamic with depth and weight and substance. We visit them where they come to life in the sacredness of their space of being, where perception—the unique language of encounter—is something they offer us out of their own self-understanding. What a lot of work this requires! Listening, resisting the impulse to interpret or judge or butt in with my ideas, waiting for them to come forth with more of who they are, listening more, practicing more impulse control, and on, and on. Above all, receiving a person in truth requires patience. It means waiting by their door until they come to fetch me, inviting me in to learn from them how to hear and know who they are. It means, until I am invited in, I must wait for them. No matter how long it takes or how frustrating it may be to wait in the hall, it means I don't pick up the book I have of them and read. Karen Jessee I have come to realize that the greatest trap in our life. . , the great temptation [is] self-rejection. —Henri Nouwen, Life of the Beloved Yesterday evening, I felt particularly grumpy preparing dinner for my kids. I was hungry. They weren’t helping. My husband and I had a date, and I didn’t want to be home fussing over pasta—a real biblical Martha. I suspect Martha didn’t want to feel resentful. I didn’t want to feel resentful, either. I hate myself for resenting my children! Hating my experience and resenting the people involved? A real lose-lose situation even if the children do get fed. Another mealtime devolved, which isn’t unusual. Eventually, it was my turn to eat. My husband and I went out to our favorite haunt and, for once, I decided to order dessert. “I’ll feel better if I eat something sweet,” I thought. Instead, I felt guilty, stupid, a failure for indulging myself—a line of reasoning which, sadly, isn’t unusual either, at least not in my corner of America. Worrying about eating is its own kind of indulgence, a gnawing compulsion. The shame and mental distraction deprive me of enjoying the gift of food, “fruit of the vine and work of human hands.” I suppose we are intent upon torturing ourselves. Or at least some of us are. I suppose that’s why I seek God, make the choice to focus intentionally on the Power Which Heals, the Power Which Brings Peace. Evidently, I could use some healing. I could stand some peace—release from the seemingly ceaseless barrage of negative thoughts that so often make me feel terrible. For example, there are my unnecessary and often unrealistic ambitions, signs of grandiosity. Chronic shame, which convinces me I am less than other people, is just as bad. Both are untrue, the result of inflated estimations of myself. What is true? I AM. I exist. I am here, now. What do I do with that? When Jesus went about healing folks, he addressed demons by name and touched people’s eyes, took their hands in his and lifted them onto their feet, back into life. He met them in their homes and on the roads where they normally walked, or where they sat stuck in the delusion of helplessness. This strategy on Jesus’ part was neither flashy nor casual. It was attentive, focused, and personal. It suggests intimate relationships have the power to heal. They have the power to heal me if I will settle into my one-on-one encounters as deeply as I can. My conscious participation in relationships with people—not tasks, self-concepts, or things—dispels false understanding and alienation. It can happen with my children. But I have to want healing. I have to want to be lifted back into life. “Your faith has made you well,” Jesus says over and over to the people who seek him. Maybe it’s true. Maybe my choice to draw close to God brings its own corrective to self-negating thoughts and behaviors, to obsessions, addictions—any interior plague. My decision to seek the truth about myself in relationship to love reveals my true size and restores peace in me a little bit at a time. I am neither too big, nor too small. As Goldilocks declares, I seem to be just right. One on one, I can try to carry a message of dignity to whomever I meet, the people I know already and those I seek out, those who suffer—human beings, all of them—like I do. Who doesn’t want to be truer, realer, awakened to life and authentically themselves? I suppose there are some people who don’t. But, among those who do, their desire for peace turns out to be a hammock into which I can fall when I lose my grip—when frustration and disappointment leave me weak with hopelessness or drunk with raw emotion. I often wonder if I can withstand life, survive the occasional sense of accomplishment alongside being a disappointment to myself, and all those other feelings each of us can name for ourselves. Truth tells me I can: by the faith which heals, relationships born of communion, and the Spirit which is God, which is infinite—neither big nor small, high nor low, but all things right. “Let us not fall into temptation,” reads the new English translation of the Lord’s prayer. I can meaningfully ask for that—even on my best days. Karen Jessee We must not therefore examine the suitability of things to mind and body in order to assess their value, for this is of little importance. It is the will of God that gives to things, whatever they may be, the power to shape Jesus Christ in the depths of our hearts.
Abandonment to Divine Providence, Jean-Pierre de Caussade Admittedly, this quote goes straight to the heart of Christian discipleship. I think it goes straight to the heart of healthy living whatever your religious inclinations. Even before I thought of everything in Jesus language, I was confronting the challenge of learning to live in the present moment with an attitude of acceptance and a “willingness to live with what is.” My circumstances—health, household, family—were in a painful state of disarray. It was difficult for me to understand how Spirit (much less the “will of God”) might be present in my life. I just didn’t get it. I hated what I was going through, and that was that. . . Except it wasn’t, because I never got off the path. I never abandoned discipleship. I kept seeking for that door to knock on, the one Jesus mentioned, the one he implied was always there with God waiting to be discovered on the other side, the inside: the present moment where we can find that Spirit which redeems rotten experiences, deteriorated relationships, crappy health. Happily, I can report I finally found a portal through which to crawl towards a new way of being in difficult circumstances. If God’s will empowers each moment with an opening—the door I can knock on and slide through sideways—then discovery of the moment leads to an encounter with Christ, with the Spirit which is the dynamic movement of God, creating, giving birth to Love in me and every lover, in every person I have chance to meet. De Caussade reminds me that the goal and reward of living is possessing Christ, being Christ, incarnating Christ—bringing the Love which powers the world into view. When I remember I want this Love more than anything, I can more easily accept my experiences and focus my attention less on judgements and more on my desire for what is good. We become Love when we love. We become Christ for others when we allow our devotion to the Way to shape our vision, our relationship to our circumstances and the people in our lives. “These are my people,” I say to myself in the company of family, friends, townspeople, peers. But God also says to me: “These are MY people. I have put them in your life. Learn from them!” Sometimes, I have the feeling I want to bow at the feet of every person I know. They are royal. God is in them—for me! They are, these particular people, the ones I have been given to discover, not other people, these. No need to think to myself, “others may be better friends, more intellectual and artistic, more suited to me,” with the adolescent longing for anything other than what I have—other husband, other children, other neighbors, other colleagues—to flee the duties that are mine. God has been and is embedded here. My friends are faithful. They are God’s ambassadors! I need to honor them by being Christ for and with them, by being Love in the world. Karen Jessee |
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