“But I would like to be a mystic and immediately.”
Eating is Delightful: Lessons from The Supper of the Lamb
“Food is the daily sacrament of unnecessary goodness, ordained for a continual remembrance that the world will always be more delicious than it is useful.
...
Love is the widest, choicest door into the Passion. God saved the world not by sitting up in heaven and issuing antiseptic directives, but by becoming man, and vulnerable, in Jesus. He died, not because He despised the earth, but because He loved it as a man loves it—out of all proportion and sense.
...
The world will be lifted, as it was always meant to be lifted, by the priestly love of man. What Christ has done is to take our broken priesthood into His and make it strong again. We can, you see, take it with us. It will be precisely because we loved Jerusalem enough to bear it in our bones that its textures will ascend when we rise; it will be because our eyes have relished the earth that the color of its countries will compel our hearts forever. The bread and the pastry, the cheeses, the wine, and the songs go into the Supper of the Lamb because we do: It is our love that brings the City home. ”
Possibilities
1.
I'm writing on the sand at Ocean Beach in the heavy late afternoon heat of July. I tried to read but was distracted by the phone conversation of a girl lying next to me. (Disclaimer: she was right next to me, so it wasn't reeaallyy like eavesdropping.) It took me a while to figure out she was talking to her mom. The conversation ranged while her hair gusted wild around her face, eyes intent on an image beyond the waves.
At one point, I realized her dad had died. She talked about missing him, missing the way she could call him up, missing the way he could fix anything. "Why couldn't you have had me ten years earlier?" she asked her mom. "Then he'd still be around for me to call and ask for help." She laughed as she said this—no condemnation, just an invitation to open shared memories. Their conversation shifted again and again as I caught fragments of it over the wind. Like this one: "There are all these atrocities going on in the world, and I'm here on the beach, with a job, talking to my loving mother."
2.
Three days ago, a U.S. airstrike killed over 60 people—women and children mostly. I opened Twitter and one of the first things I saw was a photo of a dead little boy. He was lifted in someone's arms, his head rolling back, covered completely in the gray dust of decimated concrete and desert. It was heartbreaking, of course it was, what else can you say? The image reminded me of that photo no one can forget from last fall—a tiny refugee boy's body washed onto the sand. What a strange age we live in, to see the faces of victims half a world a way on our computer screens. To carry the heaviness of sorrow as we sit on a beach and watch kids splash each other with salty foam. It seems like the only thing to do when the whole world's sorrow is so visible is to mourn with those who mourn. The mourning doesn't need to be publicized, seen, or spoken aloud, but we should mourn.
3.
And, rejoice. That's the other half: "Rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn." So after the girl on the phone leaves the beach, I go for a run along the cliffs. OB and Sunset Cliffs is my favorite place to run in San Diego. Everything is bright and overgrown and ripe and pungent. There's always star jasmine and bougainvillea growing and an odd bunch of characters for people watching. It's the best.
Honestly, I don't feel like running. The city's in a heat spell and my feet are like fat little sausages straining against their casings (you bet I'm going to be a happy pregnant lady). At one point I stop to stretch where a crowd has gathered. They are watching cliff jumpers—a crowd of teenagers egging each other on and leaping off the rocks into dives or flips, screaming the whole way down. I am one of a dozen strangers watching the scene. Suddenly the crowd parts: an old man in red trunks and a red hat is speeding toward the cliff's edge on his bike. In a split second everyone absorbs what is happening and the screams crest as he flies off the edge, off his bike which is attached to his leg with a surfboard leash, and crashes into the swell of water. He surfaces with his fist raised to applause. Along with the dozen strangers, I am laughing and cheering him on too.
Sometimes it takes an old man riding off a cliff to wake us up to the possibilities a day contains.
4.
Before the girl at the beach hung up, after her rambling and unforced and familiar conversation—just two voices connected by laughter and secrets and history and womanhood—they said goodbye. "I gotta go. I love you, Mama." I recognized exactly the mother-daughter, female-friendship intimacy in her tone. It made me thankful to have heard the conversation, and thankful for the relationship they shared.
A girl on the phone with her mom. A little boy dead from air strikes. A run along the ocean. An old man riding through a crowd of teenagers on his bike, meeting the frothing waves below. A day containing delight and surprise and sadness. Rejoicing and mourning. It's always both, and.
Summer Reading Roundup
Happy summer friends! It’s the best season of year (no arguments, plz) and potentially the only time you’ll pick up a few new books, no? Even if you’ve already started your summer/vacation reading, let me nerd out for a moment and share some titles you should absolutely put on your list.
As of this month, year one of my MFA program is complete, which means I read forty books (and wrote around 230 pages)...but who’s counting. After all that reading, I’ve compiled a list of my favorite books of the year. All are nonfiction, some are spiritual essays, and some are memoirs. I hope you pick up a few and love them as much as I did. Now go and get your vacation read on!
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace
I had to read this collection of essays in the privacy of my own home because I kept laughing aloud. It’s both a pleasure and a chore to read, but the kind of chore you willingly undertake because of the result. Wallace’s sprawling mind rewards the reader for paying attention; his footnotes are about a mile long, and he’ll often circle back to a comment he made twenty pages prior.
The title essay about Wallace’s two-week luxury cruise to the Caribbean just killed me. It’s a darkly hilarious look at the quiet desperation that permeates extreme “pampering” (his word, not mine). The essay is full of unrestrained descriptions and snappy witticisms. He depicts a knowledgeable cruise captain, for example, as “a veritable blowhole of hard data.” And the description of his cruise cabin bathroom—which amounts to several pages of praise—is too good not to share here:
“I’ve seen more than my share of bathrooms, and this is one bitchingly nice bathroom. The shower itself overachieves in a big way. … There’s washcloths w/o nubble or nap, and of course towels you want to propose to. … But all this is still small potatoes compared to [Cabin] 1009’s fascinating and potentially malevolent toilet.”
Tattoos on the Heart by Gregory Boyle
Tattoos on the Heart is less a memoir than it is a series of loving reminders. The book covers two decades of Boyle’s work with LA gang members. His writing convinces readers of God’s boundless compassion for us, just as his life has been about convincing gang members of the same. He wants to introduce us to a God who delights in us exactly as we are: “The God, who is greater than God, has only one thing on her mind, and that is to drop, endlessly, rose petals on our heads. Behold the One who can’t take his eyes off you.”
One thing I most admired about Boyle’s approach to writing about his homies is how he humanizes them. Because he has built a life with the poor—not just observed or helped or worked with them—his stories ring with authenticity and love. By detailing what he has learned from them, he returns dignity and gratitude to every character in the book. Tattoos on the Heart instilled a more expansive view of God in me.
Essays of E.B. White by E.B. White
Remember E.B. White? Yep, he’s the author of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little. His collection of essays—many of which were published in the The New Yorker—are equally as wonderful as his children’s stories. White’s writing is generous and big-minded, and he has a knack for taking ordinary subjects—a tree in his yard, the death of a pig, his dachshund Fred—and opening up a thoughtful new world for his readers.
White once wrote, “All that I ever hope to say in books is that I love the world,” and his love for the world is everywhere in this collection. His writing is attentive, varied, compassionate, and laced with wit. His diction is, well, perfect. Reading his work feels like sitting down with vintage copies of The New Yorker. (And bonus! An essay collection means you can read one or two at a time while lounging at your favorite pool/beach/tropical destination.)
The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison
Jamison’s collection of smart and piercing essays explores “pain tours”—experiences of learning from and listening to others’ suffering—as well as the complicated reactions they evoke. “You want the tour to give you back another version of yourself, you and everyone: a more enlightened human,” she writes. But there is guilt, too, and embarrassment about your unearned privilege. “You feel uncomfortable,” she adds. “Your discomfort is the point.”
I disagreed with Jamison on a few points; most notably, I’d call certain responses compassion that she labels empathy. On a whole, though, The Empathy Exams articulates questions I grapple with from a stance of humility and sincere inquiry. I loved the bits of Latin American influence, Spanish language, and the way each essays is located squarely in a place. Jamison doesn’t resolve all of her questions, and I admired her for asking them thoughtfully and even self-consciously. Her approach felt true to the lived response of witnessing suffering from a place of privilege.
Lit by Mary Karr
Okay, Lit wrecked me (in the best possible way). Anyone who talked to me last fall is sick of hearing about it. But seriously guys, it’s that good! The best memoirs tell you something about yourself, and this magnificent book does that. Karr is a total outlaw who somehow finds her way to God. Her movement out of hell into surrender and eventually, recovery, pulled me in headfirst. Despite the wide gap between her experiences and my own, I identified with her as a narrator. I found threads of my story in hers, and recognized my internal fractures—however different they might look—in the way she details her own.
Karr is one of the most accomplished memoirists of our time (and a damn good poet), and this book is her masterpiece. Her voice is irreverent and hilarious and transparent. As the back cover says, Lit is about getting drunk and getting sober, but it’s also about a million other things and impossible to summarize, so just head over to Amazon and add it to your cart ASAP. You will thank me, and then we’ll get to chat about the book, so I will thank you.
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
Read this and then tell me you don’t want to move to Paris. A Moveable Feast is a long-time favorite—this was my third read, and the book just gets better each time. A Moveable Feast is Hemingway’s memoir of his time as a newlywed expat in France. The prose is rich despite Hemingway’s typically sparse writing (one meal consists of “cold white wine” and oysters “with their strong taste of the sea”). He is the master of the mot juste—the exact, appropriate word.
A Moveable Feast paints youth, marriage, and Paris in the dreamy light of nostalgia, but there’s a clear note of melancholy throughout the story. The entire book is tinged with loss and this melancholy stems most of all from his descriptions of beautiful things—the city in autumn or his wife sleeping next to him. “But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.”
My Bright Abyss by Christian Wiman
Oh man. My Bright Abyss is such an exquisite book. I read short pieces at a time because, like poetry, the writing calls for bursts of concentrated attention. Wiman’s style is fragmented, heady, and melodic. Certain lines lodged themselves in my mind and I still find myself rolling them around in my mouth: Listen to this description of his Texas hometown: “…Spanish rivering right next to rocklike English, the two fusing for a moment into a single dialect then splitting again; cowboys with creek-bed faces stepping determinedly out of the convenience store with sky in their eyes and twelve-packs in their arms.”
If you need another reason to read My Bright Abyss besides Wiman’s language wizardry, then his searching approach to faith is worth your time. After falling in love and being diagnosed with cancer in his late thirties, he “assented to the faith that was latent within [him].” Still, Wiman’s faith is a wrestling match. He questions his own experiences and scrapes for new language to locate God, which makes for a really beautiful and open-handed spiritual memoir.
With That Moon Language
Been reading a few Hafiz poems over and over lately. This is one of them:
Admit something:
Everyone you see, you say to them,
"Love me."
Of course you do not do this out loud;
Otherwise,
Someone would call the cops.
Still though, think about this,
This great pull in us
To connect.
Why not become the one
Who lives with a full moon in each eye
That is always saying,
With that sweet moon
Language,
What every other eye in this world
Is dying to
Hear.
In Case You Need This
In January I was selected for jury duty. The charge was auto theft and meth possession, with intent to sell. (I tell you that now because it’s over, and because everyone asked anyway.) The first day of the trial I felt prickly and entitled, because obviously I have more important things to do than serve on a jury, and obviously I am more important than the other 36 potential jurors who were dismissed instead of me.
As the trial went on, I began learning about the people in the jury box with me. You guys, I am so quick to invent stories about others. Usually the stories I come up with are way less interesting than the real thing. Juror 2 turned out to be a veterinarian at Sea World, married to a Brazilian woman he met in Mexico. Juror 7 used to have an office job but started working for UPS because he likes being on the move all day. He met his wife at a party in college, and they’ve been together five years now. The more I learned about them, the more people in that courtroom took on color and shape.
Jury duty got me thinking about how dangerous our assumptions can be, to ourselves as well as to others. More often than not, they’re way off the mark.
Here’s the thing: I don’t only make up stories about strangers. I do it with people I know, too. I’m quick to assume their life feels a certain way. Generally I do this when I’m at a low point, and it feels darkly gratifying to wallow in my personal struggle and assume no one else understands or fights the same battles I do. Assuming we fight alone is one of the biggest lies we can believe.
I feel like this should be said, because other people have written things that have saved me. Everyone is fighting a battle—everyone—and we hurt ourselves if we assume we’re alone. For a year and a half I’ve fought an on-again, off-again battle with anxiety, confusion, and fear. And I doubt most people would know this by watching my life from the outside. Is God up to something? Yes. Have I grown and progressed and seen His face? For sure. Does it suck tremendously at times? You better believe it.
This is me raising my hand and saying, me too. You are not alone. You’re not crazy, either. Life is really hard sometimes and unfortunately, this is to be expected. Being human can be a tough ride, especially if you’re a sensitive, deeply feeling, INFJ-type (ahem).
Don’t assume you’re alone. Don’t invent stories about the people around you that feed the lie that you are unlovable, or not good enough, or struggling with something no one understands. If I’m learning anything it’s that, as Mariko says, the body heals itself. That is to say the body of Christ, made up of people who are—without exception—broken. By owning up to this, we heal each other. We can speak waves of truth over each other, and waves upon waves of grace will follow.
There are a few ways to fight back while you’re in the painful middle. First: tell the fear and the lies to get the hell away. Seriously. Sometimes when I’m heavy with worry or guilt, I let myself believe I should feel those things. Like they’ll help me gain some ounce of control or that—yikes—Jesus wants me to feel them. But if they’re not love, they’re not from Him. He sees our potential, and that potential is a free self powered by His unambiguous, adamant love. Fear and lies have no place in our lives and we have the power to tell them off.
Second, choose to see whatever beautiful things come your way today. I waver between being blown open by wonder and crushed by the heaviness of the world. Given the choice, I’d take the former every time. I’d rather choose curiosity and delight and keep choosing it every minute of every day. I’d rather draw nearer to what I don’t understand than back away in fear. Though it’s really hard, keep opening your eyes wide in wonder and belief—it will fill you with light, I promise.
There’s a way to live in “wide-eyed and keen-eyed thanks,” as Annie Dillard writes. “I go my way, and my left foot says ‘Glory’ and my right foot says ‘Amen.’” The battle you’re fighting can’t stop you from choosing wonder and choosing life. It may be hard and it may be long, but abundance is everywhere if we choose to see it.
We’re better when we help each other live through and out of our messes. The gift and the terrifying truth are one and the same: today is all we have. No matter what you’re fighting, you don’t walk forward alone. You can choose wonder instead of fear, even though this choice is hard and constant. You can live in wide-eyed and keen-eyed thanks.
Glory. Step. Amen. Step.
Notes on Simplicity
“Creativity has more to do with the elimination of the inessential than with inventing something new.”
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
“Minimalism is not the lack of something. It’s the perfect amount of something. ”
The Tenor of Joy
Recently I was at coffee with two close friends—those kindred spirit type of friends who jump quickly into real talk when we're together. We were talking about how dark 2015 has felt at certain moments. One of them commented how easy it is to conceal the shitty things that happen to all of us, the fear and loneliness that mingle with our victories and light. Instagram would look different if we posted these low moments—#thereal2015, anyone?
---
One of these friends gave me Henri Nouwen's The Inner Voice of Love. It's a slim little book and reading it feels like a loved one reminding you who you are when you've forgotten. A certain line clings to me like a burr:
"...Light and darkness, hope and despair, love and fear are never very far from each other ... and spiritual freedom often requires a fierce spiritual battle."
2015 has been a battle, certainly. It's been a shift into a new and older way of looking at the world. Sometime this year I crossed a threshold—not a loss of innocence exactly, but a loss of expectation. I no longer expect happiness, or at least unbroken, sustained doses of it. I no longer feel entitled to consistent well-being. And this makes me all the more hungry for joy.
Joy is a different animal than happiness entirely. It requires a fight against complacency, fear, despair. And it asks that we listen to the inner voice of love: God alive in us. The closest I've come to full joy and freedom this year, the kind of biblical freedom we're promised as people who walk with Jesus, is when I've ingested His love, unambiguous love, love "adamant as bone." Joy blooms when I fall hard on the freedom this love generates and the purpose it gives us to go and spend ourselves on others.
---
I am named after a song, sort of. I am named after my grandma, sort of. My first name is a twist on a name—Annalee—my parents heard in The Band's song "The Weight." Add an s, tweak the spelling, and you have Annelise. My middle name, Joy, is a nod to my grandmother Joyce.
If joy weren't already built into my identity in this way, I might want the word tattooed on me. That's how much I need reminding to keep fighting. That's how deeply I want joy: the elusive, hard-won creature that rests so closely against sorrow. It's not steady happiness and it's not found without a battle. But it's real and good and keeps us singing. Wishing you a 2016 marked by the tenor of joy.
“The celebration of Advent is possible only to those who are troubled in soul, who know themselves to be poor and imperfect, and who look forward to something greater to come. ”
Passage home? Never.
I've decided that year one of this MFA program is like going through self-administered therapy. The memoir essays we produce require excavating our past and trying to make meaning of what we sift from the dirt. Ideally, the work becomes edifying to us as well as to our (eventual) readers. We read other memoirists to see examples of how to do this right, and reading their work is like applying balm or a generous lens to our own errors and hurts. Thank God for the writers brave enough to get their humanity and messiness down on paper; for their sin and transparency and failures and irreverence; and for the redemption that seeps through even still.
I finished Mary Karr's Lit last weekend. Geez. Karr’s writing made me grateful all over again to be a writer, a woman, a sinner, and a Christian. It reminded me that God is not tame or saccharine, because there’s no way an outlaw like her could fall for a domesticated god. And with her reminder I came to love Him a bit more, too. However unalike our personalities and upbringings may be, I felt a fierce identification and resonance with Karr. She made me feel ready to own my flaws. (See what I mean? Therapy.) My insistent bent on soliciting approval from anyone and everyone ebbed slightly in the wake of her bucking, reluctant movement toward an eventual faith.
Lit’s opening epigraph—a tiny line lifted from Homer’s The Odyssey—does a good job of summing up what I’m learning lately. It’s just three words: Passage home? Never. Here is what I’m realizing: there is no such thing as arriving. I keep catching myself thinking "this year" (meaning a rough and relentless year of darkness and anxiety) is over. But is anything ever really over? More likely we move along a spectrum, through varying shades of gray. More likely I keep forging toward the light and unearthing more of my scabbiness, letting God shine a light on the sin I couldn't see. As another writer puts it, "Increasingly, I understand I don't get to go back. Increasingly, I don't want to."
Today, I am dredging myself upward—that is, God is dredging me up—from a year of fearful inwardness. For so long I was in self-protection mode, noticing only my own needs. Let's be real, most days I still operate that way. But I'm becoming hungry for a more outward and generous way of living. Karr puts words to this hunger: "I was made ... not to prove myself worthy but to refine the worth I'm formed from, acknowledge it, own it, spend it on others." There it is. Our full potential lights up when we let His light pass through us and onto others. When we're outward-facing and okay with all our flaws and all the gray.
Passage home? Never.