Left Behind

Growing up a military brat, you are trained to leave. Trained to adapt, to set down surface roots that are easily transplanted. You blend in, make friends to sit at the lunch table with, but you keep your roots close to home. You don't dig too deep. Your settlement is always with the next launch in the back of your mind. Should you paint that wall? How easy will it be to paint over if you need to? Should you plant that tree? Will it grow enough for you to really enjoy it? These are all inherent in your decisions, and completely logical.

For me, leaving is easy. It isn't but with a lifetime of practice, it is like any other hard thing you've had to do a million times.

Getting left behind? That's another story completely.

The first time I felt like I feel right now was when my best friend, Tasha, moved away. Her Dad was military too, so we should have known better. We knew that the odds were against both of us to stay in the same place for a long time. But in one short year we found ourselves spending all the time we could together. She was one of my first authentic "best friends" - the kind that I allowed my roots to dig in a little deeper. She was a soul sister. Then came the day that we had ignored would come. She was moving.

When she moved I cried. I had lost a piece of what made the place home. She was no longer a part of my everyday life and I had nothing new to distract me from her absence. I remember asking my Dad, bewildered, why her move had been so hard for me when I had moved so many times myself. I had never experienced these emotions, because I had never really been left behind by someone I cared this much about.

He said "it's easier to leave than to be left behind." It is. For me anyway.

The next time I felt like that was actually twice by the same person: when my sister moved to college, and when she moved away from the college that we both attended. Her first move to college was hard on me because for an entire summer- we were each other's only friend. We moved before my senior year of High School and she was home for the summer after traveling for a year with Up With People. She always had a group of friends, so it was a rarity that she chose my companionship. In this situation we both had no other option. We dug in with each other and made our summer enjoyable. When she left, I cried when I saw her red hair in the hairbrush she left behind. I felt ridiculous about it. Three years later, my second year of college, her last- she left for an internship which would be the last thing she did before her graduation. I cried. We had been each other's back up plan for everything for two years. My back-up was leaving me.

I've learned. I don't put my roots down. I don't dig in. Often I'm the first to move.

Now another friend is leaving me before I have the chance to leave her first. She's moving clear across the country, and even though I'm an adult and we have more means of communication, it feels again like those times. I had set roots down. I dug in. When she left this morning, I cried.

I'm not terrible at goodbyes, I'm terrible at being left behind. When you take my roots with you. Am I supposed to regrow them?

I want my kids to experience what it's like to stay in one place and develop long-lasting friendships and relationships, but I am hurting with the pain of being left behind. I feel the urge to move. To leave. To be in charge of where the roots go. To settle lightly somewhere. To keep everyone at a safe arms-length.

My heart actually hurts, and it's like exercising a muscle that I didn't know existed. I'm not used to letting this place hurt. I want to skip over it. I also wish I knew how to be left behind. I wish it was one of the hard things that I've been doing so many times that it didn't hurt so much. I don't really know what to do with this unfamiliar feeling. It's so uncomfortable. It hurts and I hate it.

When my friend left this morning, I cried. But then I stopped myself. I gathered my remaining roots and whispered to them: "stay close."

Graduate to Grace or Die

I'm not feeling optimistic these days. I have not found much light for the darkness. I have a small candle, but it feels vulnerable.

I saw a powerful prayer by a woman who named the current darkness not to be of the tomb but of the womb, to give birth to a new light, a new life, a new age. I cried it was so beautiful.

I want to believe her. But I'm not convinced we are the light that gets to be born. We might be a tightening contraction, running a circle of pain around the womb of creation, to fight for birth, but  ours may not be final stretch, and the condition may not be pregnancy. Throughout history creation has groaned with each new birth of so-called progress. Pain, war, famine, injustice have squeezed progressively harder at an increasingly focused humanity. The rest between has felt like light, has felt like progress, has felt like evolution. But we have not yet been born. We have not arrived. The Kingdom is not actually here, Nirvana is still out of reach, heaven is not a place on earth. It makes me wonder if there will ever be a birth.

I do a lot of work researching for a book that talks about a story that happens during the second world war. This work has opened my eyes to my ignorance about the history of civilization. Even something that we still have eye-witnesses to- we are already forgetting, we haven't learned, we don't know. I thought about this idea of new birth and thought about the world wars. Two great contractions, one right after the other. Pain and darkness that should have potentially moved us into new birth. But we didn't arrive. We just prepared ourselves for the next tightening. The world is tightening all around. My western and euro-centric view doesn't even account for the tightening in Asia, in Africa, in the Middle-east. Tightening. Pain and violence, famine, flood, the end of times sort of thing. Or is it for the beginning of time?

Then I decided to question the frame of this story: Pain produces birth.

What kind of sick sadist requires the pain and darkness to be that dark for new birth? I'm going to tell you childbirth was a challenge, but it wasn't dark night of the soul stuff. Also, we have evolved. Childbirth isn't quite the fatal risk it used to be. Of course there is still risk and fatality is still a very real possibility - but the odds have shifted. The pain has dulled. The process has become more about the birth and less about the pain. Let's also remind ourselves that our legend in Christianity about birth is that the pain was a result of a curse. I won't get into the problems behind women being cursed literally for wanting knowledge (why have I never noticed that before?!)- but I just want to say that in that narrative, the pain is not something that was original to the plan of creation. Right? Can we agree on that? So maybe we shouldn't fall so easily into this pain = new birth mantra. Maybe we should tell a new story. Maybe we should try another approach in this analogy. If this pain of the world produces no life to be born, then the pain and darkness might be a tightening for death. Maybe pain can only ultimately bring death.

All the religions of the world ask us to hope for the new life. All the religions of the world ask us to believe in redemption. I don't think atheists really believe there is no God, they just believe there is no redemption. Without redemption, there is no God worthy of the title. For me redemption is the triumph over pain, death, darkness. So it seems that we're in a cycle. The redemption is not final. Many Christians (and other faiths) see this and talk about the constant working out of their salvation, or reincarnation, rebirth, again and again the light must pierce the darkness.

Maybe this is our big problem: the great myth of pain leading us to new birth. This idea PERMEATES our lives, our society, our psyche. No Pain No Gain. No Work No Food. No Shoes No Service. (I just wanted to slide that in). It's the human condition, that without struggle and pain we are worthless and have no value. All of our lessons about life rest on this foundational wisdom. Without darkness you can't see the stars. Without pain, you have no muscles. Without struggle, you don't have appreciation and gratitude. I literally don't know if it is possible to escape this primary concept. SO therefore, we are stuck in this vicious cycle. We will be in painful childbirth forever and it will result in a temporal birth of new life that will eventually die, it will result in death, or it will be a hamster wheel of pain.

We're so screwed.

I remind myself that I am a Christian. It's hard to remember sometimes. Because being a Christian really means to have a RIDICULOUS hope in redemption. Redemption with finality. The kind that gets us out of the cycle. And sometimes it is difficult to hold on to that hope. But dammit if hope doesn't poke in places. Redemption keeps manifesting itself all over the place. This makes despair a bit hard to keep up. I wish redemption didn't feel like a stupid weak candle and would feel more like a giant floodlight shining a bat signal. However, even a candle light is enough for me to recognize that the light exists. And then there is Jesus. He's hard for me to ignore. He also didn't buy into the whole no pain-no gain bullshit. He did not do boot camp with his disciples. He did not ask people who wanted healing or food to perform some task to deserve it. He just did it. Free and all. Then when he had all the pain and all of the suffering- he died. Just straight up died. It ended his ministry as a human on earth. Christians believe that he came back to life three days later. Guess what he didn't do? (Let's assume you believe that Jesus did come back to life- and I hear how crazy it sounds to people who didn't grow up with this story.) He didn't get revenge. Like- literally zero of his energy went into correcting his wrongful death. Zero. There is no revenge. No retaliation. No zombie curse said. No hexes. No "I hate those people." Actually- AS he was dying- he forgives the people. THIS IS RIDICULOUS. It's also one of the reasons (of which I can find a zillion) why anti-semitism by Christians because Jesus was killed by the Jews- is ridiculous. I can't even begin to count the ways that that whole argument breaks down (Jesus was a Jew, the Romans killed Jesus, etc etc etc). But think about that- Jesus forgives his murderers as they are murdering and mocking him- then when he comes back to life- he spends NO time looking for justice. Why didn't everyone else follow suit? Oh right, because Jesus had evolved out of the pain cycle and we hadn't.

And that's my next leap. I'm going to be weird and say that I think Jesus was not about justice.

I think Jesus was asking us to taking a flying evolutionary leap and move beyond justice. I'm about to throw out a churchy word: grace. Often we hear the word grace in reference to justice. "God loves me despite the fact that I'm a shitty person." = Grace. We think of grace as being given a second chance when we screw up. We think of grace as this idea that someone else is willing to sacrifice themselves or the law for the love of another person. Grace - in this equation- always requires sacrifice. And usually the thing that gets sacrificed is justice (or Jesus- for people who are into the whole sacrificial analogy).

What if what Jesus really meant to do when he died and didn't do shit about it- was to communicate that his Grace was above and beyond justice. That we didn't even need to think about Grace as a sacrifice- but a way of being, of life, of love. That Grace didn't need to be in conversation with justice at ALL.

Let's swim in that idea. What does this look like? Take the parable that Jesus told of the workers. You know- the one where everyone works for different amounts of times and all get paid the same? EVERYONE HATES THAT PARABLE. (Maybe not- but certainly business people hate it). Here's the thing- people can't stand it because it implies that your sacrifice and work isn't worth anything. And we simply CANNOT handle that. CANNOT. That not handling thing is based on this idea that resources are scarce or at the very least limited- so for someone to work and not get their due (whether they get more or less than they deserve)- woah- we can't live like that. We can't live with the insecurity of knowing that we might not be able to earn our slot on the earth. When people start talking about how some people actually work really hard and still don't get ahead, or how a lot of people just get lucky and land in a pot of gold- we don't know what to do with that. We still need things to work according to justice- that's our foundation. But I mean, if I found a gold pot I'm not going to turn it down.

Here's the thing. Maybe the tree of knowledge was actually the tree of Fake News. That tree told Adam and Eve that there are limited resources, that people deserved or didn't deserve things. Then everything became a competition, everything became a scarcity problem. Everything needed sacrifice and blood, sweat, and tears in order to obtain it. (Seriously- will we ever escape this pain narrative?!) And of course we only recognize our own sacrifice, so we feel we deserve all the goods.

But God, Jesus, Buddha, and pretty much all the spiritually evolved beings who have tried to speak truth- have all said this thing: treat others as you want to be treated. Love one another. God may be a little exasperated by a set of people who look at an earth crawling with millions of different species of bugs and myriad varieties of flowers and diverse ecosystems that just dance- and say "it's not enough." What the hell people? I deserve this iced mocha because I paid for it. Lord Jesus and everything holy wants me to get over myself and my justice. Graduate to Grace.

That's nirvana, heaven, etc etc. And I am trying REALLY hard to believe it is possible. But I'm struggling. This pain is not new birth, it's a cycle that we seem to be doomed to repeat until we evolve. And I'm not sure humanity is willing or able to evolve. Perhaps we're not the pinnacle of creation. Maybe the beetles will be the ones to rule the world.