Take up your cross
I want to thank all of you for your warm and moving replies to the last email. I was not expecting such a response, but then expectations in this season of life are hard to set with clarity. Still, I am grateful for and humbled by your words.
Speaking of which, I know that it has been some time since I last wrote. The reasons for which are below. But I can’t thank you enough for reading and for being with us on this journey.
01
Like snow in summer or rain in harvest,
so honor is not fitting for a fool. (Proverbs 26:1)
The morning of the year's first snowstorm I took my son, James, fishing for his birthday. Frost was on the ground when we left, but by late morning, it was in the low 60s. A gentle breeze kept things crisp. The clouds couldn’t be bothered to come east of the Rockies, which were dappled with a snow from earlier in the week. The cottonwoods and ash trees were starting to brim with yellow pride. It was one of those early autumn days that turn you into Anne Shirley, when you can’t help but gush with gratitude about living “in a world where there are Octobers.”
James’s birthday party was that evening. We had originally wanted it to be outside at a pumpkin patch, but the forecast was insistent that around 5 or 6 p.m. the wind would pick up and the temperature would start to drop. So we reserved the gym at our church and threw a Princess Bride-themed party complete with sword fights, battles of wits and Miracle Max chocolate cupcakes.
We drove home after dark, a happy and tired family. The cold front was just starting to push through. A pale yellow sky receding above the foothills was being swallowed up by the coming clouds. The snow started around 8:30—a wet, cornmeal snow.
I can tell you the consistency of it because we were rushing out the door for the emergency room right at that moment. One of our girls had taken a fall while we were getting ready for bed. A goose egg to the forehead, courtesy of the night stand. With one hand on the steering wheel of due diligence and the other swatting away the flies of insecurity about our ability to take care of our kids, we headed for the emergency room.
Two hours later, with full assurance from the doctor that we did the right thing and that everything was okay, we stepped out into a snow globe. By Sunday morning, roughly five inches of snow had fallen. But the beauty of it was hard to appreciate because of what it did to the trees across the city. It was as if they all had puked a sickly green substance over the white snow. Entire ash trees, still fully green, were stripped of their leaves. Our cottonwood’s leaves turned a pale brown. I made a snowman with the kids that afternoon, but we just as easily could have raked together a pile of soggy, discolored leaves.
Monday morning dawned in the mid-teens. I drove to work in a white-ish world spattered with brown blood of autumn's massacre.
02
For those of you who know me well, you know how strange it is to hear me complain of snow.
Fall had been a little slow in arriving this year. The day the girls moved in, in mid September, it was 95 degrees. There hadn’t been a freeze until the day of James’s birthday. But by the second week of October the canopy across town was starting to hum. The air at the end of our street was beginning to ripen with the yellow fruit of ash and cottonwoods.
And then it was gone. We went from summer to winter in four weeks.
03
Seasons, ranked:
1. Advent/Christmas
2. Fall
3. Winter
4. BLT (mid August through early September, when the tomatoes and green chilies are peaking, and frying up bacon becomes a daily occurrence)
5. Spring
6. Summer
1,384. Lexus December to Remember Event
04
Thoreau was captivated by the leaves of October:
"October is the month of painted leaves. Their rich glow now flashes round the world. As fruits and leaves and the day itself acquire a bright tint just before they fall, so the year near its setting. October is its sunset sky; November the later twilight."
He saw the metaphor and lesson the leaves offered us:
"How pleasant to walk over beds of these fresh, crisp, and rustling fallen leaves. . . . How beautiful they go to their graves!”
But what if they don’t go beautifully? What if they “die at last, and too soon?” as the poet Mary Oliver lamented?
05
I could accept the complete upheaval of my life with the arrival of our girls. Did you know that we had only two weeks’ notice from when we were matched to when they moved in? Did you know that going from a family of three to a family of five in two weeks can be stressful?
But it’s a good stress, you say. Yes. And amen. But that’s a radical kind of change.
That’s okay, I thought to myself. Everything may be in transition, everything may be completely different, but at least you have October. At least you’ll have the colors and smells of your favorite month to help you feel normal, to help you feel a little bit of stability with all that is changing around you. At least you’ll have ash trees and maples to guide you.
Green, crinkled puke on top of wet snow put an end to that hope.
For most of the last two weeks of October I stumbled through a fog of depression and dislocation. I was unmotivated. I was drowsy with acedia. I doubted that normal routines could grow.
There’s a word for this, actually. Solastalgia. It’s a mixture of “solace,” “desolation” and “algia,” which is Greek for pain, suffering or sickness. The philosopher who coined the term defined it as:
“. . . the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault (physical desolation). It is manifest in an attack on one’s sense of place, in the erosion of the sense of belonging (identity) to a particular place and a feeling of distress (psychological desolation) about its transformation. . . .
Solastalgia . . . is a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at home.”
So this feeling of solastalgia was coupled with a frustration about the habits and rhythms in our home. Going from a family of three to a family of five in two weeks will mess up your cadences. It has been a struggle for us to get the kids in bed “on time,” because of course it has. But that has meant that Lindsey and I have been getting to bed much later than we used to, which means we’re getting up later in the morning, which means my mornings have been all out or sorts. It’s in the mornings that I have devotional times and spend time writing. It’s on Tuesday mornings that I play basketball with men from church. It hasn’t been happening. All of these deep wells of nourishment suddenly ran dry.
We’re also still in the woods of transition. After taking four weeks off to “nest” with our newly expanded family, Lindsey has gone back to work, which has brought additional changes and dynamics to our routines and schedules. We’re even wrestling with what to do about her job and her desire to be home.
It all amounted to a kind of solastalgia of the soul. What’s going on in our home? Why aren’t things “normal"? What has happened to the habits and rituals I spent all year building into my life? And when that internal dislocation coincided with solastalgia for the loss of autumn, well…I started to feel lost. Where am I? When am I?
I can’t help but think that this is likely how our girls feel, too. Kids in the foster system are always homesick, always longing for the home they’ve never had. These children come from hard places, and every move to a new home is another attack on their sense of place and belonging in this world. Every new “mom” and “dad” brings them into a season of uncertainty and confusion.
The leaves fell just as suddenly as our lives changed. A friend of mine likened it to be being dumped by text—we weren’t let down easily. As much as we gained, as much as God gave us, there were things that we lost. In my pride, I had expected life’s rhythms to go back to “normal” by now. Expectations were high and grace was low.
06
Solastalgia. Or it could have been idolatry. What I mean by that is it’s very possible that my sense of identity and worth was becoming wrapped up in how well I got up at 5:30 a.m. to read, pray and write; that I only thought well of myself (…and God?) if I was consistent in my disciplines and habits. And when those things fell apart with October’s leaves, I fell into a kind of disrepair. One day I'd feel fine, maybe even encouraged, but the next I'd be a listless mess. The rollercoaster made it harder on my family. Again, it was a question of expectations, and they didn't know what to expect of me.
I felt condemned by my feelings. By my lack of hope. By my lack of trust in God. By my lack of habits. By the growing list of home-maintenance projects. By my own unmet standards. By the clock’s hands.
07
I remember something C.S. Lewis wrote (I think it was in Surprised by Joy) about trusting God through times of uncertainty or hardship. He said, in the context of Joy’s illness, that it wasn’t that they doubted God’s goodness, but that they feared how painful that good plan was going to be.
08
TAKE UP YOUR CROSS
I am afraid
that you’ll take
my dreams like
a kidney
while I sleep.
I am afraid my desire
is a fragrant herb to be
ground in the pestle
of sanctification, the smell
pleasing only to you.
I am afraid to start
on my leaf.
I am afraid I won’t
recognize my tree
when I look out the train window.
I am afraid I will
only hear the nuthatches
scurrying around the blue spruce
and never see them hop
head-first down the trunk.
09
I wrote this poem last October when Lindsey and I were on the cusp of getting back into the foster-to-adopt world. I was also beginning a recommitment to writing, and I feared that the former would choke out the latter, steal it away before it ever got a chance to get going. It’s a prayer as much as anything, a confession and an accusation all rolled together.
I included this poem in an email I sent Lindsey when I first started to realize what I was grieving. It came after a long-ish rant that amounted to, “See? See? This is what I’m going through.”
Over my lunch break the day I sent the email, I picked up the Bible and said the cliche-y prayer of, “Okay, God, I know I need to be in your Word, so I’m just going to open it up and trust that you have something good for me.”
As it so happened, I opened to the passage in Mark 8 where Jesus told the crowd and his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”
Take up your cross. I sat for a moment in disbelief, then kept reading through Mark 9, where the father of the demon-possessed child cries out to Jesus, “I believe; help my unbelief!"
The only reasonable course of action after such an encounter with the irony and humor of God is to go on a walk. Not five minutes into it, I heard two nuthatches chatting in a ponderosa. I hadn’t seen or heard a nuthatch since last winter. Then I saw them. They hopped from branch to branch, then darted over my head toward another tree, and I lost them in the sunlight.
I think tears formed at the corner of my eyes. God saw. He knew. He looked at me the way I (sometimes) look at my children when they’re reacting dramatically to the normal upheavals of life—with compassion, truth and a little wink of the eye.
10
Tim Keller: “. . . repentance is a path through grief to greater joy.” Francis Thompson, from “The Hound of Heaven”: “Ah! must Thou char the wood ere Thou canst limn with it?”
Limn. To draw or paint with. Or, just maybe, to write with.
We all must be charred. But it doesn’t happen overnight. Repentance is never a one-time thing. Richard Dawkins and the “new atheist” types have nothing on my functional atheism in which I doubt the existence of God’s goodness every-other-day. So I’m learning to repent of graceless expectations and the unbelief that’s always too willing to burst through the surface.
10a
October ended with more color than which it started. The weekend before Halloween, we took a road trip to see some of Lindsey’s family in New Mexico. She was born not far from where my dad grew up, so I had driven that road many times; I knew it intimately, deeply. But I had never been through New Mexico in late October. The cottonwoods along the banks of the Canadian River south of Raton were on fire. Whole stands of cottonwoods roared with yellow and orange where the Pecos River passed underneath Route 66 near Anton Chico. Those trees were a reminder that death (even death to self) can be beautiful if we do not lose heart, if we remember the weight of glory on the other side of our homesickness.