I got pregnant during Advent 15 years
ago, after which I had almost no further contact with Sam’s father, John, for
years. No one could have imagined that over the last seven years the three of
us would become a quirky, tender family. For instance, last week Sam and I went
to visit his father in Canada for the fourth time, and came back home on the
first Sunday in Advent.
This year Sam was going to meet his half-brother, his father’s
first son, who is forty. No one had been ready to take this next step until
this year, and suddenly, we all were. Sam was more excited than I’d seen him in
a long time. I was too but—well, you know me with my bad nerves. John’s son was
going to stay on John’s marvellous boat with his wife and baby. Sam would stay
with John at his apartment, and I was staying at a hotel with room service and
cable TV, as I have not completely lost my mind.
John picked me and Sam up at the airport, took us out for
sushi, and dropped me at my hotel. They headed off to John’s apartment. My
hotel was on the shore of the inlet that flows into Vancouver, with snowy
mountain peaks across the water, trees seemingly aflame on every hillside, and
a bustling harbour beneath my window. I was going to take a cab to John’s
later, and we would all meet up for dinner.
I holed up in the hotel with CNN and Kit-Kats from the
mini-bar, and grew increasingly tense. What if Sam’s brother couldn’t reach
out, what if Sam went into adolescent glower mode, what if … I went through
everything that could go wrong that night, and then moved into the more
spacious realms of worrying about gum surgery, and colon cancer. I got some
communion Milanos out of the mini-bar, performed the sacrament, and then prayed
that I could just keep the faith. The thing is, I have a lot of faith. But I am
also afraid a lot, and have no real certainty about anything. Paul Tillich that
the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the
point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, emptiness, and discomfort,
and letting it be there until some light returns. Faith means reaching deeply
within for the sense one was born with, the sense, for instance, to go for a
walk.
So, I showered off that horrible butt smell you get from
being on an airplane, then bundled up and went outside. I prayed that
everything would go all right for Sam’s sake. I wish faith wrapped you in a
bubble, but it doesn’t, not for long.
During Advent, Christians prepare for the birth of Jesus,
which means the true light. All your better religions have a holy season as the
days grow shorter, when we ask ourselves, ‘Where is the spring? Will it
actually come again this year, break through the quagmire, the terror, the
cluelessness?’ Probably not, is my response, left to my own devices. So, all I
can do is to stay close to God, and my friends. I notice the darkness, light a
few candles, scatter some seeds. And out in Nature, and in my spiritual
communities, I can usually remember that we only have to dread things one day
at a time. Insight doesn’t help here. Hope is not logical. It always comes as a
surprise, just when you think all hope is lost. Hope is the cousin to grief,
and both take time: you can’t short-circuit grief, or emptiness and you can’t
patch it up with your bicycle tire tube kit. You have to take the next right
action. Jesus would pray on the mountain, or hang out with the poor or
imprisoned, or—as I’ll get to in a moment—start doodling in the sand.
I walked around town for a while, stopped at some
bookstores, bought myself a lipstick, a cup of cocoa with whipped cream, and
then dropped by an old stone church.
The church was small and beautiful, cold, and dark. This gave
me a kind of relief: we live in darkness. Everyone knows this the time they
turn 21, or they’re seriously disturbed. I started to get really freaked out
about dinner—there are literally six people in the world with whom I can bear
to eat. And besides, what if the added weight of Sam’s brother, with his
inevitable baggage, caused Sam’s and my life with John to buckle and collapse?
What if Sam’s heart got broken again? As with most kids who
are 14, it has been spackled and duct-taped and caulked back together so many
times as it is.
The church smelled dank and musky, like Sam’s dirty laundry,
but I sat quietly. My mind perched on top of my head like a spider monkey and
thought of more things that could go wrong at dinner, and whose fault those
things would be. I tried to do the two-foot drop, from my head down to my
heart, which is so kind and so amazed that John and I have made a little family
for Sam. Still, my mind chattered on, like the spider monkey had taken a little
acid. My mind is my main problem almost all the time. I wish I could leave it
in the fridge when I go out, but it likes to come with me. I have tried to get
it to take up a nice hobby, like macramé, but it prefers just to think about
stuff, and jot down the things that annoy it.
The other problem continues to be what I think the light
looks like. I have thought, over the years, that the light would look like
success, a good man, a child, a Democratic president, but none of these were
right. Moses led his people in circles for 40 years, so they could get ready
for the Promised Land, because they had too many ideas and preconceptions about
what a nice Promised Land should look like. In Advent, we have to sit in our
own anxiety and funkiness long enough to know what a Promised Land would be like,
or, to put it another way, what it means to be saved—which, if we are to
believe Jesus, or Ghandi, means to see everyone on earth as family.
I left the church and took a cab over to John’s house. I
cannot tell you the whole story, but Sam says that I can share the following
brief report: his brother is tall and warm and kind. They looked enough alike
so that you could see they were related, but not so much that I had to breathe
into a brown paper bag. And they were both a little shy. His brother’s wife is
smart and lively, and their baby is lovely beyond words. We all connected, in
the perfectly imperfect way of families. We ate and were kind to each other. We
watched TV and raced around after the baby. Sam staked out turf close to both
me and his father, and ventured out like small children do to try out new lines
of conversation. I was secretly hoping that something dramatic would happen,
and I’d have a great story to tell, but it took me several hours to realize
that this is the best story there is: that a small group of related people came
together, willing to be supremely uncomfortable, so that Sam could know his
brother, and his brother’s family, and therefore come to know a bit more about
who he is.
I am also allowed to report that Sam’s niece, and my
11-month-old niece Clara, were born on the exact same day—I tell you, when God
is not being cryptic and silent, He is so obvious. Sam was wonderful with his
niece, because his cousin Clara has taught him how to be with babies. He’s like
a cross between Big Bird and Tony Soprano with them. ‘Hey you,’ he calls, when
they’re babbling incoherently over his TV show, ‘Put a sock in it.’ Then he
tosses them around, and pushes his face against theirs, and makes farting
sounds, and makes sure they don’t get their fingers caught in drawers.
He also doodled the whole evening. The rest of us talked,
overate, cleaned up messes as we went, held our tongues, overlooked the
inevitable family tension. The oil of manners makes it possible. When you’re
kind to people, and you pay attention, you make a field of comfort around them,
and you get it back—the Golden Rule meets the law of Karma meets Murphy’s law.
And all the while, Sam drew his little guys, from time to
time asserting his adolescent grump. I felt anxious much of time, but what else
is new? Something larger than us and our anxieties and ferocious need to
control got us through, connected us, even if the connection was precarious at
first. What shone through was the odd responsibility we took for each other,
the kindness, marbled in through the past, the bad and silent patches of our
shared histories, our character defects, hidden and on the surface, and the
glitches. Things got broken—they always do—and children always yap and stamp,
cry, glower, and demand all your attention. It’s called real life, and it’s
cracked and fragile, but the glue for me is the beating of my heart, love, and
whatever attention I can pay to what matters most to me—making a good life for
Sam.
‘Hey, Sam,’ I said, when I hugged everyone goodbye and left
for my hotel. ‘Doodle on.’
The second morning, I lay in bed giving thanks for having
come from where we were, before Sam knew his dad, to where we are now. I
ordered room service, and then made the mistake of turning on the TV. What if
there really is no hope this time? What if the insanity had grown more intense
than wisdom? Outside my window, the nearest trees looked sick and in trouble.
The leaves had all fallen off, and they looked dead. All I could do was lean on
my shaky Advent faith that things would be OK, more or less, that we are
connected, and everyone—everyone—eventually falls into the hands of God. I
pray, and try to be kind, and go to church, and Sam doodles.
But these are the things that Jesus did, too. In John 8,
when the woman is about to be stoned by the Pharisees for adultery, we see
Jesus doodling in the sand. The Pharisees, the officially good people, were
acting well within the law when they condemned the woman to death. A huge crowd
of people willing to kill her had joined them. The Greatest Hits moment here is
when Jesus says, challenging the crowd, ‘Let ye who is without sin cast the
first stone.’ But the more interesting stuff happens before, when he leaves the
gathering storm, goes off by himself, and starts doodling.
He refuses to interact with them on their level of hatred
and madness. He just draws in the sand for a time. Maybe he was drawing his
little guys—the Gospel doesn’t say. But when he finally faced the mob, and
responded, all the people who were going to kill the woman had disappeared.
You have to wonder, where was the man with whom she
committed adultery? Some people suggest he was in the crowd, waiting to join in
with the crowd and kill her. We don’t know. But I can guess how the condemned
woman must have felt—surprised. She was supposed to die, and her life was
spared. Hope always catches us by surprise.
It poured all morning. But even in the gloom and
desperation, I played over the scenes from the night before, in all their magic
and klutz and ordinariness: Sam and his brother getting to know each other; the
baby racing around in a state of busy wonder. I have to say, I continue to be
deeply surprised by life.
I had invited everyone over to my hotel room for room
service lunch and a movie. I felt pretty anxious while I waited. The rain
poured down, dark, and loud. I couldn’t wait to get back to my own home: this
is the perfect time to plant bulbs and scatter seeds, in the hope that some of
them will grow. But meanwhile, in Advent, we show up when we are needed, with
grit and kindness; we try to help, we prepare for an end to the despair. And we
do this together.
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