A Not-So Bucket List and Voices I Need
After the president declared a national state of emergency in response to the unprecedented Global Pandemic, nursing homes and assisted living centers were forced to sequester their residents to prevent further spread of the fatal virus. Friends and families banned from visiting their vulnerable loved ones in a social climate of panic and for how long? It could be weeks, maybe months, some predictions casting their nets a year wide. I’m home comfortably with my family, which I’m unspeakably grateful for. We gathered around the table last night and brainstormed our separate “Quarantine Bucket Lists.” On them include tasks that ought to get done but that we’re dragging our feet to do (i.e. taxes and closet clean-outs), disciplines that will sharpen us physically, mentally, spiritually each day, and then fun, frivolous things that we just want to do because we have time and we can. We color-coded our categories in rainbow Sharpie and tomorrow we’d begin.
Since we’re unable to see her, we FaceTime my sick aunt. She’s in mandatory isolation, immunocompromised, and she says she feels like a prisoner of war. Her face is too close to the camera when she answers. We wave our decorated papers around and give her ideas so that she can make her own list of activities to keep her busy. We ask her which shows she’s been meaning to watch. Have you learned how to listen to podcasts yet? In what ways are you able to move your body? She gently bypasses those suggestions and heads straight for the priority tasks, the ones right before her. “I’d like to figure out my funeral plans. And I guess I’d better get the finances all sorted.” We don’t dismiss what she’s said and we don’t try to move along quickly. We write them down for her and listen as she safely and freely gets it out. Then I tell her I don’t like that bucket list and we let her dream of one fun thing. Ryan asks if she’d like for him to read a book to her soon, and she said if it’s a short one she thinks yes, that’d be nice. So, we hung up the phone while the promise of a good, short story lingered in the uncertain space between now and the happy music she wants played at her service.
Mom and I made two loaves of banana bread per my fun list. She taught me how to generously sugar the bottom of the pan. The recipes will never tell you to, but it tastes better this way. We sprinkled chocolate chips in one, crushed up walnuts all around both. The great thing about this sort of baking is that it works as a buttered breakfast in the morning, a light snack in the afternoon, and a sweet treat at midnight since there are no rules when the world shuts down. The loaves came out bready and delicious, but we both decided they were a bit more dense than usual. We’d done a full roll call of ingredients before popping them in the oven, so I knew we hadn’t missed anything. The next day, Mom came and found me in the kitchen to tell me about her epiphany. She’d added baking powder and the recipe called for soda. “Isn’t it wild how a single teaspoon’s worth can make all the difference?”
Another item on my house-arrest bucket list was to find more beautiful and helpful voices online. I don’t suddenly want this because the Internet is inundated with disease, dis-ease, and too many ugly and unhelpful voices, though that’s a good enough reason. I’ve wanted this for some time but just haven’t been very diligent in my search. I’ll be honest, I have my heroes (perhaps we all do) and I pick favorites, and these specific writers, artists, etc. influence a great chunk of what I do. Their work may be beautiful and it might be helpful but these voices are few on a map of the world and they swallow up space for anything new to emerge. We’re told ad nauseam to stick with what we know, staying in our proverbial lanes in terms of what we write, think, speak, do, listen to. Maybe we think we’re maximizing personal benefit this way? But the older I get, the less I subscribe to this sort of narrow mind. I know what I like and I know what I’m good at. And I know that I’ve stayed in my lane with these things to my own detriment. I’m a writer, so I’ll only write and hardly read. If I read, I’m reading men because I’m under the dangerous spell that modern-day women authors don’t quite do it for me. I’ll listen exclusively to music because it fuels the writing, leaving no room for podcasts or any other auditory medium that might stimulate my mind in different ways. I’ll choose poetry over scripture and think they’re the same. And I’ll do this for a long time until I am shaved down to a half-formed person.
A friend of mine texted me the other day, and she’s a voice that actually belongs in the group I’ll mention below. In the wake of some pretty gnarly anxiety that called me bad, she listed out a few of the things that make me good. She said you have integrity. And she said that you are integrated – body, mind, spirit, heart. She said that it’s such a beautiful thing to behold and to keep going. And let me tell you, those words were medicine to me when I did not feel it. I’ve been thinking about what she means when she speaks about integration, becoming fully-formed beings. We know what we like and generally what we’re good at. So in an effort to expand my knowledge far and wide and long as well as deep, it’s led me to two questions: 1) What do I need? And 2) What am I not?
For instance, there’s not a bone in my body that ever wants to go through seminary, but I’ll always need the thorough study of a theologian. No matter how much I practice, I will never be a gifted speaker, but I still need to hear words as well as see them. Not everyone will jump in line to become a yoga instructor, but not one of us is exempt from the embodied experience. This is the general gist. We should be committed to our vocations, but we must never do so at the expense of being comprehensively whole. We’ll venture out of our lanes and see that it’s not wasted time after all, or weakness, to need what another person has. Our togetherness is what makes this thing work.
I wanted to share a few of the helpful and beautiful voices I’ve found so far. You may know of them. And maybe right now, it’s not television you need or a podcast or to stretch. Maybe it’s a small book that sounds nice, but maybe now you need it read. I don’t know what you need, but I do know this – we are an unformed people who need more than what we know. And maybe what you need is precisely what you’re not. What if we grappled with that today. What if our common crisis became our common comfort, if not for us then for posterity’s sake. One unfamiliar voice at a time, we’ll rejoice at what a difference just a teaspoon’s worth can make.
It’s not an exhaustive list, but here are at least six places to start. I hope you’ll take a break and a breath soon to really let them minister to your body, mind, spirit, heart.
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Scott Erickson is a touring painter and communicator, and he creates art that speaks to our deepest experiences. He’s @scottthepainter on Instagram. He has some really wonderful resources on his website, one of the best being his four-part series, Why The Church Needs Art. Watch all four videos. Each one is short, captivating and poignant as he unpacks our language of vision to describe our understanding of the Gospel. We all have interior pictures of how we think things are versus how they really exist in the world, but what if our visual culture of scripture is widely underdeveloped? The work of the teacher, the artist, the illustrator, the musician, the writer, is to help foster that inner image. This is what art can do, he says. It gives us the words, the images, the emotions that help us understand our own lives. They become our deepest prayers, a vehicle to approach God with. It’s through these human and sometimes secular mediums that we’re able to identify with the story of scripture even deeper.
Bridgetown Church is doing a current series called Bridgetown Daily in light of all that’s going on. “Now, more than ever, is when Jesus calls us to follow the way of love as we seek to be a non-anxious presence in a cultural moment of anxiety. These are daily meditations on scripture, a quote, or the life of a saint to ground you in God and His peace. I listened for six minutes today as John Mark Comer and Bethany Allen read St. Patrick’s Breastplate Prayer. Here’s an excerpt that I hope you’ll take with the pace of a slow breath:
Christ with me, Christ before me,
Christ behind me, Christ in me,
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ on my right, Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down,
Christ when I arise,
Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,
Christ in every eye that sees me, Christ in every ear that hears me.
I am chewing slowly on The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel. It’s a brief yet profound meditation on the meaning of The Seventh Day with a rich, classic look into Jewish culture and spirituality. I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it: I believe this book to be the father of all Sabbath texts, laying the immovable groundwork for our continued conversation surrounding work and rest. “With the Sabbath comes a miracle: the soul is resurrected, an additional soul arrives, and the effulgence of Sabbath holiness fills every corner of the household. Anger is lifted, tensions are gone, and there is a glow on the face.” Heschel turns Western culture on its head and brings us gently into the sanctity of time, and I can’t think of a better moment in history to start. We cannot work, we can only rest. How can we infuse our time with Spirit – converting this time into eternity.
Anne Lamott is a progressive activist and public speaker, and maybe you don’t align with her politically or otherwise. But she is a female non-fiction writer who provides a deep, fresh drink for those of us feeling stuck in stagnant spaces. Her personal essays and memoirs cover topics such as alcoholism, single-motherhood, depression and Christianity. Here is her Ted Talk from a few years back, called 12 Truths I Learned From Life and Writing. If you’re struggling to find God in all this, she reminds us that “God just means goodness. It’s really not all that scary. It means the divine or a loving, animating intelligence. A good name for God is: Not me. Emerson said that the happiest person on Earth is the one who learns from nature the lessons of worship. So go outside a lot and look up. My pastor said you can trap bees on the bottom of mason jars without lids because they don’t look up, so they just walk around bitterly bumping into the glass walls. Go outside. Look up. Secret of life.” You can watch for fifteen minutes or read the transcription.
My parents have reminded me to listen to this for weeks now and I finally did today. The Unravel Podcast episode: Becoming Friendly with Pain and Ourselves. Host Brady Toops and Dr. Hillary McBride elegantly maneuver through things like trauma, disordered eating, embodiment and divine imminence. She says that part of our existence means feeling our pain. Pain is information that our bodies are trying to make sense of, and how will we choose to relate to it? She mirrors the arc of birth and labor with human suffering – enduring increasing intensities of distress until we reach a point in which we feel we can’t go further and then suddenly, something new is born. She encourages listeners with her own revelation that we don’t need to go outside our bodies to find God and to find transformation. “Sometimes it’s the smallest, the quietest, the most seemingly innocuous thing on the deepest, most inside part of us. Maybe it was God’s voice. Maybe it was my voice. Maybe they’re the same.”
Lastly, but not least of all is artist Daren Thomas Magee. He’s a brilliant illustrator, muralist, and designer living in Ojai, California. His landscapes, line work, texture and color remind me of our time in Santa Fe. If you follow him online (@realfunwow), he’s actually a very engaging thinker and a simple, unique inspiration. Here’s one of his prints that felt timely as we wish peace to our people from inside the curtains.
