Lost and Found

I believe I have mentioned in this column before my theory about things in life you just don’t ignore. Most of the things on my list have to do with being genuinely surprised by something that wells up within oneself.

I’ve had a phrase bumping around in my head for a couple weeks, almost without me noticing. Like I said, I’m a believer that these little surprises are actually weightier than they may at first appear — perhaps they are guideposts along our spiritual path or our connection to the divine. In my life they have always been things that teach me something about myself, my deeper self.

When I finally stopped long enough to hear the words, I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t readily recall their source (a book I read once a year) but it’s a phrase I have held tightly to for so many years it’s probably etched itself into my gray matter: “What’s lost is nothing to what’s found.”

It’s from the novel “Godric” by Frederick Buechner. If you haven’t read it I think you should. I’ve got a copy with your name on it.

This particular phrase, I think, speaks of promise. Of reason to hope. It points toward a greater good than we can imagine for ourselves, based only on what good we now know. It implies a reason, maybe, to believe that losing or a sense of loss is not the final word in our story, even though it sure feels like it sometimes when it first hits.

As I let the phrase come into focus in my mind, I was driving along in silence, which is actually pretty rare. Usually a little person in my charge is hollering or singing in the back seat.

The words were still on my mind Friday as I wrestled Lyla into the car, screaming, trying to get her to my parents’ for the weekend. We have a strict policy about not announcing we are heading to Mimi’s until we’re 5 minutes away. Trust me, a lot of suffering is prevented this way.

My parents had received 9 inches of snow the day before, which we also couldn’t tell her, but we knew it would mean a weekend like Lyla has never seen — snowmen, snow forts, sleds— things she could not possibly imagine as we’ve not experienced those things with her yet. We couldn’t tell her, because those words wouldn’t have made sense. All she knew as we loaded the car was that she was desperately upset we couldn’t bring her jewelry.

I hoped, as we drove away from her beloved “bwa-cets,” my decision as a parent was a compassionate one. When we picked her up Sunday oh! the stories we heard and the glee we saw on her face in pictures. But in the moments as we left Marion Friday I sure had my doubts.

I think this is a lot like what we go through as adults sometimes when we experience a particularly heavy loss. All we can imagine is based on what we’ve seen or heard of, and often a loss feels like it’s greater than the greatest good we can imagine.

It’s hard for me to believe, in times of big loss, that what I have lost will seem like nothing compared to what I will find as I keep going. When I experience loss, I can look a lot like my toddler did Friday, or at least my heart can. It kicks and screams and wretches with pain it doesn’t think it can bear.

I don’t know for sure yet, but I think my brain is trying to remind me there’s reason to believe that good I cannot conceive is just beyond the horizon for me. That actually I’m just beginning a journey toward more reasons for glee than I can imagine and if somebody tried to explain it to me the words wouldn’t make sense.

That in time I’ll look back and see it was just a short distance to a time filled with good unlike I’ve ever known.

As published in the Marion County Record, January 26, 2011

'That's a great song'

I grew up in a musical family, so I’m thrilled that my daughter is beginning to show a deeper interest in and appreciation for music.

Several times a day I’ll overhear her quietly practicing a song she’s just heard for the first time or making up one of her own. She particularly likes to re-tell everything she’s done in a day via song while we drive home from day care.

She has also begun to express her appreciation when she hears a good song on the radio or in church. She has moved from simply requesting “again again” when she hears a song she likes to saying “That’s a great song.” The first time she said it we’d just listened to a song on an old Boston record of mine.

Most recently, she chose to express her appreciation in the middle of dead silence at church following a hymn. I’ll side-step trying to draw parallels between “Amanda” and “Great is Thy Faithfulness” because I don’t think there are any.

I will say, aside from being hilarious, that moment blessed my heart, both as a mother and as a longtime believer in what appreciating beautiful things can do for the soul.

Madeline L’Engle (one of my favorite writers) states in Walking on Water, “In art, either as creators or participators, we are helped to remember some of the glorious things we have forgotten.”

In art, including music, she explains “we are given glimpses of the world on the other side of time and space.” This world, L’Engle asserts, is the glorious reality we all know as children, but “we grow up and forget.”

On Sunday, our congregation had finished its singing and sat in silence. Our voices, lifted in song only a few seconds before, echoed a few moments and quickly faded until the silence in the room actually felt like more than the absence of noise — it felt like that mysterious, created space where things are born.

And in that silence a tiny voice filled the room with her heartfelt appreciation: “That’s a great song!” She said it so happily and matter-of-factly. I felt our pew and a few around us shake with the stifled giggles, mine included, but really my heart was swelling.

Isn’t that type of thing the whole reason we humans have singing voices at all? Think about it, what practical purpose does it serve for us to be able to create melody and harmony with the human voice. None. It is purely a thing of beauty. We can offer it as a gift and we can celebrate it.

Part of being human, I think, is doing just that — appreciating beauty when we see it. Allowing thanks to ring out in the silences where things are born is something I have found extremely helpful in keeping other less beautiful things from being born there.

I love that Lyla loves music right now. That when she hears a song she likes she appreciates its beauty and takes time in her busy toddler goings-on to say so. She may not always. She, like so many of us, may grow up and forget the glorious reality she now sees.

In the meantime when she says “That’s a great song, Mommy,” if it’s in my power to do so, I play it for her again.

As published in the Marion County Record, January 19, 2011

'Had I a golden thread'

Brokenness is hard. Throughout my life I’ve heard its virtues praised in many forums and I always have the sense that maybe we’ve all agreed to go along with this because we want it to be true more than we feel it to be true. We’ve had some extremely rough patches in our home this past year — physically, financially, emotionally, holistically. There’s been a lot of brokenness this past year and I can’t say I’m sad to see 2010 go. I have been telling myself it can only get better from here, but that’s not exactly a chorus of optimism that makes a heart sing with joy.

I was sharing some of this brokenness with an old friend recently, not really looking to be comforted, more just wanting another person to go, “Wow, I’d feel pretty broken too.” But the great thing about this old friend, who is a more evolved soul than I am, is he doesn’t indulge in wallowing.

My friend responded with a story he had heard on the radio the night before about the Japanese tradition of repairing broken ceramic pieces with lacquer that has been mixed with gold powder. It’s called kintsugi, “to patch with gold.”

I have to say my first reaction was to roll my eyes. Seemed too easy. I’ve heard the idea of brokenness creating added strength where there was once a crack many times before.

But that was not my friend’s point at all.

The result of this unique repair is that the broken piece is more than restored, it is elevated to something more than it was before it was broken. With the inclusion of gold in the cracks, the piece is now actually both stronger and more valuable. The threads of gold don’t hide the brokenness, they highlight and transform it into something to be cherished. A simple bowl becomes a work of art, and the art is in the cracks.

To me, that was a whole new way of looking at the brokenness thing. It’s one thing to look at being broken as something we can turn into a positive by letting it teach us and make us stronger, it’s a whole separate idea to think of brokenness as something that adds value, that elevates the thing that gets broken to something more cherished than it was when it had no cracks at all.

Kinda makes me look forward to the next time I break a bowl while unloading the dishwasher.

It also helps me begin to look back on 2010 as something other than a year I endured that made me stronger.

I hope as the cracks begin to heal, I’ll see this past year as a time when my life was transformed by threads of gold.

As published in the Hillsboro Star Journal, January 5, 2011