milk & honey mamas

Written by Kristen

As a hospital Chaplain, one of the most common things I heard in hospital rooms was, “I know other people have it worse.” Objectively, they may have been right. But there is something lonely about that statement, as though the speaker needed to defend their pain to me, to situate themselves within humanity before they could be taken seriously. Can my pain, my grief, and my loss sit with the pain and the grief and the loss of that which exists on a cosmic scale? Can my particularity face universality and live, and can universality deal with the felt reality of particularity? 

Most of us want to be special, unique, one-of-a-kind. We want to be seen as particular beings. Yet we are all also part of a universal human story in which we are often lumped into groups: “mom,” “wife,” “black,” “white,” “accountant,” “teacher,” and so on. We all know that labels fail to tell the whole story, but we also want to have meaningful identity markers. We want to fit in and, paradoxically, to stand out. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich famously wrote that “well-behaved women seldom make history” (here). I’m curious, however, (as is Ulrich, by the way) about what makes someone interesting. What makes a record worth preserving? What makes a life worth investigating? What does it mean to be an individual, to be a person amid a sea of people? If my life follows the pattern of millions of lives around and before me, is it significant?

Long before Ulrich, George Elliot (Mary Ann Evans) wrote, “[t]he growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs” (Middlemarch). I’m interested in unvisited tombs, and hidden lives, and unhistoric acts for lots of reasons, but I’m especially interested in light of the Easter story, and the walk with Jesus through what is now called “Holy Week.” 

Those immersed in Christianity are familiar with its most common and wide-reaching concepts, such as the idea that Christ died for the sins of all humanity but he also died for each individual human being. The universal and the particular. As I’ve unpacked these concepts in professional and academic settings, I’ve gleaned a historical and theological understanding of the many powerful forces which created this singular idea. It rests, for example, on Chalcedonian Christianity, the Nicene creed, the doctrine of creation ex-nihilo, and original sin brought on by Adam and Eve’s original transgression. I’m struck, however, by how far removed much of the scholarship I’ve digested feels from the ordinary experience of well-behaved women like Elliot’s Dorothea or the women who provided the opportunity for my existence; the invisible ones whose ordinary stories are often untold, and whose bones rest in unmarked graves. I suspect that in addition to the in-accessibility of “high theology,” the average believer does not really care about Christological debates and atonement theologies and biblical exegesis. The average believer cares more about practicality. About what it means to believe in Jesus. What it means, today, right now, to believe that he came to earth and suffered and died and rose again, for me. And for you. And for our children. 

Ultimately, these are questions of the interplay between universal and the particular. We come to this week with universal wounds and resentments and griefs. We come to this week grappling with broken and unjust systems perpetually harming the most intentionally disadvantaged in society. We come with the griefs of mass violence, brutal war, genocide, economic uncertainty, crises of displacement and forced resettlement, and much more. We also come with the particular and individual agonies of loss, unfulfilled dreams, unrequited love, broken hopes, failed relationships, economic devastation, unexplained sickness, mental illness, addiction, and loneliness. We are, as a human species, much more alike than we are different. And we face real and indisputable divisions that challenge our ability to understand, to empathize, and to function as a unified people.

I think the stories of Holy Week have the potential to meet us in our human universality and individual particularity, in our own pains and sorrows and the pains and sorrows of our neighbors. Some years, the Easter season overlaps with the Jewish commemoration of Passover and the Islamic celebration of Ramadan. These sister faiths, who all lay claim to Jerusalem where the Christian holy week occurred, have historic and contemporary histories of hate, violence, bigotry, and subjugation. In their overlapping occurrence, we face some of the pitfalls that come with overemphasizing universality. But we also face the potential of meaningful particularity, which springs into life within the universal human thirst for meaning-making, symbol, and hope. We can tell the story in ways that reduce it to incomprehensibility and dogmatic absolutism, and we can also tell the story in ways that invite compassion and empathy for ourselves and for our neighbors. 

As mothers, we want to tell holy stories in ways that open us to curiosity, to genuine questioning, and to empathy. We want to tell stories that inspire hope, confidence, and wonder. We want to affirm the particular experiences of our children while situating them within a universal human story. So we will try to tell the story of Holy Week within its historical context honoring the complicated history breathing it into being. We will try to tell the story of a Christ who forgave, who healed, who wept, who washed the feet and fed the bodies of his friends, who cried out for help, and who died on a cross symbolizing the dominance of a violent political system. We will try to tell the story of followers who did not know the ending we read into the story, who struggled to make sense of the tragedy, and who ran in fear from the empty tomb. We will try to hear the story of what happened next, of miracle and renewal and rebirth and life within death. We will try to speak to the hope of overcoming, the promise of new life, and the longing for reconciliation. Is there something here that sings on a grand scale? Is there something here that sings just for you?

If you come to Holy Week with a broken heart and tired feet, meet us there. Let’s puzzle together over symbols and borrowed imaginations and memorized words. Let’s wonder how to imagine what could give you life, again. Let’s read the story with new eyes, with a child’s eyes, and meet the characters for the first time. Let’s play, and explore, and cry, and rant, and ask, and approach that empty tomb, and that spring day, and that man who died and then lived, and let’s just stay there, wondering. Your brokenness, your fear, your disbelief is welcome in the vastness of these stories’ contours. Mine is too. 

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God be a bricoleur 

An Easter poem by Kristen Blair 

Bricoleur: noun. Tinkerer. 

“It might be said that the engineer questions the universe, while the bricoleur addresses himself to a collection of oddments left over from human endeavors.” Heather Walton, “A Theopoetics of Practice”

My body feels like rain – 

porous, implicated,

forgetting boundary. 

stooped and bent with age,

a man gets on the train. 

He creeps aboard, each step a labor, 

and I want to weep. 

I want to fall on the floor and howl when another drops a pen, hands shaking to pick it up –

when a woman misses her stop and I watch her walk back, slowly treading her way on tired feet. 

They begin where I have not ended

I am poured over the moving car, 

spilled and liquid and fragmented  

for the thought of every life so holy. 

There is too much pain. 

It is all terrible. It is all beautiful. 

And there are stories I don’t know 

narrated with punctuation I’d find misplaced. 

There are meanings gathered which don’t accord with mine. 

Glory, the wrongs are unbearable. 

Hallelujah, life unfolds again, again, again. 

Strangers smile at my children 

and the city passes by, 

another day of miracle.  

God be a bricoleur 

taking us here on this train, 

broken as we are. 

And when you rise on Sunday, could you put aside the purple robe just one more time? 

Could you speak in the voice of the garden, with your clothes from Galilee? 

Forgive me, but I get lost in the triumph, 

the roar blistering in my ear. 

I return to the tomb

where I hear you in the wind, binding the earth. 

Where I recall your vow to comfort. 

God, make me a bricoleur. 

Make me brave enough to work where you are rushing, silent and strange. 

To lay paths of pleasant stones for weary feet,

to soothe the anguished, 

to sit with the forsaken. 

Give me eyes to see the breaks,

ears to hear the wisdom of trees,

a heart to resist despair.  

Make me a bricoleur 

for this earth is our home,

life shared breath by breath,

mystery revealed here in the exhale. 

New. 

Again.