My Hopes For You, Dr. Lallene Rector

Last week I heard about your appointment, and I was thrilled.  I wanted to write to congratulate you and to offer prayerful words as you transition to your next post.

Someone I love and trust told me that transitions can feel like walking on shifting grounds, like nothing is as familiar.  You once said in a class that it takes the brain up to three years to adjust to major life changes.

I hope that as you change roles, as you assume your next set of responsibilities, that your feet will find sure ground, that what’s under your feet will be steady grace and hope-filled promise that comes from God.

I hope that you will feel ready for your new role and that everyone around you, those you really listen to, will reflect that readiness, will encourage you for your journey, and will become supporters of you on that path.

I hope that your habits, your spiritual disciplines, will train you toward a nourishing faith so that you can sense how large God is in the face of daunting challenges and uncertain tomorrows.

I hope that all of your yesterdays with the Seminary will combine to give you real space to see a splendid future.

I hope that your work with the Board, the faculty, and the students will be more and more fruitful, increasingly powerful, and meaningful for the world, for the church, for the Chicago area, and the community of Evanston.

I hope you will be able to accomplish the goals that you and the community determines is best for you as an administrator, that the next academic dean will support the same, and that, because of all your good work, GETS will be a stronger, more focused, more invitational school for people making sense of their faith, for people making sense of God’s call upon them, and for people searching for how to put themselves into their own vocations in ministry.

I hope that you love your job and that it makes you a better woman, a better teacher, a better scholar, and a better follower of Christ.

I hope that you meet people whose lives you can still personally enhance the way you have throughout your career as a professor and therapist.

I hope that you will have fun, stay creative, lead with patience, grieve with hope, feel a sense of life, feel.

Finally, I hope these words in Philippians, from the Message translation, and words like them, will anchor and strengthen you, the GETS community, and the extended communities you serve:

I am so pleased that you have continued on in this with us, believing and proclaiming God’s message, from the day you heard it right up to the present.  There has never been the slightest doubt in my mind that the God who started this great work in you would keep at it and bring it to a flourishing finish on the very day Christ Jesus appears.  It’s not at all fanciful for me to think this way about you.  My prayers and hopes have deep roots in reality.

Interview with Larry Woiwide on Writing

An interview conducted by John Wilson (editor of Books & Culture) with novelist Larry Woiwide who I hadn’t known before seeing this short conversation.  It’s a touch over 17 minutes.  Enjoy.

To My Mothers In Particular

I haven’t really celebrated Mother’s Day on the Sunday everybody said I should for a few years.  Even though I’ve purchased things for my son so he could learn the habit of celebrating his mother, of praising her for her sheer wonder and generosity and life.  Sundays, because of my work, usually mean that my attention cannot be spent on my mom and my godmother.  So I appoint time to do that around the holiday.

And, in truth, I have acknowledged the day by trying to reach them and a few of the other mothers in my life, the women who have birthed something like love in me, because they have changed me, and I call or contact or think about them because I cannot forget them.  Plus, I’m one of those people who hate to do things on holidays.  I’m fond of a consistent love ethic.  If my mama doesn’t know I love her every month, there’s nothing unique about May.

Still, I’m thinking about women in general and about my mothers in particular.  Of course, my mama stands in a class that’s lonely for the esteem I give her.  As I read this week, we are all only given one.  But I’ve been blessed with many mothers:  The amazing women who have given me something, who have let me see their lives, who have taught me, and who have given of themselves until I realize what it means to be large and full and generous and kind.

So I want to write in memory of you, women and you, mothers of mine.  You know who you are.

I write to thank you…

For visiting me those six weeks after my birth, saying things to me to make me eat even though the doctors were unconvincing and for your taking me home a day or two before Christmas and making all my childhood Christmases special.

For saving me from drowning that day in the Lake and for always being a fierce protector (and more than a sister) since then.

For making me do my homework, for expecting me to accomplish, and for being gentle while I did it, all because you knew what was ahead and because you saw a splendid future.

For reading to me until I learned to love the sound of a woman’s voice more than I loved the music down in my soul, until I knew how to learn, and so that I could become a reader and lover of learning and giver of truth and knowledge.

For teaching me to get receipts when I purchased things from the corner store because young black men couldn’t assume the privilege of walking out of those doors while drinking a pop in the city of Chicago.

For cooking for me, for washing my clothes, for wiping my head with a cool clothe or picking me up when I fainted those two times before school and that one time on the kitchen floor when I was home from college.  You brought me back to life more times than I can recall; you showed me how to slow down when I moved.

For showing me how to kiss and hug and hold and stare and smile because each of those tender gestures was both an expression and an ingredient of love.

For singing to me, for letting me sing to you, and for the appreciation you created in me for doing something wonderful for God and not only for myself.

For telling me stories, yours, mine, and other peoples until I could begin to scratch at the magic of making lives out of words and images from lines that snapped.

For making it normal in my mind to be kind, normal to take care of people who had no place to live, normal to feed everybody when you had the money, and when you didn’t.

For showing me how to pray and ask God for things that I wanted and for things that other people wanted and for being a consistent, gracious instructor in the ways of Mystery.  I probably can’t give a higher compliment.

For the bad choices you made, the ones you didn’t hide from me, even if we didn’t talk about them because they made me see that as musical and seamless and spotless as you appeared when you made life happen, you were still human too.

For telling me things I really needed to hear about myself, for keeping some things I thought I needed to hear to yourself, and for giving me space—even too much at times—to get it together.

For forgiving me for not writing more in this remembrance.

Spiritual & Writing Advice

A lot of what I do in my ministry job (and in teaching too) is the slow work of deconstructing things people have spent years building.  People, myself included, spend time and energy and themselves creating notions and living from those notions.  When they’re asked or told to change, they should be told to change with grace and patience because egos are hard things.

I read this and thought how appropriate it is an advice of various sorts.  It’s from Randy Susan Meyers and is primarily about writing workshops, which are places of grief and feedback for creative writers.  Randy is continuing the conversation around these and other quotes at this weekend’s Muse & the Marketplace, a helpful and memorable place where writers and readers gather in Boston, and for the record, a place I have good memories of:

Beware of hardening yourself to protect your ego. Even the smartest critique stings. It is common to hate, really hate, someone who points out that five backflashes in a row might leave the reader confused. I make a deal with myself when I’m ‘up’ in my writer’s group. I am allowed to think everyone is stupid for 10 minutes. Then I have to consider their ideas. I don’t have to buy them, but I must rent them.

To read the rest of Randy’s post, go here.

Why Should It Mean So Much

Dag Hammarskjold, a twentieth-century diplomat, advisor, and leader is a companion of mine (through the text).  I read selections from his Markings from time to time.  They are poems, reflections, meditations, and musings.  Last night I read a few.  Here’s one from 1952 that seems compelling to me today:

How ridiculous, this need of yours to communicate!  Why should it mean so much to you that at least one person has seen the inside of your life?  Why should you write down all this, for yourself, to be sure–perhaps, though, for others as well?

I’m in the middle of revising another draft of my manuscript.  I’m walking through some thoughtful edits from Maya Rock, and the walk is both enlivening and humbling.

I’ve been sick for more than two weeks thanks to my generous son.  I’m still a little congested, in the head especially, and I mean that, at least, in two ways.  But Hammarskjold’s words come alongside me as I’m reading my edits, adding and cutting and thinking and shaking my head at some of the assumptions I make in my story.

I’m considering my draft in light of his reflection.  How he says writing, or communicating, allows a person to see the inside of your life.  How communication is for others.  It really takes me out of my head, where all the assumptions are, where all the answers are, and delivers them onto the page, into the conversation, in the space where communication happens between two people.

Good News in Writing World

Chimamanda Adichie is offering the world another book.  I’m placing it in my to-be-read pile.  Her work is refreshing, precise, full, and intelligent.  Both her novels and her collection of stories leave me with a broader world, and I think of her as a gift to the reading public.

If you’re looking for something to read, Americanah is a good option after next month.  I read of the book that a part of its appeal is “its immense, uncontained and beating heart”.  Don’t you love looking forward to a favorite author’s next work?

It looks like Ms. Adichie will work into her novel everything from cultural analysis and race to loving long-distance and the politics of black hair.  Familiarize yourself with Adichie’s earlier work by stopping by her website.

Baldwin on Being Prepared to Give

I wish all of this talk was available, but I’m grateful for the brief words James Baldwin speaks to artists.