Essence.

“I am not searching for holiness. I am just trying not to lie.” –Karen Wangare Leonard

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It has been two years, which feels unimaginable to me. 

I swear, I did not mean for it to be this long.

It is almost December now, and today is the first Sunday of Advent. For some reason, it feels especially fitting that I find myself here, attempting to discover or create something to fill the space that has been hollowed out by silence–two years lost to mental illness and trauma and the disintegration of faith as I’ve known it for my whole life. I’ve run out of ways to temper the reality of life as of late.

There’s no way to count how many times I’ve shown up here, waiting for the words to come. Perhaps this time will be different? After all, the Hope candle burns first and burns the longest. It stays wide awake to all of our pain and longing, alight with an indescribable mingling of tenderness and courage.

Back in January of 2021, I lost myself in a contrived attempt to find meaning in the middle of a global pandemic, more leaked bodycam footage of Black people dying, and scenes from an all out war as white hot hatred invaded the capitol building. We are wired to search for and create meaning, but something inside of me broke then and there, and my faith was eroded by the realization that this might not actually mean anything at all. It was as if we had simply tripped over the countless opportunities to sacrifice and make amends and quickly dusted ourselves off in an effort to move on as though nothing had happened. Surely, there was no way to catch all the pieces.

Eventually, the thought of adding even a whisper to the seemingly endless cacophony became unbearable, so I shut down.

I shut down through the loss of my grandmother to Covid and the ever widening divide between me and my mother, my brother telling me that I was going to be an aunt, the slow and painful disintegration of our beloved church, and the car crash that nearly killed us last year.

The revelation of some galvanizing hidden meaning never did come, but new diagnoses did–one of which was adjustment disorder, which is hilariously unsurprising if I’m honest. Prescriptions came too, tiny pills purposed to reconfigure the battered chemistry in my brain and absorb a little bit of the strain that inevitably comes with attempting to be a person in a precarious world. Still, whenever I tried to meditate, all I could feel was the spinning.

To borrow from Hamilton, there are moments that the words don’t reach.

These days, I feel stretched thin between two selves. There is the self with the white knuckled grip on all the things I thought I could be certain of, and then there is the self who is praying for serenity to accept all the many things I cannot change (I can’t help but wonder if we got really honest, we would all admit to feeling this way at least to some degree or another after all that has happened).

Day after tired day, I have learned that belief is not the forcefield that I’ve spent my life convinced that it is. I put all of my stock in my ability to be good, believing that if I could just be good enough, I and the people that I love will be miraculously sheltered from precarity–that we would rest in a “hedge of protection,” as it was called in the church that I grew up in. But, in the words of KJ Ramsey, “one of the most painful and important realities to grasp about the Christian life is that our belovedness does not guarantee our ease.” 

Lately, I spend my time sitting cross legged on the floor of my heart wondering at how I’ve become so tangled up and yet somehow feel entirely untethered, barely daring to ask who I might be if I were to burn it all down until only the truest essence remained. 

I’ve limped my way (physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually) through 2022. At times, I was literally afraid to go near the windows in my house and sleep in my own bed. In that brokenness, I recalled to my mind the words of the travelers on the road to Emmaus: we had hoped.

I had hoped that my faith would survive all of this, but now as I write, I wonder if it wasn’t actually meant to–at least, not in the way I thought it would.

Luke 24 goes on to tell the story of the two travelers who, in their pain, could not make out the person of Jesus, even as he walked with them. Verse 30 says that while they were eating together, Jesus took bread, blessed it, and broke it–and their eyes were opened. The recognition of Jesus in what is broken. An invitation to rest, not in the presumed safety of neatly manicured hedges, but in the wild and shadowy places. The table prepared right in front of them. 

I do not know what I believe tonight–but the longing is slowly beginning to find its way to the surface, as is the desire to whisper something like a welcome home. As I stare at the candle whose flicker reminds me to hope, I know that I am not searching for holy, precious, insulated Jesus. Instead, I am squinting through the dimness in search of honest Jesus–God in brown flesh, come to earth slippery and naked and entirely needy through the body of a woman. Jesus who had no forcefield to protect him from the elements. Jesus who was hungry and thirsty and had dusty feet. Jesus who was tempted to throw it all away in favor of a life of ease. Jesus who cried when his friend Lazarus died. Jesus who asked for a way out. Jesus who could have resurrected with a perfect body, but instead chose to keep his scars. Jesus who was and is most fully recognized in brokenness. 

These past two years have left me undone in ways that I am still struggling to articulate to myself, much less other people–to suggest that it hasn’t would be a swiftly dissipating smoke screen. There are no pretty bows to neatly gather up all of the undoing that may still need to happen in an effort to make it more pleasing.

When we offer ourselves up and fully lean into Advent, what we are really doing is leaning into all of creation’s labor pains. There is no medicine, just howling through the hurt of something new and fresh emerging.

Perhaps what we have waited for all along.

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