Paris: Remembering The Brokenness and Teaching Our Children.

Only be careful, and watch yourselves closely so that you do not forget the things your eyes have seen or let them fade from your heart as long as you live. Teach them to your children and to their children after them. Deuteronomy 4:9

My youngest child had a history assignment to report his memories of a significant family event. He chose our family's home exchange in a Paris suburb and wrote down his memories from the trip.  The next night he was asked to interview me for my memories of the same Paris trip. He was learning that history differs by who is remembering and who is reporting. 

Our trip to Paris fell in the weeks just between my husband's awful (third-time) disclosures and the day I concluded that separation seemed the only option to protect myself. In responding to my son's interview, I was remembering both extraordinarily painful things and warm family times during those Paris weeks. I discovered that the color and clarity of my story depends upon how far up the mountain I am standing when I look backwards over the valley. How I report my story also depends on what is appropriate for the listener. And our story always depends on whether we have experienced the Great Lion walking next to us on the climb; either it is His Story, or I am still pretending it is merely my story.

• From this vantage point, what I remember about Paris are late night e-mails with relatives, planning how to begin the separation process, how they would take care of me, how to protect my husband from himself, how conversations might go. It was a time of preparing to walk through the coming days with grace, strength, and the support of family. 

• I remember talking with my eldest son in the lunch room at the Louvre' and letting him know for the first time that his parents weren’t doing so well.  

• I remember Rembrandt's "Bathsheba" painting at the Louvre' and how Rembrandt captured the fear and submission to exploitation in the expression of the commoner Bathsheba who has been summoned by the powerful king David.[1]

• I remember entering Catholic mass at a French cathedral and singing the American protestant hymn, Amazing Grace (in French)! 

• I remember the conversation with my husband in our tiny Euro-kitchen where I asked him: “What do you plan to do to help restore this relationship?” I remember with sorrow his answers: "I can’t believe you think I haven’t done enough;" "I can’t answer that because it’s a trap;" "I’ve been married to you 28 years and I can’t think of one nice thing to say about  you;" "It’s really mostly your fault that I went to prostitutes and now that I've confessed it all to you, I don’t know why you are having such a hard time;" "it’s so unfair that you would ask me that question." I ponder his answers when I doubt the assurance from the Holy Spirit on the path taken. 

• I remember the plaza around Notre' Dame Cathedral glowing with evening lights, displaying the persistence of the Church universal through the French Revolution when the Enlightened populace tried its best to discard the Church.

• I remember the exquisite red Unicorn Tapestries at the Cluny Museum and the 15th Century French poem counseling the princess depicted about becoming a lady of virtuous character; 

• And I remember trudging up worn pilgrim steps and cobblestone streets on Le Mont Saint-Michel to the medieval monastery, carrying a backpack of sadness and hearing the chorus of nuns singing over me.  It was a total body and soul wash of blessing. Their voices gave assurance that God would continue singing over me in the days ahead.[2]

But to my son, I recalled other memories: 

• Together we climbed 669 steps of the Eiffel Tower to survey all of Paris;

• Our home outside of Paris came with a cat named Lola; the song Copa Cabanna ("her name was "Lola") kept running through my head. 

• The Museum Carnavalet told the history of the second world war and celebrated the few thousand brave Frenchmen who rescued Paris while omitting the hundreds of thousands of American troops who actually liberated Paris.

• Our discovery of Croque Monsieur and Croque Madame and delightful warm, drippy, chocolaty crepes filled with bananas.

Did I avoid teaching my memories to my child as Deuteronomy requires?  But Child,' said the Lion, 'I am telling you your story, not hers. No one is told any story but their own.”[3]  He only tells you your story.  The rest is His Story. 

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1.Rembrandt, Bathsheba at Her Bath (1654)

2. Zephaniah 3:17. The Lord your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves. He will take great delight in you; in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing.” 

3. C. S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy

4. One of the Cluny Tapestries, The Lady and the Unicorn

An Epiphany: Who Will Wrestle Against Sexual Bondage

 "I will fight for you; you need only to be still.  I know how weary you are, My child. You have been struggling just to keep your head above water, and your strength is running low.  Now is the time for you to stop striving and let Me fight for you." 

Jesus Today, Sarah Young (2012) 

Exodus 14:14  "The Lord will fight for you; you need only be still."

A Christian friend who has gone through many trials recently said, "I used to pray for strength. But God always answered with tests that increased my strength. Now I don’t pray for strength anymore." Amen, brother!

As the wife of a sex addict, I struggled with the alone-ness of being the only one praying for my husband's healing.  I wanted to hand him two aspirin so he would call me in the morning and announce he was healed. It was a burden to think that I should help, but did not know how to wrestle with him. I knew I should be a witness, but had no voice with him. Eventually God made an appearance; it was an epiphany teaching me a lesson I will not forget. 

Epiphany, derived from a Greek word meaning "appearance," is a moment of sudden intuitive understanding or flash of insight. Sometimes it refers to the appearance or manifestation of a god. It can also mean the appearance of someone sent by God. In Genesis, Jacob had an epiphany - he saw God face to face and went away changed.[1] 

As I became weary of fighting the battle, I began to pray that God would send a fellow Christian,  a trained disciple, to confront my husband. I prayed that He would send someone to challenge what my husband was doing to himself and his family. I hoped someone from the Church, a male leader perhaps, would step up and call out the evil.  In Genesis 32, Jacob has just learned that Esau is coming towards him with an army of 400 men.  The text says that Jacob was "in great fear and distress." [3] Then Jacob went to be alone and ended up wrestling with God all night long. In my own place of fear, I asked God to send someone to wrestle with my husband, to leave him with a limp but also healed, transformed, and equipped for kingdom service.[2]  I searched the horizon for a Christian knight to show up on my time table - before it was too late!

Then I attended karate promotion night. In a dojo, the master teacher is called the "Sensei". A "sempei" is a disciple of the master teacher, but one who is ahead of you on the journey of mastering karate. In other words, a "sempei" is a disciple who is also discipling others.  On this night of promotion, Sempei Paul, donned in a white gi uniform and black belt, was asked to wrestle a young brown belt for the purpose of testing him for promotion.  Sempei Paul was to fight the young man in a way that challenged him to the very edge of his skills, to teach him what it felt like to fight for his life, but at the same time protect him from serious harm. To most observers, it appeared that Sempei Paul was very aggressive and intending to pummel the student, but the karate students present understood that the young man was also being protected by the expert, controlled, fighting skills of Sempei Paul. I have never seen this dynamic in a fight, before or since.  It left quite an impression on those of us who witnessed it. 

The next morning I prayed that God would quickly send a "Sempei Paul" into my husband's life - someone to aggressively wrestle with him, take him down, teach my husband that he was fighting for his life and family. I begged God to send someone who could show my husband the damage sin was causing in his life.  I prayed for a "Sempei Paul" who would not hesitate to challenge my husband, but would also show the protection of God's graceful promotion out of bondage.  God was leading me away from thinking that my husband's healing was my responsibility.  I was not to be the "Sempei" wrestling to promote him out of bondage.

The next afternoon God sent me an epiphany. I was standing outside the double glass doors of the downtown high rise building where I work, waiting for my husband to meet me.  Suddenly, standing at my right hand, was Sempei Paul himself, in the flesh, wearing street clothes.  He had come out of the glass doors to stand next to me. With surprise, we recognized and acknowledged each other. Then he crossed the street and was gone. I had never before and have never since seen Sempei Paul downtown.  I blinked and then my husband walked up. 

The message came to me quietly, slowly: "My child, you are not to fight for his soul. You need only be still." I am the Master and I can send a 'Sempei Paul' into his life whenever I deem the time is right. Now is the time for you to stop striving and let Me fight for you. 

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[1] Gen. 32: 30. 
[2] Gen. 32: 4 - 6.
[3] Gen. 32:6-7

Christmas, Divorce, and The God who Caresses Me With Tenderness

Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God. 

Isaiah 40:1

[I wrote this in January 2015. I decided to post it this year while reflecting again on the holidays.]

This morning I attended church in  Alabama, not my home state. The church has grown to 34,000 members since its founding in 2001.  The music and technology were so flawless that bands from three different locations lead our singing simultaneously, streamed live on twenty foot screens behind the stage. The pastor’s invocation called on the congregation to "go with gusto after God today, grab for and seek God enthusiastically in worship."  It was a blessing being with my people, God's people, while visiting a "foreign" land.

Sadness continues for me - perhaps it has deepened. The marriage dissolution is not yet final, as we work towards finishing the court paperwork by the end of the month. And there are so many papers to be filed; it is hard to navigate through a complex court procedure in the midst of grieving and upheaval. For example, at some point we had to complete a very long “Child Support Order.”  This meant taking two paragraphs of our own simple language and cramming it into a 15-page court mandated form which included, among other things, a check in the box “neither spouse is pregnant.” Welcome to the post-Christian era.

Christmas and New Year’s was a sad time of many firsts for me and my teens.  We walked in the dark, with no play book for a broken family living in separate households. We struggled with when to engage and when to extract ourselves from dad, when to speak and when to be silent. We also recently lost our home church due to schism, so on Christmas Eve we attended a service in a small Episcopal Chapel in an old neighborhood settled by Scottish immigrants. The homily was sadly lacking [1], so in the late evening hours before Christmas morning I read Pope Francis’ Christmas Eve sermon:

• “The people who have walked in darkness have seen a great light. God who looks upon us with eyes of love . . . God who is in love with our smallness . . . . Do I allow myself to be taken up by God? to be embraced by Him? or do I prevent Him drawing close? What is most important is not seeking the Lord, but rather allowing Him to find me and caress me with tenderness.  Do I allow God to love me?   . . . He is a God who made Himself small in order to better encounter us . . . “ [2] 

I don’t know which man of God was more theologically correct - Pope Francis or the Alabama mega-church preacher.  For a bleeding soul still in pain, chasing after God with gusto seems overwhelming, even impossible.  But a God who will find and caress me in my smallness says “comfort ye, comfort ye, my people.” [3]

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[1] See prior post about this Episcopal service: Christmas Eve and Cleaning Toilets (12/25/14)
[2] Pope Francis' Christmas Eve homily, 2014.
[3] Isaiah 40: 1-5 (KJV) (and the text from Handle's Messiah.)

Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God.

Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned: for she hath received of the Lord's hand double for all her sins.

The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain:

And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.

You Don't Have To DO Anything

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast.  Ephesians 2:8-9

I have learned through marital crisis that theology becomes real in the heart, not the head. I have a degree in theology; I have been steeped in Christian catechism, Christian preaching, and 17 years of integrated Christian education. And yet God touches me with true truth in the most simple terms. Throughout my conversion journey, childlike expressions made God's heart more real to me than Calvin's Institutes ever did.

Can you be converted when you are already a Christian? Can you have two awakenings?  It is a mystery, but that is my story.  After my re-awakening, I read of Blaise Pascal's similar path - a Christian upbringing, then a first and a second more overwhelming conversion experience.[1] Even now I still find there are no words to describe conversion; I can only concur with a modern writer who said, "although grateful, I did not perceive conversion to be a blessing. It was a train wreck."[2]  I too found conversion to be more like a crash landing  - scary, unexpected, leaving one bruised and battered but ecstatic to be alive. It is life changing, but never easy.  It is extraordinarily private, yet somehow outward-facing.[3]

To explain my crash landing conversion, I simply explained to folks that God was taking very good care of me. There were so many blessings, so many people, so many activities set in place in advance to help me dig out of the avalanche of betrayal trauma. God had a plan to carry me through rejection, separation, and divorce from my spouse, my church, my denomination, even my heritage. Post-conversion, nearly everything was broken or breaking. But God strips us bare for His good purposes.

By confessing simply that "God is taking very good care of me" I was describing in elementary school terms what theologians refer to as His "faithfulness" and "providence." Even now, the simple words are more true to my ears.

Yesterday, I walked alone on a cold ocean beach praying, asking for discernment about where the Lord is leading me next, asking Him to show me whether this heart tug I feel to help a church plant is God's call or my own self-centeredness. Honestly, I confuse the two all the time. I was also repenting for being a disappointing daughter who took His care for granted, didn't stay in touch, didn't listen to His words. I repented for tasks I had not done, for failures as a wife, a church member, a peacemaker, a follower, a friend. But then I was given the words very clearly: "You don't have to do anything." For some reason these words kept pushing through my thoughts -  I believe they were from the Holy Spirit. They didn't even make much sense to me at the time.  But for some reason these words brought comfort and I wept.

English speakers often ask each other, "How are you doing?" or "How's it going?" Spanish speakers say instead, "how are you being?" It seems to me that "being" is more in sync with the Christian life than doing or even going. (Although Jonah did have to go at some point.)

I really don't have to do anything to be accepted by God. This deep realization sets me free - free to go where called - not because of my religious "to do" list, but because God accepts me, which paradoxically sets me free to serve as I am gifted, with whatever talents and resources I have, wherever He leads. Today I am finally free to say, "okay God, it's not rational, but I will go where you call me to go." Who knows if I will be of much help, or if I will accomplish anything tangible? Who knows if I will be busy for the Lord or idle for the Lord if I go?  But now I am convicted: I don't have to DO anything to gain God's acceptance, just follow and listen and walk.

Later I realized the fullness of these words gifted to me on the beach.  Martin Luther, a budding lawyer and later a monk, found Paul saying the same thing in Romans 1 and Ephesians 2: it is only by grace that we are saved, not by doing anything.[4]  For Luther also, the weight of the world was lifted when God made clear to him that he didn't have to DO anything.  Just BE a child of the King.  And then Luther went. Some might say he accomplished a few things along the way.
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[1] B. Pascal, The Pensees (The Memorial parchment) 
[2] Rosario Champagne Butterfield, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert (2015). p. 25
[3] M. Scott Peck, a famous psychiatrist,  has an equally humorous description of  religious conversion, written before he became a Christian: "We are accustomed to imagining the experience of conversion or sudden call to grace as an "Oh, joy!" phenomenon.  In my experience, more often than not it is, at least partially, an "Oh Shit" phenomenon." The Road Less Traveled, 1978, Walker & Co., p. 417. 
[4] See, e.g., Martin Luther, "Freedom of A Christian" on the concept of grace. (1520)