Spirituality Sunday
I think on why I'm here and where it hurts.
I am amazed by the increasing amount of effort it takes to stay alive. Every morning I take an anti-depressant[1], Cetirizine for allergies, a stool softener to partially compensate for poor pooping mechanics, and on the days that I am good I irrigate my sinuses with salt water.
This year I am booked for a colonoscopy, since I have been identified as potentially high risk and thus requiring five-year reviews, and I am returning to an ear, nose, and throat surgeon, fortunately the one that Kellie works for, to explore if the sinus surgery I underwent in 2007 needs to be redone. Apparently polyps in the sinuses repopulate.
Oh, and on Friday I went in for the second weekly course of my bi-annual iron infusion. They are so used to seeing me in that office at this point that they know what snacks I prefer. I also need to stop dodging the eye exam that I ADHD’d on December 27th and need to reschedule.
This is a long way of saying that it is taking an increasing amount of labor and resources to keep this aging body alive. All the more reason to make the years I have remaining count.
When I think about meaning, I almost always think about what I can do. In late adolescence, meaning was something I attempted to wring out of ancient texts. In my twenties, it was fostering funky, lo-fi, and economically sustainable outposts of Christ’s church against whom hell[2] could never prevail. In my thirties and forties it has been returning to life beside the disability community, which I once feared I had lost forever upon leaving the L’Arche Daybreak[3] community in the summer of 2000.
Working with and standing behind the disability community continues to fuel me. Even during the most challenging seasons, I wake up excited to go to work every day. I also usually sneak a few additional hours on Saturday or Sunday. I love pursuing innovation in our space, such as JVS Boston’s current initiative to provide industry education, paid youth employment, and parent coaching initiative for 14 - 16-year-old students with disabilities in underserved communities. I could also talk to you all day about past efforts to prevent the abuse of people with disabilities, equip transition age youth with leadership skills through service learning, and provoke conversations about the assumptions we make about the disability community through the Accessible Icon Project.
But meaning also requires connection. One of the images I cannot discard from youth is a hunter green four foot by six-foot banner at Christview Christian Church. With gold letters the banner proclaimed, “The Joy of Belonging.” I haven’t set foot in that church building for over a decade. My Tulsa family has long since migrated to other congregations. But I know the joy I was introduced to in that community - receiving support even when I acted in ways that were insufferable, regular reminders that we were bound together by baby dedications, marriages, funerals and the weekly participation in the body and blood of Christ, sitting by my grandmother as she desperately tried not to laugh, and realizing[4] that my beloved cousin sure was beautiful - sustains me to this day. The bonds of communities like Christview continue to provide the strength I need to stand and walk in the way.
Kellie and I’s little family, currently huddled in this dark season just off of our beloved bend in the North Atlantic coast, is now my core community. A quarter of a century ago, a length difficult to fathom, I came to Massachusetts because I was called to be Christ’s servant and Boston and Toronto were the only places I had found on the North American continent that felt like home. In the years that followed, my theology has evolved even as I would like to believe that my dedication to Jesus has deepened. My role in the church has also shifted from a pastor calling people to the communion table, to a servant who sets and cleans the table while trying to remain in the light that the world comprehendeth not. Throughout most of those years Kellie’s quiet grace has been the ground on which I have stood. The wonder of watching children rise up and prepare for full flight has also provided hope for the future. I am also grateful that our extended families, sadly reduced in number since Kellie and I were married and mostly scattered through Oklahoma, Texas and other states in the center, have continued to support us. Fiercely independent leavers, though we be.
There are other communities to stay alive for. The Disability Community, writ large, of course, but also my team at JVS Boston and the many collaborators I have met upon the way. I am well networked in my field and I have an abundance of incredible collaborators here in Massachusetts and, exceedingly, through my work with the Association of People Supporting Employment First and Kupenda for the Children, throughout the nation and world. While for the first time in years, I have recently felt my attention drifting and attention sagging in key moments of the workday, the opportunities to create new connections with and for the disability community as well as the occasional opportunities to speak in education spaces about what I have learned along the way is truly vivifying.
Since COVID, I have become even more defined by my work and almost oriented towards my inward horizon. Why go out when I have unlimited access to books and a reading chair? Why travel, when the White Mountains are three hours away, major league baseball can be accessed in under an hour, and the beach is three blocks away? There is a blessedly negative correlation between the paucity of friends I had in adolescence and the disgusting wealth of brilliant friends I have now. But my career is so people heavy that I need to rest my receptors all weekend in hopes that they will function on Monday. I am not concerned about the eternal accounting of sin, but I am worried about the angle of this inward bent. Though exhausted, I know that I cannot persist long in isolation.
[1] Citalopram for those scoring at home.
[2] If it existed.
[3] Now L’Arche Toronto.
[4] In a non-icky, this family tree is not a circle kinda way.