Picking up sticks

They just picked up some sticks. That’s all. Hearing the news the day before that their friend lost his father, they talked about what they could do, as friends, to reach out and say they care. Instead of baking a casserole, or composing a heartfelt note, they created their own language of empathy. They went over to their friend’s house while he and the rest of his family were still in upstate New York at the hospital, and picked up sticks in the back yard. The funeral would be in a few days, with the reception at their home, and the friends thought they could at least make the back yard look good. Although the friend cannot remember how the yard looked thirty-eight years ago, he’s never forgotten why there were no sticks.

I was reminded of this incredible gesture while reading Sheryl Sandberg’s new book Option B, which describes the sudden death of her husband and her excruciating encounter with grief. In it, she describes not only the tragedy of loss, but the various ways we must wrestle with sadness, anger, and other overwhelming emotions. She also describes the people who reached out and offered kindness and support, and those who didn’t, the ones who refrained from bringing up the topic (and pretty much disappeared) for fear of upsetting her or her two small children. Although I, like most readers, thought about times I was there for others, and times when I ran and hid, I also thought about the two friends who picked up sticks.

Opportunities to be present in the lives of others abound when they lose loved ones, go through a divorce, lose a job, are publically embarrassed, but we walk past them all too often. Thinking our efforts need to be grand or significant, we put off saying or doing anything at all. Waiting for the time to be right, we wait until the moment is lost. `

From now on, I want to be the kind of person who picks up sticks, picks up the phone, pulls someone aside and says something even if the words aren’t perfect. Comparing my efforts to others, or waiting until I think of something spectacular to do, will only lead me to stand back and miss the moment.

All it takes is a couple of sticks and the willingness to go over and pick them up. Who knows, maybe that will be enough to give the person something to remember forever.

Seasons

This is the first Brushstroke I’ve written in some time. Like an important note to a friend which, because we delay too long thinking about it, becomes an overwhelming task, I’ve delayed writing and become paralyzed by the idea of doing so. Some ideas have come, but they’ve floated away as fast as they arrived, leaving me wondering if the well has dried. Waiting, I realized that maybe the struggle itself is worthy of reflection.

The landscapes of our lives are a varied, with peaks as well as valleys. So, too, the seasons call for planting as well as harvesting, plowing as well as preparing. The writer of Ecclesiates described it well, to everything there is a season. It’s unrealistic to expect it to always be harvest time. Still, if we’re honest, that’s what we often expect . . . jobs that are always exciting, lucrative, and meaningful (all at the same time). . . friendships that are always laughs, with glasses lifted high in joyful toasts . . . marriages that are hand in hand walks as angels sing . . . bank accounts that are always full . . . lives that always have clear purpose. Jobs, friendships, marriages, bank accounts, and lives can be that way, just not all the time.

In the two worlds I know best, spirituality and creativity, this lesson is a perpetual companion. Because of moments when I’ve felt completely connected to God, I believe life is a wonderful, sacred journey. There’s simply nothing better than feeling connected to the universe and its creator, personally. But those moments are banquets in a life that often serves leftovers.

So, too, in creative pursuits. When an idea comes, and comes into the world through you, there’s simply nothing like it. An idea’s arrival is like Christmas morning, like seeing someone across the room that sets your heart on fire. Bringing an idea to life on the page, canvas, or work place is to know life at its most significant, but those moments are harvests. They come after plowing, planting, watering, and, yes, patience, persistence, and praying.

Julia Cameron, one of my most influential teachers, has worked with blocked artists and helped them learn about life’s seasons, about the peaks and valleys of living spiritual and creative lives. Because she has walked through such landscapes, endured many seasons, she knows the most important thing we can do is show up. Write, when we don’t think we have anything to say; paint, when no subject is clear. Whether at the page, computer or canvas . . . the marriage, desk, or pulpit, we need to arrive and open ourselves to the work that needs to be done. Just taking one step, putting our foot on the one stone within our reach, can lead to the next. Before long, we will have crossed the stream, and found ourselves on the other side.

Palm Sunday

In the opening chapters of the Bible, it says we're created in God’s image. What’s disturbing, is how often we act and think the other way around, making God in our image. There are many layers to the Palm Sunday story, the day in which Jesus enters Jerusalem and the crowd welcomes him with shouts of “hosanna” and lays down palm branches to line his way. It was a day laced with meaning and caused a chemical reaction between who he was, and who they wanted him to be.

When we designed the Palm Sunday window in a chapel we were building, we captured this tension by showing Jews looking on as he entered, as well as Roman authorities. They represented those who sought a messiah who would fulfill their religious hopes and dreams and those who hoped he would solve Rome’s political oppression. Everyone standing round had visions of who Jesus was, and hoped he would be the God of their own image.

It would be a cute story if it didn’t point a finger so accurately at those of us looking on two thousand years later. Like them, we have created a messiah in our own image, one who fits in our pocket beside our neatly arranged religious hopes and dreams, and one who also endorses our political views, whatever they may be.

As the story tells us, Jesus did not play to the crowd, and they killed him for it. “He’s not a tame lion,” C. S. Lewis once wrote of Aslan. What he meant was, Christ is not tame and will challenge our religious thoughts and dreams, just as he’ll turn the tables of everyone’s political thinking. If he doesn’t, we’ve put the lion into a cage, made God in our own image, and that’s history we should strive desperately not to repeat.