Tag: Truth

Truth Telling

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“Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.” – Thomas Jefferson

The other night we were with a family from school and the dad started to tell a story and then turned to his 4-year-old son and said, “James, can I tell a story about you?”

Such a sweet moment of respect and communication. It started me ruminating about how it gets more complicated to tell the truth as our lives get more intertwined. I try to be careful not to tell stories about my kids that I think they would mind reading 10 years or more from now but of course that’s a judgment call.

It reminds me of a story I heard the other day about a friend of a friend. On the outside, everything looks perfect – she’s attractive, healthy, has plenty of money, married with two grown kids, has a cute new puppy. But she’s unhappy, mostly because her marriage isn’t working for her. Nothing is egregiously wrong but her husband is busy with his work and friends and so he’s not interested in making a vital relationship. So she’s working on taking on new things – most recently writing. And here’s where I’ve imagined it lands –if she tells the truth, it’ll crack her life apart.

Of course this resonates for me because it was me 13 or 14 years ago when I was married. Everything looked fine from the outside of my life but on the inside I was starving. I had a husband, who as my dad gently put it after we divorced, “Loved to be loved.” The core of me was stifled into silence because it knew that if I spoke up and said I wanted more depth and meaning than just taking care of my husband it would be the beginning of the end of that relationship. I drank a lot of wine at the end of each day. Numbing was the only thing I could do to stay and not tell the truth.

I know I’m in trouble when I have to stuff down what I know to be true in order to do something. Having gone through it in my marriage, the moment I get a whiff of a situation that can’t withstand the sincerity of living out loud, it screams DANGER to me. When I write or say the small things that I haven’t dared to acknowledge outside myself before but I know are real, it feels vital and like a bridge to others that will hold up because it’s true.

So where does that leave my family? I think like the father the other night, asking to tell a story is a pretty good idea. And the story the dad told was about sitting in a car with his four-year-old, not paying attention to him because he was doing something on his phone. Finally he realized that his son, who he didn’t know could read, was saying, “It says ‘Pizza Bar.’” Hearing that story reminded me not only to ask my kids if I can tell a story but also to remember that they have learned to read or soon will. My truth needs to be told without risking anyone else’s.

Walking Boldly into Truth

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“Everything you have ever wanted is on the other side of fear.” – George Adair

Last year a friend of mine realized that she was gay at 50 years of age. In the 6 months that followed her discovery, she came out to everyone significant in her life. She didn’t have a girlfriend or any other forcing function to do it, she just walked boldly into her Truth. I know that some of those conversations, especially with the older generation were hard but when I asked her about how she did it she told me she was ready to find love and hiding who she realized she was would only hinder her path.

As someone who is walking a less traditional path by having kids as a single person at age 46 and 50, I am so inspired and in awe of my friend. I remember being five months pregnant and feeling really glad I wasn’t showing because then I’d have to tell people what I was doing. (Yeah, that wasn’t going to stay hidden forever. 😊) I had told everyone close to me, but for strangers and acquaintances, I was sure they’d think I was some loser that couldn’t find a partner. Over the years it has gotten so much easier but I really had to work hard to be able to say it without fear.

I told a lifelong friend this the other day and she was surprised. “What?” she said “we just always assumed you were some super-empowered woman.” Ha, ha. If it were that easy, there wouldn’t be a whole genre of stories about heroes who spend the entirety of the middle act wandering around trying to do everything they could to pursue their path without being vulnerable. I can say with complete certainty that if the constriction around my heart hadn’t been so tight and getting tighter every time I thought of having a family and time hadn’t been running on out my ability to have or adopt children, I would still be wandering around trying to find the right husband with which to have children. Anything so as not to have to face the vulnerability of saying, “This is what I was certain I had to do even though the circumstances at that time of my life meant doing it alone. I didn’t want to rush finding the right man and in doing so, make a mess of it.”

In Harry Potter, the young witches and wizards learn to run into the brick wall between platforms 9 and 10 to get to the Hogwarts Express train leaving from platform 9 3/4. We reach thresholds in our lives and need to change something — a job, a place we live, a relationship, a way of thinking or being, or something we just have to do — and they feel a lot like that brick wall. It is terrifying to consider running into, always looks easier when someone else does it, and once across, it is the place that transports to the magic life beyond. It’s only a perception that we don’t want to stand out that keeps us from walking into our Truths. When we do, we break that constriction around our hearts and can feel the full power of the vital heartbeat of life.

The postscript here is that with one year of my friend coming out, she has found her person and they’ve bought a house together. She crossed her threshhold and is living in the fullness of her life and it’s a joy and inspiration to watch!

Sliding Glass Door Moments

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“Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty –
that is all you know on earth,
and all you need to know.” – John Keats

I was reading yesterday about how the English poet John Keats wrote “Ode to a Grecian Urn” while he was dying from tuberculosis at age 24. As tragic as that is for him, my mind immediately thought of his mother and how she must have felt. Clearly my becoming a mother has altered the angle from which I think about life. I’ve heard of decisions like mine to become a mother described as sliding glass moments – moments where you can see life on the other side and choose whether to open the door and cross the threshold.

I’m fascinated by our sliding glass moments because they define the major plot lines of our lives. They are the story we tell others when we first meet. I was stuck in traffic at 29-years-old and just had broken up with my boyfriend when I saw Mt. Rainier majestically sitting in front of me and decided to climb mountains. I was 39-years-old and my business partner invited me out to lunch to tell me of my husband’s infidelities and my life as I then knew it changed forever. I was 45-years-old and decided that I wanted to have kids and was willing to do it alone rather than rush a relationship that might not be right for all of us.

But as showy as those moments are, I think it’s equally telling how we live each day between them. Before my business partner told me about my husband’s infidelities I was drinking at least a bottle of wine each day trying to numb the fact that I was in a relationship I wasn’t supposed to be in. After he told me, I found meditation and the inner peace that comes with leaning towards life instead of away from it. Before I had babies I would cry hearing any story about the miracle of birth. After I had my kids, I practice my gratitude by writing at least one thing down every day for my gratitude box. If sliding glass moments are the plot lines, I think our daily habits must be the language and tone of how our stories are written.

I looked up the story of John Keats and found his dad died when he was 8-years-old and his mom died when he was 14-years-old. I imagine that his genius was in part defined by those moments and the words he wrote the way he lived each day processing them. Altogether they formed the life that brought the words to us – “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty” – and in reading those we find the echo of both in our own lives: the truth of the big moments and the beauty of our days.

I Had a Dream

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“Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase. Just take the first step.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

I had a dream last night that was so clear. I was scheduled to preach in a church and while I was practicing my sermon, I became so late that I couldn’t shower or even dress for the sermon. Someone called and asked “where are you?” and I had to just go on undressed, unwashed, holding my baby who was crying and preaching from the heart that “God has a plan. And if you don’t listen, you end up here, unshowered and undressed, holding your baby and living it out. God has a plan, and if you don’t hear it in the whispers, you will bow to it’s shouts. God has a plan and the only thing you have to do is get on your knees and listen.” I told the story of how I asked my beloved dad when he was 78 years old the question of how he seemed to go through life without any speed bumps and his answer was “obedience.” He told me that he at each point in his life when he was in doubt felt God’s hand guiding him and just tried to follow, sometimes hesitantly and sometimes boldly. I told the story of listening to an Oprah Soul Sunday podcast where she talked about listening to the whispers that we hear because if we don’t, the voice gets increasingly louder. I told the story of how I was practicing a sermon I’d written – but it was from the head and so circumstances forced me to show up and deliver what I knew from my heart. I pointed at my baby and said “God has a plan for him at his age” and pointed at a 93-year-old friend in the audience “and God has a plan for her at her age and for all of us in between.”

I’m neither a theologian nor a preacher – my dad was. I don’t usually remember my dreams or put great store in them. But this dream had the ring of Truth so that even in writing about it, I get a shiver of respect. It brings together many things I’ve heard over the last few months and made them fit. Bishop Michael Curry talking about “thin places” as moments when the Truth of God is somehow more apparent and accessible. Poet Nikki Giovanni talking about her belief that nothing in our lives is wasted. That “you are always taking what ingredients you are given and making what you can make. My grandmother didn’t waste. There was nothing that came into her kitchen that she didn’t find a use for. I feel the same way about experience and words.” Rev. Dr. Scott Dudley asking “How big is your God? Is he bigger than your worries?” All three of these things slot into place with the essence of this dream. That somehow all my worries – about my kids going back to school, the details of my work, the how of my life, the fears that I will never fall in love again – get packed into a manageable box. That the only thing I have to do is live into this faith that all the good, bad and the ugly fits into a plan. And there is something bigger than myself, God, that is weaving it together. All I have to do is listen.

I write this to you because I’ve struggled with this all of my life. First as a child believing without question but also without substance. Then in my 30’s not really giving faith much of a thought at all and suffering because deep down I knew there was more to life. And now in my 50’s when it seems like I am continually having a-ha moments that bring my faith, experience and the patterns of life together so that it all makes sense – to my head and my heart. I write this to you because whether you believe and feel the jolt of affirmation or don’t believe and store the words away until some time in the future when they are ripe for you, I feel it is every individual’s job to speak the Truth of their own life. Because God has a plan and all we have to do is listen.