Tag: friendship

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The Place in the Woods

cabin

There is a place in my mind, tucked away in the Virginia Blue Ridge or just outside one of the little towns we love so much in the Colorado Rockies. We slip away, to this little roost, as often as we’re able. We do not come here merely to ‘get away,’ because this little porch, these acres, are not an escape but rather a way of returning – to wholeness, to the good earth, to a kind of slowness that reminds us we are humans and lovers and friends, not machines. We take our boys here and over time (and perhaps without them ever realizing what’s happened), these four walls and these kind woods become a sacred spot for them as well.

My vision has grown over the years. Now I envision a few more cabins, nestled into the hills nearby – not too far but not too close. A few friends have their own little place of laughter and wholeness. Together, we form a kind of mountain neighborhood. Together, we split wood and walk the forests and share more than a few warm dinners under moonlight. Friendships ripen here. We share a bond born in simplicity, a sense of wonder at this splendid world – and our place in it, an ever-expanding delight and gratitude, a sturdy hope that will not yield despite all the troubles, a keen sense of pleasure.

We don’t talk much about these places we share, because the whole experience seems to us a quiet thing, a neighborly thing. But we do welcome folks in as much as we’re able; we pass along the spaciousness we’ve been given. Our little spot in the woods makes us more whole, more true to ourselves and to one another. We have been given another place to love, to be welcomed into the solidness and generosity of this good world, and we are the better for it.

I don’t know if this vision will ever come to be, but I believe that even the picture of it, the possibility, enlarges my heart and keeps something very good burning bright.

 

image: anoldent

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I Wonder

clouds over tetons

I wonder what would happen if we could see into one another’s soul, if all the static between us were removed, if all I saw was your heart, your hopes, your fears, your joys? And you saw these same things in me? I wonder what would happen if I could trust that you were truly for me, that your love would not waver, your delight in me would never falter, no matter what comes? I wonder what would happen if you felt assured that my love and delight in you were secure, even as we parted treacherous waters, even as we saw the world with different eyes?

What would it be like for us if we expected the best of one another and simply refused to let that expectation go? What would change in us if a sharp word spoken in weariness or distress or a season of distance or coolness did not fluster us or prod us to draw away in anger or insecurity? What if we were comfortable with ourselves and secure in the sturdiness of love and friendship, so much so that we felt the ease to sit on the front porch and revel in gratitude for the breeze and the sunset — and what if we could simply sit there, even if the other had to walk away for a while, resting in the knowledge that goodness always brings us home?

I wonder.

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Lil’ Help from our Friends

bike community

Years ago, when our boys were little, we had a small community of friends that gathered in our home for several years. One evening, our oldest (three at the time) asked, in eager expectation, whether our friends were coming over. “Yes,” I answered. “Why do you like having them here?”

My son paused only a moment. “Because they love us. And they help us fight the dragons.”

In the years previous and the years since, I’m not sure I’ve heard a better definition of friendship than this one from my three-year-old. Friends (true friends) love the person we are, not the person they imagine we are or the person we pretend to be. Friends clasp arms with us as together we swing at the darkness.

I’ve often wondered what the future will reveal about how we’ve raised our sons, how we’ve done with our hopes to help them become good men who live good lives. I wonder if our meandering efforts will prove enough to help them take their good place in this topsy-turvy world. I will tell you this, though: the friends who have been in our life (thus, the friends who have been in their lives) will play a larger role in all this than most of us imagine.

When I think about how I hope to love my sons along the path toward becoming their true selves, my mind turns to the people they are blessed to encounter. There’s Tom, the master carpenter, who takes us into his shop with the massively cool racks of hand tools and takes us for walks in the woods surrounding his land, all of which exudes presence, attentiveness and respect for craft and place. There’s Corey and Juli, who’ve loved them since the day each of them came squealing into this world. There’s Debbie who asks tender, meaningful questions, provoking care and curiosity. There’s John, the poet, who sits at the kitchen table for games of Farkle and carries delight in how our boys are full-on boys, delighting too in how they are becoming men (but not yet, not yet). There’s Raul who gives them hugs and kisses on the cheek, as he does each of us each time he arrives, then pulls out his guitar for a jam session or pulls from his days as a coffee roaster and teaches my sons the art of the single pour. These friends are merely a sample – and on top of grandparents, uncle and aunts, so much love. We have so many good people in our lives, so many gifts. So many teachers.

John Lennon said he got by with a little help from his friends. We all do.

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Loneliness and the Art of Conversation

door to hell

For many, the church is the loneliest place they know. To be sure, the church owns no monopoly on leaving the soul cold, and many of us endure isolation in all the spaces of our lives, estranged in our homes, in our neighborhoods, in our workplace, in every place where we would have hoped to discover friendship. However, I believe this loneliness particularly acute within our spiritual communities precisely because we claim something better. We claim to be a people where everyone belongs, where everyone is gathered into the family. We are a people of the Table, where all find welcome and everyone has a seat.

No community, spiritual or otherwise, will be able to entirely eradicate the weight of loneliness. For some of us, our cravings and demands for connection with others are insatiable, our expectations way out of whack. Still, the church at times disappoints us with greater sting because we long for something more than frantic activity or fresh piles of biblical information. I want to encounter another actual human. We do not want to be prodded, pushed somewhere. We want to be where we actually are – and to be there in that one spot with someone else.

Several years ago, I sat in a circle with the intention, I thought, of listening to one another’s stories. Within a few moments, however, it was obvious that the group facilitator (the one billed as something like the ‘expert listener’) was not actually listening with open mind and heart to the person across from him, but rather he was waiting to hear certain key words or phrases that he could then use as a pivot to present the material he wanted to disseminate. He had a destination where he wanted the group to land, and he intended to use the story medium to get us there. I felt used and very, very lonely.

There is no cure-all for our loneliness, but I would like to see our churches return to the very human art of conversation. This work will be slow and clunky. It will be inefficient. It will certainly create lots of mess. The “movement” may not, in the end, get off the ground. But if we practiced genuine conversation, we would find ourselves to be more richly human which, as I understand it, means we will be more like Jesus. And that sounds about right to me.

John O’Donohue once gave four questions to ask yourself, question that help us to locate the good conversations (i.e. ones that are more than “just two intersecting monologues”):

When was the last time you had a great conversation, in which you overheard yourself saying things that you never knew you knew?

When was the last time you had a great conversation where you heard yourself receiving from somebody words that absolutely found places within you that you thought you had lost?

When was the last time you had an encounter with another that created a sense of an event of a conversation that brought the two of you on to a different plane?

When was the last time you had a great conversation that continued to sing in your mind for weeks?

If you have difficulty recalling the last time you’ve enjoyed such an exchange, I’d encourage you to go looking. I hope our churches can become communities where these conversations happen. I truly do.

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A Seat Just for You

For a variety of reasons, during our years in the city school system, neither of our sons have ridden the bus. This year, however, they both start new schools, and they both will be passengers on the big yellows. Today was the launch, and the last 48 hours they’ve been a bundle of nerves. Do you think there will be a seat on the bus for me? Do you think I’ll know anyone on the bus? I hope I have a friend on the route.

This morning, before putting on his brave face and his over-stuffed pack, Seth told me, “Right now, I’m 12-14% nervous.”

Downtown, there’s a breakfast crew that meets every weekday morning at Cafe Cubano. For over 25 years, this cadre of friends has sloshed coffee, passed the news and (as they’ve told me) come to be family for one another. On my morning run, I noticed a new couple had joined the circle, a man and woman in their mid-sixties. Two more seats were pulled up to the table. The conversation was lively as always, only now new voices joining the fray.

I ran past, smiling and wondering what it must have felt like to be invited into that tightly knit group, one with such a history and story, how grand it must have been to have someone point to a chair and say, “Hey, this is for you.”

Decades separate the hearts in these two events today, but the moments are not so different. Children grow up, but we all still wonder if there will be a seat saved for us.

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Safe

fence tree yard

In several unrelated settings recently, I’ve heard people describe (with immense gratitude) their spiritual community as “safe.” This struck me as odd and beautiful. Odd because one rarely hears safe attached to church. It is true of course that too often church is the last place we encounter unflinching acceptance that invites us to express eviscerating doubt, paralyzing fear or the numbing loneliness that a sermon and song could never fix (an inexplicable predicament when our prayers and worship are shaped by the Psalter, the most uncensored religious text I could imagine) — but none of that’s exactly what I mean. I simply mean that safe is rarely a religious word. It’s simply not part of the eclessial lexicon. Maybe it should be.

In each of these conversations, the person had encountered something generous, something spacious and healing in the rhythms, posture and tenderness of their spiritual circle. Best I could understand, they found room to breathe, room to be themselves, even if the selves they are right now seems to have little to offer and arrives as a Grade A mess. They knew the joy of the slow knowledge (over time) that their community possessed the strength and the patience to bear their full selves, that they would be honored and would receive tenderness and would never be shamed. There was room to be playful and to fail and to have a long stretch where their head’s just not right and they are not “productive” members. They’ve been told that their mere presence is enough, that it’s a gift – and they’ve slowly begun to believe it. So safe might be odd, but it’s also so, so beautiful.

Many of us live in fear of being exposed. Exposed for not being as smart as people think we might be or expect us to be. We fear what would happen if someone saw us in the true muck, at our absolute worst. We fear (particularly in church settings) what will happen if we ‘fess up to the shadow themes in our story or let loose with the questions that haunt us. We play the charade because we lack courage, and perhaps we lack courage because no one else has courage. Perhaps we are all afraid together. Perhaps none of us feel safe. Perhaps we are all alone, in the same big room.

So when someone tells me they have found a safe place, I perk up. I want to belong to a safe community. I want to be a safe person for others.

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A Dream on Maple St.

Every so often (but not as often as I’d like), when the moon is just so or there’s been a little too much wine a little too late in the evening, I find my way back to this recurring dream.

We live in a village, an odd place nestled amid the lush green and rolling hills of the Shenandoah but also surrounded by the Rocky’s rugged ridges where aspens stand sentinel. We grow strawberries, apples and blackberries in the valley, but most afternoons we fill our knapsacks to overflowing and walk above the timberline for lunch with a view. Our neighborhood swimming hole is a high mountain lake, a spot we call Blue Magic. Many, wide-eyed, have reeled in their first trout at Blue Magic. Many, wide-eyed, have felt love’s first fire under the stars on a sensuous summer night. At this place, life blossoms.

We live on Maple St., a winding avenue lined with century-old oaks and swaths of verdant Midnight Kentucky Blue Grass surrounding every Craftsman cottage. Our little half-acre has a name, as do all the homes in our village. The hand carved wood sign attached next to the deep purple door on our wide, shaded front porch reads Elm Grove, but most of our friends simply refer to it as Elm. “Dinner at Elm tonight,” they’ll say. Or “Gonna run over to Elm to trade out books.” Our friends surround us, as friends should. Their homes, like their lives, create what we mean whenever we say neighborhood. Two doors down sits The Fable House. Across the street, you’ll find Casa del Amor and Shalom. One block behind us, The Abbey and River Stone. Each home a place filled with laughter, a place where we know ourselves more than we could ever have known ourselves on our own.

Each of us works our trade. I have a little writing shed behind our cottage, fitted just between Miska’s herb garden and the three-level tree fort Wyatt and Seth built. The fort’s a little cattywampus, but nobody cares. I craft my novels the first half of the week and craft my sermon the second, though these two acts overlap more than some prefer. I visit parishioners, but I just think of it as visiting friends.

If you’re rolling your eyes because this sounds sweet and idyllic, hold on for one more bit: the first Friday night of each month during Spring and Summer, we take turns at each others’ place for a homemade ice cream fest (the hand-churned sort) with every conceivable flavor: chocolate chip, strawberry, peanut butter mocha, caramel apple – all loaded with fresh cream and piled high. We eat bowl after bowl, and we never gain an ounce.

Give a man his dream.

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Circle Close

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Last year, a story hit the newswires of a pod of pilot whales floundering in perilously shallow water off the Everglades. Forty or Fifty short-finned whales stuck close to a narrow shoreline, and they were not moving back out to the deep waters, to safety. Several of the blackfish were ill, and this caused real worry among conservationists. Pilot whales are intensely loyal creatures, and when one of their number is sick or in jeopardy, the rest of the pod will not leave. The draw a circle and stay close.

This image – drawing a circle and sticking close – says a lot about the way I want to live, the kind of community I want to live in. I’ve sat with friends as we sifted through the rubble to try to piece their life back together. Friends have sat with me, in long stretches where I had nothing to contribute, where my darkness kept me locked up, closed off. But none of this mattered because we were friends, because we had entered together into a life where each of us were part of the whole. To be a friend means a lot of things, but at the least it has to mean we will not leave. We will stick close.

To be a friend is to be thankful for the joy and to endure the hard, knowing that life ebbs and flows. And if we miss one another in the sorrow, well, then we’ve simply missed one another. Whenever we don’t know what to do with a marriage that’s teetering or a child that’s on the edge or a friendship where’s there’s pain or uncertainty, we can simply draw a circle and stick close. I think we can do that.

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Walk Forward

walk_forward_winn_collier_writerIn a culture obsessed with centerfold beauty and youthful vigor, we rarely know what to do with the fading years, the aging bodies. We are tempted to think of a withered frame or declining health as the great tragedy. However, I will tell you the greater tragedy, and it is not a life where the flame has been reduced to flicker. It is a life that never kindled the fire. The deepest sadness is not for the one with their life almost entirely spent, but the one who never really spent their life at all.

Some men live their years as mere shadows of other men. These shadow-men never buckle on their courage or plant two firm feet in a place or with a people they call their own. They never mark out their land. Some women never step into their strength or own their unique beauty. Existing as mere caricatures, they bridle their truest self. Perhaps their strength scares them, perhaps the disapproval of others chains them. I cannot say. I can only say that none of this is true living.

There comes a point in our life, and I think the 40’s is as good a decade as any, when we must decide to walk out from the shadows, to cast off the caricatures. We must be brave. While friendships and brotherhood will come to mean more and more to us, we will rely less and less on others’ opinions. We will live in the fellowship of courageous women and men, giving and receiving, journeying together – but we will not wait for their cues to brandish our gifts and unleash our passions. We see the glory in others, and we speak it. We see the glory in ourselves, and we receive it.

A final word. You can not make such a transition happen. Any pushy attempt at self-made maturity will only yield foolishness: self-importance, braggadocio and a brand of adult-adolescence far too prominent in our day. You can only watch and wait, listening to and learning from those wise ones ahead of you. And then, when your time comes (and here I believe the only wisdom we have is the old truth: you will know it when it arrives), we rise up and say yes. We walk forward.

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Lotto Friends

Of my several recurring fantasies, hitting the powerball is a favorite. I’ve never actually played the lotto, and I’m opposed to how the gambling industry preys on ignorance and misfortune. However, as a friend says, “If God chose to bless me with a winning ticket, I would not refuse.”

The jackpot is $127 million. Taking the lump-sum option and after giving Uncle Sam his due, I’d have roughly $68 million to work with. The fantasy is actually not the lotto itself, but rather what I would do with such a windfall: assuring my mom the finest medical care and securing mom and dad’s retirement; houses (or mortgage pay-offs) for Miska’s parents and our siblings; gifts to our church and to several strategic Charlottesville city needs, a few other philanthropic investments. I’d pull together a few writing pals, and we’d launch a start-up press.

But perhaps my favorite part of this vision is when I call up a small handful of my dearest friends and spouses and tell them I’ve rented a few ocean front villas on a Caribbean island, one for each of us. We arrange dates, and I mail them plane tickets. I hire a chef. For an entire week, we laugh and take walks and swim and read. My friends who don’t know one another meet, and we all reminisce about what we’ve shared. We look forward to whatever is to come. I’m tempted to say I’d spring for two weeks, but Lewis’ wisdom comes to mind, the bit about resisting the temptation to grab a second piece of fruit when one left you gloriously filled and delighted.

This vision brings me such joy because friendship is one of life’s true sparks. The older I get, the more I believe that friendship is one of the true goods, a necessity, one of the things without which life has little meaning, no fire. It’s not simply that I need companionship, though I do, but that I need the other. I need them so that I can see and taste and know. I need friends in order to love. I need friends in order to believe. As Daniel Taylor says, “a shared belief isn’t joining the herd, it’s multiplied pleasure and shared risk.”

Our world can be a frightening place. Our world is also a splendidly wondrous place. Friends make much of the difference between the two. On that score, I’ve already hit the jackpot. But if ever I were to hit it again, I’d certainly share.

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