random acts of kindness | pull up a chair

as soon as his breath propelled those words across his lips and out into the snow-flecked january cold, i inscribed them on my heart. i hadn’t quite framed it that way, in those four words, so profoundly, so poetically, so imploringly.

and then, as if that wasn’t enough, the wise old soul whose very fiber has been forged in the white-hot furnace of grief compounded by grief, he all but unbuttoned his coat, pulled back his ribs and showed us what burns in that cavity: “my whole soul is in it,” he said, as if speaking to each and every one of us, as if elbows were plopped on our very kitchen tables, eyeballs gazing at eyeballs, mugs of coffee just off to the side, instead of there in the sunlight and shadow of the nation’s capital. then he all but whispered it again: “my whole soul is in it.” and that’s when i whispered, “mine too.”

having just witnessed — from the edges of our seats — how close this fragile experiment in democracy came to crashing into splintered bits, having lived under a poisonous cloud of daily assaults on decency, straining to stay steady, to keep from being sucked under in the shifting quicksands of moral decay, of a nation under the false premise that license had been given to spew venom from the checkout line to the capitol steps, i am more certain than ever that this is not a one-person parade. if we stand a chance of shoving this moment in time toward the light we claim, toward the peaceable kingdom we believe is possible, well then every last one of us needs to get to work, to chip in, to put one foot before the other in a slow walk toward mercy and justice for all.

my inaugural promise is this:

i will cloak myself each and every day in humility and gentle spirit, the surest vestment for the hard and holy work ahead. for months now i’ve tiptoed in the darkness to my kitchen table where i’ve lit a candle and whispered the words of confession. “most merciful God…” i begin. “…we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. we are truly sorry and we humbly repent.”

i will not reflexively shut my ears, close my heart, turn my cheek the wrong way. i will hear them out, whoever it is. i will try, oh i will try, not to leap in with my insistent retort. not to interrupt. not to wield the sharp sword of assumed superiority, not think that my way is the right way, and all else is wrong. i will try, i will try, to step into the other guy’s shoes. to imagine the hurt, or the fear. to look for a gentle way in, to open just a little bit wider the doorway to some common ground. even if only fraction by fraction.

i will actively step into kindness. into imagining the unexpected waft of goodness that might just turn the tide of someone else’s dark day. i will model the thousands of kindnesses that have come my way — the sacks of apples left on my stoop, the tray brought to my hospital bedside, the steaming hot chicken pot pie once delivered on an arctic cold night, to name just a few.

i will carve out time even amid the whirlingest of days for whoever taps me on the shoulder, looks me in the eye, and whispers, do you have a minute?

i will — in some way, shape, or form — seek out foreign terrain, the realm of those who might be quick to dismiss me: too white, too old, too left-leaning. and begin with the light-seeking questions: what keeps you awake at night? what do you dream? what brings you joy? what makes you cry? where does it hurt? who do you consider to be the most heroic human you’ve ever known? and how so? what’s one act of kindness you’ve never forgotten?

because i realize my impotence for change-making at the structural level, i will pinpoint one not-for-profit effectively working toward solution — be it reuniting children separated from parents at the border, or ferreting out all vestiges of racism and bigotry from the nooks and crannies of america, or protecting wetlands from the ravages of greedy exploitation — and i will commit to shaving off a dollar here, a dollar there from my weekly spending and send off occasional bundles from my consciously set-aside sum.

photo of Amanda Gorman by Patrick Semansky

but even more than dollar bills, the currency i commit to this campaign is the craft i ply each and every day: mine is a calling to words, words as instruments of peace, words as the silken thread that weaves together uncommon hearts, words that open doorways into long-locked corridors. as the beautiful and blessed national youth poet laureate amanda gorman so perfectly put it in the wake of her inaugural poem: “words matter. we’ve seen over the past few years the ways in which the power of words has been violated and misappropriated.” she sought, and i seek with her, to “reclaim poetry as that site in which we can repurify, resanctify the power of words. and to invest that in the highest office of the land.” to invest that in every office of the land, elected and otherwise. from the humblest foot soldier to the commander in chief. and to that, i say amen, amen.

we must end this uncivil war. and my whole soul is in it.

what’s your inaugural promise?

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September 25, 2020

the angel always comes. often in the darkness.

this angel story begins with a stuffy nose on a sunday evening, five days ago. the nose belongs to my second-born, the one tucked away at college in the age of COVID (on a campus where — wisely, prudently — no one — well, no interlopers, bystanders, or pesky parents — is allowed in or out).

a stuffy nose is barely bothersome, and no one — save for your mother — might notice it. i, though, am said mother. so i noticed it. and mentioned it — in an otherwise matter-of-fact sunday evening phone call. the stuffed-up one all but brushed it off, said he might go to bed a little early. that was about the drama of it. zilch.

next morning, though, the phone rang. early. before 7. which in college time is middle of the night. he’d taken his temp three times, he reported, and it was hovering around 101. to whiz forward in this angel tale, we’ll skip straight to the part where he called midday that day to say the college doctor had stuffed a swab down his throat, taken a COVID test, and was promptly dispatching him to quarantine, at the old comfort inn hotel the college has taken over for the year, for the sequestering of sick kids, COVID kids, to be precise.

until my stuffy-nosed sophomore was proven otherwise, he was stamped, “pending” for COVID. he had one hour to pack two plastic bins with whatever he might need for the next two weeks, and soon found himself in a room with two queen-size beds overlooking an empty parking lot. in the middle of rural ohio.

the stuffy nose was getting out of hand. it was doing fever tricks, making it climb straight up the mercury hill (in the old days, when i went to nursing school, mercury — that slippery silver element — was the thermo-register of choice). the stuffy nose was swelling up his eyes, and making dark circles all around.

by tuesday evening, when the fever crossed the line at 103-point-something, the stuffed-up one called the front desk, and talked to the football coach in charge (yes, two assistant football coaches — sweethearts! — keep watch over the comfort inn, which i now lovingly refer to as “the covid inn.”) the football coach made some calls, and suddenly an ambulance becomes the focus of this too-long-winded tale.

yes, it was decided that an emergency room was on the docket and to get there, an ambulance was called. the mount vernon fire department ambulance. egad. hearing the wail of a siren, coursing through small-town streets, heading straight to where your kid is cowering under the covers, shaking with chills and fever, is a sound you do not want to hear. it’s a sound you won’t forget. especially as it comes closer and closer to the phone on the other end of the line, the line you are clinging to, trying to squeeze yourself through via the itty-bitty invisible wires you’re sure connect you.

since we’re trying to get to the part of the story where the angel comes in, we can boil down the ER part to simply this: they started an IV, zapped him through the x-ray machine, drew lots of tubes of blood, gave him a giant dose of ibuprofen, and declared him a ripe and ready case of mono, as in mononucleosis, an infectious disease that comes in two flavors mostly — mild and wicked. looks like we’re in for wicked.

by 2 in the morning, he was delivered back to the comfort inn, where he slid under the sheets and tried mightily to sleep. the fever though was having none of it. and for the next two days, it teeter-tottered, climbing to the very edge of 104.

we’re almost at the angel part:

all the while, during his days locked in room 229, the college was sending over trays of food from the dining hall a few miles away. (this comfort inn is in the next town over, so the commitment to feeding any far-flung sick kids — ours was the only one in the whole hotel — suddenly entailed a car and driver.) problem was, buffalo chicken sandwiches and breakfast sausage don’t work so well with fever and swollen glands swelling to the size of apricots on either side of your neck.

in trying to zip this story along here, i skipped over the part where the dean of students had called us at home as the ambulance was whisking our fevered child to the county hospital. she was heavenly, and she certainly is among the angels of the week. (there are several; i’m singling out only one for the long-distance-mama’s gold-medal-of-the-week.) early the morning after the ambulance ride, i sent my new friend the dean a little note, and asked if maybe the dining hall could send over those mama staples, the things you always pulled from the pantry when a little one was sick: saltines and gingerale. and maybe a little packet of honey to boot. (ice chips and honey somehow became our cure du jour in this old house.)

well — cue the drum roll — when our sweet fevered boy finally awoke from his long and awful night, he stumbled toward the door of room 229, opened it just a crack, and lo and behold there on the table where they always left his tray, he found not one, not two, not three — but six! — bags of groceries, custom-fit for a fevered kid. it was filled with a veritable wish list of things you might try when you can barely swallow or lift the spoon. there were soups and teas and saltines! and gingerale and 7UP, to boot. there was a teddy-bear squeeze bottle of honey, and cups of instant oatmeal and rice and ramen noodles. someone, some holy blessed someone, had up and left the dining hall, driven 5.7 miles to the kroger super-store, strolled every single aisle, all but filling a cart.

our holy blessed angel’s name is melissa. and as she wrote to me later in a note:

I have a 10 year old son. I cannot fathom him being away from me in a “normal” world let alone in this crazy world we are currently living in. For [T] to be so far away and going through such a terrible time must be excruciating. My heart hurts for you and I wish we could do more! I’m sure it is a constant worry and this is something we can do to take a little of that burden from you. We will do whatever we can to help ease your stress and give [T] a little TLC.

her words — her heart — make me cry, even now, two days later. she lived the holy heart of it all, of every holy book and ancient text ever inscribed. she literally slipped herself into the holy act of “what would make ME feel better if I was far from home, burning with a fever, all alone and stuck in a hotel a few miles from all my friends?” the very words i made sure to write, and sent straight up her chain of command, straight to the desk of the college president, so he’d hear firsthand just what a bunch of saints he was shepherding.

so that’s the story, and here’s the holiness: even in a world where every day the headlines tear us apart, and leave us gasping for breath, even in — especially in — those spells of darkness that surely come, right when you’re teetering at the precipice, worried sick and feeling more helpless than in a long long while, the universe always makes room for an angel to squeeze in, to slip in through the cracks. to bring bucketfuls of light. to adorn us with the blessed healing touch. the simple act of reaching beyond the borders of our sorry selves. of going the extra mile. of loving as we would be loved.

melissa, the director of catering at kenyon college, a mom whose job it is to feed the fancy folk and fuel the everyday special occasions, she slipped herself into my scared shoes this week, and she doled out love and saltines in an act of kindness and goodness and through-and-through heaven-ness now seared into our hearts.

angels always seem to come. this world is filled with them, though most often they go about their business without so much as a wink or a nod — and certainly not with trumpet blasts.

but if not for the angels, those messengers of real-live, in-the-flesh blessings, we’d all be piled in the dust. exhausted, hopeless, worried out of our wits.

as i type, my sweet boy is finally asleep. the COVID test finally came back: negative. and today he leaves the quarantine hotel, and gets a ride — via campus security — back to his little cottage in the woods, aka his dorm away from home. if needed, we’ll motor down and bring him home, where i can be like melissa, and ply my boy with whatever his sweet and blessed hurting heart desires.

who are the angels in your week this week?

and, dear melissa, to whom i just might send this, a hundred thousand thank yous till the end of time…..bless you, bless your heart. signed, the mom whose shoes you filled this week.

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November 1, 2019

a consideration of saints

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long long ago, when i was a wee little thing falling asleep in my tight twin bed, the hand-sewn squares of quilt pulled up to my nose, i, like many a girl who donned scratchy plaid uniform skirt and buttoned all the way up (no matter how hot or humid outside) my navy blue uniform cardigan each day for holy cross school, i drifted off to dreamland wondering what it would take to become a saint, a little flower of jesus, perhaps, or the patron saint of fallen feathered things. i wouldn’t have minded aspiring to patron saint of bicycle pedals, or patron saint of clearing the table, two fundamentals of life i knew well, fundamentals i could work at — perfect even — if given the hope of a life under halo.

it’s not a bad thing to each and every night pluck from among a roster of heroes, sainted not for their football-field prowess, nor the velocity with which they swung a bat at a ball, but for those more ephemeral, ineffable things: gentle kindness, a selflessness that verged on self-erasure. it’s a good thing i hadn’t yet read too deeply of the tortures some of the saints endured. i might have swerved left from a life of good grace. i’ve utterly no interest in strapping myself to a windmill, going round and round in eternal upchucking dizziness. nor any one of the other tricks from the saintly bag of horrors (too gruesome to type at this early hour).

but — tortures aside — the morning after all-hallowed sugar-high (aka trick-or-treating) dawned onto what might have been the super bowl for saint seekers: november 1 in the catholic vernacular is the day of all saints, a feast day of joyous proportion. and that brings us to today, when with a few decades under my belt, i still awake with a particular zing.

only now, my consideration of saints has been jangled a bit. and moved far beyond ecclesiastical strictures. i’m more inclined to look to the everyday for my roster of saints. i see saints every day. have spent a good chunk of my life keeping watch. worry that we live in an age antithetical to saintliness. no saint seeker ever imagined an instagram reel of a life where every good deed was captured, captioned, and cast to the cybersphere. utter humility, a sense of one’s smallness against the vast majesty and unimaginable genius of the one we call God or Abba or Adonai, that’s non-negotiable, an essential place to begin.

the world we live in — at least the public world — seems to have turned it all on its head. it’s all bombast and braggadocio. when, to my mind, the deepest ripples are those that move through the world with barely a whisper. the gentle soul who considered it his life’s holiest work to show kindness to pigeons, to call them by name, to notice when one of his flock was wounded or lame. the one who knew 100,000 cars each and every day passed by him and the fire hydrant upon which he sat, the one who quietly told me “i’m really advertising to the public how easy it is to be good without an attitude.”

the woman who lives down my alley, who cooks by the gallon and, like a sprite in the night, sprints from house to house, doorknob to doorknob, leaving her wares in large plastic bags dangling from handles and knobs. because to her, to feed is to love, and her heart knows no bounds.

i know saints gather at this very table. saints who seed love, day after day in a thousand unscripted ways: the one who feeds a banquet of fine organic greens to her bevy of hard-shelled centenarians; the one who whispers a prayer into every stitch and tug and pull of her needle and thread; the one who every other weekend flies halfway across the country to sit beside her faraway, struggling son; the ones who day after day visit old friends who no longer remember, who feed them spoonful by spoonful, who read them love letters from long ago in hopes that it just might spark a burst of remembering, of story, of unfettered joy.

on this day for considering saints, and counting the saints among us, i turn to a glorious book i reviewed a few years ago, a book of poetry by susan l. miller titled, communion of saints. it opens with this glorious beauty, “manual for the would-be saint,” and it begins like this:

Manual for the Would-Be Saint

by Susan L. Miller

The first principle: Do no harm.

The second: The air calls us home.

Third, we must fill the bowls of others

before we drain our own wells dry.

The fourth is the dark night; the fifth

a subtle scent of smoke and pine.

The sixth is awareness of our duties,

the burnt offering of our own pride.

Seventh, we learn to pray without ceasing.

Eighth, we learn to sense while praying.

The ninth takes time: it is to discover

what inside the seed makes the seed increase.

…(the poem goes on for 14 more lines…)

please, do yourself an all saint’s day favor, and find it and read to the end. and now, quietly, without even a ripple, i will leave you to your own consideration of saints…

what might be the opening lines of your manual for the would-be saint?

p.s. do you know the saint pictured above? here’s a hint: she was kicked out of the calendar of saints for reasons i will never know, yet she remains in some books as the patron saint of architects. it’s saint babs, aka barbara, as a matter of fact, and isn’t it uncanny that de-sainted though she is, her affinity for architecture is akin to the one to which i’ve wed my life…(a saintly patronage that must have brought my jewish husband so much relief upon discovery!) (st. babs is linked to architecture because her father is said to have locked her in a tower after she rejected an offer of marriage he’d relayed to her. egad. i’m telling you, some of these saintly tales belong in the annals of the absurd. forgive me….)

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December 2, 2016

maybe this will help…

it’s not even six on the big-faced clock that hangs above the kitchen door, just beside the cookstove. it’s pitch black outside. i couldn’t sleep. again.

that’s how it’s been so many nights of late.

the truth is, i feel broken. deep down inside and all around. it’s the state of the world. the state of domestic affairs (and by that i do mean the nation). and a few other worries besides.

i try not to bring my bundle of knots here to the table. i’ve tried mightily not to be a cry baby. but the truth is, the past few weeks have steamrolled me. maybe you too? as much as i cringe at institutions and norms being turned on their heads, like so many chairs in a tavern strewn after a beer brawl, it’s the oozing of hate, of ugly words, and pent-up outbursts that’s making me quake deep inside. getting to be it’s hard to go a day without bumping into someone spewing some sort of ugly all over the place.

i’m not wired for that. i’m guessing neither are you. when God was making me, i must have been funneled through the light-weight department. i’m of delicate nerve, i suppose. which is why, too often, i shatter. (fear not, God was looking out for me, so i got a double dose of feist, which when in desperate straits i can muster. been known more than once to pull myself up my bootstraps. i’ve taken blows that could have toppled me for good. some day i’ll tell some of those tales. but for now suffice it to say i’m equal parts shatterable and watch-me-pick-up-the-pieces, leaning toward the latter.)

which is where this tried-and-tested old table of friends comes to the rescue. i stumbled into something so good the other day, i had to haul it over here. it’s a book i was reading for work (God bless a job that commands you to read and read deeply). and while i’m not keen on self-help tomes of any kind (truth is — and we’re truth-telling here this dark morning — books that promise salvation-by-baby-step, they make my skin crawl; i’m flat-out allergic), this particular book, which hadn’t set out to fix me or anyone else, more or less set in cement something i’ve always believed: you can find your way out of your brokenness by exercising rampant and wild love beyond measure.

or, as the brilliant ann voskamp writes in her breathtaking new book, The Broken Way: A Daring Path into the Abundant Life:

“we can be the brokers of healing exactly where we have known the most brokenness.”

or: “God is drawn to broken things — so He can draw the most beautiful things.”

and: “maybe the love gets in easier where the heart’s broke open?” a theory posited by voskamp’s young son.

a canadian wheat farmer’s wife and “the mama of a half dozen crazy exuberant kids,” as she often puts it, voskamp has known grief all her life. ever since she witnessed her baby sister’s skull crushed under the wheel of a delivery truck outside her family’s farm. it’s a grief that led her to pick up shards of glass and pierce the sharp edge along “the inner softness” of her arm, “the whole thick weight of hell” pressing against her chest.

it’s a grief that led her into the deep well of darkness: “old scars can break open like fresh wounds and your unspoken broken can start to rip you wide open and maybe the essence of all the questions is: how in the holy name of God do you live with your one broken heart?”

and yet, out of that brokenness, voskamp, who five years ago wrote the runaway bestseller, One Thousand Gifts, finds a way toward blessing. she comes to understand that operating out of love—a wild, abundant love—wielded in unexpected, unplanned ways throughout the day, she breaks free. in one afternoon’s itinerary of rampant acts of kindness, voskamp and her flock of kids stuff bubble gum machines with quarters, tuck parking fees in envelopes on random windshields in a hospital parking lot, buy a cart of groceries for an unsuspecting soul in a checkout line. and that’s just the start of it.

she leans into science to back up her scheme, the review of general psychology, in particular, and a study that showed that “those who perform five acts of giving over six weeks are happier than those who don’t.” and here’s why, according to voskamp’s squad of research psychologists: “when you give, you get reduced stress hormone levels, lowered blood pressure, and increased endorphins. acts of kindness reduce anxiety, and strengthen the immune system. five random acts of kindness can increase happiness for up to three months later.”

in this particular instance i’m going with it, abandoning the newsroom adage of “if your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.” i’m flat-out buying the science, and the instruction, because frankly anyone got a brighter idea?

i might call it the fireworks rule. do something kind, do something crazily wild driven by love, and don’t tell a soul that you’ve done it, then wait for that tickle, that pop, that night sky of sparkle and light, rising up from deep down inside. it’s the lightning bolt of adrenaline, perhaps, oxytocin oozing all over. it’s God, maybe, tapping you there on the heart, whispering, “hey, sweetheart, high five. that’s what i’m talking about when i talk about love. love and love madly. love with abandon.”

voskamp circles back to her newfangled notion a few chapters later, when she asks: “why hadn’t somebody showed up a long time ago in a three-piece suit to tell me those small acts of intentional love actually trigger the brain’s receptor networks for oxytocin, the soothing hormone of maternal bonding? that little acts of love actually release dopamine, the hormone associated with positive emotions and a natural high? why hadn’t anyone told me: bend low in small acts of love, and you literally get ‘high’?”

chances are, we knew this already. or at least we had a mighty strong hunch. and chances are, too, we’ve lived it. given it the occasional workout.

but somehow, in this long stretch of feeling quite bulldozed and broken, voskamp’s words and her litany of random, wild abandon loving, it all went a long way toward helping me see the dim light of hope in the distance.

in case you’re inclined to play along, here’s more from the list of crazy wild loving that filled one voskamp day, a day that happened to be voskamp’s own birthday: she filled a mason jar with gladiolas from her garden, and drove them to an old man she knew in a nursing home. but she didn’t stop at just his room, she and her kids ran up and down the halls, leaving a trail of mason-jar glads, room after room. and on their way into town, they drove past a squad car and circled back to leave a box of cookies on the hood, hoping aloud that it wasn’t “mistaken for a bomb.” then, for the joy of it, the whole lot of them grabbed a pie at the market and dropped it off at the town doctor’s office, to “thank him for catching babies.” then, they stopped at a coffee shop, and sprang for the coffees of every single person in line. next up, a dozen donuts dropped off at the town hall. just because.

that’s not all. voskamp wondered aloud what would happen if you walked into a diner, and whispered to the waitress that you’re paying for the dinner of that family over in the corner, a family you’d never before seen, and likely wouldn’t see again. and all that was preamble to the litany i mentioned above: the bubblegum quarters, the windshield parking fees, the cart piled with groceries, paid for in full.

be audacious is the point. love audaciously, the insistence.

“don’t think that every gift of grace, every act of kindness, isn’t a quake that moves another heart to give,” voskamp writes. “what if the truth really is that every tremor of kindness here erupts in a miracle elsewhere in the world?”

i’m willing to subscribe to the voskamp theory of tremors and earthquakes of kindness. i’m willing to sign my name to the roster of crazies.

it’s the closest i’ve come in the past few weeks to seeing my way toward the light. and i’m lurching toward that flickering flame.

before it goes out.

how bout you? since the whole point is not to divulge your own wild acts of kindness, how bout recounting the times you’ve been so blessed out of the blue? perhaps a litany of blessing, of random kindness exercised madly, is just what the doctor ordered to lift us out of our blues?

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pull up a chair

Category: random acts of kindness

January 22, 2021

inaugural promise