The Slow Way Newsletter: Hope and "This Wild Project About Love"
a weekly newsletter for all the frantic strivers, serial doers & weary achievers
unhurried thoughts
“Hope is a story about all of us that God puts in the future. Ever before us, and always with us, and always behind us . . . That we will some day be wrapped up in a story about love that is beyond time and beyond our dumb bodies, and beyond finitude and beyond tears. And will be really beautiful. But in the meantime, it was always about all of us. That we belong to each other in a way that makes hope not really just about whether I get a cure and my life works out. It’s about whether you feel yourself as part of this wild project about love . . . It’s never really fully here. It’s always just a little bit not yet.”
-Kate Bowler, On Being Podcast
"This Wild Project About Love"
We’ve been watching Lego Masters as a family. Well, almost as a family. Ace goes to bed at 8, and then Lego Masters gets turned on in the family room: me, Chris, August, Brooks, Givret the Cat, Richmond the Pup. We all fit ourselves onto the one stained grayish blue couch we bought when we moved to Austin in 2011, when Brooksie was wee babe, and August was a 3 year old fire to be contained. The first thing he did when we got it was take a green marker to it. We’ve never looked back.
We’re getting close to the end of this season. Only four teams left and we all have FEELINGS about the teams. Richmond the Pup has feelings about us having feelings. So he snuggles closer. Last night August was bubbling over because he directed a film for his class at school. He and his buddy had worked for two days straight to get it edited and sent off to a middle school competition. It was due at midnight. So the feeling of making something great (it is great, says his mother), on time, and overcoming the looming deadline, had put a little twinkle in his step. He sat his long body next to me, wrapped his arms around me, and said, “I love my mom.”
He and I had lots of these moments in the early years. We were a mother/son explosion of fondness and angst. We fought big and hugged big. He was stubborn about everything, anxious, and hid his fear behind a grown-up pose of fury. I was set on being the mom of a pliant piece of clay, who wanted me to explain the world through gentle stories. Our methods didn’t align. Instead we yelled and cried at each other. Once I even debated and fought with his 7 year old self about the existence of God. (He knew instinctively what would get me going.)
Our later years together have simmered that fire between us. Maturity has helped his cognition catch up with the depth of his awareness. He’s a special kid with a lot going on under the surface. He can talk about it now, and doesn’t have to rely on markers to the couch, or yelling to make us aware that his feelings are real and big. And I love teenagers, always have. They are extra close to the heart of God, what with their in-between bodies and in-between dreams.
My eldest has been my teacher in the reality that parenting is not a gentle story I get to write for myself. It’s about two humans in relationship with one another. Two actual humans. August was never a piece of clay I got to mold, actually. He came to me as himself, and raising him has been as much about me learning how to love him well as about him learning from me how to be.
Yesterday, after a hard week, punctuated by a three-day-migraine (so grateful for my big bad migraine meds that gave me moments of reprieve in the midst of those head-to-the-bed sessions), I turned on the most recent OnBeing podcast, which features the deep and charming Kate Bowler, whom I have adored from afar for awhile. Kate lives with stage-4 cancer, and has been living with it for five years longer than any doctor thought was possible. She’s the mom of a young kid, a theologian and historian, and a beautiful writer. She is wise and gentle and I could listen to her talk all day. So to hear her in conversation on the topic of hope with her friend Wajahat Ali, a practicing Muslim who has watched his daughter suffer with stage 4 cancer, was absolutely what I needed to pull myself out of the muck of my own migraine-bed.
The chronic migraines have been mostly under control this past month. I tried a new medication, an injection I give myself that has worked beautifully to make my head feel like something made of bone and organs, and not a lake of sulphur. And I love that. But this week my anxiety has been high. I’m worried about my dad’s cancer. I’m worried about his upcoming MRI. I’m worried about being far from him and how he feels about me being far from him. I’m worried he needs me more than he’ll say. So those thoughts hum through me all day while I work and make appointments for my children, and jump on the trampoline with Ace while working on his speech. “1-2-3,” I say, holding his hands. “Go!” we say together.
I think that injection I gave myself last month is actually no match for the smoke of anxiety that floats in my brain. I can shoo it to one corner of my mind for a bit, blowing it off with a prayer or some deep breaths, but it never fully goes away. It floats back to the center of my mind, and I try to push it away again. Eventually, the smoke settles into my blood vessels (this is a technical, sciencey essay) and ignites the sulphur fire migraine. Anxiety has power over a lot of things in the body.
Which brings me back to hope. What Kate said in that interview wasn’t about my fears, or about the physical manifestations of those fears. It wasn’t about whether or not my dad will be healed, or my migraines will ever stop controlling my days, or whether my son and I will find consistent ways to know and understand each other while snuggling on the couch. What she said is that “hope is a story.” It’s a story God has set in the future. She said, “we will some day be wrapped up in a story about love that is beyond time and beyond our dumb bodies, and beyond finitude and beyond tears. And will be really beautiful.”
When I heard her say that, I was loading the dishwasher, her words in my ears. My eyes filled with tears. I want to be wrapped in a story about love. And I want that love to be bigger than my success at mothering, or my dad’s oncologist’s success at overcoming the nasty cancer cells that want to root into his brain. I want the love to be big enough to settle my deeply human fears that the people I love are not in fact immortal, that I can’t control them, that I can’t save them from the terrors that will surely come.
“Hope is a story,” she said. One that God is writing and setting in a future where our bodies are not in charge, and time is not finite nor chronological, and tears are not our common currency.
“But in the meantime, it was always about all of us. That we belong to each other in a way that makes hope not really just about whether I get a cure and my life works out, it’s about whether you feel yourself as part of this wild project about love.”
That’s what I thought on the couch with my son, whose long body is a head taller than mine, who wrapped his arms around me and said he loved me. “A wild project about love.” Mine and his. My dad’s and mine. You and me and these words we pass back and forth.
Sometimes I just need to believe that God is here in the middle of bodies and the unfolding reality of time, and all the tears we shed. That this story is still being written, wrapped in hope, whether we’re rescued now or later. It is a “wild project about love.” And miracle-upon-miracle, we are invited to participate.
a slow practice
How do we choose to participate in "this wild project about love"? How do we overcome the limits of our bodies, our slow trek across the span of time, our very real fears?
Today I want us to sketch out our stories. If the Divine is the author of this "wild project," maybe we can take a peek at God's own notes about the story. You know how this goes: Take out your journal or a piece of paper! Consider this Creative Writing class. We're prepping the plot, the settings, the characters. We're going to write stuff down.
Let's start with the cast of characters in God's story of hope about you. Now, you obviously can't list every character in your life. There are hundreds moving in and out from your orbit. But, right now, in the big story surrounding you, who are the characters shaping you? Who are the characters you are shaping?
What about the setting? There may have been several different *places* in your story, different towns, different homes. And you can be creative in how you understand the setting. But write some notes about where your story is set right now. Obviously, relationships can exist across space and time, but how is the place where you find yourself shaping this story? How has it shaped your story in the past?
The plot of your life is of course ongoing. But there are moments from childhood, your teenage years, your adulthood that are shaping your story's sense of hope. What are they? Where has all hope seemed lost? What has been redeemed? What is still left to be redeemed?
End this time of reflection by drawing that plot on a timeline. At the edge of the timeline of your life, try to draw the expansion of time into eternity: God-Time. What does it look like when time no longer fits on a line? When your story is not bound by place or chronological order? In that space, ask God what hope might look like for your story. What hope means outside of our suffering and our understanding of love.
Whatever your picture looks like, sit with it for a bit. Ask God to give you a fresh vision of this story you're living, and what "this wild project about love" might mean for you today.