The Slow Way: Lord of the Ill-Matched Threads
“God comes to us disguised as our lives,” Paula D’arcy said. Every experience of our lives, the suffering and the joy, the celebration and the lament, is an invitation to the Divine presence.
Lord of the Ill-Matched Threads
When our eleven-year-old Brooks was a wee babe, and we moved our lives to Austin, Texas (for a sweet season that would turn out to be much shorter than we expected), my husband discovered something wonderful, something I’d been waiting for him to discover all seven previous years of our marriage. Coffee. My husband discovered coffee.
Now, here’s the thing about coffee. It’s not just a drink. It’s a ritual. It’s a comfort. It’s a gatherer of people. It’s a medication. I had spent the seven years of mornings before that season waking up by myself, making the coffee by myself, and sitting to read by myself. Chris had woken quickly and dressed and run out the door to work, all while I was still sitting in my pjs with my warm beverage. But that year, some magic force shoved Chris into my morning vortex. Maybe it had to do with extreme exhaustion: having two kids waking in the night. I was breastfeeding one of them, and the other was having toddler meltdowns at 3 am. There was no room for turn-taking. And we were both so so so tired.
For Chris to incorporate something new into his life, he has to make it his own. He is a curator of beautiful things, a gatherer of people, and a maker of moments. So our coffee regimen soon transformed from a Mr. Coffee pot from Walmart (the one I’d been using since we’d gotten married) and pre ground grocery store beans, to highly-researched roast styles and examination of the extraction process. We moved to a French press and eventually to pour-overs. I learned about fine grinds versus medium grinds and the purpose of each. Reader, when I say this happened within a year of my Enneagram 7 husband discovering coffee, I’m not kidding. His coffee entry created an entirely new world.
What changed in our relationship was not the coffee, but the time together. Chris’ excitement over his morning cup got him out of bed, and what came after that was a ritual that has transformed into the heartbeat of our relationship: Our morning cup of coffee on the couch in the winter, on the porch in the summer. Our built-in 30-45 minutes of time together. In San Francisco, when the kids were up at 6:30 and off to school by 7:30, our coffee time started at 6 am. We dragged ourselves to the living room. We read our books in the lamp light. We talked about work or the kids or the things we were sad or scared about. We sometimes fought. We sometimes cried. We sometimes prayed together.
And, now that our lives are simpler, when the first school bus doesn’t show up until 8:30 and the other boys don’t need to leave the house until almost 9, our morning starts an hour later, but still in the quiet, in the ritual of sitting together, reading different things, and sometimes bringing up what speaks to us. We’ve learned to ask good questions, practice vulnerability, and say the truth out loud.
We rarely read the same morning books. (Though we’re pretty set on non-fiction in the morning, fiction at night.) Chris is drawn to headier theology. I like my theology in the form of a memoir, thank you very much. But our morning coffee has helped us change and grow in the same direction — a gift I’m only now, at almost 18 years of marriage, beginning to grasp the power of. We have a few rituals we keep. Every Lent our favorite book of poems, Rainier Marie Rilke’s Book of Hours comes back out. We both take time to flip through it, sometimes reading aloud something particularly good.
We have a few stars on the tops of pages. I have one line tattooed on my arm. And we seem to come back over and over to the images that say the thing we’ve been trying to say:
She who reconciles the ill-matched threads
of her life, and weaves them gratefully
into a single cloth . . .
In the softness of the evening
it’s you she receives. . .
and she stretches beyond what limits her,
to hold you.
So much of the life of faith is a steady nourishment of ritual. We do the thing over and over, not because every spiritual practice *feels* particularly powerful, or because prayer is a switch we turn on or off in order to get to the presence of God. But because the ritual is like healthy food and exercise and sleep. It demands something of us. It requires us to pursue the long-term good over the short-term comfort. It shapes us slowly and deliberately. And eventually, it builds a structure where we’re tuned to the voice of God. Where we can hear the sound of the Divine because we’ve learned to listen.
“God comes to us disguised as our lives,” Paula D’Arcy said. Every experience of our lives, the suffering and the joy, the celebration and the lament, is an invitation for us to lean in, to attend, to allow ourselves to show up in the presence of Divine Love.
I think it’s a little bit like showing up for coffee every morning. Some mornings are magical, but most are normal, and some are really hard. But we do the thing. We drink from our cups. We talk about what we’re learning. We listen to each other. And some seasons, we say our sharp words. We yell. We weep. We hash the words out until there’s nothing left to say. And then we show up again the next day.
And in this season of losing my dad, my coffee time with Chris has been the go-to place for my grief, the place where I check in with my sadness, where there is space and time to feel it and share it.
In the rituals — the everyday, boring, not-usually-transcendent rituals of our lives — we are like the woman in Rilke’s poem, reconciling the ill-matched threads of our lives, weaving them gratefully into a single cloth. That work is the kind that takes a lifetime. But slowly, we’re stretching beyond all that limits us, making space to hold God.
God who keeps showing up every morning too, looking exactly like our ordinary, beautiful, sorrowful lives.
A Slow Practice
I love the idea of taking the threads we’re given and noticing how we’ve actually been weaving them into something beautiful.
Today can you take some time to look backward in your life? One of the gifts of journaling is that you are able to mark what you knew and felt and experienced at significant moments of your story. You are able to look back at the threads you were given, and from this distance, discover what a beautiful tapestry you’ve been making.
Let’s consider our threads, and spend some time acknowledging the threads that came to you through joy, through grief, and through struggle. My hope is that as you reflect on those things you will have some space to see what beautiful thing you are becoming, grace making a tapestry, even from the hardest things.
Take a deep breath with me.
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
Today I’m inviting you to journal once again. Last week we wrote down the mundane realities of our present days, and invited the Sacred Three into them. This week, I want us to look back on another three: our most formative moments of joy, grief, and struggle. Feel free to pause this episode and take time with each question.
Let’s start with joy:
Take some time to write down the most significant moments of joy in your life. Moments of delight in childhood, your teen years, your young adulthood, your mid-adulthood, and on. Moments that still bring a smile to your face when you consider them. If you can, remind yourself of the colors, sensations, faces of those moments. Take as much time as you need to remember.
Now, move on to grief:
When was your first experience of grief? Did it sneak up on you or come toward you slowly? How were you supported during that time, or left to sort it out alone? How did you cope? Work slowly through your life, acknowledging each loss that mattered: It could be the death of a pet as a child, or the divorce of your parents, a painful diagnosis of someone you loved. Each season of loss throughout your life leading up to now.
And struggle:
I think of struggle as something different than grief. Struggle can be a spiritual season: maybe a season of doubt or questioning when it comes to faith, maybe a time of leaving the faith tradition you’ve known because it no longer feels authentic to be there. Struggle can be a hard-won pursuit of relationship, a particular season of working to connect with someone you love who now feels distant, or bring healing to a relationship that holds a lot of pain in the past. Struggle can be an ongoing battle to love your own body, to care for your own body or mind. Whatever comes to mind when I bring these up: Take some time to sit with this question. Where in your life have you struggled?
Now imagine all these threads of your life: threads of joy, grief, and sorrow. Close your eyes and see those moments as beautiful bright threads. Span away from them, as if you are a camera taking the long view. You get further and further from the experience and you begin to see those bright colored threads woven together. What does that woven fabric look like from the long-perspective? Could it be that the hand of Grace is fashioning all that joy and longing and sorrow into something miraculous?
Sit with that possibility for a bit.
Close by praying this with me:
Oh Lord of the ill matched threads, help me weave something beautiful of this life. Amen.
A List of Things
Lisa Sharon Harper’s Twitter thread the day after Will Smith’s slap heard ‘round the world. As a white woman, it was challenging for me to immediately recognize that what happened at the Oscars had anything to do with race. Grateful for voices like Lisa Sharon Harper who helped me notice that there was more going on in the moment and in our collective response than what I first understood. This thread helped me sort through the intricate, complicated dehumanization and trauma that was behind the moment.
This small exploration into Margaret Wise Brown’s little known children’s book The Important Book felt beautiful and poignant.
Cole Arthur Riley’s piece in The Atlantic: “Social media is one way to pay attention. But it isn’t the only way. . . Healing is a very quiet thing. In the silence, we can wrap our wounds. There are times when taking shelter is a noble thing to do.”
Nadia Bolz-Weber joined Jennifer Garner on Instagram live this past Monday morning to pray. They prayed through The Lord’s Prayer, as only Nadia can do. It’s a beautiful fifteen minutes. I highly recommend you make some time for it.
David Gungor wrote a lament for our worship service at Good Shepherd last week. It’s heavy and beautiful and I’m so grateful to be in a church where lament is welcome and embraced.
One more thing! I just discovered Be a Heart Design on Instagram. Their store is exquisite. The cutest faith based prints, toys, and signs. Virgin Mary tea towels? It’s too much, y’all. I ordered St. Francis and Fruit of the Spirit window clings this past week for Ace. And a banner that says “All Things New.” Now, go shop.
Thank you for sharing this poem and this practice. My husband and I have a version of this too. I call it our hygge time. A lot of good growth comes from that time on the couch. We also "attend" Good Shepherd from CA, and we loved that lament. I love how it ends in the silence instead of wrapping it all up in a happy clappy Jesus bow. So good. Have a lovely Saturday.