In the New Testament, Jesus and his disciples encounter a blind man. “Who sinned,” his followers ask, “him or his parents? Why is he blind?”
“Neither,” Jesus said. “He’s blind so that you and everyone else could know that he could be healed.”
Read MoreA Wrinkle in Time is a weird book. It’s theological children’s science fiction. It’s about good and evil, angels that look like old women but are also something like pegasuses or stars, different planets, and giant brains. I love it. Like all really good science fiction, it’s much more about the power of love than it is about aliens.
There’s this moment in A Wrinkle in Time that I think about a lot. Meg passes through the Black Thing. The Black Thing is evil—literally, it is the physical form of evil, and by touching it, she is hurt. The wise people of a new planet treat her and help her regain her physical strength, but she is still wounded. When she lashes out at her most important people, her alien caretaker says, “Don’t judge her harshly, She was almost taken by the Black Thing. Sometimes we can’t know what spiritual damage it leaves.”
Read MoreWhen I was twenty-two, I ran into a professor in the elevator who said, “Hey, I need someone to do research for me in London. Want to go?”
Going to London is one of those turning points in my life. I spent six weeks there, and it had undue effect on the person I became. Like, I’d always ascribed to second wave feminism enough that I’d refused to care about clothes or makeup or anything appearance related, and then I went and was like, “There are exactly zero guys here I’m trying to impress, and I still want to know what I look like with eyeliner, so I’m gonna do it.” I’d always thought I didn’t like being outside, and one day, on the top of White Horse hill with the wind whipping around me, I found out that I loved being outside. Not being around people I knew meant that I could become who I wanted without fighting their expectations.
Read MoreIt may be that we’re not supposed to have favorite prophets, but I do. Isaiah speaks to me, Moses is my dude, but Alma the younger is probably the one I want to talk to most.
After a youth of moral experimentation and rebellion, Alma had one of those (literally) earth-shaking encounters with divinity. God moves in mysterious ways, like, in Alma’s case, a temporary coma in which he came to know mercy. Afterward, he became a missionary. In one particularly wicked city, he encountered Amulek, a lapsed man of God, who fed him and began preaching with him.
If you’re familiar with scripture (this one or others), then it won’t surprise you that this didn’t go over well. All the people who came to know God through Alma and Amulek’s teachings were eventually cast out or burned alive. It was horrendous in ways that the sparse details of the scripture allow us to skip over—the screams and the smell of burning flesh of people you know and love, the flames lit by your neighbors. This is the kind of thing that leaves soul scars, the the kind of thing that wakes you up years later, sweating and shaking.
Read MoreA few weeks ago I went with my in-laws to the Immersive Van Gogh Exhibit. We sat in a room as 600,000 cubic feet of projections and Van Gogh’s artwork flooded around us. “There’s two ways to watch this,” the ticket handler at the door told us, “You can watch it like a movie or you can experience it.”
I’m not very good at experiencing art. I feel bad about this, but so it is. Usually I walk around a museum for about twenty minutes, and then I think, That was cool. Is there a cafe or a gift shop? I don’t really know enough about art for it to touch me most of the time—but every once in a while, every once in a while it barrels past my ignorance and tags me anyway.
In the exhibit, they sometimes animated the paintings, and one in particular caught my eye. It was on every wall, this rocking man, gnarled and bent over, rocking back and forth and I thought, I recognize that. I know that feeling.
Read MoreI have many gifts. I am a good writer. I have a completely adequate choir voice. I am very good at comforting people. I’m a natural at milking goats. I can get bathrooms very clean.
I am not very good at forgiving. I forgive small slights easily and I anger slowly, but what my grandma calls “soul bruising,” the hurts my mom talks about passing through the heart—those take me a while.
My patriarchal blessing, the personal prophesy each member of my church receives, says something along the lines of, “Improve your capacity for forgiveness. It will make you more useful.” Every time I read it I grimace a little bit at this part. Oops, I think.
Sometimes I try and try and try to forgive and still come up wanting after years of effort. Sometimes, instead, I refuse to look at the pain. I sweep whatever calls for forgiveness under the rug so that I don’t have to go through the emotional labor of working it through. “Nothing to see here,” I insist, my back to the horse-sized lump in the rug. “Everything is A-OK.”
Read MoreWhen I was seventeen, I took a mediation class, and I had to write a paper about a conflict I was in and analyze it using the theories we’d been learning. This professor was a family friend. I’d known him for years. We went to the same potlucks. We ran into him at Costco. He knew my family. So when I told him I wanted to write about my sister for the paper, he laughed and said, “How could anyone be in conflict with Elle?”
I pointed at him. “Exactly.”
If you don’t have the benefit of knowing Elle, I’m sorry. She has freckles and blue eyes that I absolutely covet. She is magic with little kids and pets. She likes puns and indie pop and clothes and immigration studies. Her first words were “no thank you,” as in we’d say, “Elle, time to go to bed” and she’d say, “No thank you.” I’ve known her her entire life, and she’s never been anything but delightful.
At the time, Elle was twelve. She was known for being happy and sweet, neither of which were very good reflections of the complexity of her personhood. (To this day, one of the fastest ways to make Elle upset is to call her sweet.) Professor Ford couldn’t imagine anyone getting on her bad side, because he couldn’t imagine her having a bad side. He couldn’t imagine us being in conflict, and that was the “exactly,” because we weren’t in conflict. We were almost never in conflict. That was the problem.
Read MoreThe first time I got my heartbroken, I was an absolute mess. It was almost comical. It would have been, in a chickflick. It would have been like that part in Legally Blonde where she’s eating ice cream and yelling at the TV. My version involved a lot of crying in stairwells, only eating Clif bars, writing pages and pages of burn letters, and getting very little sleep. After two months of this, a guy in an elevator said to me, “You should probably take a nap.”
As always, my approach to this new problem was research. I listened to podcasts and read blogs and scientific articles. (Did you know that heartbreak is a physical phenomena wherein, deprived of the dopamine and oxytocin the relationship provided you, your body freaks out? Tylenol helps.) In addition to online resources, I pursued more traditional modes of research: people. I asked advice from everyone, all the time. Someone would say, “Hey, how are you?” And I’d say, “Not great. How do you deal with heartbreak?” My favorite response was Bentley’s. He said, “Reread Harry Potter. You’ll feel better by the end.”
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