3-2-1: Hopemongers' Edition

Hope: A User’s Manual is out in the world, and has been the #1 new release in Christian Faith for a week! (Don’t tell Amazon that I talk about the Avengers and Lord of the Rings at least as much as I talk about Jesus. Still, I am most grateful.)

A reviewer on Amazon called me a hopemonger (have you written a review yet? It’s a vital way to juice those algorithms), and I’ll take it. Today is one of my hodgepodge posts, as I find hope lurking in the hodge and the podge of life.

THREE THOUGHTS

Compost Corner: It’s been several weeks, and Juno the Composting Gonk Droid is still ingesting stuff and it’s all slowly breaking down. I’ve learned three things so far, all of which begin with P:
-Composting is PATIENT. It’s hard to see what’s happening, but the composting people I read say that sooner or later, pretty much everything decomposes if you give it enough time.
-Composting is not about PERFECTION, which means it’s not about PANICKING either. If the pile gets too dry, add “wet” items. If it gets too gross and sludgy, add dry stuff and/or spread it all out in the sun to dry out.

Composting offers good wisdom for life as I prepare to exit sabbatical. I’m trying to lean into patience and do away with perfection. And panicking never helps!

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A loved one recently lost her mother-in-law, and her entire family traveled to the funeral in another state. When she returned home, she discovered her kids’ school district doesn’t count funerals of grandparents as excused absences in its policy. Only immediate family: parents or siblings.

Set aside how ridiculous this is–as my loved one put it, “Even if you don't think a grandparent’s death is a big deal, the child’s primary caregiver has lost a parent. Are they supposed to leave their kid home alone and go to the funeral?” The whole thing makes my heart hurt. The last few years have been unbelievably hard. Nothing will make a global pandemic and millions of deaths “worth it,” but we could decide it’s the opportune moment to remake the world more humanely in large and small ways. Alas. Are we really so insistent on returning to the dysfunctional “before”?

As an aside, my loved one knew the teachers wouldn’t hold the absences against her kids–they’d be able to make up any assignments missed. But I long for structures that are as kind as many of the individuals within them. How can we imagine better ones together?

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Speaking of grief and funerals: I recently rewatched season 2 of Ted Lasso in preparation for the leadership cohort that begins this month, and noticed something interesting in the funeral episode. When the team gets off the bus and greets Rebecca before her father’s funeral, they all say some variation of “Sorry for your loss.” Nate, however, spouts a canned line about how “fathers are the training wheels of life” or somesuch. He catches himself, seeming to realize how inane the comment is, but defends himself by saying he wanted to say something different than everyone else.

Having presided over a number of funerals and walked with families in grief, let me affirm the lesson in this scene. Don’t get cute. At best, it will come across as canned and inauthentic; at worst, it can do great harm (“God needed another angel in heaven?” WTH??).

Only upon rewatching did I realize that the episode shows an example of what to do in addition to what not to do. Contrast Nate’s response with Ted’s. Ted says “sorry for your loss” but then goes beyond it, not with a platitude, but by sharing a fond memory of Rebecca’s father that made them all smile. It’s specific, personal, and from the heart. He succeeds where Nate’s clumsy attempt fails. (As if we needed more evidence that Ted is more emotionally mature than Nate.)

Moral of the story:
-I love you, I’m sorry, I’m here for you is perfectly adequate in the face of grief.
-Stories succeed where cliches fail.

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TWO QUOTES

…My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed

I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,

with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.
-Adrienne Rich

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Edmond McDonald wrote that when God wants an important thing done in this world or a wrong righted, [God] goes about it in a very singular way. [God] doesn’t release thunderbolts or stir up earthquakes. God simply has a tiny baby born, perhaps of a very humble home, perhaps of a very humble mother… and then–God waits. The great events of this world… are babies, for each child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged with humanity, but is still expecting goodwill to become incarnate in each human life. And so God produced a Gandhi and a Mandela and a Harriet Tubman, an Eleanor Roosevelt and a Martin Luther King, Jr., and each of us to guide the Earth toward peace rather than conflict.
-Marian Wright Edelman

[photo of my friend Elizabeth's sweet baby Andrew]

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ONE QUESTION

What is your next most elegant step?
(borrowed from Gibrán Rivera, courtesy of Emergent Strategy)

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What I'm Up To
I'm speaking at Faith+Lead's Book Hub in a couple of weeks: Hope, In Vulnerable Bodies: Addiction, Illness, & Exhaustion.