Getting Real

How are you? Really.

I’m not asking in that perfunctory way, where we sort of ask out of habit, and hope people will say, “I’m fine,” or “All is well,” because we don’t necessarily have time or bandwidth to hear the in’s and out’s of how someone really is.

Don’t we all know the exquisite gift when someone asks and really wants to know, and then takes the time to listen to us, really cares about what we have to say? I think we all hunger for exchanges like that-- to be seen and heard, to be witnessed, as we really are, not as we often think we should be or pretend to be.

Especially now. With the social distancing and masking, the things we have to do to keep ourselves and one another safe, it’s like we’re even more starved for real, genuine connection. We may go online to try to connect, but social media doesn’t exactly foster vulnerability in sharing, compassion in responding. If anything, it may make us feel more anxious and depressed, isolated and lonely.

I think about my little Luca. He wasn’t even two when the pandemic began, so it’s hard to say how he’s experiencing all this. But I know early on, he would stand on the balcony and yell to someone he saw in a yard three house away. He will still press his face to the glass of our windows, looking for somebody, anybody to greet. And since our return to playgrounds, I can hardly keep him from tackling other children. He runs up, talks in animated gibberish, gesturing wildly with his hands, and then follows them all over the play structures (while I apologize to the parents, and try to keep him from breathing in their face). The other day, a little girl starting playing chase with her dad, and bless him, Luca joined right in, laughing with delight as he chased her chasing him.

A friend of mine shared that in a recent FaceTime call between her 95-year-old grandmother in a nursing home and her sister, another resident photobombed the exchange. Apparently, this elderly woman tries to get in on everyone else’s calls. And sure enough, in a screen shot the sister took, there she was, in the corner of the frame.

It’s like we are desperately hungry for one another. For real, substantive, human exchange. Where we can say real, tender, and holy things like, “I’m struggling.” Or “This is hard.” Or “I’m so scared of what’s going on.” Or “I don’t know where God is in all this.”

As much as we worry about widespread misinformation campaigns writ larger (and believe me, they are worthy of deep concern), I am also worried that we’re losing the capacity to tell and hear one another’s truth - the full, messy, complicated mix of conflictual things we think and feel and are in our very being.

One of my favorite sentences from one of my favorite writers, Frederick Buechner, in his memoir Telling Secrets is this: It is important to tell at least from time to time the secret of who we truly and fully are—even if we tell it only to ourselves—because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing. (written long before Facebook, Instagram and the like, where we make a regular habit of putting forth highly edited versions of ourselves.)

And of course, I not only think this is what we long for in our human relationships, but also in our relationship with God, a place where we can bring our full humanness, our brokenness, our hardship, our pain, our shame, and hold it in the tender, merciful embrace of Love. Of course, many of us were not taught or invited to approach God that way. Instead, we learned explicitly or implicitly, that we had to clean up our act, use the right words, pray in a certain formulaic way. No wonder so many of us wanted and needed to leave the Church, or even leave God in the dust. The religion offered in so many places just made us feel worse or left us cold.

If you grew up in that kind of religious setting, or even a more neutral one, I realize the season of Lent may carry some dark overtones for you. Words and concepts often associated with Lent, like confession, repentance, fasting, and wilderness-- don’t exactly put a spring in your step for returning Home. But what if we thought of it instead, as an invitation to tell the real, whole truth of how we are, what we’re wrestling and struggling with, the ways we can’t seem to get our act together on our own, no matter how hard we try? What if we fast from our old, worn out images of God, let go of our oppressive ideologies and formulaic ways of praying, and just try meeting the Really Real with our real? What if we trusted that the longing in us for that kind of Love and Grace is God longing for us too?

I believe that’s what God wants . . the real us, in our delightful messiness and complexity. So in the coming weeks, when we hear the Lenten call to return, to change the direction we’re looking for our happiness (Thomas Keating’s definition of repentance), to prayer, fasting and self-examination, I hope we might hear it as a call to get real, with ourselves, one another, and ultimately God.

If you’d like to get real with others, I’d love to have you in either the Lenten small group, the retreat, or both. We will explore these themes in conversation, and try on ways of connecting with God and each other that invite authenticity and intimacy, fasting from whatever blocks us where we are in our own spiritual journey. One gift of the pandemic is you don't have to be here in the Atlanta area to participate; while it's not the same as being live, I've found Zoom connections to be quite intimate and lovely in their own way. You can read more below.

In the meantime, I hope you are taking good care of yourself, that you have some place to share your full, real self, at least with yourself and God.

Longingly,

Kimberly