“In a gift economy, wealth is understood as having enough to share, and the practice for dealing with abundance is to give it away. In fact, status is determined not by how much one accumulates, but by how much one gives away. The currency in a gift economy is relationship, which is expressed as gratitude, as interdependence and the ongoing cycles of reciprocity. A gift economy nurtures the community bonds that enhance mutual well-being; the economic unit is “we” rather than “I,” as all flourishing is mutual.”

― Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World

As I considered how we might say thank you to all who walked with my family through cancer this past year I kept coming back to the idea of gifts and sacrifices. Many, many people gave rides, dropped off food, prayed for me, sent flowers, offered medical advice, took extra shifts at Lydia’s House—while I went to doctors appointments and radiation and spent my mental bandwidth worrying about my mortality. Because of our community, our lives and work went on— the kids, their activities, the shelter. Ive frequently pondered, like the Psalmist, “How can I repay all the goodness given to me?”

In the ecosystem that we live in the repayment is not, primarily, money. Nor is it immediate reciprocal favors or thank you notes sent shortly after the meal is delivered (though I am always impressed with fast thank you notes). I’d say repayment in this gift economy comes in grand gestures— we offer our best in return for others’ sacrifices and a virtuous circle is established.

The particular gestures of this season involve our family moving deeper into the life others have helped us craft and hold. They include a more formal commitment to Meridith, calling her family and not just friend. They include offering more of ourselves to the community that’s held us— in this case by taking more responsibility at the shelter by living next door. And, of course, my family’s gestures always include hosting and parties, creating beautiful spaces and offering delicious food, because that’s what we like to do.

Last weekend we held a Mass of commissioning in the Lydia’s House backyard, for our family to commit to Meridith and to life at the shelter, for our staff and volunteers to commit to the work they have chosen to share with us, for our extended community to commit to support us on this Christian road less traveled.

It brought together many of the people that have stood with us during this particular hard year, and for many years—most of our team at Lydia’s House and the daycare, our maintenance volunteers, our house duty volunteers, meal volunteers, and many of our donors.

Here's some more pictures:

In our attempt to say thank you to our community for past offerings, we now to have cause to thank them for their generosity last weekend. The party itself was the effort of many hands. Thank you many times over to Laura Yrigoyen for catering with love and care, bringing in vegetables from her garden to create a dip and spread layout that was a middle aged mom’s culinary fantasy (yes to zucchini butter, yes to tomato confit, yes to eggplant whatever that was). The night after the event I actually dreamt about watermelon with lime sauce, garlic aioli on roasted potatoes, and strawberry rhubarb pie. Yes to the leftovers that we’ll eat all week.

The whole setting was beautiful and Catholic Worker extravagant. Thanks to Amanda and Shay and Jane and the interns for bringing many touches of light and life.

And thank you to Joyce Mow, who made our new mural “The Peaceable Kingdom” with the help of kids in our community. This was it’s public unveiling! The mural was on display as kids bombarded the adjacent playset and bluegrass music serenaded the pink, Norwood sunset. Just Midwest Catholic perfect really.

Part of this life is that the rhythm of grand offerings and joyful receiving always continues. As Laura and I chopped cucumbers the night before the Mass I imagined it wouldn’t be long before our cohort of elders start catering all the weddings for Annie’s girl crew. I told her, “It’s good to practice this while the stakes are lower!” We, the women that raised them, all know we’ll contribute, mentally saving the date for our contributions long before the offerings are solicited.

The bigness of what people in our circle bring forth makes me weepy. During the after mass dinner, the maintenance volunteers, in their 70s, asked me, “Do you need any help moving into the new place?” A former board member asked, “What can I do to help your kids feel welcome in this new home?” And as people walked out of the event, they handed me checks, “I just want to make a contribution to Lydia’s House.”

We’re never trying to get even, just offering and receiving, borrowing and sharing. It’s a beautiful, extravagant life. As the book of Corinthians says, love does not keep a tab.

This scripture from Mark, has been coming to mind a lot lately, as I’ve been purging the house for the move. It struck me poignantly as I watched our cohort of young people wash 1000 dishes while I packed up leftovers:

²⁸ Then Peter spoke up, “Look, we have left everything and followed you.”

²⁹ “Yes,” Jesus said to them, “and I tell you that those who leave home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and for the gospel, ³⁰ will receive much more in this present age. They will receive a hundred times more houses, brothers, sisters, mothers, children, and fields—and persecutions as well; and in the age to come they will receive eternal life.

Finally…

Thank you to our Xavier students Grace and Claire and Izzy and Brendan, our live in crew Marita and Theresa, Annie’s longtime friends Karis Stoxen and Riley Hanauer and our neighbors Jessica and Ruby for cooking and serving and waiting tables. Thank you to Dustin for pressure washing everything before the event. Thank you to Rob for days of yard work and managing the servers and cutting pie like a boss. Thank you to Rev. Paul Lickteig for officiating. Thank you to Maria for tamales and Patrick at 16 Bricks for bread and Matthew Owensby for chicken and potatoes. Thank you to Shay for bringing flowers from her job at Target and Amanda for bringing flowers from her garden in Westwood. Thank you to the Eilerman elders for coolers of ice, holding back the 90 degree heat. Thank you to Maria and Robert and Carol and Melody for soda and desserts. Thank you to our band, My Brothers Keeper, for cantoring and playing Dolly covers at my request.

Amber Lapp, a fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, is my most consistent companion in this journey to no-where and everywhere. Lately, considering our respective work, we’ve been discussing what it takes to draw in and hold a person or family— ie, how one might break out of infidelity, addiction, poverty, lethargy or depression—all of which seem to have strongholds in our respective circles.

In the past week we’ve contended with some major human set backs here at Lydia’s House. I’m acutely aware that the ecosystem we offer isn’t enough. I’ve been longing for a world found in this book. The scene is a modern Catholic mission in Uganda, where the parish is the center of a life that includes (also) schools and gardens and easy access to vowed religious people and daily mass.

Our family has, for the last two years, been going to Church of the Resurrection in Bond Hill, an African American Catholic parish. In my wish dream, Lydia’s House is adjacent to Church of the Resurrection, and Church of the Resurrection has a full time priest ( or priests— it’s a dream) and an adjacent convent, and from that place there is a grocery store to walk to and also jobs. After church the priest(s) plays soccer with our boys that have no dads (this happens in Ghana, I’m told by our Ghanaian priest). The school is not just the Jesuit boys academy that's already there but also a girls school and a daycare. And life can happen without a car. And everyone goes to Church together and school together so there’s actually a lot of eyes on the kids. And, as I wish for it, it seems impossible.

What’s noteworthy is that our neighborhood, Norwood, Ohio used to have all of this. In 1960 there was a parish and a parish school, St Elizabeth, and a General Motors plant and a series of walkable small Kroger grocery stores. The Sisters of Charity had a convent and there was a rectory with multiple priests. The GM plant funded the community so richly that there was garbage pickup multiple times a week and the Rec center offered free children’s programming in the parks daily. From stories older neighbors told me, many families had 6+ kids. And many of those families went from moving up here from Appalachia, illiterate, to sending kids to college. (and, also, it was a sun down town so none of our Lydia’s House guests would have been welcome to take advantage of all of this, so let’s not romanticize it too much)

Amber and I turn all of this over, again and again. What is a world where a family or person that’s struggling doesn’t have to do it all by themselves? Why is our Church, the Catholic Church, less invested in this project of holding people to be their best selves in the ways, it seems, it once was? Why are the benefits of tight community, church, walkable church schools, and living wage jobs only for those that already have so much. I think here of Hyattsville, Maryland, which I learned about from , where well off Catholics have recreated parish life of old. It sounds great but it's not a working class or poor folk panacea, but rather more of a DC enclave.

Amber and I aren’t the only ones thinking about this problem. Ben Sasse, a former senator who’s dying of pancreatic cancer, gave a recent interview to Christianity Today. About his hopes for a future he won’t live to see he said:

America works and thrives to the degree that people have thick local communities and places and small platoons and congregations to assemble for worship on Sunday morning and throughout the week. Right now, I think we’re living through a period of institutional collapse, and we’re going to need to go through a wave of Tocquevillian institution-building. We’ve been mostly harvesting the consumer benefits of a technology revolution without acknowledging the production, vocational, and communal costs of burning all the districts where local community happens.

That’s a lot of what I’m wrestling through in my last months. It’s both small in that it’s directly connected to my son, and it’s more shared in the sense that I think raising kids well, and especially raising boys well, requires shared attention to what self-discipline, self-restraint, self-control look like as you come of age. Right now we don’t have a lot of models for that kind of deliberate conversation.

I keep praying through my part in building this world. For years, we've been offering Christian education at our shelter. Of late, I’m trying to encourage the sacraments for our current and aftercare guests, hoping to connect them more strongly to the metaphysical and the institutional. It’s proving harder than I thought it would be. To get a baby baptized, for example, you need to show up a few times in a row at our church before the deacon will schedule it. Fair, I guess, but it’s hard to coordinate this effort with people who have no cars and can’t walk to church. I guess the concern is, will they keep showing up after the baptism? I think, if we had what they have in Uganda, they would. As is, I’m doubtful. Also, do they need to, even if coming again is the ideal?

Maybe I don’t understand baptism.

I keep iterating. This fall we will launch out on a few new initiatives. My family is moving to the shelter compound. Though not priests or nuns, we will (effectively) staff the rectory. My co worker Meridith will be stepping into a pastoral role after years as the case manager and we hired a actual case manager. I’m working on “sacrament works” for our religious education program to catechize the kids and take this as far as I, alone, can. Matthew Owensby and our friend Frank will take on the hard work of creating programming for our most vulnerable kids, the 11-13 year old boys. I’m working with the Miami University school of architecture to create a bigger footprint on our block— more living community to offer more support.

What I can’t do is get a Catholic Church back where there once was one. Those days are done, and our diocese is closing more and more of the smaller parishes because there aren’t enough priests. The old convent on our street is now an AirBnB.

My piecework feels like that, and often like my own efforts, lacking the multiplication of the holy spirit. My longings here are to pull un-churched kids through sacramental life, including first communion; to be part of a Church that has things going on all the time that they could go to; to not hold this all as just our small motley crew but with the support of a larger institution. I’m not sure I have in me a wave of “Tocquevillian institution-building” but I wish I could lean more into an existing Church.

I want to draw the families we serve into a 2000 year old tradition that has long been successful at keeping men in families and giving boys a path to become men. I just don’t think I can or should reinvent that wheel. I want more men to step up, to be dads to these families, and fathers to these parishes. I admit, whole heartedly, we women can’t do this all on our own and nor can like, 40 priests, in a very large diocese. Noting that my own boys seemed poised to step up, I regret not having more children.

Perhaps at the end of our offerings is grace. I wrote about this last week— bringing what I have, knowing it’s only going to work when met with the grace of God. I’d like to think me and Meridith (and my husband Ben and my kids and a crew of volunteers) really are doing all we can and will keep offering more. We brought some of the boys from the Lydia’s House community to church last Sunday. They knelt at the kneeler and it felt like a thin space, heaven meeting earth. I imagined offering them up— God, can you meet these boys where I can’t, can you give them what I can’t and their fathers haven’t and the Church seems unable to. Their mom told me they couldn’t stop “geeking out” about it when they got home :)

Noting that our non-church church at Lydia’s House can only do so much, that women can only do so much, that the secular world can only do so much, what I’m bringing to the table is like 5 loaves and 2 fishes, table scraps. What I’m asking for is food for the whole hillside, and I’m asking for it now, not after these boys are gone.

I read this piece from the Catholic Worker Roundtable

From the weekly update from the Hartford Catholic Worker, Christopher Doucot wrote about the joy of reconnecting with the first child they met back in 1993; PJ is now a “happy, healthy, successful, and delightful” 40 year old. But sadly, Ducot acknowledges that not every child they have met lives to see adulthood:

We were utterly unprepared for the reality that not all the kids we’ve loved over the years would live to 40. Last week Lil’ Richard was gunned down. Richard Williams was 20. He began coming to the Green House when he was 6 and continued to be a regular presence up until the cursed pandemic. Lil’ Richard had a cherubic chubby smile. He was joyful and mischievous. He also had an intellectual disability that left him open to manipulation. I don’t know if we would have been able to maintain a relationship if the pandemic hadn’t happened, but I’d like to believe we would have and he would be alive today because instead of being potentially manipulated into increasingly bad choices we would have nurtured him.

The whole of our society, including us, failed Richard. We have the financial resources in the U.S. to end poverty and provide the kind of support someone like Richard needs to flourish, but do we have the moral resources? I read somewhere that budgets are moral documents. They certainly are. If we want to know what matters to a person or a society we just need to assess how they budget their time and money. Did Richard matter? He did to us. Please pray for his friends and family, and please work to change how we spend our time and treasure in this land of plenty.

I know this story is coming for us at Lydia’s House, a tide we can’t stop, and I want to swallow the water like the 5 Chinese Brothers in the children’s book. When the brother can’t hold the deluge anymore, though, he lets it out and the little boy he saved drowns. What we need is not one holy person trying his or her best, but a dam system, lock engineers, planning and monitoring with back up alarms.

So with Amber I’m praying, Lord hold back this flood. Give me the strength, courage and discernment to keep doing what I can to build community, raise my own boys to do more than their part, teach religious education, invite families to church and pick them up and send them texts the night before reminding them that I’m doing so. Meet these scrap offerings with a miracle.

Or perhaps, offer me the scraps to start, like the syro-phoenician woman who asked for the leftovers from the master’s table— her willingness to make something out of nothing an adequate enough show of faith to move Jesus to heal her daughter. Can I call down a crumb of faith, like an epiclesis, to help me believe the miracle of thick community can happen for those who are struggling in our circle; when small progress comes then I’ll present the gift back for a consecration, each iteration holier and more capable of redemption than the last. Can God and I pass back and forth the unnoticed and sometimes unwanted excess falling from heaven and our neighbor’s abundance? Can we hold the scraps with unwavering faith and see them multiplied by the Holy Spirit, until everyone has more than enough?

___

And for my grandma and Ben’s mom, here’s some first day of school photos of my 3 kids!

Early August the lectionary graced us Catholics with the story of the loaves and fishes in the Bible. It’s one of those greatest hits gospel stories that I actually don’t hear because I’ve heard it so much. But this year a friend was giving a sermon on it, and my kids were out of town, so I decided to go to Church and actually pay attention.

When Jesus heard of the death of John the Baptist,
he withdrew in a boat to a deserted place by himself.
The crowds heard of this and followed him on foot from their towns.
When he disembarked and saw the vast crowd,
his heart was moved with pity for them, and he cured their sick.
When it was evening, the disciples approached him and said,
“This is a deserted place and it is already late;
dismiss the crowds so that they can go to the villages
and buy food for themselves.”
Jesus said to them, “There is no need for them to go away;
give them some food yourselves.”
But they said to him,
“Five loaves and two fish are all we have here.”
Then he said, “Bring them here to me,”
and he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass.
Taking the five loaves and the two fish, and looking up to heaven,
he said the blessing, broke the loaves,
and gave them to the disciples,
who in turn gave them to the crowds.
They all ate and were satisfied,
and they picked up the fragments left over—
twelve wicker baskets full.
Those who ate were about five thousand men,
not counting women and children.

His argument was that the important part of the story isn’t specifically God’s provision to the hungry, but the original offering that the apostles brought. The miracle, then, isn’t primarily that God fed all the people as much as that the disciples offered their paltry lunch scraps and said scraps became enough. Jesus lifts up 5 loaves and 2 fishes, and what comes back is food for the whole hillside.

I know this way of multiplication because sometimes it happens at the shelter; we might move heaven and earth for a family but first we ask, “What can you bring to the table.” If the answer is nothing, typically nothing in offered in return. 0 x 0 =0

The preacher said that once he found a rock on the sidewalk that said “You are enough” and he realized that, actually, it’s a lie. His best offering is his own version of the measly one the disciples offered; it’s made sufficient for a hungry world only through God’s multiplication. He ended by admitting, “I am never enough.”

Those words keep resonating through me like a mantra. I sit at the stop sign trying to type an email and the car behind me beeps. I am never enough. The carpool schedule turns into a spreadsheet and the thought of opening it makes my stomach hurt. I am never enough. The shelter power goes off; we fool around with a generator and try to move thawing chicken to other freezers. It’s hot and I can’t get the generator on, and it starts raining again. I am never enough. I walk into my house to find every surface covered with kid refuse and laundry. I am never enough. I’m late to the parent meeting to learn how to help my son use the grade and calendar app at school. The moderator looks at me and says, “well that’s ironic.” I am never enough. I go to a protest for Haitian residents who lost temporary protective status; they leave their appointments wearing ankle monitors. I am never enough. We enthusiastically plan for the wedding of a former guest only to have her cancel it the day before—she’s not ready for this commitment. We are never enough.

As these shortcomings and disappointments pop up on my ontological control panel, yellow lights blinking “all signs are not a go,” I pause. The choices are existential angst or prayer.

The mantra repeats, not as self flagellation, but as the psalmists’ call and response like

The power grid conspires against me, the thawed chicken melting with a cleaning chore that has no foreseeable end

O Lord, my strength and cunning, all that I have, is never enough

The realization is that many things in the physical world just don’t work, my body often being one of them. My brain may be processing slower than it once did, or maybe it has more to process. Regardless, no one should be sending emails at stop signs. I actually rest in the realization that I’m never enough. At the next stop sign, I pray.

I’ve been having this contemplation that the call is always to a larger, deeper, wider life. If the Kingdom metaphors are the growing dough leavened with yeast or a mustard seed that becomes a tree then going deeper into Christian faith can’t be shrinking just because the body is weaker, the fuse is shorter, the children’s needs more complex. And yet, the addition of all of the problems of aging, and the natural decline in estrogen (even without Letrozole to help that along) is a siren song to become set in our ways, to stop making new friends, to lean into addiction and away from engagement.

The offering I have, seemingly, is less than I had to give 15 years ago. On second thought, maybe it’s just different. The next consideration is that the depletion of the physical is an invitation to the metaphysical.

Whatever the offering is, all that I can do is offer it, and then ask for the multiplication. Can my general lack of self discipline, achy joints, tendency to lose my cool, my phone and keys, etc be put on the altar, lifted up, met by the power of the holy spirit to be enough to cultivate love, peace, joy, kindness,patience, gentleness, self control— the traits I don’t possess naturally but pray for at the second stop sign. Can I become bigger, wiser, less anxious, growing to be the kind of person that, when she shows up, makes things better.

The freedom in this, the lightness, is that I’m never going to arrive at perfection in this life. I’m not going to find the hack that always keeps my keys visible or sort out calendar double bookings or handle interpersonal friction right the first time every time, unlocking the secret to everlasting life. And yet I do have access to the words of everlasting life. They just aren’t mine— I didn’t think them up. They were here before I was born and will be here after I’m gone. All I can do is keep showing up, laying what I have on the altar, praying something simple like, “Lord Jesus, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

I’m reading the Pope’s encyclical for the second time. This is what he has to say about human weakness

Everything that appears as a “limit” — incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability — tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship. And yet we must remember that humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them.

It is precisely within our limitations that the following find a place: compassion, as well as a sincere concern for the needs of others; a generosity that can emerge even in the midst of darkness and failure; spiritual experience and the worship of God.

And so, if Leo is right, there’s a paradox here. Not that we should go looking for frailty or failure, but that it shows up as a gift, opening space for us to have mercy on ourselves and others. The apostle Paul said, “God delivered all to disobedience, that he might have mercy upon all.” The logic follows that mercy, humility, softening is more valuable than, say, arriving at the calendar meeting on time. The not enough is “a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship.”

And perhaps this is the prayer at the altar, not just that my frailty would turn into abundance, but that the maturity and generosity that comes in the constant self realization necessary to ask for mercy would become the abundant return. That this rhythm would cause me not just to age but to ripen. That the ripe version would be more than food for new seeds, but sweet in and of itself.

Finally, an invitation. Our family will be reading “Magnifica Humanitas” with the Lydia’s House community this fall. Let me know if you’d like to join us.

My friend Anne always encourages us to run Lydia’s House summer programs with the essential argument “When kids show up on their first day of school the teacher asks them to write an essay entitled What I Did On My Summer Vacation. They need something to write!”

So I thought I’d take the prompt and give a recap for our family, this August 2026…

Annie, Sam and I spent most of our summer running the aforementioned Lydia’s house kids programs, with Jacob along as a camper. While it left me very tired, it was a sweet joy to work together to do something hard and meaningful.

4 of the 5 of us took a cruise, a gift from Ben’s parents (thank you).

We spent a long weekend at the Millar Family Lake house. For me, this was the best 5 days of summer. Just yes to the speed boat, tubing, eating on the patio, lake swimming and visits from friends while we stayed put.

Ben got in the ring with the residents of Over The Rhine who brought NIMBY vibes to his Peaslee Neighborhood Center affordable housing project. As a result he went to lots of hearings, then sauna’d daily on the cruise ship to recover from said hearings. He also drove the speed boat, smoked many cigars, took Sam to some Reds games, napped, fixed things, held all the babies, cleaned up after Camp Lydia’s House and took Jacob to Kings Island. He ventured out on many long walks with me where we discussed the aforementioned and our upcoming move and what life will be like when our kids are grown…the ponderings of a old married couple in mid life.

Sam turned 14. He played a lot of backyard soccer and came inside occasionally to fret that we were getting behind on the (daily) parent communications from St X. Toward the end of summer he spent a week at Catholic Youth Summer camp, where his favorite part was morning devotion and his least favorite part was spraining his ankle. With Matthew Owensby, he took an interest in film cameras and got one for his birthday from Maria and Robert Krzeski. Putting his photography skills to work, he made the end of summer video montage for Lydia’s House, which was awesome. When not patiently accompanying little boys through reading and carousel riding, he watched the World Cup, reluctantly completed his own summer reading and served as his brother’s frequent companion on roller coasters

Annie managed her summer camp staff like a boss and also was the camp life guard. She hosted a solid number of funcs (shorts for functions), part of a coordinated and complicated schedule to maximize social time with her girl gang. She altered some thrifted clothes, got last minute tickets to Noah Kahn, and baked many cookies. In late July she studied at the Youth Theological Institute at Emory, learning about liberation theology and college campus opulence. She enjoyed the freedom of her first summer of being a driver, alternating trader joes runs with fun beverage jaunts. She hung out with her cousin on the cruise ship, hung out with her mom for late evening chats, and (when introverting) read so many books.

Jacob got very close to completing the Harry Potter series, and made a “thermometer” to track his progress, which (as a gift from Anne) will end in a trip to Harry Potter world. He paused reading to look at pictures of the theme park, dreaming about roller coasters when not riding them. He hosted his own share on funcs— a weekend with his cousin, a Kings Island trip, a back flip party. Because he’s the bosses son, he went to camp Lydia’s House but got reprieves to go to acting camp and art camp and lego camp. On Saturdays he met with his new acting coach to practice monologues and write scripts. He harassed me to take him to Hollywood to try out for something, but (in the absence of making it big) continued his lemonade stand hustle and (when introverting?) hid under the couch and used the IPAD too much. Just because he could, he typically moonwalked instead of walking—inspired by the MJ movie. Most recently, he watched Spiderman, and then wanted to be Spiderman, so has been working on his routine with a crew of amateur gymnasts from the Lydia’s House guest kid circle. All this led to stepping on a nail, so we added in a late evening tetanus update last week. Probably should just keep him on the 5 year schedule…

Summer is ending with a bit of a thud. The reality of activity scheduling, 3 different schools, the PSAT, our impending move, and trying to coordinate even one dinner a week for this family of 5 together is pressing in.

All the friction seems to be getting to me more than it used to, and I can’t help but think stripping out the estrogen is a contributor. I met with my oncologist last week and went over the seemingly new issues(feelings of panic, achy joints, hot flashes, weight gain) and he was like, “Yes, those are the side effects of letrozole.” After looking at some data on the actual percentages of how much the drug is reducing my cancer risk (about 5%), we decided/ I decided to stop it, while continuing ovarian suppression. He said “I feel comfortable with that.”

Also, modern parenting life is just a lot— so I might just have those side effects without estrogen blockers. I see you middle aged mothers of children in the aspirational class. May the force and the lexapro and the google calendar be with us all as we pair college applications with colonoscopies and the general malaise of aging.

AND Happy Birthday Maria. You’re the best. Glad we got to celebrate you this week!

“This is a first important aspect of how God is near and makes himself known: encountering his Kingdom marks a turning point that does not limit life but enlarges it.

If anything must change on our part, it is only so that our lives may be opened to greater possibilities, not fewer.”

Pope Leo XIV

When last I left off, I was circling the drain. The combination of overwork, despair and irritability left me terrified of Letrozole and my own vulnerability re having my hormones messed around with. Am I not bigger than my estrogen supply? Was crashing out a placebo effect or a mild symptom that can be outrun with a mind over matter approach? Like my oncologist recommended, could it just be an issue of doing more yoga and meditation (neither of which I did before).

If I were to use one word for reaching the end of my capacity it would be embarrassed. I watch the moms at Lydia’s House single parent 3,4, or 5 kids, work at night, deal with broken cars, attempt to engage with broken family members, and they rarely melt down nor can they take a week off or schedule out (sometimes costly) friend dates. This is not false humility; really I’m wondering how they hold so much and my summer did me in?

My prayer in this past week has been “Might I draw on the strength of God to be all in on a Kingdom that’s expanding?”

When I consider the Pope’s push that we open our lives to greater possibilities, it brings to mind my Dad, living in The Villages ( a golf cart retirement compound in Florida). I’m sad to watch as each year his life gets smaller. The community is designed to strip all of the friction out of daily tasks, all relationships are optional and based on affinity, and the newspaper features articles like “My ungrateful children don’t call. I’m cutting them out of my will.” I’ve seen his life shrink into isolation, unable and unwilling to handle stress; it’s not the simple, carefree adventure that’s advertised in the golf commercials.

Considering his example as an extreme, I’ve been attentive this week to the reality that we have to stretch ourselves to the edge to get the edges to stretch. Challenge is a gift. Staying agile is a gift. The call is to a larger life, in whatever way that manifests.

So while I consider how the challenges of this summer stretched me in good ways, I’m also considering self care. And here, I’ll add, I’m skeptical of too much self care in a dying world. I don’t want to get anywhere near the Villages lifestyle middle aged mom edition. But since people have been checking on me, I want to say, I’ve taken some steps and I’m doing much better.

I thought I’d share highlights from my two week journey to recompensation (with a AI generated cartoon that gives me great hair and makes me look like I love exercise):

And here’s the narrative of my self care marathon

daily mass and adoration

I’ve written before about doing the things, and I just can’t say enough about how good it is to live in a city that has daily mass all the time on every corner. Thanks Bellarmine, St. Francis Xavier and The Holy Spirit center. Thanks everyone that makes this happen so I can just show up— I see you altar cloth changer, candle lighter, sound technician.

praying with Presbyterians

The ladies Bible study of New City Church invited me to speak to them about Lydia’s House. I joined their evening of reflection on humility with a key note chock full of CS Lewis quotes, and at the end one of the sweet church goers prayed for me. Also, the potluck of grilled chicken and 20 salads was like taking a journey to my southern church upbringing, the low-carb version.

spiritual direction

I started a new spiritual director last season and he and I do a lot of laughing through my sessions. None the less, it’s good to have built rapport with someone when I wasn’t crazy so I could visit him when I was.

a morning at the life of the world cafe

Our neighborhood hippy pay as you can cafe always has coffee and pastries and people I know on Saturday morning. I stopped by after Pilates, chatted with former guests, co-workers, and Annie’s girl crew and ended the morning eating kale with Meridith and her tango pal. Happy birthday Riley Jo!!

teaching religious education

talking to children about God is a lifelong piece of my vocation, even if they don’t really understand why someone would trade baskets of pearls for one special treasure. “Seeds planted,” I tell myself. Their parents get to go to church uninterrupted, which is a gift I want to give people with young children, as a bonus.

wild weed

Meridith recommended it and Mary Burke Rivers took me up on the offer, so Sunday night was church followed by beef tartare, striped pasta and a honey comb popsicle, plus good company, all at OTR’s new fancy restaurant. There are few better than the fabulous executive director of OTRCH who happens to be my husband’s boss, so thanks Mary for being fabulous with me.

hip hop line dancing

Ok. It was actually more like smooth Jazz line dancing but many thanks to my friends Shauna, Shea, and Jill for coming with me to Corinthian Baptist church on a Tuesday night to learn the cha-cha with lots of retired ladies. This is a yes. I will be going back.

the hard pilates class

“Ian, I loved the video of you pole dancing in that black onesie,” said the super buff 60 year old woman in the Saturday morning class, on the reformer next to me. Ian, the instructor, was a character, and I managed to survive the advanced class which was kind of a good time and definitely a good story.

walking and talking with trusted friends

This is now part of my weekly repertoire and a way I’m getting my cancer prescribed exercise in. Thanks super busy people for meeting me at all hours and discussing how the Holy Spirit might be moving while also mocking the insanity with me.

watching the sunrise while listening to Pray as You Go

My spot is sunrise at Eden Park with the Pray as You Go App. Nothing like the car being filled with the sound of bells and angelic voices while the pink sun rises over the river valley that I’ve called home most of my life. Around me are health aids on break and workers cleaning up last night’s garbage and I especially appreciate that this stunning sight is free to anyone willing to pull in at 6am.

A clean house

My kids and Ben are on a cruise for a week, so in addition to lots of silence I had Tina, the woman who cleans for us, come and clean everything. This may be the longest my house has been clean ever.

Bifocals

I’ve needed these for a while but finally just got it done. I can see all the time and not just when I can find my (always lost) readers.

All the beverages

Spicy Mango lemonade from Aldi, Caiden Nobbe’s favorite banana smoothie, daily Nespresso, an actually good NA wine at Wildweed, Passion Tazo tea, Meridith’s daily iced teas at work, a “float” bar for my movie night. Ice + drink served me well, even as I’m still navigating alcohol free life.

What I want to appreciate about this list is that most of it were preferences, people and practices I’ve cultivated during times of consolation that were “on the shelf” waiting to be pulled down to fight back the desolation. As Meridith and I like to say, “Thanks former me for knowing what future me might need.”

And I’m super happy for my family that they are on the Eilerman family cruise this week, but once again, past me did a good job of knowing that present me just needed to be home. Is this what wisdom feels like?

Finally, I’m still debating taking Letrozole. Took it every other day. Felt weird. Not sure what to do with that. I have an oncology follow up and blood work next week.

Don’t get cancer my middle aged friends. It’s a bad time.

This summer started with a new cancer drug, Letrozole, and stomach issues. I stopped it as in May I had no time for new health problems. Then I took an epic, really great trip up the east coast. But travel. Staying with lots of people. I came back tired. We rolled right into moving Meridith to a new apartment; our help were middle aged peers, each of us with an ailment. Then, quickly, we turned over her old unit to move a homeless family into.

The next day we started summer day camp. We were teaching reading and swimming to 20 formerly homeless kids a day; we have limited knowledge on pedagogy for either craft. Our help was my teenagers, a couple of high school and college students, a Bruderhof artist, and Meridith’s charming brother (pictured below). We muddled through with chat gpt and lots of time outs. We did this day after day for five weeks.

Annie, age 16, was the camp director. She did great, but needed a fair bit of help. Sam, age 14, was supposed to be the chef, but he didn’t really want to be the chef… so I was the chef, and the disciplinarian, and the trouble shooter on all things.

Just as camp started, one of our former guests showed signs of pre-term labor at 26 weeks. She was afraid to go to the emergency room because no one would keep her 8 year old, and she didn’t want the EMT to call child protection. Ben and I started keeping the 8 year old. Then they moved back in to the shelter. She left two dogs in her apartment with no plan; Meridith re-homed the dogs then departed for a 2 week trip to a retreat in Scotland (which she needed. Good for her!)

Interspersed in day camp and high need guest care were texts and emails from a variety of people upset with me for not offering help in ways that matched their desires. I responded to some; not others. This particular energy is draining: “I’m sorry I didn’t meet your expectations.”

On Monday nights we ran family fun nights. After each Monday of camp, we cleaned everything and re-set the dining room and hosted 30-40 people for line dancing or the Opera or science on wheels and dinner. Sometimes we self catered (as in cooked everything for dinner after cooking lunch). Both kitchens were a disaster, all the time.

Tuesday- Thursday night we kept dinner going at the shelter. Sometimes I helped cook that too.

In the midst of all the chaos, on July 1 I re-started Letrozole, because I want to be responsible to my breast cancer treatment regimen. Letrozole suppresses estrogen, pushing a body prematurely into menopause. My skin started to break out while, simultaneously, wrinkling and looking older. I felt pretty irritated, which was maybe a side effect, and maybe just a product of my life. I was hot all the time, but it was also 101 outside. Hot flashes? Climate change? Both? I also fell off a bed trying to change out a mattress and hurt my foot, just to add injury to insult.

Last weekend we hosted 60 people for a Lydia’s House family camp out. Ben and I are the only ones of the crew that regularly camp. I organized all the meals for 5 dozen people; I assigned jobs to the ten staff; some got done and some didn’t and then I had the martyr feeling of “I’ll just do it all myself.”

On Sunday morning of family camp, I felt crazy. I announced, “I just need to leave.” I had hit bottom. I put my two boys and my niece in the car. If they talked to me, I snapped at them. They were afraid. It was time to go home, though my absence left Ben and Meridith to deal with checking everyone out of 10 cabins, and cleaning up.

My doctor friend came over the next day and suggested I ask my oncologist to stop Letrozole or increase anxiety meds. “It’s messy to go through menopause abruptly and sooner than necessary,” she told me. “You are capable of holding a ton and not having a meltdown. This isn't normal for you,” she told me. “No body wants to be around a person in this process,” I responded.

I sent my oncologist a note: “I feel out of control. Like my mood is all over the place.” “It can happen,” he replied. “Give the medicine a few months.” He suggested I start meditating and doing yoga.

Of menopause, I liked this description found in McSweenys

Your stupid ovaries are slowing and/or stopping their production of estrogen, a female hormone that makes all kinds of wonderful things happen. They’ve had enough, they’re retiring, and couldn’t give two shits what kind of desolation they leave behind because they’re assholes. In other words, they’re like rich old parents who decide to travel the world, spend your inheritance, and forget you have a birthday.

I went to Father Del, my spiritual director, and asked what to do in a time of desolation. He said “Things you like. Maybe go to the movies.” And then he added, “God might be trying to teach you something. You usually learn something in desolation. Try just feeling the feelings. Weakness is part of being human.”

Because I wasn’t fit to be a kind boss, following the family camp melt down, I took the week off work, made a schedule of fun things to do next week, sat in silence a lot, and attempted to see through health appointments (like the optometrist) that I’ve neglected for the last year. I felt the feelings. I went to church every day. I sat in my car and listened to music, since it’s the only actually private space I have. Like a withered plant, I attempted to perk up with solitude.

I decided that it was ok to bottom out; that meant I was indeed being poured out like a libation, a desire I’ve previously expressed as a positive. How am I to know what it means to be poured out if I never experience emptiness? There are less interesting ways to go down than helping people move, taking in extra kids and running camps for homeless families while navigating cancer treatment side effects.

Not long into the respite week I got a call from Sam’s Catholic youth camp that he sprained his ankle and I needed to pick him up, 3 hours away. I told them to wrap it and get him some crutches. Amazingly, they did (and got an x-ray. It’s not broken). The camp is a place that prides itself on miracles. This week I’m praying for a miracle for him, and for me too. In my case, might my capacity expand to meet my complicated, chaotic and estrogen suppressed life?

(bonus, watch that link above at minute 1:28 for a testimony from Sam calling God “Amazing and miraculous.” My heart.)

And I’m ending on this, because watching it makes me laugh hysterically and don’t we all need some time with Jacob singing and dancing to Billie Jean?

It’s all gonna be ok. The mostly self chosen intensity of the summer is done. Fortunately, I’ve lived long enough to know that desolation is followed by consolation.

Last week was the 1 year mark of the cancer odyssey. I did a wrap up of “lessons learned” but had this post hanging out in drafts, still on the cancer theme, so thought I’d send it. I’m also working on a piece about friendship for Plough and one about the boys at camp Lydia’s House, which may come soon…

When I got my diagnosis, I went through this litany of doctors appointments, work books, meetings with other women with breast cancer, phone calls, more doctors appointments, internet deep dives— basically all the things, as I tried to decide if I wanted a full mastectomy or a minimal surgery. Again and again, the consultants said, “Only you can decide what’s good for you. Only you know your variables and risk tolerance.” (Just a note, this is an awful process, and one that any woman with breast cancer goes through).

In the end, considering the early stage, I chose the smaller surgery. As such, my life faced smaller disruptions short term, and I may face a second, more disruptive round of cancer later on. The cost of shutting down my life for my 44th year was very high for me, as was the pain and dismemberment associated with a major surgery.

One thing I’m considering, from this mid life vantage point, is how we count costs? It seems important to me, and also important for my teenage children. Like it’s a lesson I want to pass on to them.

Ben has a friend that’s always telling us what things cost, in dollars, but seems to use his time and energy in awful ways. About him Ben has said, “He knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing.”

I’m concerned with my kids knowing costs, of course, since a budget is a real thing, but perhaps what I’m more concerned about is transmitting how to assess value. How much is not being bedridden worth at age 44 with young kids at home? A lot. The value of that time, in those years, is worth a possible trade in later years, I decided. That decision came with books worth of information, prayer—basically discernment. Discernment is the work of deciding values, based on your best sources of knowledge, and allocating one’s time and energy toward the more valuable thing.

All of this reminds me of the passage of scripture

²⁸ “Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it? ²⁹ For if you lay the foundation and are not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule you, ³⁰ saying, ‘This person began to build and wasn’t able to finish.’

In the same way, those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples.

Often Christians come to me and ask how they might serve the poor. They ask, I assume, because of the work that I do. Over the years, I’ve become more hesitant to answer that question too quickly. Not because I don’t have ideas—after fourteen years at Lydia’s House, I certainly know of a lot of needs—but because I’ve come to think that the more important work is discernment.

The truth is, almost everyone (including me) in my social circle is relatively rich. We could all give more, serve more, simplify more. But deciding what another person should undertake isn’t really mine to do. I can tell stories about what I’ve seen and invite people to imagine a different way of living. But I can’t weigh someone else’s variables or know the commitments they’re already carrying.

Here I’m left to give the same advice I received: “Only you can decide what’s good for you. Only you know your variables and your risk tolerance.”

When someone asks how they should follow Christ, or what they should take on, I increasingly think the answer begins with their own prayer life. When the discernment is thorough and healthy, the life that follows is like seed planted in good soil. It grows roots that can hold over time because it wasn’t chosen out of guilt, pressure, or another’s expectations. It was chosen freely, out of love of God and neighbor.

The challenge, of course, is that when we try to discern by counting the costs, we don’t know what the future holds. When we choose to marry, we don’t know if our spouse will become disabled (or get a midlife cancer diagnosis); when we choose to parent, we don’t know the temperament or needs of the child who will be born; when we choose a vocation, we don’t know what sacrifices it will eventually require. And yet, for the human project to work, we must commit, knowing that once we were the child waiting to be born and one day we may be the cancer patient in need of frequent care; a world with no inextricable commitments, caregivers or long term companions is not a world we want to live in.

The building metaphor from Scripture can give the impression that faithfulness comes from careful spreadsheets and exact projections. But what I know from managing my share of building projects is that they’re almost always over budget and off schedule. There’s only so much counting we can do before we reach what Kierkegaard called a “leap of faith.”

All of us that claim Christianity are then left to grapple with that hard passage (above). It’s not a passage that asks us to actually assess the cost of any one building or relationship. It asks us to consider wisely if we, indeed, want to give all our lives to follow Christ— we’re advised to discern before we commit, but to commit whole-heartedly when we do. To follow half way, to go some of the journey but not all of it, is about as valuable as a half built structure and sometimes as harmful as a tower that falls.

In the end, the call of discipleship doesn't seem terribly concerned with the things that consume so much of my own worrying—length of life, pleasure or pain, leisure, my children's college funds. Constantly looking back and thinking, “we could have lived differently and had all of this” is to get the worst of both worlds. Perhaps those needs will be attended to, but we don’t respond to the call by giving just enough to also cover all the bases on our worldly needs; if that’s the posture, we are left like the rich young ruler, walking away sad. The anxieties, back peddling and what-ifs eat up all the joy.

The work I’ve been discovering throughout my life, but especially this last year, is a work of doing my own discernment, and then committing; putting my hand to the plow and trying hard to not look back. If I made the wrong surgery choice (as an example) and I have bone cancer in 10 years, I’ll be sad, but it’s my choice to own. I won’t be suing my oncologist nor am I pondering it daily. The decision is made.

If I do, indeed, find that a full mastectomy would have extended my life, I know I’ll feel regret at that moment. But to be responsible to my diagnosis, I had to choose a course. Keeping my options open was a non-decision decision, full of its own consequences.

Collectively, we’re asked to do this work— discern well, own our choices, count costs to the best of our ability and then commit to work both immediate and long term. If each of us could follow this path, I honestly think we could save the world, or in the language of faith “make the kingdom come.” I’ll go as far as to argue it’s the only hope we have.

And in other news:

Such a busy week for my crew! Jacob went to church camp with our friends the Stoxens and the Miekley’s. We completed the “last week best week” of day-camp at Lydia’s House. Ben and I went to the Krzeski family wedding in St Paul Minnesota. Annie flew off to Atlanta to the Youth Theological Initiative. Right now we’re packing up the camper to take 60 Lydia’s House guests and staff camping this weekend.

Just before all of that we had a really full weekend of time with friends and family over the 4th of July holiday, including a reading of the Declaration of Independence.

Here’s some photos from July 4th

And, for your viewing pleasure, here’s a video of our family visit to the Nobbe farm/backyard and playing with the baby goat! I am not an animal person but I was very charmed by this goat. Happy Birthday Amanda!!

I wrote my first post in early August just to let people know the bad news, and that I would be sharing updates. I was told to “expect a year of disruptions” so I decided to document what a disrupted year looked like— for my own knowledge, and maybe because others were interested, especially the growing number of younger women getting a breast cancer diagnosis.

Over the course of the project, my writings have gotten about 22,000 views, enough to say that people that know me, and some others, found them worth reading (or glancing at). Regardless of readership, I’ve enjoyed the thinking and the writing, and I think I’ve become a better writer for a discipline— time well spent.

When I look back on all the posts here’s some take aways:

My life is on the small side, and often messy, but it’s also really beautiful and uniquely textured. What a gift to take some time to see that. Here’s four of the better versions of that realization:

All the Way to Heaven is Heaven

The World Will be Saved by Beauty

Goodness

More will be Given

Pulling out a day and looking at it closely is worth doing. Here’s a post of this variety that I really enjoyed writing. I think we would have enjoyed Christmas regardless, but being attentive to the details, as I planned to write about them, gave them texture and highlighted the good.

A Christmas Retrospective

The awful doesn’t have to override the good, and at the very least the two can co-exist. This was probably the most coherent version of that revelation during the year

The Intersections

Most of my joy is found in companionship. Not just in having friends, but in sharing life and work and ideas with people who are walking the same road with me. That group is growing deeper, but also (in some ways) smaller; paying attention to this gave me peace about that change, and helped me to appreciate my co-travelers.

Here’s a few of those writings:

It’s the companions

Building a Life

I want to say something about Ben

Chosen Family

Freedom, to the extent we have it, is granted to be given away in love and mutual care. What poses as freedom in our culture largely is just keeping one’s options open, typically with little fruit, often with harm. I wrote about that idea a few times, but most explicitly here:

On that note, I find that most of what I do I do for love of others, and in my bigger moments, love of God. Rarely do I devote time or energy to a project because of the project itself. The work is to expand who and how I love, and in doing so to expand my life and my work. I’d call this one of the epiphanies of the cancer year.

As such, I’ve enjoyed thanking all of the people that showed up for me and my family. I wrote a couple of these thank you type posts and I always felt full of gratitude for days after

Bread and Roses

Community is the antidote to Despair

The rhythm I want to be in is less one of moderation and more one of feasting and fasting. This essay is probably one of my favorite writings and it connects to a big theme I’ve been turning over, which is how to live in a way that’s authentically Catholic.

Also, becoming Catholic and Why I Make Sam go to Church were continued clarifications on one of the defining features of my life, being a Church goer, religious not just spiritual.

On that note, a central idea of my year is that so much happens at the table. Over the year I’ve become a more frequent mass attender, a more attentive dinner guest, and a more curated host. Here’s two writings on that topic, also connected to a bigger theme of liturgical living:

Celebrating Well

Showing Up

Being attentive by writing weekly has helped me to see more of what, I think, God loves. The question I’m asking more and more is “Can I love what God loves?” knowing that bridging the gap between my desires and God’s desires, making them one, is the journey I want to be on. This was an early post on that theme, but also one of my favorites

The Cheap Seats

This one, too, asked if I could love more of who God loves: One More Dish

Finally, I’m discerning what to do with the substack from here.

I hope that the cancer updates are coming to an end. That’s the best case. Though I do like writing and enjoy this medium, as does Ben’s mom and my grandma, my biggest fans :)

If you subscribed through Roundtable or because of the Catholic Worker connection, I imagine more of my future writing will center on Lydia’s House, so you are in the right place. I’m also setting the intention of doing more writing for publication, and this will likely be a place where I’m work-shopping that. I’m working on a writing for Plough on friendship right now, and will be posting that soon.

Thanks for sharing this year with me. It’s been a gift—really.

And an invitation:

We’ll be hosting a mass and dinner at Lydia’s House August 30 at 4pm, as a gathering time to welcome in our community, in gratitude for this hard year. At the mass we’ll have an opportunity to pray over my family as we move to the shelter property, which we plan to do in September for a trial year. We’ll also be making a formal promise to Meridith (and vice versa) and the work of Lydia’s House; a lifelong intention for mutual care, for the sake of those in need. All of this, I’d say, was also an outcome of a year (really many years) of thinking and discerning about how I want to live the second half. Please join us.

I advise you to be guided by the Spirit, so that you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. ¹⁷ For the desires of the flesh are opposed to the Spirit, and those of the Spirit are opposed to the flesh. They are in conflict with one another, so that you cannot do what you want. ¹⁸ But if you are guided by the Spirit, you are not subject to the Law.

^{19 [d]}Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, ²⁰ idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, ²¹ envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the like. I warn you, as I warned you previously, that no one who does such things will inherit the kingdom of God.

^{22 [e]}In contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, ²³ gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. ²⁴ And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.

I’m trying one last round of Letrozole, though round 1 gave me some serious stomach issues so I’m dreading it. Noting that estrogen suppression hasn’t gone that well, I’ve been asking the internet if there’s anything else I can do to reduce my chances of a second round of cancer. I’m not really great at lifestyle changes since my hidden disposition is toward laziness, but when faced when a grab-bag of awful side effects, I’m getting more ambitious.

So here’s the list:

• Exercise consistently (probably the biggest lifestyle payoff, says the chat)

• Maintain a healthy weight

• Avoid or greatly limit alcohol

• Eat a Mediterranean-style diet

• Don’t smoke

• Sleep well

The problem with this list is that it seems reasonable, and actually it’s really hard. Like there’s a reason the spirit is opposed to the flesh, and it’s because the flesh and it’s sloth ways is very powerful. So here’s where I’m at with this version of cancer treatment:

Exercise: I’ve upped my exercise game with 2-3 long walks and 2-3 Pilates classes a week… as a result, today I can barely walk. You’d think over a year of Pilates would have resulted in me taking on the ballerina physique of my co-laborers. It hasn’t. I still go. I spend a lot of time with achy legs. I struggle with planks, but I do participate.

Healthy weight: I think it’s an ok goal, and of the things on the list, it’s my least worry… but one that is being greatly counteracted by my steady march into middle age and its associated midsection girth. Without the magic drugs, really how does one lose weight? I assume it has something to do with stopping eating bread, and as you’ll know if you’ve followed along that is akin to stopping drinking water for me. Like if there is one food I would eat exclusively, it’s bread. The chatbot says even losing 5–10% of body weight appears beneficial. Sigh. eye roll. uggh.

Alcohol: I’ve been pondering this seriously since I got the diagnosis and it’s the one that has the most energy around it for me— like it kicks up emotions in a different way than Pilates with ballerinas. I think the annoying part about this is I’ve never thought of myself as a heavy drinker, but I enjoy drinking well enough.

Jesus drank wine, and I think he did this at the end of the days when people asked him asinine questions about taxation or demanded he stop sending the demons into the pigs. We all need a coping skill. My days are long— like 14 hours long during summer camp season. Today, I kicked out two kids for mouthing off, and drove one home in the middle of the field trip. Like picked up, left the field trip, drove her home screaming in the backseat of my car. It’s a lot.

The energy around (regretting this currently short stint of) sobriety comes for me after I face all the things. People criticize me often, perhaps because they think I can take it. Housing homeless people creates a fair bit of overwhelm and of course, I get criticism from guests, but also donors, volunteers, people adjacent to our work, neighbors, relatives. Some days I really just want to check out, forget and silence the gallery of commentators. I’m not sure how to do this soberly. The cultural norm of substance use is so common, the muscles for coping well are not well developed in other ways.

I also have some friends that center their socializing on drinking, which makes it hard to hang out without it, and a big piece of making this complicated life work is having friends.

What my year of observation has taught me is that, mostly, I drink one too many drinks when I’m drinking, it often gives me a headache, and it’s expensive. I don’t want my kids to see me drinking, and they seem to notice and comment whenever I do. Ben has been totally sober for 3 years now and it’s likely annoying for him to be around people drinking. I’ve been watching my peers age and drink, and I’ve noticed it doesn’t really look good on any of us— like we seem to descend into something adjacent to dementia faster when under the influence. Then I read this NYTimes article “Why is My Alchohol Tolerance Declining with Age?”

With every year that ticks by, our bodies break down alcohol more slowly, leading to higher blood alcohol concentrations, more impairment and worse hangovers.

Given these trends — and the research suggesting that even small amounts of alcohol may be unsafe — it’s understandable if you’re questioning the wisdom of ever enjoying a cocktail after 40, Dr. Leisure said.

Add to that, apparently drinking causes cancer.

As such I’ve decided to give it up. My birthday was the end of that era. I’m kind of sad about it.

Sleep I feel like throwing up my hands, and then throwing bread and the alcohol refuse from my retired liquor cabinet at this one. I have not slept through the night, un-medicated, in a decade or more. I count it as a win if I sleep from 11pm - 5am. Also, during the months of June and July someone sets off fireworks from 7pm- midnight in Norwood, which doesn’t help.

I just finished a sleep study where I was told I stop breathing while sleeping 7 times an hour. I’ve let them prescribe me the sleeping machine but I’m really wondering if I’ll use this thing. Like do you sleep better with a tube in your nose?

I’m closing in on a year of cancer— I got my diagnosis July 11. When I started this project I said, “I’m going to try to send out one witty or thoughtful update a week” and, to some extent, I’ve succeeded. I have met the weekly quota; some were witty or thoughtful. As I march toward wrapping up this weekly substack project, I want to set some intentions for the year ahead, among them lifestyle changes. Basically, if I want to live a long life I need to try harder.

Invite me for some quinoa, sparkling water, or a walk. Don’t serve bread. Do expect me to look weird while sleeping. Let’s not take up smoking, carousing or sorcery. Those are my boring friendship requests. :/

In other news: Jacob is working on a performance of Billy Jean, including a moon walk and fedora. When this final choreography happens, I will figure out how to upload video to substack because the world, aka my 100 or so friends, deserve to see this. Annie is killing it as the camp director. Sam is really enjoying the World Cup. Ben is being sued by some NIMBY folk for his latest affordable housing project. This is our life. Pray for us, or even better…

Come to Church with us. This week the Jesuits take the helm at our congregation, Church of The Resurrection. Join us for 10am mass!

When I was younger I often visited the house of this couple that hosted young adults in community living and threw a weekly Sunday potluck. They served lunch on glass plates to 50 or so people. The wife seemed to stand watch over the kitchen counter, perpetually cleaning up. As she loaded the dishwasher, more and more twenty somethings would show up with their plates. She’d rearrange. As it got well beyond capacity she’d say, “There is always room for one more dish.” She was like a dish magician, and I never remember her being wrong.

I bring up dishes because they are annoying me this summer. We have two kitchens running at full capacity during camp, and no one ever seems anxious to deal with the dishes. I’ve taught and re-taught dish loading, and the dishes could be one person's full time job.

More relevant than my irritable temperament, the metaphor of one more dish keeps taking center stage in my mind as I consider how we might respond to the suffering around us. What if we worked harder to rearrange and find room for those who have no place?

This thought came to mind for me last weekend, particularly, because I was one of many people that received a request to help a family find a new home for their long term, adolescent foster kids.

Just as I received the email, so did the deacon at my church. Deacon reached out to me and asked me if I had thoughts on what to tell this couple; I told him I got the letter too, and I was sad about it.

I was out and about so I stopped at the church to chat about the situation. The deacon is 78 and was putting together binders of readings and prompts for Sunday’s church service. He also sings and preaches at most masses, so he spends a lot of time in service to the people of God. I sat down in the sacristy as he filed papers into folders and I told him, “I actually have no idea what to tell these parents.”

He asked me, “Why do well meaning people do this?”

I’ve been thinking about his question a lot. I mean, why do we ever stop doing hard things? Sometimes because we have to— they are actually impossible or harmful; often because we love or want something else more.

Dorothy Day often quoted “love in reality is harsh and dreadful compared to love in dreams.” I filled in some gaps in the foster kids’ story; I guessed it wasn't smooth sailing, contrary to the tone of the email. I told the deacon that I think, unlike him, most people just want to live a small and quiet life, and kids with trauma make this kind of life really hard.

This request came at the same time as a woman moved in at Lydia’s House and shared she’d lived in 10 homes growing up. Her sadness at never being given a permanent family continues to resonate in her heart-breaking story. I haven’t known how to respond to those asking me for help with re-homing adolescents, particularly since the business we’re in at Lydia’s House is to take in women like this one; women who are orphaned, and then to help them keep their kids, even as the bottom falls out. My expertise (if I have any), is in keeping children with parents and getting them under roof; finding new parents is much harder, and each move (our guests can attest), is a new trauma. Move to move, family to family, it typically doesn’t get better.

The deacon too wanted children to be kept in one stable home, enough so that he’d once opened his. He told me, “When I was younger I prayed for another child. Then a relative dropped off a 3 year old and we raised her to adulthood. That wasn’t really what I had in mind, but it’s what God gave me.”

I asked the deacon if we could pray for these kids being put up for adoption at ages too old for anyone to likely adopt them. I prayed, “God, might we all be expansive enough in spirit to be part of a Kingdom that grows. Could we imagine growing bigger to hold all of the people that have no place to be? Could we be people that say hard yes’ to a Kingdom where the birds have a place to rest?”

All of this comes at the same time as I’ve been pondering a highly publicized case of selective abortion— the baby in utero had Down syndrome. The couple that chose the abortion said that they didn’t think they were well suited for raising a disabled child— it wasn’t right for their family. On this story, my friend recently wrote

Twenty years into sharing life with my own first of three babies, one with Down syndrome, I have, yes, a visceral wailing grief at the loss of a human person — one eagerly imagined as a person and then, overnight, un-personed by genetic information. Because it was their first baby, this couple was especially alone, especially ignorant about what they were assenting to or declining. The experiential divide between knowing a baby not yet born — even one kicking and present in your own body — and the one you hold in your arms and care for — it’s a gulf that begs for monumental metaphors. There’s an oceanic distance between the abstraction and its embodiment. Making room for a child isn’t fully thinkable-through with just your skull-shaped cognition. It’s in the habitus of your body. Becoming a parent is like swallowing a solar system: a reordered gravitational pull, a new series of orbits, with magnetism and polarities that sway all of life’s conditions. It is many things, but it is not a project.

The thought that we’re capable of making room for more than we think has come to mind for me often this cancer year. I’ve not been very sick most days as I did not do chemo…but (contrary to what Jacob thinks) I did have a serious problem. With lots of help, mostly the show has gone on. My friend Anne wrote me a birthday card saying that a trait she admires in me is my willingness to persist even when there’s plenty of reason to cancel, naming my insistence that we/ I run children’s religious education at the shelter last fall even when I was also having part of my breast removed and going through radiation.

I imagine this insistence is sometimes annoying to people around me. I’m like a coach asking a team to play extra innings when they aren’t even sure they wanted to play baseball. But the team keeps showing up, and I think we’re glad we push through.

As I survey a lot of carnage— children without families, women pregnant but considering if they can care for their infants, abortion because of fear of defect or fear of poverty, pre-teens fighting in the shelter back yard over issues ranging from who took the soccer ball to who threw the mulch, guns and threats of guns, preschoolers that tell our staff to “shut the f*** up,” I think, “There is a response to this.”

The response, as I’ve observed it, is not reading social justice books, figuring out how to use AI effectively, or blaming our murky head of state for all the poverty. I wish it were— like arm chair interventions. I'll posit, instead, it is people showing up for people, usually in a community, backing each other up, letting the work of shared life be to hold those on the margins, sometimes at very inconvenient times. As Sara said, it’s not a life of abstractions but rather embodiment.

Of course, any person can burn out and burn out is real. Eventually the dishwasher is so overloaded that most of the dishes don’t really get clean. My kids have demonstrated this principle again and again. But the problem with the dishes isn’t typically too many in there— at least not when my kids are doing the work— but arranging. What I learned from the matriarch of the community house was high level attention to placement strategy.

This, however, is a limited metaphor. The dishwasher is a metal box with physical limits; the Kingdom of God is a glorious mystery that expands exponentially even while you’re sleeping.

I can testify that I’ve seen my work expand when I’ve been open to the expansion; I’ve seen my contributions stretch when I’ve responded to a calling through careful discernment and wholehearted commitment. I continue to be surprised at what I’m called to do, and my ability to do that thing when I let my yes be yes and my no no, typically with willing companions. I continue to marvel that more than I offer is returned in good works and good outcomes because this Kingdom is not a 1:1 proposal.

I’ve often thought, if all Christians prayed to be expanded like the yeast expands the dough in the Kingdom of God parables, actually, could we care for all the kids, homeless families, released prisoners, disabled people, lonely elderly? Like are we, together, the solution we’ve been waiting for? Should not the re-ordered gravitational pull of our faith draw us, like a Holy Spirit siren song, toward a constant posture of making more room?

A friend of mine wrote a poem for us, for my and Ben’s birthday. She wrote about how we are poured out like a libation, and gave us a beautiful pottery pitcher to symbolize our lives and work. I’ve been pondering that because, well, do we really want to be poured out? Doesn’t poured out imply empty? She wrote this because it’s a term used in scripture, in 2nd Timothy

I solemnly urge you: ² proclaim the message; be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable; convince, rebuke, and encourage with the utmost patience in teaching. ³As for you, be sober in everything, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, carry out your ministry fully.

⁶ As for me, I am already being poured out as a libation, and the time of my departure has come. ⁷ I have fought the good fight; I have finished the race; I have kept the faith.

What I’m confident about with the 78 year old deacon who raised his niece and is putting together liturgy for Sunday is that the above passage, or one like it, will be read at his funeral. When I consider it that way, if my own life is “poured out,” overflowing, chock full I’d count myself as having finished this race in the best of company.

In other news:

Jacob is teaching our Bruderhof volunteer Joyce how to moon walk.

“Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.

I was pretty excited to see this scripture come up as today’s daily reading. You know you’ve been at this Christian life a while when scripture takes on the aura of re-runs of a great show: “That’s a good one! No that’s a really good one.” Well, this is a really good one, enough that after my kids went to bed I wanted to spend some time thinking and writing about it, more than I wanted to go to sleep— and we’re running daycamp right now, so I did want to go to sleep.

The narrow path makes it into the daily lectionary just as I’m also navigating some complications (I’m always navigating some complications).

Among the friction in my life right now

• will Joyce, our summer art intern, agree with my color scheme on the new Lydia’s House mural

• will my 13 year old son Sam take my advice on using screens less

• will our family make our planned move to the Lydia’s House property this fall or will that plan be usurped by the need for intern housing

• will I re-start letrozole (my latest cancer drug) and try out another round of digestion problems or just give it up

• will we step more deeply into the lives of some of our guests, taking personalism to a new level, or just stay where we are, which feels more sustainable

• will we sort out the next round of sacramental life with the Lydia’s House kids in a way that has integrity to my Catholic faith while also inviting them in

It’s been on my mind this year that, generally, I like my life— I’ve written about the goodness of it a lot. Many times a week, as I look out over the swimming pool horizon on happy children or share a meal with the unusual suspects or watch the sunset down Mills Ave I think, “I have a fabulous life.” And then I sit in the corner of our dining room in a ponderous position and any of the friction list, or all of the friction list, starts to emerge.

I was chatting with a friend recently, a woman who has made some unorthodox choices about life and work, but centralized her Christian commitment. We’ve known and walked alongside each other for almost two decades. We were both pondering the many that have left the path. I told her, “The problem with this road is that we can’t promise happiness to anyone who travels with us. In fact we actually chose a life philosophy, a Way, that says blessed are the mournful, meek, and poor. Like who really wants to join this? No wonder they try it for a while and say no thank you.”

In both her case and mine, I think those close to us know that we’ve both suffered some serious sadnesses and disappointments, but also, someone might look at our lives and say, “I want what you have.” The what we have is faithful families, thoughtful children, solid marriages, meaningful work, a clear sense of vocation, good and sacrificial friends, deep community. But what we also have is people making a lot of requests of us, a fair bit of emotional labor, frequent hard no’s, a ton of responsibility, and the precarity of knowing that at any given point we’re being asked to find our lives by losing them and our marching order is to “die daily.” Really, none of that scripts well in cursive to sell as Hobby Lobby art.

There’s a passage in scripture where the disciples walk with Jesus and ask him “Can I sit at your left and right hand in the Kingdom.” I imagine Jesus laughing as he says, “Sure, but you have no idea what you are asking for.”

One of the joys of midlife for me, as a Christian, is knowing that I don’t know how my story, or even this year, will go. The idea that we are called into relationships and work by the holy spirit leaves it all as a mystery. The joy comes to fruition by constantly engaging the friction, by being in a rhythm of letting the seed fall to the ground, die, and something new be born.

“Joyce,” I say, “can we work on this mural together?” “Sam, can I tell you that your mind is meant for more?” “Ben, we need to talk about if we can move this guest kid as a house-mate.” “Letrozole, I’m going to try you again on July 1.” “Janae, do you want your daughter baptized at my church, a church that I think could be there for her, in some way, her whole life?”

It often feels like each day I stand on a high dive, and I look down and I just say, “I need to jump. Standing and looking won’t make it easier. Jump.” Then I do. Again and again— except its not into water, but more like sand paper. Each piece of friction that I jump into rubs off another hard edge, making me softer, more fit for human companionship. These constantly emerging problems are like the Kindergarten song “Going on a bear hunt”— you can’t go over them, you can’t go under them, you have to go through them.

This way is not a life of hacks and maximalization— though I like those tips and tricks when I read them on the internet. It’s not a Buddhist prayer for self realization, hours of solo meditation into self discovery. It’s not a careful calibration of leisure and labor, with a constant emphasis on self care. It’s more like a digging deeper and deeper, until I hardly can see the light that illuminates any other way of being and doing. This life is a yoke, meant for work. The prayer is that it fits, that when paired with equal co-laborers, the work will be doable, even easy, often joyful.

It’s kind of sad to not use happiness, contentment, or having a good time as true north, but true north must be fixed to make the compass work and those sentiments or moments are fleeting, even if they pop up frequently.

Instead, the author of Hebrews said

let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, ² fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

I’ve observed that any other focus leaves one falling off this narrow path, or getting lost along the way. And so this is my prayer this week, and maybe should be my prayer every day, all the days of my life.

Currently, our 1801 Mills Ave edifice is getting a new roof — the result of many bids and much hand wringing. It’s costing a fortune. The whole building is covered in scaffolding. The power is out. Meridith lives in one of the units, so she’s “camping” in her apartment.

The image of scaffolding is stuck in my head as I navigate around the maze of metal forms, trying to get to the daycare or Lydia’s House. The issue of scaffolding is you have to essentially build a structure to build or repair a structure. It feels like a way of doing things from the middle ages, but it’s happening just down the street this late spring.

For our 45th and 46th birthdays Ben and I held a somewhat intimate dinner at our house. I say “somewhat intimate” because there were a lot more people I wanted to invite. Given space limits, we chose a scattering of some very old friends, some new friends, Ben’s parents and sister, and the solid core of Lydia’s House weekly and daily volunteers to celebrate our midlife milestone with. When their children were added in too, our house and yard were overflowing, but we managed to create one big table and seat every adult with a china plate and glass cup—a smattering of heirlooms inherited from thrift stores and grandmothers:

A common thread that united those in attendance was “we like how you’ve built your life, and we want to build more with you.” We asked each person at the table to tell us about what they’ve noticed or learned from how we’ve built our life, and how they want build with us in the future. It seemed like a fitting question for both a look back and a look forward from the mid point.

On Sunday night, Annie and I did a recap of the event, which turned into a reflection on many relationships and people we know. Annie was expressing some sadness that she’s put energy into relationships that haven’t borne fruit; I was expressing disappointment about relationships that we thought would be lifelong friendships, but that faded out.

It felt like a fitting moment to try to impart some wisdom to my 16 year old daughter on who the people are that you that you might co-labor with.

While I wanted to be a sage, the truth is I’m trying still trying to sort that out; the clock is ticking, and there’s much more to do. Perhaps I have 45 more years on this earthly pilgrimage or perhaps it will be more like 10. I’m looking for the relationships that last and have consequence.

I’m convinced by the theology of co-creation: the idea that we are creating the world with God, that our lives matter, that somehow we each play a role in helping the Kin-dom to come. While I’m interested in what my one life can accomplish with the help of the Holy Spirit, what I’m sure of is we don’t do this consequential work alone. We are accountable and agents of our own actions, but the redemptive work happens with other people.

The Pope too is pretty enamored with building metaphors these days. I’ve been listening to the Magnificent Humanity encyclical, and Leo throws us the story of rebuilding Jerusalem from the book of Nehemiah as an image for the best of human capacity. He doesn’t call upon the philosophers or even the artists to show us how to live, but rather the builders.

The conversation I’m having with myself, and with my soon-to-launch daughter is “How do we scout for fellow builders, selecting for those that both emit reliability and hold an eternal gaze?”

On Sunday night I told Annie to look for the vocationally minded— ask if the person has committed to a life and to other people? Have they made promises or taken vows and lived into their messiness, in time tested ways? I told her to look for the responders. If you write a letter, do they write back? If you do a favor, and ask for one later, do they show up? If you make an invitation, do they reciprocate? Even if not directly back to you, are they showing up, inviting and responding to other people, especially marginalized people?

Do you see them make sacrifices for the sake of the good? Do you see them include the hard to include— the disabled, the poor, the orphans, parents with dementia, siblings with mental illness? Do you see them growing, even at 70 years old? Are they still open to new learning or do they say, well before death, this work is done?

I told her sometimes the committed and responsive are the brilliant, beautiful and fun, but often they are just the ordinary folk. I warned her, “Don’t become overly enamored with the smooth talkers, those that quote Mary Oliver or Wendell Barry too much, the Harvard grads or the“my God is a tree” crew. If their life philosophy has to have tons of words, be skeptical of that too.”

Rather, look for the church goers, especially the ones that volunteer for the nursery or the parking committee, the grandparents who are willing to raise grand kids, the foster parents, the people that always bring things to pot-lucks, those that share favorite verses of scripture, and the givers of thoughtful gifts. These people may not end up being published authors or partners at the law firm (though sometimes they are) but they are the people who will loan you their car, help you move, and bring you dinner when you’re going through radiation. You can’t make life work without them, and know that— based on everything I’ve read in the Bible, God endorses these kinds of folks too. Blessed are the humble, the whole-hearted, the last in line and the carefully attentive.

To end the night of our dinner, before Jacob put on a fireworks show, I wanted to give a tribute to the person whose been most influential in my life building, Ben— my birthday co-celebrant. I have to agree with the Pope: find a builder to build this Kingdom with.

Here’s what I said

I’ve been considering the metaphor of scaffolding, as I watch workers put on a new roof. If you read think pieces, like I do, you’ll know this metaphor is having a moment. It’s popular because many are realizing we need a structure to build a structure. The outer structure allows for the inner structure to be solid, beautiful, and repaired. For example, the Church is the scaffolding that allows a person to build an inner life of holiness.

So to Ben I’ll say, you are the scaffolding of my life. You have set the stable structure that has allowed me to live the best first half of life I can imagine, held me in good times and bad, in sickness and in health. If there is anything true, good and beautiful about 45 year old me it’s because you came around my life two decades ago and allowed it to be.

More than serving that role for me, your steady presence and unfussy authority allows other people to imagine new housing for the poor, allows our children to know they will always have what they need, allows your parents to know they will always be cared for– all of these people are more free because they are held and cared for by you. Your presence and endorsement communicates stability, and when you sign on people around you know that whatever you are caring for will bear good fruit because of your tending.

Midlife can be a time to take stock of disappointments– and lord knows I’ve had many. You are never one of them– your willingness to allow people and projects around you to grow into fullness is a constant source of surprise and delight. And, of course, as the things you touch and the people you know become repaired, complete and beautiful, you do too. That’s where the scaffolding metaphor ends.

Scaffolding is meant to be temporary, but everyone knows you are loyal, faithful and long suffering. Your willingness to go deeper into your own life, sense of calling, to our marriage, neighborhood and work is its own beautiful structure; your wit and sarcasm is salt, making all of us laugh and ponder; your integrity and tender heart is a light, drawing us in.

A friend at the dinner, hearing the tribute, then sent me this poem

and I’ll end with the scripture that Meridith read at our wedding, from Matthew: 7

²⁴ “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. ²⁵ And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. ²⁶ And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. ²⁷ And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”

Since people can reply and leave comments to these posts, I’m wondering, what do you think are the traits that make people good candidates for building a rock solid life with? What advice would you give to Annie?

Inevitably by day 4 of summer camp I’m thinking a few things: how am I going to ever answer an email or get any other work done while this is happening? Can we survive 5 weeks of this? Considering all I hold, is this the best use of my time?

This thinking comes in relationship to learning recently my friend and her husband adopted a baby. She is my age so when I asked her about “starting over” in her mid 40s she said, “really, what better thing might we do with our life?”

The mid-life point seems to have two trajectories. One is like the top of the curve, or a hill. When I was a kid they always referred to turning 40 as going “over the hill” though I think that terminology has faded as lives are lasting longer. None the less, the hill framework puts you at the top in your 4th decade, and what follows is a careful arrangement of finances for college, weddings and buying a vacation house; reaching some kind of work peak in your 50s, while also talking frequently about retirement. The success is that you will retire in your 60s, on the downhill trajectory, and good riddance. I’ve known people who keep calendars of the number of days until they are eligible for retirement with a paid pension, and the count down starts when they have, say, 4000 days left. That’s a lot of counting.

The other trajectory is like a mustard seed or a grain of yeast. What happens in the first half of life is a like a planting, and because relationships are strong and kids are capable and finances are reasonably in order by mid life, there’s a rapid and surprising growth of friendships and good works (and also challenges). New things happen that make sense in retrospect, but that maybe weren’t on the planned career or life map when the person was 25.

I want to be in group two.

As such I’m giving myself a pep-talk each time I have to have a kid behavior intervention at camp. It goes something like “It’s a privilege to be here and to know this kid. This kid, here with you, whom you just told to “stop acting crazy” for the 5th time this morning, is in your life because of long relationship and lots of investment. Love this kid.”

It’s my birthday week and I keep thinking about 45 as a halfway point. I’ve been having nightmares about my cancer coming back in other forms, waking up sweating. The nightmare is that I’ll miss what happens when the yeast leavens the bread or the seed becomes a tree. I want to use up my life doing weird things with interesting people; I want it to get bigger exponentially, my days used to make time for people I love, make space for the excluded, make beautiful the lackluster.

My daughter Annie’s recently taken up pickleball and good for her, but I have no beachside retirement pickleball aspirations; as this life grows, more and more, I can’t imagine voluntarily stepping away from it.

This week I’ve spent my evenings work-shopping camp with Annie, this summer’s camp director, and my son Sam, camp chef. We recount the shenanigans, mull over better ways to manage kids getting to the pool, and contemplate activities that will take up a lot of time. Some of the stories from the day are so hilarious we laugh until we cry. We’re exhausted by 9pm.

Like my neighbor with her chubby new born, I have to ask, “What better use of my life is there than this?”

The last 2 weeks have been a journey into Christian humanism, the extravagant nature of humanity and the considering of what lies in the beyond. Reading bits of the papal encyclical while taking an epic trip up the east coast with 10 year old Jacob (the DC leg also included Sam and the Lapps), I got a textured glimpse into the magic that happens when human goodness is multiplied by divine love.

Here's the basics :

We took a trip in 3 parts.

It started with the Understory Festival in DC, a gathering curated by of Comment magazine. I think, for Christians of the center right ilk, the 3 day immersion will go down in history like

Person A: “did you happen to be at the first Understory?”

Person B: “Yes!”

Person A: “Wasn't that crazy. I mean, how do you describe it?”

I followed that with 3 days in Manhattan with the one and only Nick Eilerman Ginsberg and his family. We celebrated our birthdays together on June 1. I took Jacob to Moulin Rouge (Nick manages the show and got us free tickets) and the 9/11 memorial and Ellis Island and the MoMA (which Jacob captured on video while nearly getting hit by taxis at each intersection.)

We finished at Maple Ridge Bruderhof, an Anabaptist intentional community (creators of ) near Albany, visiting our dear friends the Martinie-Eiler family and our beloved intern Marion Zumpe.

Perhaps the most fitting response for such gifts of time and talent is a series of thank yous.

Thank you to Anne Snyder, for carefully crafting every detail of the Understory, sharing a love note inviting us to visit your favorite corner of the Cathedral, gathering all your friends to speak, give workshops and present ideas, and then lighting up the space with live music and theater monologues and poetry recitations as a thank you to all of us.

Thank you to Smriti Lakhey, for staying friends with me since we were dorm mates at UWC almost 30 years ago, marrying a sweet and thoughtful husband, raising nice kids and offering up your DC home even though we barely saw you.

Thank you to for sharing a thoughtful and inclusive opening address that asked us to pay more attention to folks on the margins and in recovery, for stewarding Sam’s journey to and from the conference, and for including me in many good things.

Thank you to and , for speaking with me in a breakout session about making space for the marginalized, sharing side conversations in empty conference rooms, and working and living out your Catholic vocations in a way that your ideas are more than just ideas.

Thank you to Sam and Jacob, for sweetly attending my speaking engagement, telling me it was a highlight of your week, sitting through hours of lectures that included words like eschatology and being the belles of the ball as (among) the only kids in attendance at the festival

Thank you to Nick and Brian, for giving Jacob a reason to attempt a can-can imitation, springing for the apartment with a view of the skyline, buying me a birthday banana pudding and dealing with the mess that’s having 2 extra people in a Manhattan domicile

Thank you to the lady that had the audacity to put a beautiful flower shop next to the train line, making peoples arrivals and departures to Grand Central brighter

Thank you to the guy on the train to Poughkeepsie that played chess with Jacob so I could have 2 hours of silence

Thank you to the Bruderhof kitchen crew for including me in your party the night I arrived, to Marion for driving over from another Hof to take a walk with me, to Andrea cooking pizzas and inviting friends to meet me, to Ross for the tour of Mt Academy and taking Jacob hiking and to visit animals, to the guys that roasted the pig and chopped it up and served the delicious start of summer bounty, to the couple that spent an evening pondering Eucharistic theology with me next to a camp fire, and to whoever set up our room and left us a plate of cookies and cleaned it after we left

All in all, it felt like a victory tour, celebrating a cancer free mammogram and my 45th trip around the sun with person after person that I love and respect. What a way to reach the (hoped for) 1/2 way mark in this one wild and precious life.

Also, a bonus thank you to Anne Housholder, for helping me hold back a respiratory infection so this could all be a good time and Meridith, Amanda and Ben for holding down the Cincinnati fort.

I’ll finish with my favorite photo of the trip.

What a great life this is.

And Happy Birthday to Ben on June 8— send him a message!

Marita (one of our live in volunteers) was in the kitchen trying to prepare dinner, because we didn’t have a meal volunteer. As she chopped a Bruderhof style salad, I frantically called my doctor, begging for a z-pack— I was flying out the next day for a complicated planes, trains and automobiles venture up the east coast. I just got good news re: cancer. I was on the upswing. I could not be sick.

I started to sweat, literally, from a fever (or maybe it was a letrozone induced hot flash?). Annie was crowned de-facto swim instructor for the day, just as children were being dropped off for their sample lesson. I asked Meridith if she could run the grill for dinner. I needed to lay down. She said, “No, remember I’m at the daycare today. We’re short staffed.” I texted Ben. She texted Anne, who was arriving that evening. Who could make all of this work?

My attempts at laying down were then upended by a monsoon. I realized I couldn’t nap because I needed to go pick up the kids from the pool— they could not walk home in a flash flood. As I braved the storm with a soaking umbrella to get in the van, texts came in one after another with problems to be solved: kids don’t have suitcases for camp this weekend; Meridith can’t actually work at the daycare because she has to take a pregnant mom to the ER; Wanda sprained her ankle and needs a wheelchair; the power is off at one of our buildings; one of our tenants has been pouring grease down the drain and her sink is clogged; the daycare sub doesn’t have her background check; the auditor’s questions need answered for the tax form; Ben isn’t feeling well either (seriously this was all in one hour).

We almost never do this, but I told Meridith, “I think we need to cancel dinner.” I had just written about how the table and rituals hold our lives but that day I put away the Pentecost accessories and sent a text to staff, “No dinner tonight.” I picked up the swim instructors from the flooded rec-center. I pulled out the suitcases from my basement and texted the mom who requested them to collect them off my porch. I went to sleep.

It occurred to me that “Why not celebrate” is because “you don’t always have it like that.” Celebration in some form is almost daily in our lives but it isn’t everyday. In the liturgical cycle, the seasons are celebration time, ordinary time, feast time, and fast time. The most notorious of these fasting seasons is Lent, but Advent is also a fasting season for many.

We never know when our fast times will come at Lydia’s House or in family life, but sometimes we can predict them. Early August is often a fast— the summer workers are gone, the work is still present because summer is peak time for family homelessness, and we joke as we call it the “Meridith and Mary Ellen show.” There is no space then for niceties, we don’t throw parties, we just survive and try not to cancel dinner.

Feasting is a mindset, as is celebrating, but it’s also a reality made possible by community. There has to be the margin to hold the crisis and the dinner. There has to be the headspace to pull out the Pentecost liturgy and pick the kids up from the pool.

There wasn’t much to lament that cancelled dinner day. It just was. I couldn’t hold off the flu like symptoms; Meridith couldn’t not take our guest to the ER. Circling around it all was what had to be done, which upended what we wanted to do. Just as I settled into being ok with the dinner cancellation, Annie walked in to tell me she hit the garage door with the car. I just said, “it’s fine. It will all be fine.”

The wisdom of feast and fast cycles is they acknowledge our limitations. Elizabeth Bruenig wrote recently on the new encyclical “Magnificent Humanity”

Championing not just human magnificence but human imperfection is a radical turn. The pope’s insight that much of our beauty arises from limitation rather than limitlessness is a crucial intervention in the age of AI.

The pope writes

Finitude, when truly accepted, does not diminish us but opens us to recognizing the face of God and others. Indeed, precisely because we experience limits—vulnerability, suffering and failure—we can recognize the inviolable dignity of every person, both our own and that of others.

Pope Leo argues that, if we strip out all of the hardship, falling short and suffering from life, we also strip out the love and humanity. We will love, we will suffer, we will fail, we will try again. I’ll add we will need a break.

Our human persons tried to love well, in thought, word and deed that rainy Wednesday. Our limited forms collapsed on the alter of sickness, power outages and never ending need. There was nothing artificial and everything limited about it.

Those fast days, days where we actually don’t eat meals but rather peanut butter crackers in the car, help highlight the beauty of the days that community works well, that the pieces come together, that we’re able to say yes to all the things and also put out bells and candles and tablecloths and see our highest hopes through.

Ours is not a life of constant parties. It’s a life of thin times and fat times and ordinary times, planned breaks and unplanned breaks, onslaught and retreat. The hard times make the good times sweeter, and maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be. We can’t do everything, but when we do the things, we try our best to do them well, to appreciate the goodness of abundance- its vibrancy highlighted with a special brightness, contrasted to the weariness of scarcity.

Ps. In the end dinner actually happened, I learned the next day. Joan, our ignatian volunteer showed up, the food was mostly prepped and they heated up hotdogs. Meridith got out of the er, and whoever was home ate. Was it a feast, a fast or a celebration? No, it was a late, lackluster ordinary time meal but we need those too.

Searching for conclusions from this exercise of learning in public, I’m wrestling with something to do with Catholicism and something to do with celebrating. I’m contemplating how the Catholic worldview highlights or even manifests the physical meeting the metaphysical in a unique way. I’m wondering how we call forth the friction of such encounters to give life meaning and use said energy to expand our capacity to hold the beautiful and the awful with reverence and awe.

I haven’t read the Pope’s encyclical on artificial relationships yet, just commentaries on it, but this quote resonates with my recent thinking: “It is imperative to recover an understanding of the true meaning of the grandeur of humanity as intended by God. It is in this sense that the challenge we currently face is anthropological.” This grandeur of humanity, lived in the daily, seems to want a hearing as I dig down layer upon layer, asking what makes this life worth holding onto and showing up for.

Sunday Sam and I set the table in my dining room for a small group of people coming over for dinner. Because my best friend is a gifted liturgist, she brought a prayer litany, and we used the evening as a kind of domestic church to celebrate the fact that, last Friday, I was granted a reprieve from another round of morose decision-making and new drugs. As I shared in a post on earlier this week, as far as my oncology team can tell, there is no cancer in my body. It’s a harvest worthy of hurrahing.

For the dinner setting, I chose a red tablecloth, because that day was the feast of the Holy Spirit, Pentecost. I pulled out some new glasses I bought at the DIA, carved with triangles and painted with rainbow prisms. I cut flowers from my yard and Sam arranged them along with cloth napkins my grandma embroidered and pink hexagonal plates that Anne bought me for my birthday.

Vatican II asked churches to pull out the altar away from the sanctuary wall and priests to face the people during the consecration—making the whole ceremony more like a shared meal, less like a ritual sacrifice. As such, I think the modern church increasingly takes cues from the home, and vice versa. Kathleen Norris writes about the intersections of domestic life and Catholic ritual well in The Quotidian Mysteries. She laughs when she notes that the priest washes the cup and plate after serving the Eucharist, observing that he’s “doing the dishes.”

We don’t always put out a table cloth or cut flowers at my domicile, and when we do, they don’t often look as similar to the ones at church as they did on Pentecost, but every day we eat. Everyday we use this home altar. Our life, frequently, revolves around the table. Our children are it’s servers; Ben and I preside. It’s physically at the center of our house.

At Lydia’s House we host 20-50 people a night in our dining room, and there we go as far as to set out engraved napkin rings to assign seats, to intentionally mix people from different walks of life. What I’ve realized lately is that I have a church at my house and another kind of church at Lydia’s House and then, all the time lately, I’m at one or another Catholic Church. Church, church and more church, table, tables, the Table. In all the spaces, many opportunities for reverence and awe, the in breaking of the divine.

I’ve been wringing my hands over our closed Eucharistic offering at the Catholic Church, because I don’t like inviting people to something I love and not including them to share the meal. That said, I’m also seeing this fluidity between all these parts of my life— a through line that has to do with sharing bread and sharing tables and celebrating. I’m taking solace that I have more than one table to invite guests to and that each one is an extension of the other.

I know there are folks that frequently share tables and celebrate with intention that aren’t Catholic, but I’m realizing that I do these things more than most, noting all the circles I have chosen. My life is three layers deep in community, each a facet of my vocation. I think these intentional call outs of the good in our midst (let’s call them Sacraments and sacraments) are what give my unceasing human encounters shape; they have held me this hard year, and over the years.

I’m often asked how I do the combination of work/life that I do. I’m wondering if my frequent, intentional sitting at shared tables is, perhaps, why I’ve been able to co-direct a homeless shelter and put new buildings and projects online while raising three children and holding additional deep relationships and managing cancer, admittedly a hard and emotionally stretching combination.

Around all these tables there is music, beauty, proclamations of God’s goodness, the goodness of our companions, and shared food. Each setting both comforts me and calls me deeper in: the ask is gentle, the rewards are often felt immediately and also have resonance over time. I come to these table(s) again and again and again to find the grandeur of humanity, even as I also see so much sorrow in every layer of community I’m enmeshed in.

To give this idea some flesh, here’s a snapshot of the past few days:

• Last Thursday we hosted the daycare in our basement CGS atrium. I taught the 2-4 year olds about the Holy Spirit, we waved around flame colored banners, we sang about holy ground, and then we shared pizza

• That night we celebrated Amanda Nobbe and the daycare getting “Bronze status.” We shared cake from Annie and roast beef sandwiches from our dear friend Georgia Bishop. We rang bells and offered affirmations, telling Amanda we have no idea how she does the hard work she does but shes very good at it.

• On Friday, we celebrated Sam graduating from 8th grade. There was a Mass, and pretzels and koolaid, and speeches, and songs.

• On Saturday, the family celebrated Tony Eilerman, our patriarch, with off key happy birthday tunes and BBQ ribs and Diane’s famous desserts.

• On Sunday, we went to a two hour Mass at Church of the Resurrection. There was praise dancing, and special music, and the Eucharist. Afterwards, there was a hopeful meeting with the Jesuits about them taking leadership of our parish, with applause and speeches and Cokes and chips.

• On Sunday night, we had the celebration of my good scan results, with a side of celebrating Sam’s graduation again. He gave his speech to a new audience, I shared my learnings from this year of treatment, we ate taco salad and drank champagne from tea cups. We finished all of it by singing along to Michael Jackson’s greatest hits and going to the Norwood Creami whip.

• On Tuesday morning, I went to weekday Mass, chatted with some of my old(er) lady friends, passed the peace, heard a funny but true sermon on our personal call to sainthood and shared the bread and wine with whoever showed up for this 8am gathering.

Are the themes emerging?

I think the antidote to the siren song of the artificial life, what makes the awful bearable and the impossible doable is the combination of people we love (the companions) and the opportunities to come together to create beautiful spaces, celebrate milestones, sing songs, eat, thank God and affirm the good or share the sorrow. It’s this intersection— bringing our human lives to the altar of the daily and inviting the Holy Spirit in to bless whatever it is, while also giving thanks, that makes for the sacramental life. It’s a life that Catholics (at our best) do especially well, but all people appreciate. It’s implicitly Eucharistic, because eucharist means thanksgiving.

When done with sincerity this way draws in the lost; as evidence, in this era of replacing food and people with protein drinks, screens, and pornography, converts are flocking to our Churches. The call is to attend to the details, ask and ask again, “can (whatever we’re doing) be more beautiful, melodic, intentional, prayerful, awake, joyful, delicious?” Because that is our Christian gift to a dying world, our stage for human grandeur. Paradoxically, in giving this “way” away, in being present, sincere and excellent, we give ourselves life too.

Meridith and I continue contemplating how to make the day-to-day at Lydia’s House more sacramental, while also realizing the sacred is already called forth, seen and expanding in many ways at 2024 Mills Ave. There are often bells on the table because (as she says) “For centuries the Church has celebrated the big occasions with the ringing of bells.” It’s just that, in our community, almost every day is a big occasion, sometimes beautiful, sometimes heart breaking, often both. The inherent question that I keep running into both in the best of Catholicism and the best of humanity is, “Why not celebrate?”

And the updates:

-I feel subpar on this new medication. Side effects are weird and kind of gross. I think I’m enduring the 10 plagues of Egypt, estrogen suppression edition

-Hoping to dig down another layer into the sacred life, I’m visiting east coast friends, leaving Thursday. I’ll be speaking on the topic “Bearing One Another” with and , addressing how to center the marginalized in a built environment at The Understory, a thought festival exploring Christian Humanism in DC. After that Jacob and I are headed to visit our favorite Broadway producer in Manhattan and our favorite Catholic workers turned Bruderhof residents in Maple Ridge, NY.

The human person is created to praise, reverence and serve God our Lord, and by doing so to save his or her soul; and it is for the human person that the other things on the face of the earth are created, as helps to the pursuit of this end. It follows from this that the person has to use these things insofar as they help towards this end, and to be free of them insofar as they stand in the way of it.

To attain this, we need to make ourselves indifferent towards all created things, provided the matter is subject to our free choice and there is no prohibition. Thus for our part we should not want health more than sickness, wealth more than poverty, fame more than disgrace, a long life more than a short one—and so with everything else; desiring and choosing only what conduces more to the end for which we are created.

On my retreat I had a low key mystical experience when praying in front of the crucifix. I saw myself in green grass with an altar in the middle. I was standing in front of it, the altar cloth was white (in the Catholic Church this signifies celebration) and a circle of people were around me. The words were “you will be held.”

I left the chapel feeling freer to be ok with a long life or a shorter one. Admittedly though, I also was a little worried that “held” meant I was preparing for bad news. Detachment is tricky when you have 3 kids at home.

I had my mammogram yesterday and all was well. No signs of cancer. Thanks be to God. Thanks to all of you who hold me and mine.

Also, since I’m doing this extra post on a Saturday, Sam graduated from 8th grade last night. He gave a sweet speech quoting scripture, telling the audience that he’d learned to love God in the Good Shepherd atrium, and thanking his parents for sending him to that school. I can’t say enough good about GSCM.

We also had spiritual directors assigned by the retreat center, and I’ll say mine (we’ll call him Father X) was pretty lackluster. After three halting sessions, I showed up to meet with him for the last one. I asked him what he thought it meant to make commitments to people other than a spouse, for the sake of mutual edification and care, and on which others can also build lives. He looked at me confused for a moment, and then replied, “Well, I’ll say this. When Ignatius started the Jesuits he wanted to call us Companions of Jesus instead of the Society of Jesus. Society won out, but there’s something to that word companion. It means to share bread. Consider that.”

Despite both having mid quality spiritual direction, Meridith and I ended the trip on a high note. We had a great Saturday in Detroit including a trip to DIA and the best, most amazing pizza. I think it might be worth driving to Detroit for this pizza, and people next to us had actually driven from Chicago just to eat it. In the endeavor of eating Detroit’s finest carbs, Meridith and I were happy companions.

While eating our pie, The Joni, my thoughts were, “Father X’s offer of considering the word companion is spot on,” and not just because of pizza. Sharing bread has been on my mind sacramentally as I’ve been wringing my hands over the closed Eucharistic table of my adult faith of choice… but also because Sam continues his bread exploits. He made danishes that were like a mystical experience and then for Mother’s Day, he made me a focacia that was transcendent. To top it off, he gifted me with a glass mosaic of bread. His brother also got involved in the carb load, and made me a smiley face of pancakes.

I have thought, if Jesus became incarnate partly because he thought it would be a good time, I’ll go out on a limb and say that he decided to leave us himself in bread because it’s absolutely the best food. Like if I were to say, “When you eat this, know that I’m with you,” I too would choose bread.

Aside from sharing bread, eating bread, considering Eucharistic theology, and pontificating about the best bread and bread bi-products, I am seriously thinking about companionship (thanks Father X). Sam, for one, is no longer just my child, but increasingly my companion. He’ll accompany me next week to The Understory Festival and sweetly chose the workshop I’ll be speaking at as one he’ll attend. I share bread with him all the time these days, both at home and in church, but next week I’ll be with him at cocktail receptions and dinner parties discussing Christian humanism. When and how did this happen? I don’t really know, but one prayer I have lately is that I’d be a worthy companion to him, not just vice versa. There’s something about an emergent teenager that feels like holy ground.

On our retreat Meridith and I discussed this poem by Gerard Manly Hopkins

The take away: Occasionally, life gives you a harvest to admire. In my case, a thirteen year old boy who will gladly attend Christian intellectual conferences with me and who gets weepy at the song “How Can I Keep From Singing.” Not just this, but also a small and present crew of pals who send funny texts and prescribe appropriate readings, a tender-hearted husband who fixes church pews while kneeling at them, a best friend who writes liturgy and accompanies me on strange missions of mercy, a trio of young staff to mentor and take on camp outs and a gaggle of older neighbors and church ladies who dote on my hair (because they thought it was going to fall out) while dropping off flowers at my door.

My thought this week is that the companions are what make the difference between a life that we love and a life that we dread. The companions make long drives short, hard work bearable, awkward stories hilarious. In this late summer of the first 1/2 of life I say to myself, “Don’t be a beholder wanting, but rather a joyful companion. Hurrah the Harvest. Share the bread.”

____

As a welcome gift, a friend wrote about our family here. It’s a sweet portrayal.

And the health update: I’ve started a new med. It’s ok. No migraines. No busted veins. I don’t feel great though. Friday I’ll go in for a breast MRI, to see if any cancer is still there, or new has grown. Please pray for me and mine.

Plus save the date! August 30 We’ll be having a mass of thanksgiving at Lydia’s House, in gratitude to the community for this hard year. (My one year diagnosis anniversary is July 10, but scheduling with my preferred priest and my family of 5 was hard). It will include a commissioning of our new staff and my family to move to the shelter property.

PS. Some best of the Detroit Institute of Art, IMHO

Last week I sat down for a conversation with Dan Teller. If you don’t know Dan, he’s the founder of Good Shepherd Montessori School (where my kids go) and, really, just the best person. I told him about the kids in my Lydia’s House atrium that want to get baptized and asked for advice on preparing kids without the Church. He asked me why I felt this was pressing, even if they never enter a church building? I told him, “I don’t know if I’ll live the length of life I thought I would and I want to leave them with something more than ideas.”

It struck me in that moment that the sacred is intertwined with the sticky. Humans need textured, physical events to make real our imaginings; we want to do, build, touch. We don’t just want to hear about Jesus; we want to be baptized into his death and resurrection, forgiven by him “in persona Christi,” eat his flesh and blood. Just as I want to give these kids something more than stories or maxims, leave them with an embodied holiness beyond their hours spent with me in the atrium, so Jesus too wanted to leave us with these embodied reminders; but they are more than reminders like notes left on the door, but rather living truths. As the readings said last week, He did not leave us orphans. To be un-orphaned means to be left with people, not just words.

Including my Friday conversation with Dan, this past week was such a rich one. On Saturday, Meridith graduated from Bethany seminary with her Masters in Divinity and friends from every stage of her life traveled from many states to watch her receive her diploma. After the ceremony she hosted us for a reception and asked each person to share a piece of advice that has stuck with them. As we offered our advice, it created an amalgamated graduation speech.

My children were the only children present but each presented with poise and confidence; both boys quoted scripture, which would have been enough to end the weekend with both me and Meridith feeling like our life project was complete, but the advice from each person in the circle was sincere and thoughtful. Almost every little speech included the words, “I know you don’t need advice Meridith” or “Actually, you taught me the thing I want to share.”

I emceed the event, so I started with highlights from a Berkley commencement by Anne Lamott, from an email Meridith and I sent back and forth, in 2003. I finished with some wisdom by Alan Jackson, a country music star who rose to fame in the 90s, a rural prophet known for his stylized mullet and Georgia twang.

After a fair bit of laughter at my chosen country gold sage, I turned to the actual source of real life wisdom that Meridith and I both cherish, and shared this passage from Hebrews 12:

²⁸ Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe

She ended the time of sharing by telling us that she’d recently filled out a Gallup survey about life satisfaction. With question after question she gave the response 10/10. I’d filled out the same survey and (with the exception of health) I gave the same responses. She thanked everyone for helping her, and me, create a life that we love. She concluded, “When I graduated from High School as valedictorian my superlative was most likely to succeed… and I have.” There was barely a dry eye in the coffee shop party room.

The ceremony nor the reception included any Church ordained sacraments but it all felt sacred and so I was left to consider what makes our lives holy, and how we find more of this? While I deeply desire to offer our families sacramental life, I think the bigger question is “What does it look like to live baptismally, eucharistically, confessionally?”

Are the sacraments of our Church just the most sticky way to make real what is already true, or perhaps a way to seed a hope for truth to emerge more fully on this side of heaven? Are they left with much less meaning if they start and finish inside the sanctuary alone? What’s the relationship between church life and not church life that feeds each side, to the benefit of both. And if the sheepfold is insurmountable, is God still out in pasture?

Ultimately, what does it mean to life Catholically in a way that is mystical and beautiful, so much bigger than meeting a weekly obligation in attendance at a church service, but still including membership in a body of believers? Was that amalgamated graduation speech among friends sacramental though neither a priest nor a tabernacle was present? Did the time there call forth an existing grace and create an expansive grace, the people gathered and the good intention making space for the holy spirit to have a multiplier effect?

I guess the question I’m asking is, if we’re attentive, are there sacraments hidden in many fields, both out in the pasture and inside the sheep fold? Just like beauty is this imbued gift waiting for us to see it, outward signs of inward grace might be shared tacos at a campsite and also can be found in the oils of chrism signed on our forehead at the Easter vigil? My considering this is not to dismiss what happens in Church or say “my church is when I take a walk in the woods,” or “everything is sacred,” but maybe to say, “something holy can happen in a walk in the woods.”

On that note, to end the weekend, Meridith and I took a walk in the woods. I told her I’ve been thinking about how I want to observe the one year anniversary of my diagnosis, which is coming up. I thought maybe with a birthday party, since my 45th trip around the sun and that bad day are close. But really it seemed to call for something more.

Week by week, prayer by prayer, sacred moment by sacred moment a truth of greater commitment has been revealed to me over this past complicated year, and I want to profess this in a way that others too can build on this firm foundation. Again, the grace of this truth is already present, as Meridith’s brother is (permanently?) moving to Cincinnati to join us this June, and Anne plots her return to the Lydia’s House compound. The commitment of people to a place and each other is the rock on which lives are built and the vulnerable are cared for.

So as I’ve prayed about it what came to the surface was a Mass at the shelter, with some space to make greater commitments to the life we’re already living. I told her I don’t know what will happen with this cancer mess, but if I’m dying I want to die at Lydia’s House, with her and Ben and the kids; If I’m sticking around, same.

Why not give even more of our lives away? In this case I want to take what’s happened in real life and offer it back to the Church, even if the Church is, sometimes, at the shelter.

She and I are (currently) taking a retreat to Detroit. I wrote this before I left, so that’s where we are now, at Manresa Jesuit Center. We went to think about her new role as pastor of our non traditional flock in our not-Church church, to consider baptism, confession and Eucharist; while here we’ll go to Church and consider being the church.

We’re marching toward Pentecost in the liturgical calendar and I think it’s fair to say the Holy Spirit is dancing with me and mine this season; we’re receiving a Kingdom that cannot be shaken. The work of this week, and really the rest of our lives, is to worship God with reverence and awe.

The problem with stopping it, however, is that cessation increases my chances of cancer recurrence by about 5% and a recurrent cancer could come back in a way worse place, like my spine.

It’s hard to wrap my head around cancer coming back because I feel so fine right now. I haven’t felt better in my 40s. But the seed of this menace is in my system, meaning I will always be under surveillance during what remains of my one wild and precious life. And as such, failure to do the recommended regimen brings risks. I crossed this threshold once already this season when I decided on a partial mastectomy instead of a full; and now I look out over the murky “gamble with my life” horizon again.

These risks came into full view when, last Thursday, I listened to Ross Douthat interview Ben Sasse (the link is gifted if you don’t have the NYTimes). A former republican senator from Nebraska, Sasse is soon to die of pancreatic cancer at the age of 54. His face looks like he got mauled because the experimental drug he’s on makes it difficult for him to grow new skin. He’s doing this drug regimen to live a few more months, to spend time alongside his wife and 14 year old son.

When I listen to a story like that I feel (honestly) selfish for my reticence about suffering more now. It’s all brought into view a question about freedom, the big question of the week that Amber Lapp and I are turning over, in conversation Wendell Berry’s “Sex, Economy, Community, Freedom.”

I realize a lot is going on here: cancer drug rejection, impending mortality, Kentucky agrarian philosophy. So, just to complicate things, I’ll add some scripture. There’s two passages I’m curious about. One goes back to the shepherd and the sheepfold when Jesus says he is the gate he says the sheep come and go through him, into the fold and out to the pasture:

Therefore Jesus said again, “Very truly I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. ⁸ All who have come before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep have not listened to them. ⁹ I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved.^[a] They will come in and go out, and find pasture. ¹⁰ The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.

At another point, Paul tells us that Christ’s liberating act in death and resurrection is for freedom itself:

For freedom^[a] Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not be subject again to the yoke^[b] of slavery. You who are trying to be declared righteous^[d] by the law have been alienated^[e] from Christ; you have fallen away from grace! ⁵ For through the Spirit, by faith, we wait expectantly for the hope of righteousness. ⁶ For in Christ Jesus the only thing that matters is faith working through love.^[f]

So my question really is, “what is freedom” and more importantly, “what is freedom for?” Jesus says we are free to come into the safety of the fold and out into the pasture; Paul tells us not to come under the yoke of the law but to lean into grace, to let the only thing that matters be faith working through love.

Wendell Berry argues that freedom, American style, only makes sense when placed in the context of responsibility, and that the responsibilities we’re called to are outlined by relationship and community. Freedom is for building a world that people want to live in and a life people want to rub up against. The misuse of freedom must be litigated by community, for the sake of holding on to the higher good of shared life.

Reading the Berry essay brings me back to my own personal freedom. When I went to the oncologist early on, he told me, “You don’t have to do anything. It’s your body.” I sat with that with a great degree of seriousness. At various points I’ve been staunchly pro-choice, a feminist definitionally. Yes, I wanted to say, it is my body. 20+ years ago, when diagnosed with leukemia, I watched my mom take every treatment. As her skin broke into boils, an outcome of chemotherapy, I rubbed frankincense on her wounds until they came to a pus filled head. In the hospital with her at her death, I told myself I’d not go that way, when it was my time.

My freedom to choose last summer left me choosing a treatment regimen that prioritized bodily pleasure, participation and life now. I didn’t have my breasts removed and reconstructed because, while they would look better, they’d have no feeling. The reconstruction too would leave my mid section and my thighs numb, fat removed from areas people want fat removed but textured with scars vast and deep— a patchwork of skin with no sensation, valuable only for how I’d present my reshaped form to the anonymous world. The whole process, which would have occurred last September, also meant a cancellation of our fall religious education program at Lydia’s House, a no that it pained me to say.

But when I made the choices to do less surgery, removing only the section with active cancer cells, I implicitly decided to increase my risk of possible cancer recurrence.

With the medications, one left my leg throbbing. I could bear the indignity of bulging veins, but the fear that I was having an aneurysm was too much. With the other medication, the headaches rendered me a non participant in my life and my family.

If I were my mother, diagnosed with leukemia, or Ben Sasse, given the awful news of stage 4 cancer, would I choose a different course? Probably. If the murky horizon offered only death or painful, constantly medicated life, perhaps I’d take the pain for some number of months to say goodbye and get my affairs in order. Honestly, I don’t know.

I’m with Catholicism on assisted suicide, but what of choosing less suffering and less longevity, not actively choosing death, but intentionally choosing a shorter, un-medicated life? I’ve consulted around to my personal circle of religious ethicists and it seems I’m under no obligation to endure daily suffering for possible better cancer outcomes but, of course, I try not to deal in rights and obligations, but rather gifts and sacrifices.

What I know clearly is that my life is not my own. By virtue of many choices my body and the implications of my health are shared with Ben and the kids and Meridith, to a lesser degree with the families we support at Lydia’s House, and at a mystical level with Christ and the Church. I no longer have such a thing as bodily autonomy, despite what the oncologist said. I’ve talked to Ben and Meridith. They agreed with me not to have the full mastectomy, not to continue tamoxifen or exemestene. But the worry is present; it’s not light when I bring up these questions.

Today, at the oncologist, after he reviewed options he said, “There’s another med we can offer. It’s side effects are different. Do you want to try it?” Ben sat with me; he didn’t weigh in. I felt heavy with the possibility of this next turbulent round of, well, who knows… I thought about how it might interrupt my speaking engagement in DC at the end of the month, a trip I have planned to NY, summer camp at Lydia’s House. And then I thought about my beloved circle of family and chosen family. Is faith working through love trying medication after medication?

Taking a page from Wendall Berry, I’ll say community is the best ethical framework I can lean into, as I actively sort through this treatment quagmire. I don’t want to try another med. I just do want to roll the dice and keep feeling fine. But I said yes to letrozole and, with heaviness, told them to call it into CVS.

The conclusion of this week is that I best live the days that I feel good well: pour out my life for the sake of the good fight; be present to the people I say I want to be present to; appreciate pain free embodiment on the days I have it. If the freedom I’m exercising balances feeling good in my body against feeling less good for the sake of longevity, I don’t want to discount either costly outcome.

Feel free to ask me if I’m holding both the present and the future with care or tell me that I’m not. This year of writing, thinking about a bad illness and a good life, is a year of learning in public. I want to correct course if I’m off because, the honest truth is, I could be sitting in Ben Sasse’s chair in 5 years. Any of us could really.

And for the sake of sharing some goodness today, here’s some pictures of the week that just ended.

We gave away a van at Lydia’s House. It was great. The photo is of the winner just after we shared the news. And we crashed the Xavier end of year party to take advantage of riding the bull. No surprise, Jacob is a pro. Sam went back to soccer after a wrist break hiatus. And Ben and I celebrated 18 years of marriage, with his mom and dad and aunt and uncle, who share the same anniversary. Purcell Marian had prom— Annie was channeling Barbie for her thrift-ed prom look.

And this weekend we head to Richmond, Indiana to celebrate Meridith graduating with her Masters in Divinity from Bethany Seminary. Congratulations to my dearest friend and sister in Christ on this milestone.