lenorefranzen.com

First, some background.

The truth and reconciliation concept emerged in the 1970s as a strategy for dealing with war crimes and other human rights abuses. As one website explained, “It seeks to heal relations between opposing sides by uncovering all pertinent facts, distinguishing truth from lies, and allowing for acknowledgement, appropriate public mourning, forgiveness and healing.”

 The most famous example is South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission following the end of apartheid. More than thirty nations have used this model during the past three decades. (Imagine what restorative justice we could achieve if our country had a commission that confronted slavery.)

So why not apply the process to ourselves?

I asked myself this question at a recent writer’s group. Isn’t this what we’re about when we tell our stories? Isn’t writing the most intimate form of truth and reconciliation? Done openly, the process helps us confront and reckon with our past so that we can move beyond old hurts and inaccurate versions of ourselves to a place of authenticity and healing.

As one of the women in our group haltingly described what her story is about, tears came to her eyes and her face reflected utter anguish. So much in our past, in our lives, to reckon with. So much to process and forgive before we can love ourselves.

This is why I write. This is why many of us write. Some of us in our sixties and beyond know that it’s much more than a desire to be published that puts us in our chair. It’s more than “morning pages” or a 200-word daily goal. Writing the truth—naming it and reckoning with it—takes us deeper as we seek an Eden we will spend our whole lives hoping to reclaim.

What would it mean for each of us to speak our own truth?

Today is Ash Wednesday. It marks the beginning of Lent, the Christian church’s 40-day journey of truth and reconciliation with ourselves and God.

Today is also any Wednesday, a day like every other when, regardless of our beliefs, we can begin the process. There is always truth to uncover and reconciliation to come.

 

 

I woke up this morning and it felt a little chilly outside of the covers. Since it was the coldest morning of the year, I figured that was why and dressed and headed down to the kitchen. I checked the thermostat on my way.

 Yep. You read that right. It was a bracing 45 downstairs, a crisp 50 upstairs. At least there wasn’t a windchill.

The extent of my ability to diagnose or fix something is to check the fuse box or go on YouTube. No circuit flipped. Somehow, this seemed beyond YouTube.So I started up the space heaters, one up, one down, all smugness from yesterday’s post gone. I ate crow for breakfast. Perhaps to punish myself (and before coffee), I figured I would hunker even further down than I already had been the last few days and wait it out. Wait what out? I thought. Now is not the time to prove anything.

I called the heating company that had installed the furnace some 15 years ago and soon the service technician showed up. I met him at the door in a down coat, hat, and scarf.

After a bit of this and a bit of that, he told me my filter was probably the culprit, even though I’d replaced it this fall. He put a new one in and left. The house temperature climbed into the high 40s, then dropped to 42. Another call, another technician. He spent a bit more time doing this and that, including a few loud bangs, then gave me the news.

I needed a new furnace. Yes, I could replace parts (which might have to get ordered and weren’t easy to come by) but if I intended to stay in the house for awhile, I should do it.

I ate chilled crow for lunch. Last fall my neighbor mentioned she was having their furnace cleaned and checked out before winter. I made a mental note to do the same, forgetting that mental notes don’t come with a guarantee.

Now another guy is on his way to tell me how much it’s going to cost. I’ll gulp and cancel travel plans for the year, but be the warmer for it.

Back to the jigsaw puzzle.

 

My first writing teacher was Marion Dane Bauer. After taking a class from her through The Loft Literary Center, I joined a workshop that met twice a month in her home. Here our small group took turns reading from our works-in-progress and getting feedback. Besides writing On My Honor, a Newbery Honor Book, and other works of fiction, she wrote What’s Your Story?, a practical guide for young writers who want to attempt fiction.

This past November, I spent three days in Chicago with my siblings. We live in different states and rarely have a chance to be altogether. What better place to have a reunion, we decided, than our home town. And what better activity than to go to museums, a practice our parents instilled in us as they stressed the importance of lifelong learning. In my search for things to do, I noticed that The American Writers Museum had opened on Michigan Avenue a year earlier. It was an easy sell as we’re all avid readers. One morning we spent a few hours making our way down a long hallway, reading panels on well over 200 writers. It was a lot of information–too much, we decided, to take in in a single visit.

At the end of the alley, on the back wall, was this quote from James Baldwin:

Of all I took in that morning, this is the quote that I remember. This is the idea that won’t let me go. It was as if with his serious expression, Baldwin was challenging me to answer the question “What’s my story?” as I work on my memoir. Yet I quickly realized the “larger” and “reverberating” aspects to my individual story. His quote carried universal appeal, if not application. We don’t need to be writers to ask ourselves, “What is my story?” We don’t need to be writers to recognize that there is a fundamental theme or narrative that runs through our lives.

What’s your story?

In all the writing I’ve done—the young adult novels, the poetry, the journaling, this blog, and now the memoir—a single thread runs through it. My story is coming to terms with a sense of unworthiness and learning to accept (read love) myself for who I am.

In the preface of her memoir Becoming, Michelle Obama explains how her parents helped her see the value in her story. “Your story is what you have, what you will always have. It is something to own.”

What’s your story? How does it shape you? How does it limit you? How does it reflect who you really are and how does it perpetuate messages it may be time to delete? How does it shield you from suffering, and how does it ask you to risk everything?

Baldwin’s quote reminds me that answering the question “What’s your story?” is an ongoing process. We run, we fall, we pick ourselves up again and blunder on. It is the very act of living.

Anthony Basta, a 17-year-old from St. Paul, described himself in his high school yearbook as “Just a kid growing up!” Five months later, on April 26, 2000, he was the victim of a drive-by shooting—a senseless, random act by three “kids” out on a dare.

On Mississippi River Boulevard, between Jefferson and Randolph Avenues, sits a rock with a plaque at the site of the shooting. The plaque is inscribed with Tony’s words, dated 12/1/99. Had he lived, Tony would be 35 years old today.

This past Saturday, I was walking south on River Boulevard, noticing the first flakes of what would be a short but powerful storm that socked the southern part of the state. I saw the plaque as I’ve seen it countless times during my regular walks, bike rides, and drives along this scenic road. The rock has become such a part of the landscape that I hardly acknowledge it anymore.

But this time, I noticed the date. December 1, 19 years ago to the day. December 1, the first day of Advent.

For the rest of the weekend, I thought about Tony Basta. I thought about him during Sunday’s sermon, when I heard the preacher say, “Each of us is dying a little every day.” I thought about Tony during the adult forum, where we discussed Jesus as avatar, God in human form.

I also thought about the devotions I receive each morning in my inbox from Richard Rohr. This particular one began, “In one way or another, almost all religions say that you must die before you die . . . Some form of death—psychological, spiritual, relational, or physical—is the only way we will loosen our ties to our small and separate false self. Only then does it return in a new shape, which we might call the Risen Christ, the soul, or the True Self . . . You move from religion as mere belief to religion as a new kind of knowing.” (November 22, 2018)

I have lived for 65 Advents. This year, I’ve asked myself what it is I’m waiting for. Is it a baby born in a manger? Is it an avatar that stands in for God?

I’m waiting for more than “mere belief,” I realize. I’m seeking nothing less than a re-imagined faith, or a faith that reflects a re-imagined self, one that can reconcile the sin I’m imprisoned by with a more life-giving emphasis on being created in God’s likeness. I want a faith that allows me to hold guilt and self-worth in the same sentence. I want my prayers to come from my heart, more honest and spontaneous. I want the faith I’ve lugged with me since childhood to make sense for me today.

Perhaps I’m like Tony, just a kid when it comes to my faith, growing up within the uncertainties of life, ever seeking to move from “no” to “yes.”

Rohr concludes his devotion: “Once you know that life and death are not two but are part of a whole, you will begin to view reality in a holistic, undivided way, and that will be the change that changes everything.”

Waiting doesn’t mean being passive. The change, the growing up, starts within. I must make myself vulnerable. I must be willing to be transformed, however that transformation comes.

Tony Basta, bless his sweet memory, has inspired me to follow him on his beloved silver BMX, down every road, into every question, through every challenge, even if it means “dying” along the way.

 

 

As my pastor said today in his sermon, “It’s been a week.” He was referring, of course, to the many disturbing events that were in the forefront of the news.

• Matthew Shepard was laid to rest 20 years after he was beaten and left to die because he was gay.
• A caravan of people walking from Central America to our border, where 800 U.S. troops will prevent them from seeking asylum from the violence and poverty they are trying to leave behind.
• A mentally unstable man and Trump supporter with a long rap sheet mailed pipe bombs to prominent Democrats.
• Eleven people were gunned down inside the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.
• 400,000 children are at risk of dying from malnutrition in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia wages war by cutting off food supplies to civilians.

As a country, as a world, it has been a week. A week that reflects an ongoing intolerance of “the other.” Can the bar get any lower?

My pastor’s comment made me consider my week. Mine has been a week as well, but in a very different, hopeful way.

• I began fostering an 18-month-old golden retriever rescued from neglect and abuse. After a few days of adjusting, she has shown that indomitable spirit of her breed.
• A friend who was diagnosed with sarcoma this past summer and has been through chemo and two surgeries met with her oncologist, who gave her every reason to believe she is going to survive.
• A dear aunt—the last of her generation in my family—passed away peacefully, surrounded by loved ones who were able to say their good-byes. While we will all miss her down-to-earth goodness, we will gather to celebrate her 94 years and acknowledge those other loved ones gone before her who are now welcoming her home.
• I heard two wonderful authors speak. Min Jin Lee wrote Pachinko, a sweeping historical novel of Korean Japanese culture. Megan O’Gieblyn, a former teacher of mine, read from her collection of essays, Interior State, in which she explores being from the Midwest and her “deconversion” from an evangelical background.
• Saturday I attended a class at The Loft, taught by Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew. Most of the participants are working on a full-length project and some are nearing completion. Elizabeth gave us a new lens for considering the power a finished manuscript continues to exert on us and the world, whether or not it’s published.

It has been a week. A week of feeling as if things are coming apart at the seams, and a week of sewing up, stitch by stitch, the torn places. Soon I will head to a nordic contemplative service, where the theme for these Sunday evening services is the chance to start again. Just what we all need.