Practically Divine

Introduction

STANDING IN A GERANIUM field, smelling the dark soil fertilized by rabbit poop, is different from reading about the healing properties of geraniums. Walking beside a woman in a refugee camp holding a rag over her baby’s face because so much dust rises from the dry, red dirt is different from imagining how hard it is for moms in camps. Experience is nine-tenths of love. The senses of the beholder transform information into compassionate experiences that are holy.

Too much ink is spent on trying to perfect an ideal of love, which is wholly impractical since love is revealed through experience. We learn about love’s many facets, including humility, mercy, forgiveness, joy, and grief, through experience. The experiences of the practically divine shared in this book come from love stories I have picked up, like sacred bread crumbs, in which divine love can be seen, tasted, and smelled right in the midst of extraordinarily ordinary—and sometimes extraordinarily horrific—days.

Stories and experiences ground the idea of the practically divine and offer a way for us to glimpse how we all are practically divine and in the presence of great love. Those experiences can sometimes be scary and lonely, but they also leave us knee-bucklingly grateful. In the stories scattered throughout the book, I am sharing the moments I was able to recognize the divine love that was present through it all. Such a recognition can be wildly freeing and creative.

MY MOTHER WAS a great inspiration to me. When I was five, my father was killed by a drunk driver, and my mother was left to care for five young children. Despite being poor and alone, she served as a powerful example of how to find the divine love surrounding us, by tending to practical needs through arts and crafts and in her wise sayings:

Come to find out . . .

Three moves . . .

God is love—don’t worry about the rest.

Her sayings didn’t feel like platitudes but practical bits of knowledge that could keep us going. Some were antiquated, so they kind of lost their punch, like This whole thing is a shambles, since most of us don’t know what a shambles is (think mess or wreckage). You will grow up to be a ne’er-do-well, meant to be a threatening statement to all the kids draped over furniture watching TV, to get us off our butts and help. Her sayings rise in me like fragrance from a lavender sachet tucked away in a drawer. As the drawer is cracked open, all of a sudden you are awash in a scent that stirs your heart. I can still hear her voice, fresh and present like those old lavender buds, thirty years after her death.

My mother’s example of showing love through practical means gave me the wherewithal to open a home for women survivors of trafficking, prostitution, and addiction more than twenty-five years ago in Nashville, Tennessee. It was a small house for five women. I said: Come live free for two years with no authority living with you. Live free. I did it because I figured that’s what I would want if I were coming in off the streets or out of prison, where people were telling me what to do all day. I didn’t do it because of my mom or because of the childhood sexual abuse I experienced at the hands of a church elder, though all of that was a part of it. I did it because sanctuary is the most practical ideal of all.

I wasn’t interested in repackaging charity in shiny, new boxes with the latest words. I was bored by trendy cause-hawking that left me feeling disconnected. I was disillusioned by a bifurcated political system that numbs compassion. I wanted to do the work of healing from the inside out. And that begins with a safe home.

Imagine, for a moment, a small seed of hope lying dormant in your heart. You hold on to it, despite trauma and injustices you may have faced since you could spell your own name. One day, you arrive safely at your new home and allow community to be like the soil, and resources to act like sun and water, so, finally that tiny seed grows into a stunning plant, scattering blossoms of love hundredfold.

From its humble beginning, Thistle Farms now has thirty global partners that employ more than 1,600 women. In the United States alone, Thistle Farms has more than fifty sister communities offering free, two-year housing. The global artisan survivors are creating revolutionary crafts that help restore their communities. The mission to be a global movement for women’s freedom is broad and is growing exponentially, come hell, high water, or pandemics.

Initially, it seemed a bit ridiculous to me to think that by starting a small community, we could somehow change the world, but now, it seems more ridiculous to me to think that somehow the world will change if we don’t do something.

Now, I can see that one loving gesture is practically divine. We have to do small things and believe a big difference is coming. It’s like the miraculous drops of water that seep through mountain limestone. They gather themselves into springs that flow into creeks that merge into rivers that find their way to oceans. Our work is to envision the drops as oceans. We do our small parts and know a powerful ocean of love and compassion is downstream. Each small gesture can lead to liberation. The bravest thing we can do in this world is not cling to old ideas or fear of judgment, but step out and just do something for love’s sake.

I AM WRITING this book for everyone hungry to taste the divine, struggling to see it, needing inspiration and challenge to go back out and try again. You can cross lines and gain new perspective. It is possible to love the whole world. We don’t have to get cynical, fearful, numb, or be shamed into thinking we have nothing to offer. I think sometimes it’s even much easier than we think.

I have sat through way too many presentations in which a speaker will say something like, "Here are the Four Cs to a fulfilling life." We take out our notebooks or laptops to write down or type the four C words. We can’t help ourselves. Then the next night, I lie in bed and think of three of the words, tossing and turning, trying to recall the fourth. By the end of the week, I’m lucky if I remember that the words started with C.

There is no secret formula to experiencing the sacred in our lives. It just takes practice and practicality. The deep truth of our lives and the fullness we are striving for don’t happen with someone giving us the code to deep knowledge. Meaning and faith are not secret things. Sometimes what we need most is to remind one another of how the divine is all around us, calling us to see and taste it for ourselves. We can find our deep truth and purpose while we are on the way to the grocery store or struggling to make a marriage work. We can find beauty while we go through a TSA checkpoint or walk along any sidewalk. We can feel gratitude sitting in a waiting room or forgiving ourselves for one thing we didn’t get done.

Practice might not lead to perfection, but it will lead us closer to love. When we cultivate our ability to see the divine in the midst of our days, slowly we can trust that deep within us lies the same love that was woven into creation.

I have felt the practically divine all along the way of my personal journey. Even when I didn’t know where I was headed, or I worried that a new justice enterprise would be too much to take on, I knew I had to do something. It is good news that, beyond our power to fully understand, our path is full of sacred crumbs that are enough to keep us moving in the right direction.

It doesn’t matter where we are—whether we are reading this in the comfort of our bed, on a prison cot, or wandering in the world—something divine is present at any given moment. Maybe it’s just an idea, a moment of inspiration, or even the song of a bird. We can learn from one another’s collective wisdom, but we also have to be willing to forge our own way to new places. All we have learned, felt, and thought from childhood until this moment is with us as we take the next step. We have all we need to make that next step, with no regrets. We do not need more thought leaders repackaging ideas into a marketable gimmick or bumper-sticker theology. We need to help one another with real, hands-on advice to root us and help us grow. The practice of love in our thoughts, words, and deeds would serve businesses, politicians, and pastors well. Practically divine is what it sounds like: both practical and divine. We are both almost and usefully divine!

People are searching for the divine. Think about the divine and where you can find it in your life:

Through accepting your present state,

Finding beauty in the brokenness,

Embracing the divine chaos of the unknown before you,

Redefining the old lies and stories you’ve been told, so you can learn from the past and move forward,

Using your creativity to reconnect to your divinity and to others,

Finding love’s presence even on your most difficult days,

Appreciating the divine gifts that come from your imperfections and traumas,

Letting go of your physical and figurative baggage,

And finally sharing in a feast of love, knowing there is always enough mercy and forgiveness to go around.

Practically divine is not an oxymoron. It is as poetic as being optimistic in the midst of depression or as vital as sitting in silence with a friend who can’t take any more advice. It is both and, not either-or.

Most people want to feel excited about their ability to do something that will create meaningful change. This inspiration comes with one simple, small, practical act of love. When I see how love has healed so many broken people, including me, it is my great joy to remind people how they can create love in the world.

When you spread the message that love heals and that signs of divinity are all around, supporting us on our darkest days, you pick up lots of friends. It’s a message that gives people the impetus to do something, anything, so we can share in the feast of love together. Now is the time to promote the practically divine idea that in coming together, wherever we are, we can lift one another up and be happier and more creative.

You just have to keep practicing. The results are always a surprise, with more unfolding than you imagined, teaching you that you can’t go back the way you came. Practically divine asks us to find a new way.

In this book, I will write the word love over and over. Please know that it’s shorthand for my whole theology. When I say love, you can translate that into life with God. To me, love is where the temporal and the eternal meet, and love has an infinite number of expressions. Love is done a disservice when it is categorized into neat boxes, and the million shades of its blessings are missed. The love I’m exploring in this writing is love that feels practical and specific. I am pursuing the kind of love that moves from ideals into practices that take on flesh and bone.

ONE

In Broad Daylight

CAN YOU BELIEVE IT? my mom would ask with indignation to whoever was in earshot. Right there, in broad daylight. Somehow, in her mind, the fact that she was cut off in traffic or was shortchanged was worse because the infraction happened right there in broad daylight. The phrase emphasized that the perpetrators were worse because they had no shame and did whatever they were doing, right there, in the light, instead of skulking around in the darkness of shadows and moonlight. I can see the palms of her hands lifted toward the heavens, with a slight shrug of her shoulders that always came at the end of her pronouncements.

Many adult children can recall with amazing accuracy the ghost of their mother’s voice. We conjure up our mother’s old sayings seemingly out of the blue, with the same internal timbre, decades after they were first uttered as we received lessons we never asked for. One minute you’re an adult, and in a flash of thought, quick as lightning, your instinct kicks in and your mother’s old sayings strike through time, crash through hours of therapy, and zap you with words ringing inside your head. Just thinking about my mom this very second brings waves of sayings into my consciousness. It makes me wonder sometimes if she’s sitting on a cloud just above my head, throwing sayings like lightning bolts to keep me on track.

You need to set goals for each day, I can hear her saying when I was a teenager, above the hum of her vacuum cleaner at 6:00 a.m. on Saturday mornings. She ran the machine around my bed like an alarm. Do you think laundry does itself? might be the next sentence coming from her overworked and financially strapped lips. On Saturdays, she would have mowed the grass and started the bread baking before she woke us up, vacuuming as she got ready for the grocery store. I kid you not. She didn’t tire. She found the divine in the practical, and her theology was summed up in simple, pragmatic phrases that stick with me like sitcom theme song lyrics. We are dirt and angels, she’d muse as she tried to find the divine in the practical daily chores of keeping a family afloat on less than a living wage. There were no retreats or vacations. Just sweet, practical ways of finding wonder and joy.

DON’T MAKE ME come in there! I can hear her yelling from a distant room in the back of my mind.

Why would I make you come in here? I remember thinking. That would be ridiculous since you are in a bad mood, and I haven’t done whatever it is that I was supposed to.

You’d better snap out of it, I can hear her retort emphatically when one of the five kids (Katie, Sandy, Pam, Gladstone, and yours truly) she was raising alone was falling apart or having a meltdown.

You made your bed, meaning no matter the situation, don’t complain, because you got yourself into it. Now it’s time to deal with it.

Who promised you fair? was her