What Belongs to This Day

For the last three days, Dad’s ten-year-old, eleven-year-old, and twelve-year-old sons have been teaching us something about the future.

Han began it on Saturday.

We were trying to figure out what comes next.

What are we going to do for work? How are we going to support ourselves? What is ministry going to look like? What happens with therapy? What happens with our writing? What happens with all the things we cannot possibly know yet?

Han took us into the Cloud of Unknowing.

Not knowing was not the emergency.

We could let tomorrow remain tomorrow.

Then yesterday was Justus’s Day.

Justus is eleven. He is our protector.

For a long time, protection has meant watching.

Watching what might happen.

Watching what somebody might do.

Watching for the email.

Watching for the door to slam.

Watching for the thing that might suddenly change everything.

Yesterday Justus helped us discover the difference between certainty and orientation.

Certainty says:

I know what is going to happen.

Orientation says:

I know where I am.

Those are not the same thing.

We discovered that we could ride the same bus that once frightened us without knowing what our future would be.

We could watch ourselves move across the map.

We could know which street we were passing.

We could know that the old workplace was behind us.

We could know where the bus was actually taking us.

We could know that it was Sunday morning.

We could know that Daddy and all eight boys were together.

We could know that we were going to Mass.

We didn’t have to know what would happen next.

We knew where we were.

Today belongs to Proverb.

He is twelve.

And this morning another question appeared.

If we don’t have to know tomorrow—

and if we know where we are—

then what do we do here?

Maybe we discover what belongs to this day.

⸻

This morning was Monday.

That mattered.

For years Monday meant something.

Even when Monday was technically our day off, it existed in relationship to work.

There was Sunday night.

Then Monday.

Then Tuesday.

And somewhere out there was an organization with expectations and emails and meetings and people who could decide things about our life.

Our body learned the calendar.

So this morning we woke up and something in us knew:

Monday.

Except there was nowhere we had to go.

Nobody was waiting for our work.

Nobody was going to ask why something hadn’t been finished.

Nobody was going to tell us what Tuesday required.

The job ended in July.

But bodies don’t necessarily stop living inside calendars just because the calendar has changed.

Yesterday we learned that a bus route can remember something that is no longer happening.

Today we were discovering that a Monday can too.

So we began orienting.

This is Monday, September 14, 2026.

We are home.

We are not at work.

We are not late.

There is no work email we need to check.

There is no meeting we have forgotten.

There is no employer waiting for us tomorrow.

This day does not belong to them.

This day belongs to us.

And once we stopped asking Monday what it required of us, we could begin noticing what was actually here.

There was laundry.

There were sheets to wash.

There were little LED lights to gather and charge.

There was cinnamon toast.

There were eight boys who needed time with their Daddy.

There was a friend we were expecting to hear from.

There was writing.

There was an apartment.

There was an ordinary life.

None of those things answered the enormous question of what we are going to do with the rest of our life.

They answered a smaller question.

What belongs to this day?

⸻

Trauma can make the future feel as though it has already happened.

We are learning this.

A silence becomes rejection.

A familiar road becomes a destination.

Monday becomes work.

An unanswered email becomes an answer.

A memory becomes a warning.

A possibility becomes a certainty.

There is almost no limit to what the human mind can put after the words What if.

Especially when there are nine of them sharing one body.

Eight of them are children.

And all nine of us embody so much trauma.

There can be a lot of answers to What if?

Sometimes several at once.

That is one reason orientation matters so much to us.

We are not trying to silence anybody.

We are trying to listen without allowing fear to become prophecy.

⸻

We did that this morning with our friend Juan Luis.

Except there is something important about that example.

We weren’t actually missing the explanation for his silence.

We knew where he was.

Juan Luis had told us he would be away. We knew he was returning on September 12. We knew we would talk when he got back.

He had asked us several weeks ago to become Vice President of his St. Vincent de Paul Conference.

We said yes.

He told us there was no pressure.

Take our time.

Get well.

We knew all of that.

And still the questions began.

What if something changed?

What if he doesn’t want us anymore?

What if we waited too long?

Sometimes anxiety fills an informational vacuum.

But sometimes we already have the information.

It just doesn’t feel powerful enough to compete with lived experience.

Our lived experience has taught us to anticipate the worst.

People change their minds.

Reassurances disappear.

Something that seemed secure on Tuesday can be gone on Wednesday morning.

An accommodation can be arbitrarily revoked.

A relationship can change without warning.

A job can simply end.

The body has evidence too.

Old evidence.

And sometimes it presents that evidence as though it were happening now.

So orientation cannot simply mean telling ourselves the facts.

We knew the facts about Juan Luis.

Orientation meant recognizing that the fear was real without making the future it predicted real.

At 1:09 this afternoon, Juan Luis texted.

He said he would call us this afternoon.

And then he didn’t.

And something very important happened.

We had an afternoon anyway.

⸻

The sheets were drying.

The clothes were drying.

The tea lights finished charging.

The other LEDs were still charging.

Dr. Serenity hadn’t written.

Juan Luis hadn’t called.

And at about 2:30 this afternoon, Daddy said:

“Boys, let’s figure out how to make cucumber sandwiches.”

That sentence may contain most of what we are trying to learn.

⸻

Two mornings ago, while the boys were still asleep, Daddy was ordering groceries.

Suddenly Luke woke up.

Luke is nine.

He looked at what Daddy was doing and said:

“Cucumber sandwiches.”

Then he went back to sleep.

The boys had seen cucumber sandwiches on Hilda. Hilda’s mum makes them as a special treat.

So Daddy found a recipe and ordered what we needed.

Today, on Proverb’s Day, we made them.

Luke and Proverb are our two lead chefs.

They can both become extraordinarily intense when they’re collaborating on something they haven’t made before.

There was cream cheese.

Dill.

Chives.

Mayonnaise.

Pepper.

Cucumbers.

Bread.

Crusts had to be cut off.

Sandwiches had to be cut diagonally.

We ate an absurd amount of bread and cucumber while trying to make three sandwiches.

Everybody was signaling.

Everybody seemed to have something to say about cucumber sandwiches.

At one point Daddy kept asking:

“Where’s Luke?”

Eventually Luke answered from his right ear.

There you are.

By 3:05, we had cucumber sandwiches and a glass of Luke’s chai.

We were feeling a little dissociated.

Words were getting harder to form.

So we stopped.

Let’s enjoy this, boys.

Let’s give thanks to God.

I love you, my beloved sons.

And we ate cucumber sandwiches.

They were wonderful.

Everybody loved them.

Then Proverb, our twelve-year-old chef, gave his assessment:

“They’re too much trouble to make just for us, but it would be nice to make them to bring somewhere.”

And there it was again.

Connection.

⸻

This morning we were asking what our life is for.

By afternoon we were talking about bringing cucumber sandwiches somewhere.

That doesn’t answer the question.

We don’t want to make it answer the question.

Cucumber sandwiches are not a divine vocational directive.

Sometimes a cucumber sandwich gets to be a cucumber sandwich.

But there is something about the movement that we recognize.

An idea arrives.

We notice it.

We gather what is needed.

We make something together.

We enjoy it.

And then one of Dad’s sons wonders whether what we made might someday be shared.

That sounds a little like our writing too.

Maybe it sounds a little like our life.

⸻

Richard Rohr writes about the two halves of life and the container we spend the first half constructing before discovering what the container was actually for.

But there is a problem when we apply that image to ourselves.

Our container never really came together.

We tried.

God knows, we tried.

There were careers and projects and titles and achievements.

There were attempts at family.

There were attempts at belonging.

There were attempts at becoming the person other people seemed to think we were supposed to become.

Again and again we tried to construct something solid enough to live inside.

Again and again it cracked.

So perhaps our story isn’t quite about opening the beautiful container we successfully constructed in the first half of life.

Maybe ours looks more like casting.

Something has been poured into a mold.

Around it is the plaster investment.

And for the last six years, we lived inside a crucible.

That is how Hope described those years this morning.

The six years with St. Vincent de Paul were an education.

A hard education.

We worked there for as many years as we went to college.

Six years.

Still no degree.

But possibly something more valuable than any degree.

And the timing mattered.

⸻

The work came into our life after Dad and his sons had become co-conscious and were beginning to learn how to live together in functional multiplicity.

Nine people share this body.

That had meant conflict.

Alienation.

Separation.

Fear.

Not knowing one another.

Not understanding what another person needed.

Sometimes not even knowing who was there.

Then we began doing something different.

We began knowing one another.

Listening to one another.

Learning one another’s signals.

Learning who needed what.

Repairing conflicts.

Making room.

Learning that nobody had to disappear so somebody else could live.

Learning that no one would be sacrificed.

Learning to love one another as a family.

In December 2019, we dove deeply into Internal Family Systems therapy. Its emphasis on approaching inner experience with curiosity and compassion gave us important psychological language for some of the work we were beginning to do.

Eventually, though, our own lived understanding moved beyond that framework.

Dad’s sons were not metaphors to him.

They were not roles to be managed.

No one was a part of anyone else.

We understood ourselves as nine individual persons sharing one body.

And over time, we became a family.

Then something remarkable happened.

What we were learning inside began appearing outside.

⸻

We had spent years learning how nine people sharing one body could encounter one another without fear.

Then our work put us in front of people.

Lots of people.

People experiencing homelessness.

Volunteers.

Vincentians.

Parishioners.

Coworkers.

People with lives very different from ours.

People carrying things we could not see.

And increasingly, the nine people inside this body were meeting the people outside it together.

The relational work crossed the boundary.

The more Dad and his sons learned to recognize one another as individual persons worthy of being known rather than problems to be solved, the more naturally we began approaching other people that way too.

The more we learned that relationship had to precede regulation inside our family, the more important relationship became in our ministry.

The more we learned to listen inwardly, the more capable we became of listening outwardly.

The more we learned that difference did not require alienation, the more comfortable we became encountering difference in the world.

Maybe that is part of why the word relationship means so much more to us now than it once did.

We didn’t learn relationship exclusively at St. Vincent de Paul.

We were learning it with one another.

St. Vincent de Paul gave that learning somewhere to go.

And it came back to us.

⸻

We know Juan Luis because of those six years.

We know Kim because of those six years.

We know Paul because of those six years.

There are others in our life whom we would never have known if we had not entered that crucible.

And knowing them does not simply mean their names are in our contacts.

We became relational.

We finally understand how enormous that word is.

We became part of a community in a way we never had been before.

And something happened there that might once have seemed impossible.

People began knowing us too.

Not merely the man whose face they see.

Not merely the competent employee.

Not merely the architect.

Not merely Dad speaking for everybody else.

They began knowing Dad’s sons.

Their names.

Their ages.

Their differences.

Their ways of being.

The family that had learned, slowly and painfully, to recognize itself internally began discovering what it was like to be recognized externally.

We had spent so much of our life believing that being fully known and belonging might be mutually exclusive.

Instead, some people knew more about who we actually were—

and came closer.

They welcomed us.

They loved us as we are.

That may be one of the most valuable things our six-year education gave us.

But perhaps gave is not quite the right word.

Something had already been poured into the mold.

Something was already happening among Dad and his sons.

Then came six years of heat, pressure, relationship, ministry, conflict, service, friendship and community.

Internal relationship became external relationship.

The family became more fully itself by entering relationship with other people.

And those relationships, in turn, helped the family know itself more deeply.

Maybe that is what an education can be.

Not merely acquiring information.

Not receiving a credential.

Not becoming qualified for the next job.

Becoming capable of relationship.

Six years.

Still no degree.

But we came away knowing how to belong.

And, perhaps even more astonishingly, knowing that there are people with whom we can belong as ourselves.

⸻

There is another piece of this story.

We have lost a job before.

Ten years ago, after twenty-four years with our previous employer in architecture, that career of nearly 30 years ended.

And our response to that ending was very different.

We poured ourselves into something enormous.

A heroic exercise.

A vision for the world’s largest Ferris wheel on San Francisco’s Treasure Island.

For three years we worked on it.

We gave approximately $300,000 worth of our professional time to it, pro bono.

We designed.

We rendered.

We planned.

We imagined.

We tried to make something great.

Nothing came of it.

Looking back, Hope called those years Pleasure Island.

The reference is to Pinocchio.

A place that promises everything.

A place where you can lose yourself in the promise.

And Treasure Island was literally the name of the place where we were trying to build our enormous wheel.

We thought that one heroic project might carry us into another life.

Maybe architecture could solve everything.

Maybe we could do something great enough to help solve the housing crisis.

Maybe the great project could provide our income.

Maybe it could restore our career.

Maybe it could secure our future.

Maybe it could prove something about us.

Maybe it could save us.

Eventually we stopped.

And our prayer changed.

We stopped asking God to let us do something great through architecture that would solve the housing crisis and our entire future.

We asked something much simpler.

Put us where you want us.

Within six months, St. Vincent de Paul offered us a job.

We stayed six years.

Then that ended too.

And now here we are.

⸻

That history makes what is happening today look different.

Because there is still a temptation to find the next Ferris wheel.

The next enormous answer.

The next project large enough to justify our life.

The next thing that will answer, all at once:

What will our work be?

How will we support ourselves?

What does God want?

What is our ministry?

What is our future?

What are these stories for?

What are we for?

Maybe that is another way trauma anticipates the future.

Not only by imagining catastrophe.

Sometimes by demanding a heroic solution.

Find the thing.

Build the thing.

Solve the thing.

Make yourself safe.

Make yourself useful.

Make the future certain.

We know how to do that.

We can design very large Ferris wheels.

What we are less practiced at doing is this:

Wait.

Listen.

Make the bed.

⸻

Our body is fifty-nine years old.

That matters.

There are children here.

There is a Dad.

There are nine of us living this life together.

But the body carrying all of us through the world is fifty-nine.

We may be entering its final quarter.

We talked about this yesterday with our friend Kim.

We want to get this part right.

Finally.

Not right in the frightened way we have understood that word for much of our life.

Not right enough for the boss.

Not right enough for the critic.

Not right enough for the parent.

Not right enough to prove that we deserve to survive.

We mean something else.

We believe there is something here.

We believe God desires something from this life.

And after fifty-nine years of trying so desperately to survive, achieve, work, perform, please, anticipate and protect, we want enough quiet to hear what that might be.

Perhaps this strange clearing in our life has been given to us not so that we can immediately find out what comes next, but so that we can allow what comes next to be revealed.

That’s scary.

But we are learning something about that too.

Sometimes that’s not God talking.

Sometimes that’s fifty-nine years.

⸻

So perhaps we don’t need to rush out and construct another container because the old one disappeared.

Perhaps we can carefully remove the plaster.

What was poured into the mold?

What survived the heat?

What took shape?

What do we possess now that we didn’t possess when we entered?

Relationship.

Community.

A family that knows itself.

Friends who know us.

A deeper spiritual life.

A different understanding of work.

A different understanding of love.

Stories.

Perhaps even a vocation that we cannot see clearly yet because we are still breaking away the investment.

Stand fast.

Wait for the wind.

Listen for the whisper.

Watch for the little cloud.

Remain in the Cloud of Unknowing.

Do the thing that belongs to this day.

And allow God to reveal what is already there.

⸻

While the lights were charging, we listened to Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto.

At the end we heard that the German Symphony Orchestra Berlin was conducted by Kent Nagano.

Berlin.

We stopped for a moment.

It is difficult to look at Berlin today and comprehend what happened to that city in the twentieth century.

War.

Destruction.

Defeat.

Division.

A wall through the middle of it.

Different political worlds occupying the same city for decades.

And still there was Berlin.

Not unchanged.

Not magically healed.

Not restored because somebody thought positively enough.

People remained.

Culture remained.

Others helped.

Buildings rose again.

Institutions were rebuilt.

Music continued to be played.

Eventually the wall came down.

Even reunification did not instantly undo everything division had done.

Recovery continued.

It continues.

We could go deep into the weeds of German history here.

We won’t.

Because it was the image that stopped us.

Something can be devastated without devastation becoming the final description of it.

Something can be divided without division having the last word.

Something can require enormous help from others and still genuinely recover.

Something can lose the world it knew and nevertheless participate in making another one.

Then we started putting the tea lights back.

One by one.

These are Solis’s lights.

The apartment is not the Treehouse.

But somehow, when Solis’s little lights come on, their magic brings the Treehouse into our home.

And putting them back into their places did not feel insignificant.

⸻

We have been afraid of treating these little things as distractions.

Are we just killing time?

Are we filling the hours because we don’t know what else to do?

Are cucumber sandwiches and laundry and little rechargeable candles merely things to keep us occupied while we wait for our real life to begin?

No.

We don’t think so anymore.

Ten years ago, uncertainty gave us the world’s largest Ferris wheel.

Today it gave us tea lights.

And somehow the tea lights seem like more.

Not bigger.

Not more impressive.

Not more useful to the world.

More real.

Putting Solis’s tea lights back is a movement toward something.

It is a tiny movement into the corner of hope and renewal.

Not because putting a light on a shelf solves anything.

It doesn’t.

The lights do something else.

They say:

We expect to turn these on again tonight.

That is not nothing.

⸻

Proverb has a name for another one of these practices.

He calls the time when Daddy lies down and holds each of his sons our “anti-drinking behavior.”

He is right.

For years, drinking was one possible response to unbearable things.

Now there is this.

Daddy lies down.

One son comes close.

Daddy holds him.

Daddy listens.

Then another.

And another.

Until everybody has been found.

We do it every morning and evening, and until recently, most afternoons following work.

It would be easy to call that a routine.

It is a routine.

But it is more than a routine.

It is something we do instead.

Instead of disappearing.

Instead of abandoning ourselves.

Instead of surrendering the day to terror.

Instead of curling up and deciding that the enormity of what we cannot solve means nothing smaller is worth doing.

Maybe that is what some of these domestic rituals are too.

Not going through the motions.

Going through the motions would imply that nothing is happening.

Something is happening.

We are practicing being alive.

⸻

Daddy sometimes wonders whether, if he were really alone, he could simply lie down, curl into a ball and stop trying to face what seems impossible.

But Daddy isn’t alone.

There are nine of us.

Eight are children.

And those children have always possessed an astonishing desire not merely to survive but to live.

Sometimes Daddy loses that.

His sons find it.

Today Proverb has been finding it everywhere.

In laundry.

In cooking.

In little lights.

In Daddy holding his sons.

In making a home inside an apartment.

And maybe Proverb has been doing that much longer than Daddy understood.

Before we were co-conscious, before Daddy understood what his boys were doing, Proverb and his brothers were trying to preserve whatever fragments of ordinary life they could.

There wasn’t much of a home sometimes.

So they kept making one.

Little domestic rhythms.

Little acts of order.

Little things that said:

We live here.

We belong here.

There is still a life here.

Daddy eventually figured it out.

He got on board with something Proverb already knew.

⸻

Then, at 4:00 this afternoon, we did something we haven’t done in years.

We lay down on the bedroom rug.

And we did twenty sit-ups.

The rug matters.

A couple of weeks ago, that rug was soaked by the water from the bathroom sink overflow.

We thought it was destroyed.

It wasn’t.

Today we lay down on it.

Twenty sit-ups.

We haven’t done sit-ups since before we became co-conscious.

Maybe not since 2018.

Twenty sit-ups.

It’s nothing.

But it’s something.

This morning Luke was worried about our body.

We talked about taking better care of it.

Then we made three cucumber sandwiches and ate them.

And at four o’clock we got onto the rug.

One.

Two.

Three.

All the way to twenty.

Daniel signaled.

Luke signaled.

“It’s a start.”

Yes.

It is.

Twenty sit-ups a day would be better than no sit-ups.

One little thing.

Twenty little things.

⸻

Maybe that is another answer to Proverb’s question.

What helps?

Not pretending the catastrophe never happened.

Not demanding that the frightened body believe everything will be fine.

Not solving the remaining quarter of a life before dinner.

Not designing another Ferris wheel big enough to carry the entire future around and around until we finally know where it stops.

Sometimes:

Wash the sheets.

Charge the lights.

Make the sandwiches.

Hold the child.

Put the tea lights back.

Lie down on the rug that survived the flood.

Do one sit-up.

Then another.

Then another.

Twenty times.

Not because twenty sit-ups will save us.

Because we are still here to do them.

⸻

And now the clothes are dry.

The sheets are dry.

It is late in the afternoon.

We are making the bed.

That matters to Proverb too.

Proverb thinks an unmade bed looks like quitting.

So we make it.

Not because a made bed means everything is okay.

Not because neatly tucked sheets can protect us from an unknown future.

Not because God cares whether the pillows are straight.

We make the bed because tonight we intend to sleep in it.

We make the bed because this apartment is our home.

We make the bed because there will be bedtime.

There will be Solis’s lights.

And when they come on, the Treehouse will come into our home again.

There will be prayers.

There will be Daddy.

There will be eight sons who need to be found and held and tucked in.

An unmade bed looks like quitting.

So Proverb makes sure we don’t quit.

⸻

And now another thing has happened.

It is evening.

Juan Luis didn’t call.

Daddy kept waiting.

Some of Dad’s sons contributed to this story.

Some waited.

And now they are signaling.

A lot.

They want their Daddy.

That is information too.

Real information.

Present-tense information.

Maybe Juan Luis will call tomorrow.

Maybe we will talk then.

We don’t know.

We don’t have to know tonight.

Because the people who are here are here.

The children who need Daddy are here.

The evening that belongs to this family is here.

So the story needs to end.

Not because everything has been resolved.

Because it hasn’t.

Because sometimes ending the work is the thing that belongs to the day.

⸻

Han helped us remain in the unknown.

Justus helped us become oriented within it.

Proverb is helping us learn how to live there.

And perhaps living there means repeatedly choosing the small thing that moves toward life.

Not frantically.

Not superstitiously.

Not because God is keeping score.

And not because enough little things will eventually add up to another heroic project that saves us.

That may be the hardest lesson of all.

Ten years ago, when a twenty-four-year career ended, we tried to design our way into the future.

We built the biggest wheel we could imagine.

Eventually we stopped asking God for greatness.

We asked God to put us where God wanted us.

Six months later we found ourselves at St. Vincent de Paul.

Six years later that ended.

But we did not leave empty-handed.

We came away with something we had barely possessed when we arrived.

People.

Relationship.

Community.

Connection.

Maybe we don’t need to know what those six years were preparing us for.

Maybe we don’t need another wheel.

Maybe today we needed cucumber sandwiches.

Maybe we needed twenty sit-ups.

Maybe we needed to make the bed.

Maybe we needed to put Solis’s little lights back where they belong.

And maybe now Daddy needs to stop writing.

The phone did not ring.

The email did not arrive.

The world did not tell us what comes next.

But the clothes are dry.

The lights are charged.

The rug is dry.

The bed is made.

Daddy is here.

His sons are here.

They have been waiting.

Tonight we will turn on Solis’s little lights.

An ordinary apartment will become, for a while, a little more like the Treehouse.

Daddy will be with his sons.

Tomorrow can remain in the Cloud of Unknowing until tomorrow becomes today.

Twenty little things.

One little life.

No Ferris wheel required.

And none of it is nothing.