I know what’s what.
I know what life is costing us. I know that our income is costly. Retirement funds are like the finite, ancient air trapped in a flooded cave deep under the earth.
I don’t need to belabor the point.
But something interesting has been happening since sometime late last night.
There has been this recurring thought, a sense that I have had trouble articulating.
It feels like we are earning.
I almost qualified it with another word.
I don’t need to say what earning means.
I don’t think it is something specific. I think it has more to do with potential. Possibility. Agency.
I don’t need to define it.
I just think something has been earned.
Yesterday we spent the day with our friend Paul.
We went to St. Lawrence O’Toole in the morning for the food distribution. We helped guide cars through the line while food was loaded into them. We did home visits. We had lunch with Paul. Then we went back to St. Lawrence O’Toole and sat down with him in the Holy Family Room to do something that Dad had been almost completely unable to do for two months.
Healthcare.
Our job ended unexpectedly in July. Our health insurance ended soon afterward. We had known for weeks that we needed to do something about it.
Dad was frozen.
Yesterday, we finally sat down with Paul.
It was hard.
There were moments when we could barely comprehend what we were reading on the Covered California website. There were moments when we couldn’t comprehend what Paul was telling us. There was switching and dissociation. At one point, Paul left the room to use the bathroom and it felt as though our sense of agency went out the door with him.
But we stayed.
Paul came back.
We kept going.
We stopped to go upstairs for the Vigil Mass. Then Paul came back downstairs with us afterward, and we sat in the Holy Family Room again.
Sometime after eight o’clock, we got the application across the line.
This morning we uploaded the final paycheck stub they requested as proof of income, along with a letter explaining that it was our final paycheck and that the employment had ended.
Then the screen said:
Thank you! Your documents have been submitted and are being verified.
And something that had been waiting on us for two months was no longer waiting on us.
We had done the thing that belonged to us.
Now it was waiting on somebody else.
Thanks be to God.
And God bless Paul.
We could not have done it without him.
⸻
I know that things are happening because of the help of other people.
I don’t need to qualify that, like the difference between an earned run and an unearned run in baseball.
Things are happening because we have friends and because of the grace of God.
But I still think it is important to understand something about them as earned.
Because these things are happening either because we asked for help or, sometimes more difficultly, because we allowed it.
We have allowed Laura to help us.
We have allowed Kim to help us.
We have allowed Paul to help us.
Some of their help has been requested. But more often, someone has offered to help, and the offer has put us up against a very difficult edge:
Will we let them?
In the past, more often than not, we have declined.
Sometimes we have felt unworthy.
Sometimes we have been ashamed.
Sometimes we have been afraid that accepting help would make us beholden to someone.
And sometimes we have been afraid that allowing someone to help would expose how much help we actually need.
Maybe if they saw it, they would see how broken or pathetic we really are.
Paul certainly could have seen that yesterday.
Were Paul the kind of person who saw us that way.
He does not.
He saw how hard it was.
He helped.
And somehow he seemed happy that he got to help.
He kept telling us that it was an honor.
That is hard for us to understand.
But perhaps understanding it is not the thing we need to do.
Perhaps we need to accept it.
⸻
I have been thinking that to have agency, one must both allow and surrender.
I don’t mean surrender the way we learned surrender when we were a child.
I don’t mean submission.
I mean realizing that you need help and accepting it.
Knowing your limits.
Realizing that you don’t got it.
Surrendering enough pride to stop believing that you should be able to figure everything out by yourself.
There is something freeing in that.
Because when you believe that you should have the answers, and you search for them and cannot find them, eventually the conclusion becomes:
There must be something wrong with me.
I should be able to do this.
Everybody else can do this.
Why can’t I?
And eventually:
I am broken.
But what happens if the answer is simply:
I need help with this?
And then someone says:
Okay. I’ll sit with you.
And you let them.
Maybe that is agency too.
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Yesterday we were talking with Paul about our landlord.
A month ago we overflowed the bathroom sink.
We were terrified that the accident, combined with our disclosure that we have Dissociative Identity Disorder, combined with the unusual circumstances surrounding our rent after our job ended, would make our landlord decide that we were too much of a liability.
He didn’t.
Instead, he reassured us.
We were trying to tell Paul yesterday how grateful we were for that.
But even saying it frightened us.
We told Paul we were almost afraid to say how grateful we were because we would jinx it.
And then we immediately checked our email.
As though saying aloud,
We are grateful that we still have our home
might somehow cause an email from our landlord to appear.
Paul understood.
This devout Catholic did not chide us for superstition.
He understood that kind of thinking as something fear can do to people who have learned that good things can disappear.
And he understood what we were actually trying to say.
Thank you.
Thank you for our home.
Thank you for our landlord.
Thank you for our friends.
Thank you, God.
Gratitude can be extraordinarily hard when you are scared as hell all the time.
Gratitude is a discipline under hard circumstances, especially when it sometimes feels as though gratitude is answered by the taking away of the very thing you were grateful for.
We told Paul that too.
During the six years we worked for St. Vincent de Paul of Alameda County, no matter how difficult the job became, no matter how frightened we sometimes were, we remained grateful for the work.
We were grateful for the ministry.
We were grateful that we could make a living doing something that mattered to us.
After the job ended, I sometimes wondered whether we had somehow failed even at gratitude.
Were we grateful enough?
But something has been changing.
Yesterday we went back to St. Lawrence O’Toole.
Tracy saw us and wrapped her arms around us in one of the biggest hugs we can remember receiving.
Paul told us that he missed us.
We distributed food.
We visited people.
We prayed with Joseph, whose son had been terribly injured.
We ate an enormous burrito with our friend.
We went to Mass.
Then our friend sat beside us until after eight o’clock while we tried to figure out healthcare.
The job ended.
These people did not.
⸻
We used to do bronze casting.
The process begins with something made in wax.
The wax is encased in plaster investment. Then the whole thing goes into a kiln. The wax burns away, leaving an empty space inside the mold.
Molten bronze fills the space where the wax used to be.
And eventually, after everything has cooled, you break away the plaster.
Only then do you see what was cast inside it.
I have been thinking that this period in our life feels something like that.
The mold is breaking away.
And we are beginning to see what was cast during those six years.
Paul.
Kim.
Laura.
Juan Luis.
Tracy.
Beloved community.
People we would never have known, people who would not be our friends, were it not for those years.
There were things about those six years that hurt us deeply.
But those things do not own what was formed there.
The job ended.
The relationships did not.
The plaster is coming off.
And something remains.
⸻
There is another thing that happened yesterday.
We let Paul see us.
Not the version of us who can give a presentation.
Not the architect who could solve enormously complicated design problems.
Not the person who could write something beautiful or lead a meeting or teach a room full of people.
He saw us sitting in front of an insurance website unable at times to understand what we were looking at.
He saw switching.
He saw dissociation.
He saw Dad struggle to remain Dad.
He saw Solis.
He saw what happened when he left the room for a few minutes.
And he stayed.
We told him how much we needed him there.
And he didn’t seem to think less of us.
He seemed grateful that we had allowed him to be there.
That may be one of the things we earned.
Not Paul’s friendship.
You don’t earn friendship that way.
Maybe we earned a little more ability to receive it.
⸻
This morning, something happened that I keep returning to.
We had gone to bed exhausted last night.
I started saying good night to my sons and fell asleep before I got through all eight of them.
At five o’clock this morning, an email notification from Covered California woke us.
I looked at it.
And for once, I did not open it.
I said:
“There is a time and place for things. We need rest.”
Covered California could wait.
My children needed sleep.
I needed sleep.
A little while later I told my sons:
“Everyone sleep now. Rest in the knowledge that there is a parent who is taking care of things, and right now they need to sleep too.”
And then I said something else.
“Daddy, rest in the knowledge that there is a parent who is taking care of things.”
I don’t know exactly when this happened.
Maybe last night.
Maybe this morning.
Maybe it has been happening very slowly for a while.
But I am not only reassuring my sons that there is a parent here.
I am beginning to reassure myself.
There is a parent here.
There is an adult here.
The adult I have needed for as far back as I can remember.
I think he’s here.
Even if I don’t quite know yet that it’s me.
⸻
This is not heroism.
I don’t want it to become that story.
It is something much quieter.
I am very self-consciously trying to be the person my children need me to be.
And one of the ways I know whether I am doing that is by paying attention to them.
My boys are very good about not simply putting on brave faces so that I can believe everything is okay.
They tell me.
Sometimes through words.
Sometimes through signaling.
Sometimes through anger.
Sometimes through fear.
Sometimes through silence.
Sometimes through exhaustion.
Solis has taught me a great deal about silence.
Jude has too.
Sometimes silence means something.
Sometimes a tired child is simply tired.
And if my children are exhausted, that tells me something I need to know, especially if I am ignoring my own exhaustion.
I have to listen without making their thoughts become the thoughts I need them to have.
I have to let them be honest.
Because something extraordinary happens when I realize that my sons are beginning to feel more like children who have a father taking care of them.
I begin to feel a little more taken care of too.
Not because my children are taking care of me.
They aren’t supposed to.
Because there is a parent here.
And I think he may be me.
⸻
There is something else I am learning.
For most of my life, when things became frightening, my default was to find something I was really good at and bury myself in it.
Work harder.
Solve the problem.
Become indispensable.
Let the chips fall where they may.
I used to joke when I was practicing architecture that I wanted to be a plant.
Put me in a sunny window.
Water me.
Leave me alone.
I’ll flower.
What I didn’t understand was that other people were doing things around me that made my flowering possible.
Some of that work was being done by my children.
Proverb especially.
I don’t want that anymore.
I am doing something now specifically as Dad.
Tiny things sometimes.
Things other people may take for granted.
But every little thing has been frightening.
And over the last few days, some of those things have become just a little less frightening.
I get to notice that.
I don’t have to call it heroic.
But I also don’t have to call it nothing.
⸻
I think that is what I mean by earning.
Something has moved.
Capability.
Agency.
Possibility.
Whatever you want to call it.
I don’t want to turn immediately toward the question of how to monetize it.
In fact, one of the most persistent things I have heard in prayer is almost a resistance to that question.
Stop asking how and when you are going to make a living.
When you can barely walk, you shouldn’t be asking how soon you can run.
Take care of your sons.
Let your friends help.
Be still.
Listen.
Stand fast.
Do what you said you were going to do.
Rest.
Recover.
Let me show you.
These are not frightening messages.
They are very small ones.
They are about the thing immediately in front of us.
⸻
Yesterday we told Paul a story about paint-by-numbers.
When we were a child, maybe five or six, our granddad gave us a paint-by-numbers kit.
We had no idea what we were doing.
We couldn’t even tell what the picture was supposed to be.
There were just all these strange little shapes with numbers in them.
Put this color here.
That color there.
Keep going.
Eventually the picture emerged.
Unfortunately, it was a clown.
We don’t like clowns.
But it was a happy clown.
And I remember being amazed.
All of those little spaces that had seemed to mean nothing became something I couldn’t see when I started.
Maybe there is no shame in painting by numbers when you don’t know what you’re doing.
Maybe you don’t need to see the picture.
Maybe you only need to trust the next little space.
Tomorrow, write to Jessee.
Tell em yes.
Accept the help.
Tuesday, go with Kim to bring water.
Spend some time with the things Juan Luis sent us.
Next Sunday, go to St. Clement for the eight o’clock Mass and meet Father Jesus.
In October, do the IRA disbursement.
Keep the journal.
Write the stories.
Feed the children.
Let them sleep.
Let Dad sleep.
Be with our friends.
Pray.
Listen.
Paint this little space.
Then the next one.
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There is one other thing.
Yesterday, after we visited Joseph, we were walking back to Paul’s truck.
Joseph’s son had been stabbed 36 times a few days earlier. He had lost half his blood and, miraculously, lived.
We had brought Joseph food and prayed with him.
On the way back to the truck, we walked beneath an oak tree.
There were acorns everywhere, crunching beneath our feet.
Then we looked down and saw one.
A perfect little acorn.
One of my children picked it up.
We put it in the pocket of our blue St. Vincent de Paul jacket.
That jacket often comes home with things in its pockets.
My children pick things up.
We have a dish on the coffee table in our living room filled with these little things we have collected over a lifetime.
Things found on beaches.
Things from Wrightwood, near our family cabin.
Things our parents gave us.
Things our brother gave us when he was a child.
Things gathered by other children, I now know.
My own children.
There are things from the Thames in London: a shard of Roman pottery, a fragment of a porcelain marmalade jar from Victorian England.
Little things from the people and places and times in our shared life that we don’t want to forget.
And now there is an acorn.
Except it hasn’t made it into the dish yet.
For now, it is sitting on the dresser.
We keep noticing it.
Every time we see it, our heart fills with gratitude.
I don’t know exactly why.
I know that when one of my children picked it up yesterday, it already seemed to mean something.
It had something to do with Paul.
With that day.
With walking back to his truck after visiting Joseph.
With the food distribution.
With lunch at the taqueria.
With sitting beside our friend in the Holy Family Room while he helped us do something we had been terrified to do.
With being helped.
With being loved.
With gratitude.
We wondered today whether an acorn was a symbol of gratitude.
Maybe it is.
But it doesn’t really matter whether anyone else has ever used an acorn that way.
That is what this one means to us now.
And perhaps there is something else in it too.
An acorn is very small.
You can put it in your pocket.
You can put it on a dresser.
You can hold it in the palm of your hand.
It doesn’t look anything like an oak tree.
And yet there is something there.
Something real.
Something that has already begun, even though you cannot look at it and see what it will become.
Maybe that is why we keep looking at it today.
Maybe that is why it feels like Daniel somehow, even though we found it on Jude’s Day.
I don’t want to take it away from Jude.
Maybe it belongs to all of us.
It came from a tree, after all.
And we live in a Treehouse.
For now, the little acorn stays on the dresser where we can see it.
Eventually we will put it in the dish on the coffee table with all those other little reminders of the big things for which we are grateful—the people and places and times in our shared life that we will never forget, will forever be grateful for, and will always love.
But not yet.
For now, I think we need to see it.
⸻
There is another story in the Gospel that keeps returning to us.
Martha is worried about everything that needs to be done.
There are people in the house.
There is food to prepare.
There is work everywhere.
And Mary is sitting at Jesus’s feet.
Martha wants Mary to get up and help.
Jesus tells her that Mary has chosen the better part.
And it will not be taken away from her.
Maybe we don’t need to measure everything right now.
Maybe we don’t need a prospectus.
Maybe we don’t need a pro forma.
Maybe friendship doesn’t need metrics.
Maybe ministry doesn’t need to become a wage.
Maybe the journal doesn’t have to justify itself.
Maybe the stories don’t have to prove what they will become.
Maybe we don’t need to ask what we are worth to Paul or Kim or Laura or Juan Luis.
They keep telling us.
They are glad we are in their lives.
Paul could hardly say it enough yesterday.
It baffles me.
But perhaps at some point you stop asking what you could possibly bring to people who love you.
You accept that you bring something.
You become their friend.
You let them be yours.
You stop wondering whether their kindness is an investment on which they will someday expect a return.
Because that is transactional.
And these relationships are not transactional.
These relationships are love.
⸻
Everything we are doing right now is an act of faith.
Not wishful thinking.
Not pretending.
Faith.
We take the frightening pages and put them on the fire and let the smoke rise to God as prayer.
And then we listen.
I love you.
Take care of your sons.
Let your friends help.
Be still.
Listen.
Stand fast.
Let me show you.
And so we are trying to do that.
Not solve the year.
Not solve the next three months.
Not even solve next month.
Just paint the little numbered space immediately in front of us.
Yesterday it was healthcare.
Today it was the document they asked for.
We did it.
The screen said:
Your documents have been submitted and are being verified.
And for now, the thing that belonged to us is done.
⸻
I know what’s what.
I know the difference between a paycheck and what I am describing.
But sometime between yesterday and today, something changed.
We asked for help.
We allowed someone to help us.
We let someone see how much help we needed.
Dad did something that belonged to Dad without requiring his sons to become responsible for doing it for him.
This morning there was a parent here.
I think he may have been me.
And now, for just a little while, there is nothing to solve.
Nothing to prove.
Nothing to turn into a wage.
Nothing to explain.
There is a little acorn on the dresser.
We have earned something.
We don’t have to name it.
We don’t have to put a cash value to it.
We don’t even have to figure out where it’s leading.
We can rest here.
The direction is up.
