Holding Space

This morning I sat by the river and watched a robin bathe in an eddy—a calm area of water, usually formed by big boulders that block it from the current. An eddy is a good spot for boats to pause and regroup, waiting for others behind them, or to have lunch or a swim. Boat ramps are built with eddies, sheltered by rocks that allow rafts to pull in

As I prepared to leave my job and contemplated which adventure to take, a mentor and spiritual director told me that Jesus knows the river I’m on—where it’s calm, where it’s turbulent, and how to move through each section. This seemed like invitation enough to float a literal river.

At some point I forgot life was supposed to be joyful; I’d been so

If you spent much time in Sunday School as a child, you will know that Zacchaeus was “a wee little man,” as the song goes. Imagine being remembered thousands of years from now for your exceptional smallness. This is the fate of Zacchaeus who, even in a time when men averaged 5’5’’, was considered small. He was also chief tax collector in an

In the dark of early morning, in a closed tomb, in the place of death, Jesus takes his first breath of new life. He gets up and carefully folds the linens that wrapped his body, like the swaddling clothes Mary wrapped him in as a child. His grave is the place of his second birth, just as ours will be.

Having squared away his graveclothes, what does

The last couple years, in opposition to all that is right and good, I took up dancing. Swing, specifically. Swing is a partner dance, with a lead and a follow. The lead leads and the follow—you guessed it—follows. This is different from, say, a line dance, where everyone does the same thing, or a dance where one person does whatever. Those are

My fifth and final year of college, I decided I would no longer do anything out of guilt. I’d been carrying the weight of needing to get things right, keep people happy, and make sure God still liked me. I’d spent years wondering whether my baptism “worked.” Guilt had become a habit, ingrained into me by a fearful church; I finally decided I was

You’ve likely heard the phrase, memento mori. Or you’ve seen those 17^th century paintings with the skulls in them. The Latin, “remember you must die,” refers to such visual reminders of death. Some saints are depicted with human skulls—constant reminders of their mortality.

And you thought Ash Wednesday services were morbid.

The remembrance of death

My first spiritual director was Sister Catherine. I’d read about direction, and the only way I knew to find someone was to call the local Catholic center. Also, I figured a woman whose life is devoted to prayer has to be good one to learn from. Whatever your feelings about religious orders, they do a lot of praying, and I’m not going to knock that.

One January morning I woke as I had every other morning that January, only this time I could not remember how to make my limbs move. I lay in bed watching the clock creep closer to the time I needed to get up. I tried to remember how I’d done it in the past; it had always seemed so simple. Maybe if I spoke to my body: “Arm, move!” That wasn’t it.

So

After we watched the helicopter depart with its black body-sized package hanging below, watched the new widow follow a ranger down the trail, retrieved the backpack that had flown into a ravine from the circulating air, we contemplated what to do next.

“Well, shall we finish?”

We were half a mile from the peak and both needed badly to eat, so we

When a person nears the final days of their life, their organs slowly shutting down, their sleep stretching around the clock, they usually lose the ability to drink water. Sometimes they become too sleepy and disoriented, sometimes they simply aren’t thirsty anymore, and sometimes they begin to choke when they swallow. In hospice, when this

The first time I saw a luna moth, Max was letting it flutter around the room, retrieving it when it landed on a table leg, the arm of a couch. He’d caught it, somehow, in the Arkansas night and had brought it in to show me. I thought bugs that size only existed in the tropics, but there it was—huge and pale—its majesty defying what the word “moth”

Lisa was seated on the edge of her bed, back hunched with Parkinson’s, blue eyes tearful, looking at me questioningly. Her voice was weak and she was struggling to communicate, but her eyes were sharp.

“I’m Kara, the chaplain with hospice,” I introduced myself, trying to understand what she needed. When I couldn’t, she reached for her phone,

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I embarked on my contemplative journey on accident, on an airplane somewhere over Senegal. I was returning from the U.S. to complete my second year of teaching in Mozambique, on the southeast coast of Africa. Randy Harris was giving a lecture via my tiny mp3 player.

Dr. Harris was a professor at Abilene Christian University and someone