Hospitality
I Used to Love You
I love God. I really do love God. However, I do not love the church. I have slightly given up on the church. It is hard to reconcile the trauma that the church continues to give people. I struggle at letting go.
Put Me to Sleep, Doctor
“They put pets out of their misery,” my mother said. Mom then glared at her newest visitor. She continued with, “Why can’t you do that with me?” Mom was stitched together by rows of metal staples. They appeared like the tips of landmines on the battlefield of her abdomen.
Imperfection
My husband’s scant eight weeks in hospice were the best eight weeks of our marriage. We rediscovered our deep love for each other and I saw the meaninglessness of my striving. Suddenly, there was peace.
God Didn't Save Me—You Did
Teaching has saved me some days. When I didn’t want to get up but had to because there was George Saunders or Sandra Cisneros to read and discuss, I was saved from the pit of Myself Left To Myself that I remember preachers often scaring me into.
Bus Life
Riding the bus for me is a privilege and an inconvenience; it’s a bit new and a bit mundane, and, like most things in life, holds many contradictions...For this bounty, I give thanks.
Having Local Community Stick: The Making of Culture Care
In our work and business and in our private lives, traditional communities are disappearing. And, perhaps, without being entirely conscious of it, many of us feel worse off. Research has not only shown a sharp decline in communities, but also a lower sense of belonging.
A Slow Rhythm of Renunciations
There was a quiet fierceness in how she defended her choice and her beliefs. I had become conditioned to accept how people saw me, but what I began to learn through our letters was that I didn’t have to. I made my own set of vows and I chose to live by them.
I'll Leave the Light on for You
I have lived a long life in a world too few would recognize now. I reckon, by today’s standards, it was “old fashioned.” Simplistic? We managed to live with an ingrained sense of simplicity, of sufficiency. Our lives defied any particular sort of accumulation.
Waiting in Liminal Space
There have been times where liminal space became more like a burial shroud than a cocoon. I stayed in a relationship, friendship, or in bad habits, waiting in this space for as long as I could, never pushing forward, until I grew used to my surroundings in languish. Even in its awkwardness, there is a sacredness in liminal space.
Sacred Spaces II
We are scarred and sometimes scared. But together, we bring fears into the light and imagine that God is the sea anyways, so if we fall, if we drift off, if the boat sinks or overturns or we find there was never a boat at all, it will be into holy water; we will fall into God.
How to Lose a Friend
People lose friends all the time. I wonder if they ever give any thought to how they should. Or did they just look back one day and realize that person was gone and feel a simple sorrow because they never said goodbye?
Survival as Neighbor-Love
For the last sixteen months I have been occupied with the task of survival. I’ve been diagnosed with bipolar II, and the odds against my continuing to live are steep. Fifty percent of people with my condition will attempt suicide at least once. Fifty percent. That statistic is utterly daunting...
A Meager Offering for the Heartbroken
When tragedy befalls, when the unthinkable has not only been thought, but has taken place, some of us reach into our store of platitudes casting about for protective incantations. Others dig into our pockets and purses for talismans to keep disaster at bay.
Friends for the Journey
Luci is part of the legacy that is L’Engle’s body of work. Listening to the women who loved the real-life L’Engle reminisce, reminded me that the work of the artist is not, and cannot be done in isolation. She was a brilliant writer, yes. But she was also a grief-stricken mother, a loving grandmother, a loyal friend.
Sharing the Couch: A Reflection on Physical Hospitality
Deep love must intersect with the physical, and the point of contact is hospitality: sharing space, sharing time, sharing stories. It’s putting yourself aside so a friend can breathe deep and stretch out full length. Love is the invitation: “stay.”
To Remember a Stranger: On the Hospitality of Thought
Surely, I believe what the old Black spirituals say: Even when discarded by the world, there is one who holds us in hand or in mind, and this is sufficient. But it must also mean something to be held in the memory of people, however faulty...
Mother-Woman
I do my best, but sometimes my best is not enough. I can’t sooth one because I’m feeding another; I lose my temper in the tempest of yelling, and add my voice to the chaos. I feed them corndogs instead of cauliflower.
The Steady Climb and the Sweetness
We agree to one rule: we are here together, but we journey alone. I make a personal rule: no breaks, just constant motion. Slow and steady, or even slower and steady – but always steady.
Testament
On this bright midwinter morning, face after face shines with familiarity, including several people who have not crossed my view in years. Whether or not we are currently connected doesn’t matter; even if we knew each other best at 15, that is enough.
The Power of a Well-Timed Word
I make no pretense that this is an easy endeavor. All expressions of love are risks. There is no promise of reciprocity. To genuinely give means offering words without trying to elicit or manipulate a response.
On Masculinity
That is what I’m after—a restorative, not restrictive, maleness. This has been my prayer over the last year—long before the headlines of masculine failure flashed across our screens—a simple and direct prayer: Lord, what is in me that is not of you, rid me of it.
Why It Takes a Village (Not a City) to Raise a Child
I think what’s hard about cities is how we isolate ourselves in these constructed bubbles. We sound-proof our world, wearing headphones as we walk through the streets so we don’t have to talk to anyone....No one just sits on the streets to watch the world go by. No one has the time for that. So, I miss that about the village.
Talking About Love
When the worst has happened, when your life seems irretrievably shattered and nothing makes sense, then here’s what you can do: CHOOSE. You can choose love. You can choose to see love at work in your life. You can choose to act out of that love. You can choose to have love sustain you.
Coming Together: On Neighbors, Fences, and Moments
Who, existentially, is my neighbor, and what does it imply, or not, in my larger life beyond my front porch? Do I owe something more than I have given to this unfathomable, unreasonable world? Do I gain something more than I have wanted, or ever missed?
Editors Ruminate: On the Poetry of Issue 44, Small
Smallness can be the glitch in the system, the wrench in the machine. It can also be a line of poetry that reconfigures how we see the world. An image that unlocks something new. The poems in this issue explore the many implications and iterations of small...
Traveling with Trauma: How I Never Saw the Night Sky
The founder of the orphanage, the Home of Hope, asked the girls what they wanted me to teach them, and one of them said, “To speak in English and to laugh in English.” To laugh in English. If that meant lightheartedness, humility of language, and levity, I couldn’t even remember for myself, let alone teach anyone how.
On Failure
I’m pretty sure there are some of us whose lives don’t work that way ─ people for whom failure seems less a painful moment on a journey and more the destination itself, or sometimes, for me, like the place I’ve been living all my life, wandering in loose circles with my eyes squeezed shut so I can imagine I’m somewhere, anywhere else.
A Playlist for the Death of Dreams: Lament as Necessary First Steps
How can we welcome this place called Here—this unyielding stranger that bears no resemblance to the future we had dreamed? What I know to be true is that profound beginnings often have their start in places that appear void, formless, parched, and foreign.
Editors Ruminate: On the Poetry of Issue 43, Opening the Door
I’ve always loved the etymology of kindness, which comes from kin—those to whom we are bound by choice or genealogy. And yet I often find kindness is most difficult to practice with my family—those who have witnessed just how unkind I can be.
The Physicality of Things
I’ve spent much of my adulthood astonished by what I was supposed to learn in school but didn’t or forgot. The earth’s mantle, stardust and the miraculous heart, which pumps two thousand gallons of blood every day. Did God make me forgetful of the body and the earth or is forgetting my sin, a feature of the fall?
Creative Lives Part 4
I'm thrilled that they've allowed us to share their conversation with you in this series titled "Creative Lives." You can read part 1, part 2, and part 3 here. Part 4 begins in November of 2016, after a sobering election day. Julie and Melissa ask the question: what does it mean to create in the midst of a broken world?
How Can We Be Silent?
I’ve been thinking about silence. What role should silence play in our everyday lives? What should be a Christian’s relationship to quiet? Personally, I thrive on silence. Noise and chatter are grating to me. Quiet is therapeutic. When I sit still, be quiet, and remain silent, I’m able to sort through the chaos of my thoughts...
Magnificat
We sing Mary’s song in the gloaming. We chant at vespers or evensong, the slipping shift between day and night, when those with companions are snug or busy and grateful for the coming quiet, and those of us without find the chapel hollow and begin to fear the coming dark. Beside us sit all the loves we’ve lost, by our own devices or those of others.
Embracing the Body and What the Body Knows
ALL THAT HE HAD MADE (all) was very good. These are not complicated words, and yet for many centuries, it seems, we have failed to receive them. Cautioned by New Testament exhortations, we’ve assumed the Genesis writer’s generosity and inclusion of every part of creation to be poetic device, quietly maintaining that...
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The Waking is an online literary magazine and a part of the Ruminate creative community that houses high-quality literary writing about what it’s like to be human. We are interested in short-form prose and image-text hybrid work. This art can be beautiful, it can be strange, we just ask that it feels true.