THE PROMISE

I got pregnant during Advent 37 years ago, after which Sam's father, John, disappeared for seven years. No one could have imagined that the three of us would become a quirky, tender family.  Here is another old Advent piece about miracles, free of course:

Last week 14-year-old Sam and I went to visit his father in Canada, and came back home on the first Sunday in Advent.

    This year Sam was going to meet his half brother, his father's first son, who is forty. No one had been ready to take this next step until this year, and suddenly, we all were. Sam was excited but, well, you know me with my bad nerves. John's son was going to stay on John's boat with his wife and baby. Sam would stay with John at his apartment, and I was staying at a hotel with room service and cable TV, as I have not completely lost my mind.

    I holed up in the hotel with CNN and Kit-Kats from the mini-bar, and grew increasingly tense. What if Sam's brother couldn't reach out, what if Sam went into adolescent glower mode, what if ... I went through everything that could go wrong at that first gathering, and then moved into the more spacious realms of worrying about gum surgery, and colon cancer.

    I got some communion Milanos out of the mini-bar, performed the sacrament, and then prayed that I could just keep the faith. The thing is, I have a lot of faith. But I am also afraid a lot, and have no real certainty about anything. I remembered something Paul Tillich wrote--that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns. Faith also means reaching deeply within, for the sense one was born with, the sense, for instance, to go for a walk.

     So first I showered off that horrible butt smell you get from being on an airplane, then bundled up and went outside.

    During Advent, Christians prepare for the birth of Jesus, which means the coming of the light. All religions have a holy season as the days grow shorter, when we ask ourselves, Where is the spring? Will it actually come again this year, break through the quagmire, the terror, the cluelessness? Probably not, is my response, left to my own devices. So all I can do is notice the darkness, light a few candles, scatter some seeds in the hard soil.

    Insight doesn't help here. Hope is not logical. It always comes as a surprise, just when you think all hope is lost. Hope is the cousin to grief, and both take time: You can't short-circuit grief, or emptiness and you can't patch it up with your bicycle tire tube kit. You have to take the next right action.   

    I walked around town for a while, and practiced radical self-care: I stopped at a bookstore, bought myself a lipstick, a cup of cocoa with extra whipped cream, and then dropped by an old stone church.

     The church was small, beautiful, cold and dark. This gave me a kind of relief: We live in darkness. Everyone knows this the time they turn 21, or they're seriously disturbed. I started to get really freaked out about dinner--there are literally six people in the world with whom I can bear to eat. And besides, what if the added weight of Sam's brother, with his inevitable baggage, caused Sam’s and my hard-fought life with John to buckle and collapse?

      What if Sam's heart got broken again? As with most kids who are 14, it has been spackled and duct taped and caulked back together so many times as it is.

     I sat quietly in the church. My mind perched on top of my head like a spider monkey and thought of more things that could go wrong at dinner, and whose fault those things would be. I tried to do the two-foot drop, from my head down to my heart, which is so kind and so amazed that John and I have made a little family for Sam. Still, my mind chattered on, like the spider monkey had taken a little acid.

     My mind is my main problem almost all the time. I wish I could leave it in the fridge when I go out, but it likes to come with me. I have tried to get it to take up a nice hobby, like macramé, but it prefers just to think about stuff, and jot down the things that annoy it.

     The other problem continues to be what I think the light looks like. I have thought, over the years, that the light would look like success, a good man, a child, a Democratic president, but none of these were right. Moses led his people in circles for 40 years so they could get ready for the Promised Land, because they had too many ideas and preconceptions about what a nice Promised Land should look like.

    I left the church and took a cab to John's house. It turned out Sam’s brother is tall and friendly. They looked enough alike so that you could see they were related, but not so much that I had to breathe into a brown paper bag. And they were both a little shy. The baby is lovely beyond words. We all connected, in the perfectly imperfect way of families. We ate and were nice to each other, watched TV and raced around after the baby.

     I was secretly hoping that something dramatic would happen, and I'd have a great story to tell, but it took me several hours to realize that this is the best story there is: that a small group of related people came together, willing to be supremely uncomfortable, so that Sam could know his brother, and his brother's family, and therefore come to know a bit more about who he is.   This is why we did it.

     I tell you, when God is not being cryptic and silent, He or She is so obvious. Sam is like a cross between Big Bird and Tony Soprano with little kids. "Hey you," he calls, when they're babbling incoherently over his TV show, "Put a sock in it."  Then he tosses them around, makes farting sounds, and makes sure they don't get their fingers caught in drawers.

     He also doodled the whole evening. The rest of us talked, overate, cleaned up messes as we went, held our tongues, overlooked the inevitable family tension. The oil of manners makes it possible.

      All the while, Sam drew his little guys, from time to time asserting his adolescent grump. I felt anxious much of time, but what else is new? Something larger than us, and our anxieties, and our ferocious need to control got us through, connected us, even if the connection was precarious at first.   What shone through was the odd responsibility we took for each other, the kindness, marbled in through the past, the bad and silent patches of our shared histories, our character defects, hidden and on the surface, and the glitches. Things got broken--they always do--and children always yap and stamp and cry and glower, and demand all your attention.  It's called real life, and it's cracked and fragile, but the glue for me is the beating of my heart, love, and whatever attention I can pay to what matters most to me--making a good life for Sam.

     "Hey, Sam," I said, when I hugged everyone goodbye and left for my hotel.   "Doodle on.”

     It poured all the next day. But even in the gloom and fear, I played over the scenes from the night before, in all their magic and klutz and ordinariness: Sam and his brother getting to know each other; the baby racing around in a state of busy wonder. I have to say: I continue to be deeply surprised by life.