A week ago I had the privilege of visiting one of Michaelangelo's incredible sculptures in Rome - the Pieta, a life-size marble sculpture of Jesus' mother Mary cradling her dead son and Savior, just after He is brought down from the cross. I've been thinking about this sculpture a lot since returning home, and wanted to give you a chance to meditate on it. A friend pointed out that looking at a 2D picture of a 3D sculpture really doesn't come close to doing it justice, but since we haven't figured out yet how to load sculptures onto websites, I'm going to use a photo anyway. 

Recently, a friend pointed me to a wonderful book of meditations by Anthony de Mello, called Wellsprings. One poem in particular, "The King," held some powerful musings, and I want to share one portion. The author is contemplating Christ on the cross:

          As I gaze at that lifeless body I slowly understand
          that I am looking at the symbol of supreme and total liberation.
          In being fastened to the cross
          Jesus becomes alive and free.
          Here is a parable of conquest, not defeat.
          It calls for envy, not commiseration.

          So now I contemplate the majesty of the man
          who has freed himself
          from all that makes us slaves,
          destroys our happiness.

          In gazing at that freedom
          I think with sadness of my slavery.

Right now, I’m going through the sometimes-uncomfortable, sometimes-exciting, sometimes-scary process of becoming a parent. Yup, my husband and I are expecting our first child in about four more months.

Deep breath.

It’s not that the discovery that I was pregnant came as a complete surprise – it didn’t. It’s just that I guess I wasn’t expecting one of my resulting thoughts to be: “But I’m still so far from who I want to be!”

I am an idealist, which means the rest of my life will likely be filled with the occasional (and sometimes more-than-occasional) discovery of yet another impossibly high expectation that I didn’t know I had for myself. If you are an idealist who has begun to face the reality of who you are, you’ll know what I mean: it’s a pretty disappointing process! It’s not that I see myself as a worthless piece of junk – I don’t. It’s just that, in contrast to the shiny image of who I wanted to be, or who I even deep-down believed I was, “junk” isn’t too far from what I feel like sometimes when I first see a surprising character flaw.

Earlier this year, much of my free time was absorbed with training for an Ironman triathlon, which is an athletic endurance event in which you swim, then bike and then run, all in a row (without taking breaks in between). Triathlons are a hobby of mine, and I'd completed several shorter-distance triathlons before, but the Ironman (IM) distance is quite a bit longer than other triathlons. A lot longer. Therefore the training was much more time-consuming, and I found myself struggling to stay centered in the reality of the “normal” (non-Ironman) world. The pull of the IM-world is strong once you get near it: the pull to obsess over training and become infatuated with increasing your speed and your collection of expensive gear.

A feat as physically demanding as an Ironman does require a lot of you, and I found myself fighting to remember that I was a self—a soul—not just an Ironman-in-training. This is a glimpse into my journal a few months ago, as I was midway through training:

The other day I heard a blurb on NPR about spirituality, and turned up the volume. (It's not every day that I hear God talked about on National Public Radio!) They were interviewing a neuropharmacologist named Roland Griffiths, who is leading the first major study of drugs and spirituality since the 1970s. They want to study spirituality and what happens in the brain when someone has a profound spiritual experience. They've realized that drugs can induce spiritual states similar to what some people experience apart from drugs, but have the added benefit of allowing the scenario to be more controlled or "on demand," which in turn allows them to study it.

I won't go into everything they talked about (you can read the article here). Griffith's central question about spirituality (still unanswered) was, "Why does that occur? Why has the human organism been engineered, if you will, for this experience?" And to be totally honest, my first reaction was to feel really annoyed.

Now, granted, I thought it was great that public radio was talking about God and about spirituality at all. And I was really glad to hear that people are studying spirituality, and thinking about it at all. I was glad Griffiths and others were curious about it, and acting on that, and asking important questions.

Recently I’ve been going through a lot of relationship transitions - people moving away or schedules changing. This is hard, and honestly it's made me think more about what the value of having human relationships is, when they can be so painful and messy at times. One benefit that's begun to emerge from the muddiness is how unavoidable the truth about myself can be, when I am faced with human beings and human situations. Because they have skin and eyes and vocal chords, I can't ignore what they say to me as easily as I can ignore God (who doesn't have skin or eyes or vocal chords).

When I was in high school, I was happy (translation: “in complete, 15-year-old ecstasy”) when I found out that the guy I had a crush on, David, liked me back.  We began dating, and everything seemed wonderful... for awhile.  But it wasn't long before my friends began to notice how much it bothered me whenever David was spending time with someone other than me. I thought, If he has the time, he should be spending it with me!

Eventually, of course, my complaining bugged David so much that we had conflict about it. Ultimately, I realized the jealousy that was in my heart, and how it was hurting our relationship. This didn’t keep us from breaking up eventually, but it did change my understanding of my own heart. If David had not gotten irritated and expressed it to me, I might have felt better, but I would not have realized the “junk” in my heart that God wanted to leech out.