I already mentioned that Emily was the first person to have ever told me that she loved me.  Of course my family had been telling me that they loved me my whole life, but when Emily said it, it was different.  I already mentioned, too, how I royally messed up the moment when Emily shared this with me.

It took several years for me to figure out why my failure of a response didn’t destroy the relationship I had with Emily.  I have since come to recognize that when a woman tells you she loves you, it is generally advisable to say something–say anything!–other than Oh… That’s… Cool. She had put herself out on a limb and, at least in the moment, I hadn’t been able to do the same.

I also already mentioned that within a matter of days, I was able to say, “in complete certainty,” that I loved her too.  In retrospect, however, I now realize that Emily and I weren’t talking about the same thing.  Even when we “agreed” about love–that is, could say the same three words to each other–we weren’t speaking the same language.

Similar to the way that there are two stories behind each situation–the easy story and the true story–there are at least two ways that we think about the words I love you.  When I say I love you, I could be saying any number of things.  The thought occurred to me that something happens to a relationship when there exist two dissimilar understandings of the three words.

Allow me to explain.

After I told Haylie that I wanted to sit around the fireplace and tell stories to my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren, she became curious about what stories I pictured myself telling.  I told her that I knew of only one so far–the “I Love You Story.”  I told Haylie that it was because I thought there was something important going on in the way that it had come about.

I already mentioned that I have dated somewhere between nine and eleven girls in my life.  I say somewhere between nine and eleven because there are a few that might go either way.  Maybe it was dating, and maybe it wasn’t.  Zachary told me early on in our friendship that I, more than anybody else he knows, put the casual in casual dating. He’s probably right.

At any rate, of those nine or eleven, only five of the relationships had time to progress to the  I love you stage.  And of those five, I think I only really meant it once.

It’s important that I not confuse my words here.  I say that I only meant it once, but that is maybe not the most accurate way of thinking about it.  It might be more accurate to say that I only understood the full weight of the words once.

I had once dated a girl who my friends referred to as a “serial dater.”  She had developed a habit of moving quickly from one relationship to another, barely stopping to breathe between them.  Since her sixteenth birthday, she had never been single for more than a few weeks.  When I asked her how many different people she had been “close” to she gave me a ballpark figure of “more than forty.”  She had told most of these partners that she loved them.  I don’t want to appear too much of a grinch here, but my immediate suspicion when she told me this was that our hearts don’t have that much real love to give–certainly not enough to share with forty people in four years.

I suspected then, just as I still suspect today, that we can’t share true love with that many people.  We can certainly share something with that many people.  If it is with forty different people, whatever “love” we’re sharing is probably not the type of love that I am looking to discuss.

This same girl told me that when it came to love, if she felt it, she had to say it.  Fully aware of the brief nature of some of her “relationships”, I asked her if there was a time frame that should be observed here.  She said there wasn’t, and that it might be two weeks and it might be two months.  It all depended for her, but when she felt it, she had to say it.

And she usually only said it to me after we had gone on an exceptionally well-planned date or after we had consumed a particularly large amount of alcohol.  For her, I love you more or less meant I have great feelings of affection for you.

And affection is something that is particularly sensitive to things like experience and circumstance.

Well-planned dates and alcohol are generally the types of things that build affection between two people.  In this sense, it was perfectly understandable why she told me that she loved me when she did.  And for me, it was particularly easy to incite such a response.  But when she said those words, something was missing.  It’s not that I didn’t believe her, per se.  It’s just that I believed that there was more to love than what she seemed to be sharing.

I said that I only understood the full weight of the words once.  Every other time when I said the words, I meant them in the purely affectionate sense.  In a majority of cases, when I said the words I love you, I could have meant any number of things: I really like you right now; you look very beautiful; I want to get in your… good graces; or in particularly selfish settings, I’m going to say something that I want you to say back. That last meaning was one that I employed in particularly self-conscious moments.  It was more of a confidence-building maneuver.

But there was one situation where it meant more.

If when I say I love you, I simply mean that I feel warm fuzzies for somebody, then I am compromising the full nature of the phrase.  If it is a temporary and fleeting sentiment, then I’ve missed the boat completely.

I dated a girl who said that when she felt it, she had to say it. And that idea is not completely off base.  But if the three words convey a simple feeling, then we’ve made a mistake.  Instead, my strongest sense is that when I tell somebody I love you in a romantic sense, its fullest significance is realized only when it is tied to some idea of commitment–something that lasts.

Here’s a hypothetical:  I am out on a date with a young lady.  We have a good time.  We enjoy the company of each other.  By the end of the night, she tells me that she loves me.  I tell her that I love her.  Great.  So far so good.  What happens in the morning when we’re maybe not so free about saying those three words?  Then what?  If we share something in the night that we cannot share come morning’s light, what, in reality, have we actually shared?  Not much.  And in the end, my sense is that is meaningless–that is no sharing at all.

My sense is that this exact thing happens with more things than just the three words, I love you.  There are probably a lot of things we find to be easier done in the night than in the daylight.  That’s just my guess.

During my sophomore year at University, I had dated a girl named Jennifer who understood this idea of night and day, and the disparity between the two.  We were sharing a particularly drawn-out goodnight kiss at her parent’s cottage and I had asked her if we should be nervous about her parents interrupting us.  “So what if they do?’ was Jen’s response.  She went on to share with me that there was nothing shameful about the way that we were behaving.  Why I had felt shameful about kissing a girl goodnight, I’m not sure.  But I did, even though she had encouraged me not to.  For her, there was no way that a relationship could be healthy if it was comprised of things done in secret or in shame.  The notion that her parents could step into the room, see our embrace, and not be angry with us was an unfamiliar idea to me.  For Jen, it was important that the way we interacted not be something to be hidden, but instead be something we could speak openly about without fear that our actions were in any way shameful or disrespectful.  This idea would later become very important.

I already mentioned that it took me a long time to understand why my failure of a response to Emily’s confession of love had not ruined our relationship.  That’s because we had two different understandings of what was going on.

When I eventually told Emily that I loved her, I was giving voice to the idea that I thought she was pretty great and that I had enjoyed spending time with her.  My response was very much one of appreciation.

Emily had meant something different.  For her, the statement I love you was a profession of commitment.  For Emily, the words I love you represented a deep appreciation of another person–a deep appreciation of me.  But the words also meant more.  The words signified a commitment that said, all other considerations aside, I chose to exist in relationship with you.  That’s the only way that I can explain why she didn’t go running for the hills when I said what I said.  In hindsight I can only consider my words to have been a miserable failure of a response.

Oh… That’s… Cool…

There is no doubt in my mind that my words were a letdown to Emily.  But the words did not represent a deal-breaker, and if nothing else, they demonstrated complete honesty.  Emily’s decision and her commitment had been made without any regard for my possible response (or lack thereof).  Before I had given any guarantee that I would meet her toe-to-toe in the relationship, she had determined that, for better or for worse, she was going all in.  In hindsight I can only imagine how much courage that took.

Even after having pondered upon the situation at great length, I am to this day overwhelmed by the significance of this story.  I am overwhelmed to understand that Emily, knowing full well that I may or may not feel the same, had committed to exist in relationship with me.  Some of my more devout friends would be unable to ignore the theological implications of this story.

There’s a scene in the film adaptation of Nicholas Sparks’ The Notebook that sometimes flashes through my mind.  The Notebook is one of several books and films that I’ve read or watched (and when it comes to The Notebook, I’ve done both) to try to impress a girl.  For whatever reason there is one scene in particular and above all others that continues to stay with me.  And, in case it matters, it didn’t escape me that the following scene, perhaps the climactic scene of the film, was added by the screenwriter, and does not appear in the book.  But that is neither here nor there, I suppose.

Noah and Allie–the story’s two main characters and estranged lovers–cross paths for one of the first times in seven years.  Noah asks Allie what she wants out of life.  Allie says you can’t just ask a question like that–it’s not that simple.  Noah asks Allie to imagine what she wants out of the future and then asks:

NOAH: Would you just stay with me?

ALLIE: Stay with you? What for?  Look at us, we’re already fightin’.

NOAH: Well that’s what we do, we fight… You tell me when I am being an arrogant son of a bitch and I tell you when you are a pain in the ass.  Which you are, 99% of the time.  I’m not afraid to hurt your feelings.  You have like a two-second rebound rate, then you’re back doing the next pain-in-the-ass thing.

ALLIE: So what?

NOAH: So it’s not gonna’ be easy.  It’s gonna’ be really hard.  We’re gonna’ have to work at this every day, but I want to do that because I want you.  I want all of you, for ever, you and me, every day.

For whatever reason, that whole scene sticks with me.  Allie ends up being unable to say what it is that she wants and, at least for the time being, leaves Noah standing there in the rain.  Alone.

Emily and Noah share a similar understanding of love, I think.  For both of them, the sense of commitment doesn’t outweigh the sense of affection, but instead balances it.  Certainly the affection leads to commitment, and relationships seldom skip affection and simply begin at commitment.  Both are necessary; the two must balance each other out.  Somehow Emily knew that.  Noah evidently knew that.  I am still learning that.

I don’t know why I was expecting anything else, but the process of saying goodbye was entirely underwhelming.  I had gone through the whole process when I left Boston eight years earlier and I recalled that even back then the process felt no different.

Of course, it was different.  When I left Boston after eighth grade, I had no promise of ever moving back.  For all I knew, I would never again in my life see most of my Boston friends.  But moving to Leawood was different.  When I began thinking about leaving Seattle for Leawood, I had made a promise to myself that I would, someday, move back.  In that sense, I suppose, I didn’t think the goodbyes were at all permanent this time.

I had found it helpful to not even say goodbye to some of my closest friends.  The best I could do was a heavy-hearted see you later. If I had to think about the idea of a for-real-as-in-maybe-never-see-you-again goodbye, I wouldn’t have survived the process.  I had to view the move to Leawood as completely temporary just to cope with the reality of my situation.

Sometimes, I’ve noticed, it is necessary to change the facts of a situation to make it easier to deal with.  My sense is that there’s probably something very significant about this idea.  It seems like it is probably quite similar to the lovers’ myth.

The whole process of graduating from college had been a similarly underwhelming experience.  I woke up on the day of my commencement expecting that the experience would hold some significant change in perspective.  I woke up on the day after my commencement with the realization that I felt no different.

My roommate Zachary compared it to certain rites of passage.

“Think about your twenty-first birthday,” he suggested. “You wake up in the morning expecting to feel completely different–like a real adult.  In reality, it’s just another day.  Maybe the only difference you wake up feeling is a little bit of a hangover.  But that goes away quick.”

I remember laughing to myself.  Zachary’s words were completely true.  Certain rites of passage did mark significant points of development, but the day or the ritual or the ceremony itself had always been a little bit underwhelming in my own experience.  Commencement was a lot like that.

Zachary and I, in addition to our massive bedroom window, had two other windows that opened onto the roof of our house.  We had developed a habit of retreating to our rooftop in moments of crisis.  Somehow the air seemed fresher three stories above the street.  In the back of my mind I suspected that it was always easier to think clearly while sitting on a rooftop.  Maybe it was the stars that helped this clear thinking.  Maybe it was something else.

One week after commencement I invited Haylie to come sit on the roof.  It had become a sacred place for me and it was something I was excited to share with her.

The conversations that Haylie and I had were never particularly concise.  When we talked, we never simply went until we had reached a clear conclusion.  It seemed instead that every time we met we would just begin where we had left off.  And we would always leave a conversation open for later continuation.  When Haylie joined me on the roof we continued the conversation that had begun under the Aurora Bridge–the conversation that began with Haylie’s difficulty confronting the end of her experience at University.

As I think about our evening on the rooftop, I realize that Haylie and I had been asking the exact same question in the week since commencement.  We had both spent the last week asking the very simple question, “now what?”

Because neither of us had any clear answer to the question, we sat in silence.  We watched traffic on the expressway in the distance.  We watched the nighttime activity of boats on Lake Washington.  We smiled at each other.  We did everything except approach the question that had defined our recent days.

Now what?

Haylie was the first one to break the silence.

“I don’t think that any of the adults in our lives have been faithful to us,” she said.  I must have looked at her with the kind of look that suggests that I had no idea what she was talking about.  She took this as a cue to continue.

“I’m serious,” she said, almost seeming to laugh at the oddity of her grand claim.  “Think about it.  I can’t think of a single adult in my life who has been honest about the fact that after college, it is completely up to us to decide what we want to do for the rest of our lives.  None of them even suggest that there’s any difficulty here.  They all seem to suggest that it’s no problem to find a job, find a partner, start a life, start a family.  None of them seem to even acknowledge the fact that it’s a time of confusion–a time of asking ourselves what, in God’s name, we are to do with life.”

Haylie explained how up until now, the course of our lives had been more or less prescribed for us.  We go to college because that’s what we’re supposed to do after high school.  “But what about after college?  Now what?” she asked.

Hell if I know, I was tempted to say.

“Just think of how every adult in your life has asked you what you’re up to now that you’re done with school,” she went on.  “Their asking that question presupposes the idea that we should to have things figured out–that we should have some sensible course of action.  And think about how disappointed some of them look when you tell them you’re not sure what the next steps look like.”

Haylie’s words seemed true, but I wasn’t sure what to say.

“Tell me more,” I asked.  I had learned many years prior that one of the best ways to deepen understanding is to “mine for details” by asking the simple question, tell me more. Tell me more, of course, is no question at all.  It’s more of an instruction, but it works.

Haylie explained how overwhelming it was to consider the fact that the decisions she was making right then would lay the foundation for the rest of her life.  “Life is now happening for real,” she said.

I didn’t really know what to say.  I waited for Haylie to continue.

“But what if I make a mistake?” she eventually asked.  “What if I choose wrong?”

Haylie and I had once engaged the age-old question of whether or not something like fate could possibly exist.  She was convinced that there was no possibility of anything like fate actually existing.  I had at first disagreed, convinced that there must be something like fate at work in the world.

I very clearly remember our talking about this question because I had made a drastic error in my argument.

I had argued that there must be such a thing as fate because there appears to be too much order in the world for life to be a matter of simple chance.  I had to believe life could not just be a series of contingent occurrences.  It was just like I had agreed several years earlier with Emily–there could not possibly be such a thing as an accident–everything had to be a part of some plan.

I explained this to Haylie, managing to argue my entire case without once thinking about her sister-in-law Annie.  I was accordingly mortified when, halfway through a sentence, I realized how offensive my words must have been to Haylie.

If I was going to put my money where my mouth was, I would have had to defend the idea that Annie’s kidnapping was part of some master plan.  And there was no chance that I could argue that the kidnapping and likely murder of somebody’s family member was part of any plan.  It was easy for a person like me to talk about some grand master plan because I had never experienced firsthand the reality of plans going wrong.  It wasn’t so easy for Haylie to believe that everything happens for a reason.

In other conversations, Haylie had spoken passionately about the fact that chance wins out over order every day.  Bad things happen.  Plans go wrong.  Dreams get lost.  And in a single moment a sister-in-law vanishes and lives are changed forever.

The only reason I mention the idea of fate to is to explain Haylie’s understanding of the world.  Haylie understood that if she didn’t proactively work against chance and chaos, nature would run its course without her.  The world would go on and events would transpire with or without any consideration of her own desires, dreams, wishes, plans, aspirations, whatever.

This meant Haylie’s life was one that engaged disorder head on.  If there was no such thing as fate, it would mean that she would need to be single-handedly responsible for guiding her own steps through life.

“What if I chose wrong?”

Haylie’s question hung heavy on that rooftop.

After a moment of silence and the realization that I had no way to directly address her question, I responded to her question with a question.

“What do you want out of life,” I asked.  I wasn’t sure exactly where I was going with this question, but I was confident that a question as broad as this one would eventually lead to some truth that might be applicable to the situation.

“What do you mean?” she asked back.

“I mean, you’re ninety-five years old.  You look back on a long life.  What are you looking back on?”

I was glad that I was the one asking this question.  If Haylie had asked me a question this broad and vague, I’d have probably resulted to my default response.  Hell if I know.

She paused for a moment, appearing to consider several different responses.

Haylie eventually answered that she wanted to look back on life at ninety-five years of age and see that she was faithful to God’s will for her life.

While sincere and beautiful, I couldn’t help but think that Haylie’s response was a little bit of a cop-out.

“You can do better than that,” I said, pressing her on.  She said that she couldn’t do any better without thinking a lot more about the question.

Before I could press further she had done what I was terrified she would do–she turned the question on me.

I told Haylie that her asking me the same question violated a law of conversation.  There’s a law somewhere that says something about it being unacceptable to ask a person to answer their own vague and possibly unanswerable question.  My sense is that everybody can probably understand this phenomenon.  It’s the phenomenon that is generally responded to with the words, that’s not fair–you can’t ask me that back. Maybe I’m the only one who experiences this.

I took a moment to consider what a thoughtful response might be.  My feeling like Haylie’s answer was a cop-out meant that any answer I offered had to be substantial.

“Well, I know that I want to have children,” I began. “So at ninety-five years old, I’m probably sitting by a fireplace, talking to my grandchildren.  Probably my great-grandchildren too.  And I’m probably telling them stories about adventures and travels, so that probably means that I want to spend some time seeing different parts of the country and the world.  And I probably want to be sharing with them something meaningful about these adventures, so that probably means that it’s important for me to be able to look back on a meaningful vocation.”

Haylie looked intrigued.  I was surprised at the fact that once I began imagining this hypothetical situation in my head, the details began to come quite naturally.

This hypothetical rabbit trail had begun with with Haylie’s question, what if I choose wrong?

While I was telling Haylie about the fireplace and the great-grandchildren I began to get a sense of how my vague question had anything to do with her own question.

“Right there,” I went on, “I have at least three clear priorities.  It’s important for me to have a family.  It’s important for me to continue exploring the vastness of our world.  And it’s important that my vocation be meaningful.”

Haylie nodded as if to suggest she was interested in where I was headed with this idea.

“Beyond those three things, there are probably many more.  Some more important than others.  The fact that I could come up with those three things so quickly probably means that they are some of the biggest things I want out of life.  And I bet if I spent some time thinking about those three things, I would be able to determine some order of importance among the three.”

Both Haylie and I were well aware that I had not yet done anything to address her question, what if I choose wrong?

“Once I decide the level of importance I place on those three things,” I said, looking to return to Haylie’s original question, “I have some idea of where to go.  If I decide that the great-grandchildren are the most important of the three, then maybe my main effort right now is going to be focused on working toward a family.  If I decide that the vocation is the most important of those three, then maybe my first concern is going to be to focus on establishing a solid career path early on.  If I decide that having adventurous stories is most important, maybe my focus needs to be on seeking out adventure and traveling the country and the world.”

I was becoming aware that this was one of those situations where you don’t really discover what you’re trying to say until you say it.  External processing, a friend had once called it.

I continued to explain my newly formed understanding that maybe our next steps in life are dictated by the question of what we want out of it–what we want to be able to look back on when we celebrate our ninety-fifth birthday.

Haylie seemed to be tracking with me.  My thoughts on the issue were new enough that I had not yet had the opportunity to consider whether my words were true, or whether they were simply magical thinking.

I knew fully that I had still not done anything to address Haylie’s question, what if I choose wrong?

I left for Leawood on a Tuesday.  My roommate woke me up that morning.

“Hey.  You awake,” he asked. “You’ve gotta see this sunrise.”

By some stroke of luck, Zachary and I had worked our way into the East-facing room of the house.  The most noticeable feature of the room was, of course, the window.  The window was almost as large as the entire wall itself and gave us a panoramic view of the Cascade mountains.  In the foreground we could watch boaters on Lake Washington as they spent their summer days kayaking and sailing in and out of the channel.  And even closer than that, our neighbors across the street had a close-up view of every time Zachary or I got out of the shower.  Maybe a window like that is a sword that cuts both ways.

It took only a moment between Zachary’s statement and my actually seeing it to gain my bearings.  I had never seen anything like it.

My family had spent summers sailing on Lake Michigan, and I had always heard Uncle Dave repeat the mantra, red sky at night, sailors delight; red sky in the morning, sailors take warning.

It was almost prophetic.

As I lay there in my bed, not completely coherent, I fixed my eyes on the scene unfolding outside of our window.  The sky was blood red with thin veins of blue darting across the sky, in arcs, from horizon to horizon.  The amber glow just below the surface suggested that dawn was only moments away.  I took a mental photograph of the scene as I stared into the morning.

I had dated a girl once who took a lot of these types of photographs.  She would pause whatever she was doing,  look intently at her surroundings, take a deep breath, close her eyes and furrow her brow as if to indicate some deep thinking.  “Okay,” she would conclude, “I’ve got it.”  She told me that mental photos let us truly remember everything about a situation. Instead of limiting herself to what could be shown by paper and ink, she preferred to instead catalog her own experiences with mental photographs.  She was probably right.  It seems like there are a lot of settings in which a standard photograph just won’t do.

Considering this, I took a mental photo of my last morning in Seattle.  It was unclear when I’d see something like this again.  There was no question of if.  It was a question of when.

It was 40 seconds just as easily as it could have been two minutes.  I found myself staring off into the glowing distance for what might as well have been an hour.  For folks in Leawood, the dawn had broken hours ago.  For us in Seattle, we were still waiting for it.  We were still waiting for something that come long ago for others.

I didn’t know what time it was, but I reasoned that it had to be early because my alarm for six-o-clock had not yet gone off.  I rolled over in an attempt to fall back asleep.  It didn’t work.  I should have known there was no chance of such a thing happening.  As soon as I closed my eyes I began to wonder if the sky was changing at all without my seeing it.  Were there changes going on that I couldn’t see?

This was the kind of sunrise that makes a person believe in God.  And I was ignoring it.  I couldn’t help but think that things like this happen almost every day, whether or not we have eyes to see them.  The sun has risen every day of my life and I could count on two hands the number of times I’ve been awake to experience it.

Red sky at night, sailors delight; red sky in the morning, sailors take warning.

If Uncle Dave’s mantra was true, some poor adventurer was either in danger, or soon approaching it.

I looked at my phone to see what time I might need to wake up tomorrow to see something like this again.  4:41am the screen read.  I had been asleep for fewer than four hours and I’d be on I-90, headed for Kansas, in only a few more.

And that’s as long as it took me to realize that looking at the time to see when I’d need to wake up tomorrow was pointless.  I’d be in Kansas tomorrow.  The kind of Kansas that doesn’t have mountains.  The kind of Kansas that doesn’t have lakes.  The kind of Kansas that doesn’t have sunrises, for all I know.  It was almost too much to think about before five-o-clock in the morning.

Still staring at the glowing horizon, I said a prayer.  Please God, let there be sunrises in Kansas too.

I was reminded of Somewhere Out There from An American Tail, and the duet between Fievel and his sister Tanya.  Fievel, having no idea where his sister is, sings, “it helps to think we might be wishing on the same bright star.” Tanya offers a similar phrase; “it helps to think we might be sleeping underneath the same big sky.”

And somehow that song did it.

Were there changes going on in that sunrise that I could not see? Of course there were.  But there were changes going on all around me that I could not see.  And as soon I as arrived in Leawood I would need to confront the fact that of course things would change in Seattle, and I myself would not be able to see them.  Life would continue in Seattle just as it would in Leawood.  And every day, I could think about the fact that we’re both under the same sun, the same sky, and the same stars.  And somehow that was comforting.  Somehow that song did it.

I told Emily that distance never has the last word.  It’s one thing to say words, but it’s an altogether different thing to actually believe them.

The very first thing I did when I got to Kansas was set my alarm for 4:30am.

When I woke up the next morning I discovered that the sun rises in Kansas too.

Haylie and I met again a few days later.  Both she and I had left our conversation under the bridge feeling particularly unsettled about the possibility that a future could be lost.

What I didn’t know at the time was that the questions raised on that bench held for Haylie a particular level of significance.  Near the beginning of the school year, Haylie had experienced herself a version of this loss of future.  Hers was not of the same order of a husband losing a wife or a parent losing a child, but was nonetheless devastating.  And it did have something to do with marriage.

She and her then-boyfriend had begun to think about the rest of their lives and the way their relationship figured into that.  Haylie never actually gave me a play-by-play of how it all came about, and to this day I am confident that all of my conversations with her have been based on the assumption that I know more about the situation than I actually do.  The important part of the story was that the conversation ended with the loss of their relationship.

Haylie, just like her brother and just like Annie’s family, discovered quite quickly and quite unwillingly that any of her previous visions about the future would need to change.

Haylie and I had decided to travel toward Wallingford to grab a cup of coffee.  In the back of my mind I had already been saying goodbye to Seattle–or at least parts of Seattle–for a long time.  Our stopping in Wallingford had been for me a bittersweet occasion.  Sweet, because I had spent several years calling Wallingford home.  Bitter, of course, because I was uncertain when I’d see the neighborhood again.  I remember deeply hoping that Leawood had its own version of Wallingford.  I remember deeply fearing that it didn’t.

The kindly barista began pulling the shots for Haylie’s standard drink. Double-tall Americano, no room.  Because I wasn’t feeling particularly ready for espresso so early in the day I resorted to my default non-caffeinated drink; a medium strawberry Italian Soda, for here.

“Sorry man,” the barista responded, “we don’t have any middle size.  We’ve got a twelve and a sixteen.  And we’ve only got to-go cups today.”

I said that I’d take the sixteen ounce and that a to-go cup would be fine. Before I was able to finish my thought he let me know that he was out of strawberry syrup.  I said that anything fruity would do just fine.  He thought that Thursday seemed like a raspberry day and I agreed.  He asked me twice whether I wanted cream in my soda.  I said no both times.  “Whipped cream?” he asked.  I again said no.

“Man, I’m really harshin’ your mellow this morning,” he confessed, almost as if to apologize.

In my mind, it occurred to me to agree with my kindly barista.  Yeah you are, I might have responded.  But I didn’t.

“You know what, good sir,” I asked, more as a statement.  “I think Thursday is probably as good a day as any to have your mellow harshed…  We don’t want to get too mellow before the weekend starts.”

He looked at me as if to process what I said.  I looked at him as if to process what I said.  He paused, smiled, and continued fixing my order.

What did that even mean?  Was it even true?  Is any day really better than any other to have one’s “mellow” “harshed?”

I spent a bit of time thinking about why I responded to the barista the way I did.  Why was it important to me to affirm his harshing of mellows?  Why didn’t I just let it go and not say anything?

As I thought about this point I began to wonder if my exchange with the barista was not unlike the way that I respond in other uncertain situations.  I have noticed that there are certain conversations in which I am tempted to defeat silence by saying something; by saying anything.  In an effort to not let a conversation fall to silence, I say whatever first comes to mind.

I affirmed the kindly barista in his harshing of mellows; an activity against which I would otherwise firmly advocate.

Sometimes, I’ve noticed, this exact same thing happens when I’m talking to a new friend.  Sometimes it happens with old friends.  I say something for the sake of saying something and I only realize in retrospect that the words spoken were a.) completely untrue, b.) completely unhelpful in advancing the conversation, or c.) completely irrelevant to anything, ever.

Maybe I’m the only one who does this.

Because our drinks had been made to go, Haylie and I decided to wander about the neighborhood.  She knew just as well as I did how soon I was going to leave for Leawood.  While I had been running all over town, frantic that I might miss somebody in my saying goodbye, Haylie had been incredibly patient and understanding.  I had let her know that there were a lot of people to whom I had to say goodbye, and that meant she and I might not have as much time to hang out as we usually do.

At some level, I knew that my comment had been a bit hurtful to her.  The friendship that she and I shared was uncommon, but somehow I had reduced our friendship to one of many; one of dozens, or maybe even hundreds.  Haylie had become just a name on a list, like every other person, and my sense was that she had felt this.  In any case, I was glad that we were able to connect on the morning that we did.

We fell quite naturally into our previous line of dialogue about the loss of future.

Haylie described connecting quite seriously with the idea that in the wake of loss–and she did use the word wake–one is left with an unaddressable number of unanswerable questions.

“What if I just said these few words differently,” she questioned.  “Or what if I just agreed with him and took more time to try to see things his way?”

There was no doubt in my mind Haylie was at that point in the mourning process where the “what if…?” question was still all-consuming.  Not that I actually knew much about that mourning process, of course.  That was just my suspicion.

Several weeks earlier, in fact, Haylie and I had been sitting on a hillside, watching multi-million dollar yachts pass through the channel out to Elliott Bay.  We could have been talking about anything in the world when we arrived on the hillside but we inevitably ended up, as was a recurring theme when we sat on this hillside, having some condescending conversation about how even if such a grandiose yacht were given to us, free and clear, we’d not accept it.  “It’s just too big,” Haylie would invariably conclude. “What would you do with a boat that had eight bedrooms?”

We never knew how many bedrooms these boats had, but we suspected that a yacht that had a crane to offload its own speedboat and several Jet-Skis also had plenty of bedrooms.  We didn’t actually know about the bedrooms but we had a suspicion that there were a lot of them.

It was on this hillside that I shared with Haylie my deep fear that I have absolutely nothing figured out.

This came as a bit of a surprise to Haylie because I never seemed to have a shortage of advice for her.  For Haylie, I had become that friend who could always offer at least a small scrap of sage advice.

“Most of what I know, or think I know about the world,” I began to confess, “might be completely off base.  My sense is that the only truth I know in this world are things that are based off of a deep suspicion.”

I explained how the only things that I am at all sure about in life are those things that I sense to be true.  “It seems to me,” I might begin, “that X, Y, and Z are true.”  Or I might speak of how “my strongest sense suggests” something.

The only reason I even mention anything about the hillside or the yachts is to explain this idea of senses and suspicions.

I think that hearing Haylie talk about the loss of her relationship stirred in me a lot of these deep suspicions.

“Is there any degree to which you think you might be trying to see this situation in any way other than what it is,” I asked.

I had wondered as I heard Haylie speak longingly of a way to get things “back to the way they were” if she was being unfaithful to the reality of reality.  “What are the odds that you’re looking at the situation without fully acknowledging the facts,” I asked, pressing further.

Haylie told me that the only way she could stay hopeful for the resurrection of her relationship was to focus on the positive aspects of the situation.  The notion of a resurrection of a relationship was something that I had a hard time grasping.  She explained that to look at the situation from an objective third party perspective would be unfaithful to the reality of how much of her heart is still invested in the relationship.  Invested in a relationship that no longer exists, I couldn’t help but think to myself.

“It seems to me that it’s probably not helpful to ignore the facts of the situation,” I began to ponder aloud.  “And it’s probably also not helpful to think about the situation with too much hope.”

I couldn’t believe that I was advising Haylie to not remain hopeful.  The words that were coming out of my mouth seemed true, but also seemed completely contrary to what I thought I might say.  I always considered myself a proponent of hope.  Hope dies last, I often told people.  But is it possible that there are times in which it is best if hope does get killed?  Is it possible that there are times in which it is best that we kill hope?

It caught me off guard to think that I advised Haylie to give up hope.  Now a few months after the demise of her relationship, however, maybe it was time to encourage her to move on and to let go.  She could even say those words, move on and let go. But she couldn’t believe them.  It’s one thing to say words, but it’s an altogether different thing to actually believe them.

“There’s a name for living in a place in which you choose to ignore the reality of the world around you,” I eventually shared, not completely sure where I was going with this line of thinking.

“I know,” she said quietly.  “It’s called mental illness.”

It came as a relief to me that Haylie had made sense of my statement and had caught where I was going.

It’s one thing to say words, but it’s an altogether different thing to actually believe them.

We sat in silence pondering this disconnect between cognition and emotion without anything more to really ask or say.

When I finally chose to break the silence I asked Haylie if there’s a way to let go of a relationship without letting go of a person, and whether or not that question changes anything.

Continued From
CHAPTER II: Two Stories & A Myth

Over the course of the next few years I would have a lot of relationships that relied quite deeply on the lovers’ myth. It wasn’t until the week before I left Seattle that I even came to realize this.

I was sitting beneath the Aurora Bridge, on a bench on the Fremont side of the canal. There was nothing particularly cozy about this bench, but somehow it had become a regular meeting place for me and Haylie. The bench had become a piece of furniture in our relationship; something that we both had come to appreciate.

If Emily and I had never been just friends, then Haylie and I were the exact opposite. Haylie had grown up down the street from me and was one of those friends who, without question, would always be there. Solid, I think, would be a good way to describe my friendship with Haylie. We had grown up at each other’s house, eating Oreos and milk after school and building treehouses in the woods at the end of the street.

I would wonder, on and off, whether or not I was right in my thinking that Haylie and I would be good friends, always and forever, and nothing more. I’ve seen a lot of situations where one person says they’re okay with friendship while the other burns deeply with a desire for something more. Maybe I’m just projecting my experiences on other people. Maybe I’m completely alone in this observation of what might be called a deep silence of friendship–a deep silence motivated by a deeper desire to not lose the present friendship. Maybe I’m completely off base here.

At any rate, the only reason I mention this is because when I speak of Haylie as a friend, I mean that she and I are exactly that–friends.

Haylie and I had come to the bench to simply catch up. The madness of last-quarter examinations at University meant that it had been weeks since we last spoke to one-another.

She had been curious about how I could move so quickly from one relationship to another. Haylie asked me to list off all of the girls I had dated over the last few years. I had first come up with eleven names but disqualified two of them because I argued that one date doesn’t qualify as “dating.” “One date qualifies as poor judgement,” I joked. Hayle wasn’t particularly amused by my humor.

“That breaks my heart,” Haylie shared, responding to my final figure of nine. “How on earth can you do that to yourself and not be just completely devastated?”

“I still talk to all nine of them,” I responded, as if to justify myself. I tried to argue to Haylie that because I was still on speaking terms with all nine of them, it was okay. But even that wasn’t completely true. Surely I could call all nine, but there are actually only eight with whom I could still hold a meaningful conversation.

We had gone to the bench that afternoon because Haylie was having a particularly difficult time confronting the end of her experience at University. She was confronting the fact that life was changing in significant and unstoppable ways and she didn’t feel particularly ready.

Earlier in the year, Haylie’s sister-in-law Annie had gone on a mission trip to Burundi with some members of her church. Everybody acknowledged from the beginning that the trip was dangerous, and Haylie never told me why it was so important that they go to Burundi, of all places in the world.

Burundi experienced massive civil war for almost thirteen years–beginning in 1993 and continuing through almost the end of 2006. I learned this in a geography class at University. I also learned that the civil war involved “non-governmental and non-combatant targets.” I took this to mean that everything was a target–even those things that should typically have nothing to do with warfare. Things like schools and hospitals; families and schoolchildren.

In September of 2006 the government and the rebels signed a cease-fire agreement which formally ended the war. Because it would take much more than a treaty to begin rebuilding Burundi, various militant and militia groups would come to claim certain degrees of power in the interim.

The short version of Annie’s story–that is, the first of two versions of the story–involves something about armed bandits or groups of roving street children. It would be more than a week before Haylie’s brother or Annie’s family even heard anything about it.

According to the version of the story that I was told, their mission group was traveling outside of Burundi’s capital city of Bujumbura when they were stopped at a roadside checkpoint. Somehow, and the details here are still unclear to me, Annie was removed from her team and driven away by one of the rebel groups.

And that’s the end of the story.

I took this to mean that everything was a target–even those things that should typically have nothing to do with warfare. Things like American mission workers.

If you feel unfulfilled in my telling of the story, or that I didn’t offer any substantial information or any tidy conclusions, then you might be beginning to understand what Annie’s family and Haylie’s brother felt. Maybe more truthfully, what they still feel to this day.

As Haylie was telling the story, I was overcome by two distinct thoughts. First, that sucks. Second, I don’t understand.

The fact that I could say something as trite and trivial as that sucks begins to illustrate very seriously the second point; I don’t understand.

I had told Haylie before that I feel completely unprepared to face loss. All of the grand parents I have ever known, all three of them, are still alive and healthy. I have both of my parents and all of my siblings. A friend from highschool died last year, or maybe the year before, but he and I had never really hung out so it wasn’t something that was terribly difficult for me.

I sound like an asshole. Somebody’s son died and all I conclude is that it wasn’t something that was terribly difficult for me?

I don’t understand.

And I knew it might be a long time before I came to understand. Or it might be next week. Or later today.

The whole situation had Haylie asking questions that I couldn’t understand. It’s not that I simply didn’t understand. It’s that I couldn’t.

“My brother was going to spend the rest of his life with Annie,” Haylie began. “My brother had hopes and dreams for Annie, for himself, for the family that they would start one day…” Haylie trailed off. Her eyes seemed to focus on the flashing red lights on the radio towers across the water.

In the silence I caught myself thinking how grateful I was that I had at least read enough books to know when to keep quiet. In books that talk about grief and loss, a common denominator is the devastation that empty and thoughtless words can have on a delicate situation–especially a situation you don’t fully comprehend yourself. I waited for Haylie to continue. It could have been forty seconds just as easily as it could have been two minutes. The silence hung heavy over our bench.

“What happens,” Haylie eventually resumed, “when all of your hopes, all of your visions, all of your dreams, and all of your aspirations for the future suddenly disappear? And not just hopes and visions and dreams and aspirations for yourself, but for somebody else? What happens when you lose that? What happens when everything you thought you knew about the rest of your life doesn’t just simply change, but disappears or is taken from you?”

Haylie was in tears, and the only thing that I could think was I don’t understand.

For Annie’s family, there wasn’t even a clear conclusion to what happened in Burundi. There even existed the possibility that she was still alive, held captive in a rebel camp somewhere. But this sort of magical thinking couldn’t possibly be productive. In almost any other situation, the loss of Annie would still be difficult. But in almost any other situation, after the funeral and a period of mourning, her family would be able to begin rebuilding their lives in a way that honored Annie’s life, but was faithful to the reality that she was no longer with them.

Instead, the reality of the situation is that for the rest of their lives, Annie’s family would not know. They would not know what happened after she was taken from the group. They would not know if she had remained alive for hours, or days or weeks. They would not know if she was alive today.

They would not know, and for the rest of their lives they would be faced with the question of “why?” Even beyond the question of why, they would be doomed to the question of “what if…?” Annie’s family would have the rest of their lives to ask the question of “what if…?” What if she had missed her flight? What if she hadn’t chosen to go on the trip? What if any single member of the family had encouraged her against the trip?

Would it have ended differently? Could it have ended differently.

“What happens when you lose your future?” Haylie finally asked.

I didn’t understand.

What does happen when you lose your future?

No matter what anybody tells me, I am convinced that it doesn’t take very long in a relationship to determine whether or not marriage is a possibility.  Maybe a few weeks.  Maybe.

I already mentioned that Emily and I had been together for six years.  And that’s not untrue.  But that’s not the whole story.

I say that it’s not the whole story because there are at least two versions of every story.  There’s the story that’s easy to share.  That’s the story that is convenient and effortless to believe.  And then, of course, there is the story of what actually happened.

In fact, I’ve noticed that it is possible to to categorize my personal relationships by these two stories.  There are those, generally ancillary friends, who get the first kind of story.  This is a story that is concise and has a clear and redemptive moral conclusion.

The other group of people, an invariably smaller and much more select group, includes those with whom I might share the whole story.  This is a story that isn’t quite as tidy.  This is a story that might not be quite as concise, and almost never has a clear and redemptive moral conclusion.

For the sake of hindsight, and considering that I no longer have any real reason to hide anything, I might as well share the story as it happened, not just as I find it convenient to remember.

I said that Emily and I began dating during our junior year of high school, and that’s true.  I said that Emily and I dated for six years, but that’s not completely true.  It would be more accurate to say that the our dating occurred over the period of six years.

We spent the summer before our senior year doing nothing and everything at the same time.  By the end of the summer we had established a pattern of our days.  Because neither of us had to maintain a summer job we had almost complete control over how we spent our summer.

We would usually wake up around nine or ten in the morning.  She would give me a call and ask how I had slept and if I had any memorable dreams.  She was always interested in what dreams meant.  We’d agree that meeting up sounded like a good idea and I would walk to her house in time for us to have lunch together.  The afternoons were spent pretty evenly between reading at the lake and exploring new and unfamiliar neighborhoods of Seattle.  We would often be out exploring until nightfall.  Some nights we returned home to watch a movie.  Other nights we would meet up with friends.  Some nights we would try to stay awake to greet the morninglight.

I have already called our relationship unbelievable.  The summer before our senior year was no exception.

But we were barely seniors in high school.  What did we know?

Eventually Emily’s mother would be vindicated in her constant reminder that we not take ourselves too seriously.  What we thought with some certainty was love, she would always remind us, would probably turn out to be short-term infatuation.  By the end of that summer, eight months after the TWIRP dance, she would seem to have been proven correct when Emily and I agreed that maybe what we had was perhaps not as long-term as we had hoped.

In fact, one of our earliest conversations had something to do with accidents.  We had promised each-other that there was no such thing as an accident.  We had promised each-other that it was no mere coincidence that we met when we did–that our relationship began as it began.  Just ask your local traffic cop about this point, I would tell her.  The officer will tell you that there is such a thing as a collision, but there is no such thing as an accident.

I have noticed since that lovers often promise each other things that are clearly and verifiably untrue.  It’s a sort of lovers’ myth; a part of the fancy and whimsey of love that, while perhaps deluded, helps to advance the plot, so to speak, of love.

After eight months, I was ready to admit that maybe there was such a thing as an accident.

Maybe there wasn’t any rhyme or reason to our relationship outside of a simple semester and summer of companionship.  Maybe that’s all that it was supposed to be and maybe I had to begin satisfying myself with the idea that our relationship, whatever it had been, was all it was ever going to be.

Over the next several years, Emily and I stayed in varying levels of contact.  We tried the distance thing and found, much to our surprise, that even with the connective power of the internet and discount airfare, 3,046 miles was a distance too great to overcome.  She had elected to go to a small performing arts school in downtown Boston.  Theatrical design had always been a passion of hers and her moving to Boston was the first and only logical step toward realizing that dream.

I remember encouraging Emily’s move to Boston.  The irony was not lost on me that only four years earlier my family had moved to Seattle from Boston.  I remember how when we first got to Seattle people were always curious what would prompt such a drastic transcontinental move.  I remember joking at the time about how my parents had a Manifest Destiny complex.  “From sea to shining sea,” I would say, making no effort to mask what was then a very deep resentment.

“If nothing else,” I would eventually come to tell Emily, “my own move was a growthful experience.”  Of course, if was going to be honest, I would have to admit to her that moving so far from home was terrible.  But, while I was being honest, I would have to admit to her that some good came out of it, not the least of which was our meeting.

She was apprehensive about moving to Boston from the very beginning.  I remember encouraging her to consider it as an adventure.  She told me that she considered an adventure taken alone to be no adventure at all.  An adventure is only an adventure if you have somebody to share it with, she would repeatedly tell me.

Last week as I was cleaning out my desk, I found a copy of a letter I had written to her just eleven days before she embarked on the biggest move of her life.  Regarding the prospect of Boston, the last few lines read:

Your heart might soon be split two ways and you will have a choice.  Either you’ll find that you have a little less heart to give to those two places, or you will find an opportunity to love more deeply than you have ever done before, bridging the distance and those two places with a depth of heart that you had no previous understanding of.  You can love the same and be further fragmented by this move, or you can explore what it means to love more deeply and more fiercely in the hope that distance does not have the last word

Because distance does not have the last word.

I remember her thanking me for this letter, her eyes welling up with tears.  I remember vividly this particular letter because this letter would be the last one that we shared for almost a year.

As soon as she arrived Boston, for whatever reason, we almost immediately fell out of contact.  I remember encouraging her to put her self in such a position that she be able to commit one-hundred-percent to her new surroundings.  Of course I prayed to God that she never take me seriously on this point.  There is no really good explanation of why this surprised me that she was actually taking me up on my advice.  But it came as a surprise.

She would later confess to me that my words about distance not having the last word, while not untrue, were maybe too simple and trite.

Emily told me that in a dating relationship the woman always knows first if it is love.

How was it possible that, almost over night, what we thought was love proved to be nothing more than an arrangement of proximity?

Could it be possible that I had spare time and she was bored and that was all our relationship was? A matter of convenience or opportunity?  What does it mean to discover that maybe a relationship was based merely on proximity and opportunity?

Maybe these types of relationships have something significant to do with the lovers’ myth.

There are a lot of reasons somebody might move to the middle of nowhere.  For me, it was simply a matter of changing up the game.  I had gone to high school with some kids who were brilliant but never did anything meaningful with their lives because they never had an opportunity to get out of town.  Maybe Leawood is my proactive attempt at getting out.

And I shouldn’t actually say that Leawood is in the middle of nowhere.  Leawood is really just a southern suburb of Kansas City, but on the Kansas side of the border.  I guess you could think of it as a Kansas suburb of a Missouri city.  If that’s not a helpful way of thinking about it, I’m sorry.  You can forget I said anything about it.

It has been an interesting four days.  Four days is just long enough for things to begin to seem somewhat familiar, but altogether too short to have developed any legitimate understanding of how things actually work.

For example, I spent almost an hour this morning looking for a coffee house.

“Well, do you want good coffee or good ambiance,” Kyle, my new housemate asked me.

It was clear that I had not yet even begun to adjust to the new scenery of middle America.  I had become used to living in Seattle where it wasn’t difficult to find a coffee shop with both. But Kansas was a different story.  In fact, it was already clear that this whole story was going to be different.

This whole story was going to be different because it had started out differently.

If I try to think about all of the factors that played into my leaving Seattle I begin to quickly become overwhelmed.  There were a lot of reasons.  Maybe first of these reasons was Emily.

Emily and I had gone to high school together and ever since the second semester of junior year I was convinced that I was going to marry her.  That was the semester when she asked me to the TWIRP dance.

What was particularly compelling about Emily was that she actually gave me the time of day.  I don’t want to set the bar too low here, but this had been an unprecedented occurrence.

At the risk of falling off the proverbial deep end of tangents, allow me to explain.

During my first year of college I had to argue an original thesis for WP101: EXPOSITORY WRITING.  I took the opportunity to refine what had always been a sneaking suspicion of my childhood; that everyone needs a fat kid.

Consider any of the great coming-of-age tales of our time.  The Sandlot, The Lord of The Flies, The Goonies, Stand By Me, or any of hundreds more.  Each of these stories had a fat kid.  The fat kid in each of these stories filled a unique and necessary role.  The fat kid was generally responsible for providing the comic relief in the organization.  More subtly (but perhaps more important), the fat kid was the barometer of the group against whom all of the others could compare themselves quite favorably.  I might not be the best looking one in the group, one might say, but at least I’m better looking than him.  Or, I might not be the most capable or athletic one in the group, but at least I am more capable and athletic than her.

It was a mutually beneficial relationship.  The fat kid had a group of friends to which he or she was endeared, and the group had a clown and a barometer.

Of course, it’s not at all hard to see why the fat kid was always the clown of the group.  Quite easily,  the fat kid, not being able to rely on aesthetic or athletic traits, was forced to develop a fortitude of personality that is without parallel elsewhere.  The fat kid was the clown because when all else failed, a strong personality would be the only thing that could endear him or her to a group of people.  In all seriousness the fat kids ran with this idea because that was the only kind of running they were capable of.

(Sorry.  That was mean.  But I was the fat kid, so maybe I’m allowed to make fat jokes.)

This is all to explain, of course, why attention from Emily had been so unprecedented.  As the fat kid myself, I had plenty of beautiful friends.  But I was never the beautiful friend.  That’s why  I had no good way to respond when, after a few months of dating, she told me that she loved me.

“Oh…  That’s…  Cool…” I stuttered out, overcome both by surprise and disbelief.

Even to this day I can recall exactly where I was sitting; exactly where she was sitting.  The couch had a sage-green, almost paisley flower pattern, and the floor was covered in orange shag.  We were in her mother’s basement.

Somehow (and to this day I haven’t the foggiest idea why), my failure of articulation did not ruin our relationship.

Of course I loved her.  And even in that moment I knew I loved her… I think.  But, what was love to a high school junior? And why was she so comfortable with the idea, and I so incapable of saying something similar?

It would only be a matter of days before I could tell her, in complete certainty, that I loved her too.

Emily had told me before that the woman would always know first if it was love.

Having never known true love myself and tugging at the bit for any hint of what might even be misconstrued as love, I had always anticipated that I, not she, would be the one to identify it first, even if I was doing so at the risk of being completely wrong.  As soon as a woman gave me the time of day, I imagined, I’d be in love.  And I knew that I would know it.

Nevertheless, she did know first.

Always curious for details, I asked her later about the point at which she knew it was love.

“Do you remember when we visited my aunt in Medford,” she asked.

I said that I remembered.

“You spent almost an hour playing with Andrew and Jonah, and as I watched you play with the boys, I just knew.”

It was during the summer between our junior and senior years.  We had both earned our driver’s licenses a few months prior and decided that a weekend road trip was not only a good idea, but a requisite high school experience.  I told my parents that I was going with some guy friends; she had told her mother that she was going with some girl friends. Her aunt Kathy was just cool enough to not make a big deal of the fact that two seventeen-year-olds had made the 451 mile trip alone, together.

The point of all of this, of course, is only to illustrate that my relationship with Emily was a first and an only.  Even today, as I recall these points, I am tempted toward anachronism–toward altering the timeframe of things to increase the believability of my account.

It’s hard, even for me, to believe that my relationship with Emily had developed as fast or as young as it did.  It’s even more surprising to consider that my relationship with Emily defined almost six years of my life.

If our story is unbelievable, I beg your forgiveness.  That the story is (and was) unbelievable is precisely why it is so significant.

I was flipping through a magazine yesterday and saw an interesting advertisement. There were two seemingly naked bodies lying in bed near one-another.  In big white handwriting the page read “We were never just friends.”  The ad was for some type of fragrance, I think.

I couldn’t help but think of Emily.  We were never just friends.  From the beginning we both knew that it was something significant.

It was something significant.

And we had always planned on getting married after our senior year at University.

We had always planned.

Now more than six years since the TWIRP dance, I am only beginning to be able to use the word “was“ in its true sense, as the past-tense form of the verb “to be.”  As in, was once; isn’t anymore.

It’s an interesting thing to look back at how there are some things that always change and there are other things that never do.

This is the story in which I find myself.

She told me that as soon as I was done with college, I would find myself with a surplus of time and a degree of freedom that was before unthinkable. With this time, she shared, I might find myself reading more books, finding more adventures, and sitting alone with more of my thoughts. She’s said that she learned more in the three months since she graduated college than she ever did taking classes.

In the three days and six hours since I graduated college, I have begun my journey down a similar road.

What follows might be considered the first really burdensome lesson upon which I have been dwelling.

Last week, I asked Deb how I might try to pray for a situation whose desired outcome is unclear. On one hand, I might pray for something to happen. On the other hand, of course, I might also have cause to pray for the same thing to not happen. And sometimes, it’s just not clear which way to pray.

“So, do we just pray that God’s will be done?” I asked with a hint of confused desperation.

I don’t exactly recall the words she chose in response to my inquiry. What I do recall is her discouraging me from such a prayer. She said something about it reducing God to a puppet-animator God.

“But isn’t that how Jesus taught us how to pray?”

I pondered this question in silence, sitting on the couch in her office.

A puppet-God?

Now, almost a week later, I am still preoccupied with the question of how we pray for (and about) the things toward which we harbor uncertainty.

In the past I have prayed for abundant clarity. Dear God, I might begin, please make it abundantly clear what you would have me do here.

Abundantly clear; that there be no room for doubt or uncertainty; that God show me with decisive certainty what I am to do; that God do the work of discernment for me.

What am I praying for when I ask God to make something abundantly clear?

On one hand, as a former high school teacher of mine answered on my Facebook page, I am in this prayer asking for “Clarity and/or discernment. And/or for direction.”

And that’s completely true.

But I’m also asking for something more. I’m asking that God do the work for me.

Aren’t I?

I could, of course, do what our forefathers and foremothers have done through the ages–pray and fast and wait on the Lord’s voice. I could wait and wait and wait for that point at which I might begin to discern God’s will for me.

Or I could pray that God make the next steps abundantly clear. This sure would save a lot of work, wouldn’t it?

What am I praying for when I ask God to make something abundantly clear?

I’m praying that God give me a pass; that I not need to perform any legitimate effort of discernment on my own.

My sense is that to pray for abundant clarity might reduce God to the puppet figure that Deb told me about on the couch.

Considering these points, how do we go about praying? For what do we pray? Why does a simple prayer for discernment seem so… inadequate?

(Am I completely off base here?)

Sometimes questions arise that we have a hard time immediately dismissing.

My dear friend has told me before how there are certain unsettling questions that she literally feels. There are issues with which she wrestles that affect her in a very real and physical way. There are questions that build a home inside of us, refusing to leave until we have satisfactorily addressed them.

This is one of them.

What am I praying for when I ask God to make something abundantly clear?

What follows is an excerpt from a course integration paper I wrote for my History & Theology of Christian Worship class this past quarter.  It is valuable if only because it recounts in a very cursory way the larger themes of the course.

We began the quarter considering Rudolf Otto’s Das Heilege—the Idea of the Holy.  We discussed the concept in conjunction with Isaiah chapter 6, and explored the notion that there is something profound about true worship.  If worship is by its nature an act that occurs before the throne of God, then two things happen.  Number one, we are overcome by a sense of unworthiness—this demonstrates the penitent nature of worship.  But that is only half of the story.  Secondly, we are overcome by the reality that, as in Isaiah 6, God demonstrates a desire for union.  This emphasizes the celebratory nature of worship.  Our very first class period together began with the prayer, “God, forbid that we may trifle with you in worship.” This fostered in us the beginnings of understanding that Christian worship is a sacred act, and one that must, paradoxically, be approached with both joy and mirth, and fear and trembling.

From this point, we moved forward to speak of the various languages associated with Christian worship.  From its beginning, our faith tradition has taken seriously the two associated concepts of time and space.  In Christian worship, there is a language of time that reflects the meta-narrative of the Christian story.  In Christian worship there is a language of space that understands deeply the significance of movement and location. This fostered in us the beginnings of understanding that Christian worship is something that takes place in the present situations in which we find ourselves.

As we ventured onward through the quarter, we explored the nature of early Christian practice during the apostolic period and we noted the parallel forms of Christian communication; of spoken word and acted sign.  This fostered in us the beginnings of understanding that Christian worship is something both said and done.

Our next significant block of time was spent discussing sacramentality and the idea that the ordinary is capable of acting as a conduit of the extraordinary.  We recalled the poetry of G. Manly Hopkins, and discussed the sheer multiplicity of creation and the diversity of God.  We came to a point of hope that we develop a vision to be transformed such that everything we see, we see as a conduit of the divine.   We discussed that in addition to the seven or two official sacraments, there are hundreds more, waiting to be discovered, all around us every day. This fostered in us the beginnings of understanding that Christian worship is something that can happen all day, every day, in all things and through all things.

We next asked the question, “How do you stage manage worship such that God gets a voice?”  Perhaps the notion of managing worship borders on crass and offensive to some, but the point is worth considering.  How, as worship leaders, do we negotiate the responsibility of leading God’s people in worship while recognizing that in worship, we are only able to control half of what happens?  It was stated in class, “the temptation as liturgists is to contrive worship that touches people’s souls.”  This is manipulation and clever stage management.  This is almost always a way to guarantee false worship—to evoke deep emotion, but not deep disposition. This fostered in us the beginnings of understanding that Christian worship involves a mysterious dialogue between Divine and human ethos.

Hope as basis for the eschatological character of worship was our next topic.  The idea was explored that it is a future-orientation of the Christian life and Christian worship that gives it great significance.  Worship in a very real and tangible way is full of eschatological yearning—an epiklesis, or calling down of God’s glory.  We acknowledged the parallel dangers of despair and presumption; the first indicating a lack of hope and the second indicating a belief that the future corresponds to our personal wishes. This fostered in us the beginnings of understanding that Christian worship is something that draws us out of and beyond our own selfhood.

We then began to explore in more depth the writings of Alexander Schmemann and Sally Morgenthaler, and we discussed the idea that in worship, gratitude is formed and expressed through ritual actions performed in a community.  We also explored Schmemann’s idea that original sin is a failure to see things the way they are.  From this, it is possible to contend that ministry is helping people see what is plain as a pikestaff. This fostered in us the beginnings of understanding that Christian worship is about catechesis.

In addition to classroom learning, we took the opportunity to visit several churches of different Christian traditions.  In worshipping with those who come from different backgrounds and traditions, we began to discover that there is no “right” way to worship.  Moreover, there is a wealth of tradition and practice that constitutes the rich tapestry of Christian worship. This fostered in us the beginnings of understanding that Christian worship is something that extends far beyond our own experience and spheres of knowledge.

When considering the question of change in one’s understanding of Christian worship, it is hard to determine where even to begin.  There is no question that matters such as those presented above prove formative and foundational to one’s experience of Christian worship.  There is no way to confront such understandings and not come away changed in a significant way.

With these points tendered, there are several themes that seem quite pronounced in this author’s recollective memory.  

First, we spoke at great length about sacramentality.  The notion that there are opportunities all around us, every day, to encounter the Holy is one that should prove awesome, in a literal sense, to any Christian.  A worship planner would do well to consider the fact that much of common sacramentality is a matter of having eyes to see and ears to hear what is happening all around us, every day.

Secondly, we would do well to consider seriously the prayer that began the quarter.  “God, forbid that we may trifle with you in worship.”  It seems evident that in contemporary Christianity in the United States, we are becoming increasingly good at the second of two points—that of celebration.  What we seem to have ever-increasing difficulty in doing is that act which precedes celebration—penetence.  There is something about falling awestruck before the throne and understanding the true nature of fear and trembling that would prove valuable to recapture in our worship.

By simply enrolling in a course on the history and theology of Christian worship, our very disposition as class members is generally more inclined toward theological consideration of the topic.  We are, as a group, probably much more likely to have already thought deeply about the nature of Christian worship.  Whether we are the coordinator of a campus ministry, a member of a touring music ministry, a volunteer or staff member of our local congregation, we are a peculiar group.  Considering this, when we ask ourselves “what has changed?” we might not immediately be able to compile a laundry list of revelations.  If, however, we begin to ask “What has been affirmed?”, we might very well find that the last ten weeks were among the most fruitful of our college career. 

Christian worship is by its nature mysterious and awesome, and beyond explicit definition.  But Christian worship is also something familiar, something knowable, and, God willing, something that we may hope, over time, will become increasingly natural in the most literal sense of the statement.