The Work of Withness

The way God chooses to put the world back together, and what it means for you and me

There is so much of the world I do not understand.

That’s the thought pulsing in my mind today. There are so many experiences foreign to me.

I’m halfway through My Name is Asher Lev and feeling as though my mind, my body, has new colors and dimensions with which to see. Borrowing, for a few hours, the eyes of a young Hasidic Jewish artist and realizing that how we understand the world, what matters, where we fit—it’s different. There is some sameness. But the view, the perspective, is mostly foreign.

It’s why I read, of course. It takes more effort to read people outside the stream within which I have been raised—beyond the stories known to me, without familiar assumptions scaffolding the words. Yes, it takes more effort to read unfamiliar stories. It takes more effort still to come to know the people living such stories.

It returns me, differently, to what I thought I’d write about today. To that word I postulated might be one of God’s favorites. The word with. 

I was going to make an argument that the whole Gospel is really about togetherness. To trace through the scriptures the way The Story is all about a Creator desiring to be with his creation, making a way over and over again to come to us, restoring us to one another, binding up division because his vision is of a world in harmony, our differences drawing out the beautiful contrasts in one another.

But the words are taking me elsewhere now. They have given me a new task. I am wrestling with a single question: What prevents us from being with?

Why do we struggle to practice that way of being that is, perhaps, the most important, the practice that is the evidence of the New Kingdom breaking through? Why is it so hard to be here, now, to be with others, to be with God?

If withness is so good, then why is it so hard?

Here’s where I know to begin.

Bearing The Present

I miss it if I’m not looking for it. The slight vagueness around the edges of my attention. The way my eyes will unfocus, or become preoccupied with some corner of the room or play of the light. Still listening, scanning, reading the shifting dynamics in the environment around me. But myself, a bit removed, a bit outside. Seeing and hearing, but participating only at need. My own heart, quieter, almost beyond my own reach. I am there, but not there.

Call it what you wish. It’s my body’s way of managing what I do not want to bear. We all have our methods. Screens, gossip, food, substances of all stripes, pleasure—our manifold preventatives for having to be truly with ourselves in this moment.

Why?

One reply is simple. To be with ourselves means to be with our present pain. To tolerate the awkwardness of that interaction, the poor opinion of me that person might hold (even fleetingly), the sense of loneliness I feel in the presence of people to whom I want to belong. To tolerate my own mental chatter, the incessant stream of impulses and insights from a mind and body echoing back to me its formation.

Each moment reminds me (if I dare listen) that present pain is always tied up in history—the returning of that sense of helplessness, unwantedness, vulnerability, and unmet desire littering my early existence in ways remembered and forgotten, the crushing childlike knowing that I am very small and fragile in a world full of both wonder and terror.

We experience no moment as if for the first time. In every present, we are remembering the past. And our pasts, our lives, and our hearts, are forged in large part by fear and pain. To live within the present is so rarely to taste unmixed good. To savor the sweetness, we must partake in the bitterness. And that task can prove difficult.

If I didn’t loathe it, I would quip about the phrase “feeling our feelings” right about now.

Usually, we find ourselves instead opting out of the present. We try to play games with our grief and longing—“keep away,” hide and seek, hot potato, and freeze tag topping the list. The issue, of course, is that evasion proves unfruitful. Hiding from our hearts is a fool’s errand that harms ourselves and others. The only way out is through.

I’m thinking again of the man sweating blood in a garden and pleading with his Father for his life. He did not try to avoid the reality of his own heart. 

Of course, there’s something harder about the present. Something worse. Acknowledging how we were harmed, the ways we have felt unseen, unknown, unwanted, and unaccepted, all these ache. But the present is also where we are confronted with the knowledge that we perpetuate that harm, creating in others those same experiences of being othered and unloved that have so wounded us.

And in a cruel twist, we are most likely to repeat the harm that we hate most of all, and to inflict it on the people we love most of all. What are we to do with that?

I find myself adopting creative means of acknowledgment that also, somehow, deflect—playing the victim, martyr, or self-effacing penitent. Pushing away the shame that threatens to consume me when I take in, without looking away, the pain I have inflicted on another, even without intention and in ignorance. I do not want to be bad. I do not want to be part of the problem.

I find it difficult to be with myself when I am confronted by the reality of the pain I perpetrate in the world. And, of course, I find it difficult to be with the other person, too.

Unfastening Fig Leaves

I’ve written before about my struggle to be seen. It’s a struggle as old as the garden. To allow another to behold your naked soul, to trace the contours of the pain you bear and the wounds inflicted upon you by your own sin, proves nearly intolerable to me.

And to be shown by another: “Here, exactly here, is where you have wounded me. This is what it felt like. This is what it cost me.” That is its own kind of suffering. An essential kind of suffering for the work of intimacy. Because only when we ache for the damage we have done can the healing begin.

Shame is not held only individually, though. It is held by communities. Safe-guarded. I cannot be part of the problem if we are not part of the problem. The problem exists as a thing separate from me. Out there. I need not bear the pain of the wound inflicted by us on another.

I have a Kurdish friend who I now see only rarely but regard with much affection. She is generous and hospitable, curious with a keen eye for beauty, gentle with children and strong of spirit. We found our way into friendship through shared work and a shared love for books and words. Yet I find myself, at times, fumbling in her presence. All the more, of late.

Weeks ago, ICE operatives roamed the streets of Nashville, exercising power without decency. Then, bombs were dropped in Iran. Her family is not Iranian; they are Iraqi. But to most people who look like me, they are the same. And her headscarf makes her an easy target for any anti-Arab sentiment looking to find an outlet.

So when I sat with her, her husband, and her baby boy—a smiley, friendly, happy boy who reached so willingly for my hand—I felt uncomfortable. Anxious. Some part of me wanting to say, I am not like them. Some part of me knowing that the worlds she and I lived in, as we sat side by side, were completely different. That the world into which she brought her son was more fraught, more layered, more complex.

When we stand before an individual we have harmed, it is gutting. But there is often a degree of clarity and a path to resolution. When we stand before someone knowing: My people have harmed your people. The justified fear you feel as you move through the world finds its origin in people like me. In ways I do not understand, part of your pain lives with me. That is messy. It is confusing. It is painful.

Easier, then, to stay in our lanes. Easier to read C.S. Lewis, Wendell Berry, and Plato. Easier to remember the history of my country as told by Jefferson and Hamilton. Easier to close myself off to the reality I wish not to bear, to allow my ignorance to blunt the edges of my vision, the slight vagueness to separate me from what is happening around me. Easier to pretend.

Easier, but not better. Because remember, there is sweetness alongside the bitterness.

All the Beauty We Do Not See

We all see so much of the world, and yet so little of it. Were you and I to sit across the table, and I were to listen intently as you spoke of all that you had seen and felt and known, I could listen for a lifetime and still not know the world the way you do. There is a universe within each of us that only God can fathom.

And yet, we see so narrowly. My Kurdish friend, in a single moment on a sniffly, sick morning, taught me more about hospitality than any Southern porch or Sunday school with a bag of tea and box of Kurdish salts, a gift for the playful but sad-eyed new teacher who she had really only just met. She saw me, still a stranger, and served me because I was in need. That was all.

She sowed in me a seed of humility alongside the seed of friendship.

As our friendship would grow, she would lend me books that made me weep. She would show me pictures of beautiful cities across the world she’d visited—almost none of them hitherto places I would have chosen—captured by her photographer’s eye in both their ordinary and magnificent glory. She would show me videos of her wedding, of the feast and the dancing, and I would ache to join in, though I would have understood none of the rituals and my feet would have fumbled as I attempted to follow the steps. There was so much I hadn’t tasted, insulated within the ways of my world.

Then there is my Lithuanian friend, who invited me to dinner shortly after we met out walking the greenway. She pulled out precious preserved apples, homemade crackers, and remnants of a home to which she would likely never return while she recalled growing up in the wake of Soviet occupation and wrestled through how indifferent her American neighbors now seemed to the plights of immigrants. Did they not know? Did they not care? Shame ate at my heart, reminding me of all I had left undone as I dined on the treasured delicacies of someone I had only just met.

As the night unfolded, I listened to her tell of the ingenuity of her uncle, providing for his family and community creatively under Soviet oppression. I listened to her struggle to find the right English words to express the taste and texture of the fruit she remembers from her childhood as she lamented the produce she found now on grocery store shelves. I watched the fierceness with which she fought to provide for her daughter as a single mom and the practicality with which she counseled her daughter about the future. And even as I witnessed the imperfection and pain of her path, I saw that it held beauty mine was missing.

It is not hard to stay in my lane. To rub shoulders only with those who share my assumptions, my food and literary preferences, my level of education, my experiences. There is beauty here. But there is beauty I miss, too.

We miss out on all of it when our lives keep us proximate only to places that seem safe to us. Perhaps that is why Jesus does not call us to a safe Gospel.

Building a Bigger Table

It was once pointed out to me that in most of the Gospels, Jesus is either on his way from or to a meal. He loved to break bread together. He kept company with all kinds of people. Those with money and those without. Those who were scrupulously clean and those who hadn’t bathed in years (demon possession makes personal upkeep difficult, I’d imagine). Jewish people, Samaritan people, and Gentile people, too.

He spent his days being with lots of types of people. And then he instructed his followers to do the same. To be present to the people around them. The church was to be a place with a broad invitation and a deep belonging.

How are people who experience every present through the lens of the past, who are saddled with generations of infighting and intergenerational harm, to learn to trust one another?

His instruction is twofold. First, we are to love one another in simple, practical ways. His grand plan to put the world back together again includes ordinary love across bounds we once wouldn’t have dared to cross. It’s tea and salts for the sick, meals for the new parents, rides to the airport, and watching your kids as though they were my own. It’s sharing recipes and sharing meals.

In fact, to power this ordinary, extraordinary love, he gives us a table. He gives us a meal. We are to come and eat with him, and with one another.

I do love the word Euchrist. But I might love the other word for that table even more. Communion. Something deeper than belonging. When we commune, we share in the same together. We share in the same beauty. The same longing. The same pain. The same present.

Friday, I communed with dear friends. We sat on their porch amid the forest in a luxurious state of unhurriedness and talked for five and a half hours, munching periodically on homemade banana bread and fresh goat’s milk. Their lives in some ways bore much resemblance to mine (we opened with a Wendell Berry poem, after all)—but in others, were worlds away from what I’d known.

Their history is one of home-building and child-rearing, offering sanctuary to children in need, practicing carpentry, teaching, sewing, painting, and art of all kinds. Their home is robed in a forest echoing with birdsong and guinea calls atop a hill reached by an unpaved road crossing a creek that floods when the rains come long and hard. The friends I’d shared a pew with now shared stories of old wounds and triumphs unknown to me, recalling communities fraught with pain yet held and healed by grace. 

That was the moment I knew I had to write of this gift of togetherness. The way we all long to be with one another, without pretense or performance, without fear or distraction, without things to do or places to be. The glory of the New Kingdom breaking in.

And then, today reminded me that the same communion perhaps only deepens in meaning when we share it across lines we once would not have crossed. When unlikely worlds collide. When unlikely friendships are made. When we hold open the possibility that God is present in spaces and people where we had not yet learned to look for him. When humility turns us into students and companions and we entertain the possibility that the ground beneath us may be less certain than we’d hoped.

I’m more convinced day by day that the story of the whole world is about that kind of being together. It’s a costly story. It costs me my comfort, my sense of confidence in how I believe the world works. It costs me my ignorance of the suffering around me, the suffering that I can choose not to see in a way that others cannot. It costs me the acknowledgment that sometimes, their suffering has more to do with me than I realize.

It once cost a Jewish peasant rabbi his life—at least temporarily.

But Jesus seemed to think that the cost was worth it. That the fruit was worth the planting, waiting, and pruning. That a heart that loves and hurts is always better than a heart protected and numb. That difference, together, is better than sameness. He seemed to think that all the work of withness was nothing compared to the joy it promised.

Because I’ve never known him to be wrong yet, I find myself inclined to believe him.

Do you?