Holy Things

Lori Hetteen, used with permission

“And that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength. Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak. We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid.” ~ Audre Lorde

This morning, I saw a hand-lettered post by a poet and artist named Lori Hetteen in Minneapolis. It read, "You are the only one I'd want to sit next to on a tiny couch." Here is a holy thing: Sitting on my tiny couch next to my not-so-tiny daughter, who, at 19, is in fact an inch or so taller than me. She is showing me slides from a presentation she and two other students are making about a couple of essays by Audre Lorde, including "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action," which I just reread in my old beat-up copy of "Sister Outsider."  

The essay was first a speech in 1977, when I was three years old, and the book was published in 1984, the year I entered sixth grade, the year of Purple Rain and Like a Virgin, the year I played the lead in Cinderella and the year silence began to take root in me in ways I tried to ignore. But just as Lorde's daughter suggested, "if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don't speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside." How wise and how true. That is exactly how it happened.

And really, how holy a thing it is to be sitting here, this book and my daughter both next to me. We have set a timer since we have both been horribly distractible all afternoon, and even after I wrote that sentence, I had to take the dog outside to poop and then a package arrived and now she is trying on a pair of shorts and I've all but given up on writing about holy things. But isn't that the point, really? That these are the holy things, the dog now having pooped and eaten dinner sniffing at the young woman's legs as if to verify that it's really her, and me sitting here doing what I've done her whole life, which is watch and document and record and for what—some desire not to miss it, some hope of seeing what's right in front of me and realizing that the "holy" is not some rarified, precious thing but rather the precious thing that I could completely overlook because it seems so utterly ordinary.

I bounce over to news and headlines and social media posts, tweets and memes and commentaries and opinion pieces and live footage and photographs of families sleeping in subways fearing the worst and those who rightfully name that their tragedies aren't deemed, well, quite as tragic, and the way everything becomes a competition and the clamor and noise we call deafening is to some degree a choice because there are no bombs exploding in my town, there is nothing actually deafening since I can choose how much news to take in, and isn't that just the ultimate luxury in this wired world? 

Do any of us live in peace when so much of the world is at war? And what of the wars that occur every day inside our own borders, against our own bodies? What happens when we ignore these, caring only about what affects us personally? And what of those who dare to name these conflicts that contradict the lovely myths about our democracy? Those voices are holy, and, as Lorde wrote, they are not waiting for “the final luxury of fearlessness” to speak out, write, and fight back. 

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s words have been making the rounds again: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly." And when I think about that in relation to Lorde's words, what occurs to me is that it's how we talk and write about that network, it's how we choose to see the whole garment or only our small corner of the patchwork, that matters most. 

What is holy? That my daughter is now making herself some fried eggs, one of the foods she most misses living in the dorms, and that later she will drive her car back to her dorm and I will not wonder if her campus will be bombed. But I will worry about her walking from her car in the dark and when fear overcomes me because of the perils my–our–children face, all perils born of patriarchy and misogyny and hegemony, I will follow that deceptively simple instruction: Breathe.  

And yet they are privileged in so many ways–they have not experienced racism or poverty or even antisemitism to speak of. All these scourges on the holiest things in our lives—our chances to be together in ordinary ways like this, eating fried eggs and writing and being happily distracted and taking out the dog who is now farting by my feet and talking about plans as if there will indeed be a tomorrow and a day after that. 

So, I will enjoy this sitting on the tiny couch next to my daughter until the time comes for her to leave again, and I will remember that the holy things aren't things at all, how in the end none of us takes any of this with us–not the cherished rings, not the cute new shorts, not the dog or the son or the daughter or the photos. 

Do we take the memories? Do we shed the traumas and tragedies in that moment of leaving the body? Do we bring the love with us? These things I cannot know for sure. These require something that is perhaps the holiest thing of all, which is faith in the unknown, faith that this time together matters, faith that breaking our silences is healing something we may never see the end of and creating something we may only see the very beginnings of in the world.