Sermon given by Clare Fortune-Lad, February 12, 2023.
Early in the afternoon this past New Years Eve, I was standing at our gate at DCA National Airport, feeling sorry for myself. Couldn’t just one thing go as planned this whole freaking year? My three-year-old was asleep in what looked like a massive pile of lovies, sippee cups, and exhaustion, recovering from a night of frequent vomiting in a small Air BNB. My one year-old was strapped to my chest in a baby carrier, resisting the balance I was trying to strike between bouncing him enough to get him to sleep, but not so much that he threw up yet again. As I rocked and paced and made white noise sounds with my mouth, I noticed that his eyes were still wide open. While I was desperate with my scarcity thinking, all he seemed to be seeing was abundance.
“Mom!” he might have exclaimed, “Have you seen this place?! The people just keep on walking and walking and walking by and there’s screens everywhere, really bright big ones, and they have pictures and writing and I can’t believe we’ve never even been here before!”
Much of that travel day was a blur. I wandered so far in my attempts to get R to sleep that I even ended up in the sparse and lovely airport chapel at the end of an uninviting hallway full of storage closets. But little R was still wide awake, taking it all in, so we found our way back to our gate to try one last mommy trick - the lullaby. Now, I know I’m not alone in this, but when I’m tired, it’s really hard for me to recall details. So as I stood there, trying to think of a really sleepy song to sing in that crowded public space, all that came to me was that strange old love song: “Daisy/daisy/give me your answer doo/I’m half crazy all for the love of you/It won’t be a stylish marriage/ I can’t afford a carriage…
My thoughts interrupted me: “What was the deal with that song, anyway?” I hoped the rest of my fellow Bostonians were as absorbed in their phones as they appeared to be. A little while later, with our youngest finally asleep on daddy’s chest, I caught the eye of a grandmotherly figure several seats away and we smiled at each other, the kind of smile that was able to penetrate both of our N95 masks.
She’s remembering, I thought. She recognizes the look in my eyes, and knows exactly the kind of night we had. She misses it, and I fully acknowledge that I will someday miss it too. But, man do I envy her and the novel in her hand with my entire soul, too.
After a blessedly quiet hour, it was time to board. We gathered all of our many containers of gear, even sleepy B was proud to carry a bit of the load in his red monkey backpack. We crossed the jet bridge and found our seats, then started chatting with the very friendly young woman squashed right up against us in our row. And just as I took a breath and shut the overhead compartment door, my smiley N95 friend from earlier walked by towards her seat further down the plane and said, “I like your singing. I can tell it’s really helpful to your kids.”
Ah, I thought later, so she was thinking about abundance, too. While I had stood there second guessing my voice, and my lyrics, and the noises my child wouldn’t stop making, she was there seeing the fullness of our family and the devotion I inherited from all the other people who sang that song to their kids, and to their kids, until someone sang it to Kyle’s mom, and then she sang it to him, and here we were in this season of our life singing a song about an unstylish marriage to our children for all of Washington DC to hear.
***
Obscure songs had kind of been a theme that week. We were visiting my brother, sister-in-law, and two nieces, A and S, both under the age of three. They are fearless and delightful, and I still can’t believe I get to be their auntie.
I get all laden with scarcity sometimes, though, when I think about how I only have one sibling, and he lives so far away, and how sometimes it feels like his kids barely remember me. But when we got to their house this Christmas, and we pumped up the firepit for sunset s’mores, I knew if I just focused I could remember one of the passwords to 2 and a half year-old A’s heart. I tried singing “Skinamarink a dink a dink” which I knew my parents sang to her whenever they got the chance, and it did seem to subtly communicate that I might be of the same species as her beloved Bubbe. We kept on rearranging the play kitchen peas, and the play kitchen hotdogs, and then I sang a song my mom had written for A during the long blurry days after baby sister S was born, “Walking walking we are walking down the street/ walking walking, being together is such a treat.” And a flip switched. Yes, auntie, her eyes seemed to say, I see now that you are my flesh and blood, and later tonight when someone takes a picture of us, we will look like twins. Soon she was all snuggled up in my lap, eating the first s’more she’d ever tasted, answering every question I asked with a resounding “yaah!” and suddenly the abundance was infinite again. The warm December afternoon, my brother pushing my kids on his swing set, my dad capturing everything on camera, every single bit of it.
***
My favorite way to read a book is to have the author themselves narrate it via audiobook, and that's how I heard Anita Moorjani’s “Sensitive is the New Strong” this fall. She got me thinking a lot more about scarcity and abundance, and it first, it was tempting for me to think, oh, yes, I totally want to learn to see abundance at every turn in my life…but sometimes the scarcity just bears down so hard, right? We don’t have enough time, we don’t have enough help, we don’t have enough energy, we don’t have enough democracy, it’s all just so very obviously not enough. There is nothing shameful about feeling this way, we’ve been rigorously trained into scarcity mindsets by capitalism. Not enough time before the sale ends? No problem, just open your email at the next stoplight and order something you don’t need before it sells out. Don’t recognize the person in the mirror? Spend every spare moment working to make your body smaller and younger in an uphill battle that somehow everyone around you is attempting, as well.
There was a point this fall where I discovered that on top of other reasons to be tired, the scarcity mindset itself was exhausting me, too. I tried to stop, and look around and find little gifts in the hard days, however small or sad they might have felt next to what I perceived should have been. When we find these gifts, we can and must accept them, imagining bathing in them like a hot bath with epsom salts…even if we’re only in that steamy bliss for a few minutes before starting to worry about inflation, rising energy costs, climate change, the grocery list, tomorrow’s schedule…back to the scarcity default.
Last year was a hard year for our family. I eventually started just operating in crisis mode, because sometimes you do just have to keep playing the whack-a-mole arcade game to get through the day. Oh now that popped up, and look, another one, yup, I got this. One day at a time, tunnel vision. But after months of that, I had to look up one day and remember that it doesn’t have to be a binary. Two things can be true at the same time. This is really really hard, AND, I have everything I’ve ever wanted.
It felt like I spent my twenties counting down the years until my life was set up in just the right way to be a mom. I had this picture of how it was going to be and I prepared my life like a nursery for years until it felt like there was nothing more to do than just have the babies already. And now here I am, and sometimes I look at my children and think, “Are you real?” while other times it’s a lot more like “Is this seriously for real?”
Sometimes there really isn’t enough, our loved ones really aren’t with us, the toy train is so broken that it’s just never going to be able to be fixed. It would be saccharin not to accept scarcity where it can’t be denied. But I like that Universalism reminds us that none of us is beyond redemption. And lately I’ve been wondering if that might also mean that none of our situations are so far gone that we can’t sometimes find glimmers of abundance in them, too.
***
Lately, one thing I have been trying to lug over this rickety bridge from scarcity to abundance is my memory. One recent morning, it took me almost an entire minute to recall the term “bulletin board.” And that kind of thing can put me in such a desperate place some days. I think: “I’m not sleeping enough, I’m too young to be forgetting this much, what is wrong with me, I’ve gotta stop multitasking, what if one of these times I forget something so terrible”…but instead, now, I’m just trying to stop. My focus, instead can turn to the abundance of the evolutionary wisdom coursing through my veins. I read a study once that suggested maybe I’m forgetting the word “bulletin board” because my brain is trying to get me to forget childbirth & newborn hood so that I produce even more offspring, and my genes can have a better shot at going on and on through time. And maybe I can just see forgetting as that, an ancient, innocent-enough ploy from my cavewoman great grandmas who are somewhere up in the stars admiring my excellent taste in lullabies.
I think of those great great great grandmas and the songs they sang to their kids and the incomprehensibly abundant number of songs in this world. I think of a song my niece A picked up at a library story hour in a language no one in her family could identify for weeks. But then, in a miraculous feat of abundance, her Au Pair, Andrea, found a video of the song being sung in the aboriginal dialect Yorta Yorta [“yerta yerta”], spoken by only about 150 people still alive on this planet today.
2023 is abundant. And, it is so scarce. Both things can be true.
***
One final story for you today, about last summer, when I was in the throes of a physically and emotionally demanding final trimester before baby R arrived. I was driving through some remote Metrowest town like Groton or Pepperell. I passed by a ramshackle church that I assumed was quite theologically different from ours, probably because of an abundance of crosses on the building. It had one of those magnetic signs that changes every season or so, and I almost didn’t want to read it because Trump 2024 flags were everywhere out there and I was just in one months-long bad awful mood. But then, of course, I read it. Or maybe those plain black capital letters read me. The sign said, “GOD LOVES YOU TO THE MOON AND BACK.” I immediately burst into tears.
God loves you to the moon and back. That one’s pretty easy to forget, right? However you understand the spirit of love and mystery that some people call God, it’s true. There is enough love in this universe for each of us to let it wrap itself around and around and around our shoulders like a handmade blanket that our ancestors wove out of celestial yarn, all of our hardest days, all the things we can’t remember, and every obscure and strange and handwritten lullaby one person could ever recall. Hold tight to that blanket, friends. Our lives are scarce, and they are abundant. It doesn’t serve anyone, not one single person, when we forget that though we are broken, we are also whole, and that can be enough.
May it be so, and blessed be.