What is Saving Your Life Now?

Near the end of her 2006 memoir, Leaving Church, Barbara Brown Taylor tells the story of being invited to speak at a gathering. “Tell us what is saving your life now,” her host requested.

Brown writes, “It was such a good question that I have made a practice of asking others to answer it even as I continue to answer it myself. Salvation is so much more than many of its proponents would have us believe. In the Bible, human beings experience God’s salvation when peace ends war, when food follows famine, when health supplants sickness and freedom trumps oppression. Salvation is a word for the divine spaciousness that comes to human beings in all the tight places where their lives are at risk, regardless of how they got there or whether they know God’s name.”

The concept of divine spaciousness is one that has captivated me for years: how do we, within the tight grip of an imperfect and often-harsh world, within the cramped spaces of our imperfect and often-hurried lives, seek God’s presence?  How do we stay attentive to the divine in the most ordinary, miraculous moments of our lives? How do we seek—and possibly even work to co-create—thin places where, as the Celts spoke of, the margins between heaven and earth seems to dwindle?

In Brown’s memoir, which is about leaving parish ministry to find God, she concludes by naming specific ways salvation was showing up in her life:  “To be saved is not only to recognize an alternative to the deadliness pressing down upon us but also to be able to act upon it.”

Besides turning in her clerical collar, Brown names several things that were helping to save her life: teaching school, living in relationship with creation, observing the Sabbath, encountering God in other people, and committing to the task of being fully human. 

I vividly remember one summer when my kids were tiny and my life was filled with both chaos and joy, rambunctious play and short spurts of rest in the form of naptimes. Those summer months, when I had a break from the classroom to stay home with my young sons, I was especially drawn to idea of spacious places, an idea that shows up several times in the Psalms.  “He brought me out into a spacious place; he rescued me because he delighted in me” (Psalm 18:19).  “I called to the Lord in distress; the Lord answered me [and put me] in a spacious place” (Psalm 118:5). 

During that sliver of life, I read those verses over and over and pleaded for God to carve out spaciousness —not despite my full schedule, but in the midst of it. I prayed that when fall came around and the busyness of the school started again, somehow, I would still find a way to cling to the spaciousness of that summer. But with the season’s change, I felt squeezed. My margins in which to seek the spiritual shrunk.

Years later, I’m still captivated with this idea of seeking spaciousness. I’m still pursuing ways to purposely turn away from the deadly rush of our lives to seek and see God’s hand. And so, I decided to take Brown’s advice and ask a host of friends, what is saving your life right now? On this September day, forty days til U.S. election day, in the midst of our to-do lists and dirty laundry and tense shoulders, what ordinary things are showing up as extraordinary in our lives? 

Jack Ridl, my poetry teacher, who Jeff Munroe lovingly introduced to our readers on Monday told me, “Being 80, what’s saving my life is experiencing profound gratitude for rising into a new day filled with the mystery of all the specific goodness that has come freely over all these years, the willingness to carry grief and joy, and for everything from a sparrow to the cosmos to the choir of great good souls who have brought and bring abiding kindness.”

Another friend I’ve known since I was born told me a prayer habit is saving her. She keeps a prayer card in her van and prays on her drive to work over an ever-growing list. “It puts me at peace and empowers me to know that I am doing something, although I know that at the end of the day, I can do very little for some of the needs on my card.” 

For me? It’s often words that save me. Sometimes they come in the form of just the right book at just the right moment. Sometimes in the lyrics from a song or a text or phone call. Sometimes in something that’s said aloud: laughter in my kitchen, a story around a fire, a witty remark from one of my sons (who are no longer napping toddlers but teens who tower over me).

Another joy: in an education course I’m teaching this semester, a student has an internship in a middle school art class shared the collages of some of the young kids she’s working with. She reminded us that the word, “collage” comes from the Greek work for glue. I’ve long loved collages—the power of broken things being put back together to make something new. And so, by piecing together several of the “what-is-saving-you-right-now” responses from a host of friends, I offer you what you might think of as a collage poem of ideas. Maybe something inside of it will call to you, offer you a bit of spaciousness and salvation today.

Things that are Saving Us:

• A weekly fresh flower subscription. A bike ride with friends.
• Sunrises. Text threads. Life 360. Rotisserie chicken. 
• Wearing shoes that feel genuinely comfortable and supportive. 
• Having friends that are genuinely comfortable and supportive.  
• My dog, Hank, who saves me from despair.
• Benevolence. The belief that the universe is generous and kind. That it wants to be kind and give good things.
• The flim, UNDIVIDE US. 
• Another dog, Jax, and his daily 20-minute walk which guarantees a daily quiet 20 minutes. 
• Fraser Tea’s Morning Blend. Family dinners around the table. 
• Lectio 365 app’s Morning and Night prayers.
• Lifting weights. The strength and ability to move each day. Sweating. 
• Sleep.
• Mission House’s Family Nights Volume 2 album, especially, “Faith More Precious Than Gold.”
• Conversations with my students. 
• Conversations with my kids.
• Morning coffee, prepared just so and sipped in bed.
• Cooler fall temperatures. 
• Music by Arvo Pärt, a swim in the evening at the local Y, a new standing desk.
• Sunday football. The Detroit Lions — a few hours when the only worry is whether they’ll make the Super Bowl this year.
• Being with people.
• Taylor Swift’s “The Tortured Poet’s Department.”
• A baby’s first words.
• Al-Anon meetings. 
• Turning off the news.
• Humor.

And so I ask you, readers, what is saving your life now?

Author’s note: I was familiar Barbara Brown Taylor’s book, Leaving Church, for years, but just recently read it cover to cover with a book club. I recommend it, along with Doug Brouwer’s 2006 RJ review of it. Doug’s review ends with a wish for a memoir written by someone who had stuck it out in ministry for 40, 50, or even 60 years, which he went on to write in 2022: Chasing after Wind: A Pastor’s Life. If you haven’t read Doug’s memoir, I’d add that to your list, too.

header photo by Jude Mack on Unsplash
collage photo by Taylor Heery on Unsplash