for all those grandmothers and grandmothers-to-be

Every house needs a grandmother in it. —Louisa May Alcott

In a new research paper, ecologist and lead writer Zoe Muller stated that after reviewing more than 400 existing studies on giraffes, ecologists discovered that, like elephants, giraffes have complex social dynamics. Muller explains that giraffes benefit from the grandmother hypothesis: the idea that the presence of grandmothers increases a populations’ chances of survival because of the authority, knowledge, and resources they contribute to the group’s young. This matrilineal pattern can also be seen in elephants, orcas, and humans. Those who have studied the grandmother hypothesis contend that older matriarchs create a bank of generational knowledge.

According to the hypothesis, in our earliest years as humans, grandmothers helped gather food for their sons’ and daughters’ children. This made it possible for their daughters to have more children. Consequently, the strongest, most evolutionarily-fit grandmothers would have the greatest number of grandchildren who, in turn, would inherit their good genes.

Since retirement, I admit that I’ve often struggled to define my purpose beyond a lifetime of teaching and mothering. But this is good news, perhaps the best news for those who, like me, may feel a bit out-to-pasture. I question my evolutionary-fitness, but I’m giving myself the benefit of the doubt here. I can still get down on the floor to play board games and get up (albeit with some effort and the aid of nearby furniture). I can still run across the yard to fetch a ball (run might be too generous—it’s probably more like a jog, but it’s definitely more than a walk). I can still speak the language of my grandchildren (hey, I know what Tik Tok is and that mom jeans are once again fashionable!) So, I’m giving myself a pass on evolutionary-fitness, and I’m encouraging other grandmothers to do the same.

I’ve begun to contemplate the bank of generational knowledge that I could pass on to my grandchildren. I know that they like my brownies and that over time, I perfected a pretty decent slime recipe, so there’s always this. But I’ve come to see that my greatest generational gift may be more in the realm of love than knowledge.

I’d be the first person to admit that my bank of knowledge is limited at best and woefully lacking at worst. What we know changes so rapidly that few of us can keep up with this pace. But loving?

In his novel, The Guermantes Way, French novelist Marcel Proust writes:

My grandmother had a love which found in me so totally its complement, its goal, its constant lodestar, that the genius of great men, all the genius that might ever have existed from the beginning of the world, would have been less precious to my grandmother than a single one of my defects.

It goes without saying that there is much knowledge that grandmothers might gift their grandchildren, but Proust’s words get right to the best stuff: the abiding love that says you are loved—unconditionally, warts and all. This is, indeed, a constant lodestar, a gift which keeps on giving through thick and thin. This is what grandmothers are most fit for. Long after they’re not physically fit for bending and running, they’re just coming into their stride for constant, unconditional loving.

I take heart in the whole concept of the grandmother hypothesis. I’m both humbled and privileged by the role I might play in my grandchildren’s lives, a role that has much less to do with passing on good genes and so much more to do with passing on an abiding love. This is a purpose I can wholeheartedly claim.

The lilies say: Behold how we preach without words of purity. –Christina Rosetti

I just like to say it: Behold! This is a word that commands attention, calls us to reverence. It’s a word of sacred proportions, a soul-shivering word. Behold is a word that should be in everyone’s vocabuary, and it should be used more frequently.

The Lakota Sioux people understood the power of the word behold. Lakota medicine man, Black Elk, writes: The song and the drumming were like this: Behold a sacred voice is calling you; All over the sky a sacred voice is calling. Another Lakota, Chief Sitting Bull, writes: Behold, my friends, the spring is come; the earth has gladly received the embraces of the sun, and we shall soon see the results of their love! Both men use the word as a kind of invitation. Father Richard Rohr, Franciscan spiritual guide and writer, shares his insight into this invitation. He recounts how he borrowed a strategy from wilderness guide, Bill Plotkin, who suggested that we draw a symbolic line in the sand and expect things on the other side to show themselves as special, invitational, or even a kind of manifestation (Rohr, Just This, 2017). The Lakota clearly expected their world to be special, expected that the sacred would be manifested in the physical. They expected to hear a sacred voice and to see the results of the earth’s and sun’s love. Black Elk’s and Sitting Bull’s words testify to how these expectations were met, time and time again.

Behold is also a word that many associate with the Bible. In the original King James version of the Bible, behold appears a whopping 1,298 times. In today’s King James Bible, however, the word appears only 586 times; in the New Revised Standard version, it’s used 27 times, and not at all in The Message. When the angel appears to the shepherds on the night of Jesus’s birth, the proclamation Fear not! For behold, I bring you news of great joy seems so much more befitting this miracle than Don’t be afraid! I bring you good news. Some contemporary translations just don’t seem to offer the same expectation to imagine and revere. They don’t seem to have much use for beholding.

I fear that many of us may be losing–or have lost–these expectations. I suspect that we don’t wake enough to the day’s invitation to behold. Too often, our expectations are low, very low. We don’t draw a symbolic line in the sand because we can’t imagine that what’s on the other side is any different or more special than the same-old stuff that weights our days. We plow through our lives like work horses, one steady foot in front of the other. I suspect that the invitation to behold may have been drummed out of us.

I can recall working with several groups of elementary students in a creative writing workshop. We often opened our sessions with language warm-ups, and one day, I asked the students to fill-in this blank: Too many _____________ are dancing on the ______________. One of the fifth-graders responded quickly: Too many dancers are dancing on the stage. She looked up at me quickly, hoping for affirmation that she’d gotten the right answer. Contrast this response with one I received from a first grader later in the morning: Too many moons are dancing on the water. This first-grade boy was already an expert at beholding. He talked openly about how he saw this when his family was camping, how the moon just wriggled across the lake. I remember lamenting the fact that by fifth grade, the power of beholding had largely been drummed out of many students. By age 11, they were all about filling in blanks with correct answers.

I admit that I’m a much better beholder now that I’m retired. I have eyes to behold because I have time. A coneflower that’s naturalized along the edge of the timber can make my day. More days than not, I step out of bed and cross the symbolic line in the sand, expecting something special, expecting that what I experience will, as poet Christina Rosetti claims, preach without words of purity. A lone coneflower, a stand of Queen Anne’s Lace, a single word from my grandson as it floats across the yard–all are worthy of beholding. Father Rohr suggests that [b]eholding happens when we stop trying to “hold” and allow ourselves to “be held.” I like this a lot. We can–if we will allow it–be held by moments, by sounds and words, by places and things, by the manifestation of the sacred into the profane, the extraordinary into the ordinary.

In “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tinturn Abbey,” poet William Wordsworth writes that [a]ll which we behold is full of blessings. See how the trees frame a perfect opening in my daughter’s magnificent photograph above, how this leafy aperature reveals river and hills. Behold the greens, the golds and distant blues! Behold the vista beyond! In the end, to behold is to be blessed. We would do well to draw our symbolic lines in the sand and expect to be blessed.

Etty Hillesum

What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. All day long, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, not those of other things, are his history. –Mark Twain

It will always be both blessing and curse, my father said, as, minutes before bed time, I confessed the turmoil that continued to ravage my inner life as surely as acne was ravaging my adolescent face. My father was referring to my sensitivity which–even on my best days–reached hyper-levels the moment I stepped out of bed. If a single paradox could define one’s life, then my father’s insightful words would be my lifesong.

To say that I’ve lived in my head would be an understatement. I’ve lived in my head, dreamt in my head, argued and speculated in my head, grieved and celebrated in my head, died in my head. And, as my father proclaimed, this inner life blessed–and continues to bless–me in many ways. My inner life has made me wildly empathetic, so much so that I’ve often found myself wearing the lives of others–at least to the degree that one who is determinedly empathetic can. Ironically, this has often helped me to get out of my own head, to act compassionately, and to treat others as broken and beautiful beings. Paradoxically, my inner life has also cursed me with self-doubt and indecision. It’s also cursed me with the same acute pain of those with whom I’ve empathized. I’ve walked a mile in their shoes–internally, that is–and I’ve got blisters to prove it.

My journey with my own inner life brought me to another woman whose inner life was also both blessing and curse. Etty Hillesum reveals this paradox in the diaries she left with housemate Maria Tuinzing before she left the Jewish transit camp, Westerbork, for Auschwitz in 1943. In her teens and early 20s, Etty’s inner life was tumultuous, often tortured. She wrote:

I still lack a basic tune; a steady undercurrent; the inner source that feeds me keeps drying up. Worse still, I think much too much. My ideas hang on me like outsize clothes into which I still have to grow.

I think too much? Preach it, Etty. There’s something to be said about a continuous loop of thoughts (the unexamined life not being worth living and all), but the relentless presence of ideas–old and new–can be exhausting. Like Etty, when I desperately desired a basic tune, I often got a cacophony of independent notes and rhythms which was anything but a steady current.

Etty confessed that her inner life was often too complex, too indulgent. At times, it was marked with self-doubt–even self-loathing. She explained that she suffered from a bacchanalia of the spirit and lamented that she was taken in by everything she read. Someone like Dostoyevsky still shatters me, she said. Yet, at other times, her inner life was marked with the exquisite joy of experiencing the world around her. Whenever I saw a beautiful flower, what I longed to do with it was press it to my heart, or eat it all up. To be like a lily of the field, she said, would be the right way–the best way–to live. Etty Hillesum’s inner life was, indeed, a paradox.

Always, however, it was marked by her desire to know and serve God. In her diary, she wrote:

Something I have been wanting to write down for days, perhaps for weeks, but which is sort of shyness—or perhaps false shame?—has prevented me from putting into words. A desire to kneel down sometimes pulses through my body, or rather it is as if my body had been meant and made for the act of kneeling. Sometimes, in moments of deep gratitude, kneeling down becomes an overwhelming urge, head deeply bowed, hands before my face. 

It has become a gesture embedded in my body, needing to be expressed from time to time. And I remember: “The girl who could not kneel,” and the rough coconut matting in the bathroom. When I write these things down, I still feel a little ashamed, as if I were writing about the most intimate of intimate matters. Much more bashful than if I had to write about my love life. But is there indeed anything as intimate as man’s relationship to God? 

She confessed that she had been the girl who could not kneel for much of her life. A host of physical ailments, as well as sexual desires and struggles, tormented her. But in spite of these and in spite of her impending deportation to Poland, she ultimately discovered a peace that she claimed was neither indifference or helplessness in the face of suffering and evil. For in Etty's inner life, she claimed that she would be with the hungry, with the ill-treated and the dying, every day, and yet also with the jasmine and with that piece of sky beyond my window. Every day, she discovered there is room for everything in a single life. For belief in God and for a miserable end. 

In the end, Etty Hillesum’s inner life led her to the conviction that all must turn inward with sharp, humble eyes if the world was ever to recover from the current hatred. She conveyed this passionate conviction to friend and former lover, Klaas Smelik Sr.:

Klaas, all I really wanted to say is this: we have so much work to do on ourselves that we shouldn’t even be thinking of hating our so-called enemies. . . And I repeat with the same old passion, although I am gradually beginning to think that I am being tiresome, “It is the only thing we can do, Klaas, I see no alternative, each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others. And remember that every atom of hate we add to this world makes it still more inhospitable. And you, Klaas, dogged old class fighter that you have always been, dismayed and astonished at the same time, say, “But that—that is nothing but Christianity!”

That is nothing but Christianity. And that, I believe, is everthing. Turning inward, facing our own real and present demons, and destroying all we seek to destroy in others is a curse because it’s hugely painful. It’s also, perhaps, the greatest blessing because it’s hugely redemptive. As Klaas Smelik proclaimed, this attitude and subsequent act is what it means to be real Christians. That is, Christ calls us to love our enemies as ourselves, to see and love their brokenness as He would. Etty came to understand that this would only be possible if we all lived inner lives that invited this kind of self-destruction, the kind that obliterated every atom of hate.

Ultimately, the magnificence of Etty Hillesum’s inner life was birthed from and sustained with a paradox, and her life and death gave testimony to this. She could love herself and the world, yet criticize both. She could find refuge in her inner life and also find pain. She could live gloriously in the sanctuary of her neighborhood at the same time that she projected herself into the concentration camps. She could be righteously indignant and yet at peace.

Etty’s diary has had a profound impact on me. I find myself thinking about her inner struggles and marveling at her wisdom often. As I read, I couldn’t help but think that I wished I could be more like her, that we all could be more like her. As she was packed into a cattle car to be taken to Auschwitz, witnesses reported that she was singing. As I consider our present troubled world, I believe that her words have as much value–perhaps more–than they did in 1943:

Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it toward others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world.

I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world. John 16: 33