Spirit

I learned a lot when I went back to school to study theology in my early 40s. For starters, I found out that I was not the oldest person who wanted to know more about religion in general and, in my case, God in particular, which made me feel better for reasons I cannot explain. I also realized that there is an entire literature devoted to the Holocaust, the atrocity somehow having been overlooked by my high school and college educations in Mississippi in the 1970s and 80s. And I discovered that some people don’t think of God as male.

My sister Diana teaches high school biology in Virginia, where biology is a required subject for graduation. Early in her teaching career, Diana was challenged by parents who felt that evolution shouldn’t be taught in public school because it contradicted their religious beliefs. Several years later the battle was fought at the state level — and won — to keep evolution in text books and biology teachers safe from persecution.

First there was Sloopy. It was the 1960s, after all, and my high school-aged sisters chose the name from one of their favorite songs. He was the almost-white Labrador retriever who played with me every afternoon when I got home from elementary school. For a while Sloopy was my only friend when we moved across town and I hadn’t yet met any of the kids in our new neighborhood. He lived long and well, and when he died, my mother and my sisters and I cried for what seemed like hours. Daddy was in England at the time, staying at the Savoy Hotel.

While walking the beach in Fort Morgan, Ala., I see young women who are thin and tan. They wear bikinis and an air of self-assurance. Their long hair is pulled back in ponytails or piled on top of their heads with big plastic clips. I also see middle-aged women, like myself, who are not so thin. Our bodies are covered in sunscreen, and we wear full-coverage, one-piece swimsuits with tummy control. Hats protect our faces from harmful ultraviolet rays. But we, too, seem confident; propelled down the shoreline by beauty of another sort.

Though there have been many mothers to provide me with positive influences during my 48 years, I’ve learned the most from my own mother, Martha Lee Lyles Wilson, who was born in 1922. The only daughter of Eunice and S.T. Lyles, my mother spent her childhood surrounded by three older brothers, few material possessions, the red clay of north Mississippi, and a whole lot of love. She grew up to share all she could glean about life and loss and the grace that must surely come in between with her own three children, daughters all.

This past winter was the longest, coldest, and wettest in recent memory. Even as I write this, in mid-February, it is snowing … again.

I’m not sure exactly when food took on greater meaning for me than just what to eat. Of course, like many middle-aged women I have, for at least two decades, tried to monitor calorie counts and cholesterol percentages. So for a while now my concept of food has included good nutrition and the threat of extra pounds on my hips. But what I’m less certain of is when meals began to sustain more than my body.

Fear has taken me to some amazing places. It rode shotgun as I drove from Mississippi to Tennessee after graduate school, to take a job in a city where I knew no one. We made friends, advanced our career, and learned how to kayak.

Ask about someone’s neighborhood, and they may offer the formal name assigned by the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhoods — Richland Park, Lockeland Springs, or Bordeaux Neighbors. Others view their neighborhood as a collection of homes within walking distance with people who feed their cats when they are on vacation. Neighborhoods are often distinguished by large, dividing boulevards, important landmarks, and socio-economic differences.

Neighbors and neighborhoods are harder to define in spiritual terms.

I thought I would never forget the details of the day my mother’s first cancer diagnosis came, back in the late 1980s. But today, right now, if you ask me where I was when I heard, or what I was wearing, or what I ate for dinner that very evening, I would draw a blank. What I do remember are long, teary phone calls with my two sisters; appeals to God for grace, understanding, and (dare I ask?) healing; frantic searching of medical literature; a gazillion questions, many of which had no answers; and the resolute circling of a family’s wagons around its very life source.