My New Glasses

2014 is the year I mark as the beginning of a different Kirstie, one of the most important years of my life. For those new to my writing: 2014 is the year I had a massive breakdown in body and mind and checked myself into a psychiatric hospital in a dreadful state of darkness and horror and terror and sleep deprivation. I was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and OCD and given mind-saving meds and started off onto an intensive therapy program. It was the hardest year and the best year, a new beginning of a quality of life I didn't know was possible. While I was totally wrecked, the clarity I began into gain in my mind, free of the bullhorn of constant, disturbing intrusive thoughts (well, not totally free, but toned down to a much much quieter level) gave me hope. With an excellent therapist and finding a church that accepted my broken self without fear or disgust or judgement, I began to heal.

Eleven years. Eleven years of the Lord's gentle, patient, loving work in leading me out of the darkness of twisted messages both received from the outside and generated from the inside, grown into dominating monsters of living fearfully, terrified of doing things wrong, not doing enough, and imagining that I could have prevented bad things happening to myself and loved ones if I just had more faith or done more or stopped being so selfish and rescued more. I was wearing the glasses of fear.

Looking out through glasses of fear on the world is, obviously, just going to take you from one terror to the next. It's nearly impossible to read the Bible with these glasses on and not have a panic attack. You take everything as literally as possible, and somehow that feels like the safest path, but not really because it requires things like chopping your hands off and pulling your eyes out and selling all your possessions and not owning anything. Reading through fear means you are constantly condemned, over and over and over again. You lose the ability to perceive nuance and metaphor. Every sermon or well-meaning thing someone says is dissected under the microscope and leaves you worse off than ever.

Underneath it all, there was a persistent glimmer of refusal to believe all that fear was saying to me. I knew I was loved. I knew God would rescue me from this hell that I suspected was not what he wanted for me. That glimmer never left me even though it was tiny and faint and overwhelmed constantly by the intrusive visions in my brain that left me reeling and unable to sleep and heart pounding.

The past eleven years have not been easy in terms of things happening to my life and family. But how I receive these hard things into my life has changed dramatically because slowly but surely, my internal outlook on the world has changed from fear to love. 

I started writing this post this morning after writing this in my journal:

"The Lord always shepherds us toward greater freedom, peace, wholeness and rest, away from anxiety and fear and heavy loads that we drag along *because* of anxiety and fear. He accomplishes his work of healing us via love we can settle into and trust, instead of the fear that makes us sit up suddenly and race off with heart pounding to try to accomplish something for him that we think he wants so we can be safe, but that we hate doing and desperately wish we didn't have to do because deep down it doesn't feel good at all."

That excerpt is the distillation of how I function now inside. This truth is what helps me decide what I will take in to be part of myself and what I will reject. It is what helps me discern my own thoughts as trustworthy or trashcan-worthy. Not always. I am still certainly prone to the occasional embracing of fear-based thinking, but not for long. I begin to see it clearly what it is for what it is sooner. 

As you probably know, we here in the United States are in the middle of a cultural and political upheaval. The status quo has been turned upside down, to the rejoicing of some and the despair of others. As a nation we have made major shifts in deciding how we are going to respond to the hardness and despair in the world. We have determined to put on a new pair of glasses to chart the course ahead for our country. What sort of glasses those are could be described many ways depending on who is doing the describing. What is clear is that we are not all wearing the same glasses — what one side is seeing for us as a glowing golden future is being viewed as the burning darkness of hell by the other. 

There are many, many Jesuses on display at the store of America right now, and each one comes with its own pair of glasses and irrefutable instruction booklet supposedly lifted from the pages of Holy Scripture. The problem is, most of these Jesuses make me sick (especially the ones on display sold by some prominent political figures and organizations who shall not be named). They are so far removed from the Jesus I know, who attracted me to himself with his revelation of profound love filling up my soul to the brim and overflowing. A love that wants to make me whole, and more me, not less, by snipping off all the things that hold me back and restrict me and bind me in fear and anxiety. The Jesus I know is constantly taking weights off my back that I didn't even realize were there so I can leap higher for joy. The Jesus I know has given me a new pair of glasses: The glasses of love. It is these glasses that he has slowly been helping me to wear more these past eleven years more than the glasses of fear. 

Instead of being scared of people- because I might have to try to rescue them/convert them/change their minds- I see someone to love and come alongside. I want to know them, listen to them, see them, understand what makes them tick, enjoy them. I want to be a trustworthy friend that they can explore their thoughts and struggles with, without me jumping in awkwardly to make sure they know what I think God does and doesn't approve of (according to whatever my interpretation of the God of the Bible is). I want to trust that God has them in His sights and loves them profoundly and cares far more about them than I do, and hope that He uses me in some way to make his gentle, kind love more real to them. And the more I participate in this kind of relationship with others I find that they- whether they know it or not- are being used by God in *my* life. I am seeing God's love poured out on me and blessing me through people that would probably laugh at such an idea. But God speaks through them all the time! He is so kind to me, leading me to love people who turn out to have hearts secretly aligned with his ways. I find Jesus looking out all the time through the eyes of people who have supposedly rejected him and want nothing to do with him (I suspect perhaps because the most of the Jesuses they have been offered are the ones that all of us should heartily reject). 

I don't know where my winding rocky path through the wilderness of my faith will go next. Surely through more hard places, but also surely through astounding beauty and love that makes me sing, because my own dear Shepherd is the one leading me, giving me new eyes to see every day.

(Picture description at header: Silly picture of me and my black dog licking me, hand-drawn square glasses on my face with hearts on the lenses and lightening bolts coming out the sides of the frames.)

A Man Named Country

 I met a man named Country on the beach at sunset tonight

That’s what he calls himself

Maybe thirty years old

But ancient sorrow 

Was hewn into his ruddy freckled face

Giving him years and years he did not ask for

Eyes as blue as the sky

Overrun with tears

As he apologized -for nothing-

You can’t apologize for this

He said he was walking this beach 

To salute his buddies lying beneath the waves

Over there, out there, he pointed- 

A place where his heart  

Was lying blown to pieces with them.

17 of them, I think he said

Soldiers, his people,

The ones he served with day in day out

But they died,

And somehow, he lived. 

No one cares

That they give everything

They come back worth nothing,

Worth nothing, not even shit to anyone.

No one understands, no one knows what he’s seen.

I asked if I could hug him

And he said yes

I held him in the tightest hug I could

While he cried and shook

And apologized and apologized and apologized

I did not want to let him go

I wanted him to know that he is valuable, important 

Worth more than any of the stupid million things this stupid world thinks are something.

I looked at him and willed with my eyes for him to know

With all my heart crying out into the moment

I squeezed his hand and said things, I don’t even know what they were

I told him I would pray for him. I had nothing to give except wanting,

Wanting him to be well, wanting him to be loved,

Wanting him to be whole, healed

Able to leave his buddies trustingly in the hands of mercy

Mercy bigger than the ocean

Whose waves crashed around us in the sunset.

And then we parted-

Three, maybe four minutes of connection

In which I hope

The Love from the heart of all creation 

Came through me somehow

The only Love I know 

That can bring hearts back from the dead.

(This is a true story that happened tonight. Can we take care of our Vets, please?)

The High Cost of Easy: are we losing the ability—and the will—to do the hard work of real connection?

First: thanks to ChatGPT for giving me the title of this article. Thanks, ChatGPT! You’re so great, so nice, so freaking… Easy.

The natural world we are born into is just hard. Everything we need to flourish takes so much dang work. When Adam and Eve picked the fatal fruit they ushered in an era of hard, hard work, according to the biblical story of our origins and explanation of the challenging reality we face every day. Nothing would come easily- food or relationships or health or satisfaction. Weeds and thorns would abound, and provisions for our needs could only come from the sweat of our brows.

Our brilliant human minds have spent our entire existence trying to overcome this hard-ness. And I wonder, as technology makes things easier and easier- have we grown less able to put in the work to attain what really satisfies?

I’m thinking specifically right now of the internet age and the dawning of the AI era we find ourselves in, and relationships with other humans,

In a New York Times essay by Rachel Drucker, “Men, Where Have You Gone? Please Come Back.” she notices how women seem to be retaining the desire to be together in person but men are disappearing from the social world. She recounts dinners out with a noticeable lack of men and women on dates together. The women are there socializing, but where are the men? I haven’t personally spent enough time looking around at other people restaurants to be able to agree or disagree with her observations, and what I am exploring today is an idea that applies more broadly than just to the heterosexual male. Drucker formerly worked on the business side of the online pornography industry so she brings an interesting perspective that I think applies far more broadly than she explores here in the context of the heterosexual male. 

 I came to understand, in exact terms, what cues tempt the average 18-to-36-year-old cis heterosexual man. What drew him in. What kept him coming back. It wasn’t intimacy. It wasn’t mutuality. It was access to simulation — clean, fast and frictionless.

In that world, there’s no need for conversation. No effort. No curiosity. No reciprocity. No one’s feelings to consider, no vulnerability to navigate. Just a closed loop of consumption.

What struck me most wasn’t the extremity of the content; it was the emotional vacancy behind it. The drift. The way many men had quietly withdrawn from intimacy and vulnerability. Not with violence or resistance, but with indifference.   

They weren’t sitting across from someone on a Saturday night, trying to connect. They were scrolling. Dabbling. Disappearing behind firewalls, filters and curated personas. And while they disappeared, women continued to gather. To tend. To notice who wasn’t arriving — and to show up anyway.

This morning my husband was describing to me the mental shenanigans that assaulted him at 3:30 am regarding a coworker who is hard to work and communicate with. Our conversation then turned to his contemplations about AI and the future and a fascinating conversation about it that he had with a chatbot yesterday that overall left him with more concerns than he started with.

People are hard. Communicating with other people is hard. Not knowing what someone is thinking as you are conversing with them, not being able to clearly articulate what you think, feel, and want to say, conflicting viewpoints, not feeling listened to or appreciated and valued, trying to craft your words so the other person will hear it in the intended spirit- all these things are so, so exhausting. Work. And the internet/social media world is so alluring. I want to retreat where no one will bother me, scroll, make snappy comments on friends posts, read the interesting articles that catch my eye and watch the animal reels.

ChatGPT has its pitfalls and hallucinations and energy use concerns but despite those things I keep feeling myself drawn back because of the ease of answers. It’s less work than googling. I have a simple question and I want a quick answer and it’s easier than wading through a page of search results. I just saved one minute and 45 seconds, hurrah. And the age of google saved me the trouble of walking to the library or trying to think of someone I knew that might know and calling them up and asking them. And what have I saved all this time for? My screen use statistics suggest I have saved it to fritter it away… scrolling, commenting, and watching animal reels

AI chatbots have another handy advantage. They are always there, ready to talk about anything, there are no feelings involved. You can have a pretty in-depth discussion it about anything you want to know. You don’t have to consider whether it’s busy or feeling like talking right now or if the expression on its face suggests openness or hostility. It answers right away and you aren’t left wondering during a long silence if it’s just thinking or you said something that offended it. It doesn’t bother you with its tone or make you wonder if it is implying something personal with its answer.

Do you see where I am going with all this? We have just been handed a new technology on a golden platter that draws us even further down the path of temptation to withdraw from each other into an easy existence that also makes us miserable and lonely because we were made for each other. We used to have no choice. Work through your differences and work together or you will probably die because it takes more than one person to do the hard work of living and getting all you need to live. Living required doing all kinds of hard things every single day and asking for help a lot. Now we can escape most of that and I think it is likely that we are losing the skills to do those hard relational things that take years and years of  practice and maturing and tears and joy. If our kids grow up in this easy online world with no experience persevering through the work it takes to have a relationship with another human, I can’t see much dating, marriage, or raising another generation happening, right? It’s grim prospects for humanity.

I don’t have answers. I don’t know whether humans will adjust and thrive to this new world or implode into a bleak dystopia. I just know that for me it takes a daily hard pull to not spend so much time in the land of online ease whenever I have a break, where my mind and attention start dissolving and I feel my thinking skills atrophying. I have to keep thinking about these things to have any hope of being who I want to be, which is a person engaged with other people in reality, engaged with my children, showing them it’s worth it to be with other people, that doing hard things can be much more rewarding than doing easy things. 

Figuring out Lent- it’s not so bad, actually.

Picture my grandfather took from the shore in 1936- possibly of the ship coming into harbor of Bremerhaven that he was about to get on to to go back to his new home country, the USA. He had been on a visit home to see his dying mother for the last time. You can see the dark clouds of war on the horizon.

I’ve written a few pieces over at kirstiemacleod.substack.com if you’d like to check them out. I’m not sure I will be continuing to publish there, I’m awfully fond of my little writing nook over here. There are no ads, tempting reels and random posts to distract me while I’m working, and since the comments don’t work, ye trolls who don’t know me can’t leave their thoughts lying around.

It’s Sunday morning and I’m not feeling my best so I just watched church online, in my pajamas, with dogs at my side and coffee in hand, reminding me of covid shutdown days. I’m thankful that church can be streaming now for the days we can’t be there in person or for those that are homebound. 

The season of Lent has begun. Lent has always been more of a concept than a practice for me. Before we joined an Anglican Church, Lent just wasn’t a huge part of the church year- yes, it was there, but didn’t have the same kind of focus. All in all, outside of Advent, Christmas and Easter, in churches we were a part of in other places we’ve lived, there wasn’t much focus on the traditional seasons and practices of the church calendar. It’s something I’m getting used to and learning to appreciate- the annual spiraling and coming back to certain themes, and getting deeper understanding as we revisit them again and again- but each time we’ve all aged a year and are in new life circumstances. The world is in a different place. I think I feel that much more so, this year, in March 2025.

I take comfort in the fact that that as the wise writer said in Ecclesiastes, “There is nothing new under the sun.” The disasters, politics, wars, empires, plagues- humans have been through the same thing over and over and over. The human world seems to have its own cyclical calendar of seasons in the rising and falling empires and all the misery that comes in between. Why do I take comfort in this? Because it means that others have gone before us. There is also a rich cycle of humans responding by caring for each other, building community, depending on each other, bonding together and seeking justice, goodness, kindness, and love in response to darkness. And they have left riches for us to mine. We can rightly hate the evil and darkness stalking the world, and get our “revenge” on it by letting God reach deep inside of us and use these circumstances to form us into people filled with light. We can look at what our brothers and sisters left behind as waypoints to guide us on this path. 

One of these waypoints is Lent. An image that our priest used in his sermon this morning was that of us being battered, broken ships that have been through violent storms of the soul, docking our ships in Jesus’ safe harbor. 

I love this image and it puts Lent into a new light for me. The various practices of Lent- fasting, giving something up, etc- are things I have never really done much. And the whole time we’ve been going to this church, where Lent is a “thing,” I’ve been living a very hard season of loss. Losing my mom figuratively and literally. Last Lent was one of tears every single day, knowing that the long, painful journey my mom was on was coming to its end. It has felt like my life of the last seven years or so has been 24-7 Lent, as I understood it, and I certainly didn’t see how giving up chocolate or coffee or some such on top of everything else was a going to be good idea.

But this year, a new concept of Lent as a deep season of mercy is wiggling into my mind. We are not very good and stopping and paying real, sustained, reflective attention to our souls. And some of us are frankly scared to. We are scared of the feelings we are sure will bubble up. Guilt over the reminders of the ways we are not living up to who we want to be, the good we want to do but don’t (mostly for the very stupid reason that we are staring at a screen, mesmerized, zoned out by candy content that we know is rotting our brain and attention but seems to glue us to the sofa). I’m sure you have your own list of the things you know you would feel guilty about if you stopped to think about it, and then there is the welling up of shame that follows and the tendency to reach for distraction when such unpleasant feelings arrive, and bam- that’s the end of that time of self-reflection.

But what if Lent is a safe harbor for those feelings? What if there is Someone waiting to come on board, not to inspect and condemn, but to bring healing salve and restoration? Maybe Lent is about realizing and admitting that if we are honest we are broken by things we have both done on purpose and things we have just let happen, been sucked into without raising resistance even though we instinctively know it’s not good for us or others. Realizing that the evil that has happened to us has created angry, bitter places that are growing and taking over our lives. Or maybe it’s not anger, but fear, shame, or self-loathing.  

There is another reason that I personally struggle with self-examination, though, that any fellow sufferers with OCD will recognize- the tendency to examine self  with a fine-toothed comb and scrutinize my inner world with a microscope. To easily get sucked into to a cycle where I am worried I am not thinking rightly about myself, and accuse myself of letting myself off the hook too easily. I get trapped in a room with a repetitive assault of thoughts about whether something is bad or not, I don’t think it is, but OCD thinks so, and accuses me of indulging in self-justification, and we go round and round about this, and I can’t see clearly at all whether this thing really is or isn’t good for me, good or bad. I can’t get any clarity once that starts up. 

I need Jesus-examination, not self-examination.

In other words, if this ship docks in His harbor for repairs, I have to give complete control of it over to Him. I can NOT be put in charge of my own inspection. I didn’t build this ship and despite the fact that I have lived in it for 46 years I still seem to have a very poor knowledge about its inner workings and zero knowledge of boiler room engineering. All I know is I’m full of holes and problems and it’s very dark below deck and my flashlight’s batteries are so low I can barely see anything. Someone has to come in with floodlights and far superior wisdom and capabilities.

During communion one of the songs was Jesus, Strong and Kind. I’ll end with the lyrics, which say all the things I most deeply want to say about the assurance that docking in His harbor is safe. It’s going to be okay.

Verse 1
Jesus said
That if I thirst
I should come to him
No one else can satisfy
I should come to him

Verse 2
Jesus said
If I am weak
I should come to him
No one else can be my strength
I should come to him

Chorus
For the Lord is good and faithful
He will keep us day and night
We can always run to Jesus
Jesus, strong and kind

Verse 3
Jesus said
That if I fear
I should come to him
No one else can be my shield
I should come to him

Chorus
For the Lord is good and faithful
He will keep us day and night
We can always run to Jesus
Jesus, strong and kind

Verse 4
Jesus said if I am lost
He will come to me
And he showed me on that cross
He will come to me

Chorus
For the Lord is good and faithful
He will keep us day and night
We can always run to Jesus
Jesus, strong and kind

Carolina February

 

Warm sun, cold air on the face

Blue sky, scudding clouds

Wind in the pines

Swaths of sky-eyed speedwell

Vibrant tiny blue gems set in the green grass

Rows of leeks, pulled into piles

Rich earth.

Which apple branch to prune?

Craning necks, handsaws, clippers, ladders

Gnarled branches, fire blight, leaf buds, lichen.

Red-shouldered hawk cries above

Crows call from high bare branches.

Spring peepers have begun their piping,

Unaware of winter’s looming return

on Wednesday’s horizon.

January Poem

Despite all the nonsense of now

I still have joy.
Despair, anger, wanting to hide-yes.
But here I am, with joy.
A hawk is loudly hunting his breakfast 
nuthatches hop down the damp fissure
on the shady side of the the maple trunk
just outside the window.
Bright morning winter sun travels
past blue sky and bare tree limbs 
lands on aloe, cacti,
geraniums, the unfinished wildflower puzzle.
The keyboard where Bach Invention No. 1
is open and waiting
for my fingers to practice seven sixteenth notes 
four eighths, right hand, left hand, again and again.
Gentle dog snores from nestled balls of black fur 
the clacking of keys, furrowed brow, hand stroking beard- how lucky I am that my husband is working from home, saying, “you can have the last cup”
of coffee in the french press.

Learning to be 46, interrupted by a titmouse

Upside-down titmouse says “hi!”

I am 46. That feels very weird. But I can't dispute it and I don't really want to. Maybe when I am 80 I will look back at this post and think "what an innocent young chicken I was then... and I probably am. But I feel changed in my bones, these last few years. They have been hard, sad, joyful, full of life and death years. My roots are growing deeper, searching for the streams deep underground to sustain me. I am leaning in instead of running away. I am more whole, finding pieces of myself back on the old paths where I tried to discard them in frustration and self-disgust and fury, parts of myself I didn't want and hurled into the woods hoping the passage of time would cover them with leaves and debris until they were just gone. No. as soon as I went looking, there they were, waiting for me, to be picked up and held tenderly. They are mine, and I shall learn to treasure these rejected pieces of me and let them grow in to my wholeness.

Today I woke up and didn't want to feel the way I felt. I wanted to feel happier and began a mental self-motivating routine when I stopped- and let myself be. It's okay for me to feel this non-happy feeling. If Jesus appeared in front of me the first thing I would do was cry, I think. Cry for hours, days, weeks. He is like the mom who comes to pick up the child from daycare who held it in all day and looked fine on the outside and completely falls apart with mom, who is safe. Yes, I would cry and cry and cry until all the crying was done, and then- "I will every tear from your eyes. We will do it together. One by one until they are all dry." 

I walk with my father and let him cry. Impulses to try to ward off the tears jump through my nervous system and I take a deep breath and remind myself there is no need to do that. It is okay to just let him feel what he feels until he doesn't need to feel that thing anymore. Just let myself be who I am- and allow him to be who he is, in this moment, right now. We are walking in strange, uncharted territory, this place where my mom no longer walks beside us, where she will not come. We can only go toward her, but each day and hour is closer when we will take the same path we saw her take with joy on her face. I think about that moment, the second time in my life I saw someone see that door into heavenly places open. The expression of pure delight, looking beyond this world, to a place our hearts ache to be when we catch the smell of it on the wind. 

I know that taking a walk with my father is a thing I will only be able to do for so long. That is a strange place to be. Existing in this in between, turned-upside down place of grief and joy that I know is only temporary, but a temporary that could last until tonight or a decade from now. 

I constantly have to allow myself to exist here and now, in this season where everything is changing and unfamiliar. The role I have held for the last 19+ years as a mother and adult daughter is changing. I am on a train where the scenery outside is transitioning to something very different and it makes me nervous. I find myself scanning the horizon of my acquaintances for older women who have been here already and might help orient me. Hah! A tufted titmouse interrupts the flow here by landing above my living room window and looking in at me upside down, this way and that. Then he flies around the corner to the other window and sits on the back of a deck chair and looks in from that angle. What is this place where the humans and dog beasts are gathered? He zips away and then lands again on an overhanging branch with a seed to eat while he observes our ways. I’d probably feel a lot better if I stopped sitting here scrunched up drinking coffee and went outside into the crisp air and observed his world for a while, briskly exerting myself in the process. In other words, a walk. Good day, sirs and mesdames, I must be off.