Tag Archives: All Saints Day

All Saints, FFTs, and Being a Nephesh

Restart, Uncategorized, , , , ,

I’ve been settling into a new ministry position for the past two months: slowly learning all the names, the systems, the already existing ministries associated with my role (minister of missions), figuring out what is and isn’t working, introducing myself over and over and over to the neighbors and community organizations we partner with…and generally discovering something new each day. 

I am truly loving getting to connect with our neighbors and partner with our loving, missional congregation as we seek to love and serve our community. Dozens of holy moments light up each day. 

And, whew…I am worn slam out. 

Brené Brown’s work around “FFTs” or “freaky first times” (that’s the non-spicy translation) helps me stay in touch with how much work, time, and energy this stage of anything truly is.1 If it’s my FFT doing something, then of course I’m going to be clueless about how to make it happen, anxious because of that cluelessness, and learning—often the hard way– and adapting every second of the experience. 

No wonder I am exhausted when I get home! No wonder I am having trouble remembering all the things! No wonder my days off are less fruitful in dealing with “everything else that has to happen to make life work.”

Mom, I had to buy some extra textbooks I wasn’t expecting so can you reimburse me from my 529? Mom, I need to get my sports physical by Thursday so I can try out for basketball. And (from our financial planner), Alicia, please fill out these forms detailing what your family spends annually in these 672 (slight exaggeration) categories. 

But in addition to the FFTs, I am experiencing something else significant: embodied grief and the Anniversary Syndrome.   

The older I get and the longer I serve in ministry, the more I experience the ancient Hebrew understanding that we don’t just have a body, we are a body. The Hebrew word nephesh, sometimes translated as “soul,”  has a rich, layered meaning. Nephesh incorporates soul in its meaning, but not as a counter-reality to body, as Greek thought would later use the word. In ancient Hebrew thought, our soul-mind-body are intimately, wonderfully connected–not disconnected, opposite realities. 

Nephesh means “that which breathes,” “a living being,” “a creature.2 The word is connected to breath, the breath of God that gave the first nephesh life. The breath that keeps us alive, physically and spiritually. 

When I am anxious, rushed too much, task-overwhelmed, etc., my breathing gets short and shallow. It’s my most reliable sign that my nervous system is “activated,” as somatic therapy describes, and starting to function in survival mode. When I notice the short, shallow breathing, my most reliable calming response is to concentrate on slow, deep, deliberate breaths. 

On Monday, I’d just finished leading a particularly task-heavy, congregation-wide community ministry, an amazing time of connection and loving our neighbors.  It was an absolute joy! And…waiting on my desk was everything I had set aside to get ready for that ministry. Then, someone needed emergency financial help and I needed to make that check happen. But as the next few days revealed, I didn’t know our system quite well enough and got myself tangled up. 

I knew I needed to breathe deep and slow.  So I signed up for an online All Saints Day gathering set for Wednesday at 1:00 pm. I needed that time. 

But I needed that time not just because I was task-and-FFT-tired.

November has always been hard for me with the loss of daylight, gray weather, trees stripped down to bare. Then, eight years ago I spent the first three weeks of November at my father’s bedside, gathered with my mother and sisters as he slowly slipped away from this life. He was such a stunningly generous gift to all of us. Facing his death with him was the hardest, holiest time of my life. 

That loss still lives in me. I, a nephesh, bear that grief still. November is the hardest month. I have to work hard to make space to breathe in November. 

And … last November also held the most nephesh-draining season of my vocational life. Things had been hard for some time, but starting in late summer, the intensity shot up fiercely. In October, it rose even higher and kept climbing. I felt trapped in a lament psalm, caught between the “terror of the night” and “arrow that flies by day” (Psalm 91:5). 

It was the hardest—in every single sense of that word—and most demoralizing season of my life. That lament still lives in me. I, a nephesh, bear it still. This makes November even more so the hardest month. This year, I have to work even more to make space to breathe in November. 

So I profoundly needed this All Saints service, designed and led by Rev. Dr. Eileen Campbell-Reed. I had personal grief and gratitude, awareness of the catastrophic losses going on all around me in our world, and a new layer of vocational grief to lift up to the God who hears. Even just the video of the burning candles during the service helped me settle and breathe more deeply. 

But the service couldn’t give me what I had hoped for—because time-sensitive texts about that emergency assistance check kept coming in and I had to respond on the spot to untangle what I had tangled up. I got tangled up because it was my FFT and I didn’t fully understand our benevolence-fund-check-writing system. Everyone was gracious and helpful in helping me work it out, but UGH! What an FFT!

Here’s the good news. Last night my spiritual director reminded me that I could have an All Saints do over. As a living, breathing nephesh, I could try again. It wasn’t like All Saints Day had passed me by and I would have to wait until next year. It wasn’t like God was tapping a foot, sighing, “she sure blew that chance!” Grace abounds. 

I could circle back and watch the video, which, thankfully, had been made available to us. Which is what I am doing as soon as I finish this post. I am going to turn off alllllll the alerts, get a cup of hot tea, and breathe as I honor All Saints Day, all the griefs and gratitudes, losses and laments, and simply let God love me and all our lamenting world.  

This nephesh deserves that. 

Rev. Alicia Davis Porterfield midwifes this communal blog, serves as Minister of Missions at Oakmont Baptist Church in Greenville, NC, and moms 3 young adult-ish men.

  1. Here’s a good explainer about FFTs and BB’s podcast episode on FFTs—warning: both contain a curse word; if that will distract you from her teaching, skip these links. ↩︎
  2. https://www.biblestudytools.com/lexicons/hebrew/nas/nephesh.html. I was too exhausted to look up my Divinity school Old Testament notes to work with a fuller source. They’re packed up in the attic.  ↩︎

Alicia Davis Porterfield: All Saints and the Anniversary Syndrome

Everyday Theology 2016, , , , ,

 

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Gray November Sky Photo courtesy of touch2touch.wordpress.com

Since childhood, November was one of my least favorite months. Halloween’s candy was long eaten and Christmas felt too far away.The leaves lost their brilliant hues and fell to the ground, leaving bare branches up high and a raking chore waiting below. Gray skies and a gray heart.

In Divinity School, I discovered All Saints Day, which helped start my gray month off with a gild of theological wonder. My favorite image of All Saints was the across-time-and-space unity of the people of God, the sense of a cosmically bigger picture than any human mind could comprehend. That “cloud of witnesses” stretched far and wide and deep, surrounding us all with their stories and faith, weaving us together as one family.

In my time as an eldercare chaplain at a Continuing Care Retirement Facility, our All Saints observance involved lighting candles for each community member who had died  the preceding year. We talked about each light being a reflection of the light of Christ our Savior; how each flame spoke to the life of a person who had touched countless other lives. We shared stories of the light these people had shed in our lives, those memories and moments that we would hold onto for the days to come.

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Photo courtesy of http://www.mattoonfirst.com/events/allsaintsday

All Saints became one of my favorite services, full of remembrance and wonder, thanksgiving and grief, shared tears and shared laughter.

Then, my father died last November. We had three weeks between the diagnosis that finally told us what had been happening to him over the past year and his funeral. Those three weeks were priceless and holy and rich–and not nearly long enough. 74 years was not nearly long enough for my father’s light to shine.

(Note: God knows how I feel about this.  And God’s OK with it, according to the Biblical witness of the Psalms, the lived out faith of those who have gone before, and my own prayers. We’re good.)

Grief has been a constant companion this year, an invisible armband on every outfit I wear, taking up room and energy and attention, some days more than others. Sometimes this grief is a silent companion; other times it jerks me out of another conversation or train of thought and unashamedly takes over the space it needs.

I’ve been dreading the anniversary of Daddy’s death since summer. Last year, we were all still stunned and absolutely raw when Thanksgiving rolled by two days after his funeral. We limped through Christmas, grateful for the children in whom Daddy delighted to keep us distracted enough to function.

This year, the shock won’t be there to cushion the reality of his absence.

This year, we’ll be facing the fact that a whole year has passed since we lost Daddy. The world has been racing on as normal, pulling him farther and farther into memory and the past and pushing us forward into life without him and a future where his stories and guidance and laughter are not present.

And it is that framework that I find I cannot bear.

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The Anniversary Syndrome wasn’t just going to dredge up all the pain of the original loss–it was going to tell me that I should be somewhere else with my grief, that life had moved on, that I wasn’t keeping up, that a whole year has passed and that’s a mighty long time. 2016 was about to roll into 2017, making our 2015 loss ancient history in a nanosecond world.

I wasn’t just dreading the resurfacing of the deepest grief of Daddy’s death. I was dreading the reality that a whole year has passed without him in our lives. I was dreading the judgment doled out by way we frame time, the calendar’s unspoken but powerful assessment.

But All Saints Day rescued me.

All Saints Day offers a wondrous counterpoint to the peculiar judgment I was dreading on the anniversary of my father’s death. Time doesn’t matter.  At least not the way our world thinks about and measures time. According to Hebrews, that cloud of witnesses we will all join one day binds us together over time and space, death and life, woven by the love of Christ Jesus.

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from internetmonk.com

Past, present, future–it’s all God’s time. The cloud of witnesses brings together the earliest followers of God’s call as outlined in Hebrews to those who lived when Hebrews was written to all of us who read Hebrews now to those who have not yet taken their first breaths.

My father is now part of that cloud of witnesses. We are still part of the same grand, cosmic, beyond-human-comprehension story of God. Through the Light the darkness could not overcome, Daddy’s light still shines, in all of us who loved him: in our memories, in the countless kindnesses he offered, in the welcoming space he taught us to create for others, in the childlike curiosity about God’s amazing creation–especially people–that he fostered in us, in the songs he taught us, stories he told . . .

So November looks different for me this year. Never my favorite month, it is now a holy month. Still gray with the loss of an hour of evening light, with the bareness of the trees, with the death of my father.

But now, November is infused with the “substance of things hoped for, the assurance of things not seen.” Things not seen, like the cloud of witnesses that whispers me on, one voice in particular I know by heart.

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Alicia Davis Porterfield recently moved to the wilds of West Virginia with her family, where she serves as Associate Pastor for Adult Education at Fifth Avenue Baptist Church, Huntington, WV.