"Knockin' on Heaven's Door"

Advent is time out of time. It is the four weeks set aside before the birth of Jesus to remember his coming in the future, in the past, and in the present.  It is the season of dreams. God used dreams to communicate with Mary and Joseph in the first Advent, and this continues to be the time to honor God’s voice in the mysterious places of our lives.  Advent calls us to believe God is not dead, revelation is alive and our lives are an incarnation of love.  We can believe in a mystical God that dwells in the fabric of creation still creating new life. We can believe in "deep calling to deep."  We can share Isaiah’s vision of swords beaten into plowshares and new paths cut through the desert.  It is the time to think about our beginnings and endings.  It stirs us to watch and wait upon the Lord.

"Mama, take this badge off of me I can't use it anymore.
It's gettin' dark, too dark to see, I feel like I'm knockin' on heaven's door.

Knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door.  Knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door."

I was walking on Venice beach.  That in itself is surreal.  In the distance you could see the smoke from fires in Malibu.  As the smoke billowed over the hills it was easy to imagine the mansions crumbling and exhausted firefighters battling against a wall of flames that look like the end of the world.  The news said 5,000 acres burned.  I was thinking about the fires when I passed an old hippy who had lived through the days of "flower power" singing Dylan’s song "Knockin' on Heaven's Door."  The dream-like walk felt like a vision revealing the thin line between this crazy world and the deep well of eternity.  Not to see the vision would be like being a blind man walking.  We are knocking on heaven's door.  Everything between here and there is dust no matter how big and powerful it looks.  When we come knockin’ we are coming naked, no more or less than a child of God. We can't claim worth from mansions, from success or failure, from anything that we think is ours.  All that we have is ourselves.


"Mama, put my guns in the ground.  I can't shoot them anymore.
That long black cloud is comin' down.   I feel like I'm knockin' on heaven's door.

Knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door. Knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door. "
 

I went to a nursing home to give a man communion who was old when I was a child.  Walking down those halls, all your senses tell you to be afraid of death.  You see blank stares; you smell urine and hospital food; you hear nurses calling to one another from behind desks and doors; you taste a dread that this is death for all of us who are left standing in the field; and you touch cold metal as you reach to touch skin lying behind a bed railing.  The man has been in and out of consciousness and hooked up to oxygen.  He told me he loved God, but that he left the old church when they let a woman priest come.  There at the side of the bed, I felt a touch of panic.  I know in my head that I am a worthy child of God.  But, if my being is not good enough for him, even when he is knocking on heaven’s door, then maybe it’s partly true.  Sitting there I felt like a living embodiment of the fear that people harbor.  Maybe when people look at the end they fear they are not good enough.  Maybe people worry in their end time if anything is enough: the world, the life they have lived, or the faith they have carried.   Just as I let the fear sink in, the deep truth that lives in the quiet of this season pushed it aside.  Like a sweet early present, above the hum of the oxygen machine, beyond the fear of death, I felt close to God’s heart.  I swear we are enough for God.  I know that we can trust God’s love for us even if we doubt our love.  So I said, “Mr. Jones, I would like to give you communion, but I don’t want to offend you.” He said, wiping back a tear that I didn’t know had come, “I would love communion; I have been starving for it.  I am glad you came.”  That tear is my sign.  We are knocking on heaven’s door, but we are not knocking first or alone.  Beyond the worry and fear, there is tenderness and love. We can have courage in our faith, in our life, and in our death.  So it’s okay to come with just our hearts before our maker.  We can be sycamores in the world of faith, the ones standing tall and naked before God in a crowded forest of barked trees, looking strangely perfect.  

Glorious Late Fall

I believe the seasons change at night.  You can’t see a leaf change colors, so it is magical to wake up into the deep fall south.  At sunrise late fall becomes an impressionist vision with pink skies on an orange and crimson palate of sugar maples painted on yellow canvas framed in walnut.  Its stunning appearance allows you for a moment to forget where the earth ends and the heaven begins.  Banded clouds look like darker mountains and water looks like sky.   When it is that beautiful, you know the end of the year is near.  It is even more beautiful when you remember the trees endured a late frost and survived a harrowing draught. It is a tender vision knowing the leaves are hanging by a thread and in another night, the asters will bow their heads and call it a winter.  It is the moment when the fruits are their ripest, when we give thanks for everything and everyone, and when we reap.

The work of Magdalene, communities of women with criminal histories of drug abuse and prostitution, had its late fall moment last week at the Student Life Center at Vanderbilt University at our 10-year anniversary celebration. The night represented an ending and a beginning. When we began planning for the next ten years we said it is to walk deeper thinking locally and seeing how our actions are global.  We are just beginning to create a small global network of local communities of women that share the same war stories and need to work together in community to live safe and sober lives.  Next month, a woman who walked up to the front door at one of our houses from the neighborhood will graduate and is moving into her own home. Next week, two women from the Sudan who I talked about two weeks ago are flying out and beginning to form a not-for profit for other women there.  Next April, six women from this community and Magdalene will travel to Rwanda to work with the sisters of Rwanda to help them start working with natural body care products to create work.  After ten years of being about this work I can see that in being a part of restoring a life, we are restoring the world.
   
The late fall and Magdalene anniversary are beautiful and fleeting moments in time.  Jesus comments at the beginning of his time preaching in the temple that as beautiful as it all is, it is nothing compared to the kingdom within us.  He says that fall will pass, that he will pass, and that the temple will pass, but nothing will kill the kingdom being born in us.  It is the great message for us.  It is not about the end or beginning of times; it is not about our beginning or ending but the promise that in all our endings and beginnings God’s love and presence will not be lost.

Finding Home-- Magdalene's Ten Year Anniversary

Three years ago, a couple residents of Magdalene and I went to Chattanooga, Tennessee to help some friends open a community for women.  On the way there one of the residents told me that our old friend, Vicky, had died of an overdose. I felt sad and guilty, because she had written me a letter from jail with questions about God that I never answered.  After the trip I wrote her a prayer letter asking her about god and asking her forgiveness.  The letter was included in a book I wrote last year.  This summer while I was making lunch for my kids there was a knock on the door. When I answered it, Vicky was standing there.  It was startling and joyful.  She was fine and working at Honey Baked Ham.  I told her how sorry I was and about the letter.  She laughed and cried with me in the living room and told me she was just coming by to thank me.  I can’t believe how much I still have to learn.  The work continues to be a huge surprise and love always humbles us.
   
Sometimes doing something for ten years seems way too long.  In Magdalene years it means we have been housing women for 3,650 days, non-stop. It’s also how long most women walk the streets.  It’s how long we have heard the stories of women almost dying or killing themselves with phrases like:  I was at the point of begging from beggars; I felt like jumping in the Cumberland river again; that was when I crossed the sea in a truck tire; that was the day I knew I was going to die; at least he drove me back to town after the rape.
  
Sometimes doing something for ten years seems not long enough.  It’s the tender age most women who end up on the streets learned the horror of rape.  It feels like it’s just been a blink of an eye and over a hundred women have come and gone through the doors.  It seems like just yesterday we were beginning to form the words that described the realities we were learning about.  It’s barely enough time to figure out how to help women move from street walking to home ownership.  It’s not enough time to grow up. It’s a pause in history. It’s nothing in the eyes of God.
  
Then sometimes doing something for ten years seems like the right amount of time. It’s been the perfect time to learn to speak our truth in love and set our foundation and blossom.  It’s the right amount of time for all of us together to learn our instruments and play as an orchestra.  We can finally play in harmony and still can hear our own parts. It’s been so full of great moments and memories.  One moment I will never forget is when Clemmie Greenlee, a graduate of Magdalene and her son stood up at an event and gave a testimony for Magdalene.  They talked about three generations in their family getting clean and sober and what it meant. Rodriguez was a beautiful 19-year-old boy who was shot on the side of the road months later.  Clemmie talked soon after about wanting to visit the young man who killed her son, because now his life is going to be spent behind bars.  She wanted to go to the jail and hug him.  She keeps teaching us to speak up, speak truth and keep trying to heal the world. It’s been the right amount of time for us to learn that the scars people carry from childhood and the streets will stay with us---but that there is healing that runs deeper even then those scars
   
It is just long enough to learn that we are truly a global program. Not only have we welcomed women from Indiana, Wisconsin, Virginia, New Mexico, Texas and Honduras, we have made friends in programs in Russia, Rwanda, and Ecuador.  We have learned that while there are stories in the Times about girls sold into sexual slavery in places like Cambodia, we have the same issue in Georgia, Miami, and Nashville.  Globally people want to hear the message of truth and hope that we bring.  When we had our Launch party in New York to celebrate the new products and marketing events, everywhere the women went they were welcomed and honored for their courage and the hope they carry with them.  They preach you cannot buy and sell women-- that even though prostitution may be one of the oldest forms of abuse in history, women don’t have to stay in it or addiction for the rest of their lives, and that all the women came to the streets with a story of broken community and so it is the community that has to welcome the women home.

We want to keep going for ten more years.  We want to witness a 100 more graduates and support for 500 more women, one at a time.  Our vision is to launch a network of body healing products made by local women’s communities globally.  Grow Thistle Farms twenty fold into a company that earns $5 million a year.  We are going to need a plant, a serious operations system, but we are beginning to hear our voice on the national level.  If we can grow, we can help residential communities like Magdalene have income, establish an endowment, and provide meaningful training and work for more residents.  We want the spiritual lessons we have learned to become part of the recovery process for all kinds of people, so we are going to publish a book.

My vision beyond the work of Magdalene in the future is to be buried out by the Potter’s field near Lisa’s mother-- in the cemetery between the sewer treatment center and the gas storage surrounded by chain link and some maples-- the place they bury all the Jane Does who don’t find their way home in this world.  And I hope to have on my tombstone: consider the Thistle, because that is where I have learned about grace in this world.

My vision beyond that is to imagine our great-grandchildren living in a culture where little girls will not know sexual abuse; where drugs are used for healing and where women feel the freedom to speak their truth without fear.  It is only possible if we walk ahead together.  Working and living toward the witness to the truth that in the end love is the most powerful force for change in the world.  Preach the truth you know with respect for the dignity of every human being.