Lyndsey Medford

justice + joy

spirituality

I am lonely and it is OK.

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There is a thing we do not always like to tell people who are graduating from high school or college, with the result that they hear of it in whispers and snatches—a specter they, too, try to ignore. And some of them escape it; they go home, or they go to graduate school, plopped down into a new life with a readymade cohort of like-minded young people. But most of us go to jobs in cities new to us, seeking adventure and success, and we find them, but we also encounter that specter. Its name is loneliness.

There are different kinds of loneliness, but we do not have names for them. It would be nice if we did. If we could throw out an offhanded comment like, ‘I’ve got a bit of the usual topodoloria that one expects three weeks after moving somewhere new,” instead of having to stay mum or else burst out: “I wish one single thing felt familiar in this place besides the coffee mug I’m carrying around obsessively because it reminds me of home.”

We need words for the loneliness of a long-distance relationship, the unreasonable rage at happy, cuddling couples when it is still weeks til you hold your person and something finally unknots inside of you. The ache of being single and wanting not to care, but thinking you would do anything to avoid one more engagement photo in your feed. The effort of trying not to weep at a party because you only wish you had people to feel safe with. The disappointment of a perfect summer evening when you have no one to give a beer on your porch.

Why does saying “I’m lonely” feel like admitting weakness, like if you had to foist the news on people that you had a disease? In a culture so far removed from the tribes and villages that have held most humans in history—a culture designed for loneliness—we don’t know how to talk about it. (I imagine this conundrum is even worse if you are male.) So we eat food or watch porn or shop to assuage the emptiness. We scroll social media looking for the rush of momentary connection. We hit the gym or log extra work hours because if we can’t feel fulfilled, maybe we can at least appear successful.

Well, everybody, I’ve done all those things and they were hardly even momentary fixes and I am done being afraid of it. I’m lonely. And it’s not because my existing friends (or my husband) are inadequate; and it’s not because I am abhorrent; and it’s not that I am inordinately needy. I fall well within the normal human range of neediness. Here is why I am lonely: because I moved. Because people my age move constantly in my culture and no one is supposed to make a big deal out of it. But you don’t find and love and trust your people overnight, the people who make you snort-laugh and tell you when you’re being dumb and are good at giving you gifts. It takes a lot of friend dates, awkward party situations, mild rejections by people who are too busy for you, testing of sense-of-humor waters, weekend nights hiding with Netflix because it’s all so exhausting. What it takes, like anything worth building, is time and effort.

Meanwhile, you will be lonely. At least some of the time, it will occur to you that you’d like to share something with someone, and there will not be anyone, and it will ache.

Here is how to live with the ache:

First, you must ignore your feelings. Not the ache itself, but the momentary feelings that keep you from making and being a friend. Read this article. Trust the rational voice in your head—the one telling you that calling a faraway friend is what you need when you’ve reached the end of your feeds; or that that one person deserves a third or fourth chance even though you’ve already grabbed a magic marker to label them annoying; or that drinking alone is unhealthy and it would be better to walk, bake, or color through that ache.

Then you really must put on your confident pants and go to the damn party. (Or the church, or the meetup, or the networking event.) Yes, you will be out too late and spend several awkward minutes standing alone next to the food table. Yes, there will be obnoxious people and fake people there. But the people you’re wishing for aren’t going to come knocking; they’re putting on their pants to go to the party and maybe make small talk with you and maybe accept your invitation to coffee or trivia. Think of your beautiful friends walking around other cities and going to other parties. Your people are out there.

Trust the process. Be patient with friendships in early stages. Grow a plant from a seed. Be faithful to the little tasks of tending them. Know that the ache, though overwhelming, will not overwhelm forever.

In the meantime, pray and pray and pray. Jesus was so lonely, dear heart. How often have you wished for the head space to reach toward him? Let the ache push you to God. Be still. Pray for others. Is this not a gift, to ache for connection, to feel the gaps in the universe where we have been broken from each other? Grow more tender and more grateful. Become a person with names for lonelinesses, and give the gift of recognition, and look the lonely in the eye and share something with them. We are already more connected than we can know.

How to Be At Home in Discomfort: 1,000,000 Easy Steps

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Boston will never be—if I had lived there ten years, would not have been—home. But I will always love it like I can never love another place. When I was in high school, I dreamed of being a young professional there, of living in a historical brick home and riding the train; lazing afternoons on the Common and laughing over takeout with friends in my garret. I never have a stronger urge to go back to talk to a former self, purely for the joy of seeing her face. When I think of those high school dreams, I am at once in awe that I achieved them and astounded by how small they were. How could high-school-me fathom becoming one of those bike commuters whizzing down Beacon Hill, dodging Duck Boats? Or working in the city’s underbelly as a caterer in the basements of its best museums?

Of course, I don’t think I could tell her about the highs of a night skyline in summer without the lows of predatory landlords and an exhausted hour-long commute at 2 A.M. The very specific loneliness of being crushed by people on the sidewalk, and how it doesn’t feel less lonely to know that they’re all lonely, too.

No one has ever really asked me what locals do in Boston, but high-school-me would. I would tell her that if you are middle-class or better off, you go to graduate school. I played an ultimate stereotype—passing through the city, using it for its books, and leaving more liberal than I came—but Boston never once derided me for sticking to that tired script. At least, I would tell myself, I had a dirty job. At least I walked many miles on my days off, til the map was part of me.

Other things locals do: put 80% of your income toward rent and heat. Crowd the neighborhood bar that has the cheapest Sam Summer once the temperature in your place tops 95. If you live on the green line, plan your days around the Sox, Celtics, or Bruins. If you do not live on the green line, refuse to ride the green line. Swear.

You see now, whenever I try to describe my fondness for Boston I tell only gritty, boring, maybe-depressing scenes. Maybe because everyone knows the bright, idyllic Boston I met in high school: sailboats on the Charles and rapturous cannoli. But it is also because I went to The North to get out of my Comfort Zone, and Boston did it for me—three years of unceasing discomfort.

Boston was full of people demanding I confront my privilege without offering an inkling as to how. It was also fond of judging my home states while itself remaining demonstrably among the country’s most racist, most segregated places. Boston gave me several weeks inventing new food combinations until I could buy groceries with the next paycheck. It was one spiritual or theological or identity crisis after another, culminating in my own personal Great Evangelical Betrayal.

All of that—it was a gift: much more than I bargained for, indeed. And through all of my throes and thrashing, Boston held me without sentiment and without judgment. Now there are sides of me that only the Charles knows. There are places I’d put my own historical markers: on this site in 2014, Lyndsey learned to be friends with women. Here, here, here, and here, she realized things were going to be OK. L and L once walked a marathon in a weekend, which began and ended here.

If you want to visit the shiny, nice, historical Boston, I can tell you where to go and wish you a very good time. But if you want to visit my Boston, I will tell you: walk and walk, then keep walking. Ask why things are the way they are. Tell the Charles you are in love with him. Get very sweaty and lost. Buy bread in the North End. Realize you have gone much too far. Then turn around and come back. And when you arrive wherever you started, and you are terribly exhausted and your bread is gone and you are grateful for a place to just be, then you are there. Share a three-dollar bottle of wine with someone and toast the safety of a cyclist and belatedly thank God, who happens to be around, for the bread. Swear. Swear especially if it makes you uncomfortable. It is good not to be so delicate; and so this Boston will make you a better person—a better lover—in the end.

This post was inspired by Tsh Oxenreider’s At Home in the World, a book about home and other beloved places and a nine-month trip around the world with three kids. I love her Art of Simple life-vision, so I can’t wait to see how it translates to the un-simple endeavor of travel with family.

Sexual Harassment for International Women’s Day

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It may be a failing of mine that I don’t like to feel as though I’m on a bandwagon; so I’m not always keen on celebrating things that hardly seemed to exist before social media, like International Women’s Day. A certain amount of naivete, too, has in the past made me wonder how much we still really need to celebrate women, at least in the developed world. I thought, a year or two ago, that “feminist” wasn’t such a radical label.

Today, though, I was followed by a man in a car for two blocks on my walk. “Be my friend,” he said. “I like that. You’re cute. Princess. I like that.”
“I’m married,” I said.
“You sure?” he replied. He knew it didn’t really matter. He knew it was a calculation, the way of saying please go away that usually seems least likely to incite physical violence.
“I’m sure,” I said. If you don’t respect the demands of civility, of humanity, please at least follow property law.

Last week my neighbor was suspended from her high school for reporting sexual harassment.

Our president has bragged about sexual assault.

I wish that feminism were just a matter of working for equal pay, or for the rights of transgender people to exist.

Instead, feminism is still fighting for women’s physical safety in broad daylight. At school. In the office. Women are still waiting for the day we do not go outside expecting to be demeaned, intimidated, or attacked for sport or spite.

The book of Luke passes the Bechdel test* right away.  I’ve been reading and rereading the beginning of this book for a few days now, enthralled most by its celebration of the rich and joyful friendship between Mary and Elizabeth. The two women are prophets before they are mothers, secret bearers of a wide and deep vision of the future. They have been faithful where Zechariah, the priest, was unfaithful, and they see now beyond a doubt that the Lord lifts up the humble. I can’t stop thinking about them, the older woman and the younger, preparing together for the births of their new boys, marveling at the work of God.

We are not allowed to forget, in this gospel, that every moment of Jesus’s ministry is borne up by women, women who bear and maintain life, women who offer financial assistance, women who do not abandon him at the cross and women, again, who are the first to believe in his new birth out of death. He insists on naming those unnoticed roles that sustain all of us with their everyday faithfulness: they who cook, clean, tend, mend, and bury, holding up the world in these tasks we deem small only because they are so ubiquitous. So necessary and precious.

The Christian doctrine of creation tells us that God is the sustainer of the universe, in some sense recreating us all at every moment. Creation is not an event about which we must decide whether it happened thousands or millions or billions of years ago. It is an intimate, involved embrace of all that is at once beautiful, mundane, and yucky in this world. It is a recurring yes, an ongoing artwork—and, perhaps, a tedious, exacting, unappreciated one. God is at work in the splashy sunsets and the wild-eyed desert prophet. God is also at work in the clouds drifting overhead at night, and through the prophet’s ungloried mother. Women and servants meet this humble God in our own work. She sees us and we see Her, different than do the powerful and celebrated.

*The Bechdel test is a cultural barometer asking whether two female characters in a work talk to each other about something other than a man.

We say that feminism is the belief that women are equal to men. This has come to be parsed in many ways, but I think one that is often overlooked is the belief that traditionally feminine ways of being in the world are equal to traditionally masculine ones. I think we fear putting women on a pedestal; the pedestal doesn’t have to be so high, after all, before it becomes a prison of its own. But launching certain women into the C-suite shouldn’t come at the expense of the women who will never have the money for childcare, the education, or the social clout to climb the corporate ladder. Or, for that matter, the expense of men who want to go into caring professions, but fear losing prestige. Moreover, we must recognize that many women who succeed in the C-suite do so precisely because they lead distinctively: seeking consensus, drawing connections, and caring for whole people, rather than defaulting to a top-down model or convincing employees to ram their way to success by sheer willpower.

Christian feminism, in particular, should recognize that part of our duty is to follow our servant-leader, Jesus, in a way that leads downward. Many men have worked hard to pull the heart of our faith away from service, humility, simplicity, and sharing; but they are ultimately inescapable. To celebrate International Women’s Day, for me, is to celebrate these virtues, not to mirror the patriarchy’s contempt of them. Some of us, it’s true, have lost ourselves in them, and have not much reflected Christ until we recovered other virtues like rest, self-love (dignity), confidence. Still, I do not think women’s safety or equality will be achieved until society recognizes, not only that women can be as stoic, as strategic, as strong and unflagging and dogged as men, but also that emotion, intuition, and human connection are themselves sources of strength worthy of reverence. Let us not rest until men have begun to learn, too, from us. May we assert our rights to live without fear, to take up space without reprisal, to have our gifts and talents not only used but recognized, and may we do so for the sake of the world. May we make a place that is better for caretakers and maintainers, for the weak and the vulnerable, for bodies and babies; and may we do so for the sake of the God who is incompletely imagined until we see her laboring in their midst.

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when being white hurts for once

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It’s possible I didn’t get into a Ph.D. program because I’m white.

I don’t mean that as an excuse or a complaint or really even a literal statement. In reality, there are lots of reasons I didn’t get into a Ph.D. program, and my race isn’t among the top five you’d hear if I told you the story. But it was something I had to think about both during and after the application process: If it came down to a choice between me and someone of a minority race, all other things being exactly equal, the other person would “win.”

In theory, I think this is absolutely good and fitting for any academic program, especially in the liberal arts, and especially at the highest levels. In these fields, our personal backgrounds and perspectives influence our work even more than in others. Because of that, the academy is much, much poorer if it fails to cultivate a diversity of backgrounds and perspectives. And the world is much, much poorer if it’s not represented well in academic and theological circles; people who can’t see themselves in the thinkers they’re hearing about often aren’t going to connect with the ideas. There’s really no one sitting around saying, “I can’t relate to this theology; I wish another wealthy white lady would write one.”

In theory, that makes sense. In practice, it’s not just nerve-wracking or hard to swallow. It hurts. It hurts, on a personal level, to hear that your perspective is valued less than someone else’s; and it hurts very practically, when you’re forced to compete for your dream, to know there is the potential that it will come down to something so far outside your control.

But just because it hurts me doesn’t make it any less right.

I’ve listened to the academic arguments and the personal pleas of my minority classmates and friends enough to know that they feel that same hurt every day of their lives. They don’t blame me as an individual and they certainly don’t revel in my pain, but they do ask me to see affirmative action as a conscious effort to reshape a world whose culture—whose unconscious efforts—often discount, demean, and defeat them.

This all came to mind when I read Dr. Christena Cleveland’s latest blog post, “How to be last: A practical theology for privileged people.” Of course, you should read it and then read it again, but here is the synopsis: Dr. Cleveland gives a brilliant retelling of the parable of the workers in the field—the one where some people work all day, and some work for only an hour, but everyone gets paid a full day’s wages. She points out that this parable illustrates that saying of Jesus: the first shall be last and the last shall be first. This isn’t just a saying; it’s a vision of God’s kingdom. The Bible says (and social psychology happens to confirm) that in our sin-stricken world, where history and culture have conspired to place some people’s value, opportunities, lives, and comfort so far ahead of others’, putting everyone on a level playing field isn’t enough to bring about equality and justice. As she puts it,

We experience the kin-dom of heaven when people from oppressed groups lead and people from privileged groups follow…If you’re a privileged person, here’s what I have to say to you: You have an invaluable role to play — and that role is last. When you inhabit your role as last, you play a crucial part in forging and maintaining the equitable balance of the kin-dom of heaven. Furthermore, your freedom is in being last. Your pathway to a more just world is in being last. Your liberation from the shackles, alienation and dehumanization of privilege is in being last.

When someone says the first shall be last and the last shall be first it sounds like a nice saying. When someone says your place is to be last, you realize it’s not nice at all. It’s far more than nice; it’s redemptive, and redemption is a purifying fire, and it’s hard, and it hurts.

Some of the comments on the post reflect this hurt. There’s defensiveness, anger, and dismissal: running away from the fire. There’s calm debate: seeking to get around the fire. And there’s this:

My brain says This is absolutely what needs to take place.
My emotions say This is undignifying.

I think that’s a guy walking through the fire.

It sounds like this guy knows that what our culture calls “dignity” isn’t what the kingdom calls blessed. But we rarely know in our bones those conclusions we mentally assent to, no matter how firmly we think we believe them. We know in our bones what we experience. That’s why Jesus demands obedience: sometimes you can only learn the truth of something by doing it.When you’re used to measuring value and accomplishment in status, money, and power, it can take a long time to know the joy of undignity. When you’ve spent all your life being told you were meant to lead, it’s not immediately apparent how there could be freedom in following.

Since Trump was elected, the same word has been on a loop in my mind: humility, humility, humility. When someone becomes the leader of a country by bragging about wealth, power, deceit, and violence, humility has become a foreign concept. I can’t get away from that this Advent: they will know you are an alien when you worship a peasant baby as king. They will laugh at you when you pursue humility. They will despise you even as they secretly respect you when you begin to attain it.

Some of us get into the “social justice” game or “kingdom of God” talk because we think it will make us heroes. But God gets us into the game so it will make us humble, and so it will make us free. Work to free others long enough, you discover just how many of their iron chains are matched with your own invisible spider-web chains, chains you never noticed before you learned how to see. Clinging to “dignity” and even to dreams that revolve around achievement and status are two of those chains. Jesus, the teacher of hard sayings, is the one who frees us all from them; there are no other heroes, and that is good news.