By Melissa Walsh
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"... new life starts in the dark. Whether it is a seed in the ground, a baby in the womb, or Jesus in the tomb, it starts in the dark."
― Barbara Brown Taylor in Learning to Walk in the Dark

It was days before our first Christmas without their dad, in our so-called “broken home.” My oldest son was three. My twin sons were two. The divorce was final the previous April. It was 2000. I grieved my marriage and the dreams that died with it. I was sleep-deprived; any sleep I could find came with crying myself into it. I was afraid for my and my sons’ future. I was in a darkness that comes with despair. Then a mysterious light broke through December 23, warming me in its power.

Darkness and Light
My church's divorce from me following my divorce from my husband made despair's darkness even colder. I hadn't stopped loving him. I did it as a last resort, after years of his lies, betrayals, apologies. I did it as a means of protecting our home and family from his addiction and the activities his addiction generated. I needed to protect our home from being taken due to his selling drugs, as an attorney in the church had told me, his advice unsolicited by me back in 1999. My pastor, whom I had confided in for counseling, had told this attorney, who also was a church elder, about my crisis.

The irony, as I discovered when the divorce became final, was that the body of church elders (men, no women) also had discussed my situation and they came to a consensus of denouncing my decision. Whatever they had used as discovery did not include speaking with me. Perhaps they concluded that I had happily filed for divorce, that I had gleefully decided to go it alone with three babes and a full-time job. I was kicked out of a Sunday morning study group of congregants my age, a group I had founded with two friends years earlier. They loved the addict more than me, I learned later.

Nonetheless, I continued bringing my sons to church each week, not an easy task walking past people I’d known for decades, who pretended not to see me, to drop the boys off in their toddler class and then walk to the sanctuary to sit alone in a pew, listening to sermons about Jesus:  Jesus speaking with the Samaritan woman, Jesus' lesson of the widow’s mite, Jesus' teaching on the Beatitudes, and Jesus' humble birth to impoverished, unwed parents.

I felt like a widow grieving the walking dead. I wore a veil, invisible to a world indifferent to my loss, concealing eyes that ached from crying. One only had to look me straight in the eye to see beyond the defiant veil, and three women in the church did. They looked and saw angst and heartbreak.

An elderly woman I had never spoken with previously but had often seen over the years stopped me in the lobby as I was leaving the sanctuary one Sunday when the divorce was still raw. She led me to a private corner in an adjoining room. She burst into tears and hugged me.

“I was married to an alcoholic,” she said.

 By Melissa Walsh

The secret sauce of good fiction, as food for the soul, is didactic, curious prose sprinkled with generous pinches of empathy. Claire Luchette cooked up a soul's delight in her debut novel Agatha of Little Neon.

Yearning for Community
Agatha, a young sister (not "a nun"), narrates. She's a young woman growing self-awareness about her identity and troubled past as she serves a small community of recovering alcohol and drug addicts in a halfway house known as Little Neon. She serves with three other young sisters, whom Agatha presents to the reader from behind a veil of private pain and an emerging sense of identity that could prove inconsistent with her sisters', and the church's, religious values. This sense of herself comes into focus when she serves as a math teacher at a girls parochial high school, in addition to her service at Little Neon. She manages both roles without training in social services or education. Empathy and dedication to study and prayer seem to qualify her well as an impactful servant leader. She is mindful to pray for others; when she prays for herself, it is for understanding and loving others better. 

The story is less about religion than about how dedication to loving others grows wisdom and about the strength required for profound kindness. Agatha values a practice of treating each person as valuable, as a unique human being designed for purpose. Perhaps, for her, this is the most direct approach toward achieving sacred community.

Myth of Comfortable Holy Community
Agatha's approach is inconsistent with the conventional American dream. We know that many, or most, Americans are conditioned to laud the success of the individual, measured in dedication to one's work, paying one's bills, spending time with one's family. This American breed of individuals fence themselves into what they mark as “mine” and worship what’s locked up there — apart from holistic society, or segregated from parts of society they perceive as dangerous or in conflict with their ideal for American society. They seek to remove themselves from random bad luck by pulling their weight. To those who struggle, they say, "Just pull yourself up." In doing so, they generate what is noted by analysts and journalists as “marginalized groups,” or "broken families, or "at-risk youth," or "the homeless," or "displaced families," or "underserved communities." Their approach to community breaks it, because it is selfish, self-serving.

Those who worship the American myth of the comfortable life with a happy ending are those who marginalize the marginalized, fossilizing conditions for people labeled as such for generations. They would like to put the marginalized in a box to dwell outside the white picket fence, where they are to remain until they are no longer viewed as unsafe or unholy. They flee with their families and churches from aging neighborhoods to new havens, leaving behind empty shells of schools and churches for a neglected, broken community left behind. They seek walls to safeguard their homes, schools, and churches as sacrosanct. They determine that strangers behind these walls are unsafe and treat them that way, citing the Second Amendment.

By Melissa Walsh
Four-year old Fenn Rosenthal conceived the 2020 smash single “Dinosaurs in Love.” The song went viral weeks ago after Fenn's dad, her piano accompanist, released her performance on Twitter. Fenn's vocal delivery is adorable and her song-writing meaningful. In an NPR interview, Fenn’s dad, explained how the lyrics express Fenn’s processing of love and loss following the death of her grandfather.

I picked up on something more abstract about love's truth from Fenn's song — that love’s presence (and reward) is peace and its absence disharmony. I recalled how philosopher Jean Varnier, who died last May, describes true love in his book Finding Peace.

​"Peace is the fruit of love,” Varnier writes, “a love that is also justice. But to grow in love requires work — hard work. And it can bring pain because it implies loss — loss of the certitudes, comforts, and hurts that shelter and define us.”

​The triteness in the way we celebrate Valentine’s Day today generally misses this truth. For many, it’s a have-to-buy-a-card holiday; for many others, it’s a litmus test of the health of a romantic relationship.

Though conflicting legends abound about who St. Valentine was, we know that the Roman festival of lovers, Lupercalia, was renamed St. Valentine’s Day by Pope Gelasius I in the late 5th century. Since the 14th century, St. Valentine’s Day has celebrated romantic love. The first Valentine’s Day greetings cards were produced during the late-18th century, according to Encyclopedia Brittanica.

​The namesake of this so-called “Hallmark holiday” was likely a church martyr. The kind of love he lived out might have been what C.S. Lewis describes in his book The Four Loves as “Divine Gift-love,” or unconditional love in action. This is the type of love the Greeks categorize as Agape. The word communicates the sacrificial and most vulnerable form of love. The other three words for love in the Greek lexicon are Storge - familial love; Philia, friend love; Eros, romantic love. Lewis believed that Agape is a reflection of God’s love, essentially a reflection of who God is — Love revealed, Love in motion.

Lewis argued that human love usually and naturally demands reciprocity, falling far short of Divine Gift-love, which living in a free-will cosmos, makes no such demand. The unconditional love a parent has for a child is the best way for the finite human mind to make sense of this Divine Gift-love, or Agape perfected. With unconditional love, we are not guaranteed love returned to us. We are vulnerable. Lewis warns, “There is no safe (love) investment.”

“Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken,” he writes. “If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully around hobbies and little luxuries; avoid entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.”

In that casket or coffin, Lewis explains, where the heart is safely locked away in a dark, motionless place, love dies. In other words, safe love is immobile and terminal. Vulnerable love is free and eternal.