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Devi Abraham

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When do we say the house is on fire? What headlin

When do we say the house is on fire?

What headline are we waiting for to say our theology harmed?

How long will it take for someone to admit that we got it so very very wrong?

I lived eight years in the towns around where Josh Duggar lived. I was at the Bible studies and pot lucks with all the people who homeschooled their kids or sent them to Shiloh, the big Christian school. Nothing was supposed to go wrong. Godly discipline. No worldly influences. My god I can still remember a video with Jim Bob talking about the software that kept porn off the family computers.

Who will say it was a sham?

Who will say to the generation before us, you were so full of your own dysfunction, your own shame, all you wanted was kids who would get right what you got wrong.

The culture war generation yields its fruit, and the rot stinks. It oppressed the weak, it victimized, it lied and it lied and it lied.

Friends, I don’t know about you but this news today and always reminds me again: there is no hope in ideology. There is no promise in systems that elevate a few.

Get out.

Listen to survivors, there are so many, and there are many more to come.

Do the right thing that’s right in front of you.

Fight for an undeceived life.

Let the fire burn the lies all the way down.

Years ago in therapy my counselor told me that ang

Years ago in therapy my counselor told me that anger isn’t a primary emotion. It is secondary, which means something is underneath.

Anger is an arrow.

I’ve been thinking about this in the past weeks as it seems like I’ve been watching outrage and anger all around. From my kids fighting to online cancel mobs, anger comes to an easy simmer fast.

And I wonder if we should not be surprised by any of it. Last year was many things, but it was also a year of loss.

Weddings that weren’t what you thought it would be.

Months on end without touch.

The loss of personal freedom, being able to go where you want, when you want to.

Jobs and income, homes and security.

Burying loved ones to whom you couldn’t say goodbye.

We endured a brutal experiment in loss, and we did it locally, globally, everywhere.

@aliajoy has a line in her book Glorious Weakness, “Grief pressed down comes out sideways.” And I wonder if the anger and rage that seems so easily accessible is in part the rumble of our collective grief.

I don’t know what collective healing can look like, but I know I can start by telling the truth about myself and recognizing the truth in others.

I’m sorry it’s been so hard.

I hate that this happened.

I wish it was different.

Then follow it up with actions that support the grief, that allow for grief to run its course.

The anger in our world can grab our attention, but what would our communities look like if we paid attention to what lies beneath?

There was a poetry to Easter in the US, Switzerlan

There was a poetry to Easter in the US, Switzerland, and Sweden. The daffodils popped out of the ground, buds on bare branches, the temperature warming. There were signs of life everywhere.

Easter in Australia feels strange because it’s the middle of autumn, and around us the world turns inward to die.

Leaves fall off trees. I cut down the dahlias. It is colder and darker with each passing day.

I think whatever we believe, we bear witness to different forms of living and dying. Each of us are in varying stages of death and resurrection.

So for me here, on this bright Good Friday in Melbourne as the world goes to sleep around me, I do the work we all have to do whatever the season may be.

Hold on to hope.

New life will come. Better days are ahead. It is a law written into the fabric of the world. A grain of wheat must fall into the ground to die for there to be more seeds. Trees need to sleep to live another year. We spend our love that others might live.

This is my son’s copy of Beezus & Ramona because

This is my son’s copy of Beezus & Ramona because I can’t find mine. Beverly Cleary died last week, and this 39-year-old woman could only think back to her 9-year-old-self curled up in a corner of a blue bedroom in the Philippines eating salty corn bits while the world opened wider and wider.

No one told me it was normal to feel out of place in your family.

No one told me you could hate the food at dinner.

No one told me you could feel like the person who messed everything up.

Until this girl named Ramona and her sister Beezus talked to me through the pages of these books about white lower middle class America.

How it translated to a Sri Lankan girl in the Philippines is the power of stories told simply and truly. I didn’t understand the details of the Quimby’s lives, but I knew the emotions. I didn’t have words for some of mine until I read these books. This is the gift of Ramona and Beezus and Henry and all of them, it’s the gift of stories that tell the truth.

What’s your favourite Beverly Cleary story or moment? Let’s remember together in the comments.

We choose our baptisms. I’ve been thinking abo

We choose our baptisms.

I’ve been thinking about this over and over as I’ve felt immersed in the stories of power and abuse and celebrity culture in the last months. I sit and watch - it’s one of my favourite postures, for better or worse - and there’s just a lot circling, many questions, what is right, what is wrong.

To look away from what is broken is an act of privilege, but is there a way to regard it without being consumed?

“Beauty will save the world,” is Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s line, and if a man who spent four years in a Siberian prison camp wrote that, well I guess it’s true.

Baptize me in beauty, I ask, as I water this plant once a week and watch it grow. I sprinkle the raspberries on yoghurt, and they are rubies instead of fruit for a moment. Here comes our autumn April light just in time, making everything it touches glow.

Can I look at the ugliness? I think there is work there too. But the way to sustain the work is full immersion in the beautiful, sensuous realities of living.

Maybe it is these moments that help us to see, to wade into the water, to sink deeper.

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Devi

Home
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Home
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Home
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Motherhood
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