PORCH GATHERING CLOSING REMARKS - Brian Ammons

We have an agreement in our house: no real conversations for the first hour after we’re both awake. 

It took us many years to figure this out. The vast majority of heated conflicts in our home are about little things—we’re actually pretty good at the big stuff (like what are we going to do with our lives, or how do we want to show up in the world given the current cultural climate). But, when we spiral, it almost always starts with one of us accidentally rubbing the other the wrong way, or occasionally a wee poke or jab (or what one of us hears as such). After a few years of living together, we figured out that about two-thirds of those heated moments happened early in the morning. 

Our sleep patterns don’t always line up. Often I’m awake at 4:30 or 5:00 for about an hour, and right as I’m ready to drift back to sleep Gareth is waking and ready to start his day. This is the first of our two danger zones. I’ve been awake and thinking through the to-do list, so I’m ready to hold off the chaos of the world by launching into what undoubtedly sounds more like demanding instructions than collaborative requests. 

If I manage to keep the conversation to “Good morning, I love you,” we’ve cleared a hurdle, and I generally get another hour or so of sleep while Gareth goes to his office, sits quietly and works a crossword. 

The second hurdle comes when I wake up the second time, and Gareth is ready to engage. A perfectly reasonable request or invitation coming my way at this point in the morning routine is almost inevitably met with a forceful “no” — regardless of whether or not I think it’s a great idea. So, it’s his time to be patient and wait for me to soften.

I hear strange stories of folks who wake up full of gratitude and peace. I have even experienced something like that on rare occasions, myself. But the vast majority of the time we are not those people. Gareth wakes up and sifts through fear (he wrote a book about it), and I wake into defended anger (I have not written that book — mostly because the whole of it would be “NO!” followed by a list of muttered expletives). 

For Gareth, who leads much more easily with kindness, part of the task of waking is to remember his strength and fortitude as he enters the day. For me, however, the waking task is to once again disarm. Though it happens less now than when we first met, I have been known to literally wake up swinging. 

So why am I telling you all of this…

It’s because my social media feeds are overflowing with calls to resist. And though I live with and love deeply someone who may benefit from the occasional reminder that it’s not always effective to ask a charging rhino what deeper emotional need lies beneath their charging, left to my own devices I’m more likely to take on the role of said rhino. I do not dispute the need for, or even critique the tone of, the calls that are coming to resist—but y’all, if I lean much more into that call it may well kill me. Resistance is my (very unhappy) happy place. That is to say, I am not someone who needs a reminder to say “NO!” I need a reminder to expand my vocabulary beyond that word.

So in this season, if resist is your rallying cry, more power to you—seriously, more power—but, I’ll be over in the corner trying desperately to soften. 

That takes practice for me. And right behind my big “No” is a story that whatever ugliness I may encounter or hear about is somehow mine to handle, and that I’ll be better off taking it on by myself. I’ve spent decades unlearning that story, but every morning, I still have to find stillness and remind myself once again.

I know not all of us in this room claim a religious identity, and those of us that do come from many traditions. So, I ask for your grace as I speak from my own. The short of it is that without some sort of prayer life, I can be a pretty destructive ball of anger with a self-fashioned superhero cape. 

My definition of prayer is pretty broad, though. It includes any intentional act that draws our attention to, and lets ourselves be transformed by, the inbreaking of Love (which I call God) into the world. 

I need prayer, both as a way to remember there is more love than I can imagine, and as an act of humility, getting closer to clarity both about where and how to use my power and over what I am powerless. My default settings are such that my practice of prayer is not an act of resistance. It is instead the only hope I have at not resisting everything, including, and maybe especially, the love that surrounds me. 

So yeah, I still pray. And despite being professionally religious, I still find it hard to talk about.

——

I sent a text to a friend a couple of weeks ago. Actually, it’s a new relationship, so it feels a bit presumptuous to call him “friend,” but it seems like we’re heading that way, even in these embryonic days. He’s a beautiful spirit, and like many of my friends, spends much of his life walking alongside other people through theirs. 

His community was living through a significant loss, and not knowing the others most directly impacted, my emerging friend had been very much on my mind. I know a bit about what it means to walk through that kind of moment with a community—the strangeness of experiencing one’s own grief as you simultaneously are holding space and speaking into the grief of the collective. 

So, I sent him a text: As my Divinity School classmate said, “You’ve been all up in my Spirit” — quoting a woman I’ve not seen in years, who once approached me in the hall at Wake Forest on a day where I was particularly feeling the heaviness of my circumstances, saying exactly those beautiful words. 

The language of her Pentecostal tradition was unfamiliar to me, but I trusted her connection to both the transcendent and immanent so deeply, that it did not surprise me to hear that she’d sensed some disturbance in my soul despite having not been in my presence for several days. Her words pointed to her deep belief in, and experience of, the interconnectedness of things so clearly that I received them as a balm and remember them with clarity over two decades since. 

I followed that text with another: and as my Quaker friend says, “I’ll be holding you in the light.”

The borrowed language from friends whose traditions lean into the active presence of divine mystery unapologetically expressed something that I could not find so easily in my own progressive Protestantism. In the moment the two felt as if they belonged together—the first an acknowledgment of some spiritual resonance initiated by something beyond myself, the second a conscious response to that vibration. 

My more familiar language would be something like, “I’ll pray for you,” but those are words I rarely speak out loud. In no small part that’s because they’ve been so over- and mis-used that they feel anemic at best, and dismissively trite at worst (“Thoughts and Prayers 🙂”). 

So yeah, I still pray—I take prayer very seriously—it’s just that without unpacking my whole theology it can sound too much like I’m throwing sentiments around carelessly that have too often come to mean “whatever suffering you’re experiencing is all part of God’s plan,” and I cannot abide the violence in that theology.  

My friend texted me back, and we exchanged a few lines. I ended the conversation with, as my Belfast Catholic friend says, “I’ll light a wee candle for you.” An expression of hope—not only will I hold you in the metaphorical light, I’ll make it concrete in this simple act—a ritual of piercing darkness, and a humble acceptance of how little else I can offer, of knowing that I am powerless to “fix” this.

In acknowledging my friend’s grief, I found myself face to face with the limits of the linguistic imagination of the particular Christianity with which I am most familiar. The folks in my tradition are a reasonable lot, fond of words and systematic approaches. Ironically, we are also the branch of our theological family tree most apt to speak of religion as poetics, a system of metaphors pointing to something through the cloudiness of our unknowing. We speak of metaphors, but often lack practice in the beauty of speaking through them.

I say we, but perhaps it’s not fair for me to speak on behalf of my peers. Maybe it’s just me. I’m finding as I continue on this path, one I’ve been walking for over half a century, the best case for my faith tradition is that it calls me into humility. It confronts me with its uncertainty, and sneakily undercuts the very reason and language I use so clumsily to try and express it. 

I could send those same fumbling texts to the keepers of stories big and small—from those impacted directly by climate crisis, state violence, gatekeeping and displacement, inequitable distribution of resources…to those facing the everyday limitations of their changing bodies, and the petty squabbles between family members. All of it.

I pray not to turn my gaze away from suffering, but because otherwise it’s all I see. Without some sort of practice to open myself to Love I grow arrogant and ungrateful, missing all the beauty and joy, or feeling only guilt when I encounter it.

We all know there is very real work to be done. There are competing stories clamoring for attention, and the volume is turned up really loudly right now on the ones that double down in “us vs. them” thinking. I can enter the day nearly completely consumed in my outrage and grief. 

Nearly, but not completely. So, just give me a minute—I’ll be a lot more useful in an hour or so. I’m realigning with a better story—one I barely know how to speak of, but I desperately believe in. 

—

All up in my Spirit.

Holding in the light.

Lighting a wee candle.

Resisting or softening—whichever is longing to be called forth in each of us.

Praying…whatever that means. 

Telling a better story, or maybe letting a better story be told through me.

No, not just me alone…letting a better story be told through us.

That is why we’re here.  

This…coming together to be about what we have been about these past few days…this is how I’m praying.

So, thank you for being here.

…and, Amen.

Brian Ammons, M.Ed., M.Div., Ph.D. is an educator, spiritual director, coach, writer, ordained minister, and co-founder of The Porch.