MARGINALIA

IN A COMPROMISING POSITION

Valerie Weaver-Zercher

"Let us not, then, take our littleness lightly. It is a wonderful grace." —Macrina Wiederkehr, A Tree Full of Angels

I was almost going to spend next year in Southeast Asia. For several years my husband and I had been talking about spending his sabbatical in a year of service with a church organization, and we were now coming close to finalizing the details. We would rent our house, pack up our two-year-old and five-month-old sons, and catch a plane in May, one week after my husband’s semester was over. We had told friends and family of our plans and, perhaps most telling, had begun that subtle but significant lingual switch from "if we go" to "when we go."

And then I chickened out.

Gave in to my inner scaredy-cat.

Bolted.

For the past several months I’ve been trying to figure out other ways to phrase this. I’ve been seeking more self-affirming and constructive language to describe my about-face in this process. These discourses are available—and this column is, in a way, about finding them.

But there’s something raw, something stark about those first phrases that I can’t ignore and don’t want to ignore. I don’t think it’s just warped psychological self-flagellation, either, that makes me want to retain those characterizations. I think they hint at something deeper about the messages that our fears can contain, the grace of learning our "littleness," as Wiederkehr calls it, and the blessing of sometimes compromising our commitments.

My journey began last autumn, with intense excitement about the work I would be doing—the development of a curriculum for a peacebuilding institute. It combined two passions of mine, writing and peacemaking, and apart from the audible voice of God, seemed to fit all the characteristics of vocation and calling I could imagine.

I was excited about learning from the people with whom we would live, about the way this cross-cultural setting would form me and my husband as global citizens with more intimate understandings of international issues like poverty and war. I looked forward to telling my children about this year as they grew up, helping them understand the values and commitments that led their father and me to choose this.

But as snow and ice shouldered into the Eastern Seaboard, so did my doubts about this coming year. I won’t recount all the doubts here, partly because I’m ashamed of some of them and partly because I can’t articulate that deep, wordless, often nighttime-appearing intuition that a decision just doesn’t "fit." Suffice it to say that anxiety began to outweigh my initial excitement about the position, and after much conversation with each other and some close friends, we decided to back out.

So we’re going to Kentucky instead. Appalachia is hardly as exotic as Southeast Asia. It won’t stretch us in the same way, won’t test our cross-cultural mettle. But right now, with two small children and only a year to give, it feels like a better fit. Ever since deciding this, I’ve felt a deep-seated sense of peace.

I’m still trying, however, to figure out this whole business of fear. I’m accustomed to looking at fear as something to be overcome, not something to befriend. Doesn’t good psychology tell us that going deep enough into our fears will bring us insights into ourselves that unleash us from those fears’ powers? Doesn’t Jesus tell his disciples to "Fear not," and don’t countless psalms offer comfort for times of terror? Fear prevents us from reaching for our ideals and causes us to compromise our deep-seated values. Right?

Yes—to all of the above. But what if at least some of our fears hold within them important messages from our "subconscious minds" (read: God), messages we need to listen to rather than silence? What if my anxieties about going to Southeast Asia were signals that I was reaching some internal limit, some "littleness" that I needed to heed?

In his astute little tome, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation, Parker Palmer writes of the danger of trying to give something that one doesn’t possess, of "violating one’s nature in the name of nobility." When I try to live as the noble person I think I should be, rather than as the person I really am, I can offer only "a false and dangerous gift" to others, because I am offering something that I do not have.

Humbly recognizing, then, what lies within my nature and abilities—and what doesn’t—becomes a spiritual discipline of sorts, a recognition of the organic, real, and God-given self. As Palmer writes, "God asks us only to honor our created nature, which means our limits as well as our potentials" (emphasis mine). For someone who has just backed out of a challenging assignment, this is a comforting phrase. It releases me from that perfectionist voice within that says I must always confront and tame my fears.

What pulls me up short of embracing it completely, however, is this: What about the martyrs? What if Anabaptist martyr Anneken Hendricks had decided in 1571 that she really ought to listen to her fear of being burned at the stake rather than overcoming it? What if Felix Mantz had decided that being drowned in the river Limmat was really beyond his organic, God-given nature, and that instead he would honor his "littleness," renounce his faith, and thereby skip that nasty water treatment?

Or what if, more recently, Martin Luther King Jr. or Ita Ford or Steve Biko or any number of modern-day martyrs had decided that they ought to pay attention to what messages their fears of death might contain, hunker down by the fire, and write nice little essays about recognizing one’s limits?

In other words, is writing this column a step toward knowing and honoring the self that God created? Or is it simply an exercise in self-justification?

I’ve read a lot about childbirth recently, poised as I am just one month past my second labor. I entered my first labor convinced that I wanted a natural birth, or at least as close to it as I could get. I did end up asking for some pain medication during active labor, but it wore off after about an hour and I pushed out that nine-pound-one-ounce boy completely medication-free.

I have to admit that I’m proud of that fact. I liked the admiration of the nurses on the morning shift saying, "Wow, I heard about you!" And I’m proud that my body could accomplish such a feat.

But not proud enough to have attempted it again. In fact, I became terrified about giving birth a second time. Those hours of labor and delivery during the birth of my first son were the most excruciating and traumatic of my entire life and hardly resembled what I hear some women describe as a spiritual or empowering experience. So this time around I decided to ask for an epidural.

I wavered whenever I read books and articles advocating natural childbirth, however, because I agree so wholeheartedly with them. I agree that childbirth is a natural process and shouldn’t be medicalized, if at all possible; I agree that women should trust their bodies, since they’ve been giving birth without medical intervention for millennia; I agree that North Americans tend to unhealthily seek the eradication of pain from all aspects of life and that epidurals can be seen as one symptom of that.

But the distance between the nobleness of these ideals and the (literally) gut-wrenching reality of my fears was too great. So when hard contractions started on that cold January afternoon, I turned my back (literally) on my natural birth ideals and called for the anesthesiologist. I nearly wept with relief when the epidural took effect, and less than two hours later I was holding our second precious son.

So does catering to my inner labor-and-delivery wimp mean giving up those ideals of what I think childbirth should be? Is there a way to hold onto ideals even while admitting that I’m too weak or scared or tired to reach them?

I hope so. I also hope that some of my values are attainable. But mostly, whether in life plans or birth plans, I hope I can offer myself grace during those countless times when my "littleness" trumps my ideals.

—Valerie Weaver-Zercher, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, is the mother of a toddler son and a newborn son as well as assistant editor of and columnist for DreamSeeker Magazine.