Holy Chaos

Creating Connections in Divisive Times

Amanda Henderson

• Publisher: Chalice Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780827215153
• eBook ISBN: 9780827215160
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Daily living – and loving – in our fraught and deeply divided world can be disorienting, unpredictable, exhausting, and scary. How do we find peace in the midst of the chaotic spaces? Connection in the midst of division? Healing in the midst of suffering?In Holy Chaos, interfaith leader, activist, and pastor Amanda Henderson reflects on the core principles of rooting down, embracing fear, engaging curiosity, showing up, accepting our brokenness, finding joy in each other, and letting go to chart a way forward with integrity and love.

1—I Still Love You: Getting to the Heart of the Matter

Standing on the rocky shore overlooking La Jolla Bay, I was observing pupping season in the bay, a time when dozens of seals come to the harbor to have their babies in a place free of predators. The day before, I had literally seen a seal birthing her pup on the beach. I had been watching the mama lying in the sand when suddenly there was a mess at her side including a brand new pup the size of a small dog, and a placenta, which quickly became fodder for the gulls battling overhead.

Today, it was time for swimming lessons. Mama seals and their pups dotted the bay, diving and bobbing. The mamas guided their pups up onto their backs and then let them slide back into the water. They alternately pushed the pups away and pulled them close with their flippers. I watched with delight, laughing aloud and full of awe. Then I noticed that unusually one of the mamas seemed to have two babies with her. Ah, there was another mama close by who must go with the additional pup. Suddenly the two-pup mama noticed the intruder and reared up, snarling and snapping and aggressively pushing herself away from the wandering pup. Startled, the wanderer returned to its own mama where it was quickly reprimanded and then coddled.

For me, it was a startling moment. The placid and loving mama turned so quickly into an angry defender. Of course, most animals do not accept those who are not of their own womb or their own pack. When they do, it makes the news. Remember Koko and her kittens? Taking in young who are not “of our pack” is typically a uniquely human endeavor. Perhaps caring for someone who is “not us” as much as we care for ourselves—with deep, generous care, compassion, and love—is an aspect of our human evolution.

* * * *

The moment with the seals yanked me back to my first moments and days as an adoptive mother. My husband and I had made the decision to adopt out of love. We had experienced the pregnancy and childbirth of “biological children,” and we felt we had more to give. We had been in a social justice Bible study group discussing globalization and poverty around the world. We were immersed in books about broken lives and broken systems. We also had long connections to the Philippines, the country where my husband was born at Clark Air Force Base. Lying in bed one night, with three-year-old and one-year-old daughters tucked safely in their respective beds, Kyle and I looked at each other and said nearly simultaneously, “We should adopt.” A piece of me knew this would be a more challenging route, but I thought I was up for it.

It was a sunny Monday morning, two years after that bedtime moment, when we got the call. I literally fell to my knees, feeling the gravity of the moment. We had been matched with a healthy little boy who had just turned one year old. He had been brought to a hospital in Bacolod City in the Philippines at about five days old. The hospital staff had searched without success for his birth mother or family. They had spent six months looking for a home for the boy in the Philippines, where one in four people live in desperate poverty, and where there are far more people than available resources. My most sincere prayer was that he had been held and loved through this time, and indeed he had been. At the same time, our broken and imbalanced world left no other options at that moment, and so he was added to the orphanage’s list of children looking for homes overseas. We were the lucky family chosen to love and care for him.

We arrived in Bacolod City on August 13, 2007, the morning after a quick flight from Manilla. It was warm and muggy as we drove to the orphanage. The sights and smells were familiar from our travels to other countries where poverty and life intermingle: the crowing of roosters and humming of motorcycle engines, the intermingling acrid and delicious smells of fires and street food, the colorful, clamorous vendors and markets lining the roads.

When we finally pulled up to the “Holy Infant Nursery Foundation,” my stomach fluttered with anticipation and nerves. Nursery staff invited us into the large room lined with cribs and cots. I looked into the wooden crib with peeling blue paint and no mattress and saw our baby wearing mint green shorts with a white tank top. He held a small pillow by his side. I knew those little feet from the picture we had been sent. I leaned into the crib and lifted his body to mine and held him for the first time, with tears running down my cheeks.

I held him for the next three hours as we waited for paperwork to be completed, and we dropped off suitcases full of clothes and toys and baby formula sent with us by our loving community back home. When all was complete, we said goodbye to Holy Infant Nursery, climbed in a jeepney, and began the next leg of our journey as a family.

The days and months that followed were filled with wonder, joy, confusion, and exhaustion. Our sweet boy seemed to bond quickly, but my heart was more challenging to crack. I was tired and sick (I had contracted giardia and hepatitis A after our trip), and that added to the challenge of raising three young children. In the months that followed, I learned things about myself I had never known and didn’t really want to know. I learned that I become angry and impatient and even have aggressive thoughts. The “self” I had imagined did not show up. Instead, a stranger took my place, a stranger who was depressed, disconnected, and overwhelmed. In that first year, I was forced to face my own demons, to accept that I was not the person or mother I had hoped I would be, and that my expectations were unrealistic and unattainable. These feelings mixed with immense guilt and profound responsibility for the amazing ones in my care. My heart broke.

My heart was broken by the realization of both my own inability to live into my expectations, and the painful realities in the world of poverty, imbalance, injustice, and exploitation, realities that daily affect the lives of individuals, families, and communities.

It took me a good while to come to terms with my broken heart.

Yet it was also during this time of brokenness that I came to live what one of my favorite thinkers, Parker Palmer, speaks about in his theories around the broken heart. Parker Palmer says:

There are at least two ways to picture a broken heart, using heart in its original meaning not merely as the seat of the emotions but as the core of our sense of self. The conventional image, of course, is that of a heart broken by unbearable tension into a thousand shards—shards that sometimes become shrapnel aimed at the source of our pain. Every day, untold numbers of people try to “pick up the pieces,” some of them taking grim satisfaction in the way the heart’s explosion has injured their enemies. Here the broken heart is an unresolved wound that we too often inflict on others.

But there is another way to visualize what a broken heart might mean. Imagine that small, clenched fist of a heart “broken open” into the largeness of life, into a higher capacity to hold one’s own and the world’s pain and joy. This, too, happens every day. Who among us has not seen evidence, in our own or other people’s lives, that compassion and grace can be the fruits of great suffering? Here heartbreak becomes a source of healing, enlarging our empathy and extending our ability to reach out.1

When my heart broke open, I became raw, vulnerable, free, and newly able to see the broader brokenness in the world. I asked fresh questions. I sought understanding in books and ideas and stories and in understanding the pain in the world with eyes wide open. During this time, I wound up feeling the call to seminary and to a new vocation—out of deep curiosity about life, meaning, and why the world is the way it is. Ultimately, my broken heart allowed me to see with new eyes and left me with a powerful, persistent longing to be in solidarity with the brokenhearted of the world.

* * * *

Back to the seals teaching the pups to swim in La Jolla Bay. As I watched the mama seal attack the other baby seal, I was both shocked and relieved. Relieved that I was not alone. For loving is hard work. At times we are not our best selves. We hurt and are angry and protective in ways that are not life-supporting. And it is ok. What I felt at that moment with the seals was grace. Loving outside of ourselves goes against thousands of years of training to guard ourselves and others. This loving outside of ourselves is the work of evolving to our deeper humanity. As I experienced through bringing a child into full inclusion and love from outside myself to inside myself, this is difficult and long-haul work. In the process, we learn things about ourselves that we really don’t want to know. Our hearts become broken. At our best, in that brokenness we become vulnerable to the pain, life, love, and joy that comes when we open our hearts and eyes to love beyond.

* * * *

Ultimately, loving beyond ourselves is the life task to which we are called, isn’t it? This is the central teaching in so many ...

Table of contents

• Praise for Holy Chaos
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Prelude
• 1—I Still Love You: Getting to the Heart of the Matter
• 2—First Things First: Seeking to Understand
• 3—Rootbound: Taking Time to Think
• 4—“I Can’t Breathe”: Seeing Fear
• 5—Embracing Curiosity: Wonder as an Act of Justice
• 6—Showing Up: Friendship as a Political Act
• 7—Broken: Messing Up
• 8—Cultivating Joy: Dance, Regardless
• 9—Letting Go, Holding On: What About My Family?
• 10—It Takes a Village: Building Community
• Conclusion: In It for the Long Haul
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author