When I write, I take my rings off. They’re both just a bit big on me, especially in the winter when my fingers shrink up in the cold, and it’s hard to write with them sliding around. One of them I bought from a vendor in Rome, when I went on pilgrimage on the Way of St Francis. I was so proud of myself, dickering the price down. It’s a metal ring with a teal stone, bent out of shape by catching on corners of cabinets and desk edges. It’s way too big. I bought it for my ring finger, but I’d been hiking for 6 weeks, so my fingers were swollen and I didn’t take that into account. Now it hangs around on my thump, biting into the base of my thumb a little and sometimes leaving a little indent.
My other ring is a maybe topaz, maybe aquamarine, probably glass costume jewelry, from my grandmother on my mom’s side. She had mostly costume jewelry — big tacky clip on earrings, huge dangling necklaces and bangles. She was flashy and extra. No one would ever accuse Sylvia of being tasteful. Bless. I’ve never gotten this ring professionally evaluated, because it’s probably just glass, but I love it so much, and don’t want anyone to tell me that it is, perhaps, something she picked up at Walmart.
Or maybe she picked it up in Italy. She won the Price is Right back in the 60s, all the way to a trip to Italy. She won a lot of other odd stuff too. She won a 1960’s video camera, and a set of connected, folding canvas chairs that a very large family could take to a football game or — something? When Sylvia passed away, the grandkids pulled the folding chair shenanigan out of the attic, and all dressed up for her funeral, made silly faces in the Price is Right chair in her driveway.
I’m not sure if she would have approved or not. She did like being extra, but I don’t know if she would have tolerated silliness on a day when we were supposed to be extremely sad because she had left us. She was a glamorous matriarch. She liked to be the one to set the mood.
My oldest cousin, who’s very good at genealogy, spent a lot of time trying to track down that Price is Right footage, but they don’t keep those kinds of things. I would have loved to see a young Sylvia flirting with Bob Barker, because she did love to flirt. All the way to the final prize, a big trip to Italy, back when people couldn’t just hop a plane to Europe with the relative ease we can now.
I wish I’d asked her more about that trip. I remember her telling me about how the men would whistle at her all the time. This is what Sylvia remembered most about her time in Italy, the land of her heritage—the men there thought she was very cute.
I used to imagine that this cheap maybe-topaz and maybe-blue-glass ring was a gift from an elegant suitor in Italy. Ten years later, I know that’s balderdash, because if it had been a gift from an elegant suitor in Italy, we would have all heard about it, non-stop.
I spent most of seminary losing my ring, because I’d take it off to write and then fool with it while I was writing — twirling and fiddling with it, dropping it, forgetting to pick it up, putting it in my pants pockets and the losing it in the wash.
If I kept my rings on while I wrote, it might be a bit easier to not lose them so often. But I like writing with free fingers, fast fingers, no bracelets or rings and sleeves rolled up and usually barefoot. I like writing unencumbered.
Sometimes I wish I could do that in my writing, too— put together disembodied words about a disembodied faith, writing about Jesus and grace and hope and faith and leave myself out of it entirely, taking off these pieces of my history when I write and leaving them gently on the desk, and then when I’m done, pick them up and put them back on, no worse for the wear.
Well, the pieces of ourselves might not get worse for the wear when we take them off in our spirituality, but sometimes our spirituality is worse for the wear—worse for the not wear, I guess. It can feel easy to gently ignore pieces of ourselves to present a crisper, streamlined version of our spiritual lives to ourselves, stripped of things that make us people — people that Jesus not only came to save, but came to be like.
Those stories are part of us—whether we love the stories or not, whether they feel integral to our lives or entirely irrelevant. These stories are part of our spirituality, woven into our relationship with God and our relationship with ourselves, whether we notice and acknowledge that tapestry of history or not.
We can’t just take them off to move through our spirituality “unencumbered.”
My Italian grandmother Sylvia passed away the day after my birthday, ten years ago this week. We joked (darkly but with much love) that she was actually aiming for my birthday, because she knew somewhere, SOMEONE was having a party that wasn’t about her, and that, she simply could not tolerate. I inherited her kitchen stained-glass Serenity Prayer; a single bell from her bell collection; her love of going barefoot; her excitement about her birdfeeders; her love of lobster; her passion for reading tea leaves and loving Jesus and believing that He spoke to her in dreams; the way she talked about Jesus like a fully human person who carried on conversations with her all day long, as she fought to maintain her too-big house and too-big garden all alone on the seacoast of New Hampshire. Perhaps I also inherited her immeasurably high excitement about a good gossip; and her rigid insistence that her political views were the only moral political views; and how much she liked to show off when she was on a roll being hilarious and everyone was watching her.
And this ring, this maybe-glass maybe-topaz ring that I wear when I don’t write, and sometimes try to wear now when I do. Presence to the moment is a spiritual practice, but so is presence to the past that made us and is still making us. We are all our pieces.
Being so absolutely entirely human and beholden to our stories is not a disadvantage to overcome in order to be more spiritual or access our highest self or achieve unencumbered spiritual access to the Holy.
This being so human is where Jesus meets us, in His own so human body with His own so human stories and genealogies and histories. And everywhere Jesus meets us is the best and most holy ground.