Another Year of Being Human

Some fragmented thoughts on 2024, so many feelings, stained-glass windows, surrender, and the blessed shared light of someone else's lamp

Dec 31, 2024

December 31, 2024
Grand Rapids, Mich.

It’s been some year.

As 2024 sputters to a close, I have no “best of” lists to share with you—no round-up of my greatest writerly hits, no Spotify Wrapped, no impressive stats on step counts. I didn’t read 300 books this year, or 200, or 100, or even 50—and if we’re talking about books that I read for fun rather than for my studies, I’m pretty sure I didn’t finish enough even to give you a Top 10.

As I write to you, a light snow is falling here in West Michigan, on the last day of this calendar year as on the first. Time circles and cycles, and we return, though not quite unchanged.

It’s been some year of...

Resolution: After nearly eight years of waiting and fighting and asking and praying, I got ordained as a minister and made some big promises about fulfilling my ministerial duties “faithfully, diligently, and cheerfully.” Cheerfully? Yikes! Then, some months later, an official notice came from my denominational headquarters, except that the letter of congratulations and the accompanying ID card were for “Rev. Veronica Chu.” A clerical error, it turns out—and it did make me laugh. After all that? Depending on the source, “Veronica” can mean “true image” or “bringer of victory.”

Grief: We said goodbye to our dear Fozzie, who taught me new things about unconditional love. Of course he remains with us in a way, and I don’t even mean just in our memories; I keep finding his hair—in an unvacuumed corner of my study, on that coat I hadn’t worn since last winter, even inexplicably in my desk drawer.

Wonder: Tristan and I hiked in the Cotswolds, and we walked through the rain in the German countryside, and we wandered mountain paths in the Tyrolean Alps, and we were reminded of beauty’s omnipresence in this weird world.

The Seebensee, a lake in the Tyrolean Alps of Austria

Crankiness: When my nephews and I were at the Olympics in Paris, we went to see a couple of volleyball matches. Before play began, the deejays instructed us that, every time a player spiked the ball to win a point, they’d put on a particular song and we were supposed to raise our arms in the air and yell, in chorus, arms flapping: “Super spike! Super spike!” Did I participate? Absolutely not.

Feasting: Tomatoes and peppers and potatoes from our garden. My nephews’ first taste of escargot and mussels. So many delicious meals with friends, including my first Victoria sponge.

Disappointment— and satisfaction— and achievement— and worry— and delight— and anger— and gratitude— and envy— and elation— and pettiness— and repentance.

It’s been some year of navigating what it means to be human, sometimes in ways that feel exhaustingly, excruciatingly familiar and other times in a manner that seems disorientingly, wonderfully new. At moments, God has felt so shockingly near; more often, the divine has felt frustratingly far away. Which is to say that it was just another year, and also a year unlike any other.

In May, Tristan and I went on a pilgrimage of sorts to Tholey Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in a village in southwestern Germany. It is believed to be Germany’s oldest monastic community, mentioned in books as far back as the 7th century.

A few years ago, the monks asked the artist Gerhard Richter to redo the three stained-glass windows at the front of the church. The sanctuary was nearly empty during our visit, and I walked its length and width, looking at the windows from different angles. I’m not sure what I hoped to see, but I think I was trying to make sense of the colors and the patterns, as if the windows were stained-glass versions of those Magic Eye puzzles: What could I see? What does that look like—a blurry Persian carpet, a collection of terrifying masks, a kaleidoscope unspooled? What if I stood over here?

Eventually, I plopped into a pew and just stopped trying—trying to see anything in particular, trying to decipher, trying to try. And when I stopped trying and when I stopped moving, I saw what I hadn’t seen before: light that never stopped moving. It streamed through the colored glass, and it flickered when a cloud passed, and it danced with the shadows in the church.

It’s been some year of seeking out goodness and trying to see, but also of choosing to surrender and learning to let things be what they are. “We don’t know anything,” Richter said in an interview after the windows were completed. “So we believe.”

Come to think of it, I did read a book some months ago that I remember very well and that I loved very much: Claire Keegan’s Foster.

Foster seems a waif of a novel—just 92 pages—but there is such unexpected strength in that slim body. I don’t want to give too much away, in case you haven’t read it. To me, the book is about grief and loss, growth and love—in other words, what it means to be human.

There’s a scene in which the narrator, an unnamed girl of unspecified age, goes for a walk with John Kinsella, a relative with whom she’s staying for the summer: “We keep on walking until we come to a place where the cliffs and rocks come out to meet the water. Now that we can go no farther, we must turn back. Maybe the way back will somehow make sense of the coming,” she says. “We turn back along the beach and walk on, seeming to walk a greater distance than the one we crossed in reaching the place where we could not pass, and then the moon disappears behind a darkish cloud and we cannot see where we are going. At this point, Kinsella lets out a sigh, stops, and lights the lamp.”

I suppose it’s natural at the close of a calendar year, now that we can go no farther in those pages, to turn back to somehow make sense of the coming. What I notice is that, again and again, when I could not see where I was going, someone else lit a lamp—often my beloved Tristan, still other times one of my dearest friends. On occasion it has been one of you dear readers, who have written to share a thought or a recipe, a fierce exhortation or a gentle encouragement.

It’s been some year of disappearing moons and darkish clouds—and lamps lit and held up by others. Though I have few expectations for 2025, I imagine it will not be too different from 2024. My hope and my prayer for you is that you will know that you don’t walk these paths alone. When it feels as if you can’t see, may you know the consolation of companionship and the comfort of shared light. And when it feels as if you can, may you lend your steadying hand, your sympathetic sigh, and your strong shoulder to someone who needs them.

How are you feeling as we turn the page on 2024 and greet 2025? What can I be remembering in prayer on your behalf, whether in yearning or in celebration?

Notes of a Make-Believe Farmer

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