Slowing Down to the Speed of Love

Some fragmented thoughts on the gift of slowness, the challenge of loving and being loved, the ruthless queen of the snow monkeys, and the film The Power of the Dog

Friday, January 21
East Sandwich, Massachusetts

Greetings, dear reader.

Do you know those days where everything feels a bit off? Yesterday was like that for me. The weather decided to be unrelentingly drab. Fozzie hasn’t been feeling his best. And the moment I sat down at my laptop, I was swamped with regret: avalanche season in my inbox.

What sweet relief, then, about two hours into my workday when my friend Micha Boyett called. She lives, with her husband, Chris, and their boys, in New Jersey, and I’d been hoping to catch up with her about life. I also wanted to hear how her work has been going. Micha is a beautiful writer—her book Found: A Story of Questions, Grace, and Everyday Prayer is worth reading if those things named in the subtitle appeal to you—and started a newsletter called The Slow Way last year. Last month, she launched a podcast too, also named The Slow Way. 

Micha is someone I’d love for you to know just a little bit. To be around her is to be embraced by her tenderness, but don’t misunderstand: her tenderness has spine and substance. She’s fiercely gentle and gently fierce.

Both incarnations of The Slow Way grew out of years of wrestling and reflection as Micha examined the source of her own worth. “It’s difficult for me to see that I have value outside of what I do,” she told me. This is obviously not uncommon in a society that so often conflates what you do with who you are. Productivity and performance are two of our most beloved idols, in the workplace and in the rest of our lives. 

Micha sees a pattern etched into the life of her soul even in her earliest years: “Going back to my evangelical childhood—I think of the number of times I cried in bed while I was worried that I hadn’t really accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior—everything was reliant on me and on my ability to get things right,” she said. I thought I heard wry regret creeping into her voice. And she admitted that, as much as she’d like to say otherwise, she hasn’t entirely shed those old habits: “As much as I’d rejected that idea in my adulthood, there are so many deep levels of feeling that we have to perform in order to get God to accept us. We do these things or we don’t do these things, and God is either pleased or not pleased.”

Six years ago, Micha and Chris welcomed their third son, Ace, who has Down syndrome and is also autistic. Ace has become one of Micha’s great teachers. He has helped her reimagine concepts like “performance,” “success,” even “love.” “To really sit with the fact that I have a child who may never speak—and to think about how I can’t even really know how much he understands of the world around him—yet I know how much I love him and I know how valuable his life is, and that love has nothing to do with his ability to perform for me,” she said. “Experiencing that on such a gut level as his mom, I have also had to lean all the way into a God who is not impressed with my performance or my abilities or what I do or don’t do—a God who is just in love with me.”

Micha with her ridiculously lovely family

I found it incredibly moving when Micha said that her newsletter and her podcast are expressions of “my tenderness toward our culture of striving and accomplishing and living frantically and filling our calendars and trying to be enough.” But as much as I write and talk about love, I’ll be honest: It’s hard for me to believe that God “is just in love with me,” as Micha put it. Sure, I can accept our collective belovedness; for God so loved the world, right? I’m totally on board, too, intellectually and theologically with the idea of a God who adores each and every one of God’s creatures. But sometimes there’s a seemingly unbridgeable gulf between your brain agreeing with an idea and your heart assenting to its truth, such that you feel it in your marrow. 

Micha co-hosts, with two other moms of kids with Down syndrome, another podcast called The Lucky Few. Not long ago, on assignment for The Lucky Few, she went to a conference for mothers of children with Down syndrome. She was there to ask attendees one question: What does success look like for your child? “That was a really powerful question to ask,” she said. “There were so many tears. Everybody has had to redefine it.” 

Success is tough to redefine. “All of our culture is obsessed with success, and even in those subcultures where we’ve tried to redefine it, we’re still obsessed with the ‘winners.’ Even in the Down syndrome world, there’s such a tendency to say, ‘Look what all these super people with Down syndrome have done. Here’s one who ran a marathon! Here’s one who swam the English Channel!” Micha said. “When it comes to Ace, I’ve done a lot of work to say that what success looks like for him is just to love and to be loved.”

To love and to be loved.

How beautiful it would be for that to be the bar of success for all of us. How devastating that it isn’t the measure already.

To love and to be loved.

Even as she made that a goal for her son, Micha struggled to envision it for herself. She stopped writing for five years after giving birth to Ace: “I’m still working through that. I still feel failure and frustration around that.”

Now that Micha has resumed writing, Ace remains a force of creativity in her life. For one thing, he models a patient attentiveness to the surrounding world. Last summer, the family was visiting Chris’s mom, who has a prolific flower garden. “There were just bees everywhere,” Micha told me. “Ace would stand so still, because he was so fascinated by the bees. At times, I was terrified they would sit on his hand. He did not care! He just wanted to touch them. That deliberateness of standing so still—I’ve never seen someone able to do that. So I’m learning to go at his pace.” 

Ace and Micha

In her newsletter and on her podcast, Micha shares some of the learnings of choosing that gentler pace. She offers practices of slowness. She guides us through prayer—but prayer that isn’t performance. “It’s not words that you ought to say. It’s not asking for the right things. It’s not even necessarily giving glory to God, whatever that means,” she said. In the Godly Play curriculum often used in Sunday schools, there’s a phrase deployed alongside some stories from Scripture: “This person came so close to God, and God came so close to them.” That resonates deeply with Micha. “I want prayer to be coming so close to God, and God coming so close to us, that we feel rested. That we can transform our vision of ourselves and of others. That we can see the truth that we’re hiding from ourselves and the truth that the world might be hiding from us. I want to give people fifteen minutes a week of believing that God wants to come close to them.”

This is not always an easy, warm, or fuzzy experience. The countercultural slowness that Micha encourages means taking the time to be honest with ourselves about our desires and motivations. It means gentle but ruthless examination of our fears and habits, our patterns and processes. Exposure, even to oneself, even in unfolding to God’s love, can feel raw. As Micha wrote in a November installment of her newsletter, “The choice to slow it all down is not necessarily a choice to make life more enjoyable or exciting.” Indeed, often, it means that we choose to see life as it actually is—“more real, less sanitized, exposed. When we can’t fast forward through to the other side, we have to feel the reality of this moment, its joy and its grief. The slow way forces us to move through to the other side at the speed of love. And love will break your heart sometimes.”

I should tell you that Micha wrote those words as love was breaking her heart. The invitation to slowness comes with an extra sting when you’re confronting something that so many of us would rather rush past: grief. 

Micha’s father, Mike, was diagnosed with brain cancer last January. During 2021, Micha returned repeatedly to Amarillo, Texas, where she grew up and where most of her family still lives, to spend time with her dad and mom. 

As her dad’s health declined, he lost both his appetite and his speech. Micha told me that she experienced something unexpected and unusual—“this profound and beautiful time of mothering my dad.” And here, again, she had Ace as a teacher and an unexpected guide. “Because I have a nonverbal kid, I somehow felt prepared for what my dad needed—as if I could read some of what he might have been trying to tell me.” She found herself drawing on skills she’d learned from rearing Ace. “My dad’s head would really hurt—who knows what the tumor was doing in there. So I’d sit next to him, and he would work really hard to get his hand up to his head, and I’d put my hand on his head with some oil, and he’d move his hand from place to place to show me where it hurt, and we’d do that for hours. It felt a lot like what I’d learned with Ace, who takes my hand and shows me what he wants.” 

Micha’s dad died on December 16. In the aftermath of that loss, slowness has taken on yet more contours, yet a different shape—this time, in the form of attention to her own needs and desires amidst grief. This is no easy thing for someone who was reared, in her own words, to be “a good Southern Baptist Texas girl. I have perfected being pleasant! So it’s been hard for me to know in some moments if I’m really okay, or if I’m just good at not making people feel uncomfortable.”

Not long ago, she was chatting with two dear friends in California whom she sees once or twice a month on Zoom. They hadn’t spoken since her father died. “I was just normal, and we had a conversation about everything else. Then I got off, and I was so sad. I started crying. I said to Chris: I can’t believe they didn’t ask me how I was doing,” she recalled. Chris asked: What was the vibe you were putting off? She replied: I was acting just fine. And he said gently: Well, maybe you should think about that.

So she did. Eventually, she confessed to her friends that she had been really sad. They told her that they thought she had just not wanted to talk about her dad or grief or any of it, so they were trying to be normal too. 

Sometimes slowness can mean taking the time and energy to parse one’s own complicated feelings—and then to fight through the thickets of insecurity and doubt to share candidly with the people you love, the people who love you, what you’re really thinking and what you’re really needing, especially in those seasons of grief. “Grief is a slow process and grief is a weird process,” Micha said. “It hits you in weird ways and it expresses itself in weird ways, and it is sometimes impossible to read—and that was really important for me to realize. My friends love me and want to be there for me, but I have to tell them what I need, especially because I’m really good at hiding it even from myself.” 

To love and to be loved.

Sometimes slowness can mean pausing just long enough to recognize that loving and being loved is at once lavish grace and tremendous labor, precious privilege and damn hard work. To have the chance—I might even dare say the calling—to give love and to receive it is both the blessing and the challenge of being human. What else do we have?

What I’m Listening to: My music-listening habits tend to be seasonal, and I don’t know why, but I keep coming back to Dolly Parton lately. The other day, I confessed to my friend Hana that I really don’t like “Jolene.” Note to “Jolene” stans: This is not an invitation to convince me. Anyway, Hana asked me which Dolly songs were my favorites. My list has to include “Light of a Clear Blue Morning,” “Here You Come Again,” and “Tennessee Mountain Home.” But the one that has been speaking—singing?—most directly to me is “Travelin’ Thru.” I still have not gotten over the fact that, at the 2006 Oscars, “Travelin’ Thru” was nominated for Best Original Song and lost to “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp.” (The 2006 Oscars were notoriously special; that was the year Crash beat out Brokeback Mountain for Best Picture.) To my ears, “Travelin’ Thru” sounds like the modern psalm I need right now: “Like the poor wayfaring stranger that they speak about in song/ I’m just a weary pilgrim trying to find my own way home/ Oh, sweet Jesus, if you’re out there, keep me ever close to you/ As I’m travelin’, travelin’, travelin’, as I’m travelin’ thru.”

What I’m Reading: At a nature reserve in Japan, a snow monkey named Yakei made history, becoming the first female in 70 years to upend the patriarchal system and become her troop’s alpha. I am here for the snow-monkey drama... I think? Yakei scares me: “Last April, she beat up her own mother to claim top spot among the females. While most females would be content there, Yakei continued to fight.”  

Queen

What I’m Watching: Since I mentioned the Oscars above: Last year was, thanks to the pandemic, the first year of my adulthood during which I watched none of the nominated movies. This year, I think we’ll have at least one. Have you seen The Power of the Dog? It’s on Netflix, so we watched it last weekend. Takeaways for me:

1. Humility, because even after my Bible-heavy, evangelical childhood and three years of seminary, I couldn’t place the scriptural allusion in the title. It comes from Psalm 22 (“my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”), from a section ending at verse 20:

For dogs are all around me;
a company of evildoers encircles me.
My hands and feet have shriveled;
I can count all my bones.
They stare and gloat over me;
they divide my clothes among themselves,
and for my clothing they cast lots.
But you, O Lord, do not be far away!
O my help, come quickly to my aid!
Deliver my soul from the sword,
my life from the power of the dog!

2. So much visual beauty! Gorgeous scenery. Captivating cinematography.

3. Kodi Smit-McPhee does a phenomenal, beguiling job.

4. Kirsten Dunst might have been better in Bring It On? 😬 Yeah, I really said that. 😬

---

That’s it for this week. Sorry I was a bit late. If you have any reactions, thoughts, or responses to any of the above, from your take on The Power of the Dog (no spoilers, please!) to your wonderings about choosing a slower way, please share. It’s always wonderful to hear from you.

I’m so glad we can stumble through all this together, and I’ll try to write again soon.

Yours,
Jeff