It has been two weeks, and it is time to write in about your experiences with the “How Can I Help?” challenge from two weeks ago: talking to someone you love about things that you believe but are intimidated to tell them.  I will write about my own experience(s) tomorrow, but I want to hear about yours so post them as comments to this entry. They can be long! (It should be obvious by now that I don’t mind that!)

For the first summer in five, I am not working at a place called Birch Creek Boys Ranch in Spring City, Utah. I miss it.

 Birch Creek Boys Ranch was born Bennion Teton Boys Ranch in Driggs, Idaho. It was founded by Lowell Bennion as a way to teach normal, everyday kids how to work hard, play outside, and help their neighbors. If you are Mormon and don’t know Lowell Bennion, you have a lot of Mormoning to do. Okay, joking, but he is a hero of living a religious life with great and expansive spirit. He wanted to reinvigorate the religion of simplicity and service, and he used the ranch to teach people how to make their lives an elegant economy of gratitude and giving.

The boys ranch (and now a girls ranch) where I have spent my past five summers grew out of Lowell’s prescription: Every morning, we wake up early, eat a good breakfast, and spend four hours working. We divide our time between our own ranch and the community, some days building our straw bale lodge and other days helping a farmer buck bales of hay. By the end of the summer, we have repaired fences, painted barns, cleaned sheep pens, or sledgehammered something for every farmer within twenty miles. We are strong and tan and we feel good.

Afternoons, we see what games we can make from the things we have. We cut plastic tubing into shooters, nail together scrapwood into bunkers, and play a vicious round of marshmallow war. We draw. We play dominoes in the sun. At night, we have artists, thinkers, and musicians come and show us how to rethink (re-draw, re-hear) the world. We play frisbee as the sky goes dark. Weekends are camping, hiking, waking up to the sky. 

Sundays are my favorite. Sunday is Chapel in the Pines.

Chapel in the Pines is actually Chapel in the Junipers. There are benches facing a big rock, and a question–a different question every week. There is “Why do or don’t I believe in God?”, ”What’s the most important thing?”, “What I can offer that no one else can?”, and “How can I learn to love?” We go up to the rock, stand on it, scuff our toes, look out at the audience, put our hands deep in our pockets, and say something we really mean (which is my definition of sabbath, as far as I can tell). But every year, there is always one question, a nod to Lowell. His favorite question: ”How Can I Help?”

And we stand on the rock and try, we think really hard. We think days and weeks and months in advance, and we try to articulate how we might do something good, something that will last for someone, even if that someone is just us.

Lowell used to answer the phone that way: “How can I help?”, and that one question gave people permission to unfold, to ask for something they could not have asked for from someone else. Lowell’s family said their vacations were never really vacations. Three hours into it, Lowell would have already found someone whose house needed painting or whose garden needed weeding or whose wallet needed moneying or fridge, fooding. And so that’s what they would do instead.

I am saying all this because I have been thinking about Lowell and how much a person I’ve never met has affected me. I am thinking about how many blessings even I contain, and how much I could give that I do not give and how much the giving I do manage might someday help someone I have never met to give also. I am saying this because I miss standing on a rock and committing myself to being a blessing,  a future of blessing to someone else.

So I am doing three things. First, I am standing on this rock, the Internet, and committing myself to being a person who helps to ease hardship–any sort. Second, I am writing postcards and sending them off to strange and familiar people. The postcards have phrases on them, phrases that people have said to me in my life, things said maybe even in passing but that have disproportionately affected who I’ve become. I am asking these people to send their own phrases on to the people who have said words that have blessed the person they now recognize as themselves, and I am asking them to send these phrases back to me. So that I can make a web, of postcards and string, between one act of loveliness and the next, and all the influences and braveries in between. So I can remember to see the world that way.

Second, I am starting a tradition on my blog. Every couple of weeks, I will put up a post called How Can I Help? It will be in honor of Lowell, a person I have never met, a phrase on a postcard many strings away that has swung down, on strings, to bless me eight or fifteen or fifty postcards later. The How Can I Help? posts will be part of an experiment, a single experiment that will hopefully turn into a group kind of magic. I will write every two weeks with a challenge to help in some way. Some will not be concrete; some will demand an act of bravery; some will be political; some will ask you to change an old habit. They will all be done in the spirit of the following belief: that there are ideas, people, and movements out there that need our help, and that I can use this small blog to orchestrate a big help–that with the knowledge of a problem, we can combine into a great force and meet that problem boldly.

After I post the How Can I Help? post, you will have two weeks to complete the challenge. As you complete it (or whenever the two weeks expires), you can log on and post a comment describing your experience. They do not have to be positive responses, just honest.  I want to catalogue our great effort, whatever it costs or however poorly or greatly it works.

So: Here is the first challenge, and it may seem (after all my cheerleading) somewhat oblique. You might say, “How is this helping? I thought I was going to give bread to a homeless person or something.” Well, that one is probably in the offing, but today’s challenge is different. I want to start with a daring prospect: the prospect of deliberately trying to communicate what we believe to the people closest to us.

I believe that one of the most difficult things is to break through the usual character of familial love–which, in my experience, is accomplished mainly through inference and a silent kind of knowing–to explain the things we usually keep quiet, to dare to actually voice something we believe and to have the arduous but beautiful conversation of discovering what someone else believes, and why.

The challenge, then, is this: Call someone in your family–someone you love but someone to whom you are scared, in some way, to express your beliefs. Tell them something you believe. Ask them what they believe in return. Have that conversation, back and forth, until it is actually over. Be willing to listen but also to disagree. Do this with love.

Write back about it.

I did my version of the challenge today. I talked to my dad about single payer health care. This may seem silly, but we both worked hard to do it. It was brutal and wonderful. I will write more about it later.

Love,

Ash

P.S. Thanks to Thelma Young for doing something brave like this and for inspiring me to finally brave up and do my own version of it.