"blessed" are the achey
a bite-sized q&a with author micha boyett
It’s a dumb thing to compare blessings, but I do it anyway.
I met Micha back when I was a book publicist in San Francisco. I wasn’t even her book publicist but her brother’s. You’re not supposed to have favorites as a publicist, but he was one of mine, and when he implied I’d love her, who I was to argue? I met Micha at a Mexican restaurant off Market, and I was smitten. It didn’t hurt that my partner and hers hit it off too, despite a foot of height difference.
Some fifteen-plus years later, writing festivals and fellowships shared, parenting hopes and heartaches traded, Micha is one of my most trusted practical theologians. She’s nerdy about footnotes. She’s earnest about feedback. (I’m in a Mastermind with her; she’s brilliant and with a poetry MFA to boot.) And she lives what she preaches; in February, I got to be an anthropologist in her own home, and it was just as I imagined. Awesome and awkward and unruly.
You’re not supposed to do this, but I did: I mapped each of my three kids on to each of her three (including a son with disabilities) and was sufficiently convinced we were kindreds. And if she was calling the achey limits of her life “blessed”? The least I could do was try and follow suit. Keep reading for a bite-sized interview on how she’s redefining “blessed” for the rest of us.
Erin Lane: What is your favorite thing about being an adult?
Micha Boyett: My favorite thing about being an adult is the freedom I feel to be “magnificently” myself (to quote Andy Crouch’s definition of a flourishing life, which I only just read last week in Lore Wilbert’s new book). There are the outward things: Freedom to love what is good for my whole self, like barre class and naps and gardening. And, finally, embracing the truth of my heart: that french fries are the best food always and forever, and I don’t have to pretend anymore that it was ever anything else.
There’s also the invisible parts of being an adult: Wendell Berry called it “being at peace and in place.” I love that invitation to stability. I have moved a lot in my adulthood, but this last move four years ago has given me the freedom to settle down in a space that I’m not renting. And I’ve found a lot of meaning in stewarding the little bit of garden and grass we have, and receiving the house we live in (which is 160 years old) for all its stories and all the lives it’s held. I’m thinking about this because the fifty-year-old rose bush that grows on an ancient fence is blooming this week. I feel so connected to its life, like I’m part of its beautiful big story, connected to all the hands that cared for it before me.
I think what I’m trying to say is: Being an adult is freeing me from floating above the world or my body, convincing myself that I am only what I do or accomplish, that I am only my hustle or influence. Being an adult means that I am allowed to be smaller, more rooted, and can use my gifts and my presence in a way that grows deeper and lasts longer, even if it’s not as flashy as I once thought it should be.
Erin: You wrote a book! Tell us! What shitty script were you trying to tear up?
Micha: I wanted to tear up a script about blessing in Blessed are the Rest of Us. The word blessed is so fraught for me. And you don’t exist long in Christian spaces before it’s used transactionally, often manipulatively. Is blessing something we can earn by somehow becoming enough to earn divine affection? Who gets to be blessed? And if we use it transactionally, don’t we have to believe that God blesses the wealthy, healthy, and confident? Are you blessed only if your kids are successful and obedient, if you live in a comfortable house, if you get to go to Hawaii for vacation? Who decides what blessing is?
Much of this book centers around becoming the mother of a child with multiple disabilities, and struggling with the reactions of others to his existence. After he was born, I realized many people reacted to his life with pity, seeing him mostly as a burden. And then there was the opposite reaction. All the over-the-top memes about how our child would be an angel on earth, living just to inspire and transform lives: “A blessing.”
Both views diminished his humanity. Both were the overflow of our ableist culture. My son is perfectly human and deserves to be seen as fully valuable, with a life that belongs to himself: Not as an angel here to inspire, and absolutely not as a burden. And I needed to rewrite for myself what a blessing is and learn how to celebrate my son who actually is a critique of that transactional idea of blessing, simply by being “magnificently himself.”
Erin: Okay. Now flip it. What truer, weirder story did you set out to write instead?
Micha: I found my way to the words of Jesus in the process of advocating for my son’s full human value. And the more time I spent with Jesus’s quirky poem at the beginning of his longest recorded sermon, the more I found my own humanity and value.
In the Beatitudes in Matthew 5, I found a kindred connection with Jesus’s words. There was something so real and human about this passage. He was using blessing, but not the way church culture tends to use it—as a feel good, God-is-on-our-side narrative. Very little is comfortable about the way Jesus uses blessings in this passage. There’s no healthy, wealthy or pain-free ideas here. It’s all ache, weakness, and yearning.
These words of Jesus gave me the language to define my child’s worth, and to make sense of what to do with my own limits and longings. In Jonathan Pennington’s book The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing, he makes the case that the Beatitudes are part of a greater oratory tradition used by Greco-Roman Virtue poets. And in this tradition, the speaker would attempt to expound on the idea of “the good life.” How do we live an authentically happy human existence?
In the Beatitudes, that’s what Jesus is attempting to do. He’s using this oratory tradition to turn the notion of the good life upside down. What does it mean to flourish, to be whole? Who gets to claim wholeness? How do we move toward true happiness?
He’s taking the old script of blessing—that it belongs to the people who already have it together, who are already happy, who don’t struggle—and he’s shredding the whole thing up. Blessing belongs to the rest of us, because blessing is the movement toward wholeness that comes through very real sorrow, weakness, and longing.
Erin: Writing—and Christianity—is about the threat of resurrection. What is the scariest thing about bringing this book to life?
Micha: The reality of how new life actually works in the world is that the Holy Spirit’s work is almost always slow and steady. Every once in a while we get to see a divine flashbang, but it’s rare.
I love gardening. Not necessarily for the end result, but because I find a lot of peace in the process. I like how things grow. There’s a sturdiness in the metaphor of it all. And most of the time in this world, resurrection is a threat because it moves so slowly in the darkness. My friend Jayne Sugg has a new song about the darkness of buried seeds I’ve been listening to all week. And I’ve been reading Lore Wilbert’s book about the beautiful and holy mystery of the forest floor, how all the nutrients in the soil depend on centuries of dead and decaying trees. Resurrection is sometimes a threat because it comes through the slow ache of transformation. We humans always push back on the ache of resurrection, especially when it involves decay and darkness.
Erin: Publishing a book is a shiny milestone! What is something less shiny about a life well-lived you’re celebrating this week?
Micha: I am celebrating that my peonies are blooming. It’s the season of cut flowers on every table in my house, and I’m doing my best to be present for it!
P.S. Want to celebrate Micha for doing her work and sharing her story? If so, consider joining me in donating to a nonprofit she loves: The Ahli Arab Hospital. It was bombed in Gaza, but its workers are still creating clinics in needed areas like Rafah. Go to this page and choose the Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza in the dropdown menu.
P.P.S. Want to explore more about the history of #blessed? Fellow Duke Divinity colleague Kate Bowler is one of my favorite’s on the limits of the prosperity Gospel. Check out her seminal book on the subject or listen to her most depressing and lovely podcast.
P.P.P.S. The best way you can support an author is to enjoy their work. Buy, borrow, or lend Micha’s book to whomever you can. (Bonus points for leaving a review.) Or follow her Substack, the Slow Way, a weekly letter for the frantic strivers, serial doers, and weary achievers among us.
