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March 15 - March 30, 2019
You’ll find me talking a lot about waiting, for in many ways waiting is the missing link in the transformation process.
I’m not referring to waiting as we’re accustomed to it, but waiting as the passionate and contemplative crucible in which new life and spiritual wholeness can be birthed.
My deepest hope is that you’ll read not only with your mind but also with your heart, for that is when God strikes music and life into any author’s words.
I was standing on the shifting ground of midlife, having come upon that time in life when one is summoned to an inner transformation, to a crossing over from one identity to another. When change-winds swirl through our lives, especially at midlife, they often call us to undertake a new passage of the spiritual journey: that of confronting the lost and counterfeit places within us and releasing our deeper, innermost self—our true self. They call us to come home to ourselves, to become who we really are. That winter of my discontent, I had no real idea of any of this. I was mystified by the
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I should have remembered, though, that the life of the spirit is never static.
That’s the sacred intent of life, of God—to move us continuously toward growth, toward recovering all that is lost and orphaned within us and restoring the divine image imprinted on our soul.
Each day I went about my responsibilities as always, writing through the morning and early afternoon, picking my children up from school, answering mail, shopping for groceries, cooking—plowing through the never-ending list of duties. I’ve always been accomplished at being dutiful (even during a crisis). Outwardly I appeared just fine. Inside I was in turmoil.
Is it possible, I asked myself, that I’m being summoned from some deep and holy place within? Am I being asked to enter a new passage in the spiritual life—the journey from false self to true self? Am I being asked to dismantle old masks and patterns and unfold a deeper, more authentic self—the one God created me to be? Am I being compelled to disturb my inner universe in quest of the undiscovered being who clamors from within?
In our youth we set up inner myths and stories to live by, but around the midlife juncture these patterns begin to crumble. It feels to us like a collapsing of all that is, but it’s a holy quaking. “When order crumbles,” writes John Shea, “Mystery rises.”
Live the question, God whispered. That was the moment the knowledge descended into my heart and I understood. Really understood. Crisis, change, all the myriad upheavals that blister the spirit and leave us groping—they aren’t voices simply of pain but also of creativity. And if we would only listen, we might hear such times beckoning us to a season of waiting, to the place of fertile emptiness.
On it was a golden butterfly, its wings spread against a blaze of sky. “Your soul is your greatest work of art,” the caption read. As I looked more closely, however, I noticed in the bottom lefthand corner of the poster the husk of an empty cocoon, a painful reminder that bright wings and works of art don’t just happen. They require the courage to let go and spin the chrysalis. In soulmaking we can’t bypass the cocoon. Wherever there are bright new wings, there’s always the husk of waiting somewhere in the corner.
One day, while I was reading in the Gospels, it occurred to me that when important times of transition came for Jesus, he entered enclosures of waiting—the wilderness, a garden, the tomb. Jesus’ life was a balanced rhythm of waiting on God and expressing the fruits of that waiting.
For over a year I lived and worked inwardly with the symbology of caterpillar, chrysalis, and butterfly. I accepted them as God’s gift to me—healing symbols that went beyond the usual sentimentality attached to them. We tend to forget, I think, the power of a symbol to mediate grace and move us toward change.
Somehow we’ve lost this important secret in the spiritual life—that in “stayed-ness,” as George Fox called it, we find the realm for transformation. In the stayed-ness of waiting we find everything we need in order to grow.
Waiting patiently in expectation is the foundation of the spiritual life. SIMONE WEIL
When you’re waiting, you’re not doing nothing. You’re doing the most important something there is. You’re allowing your soul to grow up. If you can’t be still and wait, you can’t become what God created you to be.”
Apparently such information is important to a society that places its highest premium on the quick and easy.
It was inevitable that the lure of the quick and easy would seep into religion. Our churches have filled up with people looking for sudden and painless paths to change and growth—for what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace.” A lot of us have spent our lives in shortcut religion. We haven’t been willing to face the fact that while the spiritual journey is joyous and full, it’s also long and hard. It asks much—too much sometimes.
Anthony Bloom reminds us that the aim of prayer is nothing less than a “deep change in the whole of our personality.” As Thomas. Merton says, our commitment is to become “a completely new person.”
What has happened to our ability to dwell in unknowing, to live inside a question and coexist with the tensions of uncertainty?
Creativity flourishes not in certainty but in questions. Growth germinates not in tent dwelling but in upheaval. Yet the seduction is always security rather than venturing, instant knowing rather than deliberate waiting.
Not a word about the desert that lies between our wounds and our healing, our questions and our answers, our departure and our arrival. Nothing about the slow, sacred rhythms of spiritual becoming or the spiral of descent and ascent that make up waiting.
If you don’t show up prepared to wait, you may miss the transcendent when it happens.
Anne Wilson Schaef maintains that “process addictions” occur when a person becomes hooked on a specific series of actions in order to avoid inner pain or inner growth. In her book When Society Becomes an Addict, she refers to watching television, running, accumulating money, and working, among other activities, as processes that can become addictive.
The natural gradient in us is toward growth. Whatever we use repeatedly and compulsively to stop that growth is our particular addiction. An addictive behavior “keeps us unaware of what is going on inside us,”
Likewise, latching onto easy, quick-fix solutions becomes a way of escaping the slow pain of uncertainty and self-confrontation. It helps us avoid the misery of wading through the inner mire toward change.
We might complain (though that complaint is often hard to distinguish from boasting) of how pushed and hurried we feel, but we can’t seem to extricate ourselves from the frenzy. We’re unable to truly see that “there is more to life than increasing its speed,” as Gandhi put it.
“I think I’d rather die than have time on my hands.” Addictions always lead us to death.
“Contemplative waiting is consenting to be where we really are,” he explained. “People recoil from it because they don’t want to be present to themselves. Such waiting causes a deep existential loneliness to surface, a feeling of being disconnected from oneself and God. At the depths there is fear, fear of the dark chaos within ourselves.”
At the moment, saving time wasn’t the issue. What mattered was avoiding the misery of standing still.
All lines must keep moving. That’s one of the primary rules of modernity. Movement is a kind of diversion from our inner misery. Without the stimulation of forward motion, we’re troubled by thoughts we usually keep at bay.
Counselor Helen Luke cautions that without significant times to be still, we “extinguish the possibility of growth and walk backwards.”7 Here’s the paradox: we achieve our deepest progress standing still.
Keep moving. Be still. Here are the two diverging paths: one that urges us out of our waiting and one that takes us into the contemplative heart of it.
“Be still, and know that I am God” (Ps. 46:10, KJV). The verse tells us something so powerful that we scarcely recognize it. It informs us that in the act of being still there’s a knowing, a transcendent knowing that’s available to us at no other time.
“a lifetime burning in every moment.”
The slogan “Life is uncertain . . . so eat dessert first” is another rule of life that undermines our waiting. It taunts us with an approach to life that’s rampant in our culture: when life gets unpredictable, skip the unpleasant and tedious and go for instant gratification. Forget broccoli; cut right to the pie.
To cultivate the discipline of delayed gratification we have to learn one elemental thing, to face pain. Ultimately, we covet what’s fast and instant because we don’t want to endure the suffering of going the long way round.
“The pain won’t kill you,” he said, “but running from it might.” Here was one of the more valuable lessons I learned: avoiding pain, rather than having the discipline and courage to confront it and live it through, only compounds suffering in the long run.
Yet if we choose a time of waiting, our extroverted society will do its best to pull us away. We may be called selfish and lazy, too introspective, self-indulgent. “What are you waiting for? Get up and do something. Take action.” When such voices came, I tried to remember the small voice of my daughter, calling me to the depth and solitude of myself, to the experience of patient yeasting. In the end, God and I would make bread. CHAPTER
The Tinsel Star pours herself into a long line of praiseworthy accomplishments. She’s the overachiever in us, the perfectionist, the performer whose outer radiance often covers an inner insecurity. Whether it’s being mom, career woman, PTA grade-mother, church volunteer, or committee chair, the Tinsel Star’s aim is to do it with dazzle and win accolades. When we adopt this particular ego mask, we invest ourselves in the notion that those who shine the brightest are loved the most. This comes from the distorted idea that meaning and acceptance come from what we do, not who we are. We buy into
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God’s presence was round about me. That moment spoke a great truth to me. We can endure, transcend, and transform the storminess when we see the meaning and mystery of it.
It helps if we understand the source of the crisis. There are three basic sources: developmental transitions, intrusive events, and internal uprisings.
Intrusive Events The second source of crisis comes from intrusive events that impinge on us from without. These crises come in many forms and usually take us by surprise. A death, an illness, an accident, a lost job, a broken relationship, an unwelcome move, a dashed dream, an empty nest, a betrayal. It may be unwise (probably even insensitive) to suggest to someone at this point that the calamity can be a transformative event. There’s a fullness of time for such an awareness, a fluidity to the crisis that must be allowed. When the awareness does manage to break through, however, it can assume
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An internal uprising could be as simple as a vague sense of restlessness, some floating disenchantment, a whispering but relentless voice that says, There has to be more than this. Why are you doing what you’re doing? Or the uprising may take the form of stress, burnout, a chronic sense of exhaustion, inner voices desperately trying to tell us something. Perhaps an addiction grows too loud to ignore any longer, or the scar tissue of an old wound begins to break down and we have to face the place where life has impaled us.
The next question of faith comes when things in our lives begin to fall apart. Something wrecks the dominoes. For the apostles, it was Jesus’ crucifixion. The life that they had known with him was taken away. They felt numb, betrayed; it was as if the God they had invested everything in had vanished.
A crisis is a holy summons to cross a threshold. It involves both a leaving behind and a stepping toward, a separation and an opportunity.
Yet there’s a third way to have a crisis: the way of waiting. That way means creating a painfully honest and contemplative relationship with one’s own depths, with God in the deep center of one’s soul. People who choose this way aren’t so much after peace of mind or justice as wholeness and transformation. They’re after soulmaking.
