When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life's Sacred Questions (Plus)

by Sue Monk Kidd

How I’m feeling. May 19, 2019

And rarely do significant shifts come without a sense of our being lost in dark woods, or in what T. S. Eliot called the “vacant interstellar spaces.”1

The familiar circles of my life left me with a suffocating feeling. My marriage suddenly seemed stale, unfulfilling; my religious structures, stifling. Things that used to matter no longer did; things that had never mattered were paramount. My life had curled up into the frightening mark of a question.

The previous evening I’d drawn a tent in the middle of some wind-howling woods. The stakes that secured the bottom of the tent were uprooted, and the flaps were flailing in the wind. As I put down my pencil, I said to myself, “That’s my life.” Indeed, it seemed as if the stakes that had secured my neat, safe existence—stakes that I had spent most of my life carefully nailing down—had been pulled up, and everything was tossing about. Underneath the sketch I wrote, “Midlife.”

When it comes, we don’t understand that we’re being thrust into personal transformation, into the task of birthing an “I” that is not yet. We write it off as just another predicament or plight—perhaps the result of burnout or our dissatisfaction

“When order crumbles,” writes John Shea, “Mystery rises.”

And if we would only listen, we might hear such times beckoning us to a season of waiting, to the place of fertile emptiness.

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.

Waiting is thus both passive and passionate. It’s a vibrant, contemplative work. It means descending into self, into God, into the deeper labyrinths of prayer. It involves listening to disinherited voices within, facing the wounded holes in the soul, the denied and undiscovered, the places one lives falsely. It means struggling with the vision of who we really are in God and molding the courage to live that vision.

We find that we must trust the process enough to go into the circle and stay there until the time comes for emergence.

When you wait, you’re deliberately choosing to take the long way, to go eight blocks instead of four, trusting that there’s a transforming discovery lying pooled along the way.

But we have to be patient. We have to let go and tap our creative stillness.

Later I sought him out. “I saw you today sitting beneath the tree—just sitting there so still. How is it that you can wait so patiently in the moment? I can’t seem to get used to the idea of doing nothing.” He broke into a wonderful grin. “Well, there’s the problem right there, young lady. You’ve bought into the cultural myth that when you’re waiting you’re doing nothing.” Then he took his hands and placed them on my shoulders, peered straight into my eyes and said, “I hope you’ll hear what I’m about to tell you. I hope you’ll hear it all the way down to your toes. 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.”

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.” Such extraordinary movements of re-creation don’t happen spontaneously or without effort and pain.

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.

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.

Somehow we’re going to have to relearn that the deep things of God don’t come suddenly. It’s as if we imagine that all of our spiritual growth potential is dehydrated contents to which we need only add some holy water to make it instantly and easily appear.

A waiting, a gestating, a slow and uncertain birthing. That is where God was to be found. Not in the erasing of the experience, but in the embracing of it.

If you want to be impressed, note how often God’s people seem to be waiting. Noah waits for the flood waters to recede; Daniel waits through the night in a den of lions; Sarah waits in her barrenness for a child; Jacob waits for Rebecca’s hand. The Israelites wait in Egypt, then wait forty more years in the desert. Later they wait seventy years in Babylonian captivity. Jonah waits in a fish’s belly; Mary waits; Simeon waits to see the Messiah; the apostles wait for Pentecost; Paul waits in prison. The Bible is rich with language urging us to wait. “For thee I wait all the day long” (Ps. 25:5).” My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning” (Ps. 130:6). “Wait continually for your God” (Hos. 12:6). “If it seem slow, wait for it; it will surely come” (Hab. 2:3). “If we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Rom. 8:25). I came to the parable Jesus told about the ten maidens waiting for the bridegroom. Five came prepared with extra lamp oil to wait through the night. The other five didn’t plan on having to wait, so they brought only the oil that was in their lamps. Naturally their lamps gave out. When they left to go buy more, the bridegroom showed up, and they missed him. I’d always thought that the point of the story was that we should be prepared. But in my reading after the retreat, it seemed to be just as much about waiting. Waiting through the dark night. The idea is that waiting precedes celebration. If you don’t show up prepared to ...

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

Darting through life at a progressively increasing speed diverts us from deeper realities.

I had to face the fact that my inability to wait was symptomatic of something amiss in my soul. I feared waiting because such pauses in life brought me close to the dark holes and empty pockets inside me, to the rigidities and self-lies I had fashioned.

“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.”

I would need to find my own pace, one that flowed with the rhythms of the earth and the Spirit, not with the frenzy of modern life.

Waiting is the in-between time. It calls us to be in this moment, this season, without leaning so far into the future that we tear our roots from the present.

wood”

Night prayers, more than any others, seem to carry us over the portal. A night prayer is one said against a backdrop

With God she becomes the co-author of her own life rather than allowing herself to be authored by others.