Lessons from the Monastery: Part Two (Sixty Year Old Memories of Sensible Shoes)

Part Two in a series: Lessons from the Monastery.

I don’t find it hard to confess that dissatisfaction comes easily to me, along with the admission that my life has disappointed me. Disillusionment too, as my life is not what I thought it would be. I can admit this is true.

Well, that’s not exactly right – I had no plan.  No grand scheme.  I didn’t have any idea what I would do with my life as a youngster.

One thing I knew.

From that moment when I was swiftly rescued, “healed” in an only God could have done it miraculous sort of way.  As I grew up, I was told the stories over and over.

I was “the peanut baby.”  The miracle was something of God, everyone said so. And for whatever reason I began to believe that God had something special planned for me – for my life.  Eighteen months old I was choking on a peanut. I should have died. I will have to get my mother to retell the story because even as I ponder it now, there is much I cannot remember.  I don’t want to lose the details.

I have no memory of it.  In fact I have very few memories of childhood at all.

They are all gone, stuffed somewhere safe.  I haven’t in all these years of healing been able to find the key to unlock that precious girl’s life.

My life. My memories.

I’ve been going to the monastery with my mother.  Being with my mother is startling and even as I learn to trust her, I am afraid.  She’s a blurter.  And she has for memory everything, and more, that I don’t.  Her brain is iron clad; she is a beast of remembering.  And her stories come out at the oddest, least opportune moments; like the shock of ice-cold water.

So much so, that sometimes I cannot bear to be with her, sometimes.  I am learning to not be so afraid.

But today her memories were of her childhood.  A controlling father “much like your father” she said.  “Only mine was around less often, which was perhaps less damaging …” her thoughts trailing off.  In my mind, I too found I was wandering back to my dad’s controlling ways.  She’s remembering that her dad made her wear ugly shoes, because she was “hard on shoes.” Even though her sisters got any kind they wanted.

Those are sixty year old memories about sensible shoes.  Her father long dead and yet still, she remembers it today. 

God save me from bitter memories I say, not to her but inside to myself and to the ghosts.  Perhaps that’s why I keep them all locked up safe, because I don’t want to be bitter.

Today the speaker at the monastery spoke of stability and the descent into darkness as a way of becoming comfortable with uncertainty; a willingness to explore our pain.  Moving down into it and facing it.

No way!  I thought immediately.  This is simply nuts.

Then I remembered…

all the ways I learned to numb my pain, to forget.  And in that moment saw my progress – over time, over years.  A decade flashed.

I used to work hard at my job, to do really well and I received tons of praise and it was never enough.  I was never happy about it.  I was always afraid – of being unmasked, shown for the farce that I was.

The speaker spoke of learning to live deeply in the monotony of life, as do the Benedictines, monks, others – shall l I just say it?  The stay-at-home mom’s life was the epitome of mundane to me.

I see now that is was because I was running.

I couldn’t run fast enough from my internal demons.  Michael Casey, the Cistercian monk of Tarrawarra Abbey in Australia, says that distraction seeks to avoid and that we need to accept life as it is given to us. 

Ten years.  More than a decade of running.  Looking back I can see progress.  My heart was full of self-deception.  I couldn’t feel my feelings for many years and I numbed my feelings with alcohol, work, shopping, obsessive busyness, Christian service, action and movement of every kind.

And now I attempt to live in this moment — to see what’s in front of my nose. 

The speaker asked: Where do you find sources of stability in direct opposition to the running?  What does life look like when you need some stability? How do you know when you’re running? What prompts our perpetual running? What stops it, for you?

I was able to see, today that I have come a long way.   There are still moments of grievous disappointment in myself, but I lay that aside knowing that life is a long, long path for which I am only partway there.  It felt good, even divine, to gaze backward seeing the timeline of the years to appreciate that I am altered – different  – shifting and less flustered and more resolved.

I am able now to go unhurried into the future.  And I can now appreciate the dailies of life. I look forward to remembering, when it comes.

The deep monotony is good, in order to simply be.

MHH

Inspired by Stability and Balance in Relationships and Prayer led by Carole Kretschman at the Holy Wisdom Monastery, March 7, 2012

On Motherhood, On Children

I’ll be the first to admit it.  I fight daily with the little devil on my shoulder.  That being tells me lies.

I feel it so vividly – the tensions of being a stay at home mom, a lack of validation in the culture at large for motherhood or stay at home parents, and the voice inside me telling me almost every day “It’s not enough! Do more, be significant, something special.”  A lot of my poetry recently has come out of that place.

God has reminded me, for some reason, of the truth that we never know whose mother we are — in that we don’t know who our children will become. If we knew that our sons or daughters, nieces or nephews, would grow up to be the next Barack Obama, or Madeleine L’Engle, Joan Chittister, or Scot McKnight, or Michelangelo, whomever, would we look at parenting, at mothering, differently?

They all had mothers.

Fathers.  Aunties and Uncles.

Your role in the life of a child is a role that only you can fulfill even though most days you likely consider it insignificant.

This post was inspired in some part by reading this.

Upward Mobility (a poem)

Earth ‘s crammed with heaven… 

But only he who sees, takes off his shoes.  – Elizabeth Barrett Browning

More than once, in fact
dozens of times in the Big Story of the Torah,
responding to God meant
falling face down on the ground.
Blinding light,
being pregnant with plain old
awe.
Take off your shoes kind of wonderment.
Because you’re on holy ground.

I am so unseeing.
Everything in me,
in my dusty, meager day to day corporeal living
roars something else.
At me. In me.  From me.  To me.
Lift yourself
up. Rise higher, get
above the next fellow.
Upward mobility. Show
your stuff. Your smarts. Your
talent and creativity.
The world is shouting in my ear.

Then I close the door, and
find within, in
my paltry worship, my measly human love.
All I have is a quickening heartbeat, throwing off
the chasing anxiety.
All I want is a falling face down on the ground, kind of awe.
When was the last time I felt
astonishment in God?
A breathed in, have to close my eyes
star struck, stomach lurching,
take off my shoes, because I’m on holy ground

kind of amazement of my God?

All I want.

When was the last time?

 

Not to Speak is to Speak: Volume 3

“If we could read the secret history of our enemies,

we should find in each man’s life

sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.”  

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I am finding it hard to love my enemies.

Rush Limbaugh who obviously hates women and calls them sluts and makes them feel like whores.

Those that do not understand America is made up of oppressive systems and structures for African Americans especially and other minorities. That if we don’t do something about it, we are passive racists– contributors. I read this week that the Bible has “more than 2,000 passages of Scripture about God’s hatred for poverty and oppression. They see God’s desire for systems and structures to be blessings to all of humanity — not a curse to some and a blessing for others.”  Lisa Sharon Harper, Sojourners

(White) people that say our President is not a believing Christian make me angry. Because if he isn’t, then likely they think I’m not one either.

That Olympia Snow despairs enough about our political system that she quit the Senate this last week.

Quick to rush to anger.  That’s me.

'Meet the Sports Illustrated 2011 Swimsuit Models at STK Invite' photo (c) 2011, The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/

Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition makes me angry.  Come on!  The ongoing female objectification implies that being healthy for women is all about fitting into a tiny bikini (especially since women very rarely appear on the Sports Illustrated cover otherwise).  The effect of female objectification in mainstream culture huge.   Does an interest in sports necessitate an interest in ogling female bodies? When boys watch their fathers flip through magazines dedicated to objectification, what do they learn about what it means to be a man? And what does this communicate to them about a woman’s place in society?   One positive, a doctor who raises concerns regarding the effects of “our pornified culture on our children”.  Miss Representation offered specific suggestions for creating change: positive change; healthy change. The link is www.missrepresentation.org.

I’m finding it hard to love.  These things make me angry!  God says Pray for those who persecute you.

Sigh, pray for Rush Limbaugh? Pray for racist people and the sexist editors of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition?

Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless.

Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act. —  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Not to Speak is to Speak is a series I started last year. I’m thinking of reviving it.

Volume 2

Volume 1

let go (a poem)


let go

 

To part with sarcasm’s drips, acid

burning on my tongue, corrosive and scalding

a hole in my soul;

I know the true beneficiary, me.

 

Hatred’s Sweet Kiss (a poem)

Hatred’s sweet kiss deceives,

leaving me battered, shattered, and alone.

Only holy soul work undoes

the damage of deep aching;

ravages of original toil,

wanting to be God.

Lessons from the Monastery: One of Five

Entering the monastery there is a sense of stepping outside of the line of time — real-time.  You have entered into kairos .  God time, as Eugene Peterson calls it.

The people I encountered at the Holy Wisdom monastery were kind. You couldn’t tell who was who.  They may play a role in the running of the monastery.  You don’t know.  I shook hands with a middle-aged woman with short salt and pepper hair, in a pristine suit, who did not give me her name, even when I gave her mine.  I found it odd and I learned later from my mother that she’s the boss of the place.  The Holy Mother?  Not being too familiar with the Benedictine traditions, I simply smiled when she did not give her name.  I am a “go with the flow” kind of person, but I’ll admit it felt strange.

When you enroll, you are asked your goals or intent for coming.  Oh dear, “my mother invited me” isn’t quite right.  Reading the luncheon topics is what convinced me to attend; today’s was Bearing with One Another. Next week’s will be Stability and Balance in Relationships and Prayer. It will be five weeks in all during Lent.  “Creating space to listen” was my final goal, scribbled  quickly on the form, wondering what God might do if I was quiet for that long—listening for him.

I find life is so full of learning of late, that I don’t even have time to apply.  That’s nuts.  Church attendance, doing, and serving – well, it’s all meaningless if we cannot, do not take in what we’re learning and be transformed by it.

Nevertheless what I heard today could very well change me forever, if I allow it.

Recently I was the recipient of some soul care, which served to do a work of healing in my life that profoundly changed me.  A good woman, she is a healing servant by night and doing servant by day.  Efficient and skilled though she is in her day-to-day life, she took several hours to listen to me, unknowingly being a part of a life-giving healing.

I brought years of pain, bitterness, misunderstanding, dejection, feelings of rejection and being disregarded. I felt so much pain that when I started to talk I began to weep.  Not simple crying mind you.

This was the aching heart of a person stuck in sin.

I couldn’t speak, often.  Unperturbed, she listened.  She didn’t touch me.  She didn’t pray.  She didn’t say much of anything, though she had some words to encourage – breathing out with kindheartedness and veracity, both of my sin and of my giftedness. Of my culpability and the tragedy of it all.  And as I spoke I knew.

This was a holy moment.  We were not alone.  This was kairos time.  She attended to me and as she did calcified thoughts and feelings came unstuck and God knows how long I’ve carried this pain, some of it over a decade; it began to wash away.  It was holy.  It was sacred.  Monumental.  Transformational.

Over and done, by listening.

I learned today this type of listening is called kenotic listening.  It is characterized by reverencing what is sacred in someone else. So often, when interacting with each other, we dwell on all their faults.   Their failings, their annoying bits and pieces, even how they disappoint us or let us down.  A kenotic listener affirms the good in others. 

  • Letting go of expectations that are likely unrealistic or self-serving.
  • Letting go of trying to change another person’s behavior.
  • Letting go of the desire to control outcomes or choices.
  • Choosing not to criticize.
  • Letting go of judging or negativity.
  • Letting go of your reluctance to forgive another.

Kenotic listening means giving up our desire to be heard, to pay attention to what the other person needs to say.  Creating space for them to speak.  Suppressing the urge to jump in with advice or simply interrupt with a differing opinion, or to argue our point.  It means being less focused on yourself and what you next want to say.  Opening your spirit to what the other person needs and wants.

Taking on patience as a way of life, which is the only way to bear some else’s burden. Yes people are temperamental, argumentative, self-righteous, rude and obnoxious, even stupid sometimes.  But we are called to bear with them.  Yes, some people can be mean-spirited, arrogant, close minded and selfish.  We care called to bear with them. Yes, some people make inconvenient demands on us, yet we are called to bear with them. Some people can be hard to get along with, and yet we are called to bear with them.

Phylo of Alexandria is quoted saying “Be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a huge battle.”

“Have compassion for everyone you meet, even if they don’t want it from you.  What seems like conceit, bad manners, or cynicism is always a sign of things no ears have heard, no eyes have seen.  You do not know what wars are going on down there where the spirit meets the bone.” – Miller Williams

This is it.

I had a festering sore, down deep inside where the spirit meets the bone.  I didn’t know how to heal myself. I didn’t always want to heal.

I talked. She listened.  It was a sacred holy moment where true church happened – ekklesia.

Spiritually, emotionally and physically I will never be the same.

It was a holy moment, where time was pregnant with what the Holy One intended.  I shared all the ugliness of my inner most soul and with no guilt or religiosity, I was loved.

These are thoughts inspired by Trisha Day who spoke at the monastery yesterday. She gave me a name for what happened to me and offered a challenge to be that sort of person – a kenotic listener.  To revere what is sacred in others, to know they are fighting a huge battle, often alone.  Seek to build up not tear down.  Ask myself how I react to others thoughts and ideas?  Am I respectful? Do I allow others to annoy me?  Do I affirm what is good in them?

Kenosis means an emptying of me, giving up more than getting, and letting go of the need to be heard.  Listen well and deeply.  Stop myself from offering “sage” wisdom or advice, from jumping in.

Just listen.

Have compassion with everyone you meet.

It’s a high calling; a holy challenge for everyone is suffering in some way, life brings challenge and pain, sometimes unbearable pain.

We can blast. Ignore. Correct. Challenge.

Or we can embrace a holier moment, a holier calling of acceptance, endurance and trust.

MH

Trisha Day is a member of Sunday Assembly at Holy Wisdom Monetary, a Lay Cistercian associated with New Melleray and Mississippi Abbeys near Dubuque, Iowa.  She is the author of Inside the School of Charity –Lessons from the monastery.

Logic & Imagination

Be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a huge battle. — Phylo of Alexandria

I am still processing time I spent today, alongside my mother and a lot of mostly grey haired women, at the Holy Wisdom monastery. And my ten-year old turns eleven tomorrow, so life will be a little full over the next twenty-four hours with ice-cream cake and video games,  rides here and there, and the flow of life as a mother of four.

While I mull on what I have learned, I thought you might enjoy seeing the list of the top ten articles on my blog this month.  A few are recent work, but I was surprised to see that several are oldies but goodies like What’s a Woman of Leisure?, On Parenting Deeply and Well, and the ebb and flow.

Title Views
Home page 400
If you Read Nothing Else from me. Read this. ((On healing)) 72
What’s a Woman of Leisure? (Not that you asked) 69
Can I “forget” that I’m a Woman while at Church? Forgetting and Forgiving 55
On Parenting Deeply and Well 46
Perfect Practice (A poem about Lent) 45
My Sobriety and My Sin 44
To Lent or not to Lent, that is the Question 42
the ebb and flow 39
Faith Transforms Me, Sometimes. 37
Uncluttered, Exposed and Present: Touching the Unknown (a poem) 36

It is an incredible honor to know that you all are reading and walking with me.

My Spiritual Eyes are Stinging

From listening to a QIdeas talk with Eugene Peterson on the Sabbath.

I must stop trying to be God.  

Which means also stop trying to prove myself.  Stop with the interminable, frantic burden of finding my place in the world.  Yes, there is a dignity to work – any kind of work—even house work.  But when we inflate our worth by acting like what we do is everything  — it’s something, then we put ourselves above God.

When our “moral sweat” brings our sense of value, it blinds us to God at work and our spiritual eyes are left stinging.

“We want to be like God.” said Eugene Peterson.

Sabbath living is … to show up.  Then, shut up.

Knowing  that God is doing something, we are to live in response it.  Otherwise, it’s only an oppressive ritual.  Religious devotion deprived of meaning.  Eugene Peterson even asserts that programs sometimes can keep us from finding community in churches.

I’ve reflected for a long time on what it means to be Christian community to one another.  Unabashedly knowing that I’ve lived most of my life feeling as if there’s a giant, lonely even gaping hole inside me that I cannot seem to fill up.  Family didn’t do it.  Work didn’t do it.  Creating doesn’t do it.  Motherhood didn’t do it.  Being married didn’t do it.  Drinking really didn’t do it.  Being a part of things doesn’t do it.  Serving doesn’t do it.  There will never be enough friends — the right sort of friends.  Work.  Hobbies.

Nothing fills it that gaping, God sized hole.

Shutting up and showing up is how God fills that gaping hole inside us.  It is the most repeated commandment in the Bible.  And ironically Jesus was accused, of all the radical things he did which were many, of not keeping Sabbath well.

“God is working when we are sleeping.” said Eugene Peterson. “We live in a toxic culture that doesn’t understand the need for Sabbath – our world is full of compulsively and insecurity.”

Rarely do we sit, play, see, breathe  in slowly, and just be. 

Creating active space for nothing,

knowing that when you pray you are not accomplishing.

Learning an awareness that God is doing something and you don’t have a clue what it is—

it is a constant surrendering.

I keep being struck reading the Torah (the first five books of the OT) by when Moses and Aaron are confronted by the failings of the people of Israel – the abject poverty of soul, their errors, constant rebellion and the sinful nature of the people, they fall face down.  Moses and Aaron, that is — over and over again.  (I wonder how many times it is repeated?)

They fell, face down.

How do we fall face down—letting go—surrendering ourselves?  Literally.  Figuratively.  Moses and Aaron did it over and over again.

I’m starting to think,  just possibly,  that I’m meant to live with that hole in my heart.  Perhaps even, I am supposed to acknowledge it and

let God do the filling up.

Just maybe, he made me that way for a reason, so that I would never okay without him— never totally content — never fully joyful— never imagine that I’m in control—living always humbled by my need for the Holy encounters with him.

It’s living in constant surrender.  Face down, a kairos surrender to the Holy One.

“Take my tired body, my confused mind, and my restless soul into your arms, and give me rest, simple quiet rest.” — Henri Nouwen

MHH

On Writing, On Being


I’ve been thinking a lot about my traumas and God’s grace, about sin and  God’s grace, about my separation from God, actually pushing God away, and the act of drawing near to him again. About the things in our lives that keep us from total dependence. My life, to be clear, my dependence.

I find it interesting the pathways we travel in life.  For me, being at home, working solidly on my writing now for months, even years, perfecting my craft, reading and writing, studying scripture, and rethinking how I read the Bible, learning the Story of the Bible.  Rethinking what it means to be a woman in the evangelical church.  Being healed, yes coming utterly unstuck with regards to bitterness over women in the EFCA denomination and specifically feeling ignored, unheard, and unimportant and then chastised for being so outspoken, but simply wanting to talk with others about their experiences as women in ministry, and not finding people like that except online.  Years of feeling very alone in all respects about all these things.

And then there is the writing; being challenged by two friends (one being my husband) to write, and remembering the others over the last year or two.  I should take up with Nike because writing, really comes down to just doing it.  Right?

Sure, you need a plan.  Perhaps there is a proposal for a book.  You need connections, eventually an agent or a publisher.  But first, you must simply be willing to write; to occupy your story and to portion out your life experiences for others; be exposed and yet trustworthy with yourself and others.  That’s the objective, but even as one engraves their story on the “page”, lives, shares, replies to others.  There is the parallel deepening comprehension that you must remain vulnerable and open to the Holy Spirit, to growing in the faith journey, to see God work – in his most miraculous, deeply challenging, sometimes abysmal challenges, promptings, and difficult though it may be – to grow!  As the scriptures are open before me, to thank God for the challenges, the scares, the mistakes, and the sin.  He won’t turn away from me.

Writing is about remembering, acknowledging the power of God in my life.  It’s about believing and knowing.  Not being perfect.  And as the two paths run parallel I suppose the challenge is to not allow the writing overtake the growing, the life story outshout the holy spirit and the narrative of scripture and all that should and is doing inside me.

And so, this place will be less a place of perfection but a place of perfecting.

Perhaps you will enjoy the process. I thank you for your grace as you journey along.

My Sobriety and My Sin

“… And lately I wonder if Christians aren’t the most miserable of addicts–and if the fact of our faith itself isn’t part of the reason.  After all, aren’t we supposed to be new creations in Christ, freed from the power of sin? Because we tend to think of addiction this way—strictly as a moral failing—we try to pull ourselves up by our spiritual bootstraps. We pray harder, repent more fervently, and fight temptation until we’re blue in the face.”  – Sober Boots, a blog by Heather Kopp

After reading Heather’s thoughts last night I read several of the comments from those who had extremely judgmental view of a person’s addiction recovery.

I was left with a hollow feeling inside.  I found myself saying that addiction is not a sin.  But then, thinking long and hard about it this morning, I realized that although I have never dealt with it there was an element of sin involved in my alcoholism.

I am always helped by talking to my husband Tom.  I sought his comfort in the question, “It wasn’t sin, right, that I became an alcoholic? It wasn’t sin, was it?  Is it?”  He’s one of the least judgmental people I know, so when Tom said “Yes, it is in part it was sin, you had a choice .  You cannot discount free will.” I had to listen.

(And then we launched into a wonderful conversation about James 3, our hierarchies of sin and the power of our tongue.  “With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers these things ought not to be so.”  James 3, ESV)

How is it that I fell into addiction?

How is it that I am sober today?  My sobriety has taken inner strength of will and conviction. Was it God that has given me the strength to remain sober for three and a half years? 

How much of my sobriety was tangled up in my conversion path, my faith walk, the gentle work of the Holy Spirit?

In some ways living free of addiction is a form of conversion, as Alyce M. McKenzie says, a turnaround from bondage to a self-destructive behavior to freedom that comes when we commit ourselves to the power of God.

But honestly I don’t recall some grand transaction, or moment, whereby I asked God to help me become sober and whamo I was healed.  No, it was much, much slower.  It was through the conviction of the Holy Spirit and a final ultimatum-of-sorts made by my husband converging within twenty-four hours, that I made a choice to finally quit.

But the conviction had been building for some time – though choosing sobriety took years.

I was pretty sure I was addicted to alcohol when my sisters and I attended the family program at Hazeldon at the request of my mom.  It was there that I learned for the first time about  the illness of addiction, more importantly about the brain pathways of an addict, about codependency, about the hell we create for others by our words and sarcasm, about the strength sometimes to be found in Al Anon and Alcoholics Anonymous.  (**I say more about AA below)  After meeting with a doctor there, acknowledging my depression and how much and how often I was drinking, she said they could justifiably commit me to the residential program.  But I couldn’t do it — couldn’t accept the need to quit totally.  Didn’t believe it was that bad.  I went home and spent the next five years or so on a slow decline.  Not every day at that point.  Not drinking to black out, yet.  Not even really in that bad of shape, but an alcoholic for sure.

How many nights over the next few years did I go to sleep almost blacked out drunk.  Only just able to stumble to bed – falling into the protective  down covers, pounding head on the soft accepting pillows, heart aching with the pain of it all. Thinking – praying – crying out to God.

Making promises.  Promising that tomorrow would be different.  Promising myself that tomorrow I would not buy  any wine.  Tomorrow I would not drink myself to a disoriented, forgotten, insensible place.  Hopeful that tomorrow would be different, only to fall into the same habit, experiencing the same amnesia as I was purchasing more alcohol.

The psychologist and spiritual counselor Gerald May in his book called Addiction and Grace defines addiction as “any compulsive, habitual behavior that limits the freedom of human desire.”

I found myself, day after day, month after month, year after year, for more than five years being fairly certain that I was an addict and yet choosing the same path.  I thought I could be a social drinker.  I didn’t want to stop, not really, for a long time.   Wine and other alcohol was like a lover.  I look back now knowing it clearly, seeing it objectively that it was an idol, yes, more important than anything else.  Alcohol was my reason for living.  I gave it the space and place in my life much more important than my health, or the welfare of my family, or my commitment to God. So, yes, there is an element of choice.  And in that free choice it was a sin.

But sadly as Christians we have a hierarchy of sin – infidelity and addiction being at the top.  Why?  I suppose it doesn’t even matter ultimately.  They were my choices, though compelled by the illness in my brain and the broken state of my heart.   I made them.   I chose.

And where was God?  Well, I stopped seeking him.  I closed off from him the part of me that was an addict.  I cannot fully describe how I lived with myself spiritually in those years except to say that I was numb even while being wracked with guilt.  I was self-medicating.  I was depressed.  I felt hopeless.  I turned away from God. This is a poem I wrote at one point in my recovery, titled Days Without God.

she walked away from hope,
traveled the road of unkept promises.
and god was far away.

days without number

she ran down that road,
of fleeting pleasures
and god turned away
unable to see
unable to be with her.

though she can never deny going,
after a time, she turned
and walked back.
she was broken and bleeding.

the moment she turned back
she felt the presence
and then, god forgave.

For these choices I had to ask my husband’s forgiveness.  Someday I will do the same with my children when they are old enough to understand.  From the friends who lived beside me and saw the destruction of alcohol in my life, I covet their forgiveness.  Family members who saw and lived and wondered and were wounded by me, they too I need forgiveness and grace.

I live with the knowledge of my walking away from God.  I live with the knowledge that I did that every day, I chose it.  I cling to God now.  I relish his forgiveness and I acknowledge my sin.  His grace is enough.

To those accusers, the ones that throw out the accusation of “sin!” like Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, I say this. No matter who we are or what we have done, in Christ we are given a new life of repentance and dignity where there is no place for legalism and guilt.   This is a life of grace.   Only God knows our hearts.   He is there with us, if we cry out to him.  But recovery, that is a long difficult walk and by no means something that just happens by surrendering to God.  I know this.

But I also know that He walks it with us if we ask him.  Look at John 8, Jesus asking where are your accusers?  “Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”

Do I know how that transaction works, ultimately?  Not really, but it is for me now found  in the daily choice to be sober.  Did Jesus think she’d be free of sin them then on?  Nope, not likely and there was parts of her life she had to choose to walk away from.  Alcoholics must do this in order to recover.

I cannot cast stones at others, no matter their “sin.” Grace and peace is found in the knowledge that I am not judged either.

“… and I’m still learning how to hack and slash through this beautiful jungle of grace.”  Stephen

MH

** I do not work my sobriety with AA (Alcoholics Anonymous).  I don’t personally find AA all that helpful, though for a time I was greatly encouraged by attending a weekly meeting with women.  I walked into that room and experienced like I never have in my life a level of understanding, empathy and acceptance.  No condemnation.  We were all alcoholics and other forms of addicts.  No pointing of fingers.  In a way that the Church doesn’t seem to be able to live out — the idea that we’re all sinners together in this mess of a world.  All sinners.  All saints.  All walking the path together.  Why is it that (some) Christians are the most judgmental of all?

I longed for (and still sometimes do) church to be a safe place for me to go and find help with my recovery, but my church at least doesn’t offer anything for addicts.  Not sure why when they have divorce-care, and grief-care, and cancer-care among many other kids of “care.”  It does feel like they are strangely silent on this.  I was helped by an addiction specific counselor, fortunate enough to have it covered by insurance, and spent more than six months in weekly therapy working through many aspects of my addiction as well as learning about the disease’s power.

Lent: My Agenda or God’s?

I am looking to Lent as a way to make space. In our cluttered congested lives we have no space for God. Then we act almost indignant that he won’t speak (I’m talking to myself here.)  So often I have an agenda with God and even in the practicing of Lent.  I can’t hear what he wants to say.

What if Lent was a way of creating more space for God?  While knowing he is preparing us for his death and for his resurrection.

Instead of being ruled by social media.  I could read all the day long the blogs and whatnot of people I like and respect.  But what if I could make space for God?

Because at the end of the day, if I don’t make space for the Holy One, I will be empty. Bereft.  Spiritually limp and disbelieving. I will not have done the simple profound work of inquiring of God what he wants to say. Can it be that simple?  That so often I don’t pray.  I don’t ask.  I stay too busy.

And it feels then, like he’s silent.

But I have a feeling it is simply that I was too distracted to be still enough to listen.  To recognize him.

So the giving up of things is good if we allow the Holy One to fill our spaces of fear, regret, pain, selfishness, anger, pride, shame.  He wants to take them.  He is leading us, to the cross.

There is no room for his Voice. The way I create space is likely giving things up.

Stop looking to others to fill me, inspire me, motivate me.

I want to hear from my maker, so I should let go of all the other voices. If I can bravely crack open that space in my day.

“Let the things of this world fall away so the soul can fall in love with God. God only comes to fill the empty places and kenosis is necessary – to empty the soul to know the filling of God.”   ––  Ann Voskamp

It isn’t really anything I do, or don’t do, that matters.  Not really.

It’s making space for the Holy One.   Waiting for his filling up.  Asking for his agenda with me.

“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast.”  — Ephesians 2:8,9