Revisiting the Desert

Matt and I went on a little vacation to Las Vegas over the weekend to rest and try snowboarding (my first time).  It was a nice getaway, other than people smoking on the no-smoking floor of our hotel and Matt’s getting altitude sickness from our little snowboarding adventure on Saturday.  As we drove through the desert on our way back home yesterday, I was struck again and again by the unvarying ugliness of the landscape, the repetitive monotony of the drive, and the stark contrast between the barrenness of our desert vacation and the beautiful tranquility of our beach-side home.

Our drive home reminded me of the contrast between the spiritual wilderness I endured for several years since moving to California and the rest and growth I’ve begun to enjoy in the last few months.  Here’s a little taste of my spiritual “desert vacation,” an excerpt from a piece I wrote and posted two years ago:

There is something haunting about the barrenness of the desert. The dry, cracked earth produces little more plant life than bristles, thistles, and thorns. I am sitting on the hillside overlooking St. Andrew’s Abbey in Valyermo, California. The cemetery rests behind me, just up the winding dirt path. The sun is unmerciful, but I shiver, defenseless against the wind. It is Ash Wednesday. I have never been to a monastery before. I envy this rhythm of life so firmly established here, so deeply rooted in history, tradition, and meaning. I envy the unrushed movement of the brothers as they go about their daily tasks with studied patience. Mostly, I envy the cultivated attitude of reverence toward solitude and stillness. Ash Wednesday, the first day of the Lenten season, is marked by fasting, prayer, and quiet. I have hiked up this hill, away from the monks and visitors, in order to break the silence with my sad song.   Read the rest here.

What I noticed as we drove back toward California was something I had never been able to imagine while I was stuck in my spiritual wilderness: we were leaving the desert.  We had stayed in the desert for a time, but we weren’t living there.  Now we were going back home, back to where we live, back to the mountains and the ocean.  I was in the desert for so long, it felt like I was living there, like I was going to live there forever. Now I see moving to our home by the beach as a physical representation of the spiritual move I was making from the wilderness to the ocean, from barrenness to new life, from anguish to peace.

When we arrived home yesterday afternoon, we unpacked the car and made a bee-line for the beach to catch the sunset.  Every time I watch the sun set over the Pacific Ocean, I marvel that I live here now. I can see this every day if I want to.  I’m no longer surrounded by noise, rushing cars, flying helicopters, and smog.  Now I’m surrounded by vacationing families, retirees, quiet days, and quieter nights.  And, oh yes, the sunset.  Here’s what I see every day as the sun goes down:

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“Yearly” Examine, Elephants, and Psalm 131

Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Welcome to the year 2012.  Today I decided to begin the new year by reviewing the old one, using the Daily Examination of Consciousness as a guide.  Some of what came up was expected, and some surprised me, but overall it was a fruitful time.  I used a journal my brother brought back for me from China when he came to visit me in June 2010. I had only written in the first couple of pages, recording spiritual exercises from September and October 2010 before I got engaged in November and my life was completely taken over by planning a wedding, getting married, moving several times, working overtime, and becoming overwhelmed by fatigue.  2011 was a crazy year.  Now in 2012, I hope to fill the pages of this journal with my encounters with God through various spiritual exercises.

my elephant journal

As I closed the journal after my prayer this morning, I noticed there is an elephant on the front.  Out of curiosity, I looked up the meaning of elephants and came across these adjectives in my web research: grace, prosperity, power, loyalty, wisdom, luck, solitude, intelligence, honor, stability, patience, temperance, chastity, reliability, dignity, royalty, pride, determination, responsibility, sensitivity and social connection.  Specific to China, the elephant represents happiness, longevity, and good luck.  Wow, that’s a lot to live up to.  In any case, I like that the elephant is a symbol of so many positive traits and that 2012 is the year of writing in my elephant journal.

I also had my Bible out in case I needed some inspiration during my “yearly” examine, and I happened to flip through the Psalms and come to one I’ve never really noticed before: Psalm 131.

¹ My heart is not proud, O LORD,
my eyes are not haughty;
I do not concern myself with great matters
or things too wonderful for me.
² But I have stilled and quieted my soul;
like a weaned child with its mother,
like a weaned child is my soul within me.

³ O Israel, put your hope in the LORD
both now and forevermore.

Over the past two years, God has used a lot of imagery about babies to teach me about dependence on and trust in God to take care of the the things that burden me as well as to take care of me.  Now, as I move into a new season, I believe God is using this psalm to show me I have grown enough to become the weaned child–older and more content with the waiting and patience that come with seeking God.  Now that life isn’t so crazy and I have more free time to invest, my soul has become still and quiet, hoping in and waiting on the Lord as King David modeled.

I will take Psalm 131 into 2012 to remind me to wait on God with the patience of a toddler (however little that might be), confident that I have tried God and found God indeed dependable and trustworthy.  Welcome, 2012!

Goals for 2012

After some thought, here are my goals for the new year:

Writing goals
Start a new journal
Blog twice a week
Make a dent in my reading list

Spiritual health goals
Try a new spiritual exercise each month
Practice the examine every day
Find a church community
Find a new spiritual director

Physical health goals
Ride my bike more than 5 miles
Use my new sleeping bag
Use my pilates videos at least once a week

Emotional health goals
Make a new friend in the SB area to have tea with
Watch at least 3 sunsets a week

Revisiting Contemplation

In honor of the anniversary of Thomas Merton‘s death (December 10th, 1968), I have decided to re-read New Seeds of Contemplation. It’s been a while, and I forgot how much I enjoy his writing.  Here’s a bit from the first paragraph of the book:

Contemplation is the highest expression of [one's] intellectual and spiritual life.  It is that life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive. It is spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being. It is gratitude for life, for awareness and for being. It is a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent and infinitely abundant Source. Contemplation is, above all, awareness of the reality of that Source. It knows the Source, obscurely, inexplicably, but with a certitude that goes both beyond reason and beyond simple faith. For contemplation is a kind of spiritual vision to which both reason and faith aspire, by their very nature, because without it they must always remain incomplete.

I like that idea that contemplation is the completion of reason and faith.  It helps me to understand why God has been leading me the past several years out of my left-brained intellectual self and toward a more right-brained, mystical experience of who God is and who I am in God and because of God’s presence in my life.  My college years were very much defined by St. Anselm‘s concept of faith seeking understanding.  I expected my graduate years to be much the same, yet I found myself drawn to fringe classes like Power Encounter and Theology and Popular Culture.  I discovered PIHOP and began an unexpected journey into the tangible experience of God.  Instead of lining my bookshelves with academic volumes and commentaries, I filled a whole bookshelf with new and used titles from the Prayer & Spirituality section at the bookstore where I worked.  Now, I’m excited to revisit New Seeds of Contemplation in light of my spiritual journey and see what new truths God has in store.

Trees: A Vision

“But blessed is the one who trusts in the LORD,
whose confidence is in him.
They will be like a tree planted by the water
that sends out its roots by the stream.    – Jeremiah 17:7-8

Has God ever answered a question you didn’t realize you were asking? I was wondering idly what season I’m in now, and to my surprise, God answered me!  Now, I have been in a very wintery season for the past few years, but now that I sit reflecting and searching my inner life, I realize I’m not really in that season anymore.  Getting engaged, getting married, and moving to a new area haven’t exactly been the easiest experiences of the past year.  In fact, it’s been an incredibly stressful year.  But they are happy things.  For the first time in a long time, I’m satisfied with who I am and where I am in life.  I no longer feel pain I can’t describe or identify.  I no longer feel dry and far from God.  Instead, I love being married to my wonderful hubby.  I love living in Carpinteria where it is quiet and peaceful.  I love working from home. I especially love having only one job.  I love being able to sleep as long as I want and stay in bed all day if I want.  I no longer feel like my world is coming apart.  Before I share what God said to me, there are three things you need to know.

#1: When my roommate and I decided to move to Sierra Madre several years ago, we ended up living on a beautiful little street called Esperanza.  When we prayed over our new home, my roommate remarked that it was ironic that we moved onto a street that means “hope” or “trust” since we were both struggling with a very painful season of life at the time.  About the same time, Jeremiah 17:5-7 came up in discussion with my spiritual director, and she encouraged me to mediate on the verses for a time, which led me to create this little picture to encourage myself that though I felt like everything on the left, I could hope and trust in God to bring me one day to everything promised on the right.

#2: Sometime later, Jeremiah 17:5-8 came up again, and I wrote this poem.

#3: I remember sitting in my living room about a year ago with a group of girls as my roommate led us in an exercise of Visio Divina (here’s a great resource). She asked us to imagine ourselves as a tree and to ask God to enter the image and reveal a truth to us.  At that time, I tried to imagine myself as a tree, but I could only see the roots.  It was dark and isolated, but I saw Jesus sitting on the roots and heard him telling me that the roots have to grow first before the tree can begin to grow above ground.  There was a sense of promise that although things seemed dark and lonely in the moment, growth was still happening, and I would one day begin to grow in the light.

Now in the moment I was wondering idly what season I had entered, I was not thinking about this image of the tree’s roots from that night with my friends, or the poem I wrote, or the picture I made. I was not thinking about Jeremiah 17:5-8.  To be perfectly honest, I had not–until the writing of this post–even noticed that there was a theme of growing trees in the story of my spiritual journey.  But suddenly there popped into my head this image of a tree.  Now the tree wasn’t really a tree yet. It was still a sapling.  It was young and bare, but it had a few green leaves beginning to unfurl on its flimsy branches.  In that moment, I saw myself as the tree growing above ground, and I knew I had entered a new season: spring!  New life and growth.  Light and green.  Health and hope.  Without even noticing, I left the barren wilderness and frozen ground behind and walked into the fulfillment of God’s promise all those months ago.

Journey Through the Liturgical Year

I’ve decided (albeit belatedly) to follow the liturgical year over the next year and blog about it from time to time.  Since the first Sunday of Advent was this past Sunday, I’d better get a move on.

Advent is a period of preparation for Christmas but, unlike Lent, it is not a period of penance.  It is a period that focuses us on joy.  We prepare ourselves to understand the full adult meaning of the feast.  We come to realize more each year how great are our blessings, how beautiful is a life lived in concert with the Jesus who came to show us the way.  We learn the joy of anticipation, the joy of delighting in a sense of the presence of God all around us, the joy of looking for the second coming of Christ, the joy of living in the surety of even more life in the future. – Joan Chittister

I started reading The Liturgical Year by Joan Chittister (read a review by my friend Wess Daniels) along with Eternal Seasons, which is a collection of excerpts from Henri Nouwen’s writing, edited by Michael Ford.  Here’s something Nouwen said that struck me in his discussion of Mary’s response in Luke 1:38 to the news that she was pregnant with God’s child: “She was saying, ‘I don’t know what this all means, but I trust that good things will happen.’ She trusted so deeply that her waiting was open to all possibilities.” In reading these books, I am reminded that Advent is a season of waiting–unlike the waiting of the lenten season–that is full of hope, expectation, and joy.

I have spent the last three years learning to find meaning in the painful, barren waiting the lenten season teaches us. I have cried, rebelled, and begged God for answers when the only answer I ever received was wait, wait.  Today in my readings, I realized that my last three years of waiting have been all wrong.  I wasn’t meant to wait in a prolonged state of repentance, despair, and emptiness.  I was meant to wait in hopeful and joyful expectation of the next season in my spiritual journey.  I realized today as I read about the Advent season that I consistently used as my breath prayer the line Mary used to express surrender to the season God had brought her into when the angel Gabriel brought her the news. For three years, I have prayed with Mary: Let it be to me as you have said.

This realization has given me new eyes to look back on my experience of graduating from seminary and trying to figure out what to do next.  I see now that what I perceived as barren wasn’t barren at all. In fact, it was pregnant!  Now I can’t speak from experience, but any mother will tell you that pregnancy isn’t exactly the most pleasant experience.  In fact, it can be quite unpleasant and even painful to endure nine months of ever increasing weight, movement, and discomfort.  Nevertheless, there is also hope, expectation, and joy.  I’m not sure what my season of waiting is going to bring into being, or when that expectation will be realized.  What I do know for sure is that all those times I felt forsaken, I wasn’t.  All those times I felt empty, I wasn’t.  Instead, I am filled with the very fullness of God–living and moving inside of me.  I want to be like Mary.  I want to be open to all possibilities, as Nouwen said, and I want to trust that it is all going to be for good.  Something is going to change, and I can’t wait to find out what is coming…or becoming!

The spiritual life is a life in which we wait, actively present to the moment, expecting that new things will happen to us, new things that are far beyond our own imagination or prediction. That, indeed, is a very radical stance in a world preoccupied with control. – Henri Nouwen

 

Church or Bust

So our church visit tonight was a total bust.  To all church leaders everywhere, please update your websites!

Matt and I had planned all day that we would visit a church down in Ventura tonight for their 6pm service, allowing Matt his first chance in a while to really sleep in.  We drove down to Ventura this afternoon at about 4:30 after a leisurely morning and early afternoon sleeping and puttering around the apartment.  We caught a quick bite at Jack in the Box, went by Bed Bath and Beyond to return some household items that weren’t working out, and made our way to the church building.  Pulling into the darkened strip mall, we knew immediately that something was wrong, but we thought we had just entered the church’s business office address by mistake.  After some quick investigation via smartphone, it became clear that we were indeed in the right location.  We pulled up to the door and saw the church logo screened on the window along with the service times below: 9am and 11am.  Boo.  Evidently the 6pm service no longer exists, and no one bothered to update the website accordingly.  If you’re going to have a web presence, people, it needs to be useful!

We were really disappointed since we could have gone to a morning service if we had known the evening service wasn’t an option, and now it was too late to find another church option this week.  We were doubly disappointed since Matt is working the next two Sundays, so we won’t have another chance to check out a new church for a while.  Our whole day had been geared toward going to church tonight, and now we were so deflated we just turned around and went home.  Driving back toward Santa Barbara, we hit major traffic and spent most of the journey back at an unsteady 6mph pace.

On the upshot, we decided to listen to a podcast of a sermon at Mars Hill Bible Church called Miracles and Maple Trees (you can download it here) that helped redeem the evening with the reminder that our God is a God who heals. Amen to that!  Our evening was further redeemed by an unexpected conversation with a young married couple living in our same complex.  We bonded over miraculous stories, theology, music, and snowboarding.  Further proof that God our Redeemer is God of more than just the miraculous; God also redeems the mundane, like our disappointment over not getting to attend church this week.  Our church visit may have been a bust, but our evening was a success.  Thanks, God, for caring about the little things in our lives.

Why Being an Idealist Sucks

Matt and I have been looking for a church ever since we moved to Carpinteria about 3 months ago.  While we haven’t been able to attend church every Sunday due to Matt’s work schedule, we’ve still visited 6 or 7 churches so far and have another new one laid out to visit tonight.  While we both know that no church is perfect and believe it is important to be in consistent Christian community wherever we are, we’re having a really hard time finding a church we can both feel comfortable in because we’re both recent seminary graduates and too idealistic for our own good.  (Plus, Matt is also a musician.)  Aside from the basic tenants of faith we would never bend on, here’s what we’re looking for (in no particular order). * indicates a must.

Music featuring drums and guitars (i.e., no organ/choir) *

Music is more about the Holy Spirit’s leading than the leader’s leading *

Songs written recently

Emphasis on music as part of worship

Supportive of women in ministry *

Women in pastoral/leadership positions (other than Children’s Ministry or Administration)

Multi-cultural/multi-racial (i.e. not all Caucasian people)

Multi-generational

Some young marrieds without kids (i.e. we need some friends)

Intellectual sermon *

Preferably Fuller-esque theology (i.e. likeminded)

“Community” feel, a place we can connect, comfortable atmosphere *

Open to the Holy Spirit

Artsy, artistic, celebrating worship with art

Not more than 1 hr away *

Liturgical (not necessarily in the traditional sense)

Emerging

So far it seems we can find either the music/art side of things or the theology side of things.  It’s been a very discouraging experience thus far to see the state of churches today as opposed to the vision we have for what the Church can be.  It doesn’t help that Matt has had extensive experience with church planting, so we’re more likely to start something new where we can’t find it than be satisfied with whatever we find to be the status quo.  Starting something new is great when you already have a likeminded community to start something with, but since we just moved here and have no friends yet outside of Matt’s coworkers, there’s not much we can do on our own.

Besides, we both just need somewhere we can plug in and recharge for a while, receive and rest rather than work and give.  The trouble with having a leadership skill set (especially when you’re also a phenomenal musician like Matt is), is we end up in leadership positions wherever we go.  As newlyweds, we’re both in a season of needing a break, yet that means giving the churches around here a break as well and not being so critical.  It’s awfully disappointing to have to lower our expectations in order to find a church community, but it’s a good exercise in humility as well.  We don’t have all the answers, either, and perhaps our vision for the Church is one that will only be fully realized in the Kingdom to come–the “not yet,” if you will, rather than the “already.”

Here’s hoping we have better luck tonight.

Two Years Later…

I had grand aspirations in January 2010, didn’t I?  Blogging magnificently each week, drawing inspiration and spiritual insight from my walks at the Arboretum.  But life interrupted.  My apologies to anyone who actually read my posts, although this blog never really got off the ground.  If I can excuse myself, I was busy:

falling in love,

getting engaged,

getting married,

and being a newlywed.  Here’s where we live now:

 

Now that life has settled down a bit, I hope to get back to inspiration and insight–this time from walks on the beach and around the salt marsh just outside our apartment.  I’ve also started another blog about having a holistic body theology.  Feel free to check it out.

Insight for today: just as we can’t rush progress, or greatness, or growth, or waiting–so we can’t rush resting.  Rest and restoration take as long as they take.  We’re not promised a time frame, but we are promised a finish line.

God restores my soul. – Psalm 23

The one who began this great work in you will bring it to completion.  – Philippians 1

Take a Hike: what the princess said to the frog

“You have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your prince.”  A friend and I saw the Princess and the Frog last week, taking advantage of the Academy’s $10 date night.  As I watched an unlikely pair fall in love amidst toothless fireflies, trumpet-playing crocodiles, and some surprisingly dark voodoo characters, I was struck by the simple message of the fairytale world: love turns up in the most unexpected places.  Jane Austin describes falling in love best in the words of Mr. Darcy: “I cannot fix on the hour, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.”  But this is not a treatise on love, which comes along in due course.  Love is rather like a chance discovery along the road—like a beautiful outlook or picnic spot to inspire and revive weary travelers, but it is neither the direction nor the destination.  This article is, in fact, the briefest beginning to an apology for healthy relationship in the form of a (perhaps radical?) suggestion: dating should begin with fun.

Relationship is like a hiking trail, an enjoyable activity that both challenges and strengthens the body and the soul.  There are many different paths of varying difficulty, to extend the metaphor.  Some converge and some diverge.  Some lead to water and some to beautiful vistas.  Some require training, gear, and oxygen while others are paved or beaten and lead gently onward.  Dating is just one kind of path on the relationship journey, along with friends, family, coworkers, mentors, and of course our unique spiritual paths toward and alongside God.  Dating isn’t meant to be a leap from Eaton Canyon to Mount Everest.  It is meant to be user-friendly, a beginner’s guide to trail-making that requires the steady growth in learning to live in the moment, relating just for the sake of enjoying male-female interaction.  I think it’s about time we take the “taboo” out of dating multiple people as practice in relational living and stop worrying about whether or not this person is a prince who’s gone a little green or just a slimy frog.  Dating is a lesson in joy:  joy in the moment, joy in relating to another person, and joy in learning about who you are as you relate to others.

This is not to disparage marriage.  Marriage is a beautiful and worthy fringe benefit of relational living, much like the breathtaking view of the sun rising over the valley at Pretty Place, South Carolina.  For some, it can make the whole journey worthwhile. But let us not forget that the purpose is the journey, not the destination.  Oh, the destination exists, but it is not the only reason for moving forward, as though married people stop learning about living in the moment, relating to others or understanding themselves just because they now move as a unit.  We keep learning.  We keep moving toward God, toward each other, toward love of God and each other.  Dating is just one way to experience the journey.  It’s not a pain but a joy.  It’s not a test but a lesson.

Somewhere in the last couple of decades, we’ve lost the freedom of learning together in community how to relate to another human being in a safe, healthy, and fulfilling way.  Pressure to find (in Sharon’s words) “God’s chosen” and fear of rejection, failure, and isolation have been filling our lives with don’ts and can’ts and carefuls and all the lies that keep us from entering into the abundance of life and the completion of joy that God has promised, that Jesus came in very human flesh to bring us.  I’ve lived the greater part of my life weighed down by that pressure and boxed in by that fear.  I used to think there was no practice round; I had to get it right or fail miserably and die alone in the rain, like something out of Ernest Hemingway.  I lived in constant fear that something bad WOULD happen, and so I did not live in order to keep that bad thing away.  Now I realize that the bad thing was actually living in fear, being too afraid to live life, try new things, have new experiences, make mistakes, learn something about myself, learn something I never expected about or from someone else.  My slow journey into relational living has taught me so much about God’s character, creativity, and grace. I hope to help others make the same discovery and walk their own path into freedom. Isn’t that what knowing Jesus is all about?  Isn’t freedom the outcome of knowing the truth?  Isn’t it God’s promise that this truth will make us free?

Somehow culture has shifted toward the drive for perfection and the extreme protection from the fear of getting dating WRONG.  Let me assure you, you can’t get it wrong.  Nothing bad will come of trying if your expectation is simply to learn about who you are and who another person is.  You will definitely learn something, even if your date is boring or you drop pizza in your lap.   Kissing a few frogs won’t kill you, and you just might be surprised at the changes you see in yourself as a result.  Just remember: enjoy life; love others; and above all—relax.