Honesty About the Journey

For a few moments I drove alone in the car, heading south from the Benedictine monastery just outside of Winnipeg, Manitoba, where I was leading a retreat. I was on my way to purchase bread and wine for the next day’s Communion service while the retreatants were back at the monastery observing an afternoon of quiet reflection. Some were engaged in prayer walks while others were drawn to the chapel’s embracing silence, and a few strolled along the banks of the gently flowing river bordering the monastery grounds. In the quiet of the car, I began to reflect on what had brought us to this place four times over the past two years.

In part, we were here because of something I read by Sue Monk Kidd many years ago. “We seem to have focused so much on exuberant beginnings and victorious endings that we’ve forgotten about the slow, sometimes tortuous unraveling of God’s grace that takes place in the ‘middle places.’”[1] Those words were embedded in my memory from the first time I read them, yet it would be years before they would ring in my ears once again.

Several years ago, I began to feel a subtle dissatisfaction with the retreats I was leading. Dissatisfaction identified itself in questions: Had participants been able to integrate their spiritual practices with their daily lives? How had their experience affected their way of being with others? Were they aware of the Spirit’s part in life changing moments? Then Kidd’s words returned and gave new focus to my concern. I realized that a retreat leader must be careful not to play to a participant’s desire for exuberant beginnings and victorious endings. Such desire is insufficient at best and escapist at worst. I concluded that spiritual retreat must evoke a maturing spirituality that enables God’s people to live confidently in those “sometimes tortuous middle places,” but to do so means retreat leaders must be prepared to journey along with persons who have sought out the retreat experience.

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Over the years, I’ve discovered something. Maybe you have too. It’s relatively easy (and somewhat enticing) to talk about spiritual formation—the hope of becoming more attuned to God’s work in and around us, the hope of shedding bad habits and self-serving attitudes like so many pounds after the holidays, the hope of experiencing even just a smidge of God’s ever-present, never-failing, nonstop love for us. Yes, it’s easy to talk about it. Just like it’s easy to talk about diets and exercise regimens, New Year’s resolutions, and the like. The hope of becoming something new—something better—is usually the silent driver behind marketing and advertising. Better abs, better hair, better tires, better life, better wife (yes, that’s what my husband asks for). It’s pretty easy to get us imagining our “better selves.” It’s easy to talk about spiritual formation, but it’s so much harder—so much more confusing, requiring so
much more hope—actually to hold myself open to change.

When we’re talking about the possibilities, especially if it relates to what other people should be doing—how they should be transforming—we can talk all day long.

But hope is the most dangerous thing in the world. I know that sounds counter-intuitive, but here’s what I mean. I believe most people eventually give up hope. Somewhere along the way they resign themselves to “life as they know it.” Hoping for a better life, a better relationship, a better job, a better retirement, a better church, a better relationship with God has all fallen flat. The striving has stopped; the surviving has begun. Like a drowning victim exhausted from effort, they give up. They stop trying. They stop hoping. It’s just too painful. It never works. If their soul-injuries happened early enough in life, they stopped hoping long before they reached adulthood. They’ve learned better. They may be dutiful soldiers, hard workers, devoted spouses and parents and employees, but inside they do not hope. Their souls ache with the haunting words offered to an incognito Jesus on the road to Emmaus: “But we had hoped…”

In the Apostle John’s gospel, the picture Jesus uses for life on His Way is the picture of a river. He tells us, living in the flow of the Spirit, this river will flow out of the core of who you are. Ever find that a bizarre image? A river of life flowing out of you? Does it even sound appealing?

It seems to be a big deal to God, though. This image of a river is used about 150 times in scripture, most often as a picture of spiritual life. And there is good reason. Israel is a desert country where rivers mean one thing: life.

My husband Rudy says that he thinks I was a Christian in utero. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I do know that all of my life I believed in the power of God. When I was a little girl at my grandmother’s house, she would tuck us in at night in this huge bed, and she would lead us in prayer. There, I began to establish a sense of the fact there is a God out there.

Because of the kind of kid I was—very compliant—I assumed that I had found God. I found God in Vacation Bible School with the rules that said, “Don’t chew gum in here.” I found God when I wanted to join the choir, and they said, “You’ve got to be baptized first; that’s the rule.” And then, of course, ultimately, I found God in the big rules—the Ten Commandments. Real rules of what it means to be a Christian. This God was crafted around rules that filled the imagination of a little girl who wanted to be a “good” girl, who wanted not to break rules. I lived for quite a while with that God that I found. I shared that God with my husband, who married me in 1985. In 1990, he accepted Christ. He says he was a late bloomer. In 1991, he accepted his call to ministry. And I accepted mine.