"Call the Midwife," that's where Wisdom met me after online Centering Prayer recently.

The phrase that called to me from Wisdom of Solomon 6:12-20 was "appears to them in their paths," but I had no idea how She was going to appear because I was sick with COVID and able to do little after Centering Prayer but watch Netflix and sleep. All my plans for the week were thwarted.

"I don't know how you'll meet me in my path, but I'd love for you to show up somehow," I silently and half-heartedly prayed. 

So I started watching the last BBC episode of season 12 of "Call the Midwife," and smiled when I saw how plans getting thwarted was the theme! With her big plans thwarted, Trixie, one of the midwives, needed to release her grasp on her ideal and open her hands to all of the Plan Bs being offered by her community. In doing so, she found them to be a better fit for her heart.

Says narrator and actress in her eighties Vanessa Redgrave, about  the community's efforts on behalf of Trixie as the last scene unfolds in episode 8:

It was like Mother Wisdom was speaking right to me (and not just about being sick for a week)! I stopped the show and backed it up numerous times to listen to the voice of one who had born witness to many deaths and births of people and plans. I wrote down her words as an extension to the Wisdom of Solomon, savoring them, allowing them to strengthen my heart and soul. 

A week later as the Centering Prayer group continued with Wisdom of Solomon during the time of Lectio Divina following the silence, two phrases from 7:7-14 called to me: "in her hands uncounted wealth" and "unfailing treasure." I couldn't help but think of how Wisdom opens our eyes to a different kind of wealth, a more lasting treasure. Once more, Mother Wisdom's voice, sounding now like Vanessa Redgrave, echoed in my ear,  "Here are life's riches next to you..."

"Call the Midwife" just may be my new phrase for prayer!  Wisdom is certainly showing Herself to be a dependable and delightful Midwife to the Soul!

(You can watch "Call the Midwife" on PBS or Netflix and/or join me for online Centering Prayer sometime! )

She stood in the parking lot in tears.

The only thing that motivated my daughter to get her driver's license was knowing that in a few months she would be a senior in high school and that meant the opportunity to paint her senior parking spot.

Lainey sketched out her design and bought the materials. Now here we were, after hours of work and she was ready to take a paint roller to all her plans!

She had hit a snag that was throwing off the whole picture (and the picture she held onto in her head). She felt like giving up.

"It's ruined!"
"Impossible!"
"Why did I choose something so hard?"
"I can't do this!"

The sun had gone down and she kept working by flashlight trying to force her original idea.

"Why don't you call it a day and sleep on it? Maybe you'll come up with another idea." I asked and encouraged. 

On the way home, thankfully she had another plan.  The next morning we stood in front of the spot and realized that this idea would not work either. Oh the frustration!

"Trust me, you have everything you need inside you. BUT, you're going to have to give up what you had envisioned to make room for something new to emerge. You go paint the ears and let's sit in the Silence a moment. Something will come to us."

In releasing her grasp and opening to other possibilities, a new idea did emerge. And not only was it going to work, it was going to add some lighthearted humor to the parking spot, making it even better than she had originally planned. Hope resurrected. 

A week later I headed to a personal silent retreat and was getting increasingly frustrated as I walked a prayer labyrinth, my own snags and stuckness on my mind.  I heard my inner proclamations-- "Impossible!" "I can't do this!" "Why is life so hard sometimes?!"

A passage of Scripture I had always loved came to my mind and sounded completely naïve, "Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.”

"Sure You will," I said sarcastically and trudged on.

In midstride, I stopped and looked up, seeing the sculpture of Jesus on the cross in the monastery cemetery. I silently pleaded, "How did You do it?" as I considered how his path led straight to the cross. 

Continuing to walk I thought of my words to my daughter, "Trust me, you have everything you need inside you. BUT, you're going to have to give up what you had envisioned to make room for something new to emerge..."

Just then a rephrasing of Proverbs 3:5-6 flowed into me:  

Trust in The Creative Process 
with all your heart
and lean not on your own expectation
or image of the ideal.
In all your ways allow and accept
The Creative Process and 
your next step will be
made known. 

No circumstance had changed, but my way of seeing sure had! Even seeing God not only as Creator but The Creative Process offered a needed depth. It became clear that through the process of walking the prayer labyrinth, The Creative Process had walked me right into the middle of the Wisdom Pattern! 

I could now see that I was in the fire of the crucible, the dissolution of the caterpillar in the chrysalis. It was a place I could not force anything to change faster and trying harder would simply lead to more frustration. Instead I was being invited to let my expectations burn and my images of the ideal break apart. 

In this place I was being asked, "Will you trust in The Creative Process with all your heart?"
_______

• Is there any part of your life that order has turned into disorder (& reorder seems far off)? 
• How are you experiencing the heat of the crucible or dissolution within your chrysalis?
• Will you trust in The Creative Process with all your heart?

"What a luxury!" a friend said to me when she heard I was going on a silent retreat.  

"I've discovered a silent retreat is not a luxury, it's a necessity!"  I replied. She had no idea how serious I was about my need for silence.

At the beginning of July, my body was letting me know I needed a pause--irritability & a short fuse, quick to tears, constant tiredness, feelings of overload & overwhelm, etc.  My spouse was letting me know he needed a pause given how his own emotional and physical weariness had intensified by the loss of his father earlier this year.  My kids were letting me know they needed a pause to recover from the pressure of school & sports schedules as well as a very active June. 

Looking at our July schedule, we decided the planned family vacation to Seattle was not a wise idea.  It was full of activity rather than rest.  And even though we had been looking forward to it for a long time, we would not push through, instead we would pause. 

While it was to look differently for each of us, all of us needed silence and solitude.

Russ went to Missouri to stay at his dad's house by himself then I went to Sacred Heart Monastery in Cullman, Alabama (pictured above) for a private silent retreat.  And the kids spent time inside and outside their rooms, painting and playing driveway basketball, allowing for some slow summer days at home. 

A pause offered us space to grieve and breathe.

A pause also helped us see!  "When your eyes are tired, the world is tired also," begins poet David Whyte in "Sweet Darkness" from The House of Belonging.

When tired, I need to rest my own eyes so I can see the world differently.  Of course this is both literal and metaphorical! 

At Sacred Heart, I needed to literally sleep and have large chunks of time with nothing to do but rest and remember.  A sacred pause often looks so ordinary!  Here's what mine looked like:   

• Slept & when I couldn't at night, took naps in the afternoon
• Watched clouds float by & turtles swim in the lake
• Enjoyed good food lovingly prepared by other hands
• Received spiritual direction from Sr. Mary McGehee
• Walked the prayer labyrinth and hiked an overgrown trail
• Laughed at a squirrel eating a mushroom half its size
• Journaled and let myself have a cleansing cry
• Left my phone in my room so I could wander and sit without being tempted to scroll
• Received God's care which helped me open my heart and my inner and outer eyes

Did it solve all of my problems?  No, but it gave me needed insight.

It helped me see myself, my work, spouse, kids, and world in a new (or renewed) light.
 
I was reminded that I am not and never will be superwoman.  I was also reminded that I have the strength to establish or return to some much-needed boundaries.  And my time away affirmed how much I need regular time away!  My family, friends, and co-workers would agree!  ______________________________________________   
 
What are your indicators that you need a pause?  Is there anything you need to pause, postpone, or plan differently?

You don't have to go anywhere but sometimes it's good to get away.  Even Jesus invited his disciples to "Come away all by yourselves to a quiet place and rest awhile." (Mark 6:31)

As his disciples experienced, life can get to be too much sometimes so silence & solitude are a necessity!  So whether or not you join me for Centering Prayer or the 4-day silent retreat at Sacred Heart Monastery in October, may you, too, allow silence and solitude to be friends on your journey. 

(This blog was part of an e-news sent July 2023.  Sign up for Kasey's quarterly e-news here.)

Driving down the road.

Putting wet laundry in the dryer.

Picking up a garden trowel.

The quiet moment before falling asleep.

A memory slips into your mind—their familiar whistle, particular look or smell, a phrase spoken…you remember and for a moment you re-member. 
 
The Port William Membership…if you don’t know what I’m referring to, it’s time to be introduced to Wendell Berry’s fictional town in Kentucky, its landscape and people.  How It Went: Thirteen More Stories of the Port William Membership is his latest (and hopefully not last) book.  I bought it for myself for Christmas and quickly read it, but like each of his Port William novels and short stories, they stay with me long after.
 
Berry has a knack for describing the lived experience of the land and its people.  Even if their particularities are not your particularities, you find yourself woven into their human experience. 

Stories of small town & farm-life, a barber and his shop, being a child or a parent during a world at war in the 1940s…they pull you in and draw you like a threaded needle into the fabric of your own life. 

With an ease that may surprise, you open your own memory box containing the people and places that have made you and many times, held you together. 
 
This particular book centers on an old man, a writer, looking back (like Berry himself).  “Memories of times and places he had forgotten came back to him, reached him at last as if they had been on their way for a long time.  He realized how fully and permanently mere glances, touches, passing words, from all his life far back into childhood, had taken place in his heart…” (p. 76).
 
Andy Catlett remembers those no longer living and “yet by their absence his old companions have in a way come closer to him than they were when they were alive.  They seem to involve themselves intimately in his life as he goes on living it” (p. 131).
 
He sounds a lot like Saint John Chrysostom in the 4th century: “Those whom we love and lose are no longer where they were before. They are now wherever we are.”
 
There are expressions of wit and wisdom that you have inherited.  
There are people whose presence, whether still with you in body or not, continue to bring comfort, encouragement, or perhaps curiosity! 

Pause for a moment: 

• Bring them to the kitchen table or garden of your heart, the living room or hiking trail of your mind.  Who wants to walk out of or whisper from the past to you?
• Allow for a moment to come back together, to re-member.  What does this occasion call for?  Gravity or levity? Andy recalls grandaddy Feltner on occasions more than enough saying, “What can’t be helped must be endured.”  Or when someone is talking on and on, he can’t help but hear Art Rowanberry’s judgement: “I reckon he must be a right smart fellow, but whatever he knows he learnt it from hisself.” (p. 132)
• Let these simple memories of Andy’s spark your own.  Receive a gift from the past you didn’t know you needed today…from your own membership.   

___________________________
Just now as I finished writing, my son opened a can of sparkling water and the sound of his pouring it over ice took me back to childhood.  I’m in 4th grade, pouring a cold glass bottle of Pepsi over ice and running it out to my mom who is push-mowing the front yard.  I knew she loved the frothy fizz and wanted her to enjoy it that hot day.  Although little fizz was left by the time she stopped and knelt down to drink it, I remember her look of appreciation, her joy in being remembered.   
 

To Get Started with Port William, look for these books:
Jayber Crow
Andy Catlett: Early Travels
Hannah Coulter
Nathan Coulter
A Place in Time: Twenty Stories of the Port William Membership
How It Went: Thirteen More Stories of the Port William Membership

Kasey Hitt is a co-founder and instructor for Wisdom Tree Collective.  She’s been a spiritual director since 2003 and has been reading Wendell Berry novels and poetry for just as long. 

You can also find this blog and others from the Membership of Wisdom Tree Collective here.​

A week ago, Steve had an experience of God at the 4 day silent retreat at St. Meinrad Archabbey that he will never forget. Here's his story in his own words...

"It wasn't that I ended up or happened to be at the retreat, it was the retreat ended up happening to me!

I have a past that I hadn’t been able to deal with, in fact I let it define who I was. As a result I struggled with how God could love me. I read about His unconditional love in the Bible, it was preached from the pulpit, but I could never let it into my soul.

During four days of silence and total disconnect from daily life along with Spiritual Directors as God’s conduit, I surfaced deeper sins I had refused to look at and became aware that all these sins were not who I was, but something I did. Remove what I did and I am still the child of God He created.

In my silence focusing on listening to God I heard Him speak,
“Steve, I love you.”

And I melted. I cried. I felt lifted up.

My spiritual awakening could not have happened without the silent retreat and spiritual direction. It created the environment where I could actually hear God speak to me. I have been so blessed.

A couple of days later I awoke at 3:30 am giddy with life like Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas morning."
________
The power of Silence and Spiritual Direction!

Many thanks to Sally Sharpe for joining me to provide spiritual direction at this silent retreat.

Note: Steve started to befriend Silence through Centering Prayer and a silent day retreat.  You're welcome to join me online any Friday from 9am-10am CT for a Centering Prayer group.  Beginners always welcome!  Contact me for the Zoom link.

“I’ve always known God to be the 'God of Surprises'!” the twinkly-eyed 80-year-old woman said after I asked her to tell me about her relationship with God.

“Take you for instance,” she went on, “I woke up in the night a few weeks ago and heard God say, ‘Spiritual direction would be good for you,’ and I said, ‘Yes, Lord, I’m listening, who do you want me to see?’”

She paused then said, “And immediately your face came to mind!  I remembered you and it didn’t even matter to me that you weren’t Catholic!” 

I didn’t know her too well and hadn’t seen her since before the pandemic began.  In fact, I was amazed she even remembered me at all!

“But then you told me you had no openings,” she said incredulously, “So I said, ‘Well, Lord, I’ll trust you anyway.”

Her eyes lit up as she said, “And now here you sit!”

Three days after I told her I had no openings, I wondered what spiritual director would be able to go see her as she no longer was able to drive.  As I thought about who lived close to her, I realized that she lived near the place my daughter took fencing lessons, so I actually did have space in my monthly calendar when I could go see her!
 
We laughed and I said, “God of Surprises for sure!”
 
She told me that while it had been close to a decade since she’d seen a spiritual director, God had always brought the right ones to her at the right time.  “Every single one I have connected with and they have become dear to me,” she reflected.
 
Then I asked her where she grew up (it's not a question I usually ask but I did that day).
 
She leaned forward (as to let me in on a secret), “A little town called, Pick-way, O-hi-o!”

“You grew up in Piqua, Ohio?!” I said laughing, “Not only do I know where that is, but that’s my hometown, too!”

“God of Surprises!” we both exclaimed.

We reminisced about Piqua, the streets we lived on and schools we attended.  I told her that my parents still lived there and also had a tiny cottage up on Lake Loramie.  “Do you know where that is?” I asked her.

“Of course! It’s on State Woot 66 and the reason I say "Woot" is because I had a coach for a teacher who had a speech impediment—” 
I leaped forward in my chair, interrupting her excitedly, “You had Coach Heil!”

“What?!” she exclaimed, “You knew him, too?!”

“I did because he was my Health teacher AND my Drivers’ Ed instructor!  Wow, you had him when he was a young pup in his 20s at Piqua Catholic and I had him when he was in his 60s at Piqua High School!”

“God of Surprises!” we gleefully shouted in unison, now both of us suspecting we were part of a Divine secret.

We sat in silence for a few moments just marveling, shaking our heads.

“I tell you, I would never have guessed in a million years that I would be sitting here in Nashville, Tennessee, talking to you about Piqua, Ohio, and Coach Heil!” I laughed.

“I know it, God of Surprises, I told you, it's always been true!" she responded, "I need to call my sister in Ohio because she is never going to believe this!”
 
Believe it or not, there were even more surprising revelations of connection that she shared with me that first session! 

The hour came to a close and we hugged.  I could tell I had already become dear to her and she had become dear to me.  There was no doubt the Holy Spirit was the true Spiritual Director!

I crawled into my car and couldn't help but cry tears of gratitude all the way back to the fencing club, full of wonder and awe at the God of Surprises.   

I had a blog I was going to share then decided not to...yet.

​As I read what I had written, my supervisor's wise words echoed in my head, "Sometimes a spiritual insight or experience is meant to nourish you for a while before you offer it to others. Given away too soon and it loses some of its potency for your own heart & soul."

So I decided to savor the experience and insight for now and share her words instead.

In this age of social media, "sharing" can become compulsive (those of us who teach have this tendency as well)!

​Here's some encouragement to savor a moment or insight without sharing a photo or post...yet.

​​I couldn’t go to sleep.

Spending time in a crowded hospital with a dear friend who was dying left me restless and lying awake looking for God in the dark and finding nothing.  
 
It was the proverbial last straw.  Too much.

“What the hell?!...Does God even exist?!” I bitterly thought in the emptiness.  The absurdity of being a spiritual director seemed to mock me in that moment.
 
Every image of God I ever held did nothing to comfort me and the absence of images and comfort left me in a place of nihilistic rage and deep sadness.

Even though I had read John of the Cross and Julian of Norwich by her hospital bed, recalling conversations we had enjoyed over the years about their (and our) experiences of love in the darkness, here I was struggling in my own dark night.

“What a waste of my life!  What a charade!” I thought as I recalled my life of being devoted to God and tending to the spiritual life, both mine and others, only to stare into the void of meaninglessness (and not for the first time). 

Furrowed brow, eyes squeezed shut, the rest of my body now as tense as my face, silently shouting—"Where is God in this chaos?”  “Why even ask?  Life is showing me there really is no God at all.”
 
After a while, somehow, something small slipped in through the tightness and whispered, “God IS Chaos.”
 
Before I could think, my brow and eyes started softening. 
 
My body noticed the truth before my brain could think about refuting what had just been spoken to me in the dark.

Then an image appeared in my mind’s eye—Kali. 

I couldn't remember much about her, only that she's the Hindu goddess of chaos and destruction leading to life.  Images of her can be quite disturbing (especially for those of us Westerners who don't know the symbolism) and here she was showing up in the stillness of night!  Later I would read that in Hinduism, she is the ultimate manifestation of Shakti, the primordial energy, the mother of all (watch this video for more).  Kali’s dark skin stands for this chaotic, life-birthing energy.

"Hearing ‘God IS Chaos’ and remembering the Hindu goddess, Kali…there was something strangely settling in that, and I was able to fall asleep,” I later texted a friend, a nurse experiencing burnout in a crowded hospital (she went on to write a piece of prose for her doctoral class assignment based on our text thread).
__________ 

The next morning, I walked outside in my pajamas.  The stifling heat, sticky humidity, and earsplitting cicadas continued the conversation— I was surrounded by the sound and sensations of chaos. 

I forced myself to sit in the discomfort.

​From that place I wondered if I had written anything down from the Icon-Writing Retreat my dear friend and I had attended together a couple of months earlier. 

I went inside, grabbed my journal, then returned to the front porch to find the dates of that weekend retreat. 
__________

In the first place, I had no time to go on that retreat.  Life had been exhausting and the thought of painting anything in that state added to my overwhelm.  In the second place, I wanted to spend time with my dear friend, knowing that stage 4 cancer was eventually going to rob us of time (by the way, Kali's name means both "darkness" and " force or fullness of time").  So I picked her up on a Friday morning in May and went. 
_________

There it was, May 13th-15th, along with a short entry for each day (the last one being, "I am so glad I went.").  I was grateful that I had written down a few things, even though they had been forgotten in the rush of life’s challenges.
 
I recalled how my friend and I sat side-by-side looking at the blank wood that our icons would be painted on and while she felt excitement, I felt dread.  How was I going to do this?! 

The instructor told us to fill our brushes with paint and then said, “Relax, because the first stroke when it comes to painting an icon is called The Chaos Stroke!” 

Immediately I softened and a hint of excitement even found its way inside my weary head.

The Chaos Stroke is named so because it represents the primordial energy at the beginning of Creation found in the first chapter of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible. 

Our spontaneous swirls and waves echoed the Spirit (or Wind or Breath) of God, moving over the surface of the deep, dark waters.  And like the Genesis account, step by step, day by day, things started appearing where before there was nothing but potential in the eye of the Beholder.

From the chaos within me, from the chaotic swirls on my wooden panel, emerged a rendering of Rublev’s Trinity from the 15th century!

Sometimes we need reminders that it’s okay to be human. 

Reading through a thrift store find, I was introduced to a story of a zookeeper who trained (and then untrained) an otter. 

I was expecting a feel-good story.  

And I was not disappointed as I read the beginning and middle with all of the magical moments of taming and training the female otter.  How fun!  Who wouldn't want a pet otter?!  

But one unfortunate encounter with a chimpanzee undid all the training and showed the zookeeper that the otter needed to return to being the wild animal it had been...how sad!  It was not the ending I (or the zookeeper) expected. 

In It’s a Jungle Out There, Gary Richmond's insights from his experience still stay with me because they offer universal wisdom (remember, any authentic wisdom is universal, whether Christian, Buddhist, Taoist, agnostic, etc.).  Here's what he learned that can speak to any of us, whether zookeepers or not: 

1. “You can do all the right things, and things can still go wrong.”  
2. “Even when stories have sad endings, they can have happy middles and good beginnings.” 

Have you had an experience where you did all the right things only to have it backfire or lead to an unfortunate outcome? 

This doesn’t mean you "didn’t have enough faith" or didn’t do things "right enough," or any of the variety of “shoulds” that may ring in your ears.  

Sometimes things go wrong (no matter your best efforts).  It’s part of being human.
 
Everyone has experienced a story with a sad ending.  It’s part of being human. 

Sometimes the sadness is so great, we want to demonize and dismiss the whole story, labeling it an utter failure.  We tend to be too attached to our preferred outcomes (as Buddhists wisely point out).  That, too, is human.  

But, it is also okay to remember the happy middle and good beginning. 
While things did not turn out as he had hoped (& efforted), Richmond was still able to celebrate the fond memories of the process of befriending the otter.
 
Is there a story of yours that by remembering the happy middle and good beginning may be good for your soul?
 
Let’s give ourselves permission to be human today, especially when things don’t go as planned (no matter our best efforts).

During these turbulent times we must remind ourselves repeatedly that life goes on.

This we are apt to forget.

The wisdom of life transcends our wisdoms;
the purpose of life outlasts our purposes;
the process of life cushions our processes.

The mass attack of disillusion and despair,
distilled out of the collapse of hope,
has so invaded our thoughts that what we know to be true and valid seems unreal and ephemeral.

There seems to be little energy left for aught but futility.

This is the great deception.

By it whole peoples have gone down to oblivion
without the will to affirm the great and permanent strength of the clean and the commonplace.

Let us not be deceived.

It is just as important as ever to attend to the little graces
by which the dignity of our lives is maintained and sustained.

Birds still sing;
the stars continue to cast their gentle gleam over the desolation of the battlefields,
and the heart is still inspired by the kind word and the gracious deed.

There is no need to fear evil.

There is every need to understand what it does,
how it operates in the world,
what it draws upon to sustain itself.

We must not shrink from the knowledge of the evilness of evil.

Over and over we must know that the real target of evil is not destruction of the body,
the reduction to rubble of cities;
the real target of evil is to corrupt the spirit of man
and to give his soul the contagion of inner disintegration.

When this happens,
there is nothing left,
the very citadel of man is captured and laid waste.

Therefore the evil in the world around us must not be allowed to move from without to within.

This would be to be overcome by evil.

To drink in the beauty that is within reach,
to clothe one’s life with simple deeds of kindness,
to keep alive a sensitiveness to the movement of the spirit of God
in the quietness of the human heart and in the workings of the human mind--
this is as always the ultimate answer to the great deception.

Excerpted from Meditations of the Heart by Howard Thurman, published by Beacon Press, 1953.
_____________________________________________

The words of this spiritual mentor of Martin Luther King, Jr., can still offer us wisdom during times of rising anger and increasing hopelessness.  We often reflect on the writing of Howard Thurman in Wisdom Tree Collective’s School of Spiritual Direction. 

He was a civil rights leader, a theologian, author, academic, and pastor who was a mystic at heart, finding solace in nature—a favorite oak tree was a spiritual friend, a nonhuman elder & mentor.  Thurman also co-founded the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco, the first racially integrated, intercultural church in the United States, which also valued the creative arts as a way of sharing the Good News.  He was familiar with suffering. Let his words speak to your soul today.  Read more of his wisdom in his book Meditations of the Heart.