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!