|
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!  My finished icon of Rublev's Trinity I smiled sitting on the porch, in awe of the synchronicities…chaos, Kali, cicadas, a journal entry about the Chaos Stroke from an icon retreat attended with this friend whose impending death had ushered in another layer of chaos... Nothing had changed. It still felt awful to know my friend was going to die (and she did, less than 24 hours later). And the things that were a mess in my life, were still a mess. Nothing had changed this, and yet… Being open to “God Is Chaos” had strangely allowed comfort and brought the awareness that God was also “With Me in Chaos.” The latter recalls the message gifted us through the person of Jesus the Christ, who was called Emmanuel, God-with-us. Light began shining in my darkness once more. Holding the paradox of "God Is Chaos" and "God With Us in Chaos," I remembered the expression that emerged on the face of the center figure, the Christ, in my friend’s painting of the Holy Trinity—we laughed and called him the “Mischievous Jesus.” He knew something we did not...yet. Even now, words fail to describe how, in darkness and in light, I keep being beckoned into the at-times-difficult, divine dance that Rublev painted years ago, his brush beginning with Chaos.  My friend, Linda, and me with our unfinished icons. We both finished them at home.  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:
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.  Howard University - Andrew Rankin Memorial Chapel - stained glass window with three deans including Howard Thurman  We tried "blowing eggs" for the first time this Easter. The hollow eggs remind us of the "empty tomb"--although no one wanted to crack their painted egg to prove it!
Happy Eastertide! Eastertide is the festival season between Easter Sunday and Pentecost Sunday. While Christmastide is 12 days, Eastertide is 50 days! I like celebrating the “tides” because it gives you more than one day to celebrate. And practically speaking, that is really helpful. Especially if you’re a pastor or someone who works on Sunday (or you’re recovering after 12 days of vertigo, as thankfully, I was this past Sunday). Heart-wise, we need to recover “seasons of celebration.” We can be so quick to get to a holiday and so quick to leave it—going at such a dizzying speed, it can feel like a kind of vertigo of the heart! I don’t know about you, but I want to celebrate the reality of resurrection for more than one day! If you feel like you “missed Easter” or didn’t get to do what you wanted to this year, there’s still time! What would it be like for you to celebrate the reality of resurrection for 50 days? Not only the final triumph of life over death that Jesus Christ’s story announces, but all of the “little deaths” you’ve experienced…all of those times it felt like the future you desired was over, dead & buried…and yet new life came. God at work in your story, the ways you have been raised from the dead…it’s worth celebrating for more than one day!  A pastel drawing made with eyes closed to remind myself to simply "be" when it is hard to see. What a strange Holy Week! Episodes of vertigo and dizziness have lingered for ten days now.
The kind of vertigo I am experiencing (BPPV) often has no known cause, although it can be triggered by stress. I happened to be stretching my neck at the time. I also happen to be in a season of stress, marked by both positive & negative events. In this uncomfortable and disorienting place I find myself in, I cannot help but think of that first Holy Week long ago and how that one week stretch must have been so disorienting for those early followers of Jesus! Heads left spinning, wondering what was going on... From Palm Sunday to Good Friday and then to Easter…to go from what seemed overwhelmingly positive to overwhelmingly negative to overwhelmingly positive again…what a whiplash of a week! The human mind & body can only take so much (as I am being reminded).* A swirl of activity and inactivity. A dizzying array of events. A murky clash of praise and blame. Movement at warp-speed through the wisdom pattern of order, disorder, and reorder. Currently in disorder, I am being forced to slow down, to wait and see. When I don't, here comes the lightheadedness, as my body offers a warning that I am not to interrupt the healing process, so stop and be still. It feels like the in-between time of Holy Saturday. When one is trying to grasp what has and is happening to cause such a state, when waves of strong feelings and sensations come and go, exhaustion sets in from the strain. In such a place, trying harder eventually runs its course and one is invited to surrender. And remember. It’s usually in looking back that I see the transformation or wisdom gained through a disorienting period of time. Sometimes there is no clarity about a lesson learned or gift given, just an ever-deepening invitation to trust in the healing, transforming presence and slow work of God. The same was (& is) true of the followers of Jesus. Holy Triduum blessings to you (even if it feels more like a disorienting rather than a blessed time). ________________________________________________________ *Allowing for help during overwhelm is important and is part of surrendering (letting go of the "I can do it on my own" mentality). I am grateful for access to healthcare, like a walk-in clinic and a physical therapist specializing in vestibular rehabilitation, a reminder that once well, to find a simple way to encourage such accessibility for others. And I am thankful for the grace & support of my supervisor, counselor, directees, friends and family members. As I was sitting in silence with someone in spiritual direction, a rendering of St. Francis of Assisi by Daniel Ladinsky, came to mind. I reached over, found the little poem and read it. A smile grew on my directee's face and tears of gratitude began to flow. After ending the silence she said, "Kasey, how did you know I needed that old squirrel?!" Maybe you need Saint Francis and the old squirrel, too! THE SACRAMENTS I once spoke to my friend, an old squirrel, about the Sacraments-- he got so excited and ran into a hollow in his tree and came back holding some acorns, an owl feather, and a ribbon he had found. And I just smiled and said, "Yes, dear, you understand: everything imparts His grace. -St. Francis of Assisi, rendering by Daniel Ladinsky, Love Poems from God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West  Photo by Boys in Bristol Photography from Pexels  Celebrating Candlemas with Simeon and Anna greeting Joseph, Mary, & Jesus (figures from Gertrud Mueller Nelson & Peter Mazar's "Build Your Own Bethlehem") Light your candles tonight for the Light is coming. Christmas decorations come down in our house after Epiphany on January 6th, but the candles in our windows remain through February 2nd. Most may know February 2nd as Groundhog Day yet in the Christian tradition, it is Candlemas. Before Candlemas, ancient religions recognized this time as the midpoint of Winter and celebrated rituals in anticipation of the return of the light. These ancient peoples celebrated the bear leaving his den to see if Spring was in the air. Candlemas replaced the “Cult of the Bear” rituals, becoming one of the oldest Christian festivals, originating in 4th century Jerusalem. Forty days after Christmas, this Feast of the Presentation, celebrates Jesus being presented at the temple 40 days after his birth. In Luke 2, we read of the holy family meeting an old man and woman in the temple. Simeon and Anna, faithful to God, recognized Jesus as the "light for revelation." They had been waiting and praying, hoping to witness the arrival of the Light. Upon seeing him, they gave thanks for this Light that had now come into the world. Rhythms of nature and rituals of ancient peoples combined when German Christians used to say if badgers saw their shadow on Candlemas Day there would be more Winter. Sound familiar? As Germans moved to the United States, the badger was replaced by the groundhog. Whether literal or metaphorical, we all long for the return of the light after a long, dark Winter. The story of Jesus and these age-old celebrations remind us that, sooner or later, the Light will come again. May you light your candle in hope of this (& your) resurrection. By the end of December, I was exhausted. The joy of journeying with the first cohort in Wisdom Tree Collective's School of Spiritual Direction (more about that next month!), was overshadowed by a deep weariness. And I was dragging.. My repeated tries to get away for a few days of rest and relaxation?--thwarted! So, I took a vacation from social media and spent a little time listening to my life (and body). What I discovered was over-commitment and way too high of self-imposed expectations for any mere mortal. You may know this feeling well. I did not simply need a week away from my everyday life, I needed to change the rhythm of my life every day! That became (and is) my prayer this month: to return to the "unforced rhythms of grace" that Jesus speaks of in Matthew 11. With that prayer has come the awareness of how I'm out-of-rhythm:
Such self-awareness can leave me feeling overwhelmed. Creating space or learning anew seems like another responsibility. A spiritual practice that helps soften the hardness and let go of the heaviness in the moment is writing haiku, a 17 syllable, separated into 5/7/5, poem. Here are two of the six I wrote last week: When too many words Are swirling within your brain Pour them out in ink Come, laugh a little Release the seriousness Everyone needs play These simple poems helped me focus my overwhelming feelings into three simple lines revealing my soul's wisdom for the present: Pause, write and play. Others revealed practical ways of shifting energy and attention, letting go and opening up. Space was being created in me! This allowed me to see the gifts being offered, like a friend suggesting a children's book on breathing (scroll down to learn more). Maybe haiku is something for you, too. It reminds me of Jesus' invitation to become like a child (especially when struggling under the weight of being an adult)!  For some of us, Christmas is not experienced as "The Most Wonderful Time of the Year." For all who find themselves in this place, my husband, Russ, and I have offered The Longest Night of the Year Service on or around the Winter Solstice. A friend suggested it to us and after the first gathering in a small, country church over a decade ago, we knew it was something we wanted to continue. The service offers a safe space to acknowledge mixed feelings surrounding the holidays, to join together in lament and longing, and to simply step away from the rush of the season and breathe. Usually Russ offers only instrumental music during the short, 30 minute service but last year we offered the service via Zoom and he created a video with his only song with lyrics, "Some of Us," on his album, The Longest Night. Click on it below, listen and watch. Perhaps there's an image or lyric that connects with your own lament and longing, something that speaks to your soul. As to this year, we are offering the service online once again knowing more people can participate this way. I invite you to join me and a handful of others from Wisdom Tree Collective and Friday Morning Centering Prayer as we allow instrumental music, art from local/regional artists, laments and longings from Scripture, and Creation's own rhythm to companion us in the dark. Tuesday, December 21st 7:30-8:00pm CT Email me for the Zoom link. With darkness falling earlier, I have looked forward to the growing number of lights as I drive through my neighborhood. The display increases with each passing day! Childlikeness, anticipation, playfulness, joy, and magic are part of the season. So is pressure, overstimulation, exhaustion, loneliness, anger, and grief. Some years it is more one than the other, isn’t it? Other times it is a mix. The good news is that God is with us (& found) in both—moments that look & feel light and those that look & feel dark. Said the Psalmist (139): 11 If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,” 12 even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you. Our culture does a good job celebrating God in the light, but rarely guides us to discover God in the dark, especially during Christmastime. For some, the idea of God seeing us in the dark inspires more fear than comfort! However, the Psalmist is extolling the wonder of being seen by God, even when he cannot "see" God. When all is dark around us, God is still there, within and without. Do you have the inner eyes to see (& receive comfort)? Perhaps it is time to let yourself befriend the darkness or rather let yourself be befriended in the dark.
 |
AuthorKasey is a scarf, ball and club juggling spiritual director just outside of Nashville, TN. Play helps her Type-A, Enneagram 1 personality relax, creating space for poetry and other words to emerge. She also likes playing with theological ideas like perichoresis, and all the ways we're invited into this Triune dance. Archives
November 2025
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed
By clicking “Sign up for E-News” I consent to the collection and secure storage of this data as described in the Privacy Policy. The information provided on this form will be used to provide me with updates and marketing. I understand that I may modify or delete my data at any time.