There is such a deep seated need within our hearts to be seen.
Children feel no need to hide this aspect of human nature. How often have you heard a child beg, “Look at me!” or felt little fingers tapping on your arm for attention? Have you ever noticed how often they glance up, checking to see if their parent—or even a complete stranger—is watching, observing and delighting in their antics? It’s as if there is something embedded in their little souls with an unrelenting, insistent need to be seen, to see the shine of delight and affection in someone’s eyes. It’s as if in this big, overwhelming world, caring eyes turned on them provide a secure anchor for their play, their creativity, their adventure.
I’m convinced we change little in this regard as we grow older. We’re merely socialized and disciplined to not make our hunger for seen-ness so obvious or insistent. Perhaps we’ve learned to discern whose eyes and attention to care about. But in our souls still hides this same aching desire, the same questions: Do you see me? Do you delight in what you see?
When I look deeply at my own soul, these are the questions I find, and they are particularly poignant in my relationship with the Lord. In some moments, I am a small girl, twirling and dancing, skirts and ribbons flying, in fields of sunshine, face upturned: Do you see me? In others, I am cowering, hugging my knees to my chest, lost in the darkness with a storm swirling around, calling out to be found: Do you see me?
Read moreThe cloudy mist enveloped me on graduation morning, as I waited in the stream of black, red, and blue vestments, shifting from one foot to the other to keep the chill from setting in too deeply. The sense of what I had accomplished had only dawned on me a couple weeks before, and the day was more emotional than I had anticipated. I was reaching the finish line of a marathon, and there was a freeing buoyancy in my spirit as I reached the end of the stage, my diploma in hand.
Now, several weeks later, it still seems a bit surreal. No more papers or 1500 page reading lists. No more end of semester crunch time stress. No more syllabus-structured work schedule.
I don’t know if I know what life is like not in school. I’ve been doing this for 20 years of my life, with only one year of a break. Twenty years of the rhythm of semester’s worth of assignments. Twenty years of exams, homework, syllabi. Twenty years of summer breaks and mid-year holidays. I like school. I like its structure, and I know its rhythms. With all the work and stress, it’s familiar, and I’ve become adept at riding its waves.
Now the question repeatedly greeting me is “What’s next?” I’ve been developing some graceful, intelligent-sounding, rather definitive ways of saying “I have no idea.”
Read moreHave you ever felt a deep connection to someone you’ve never met? Perhaps you’ve developed feelings of friendship after reading a memoir or listening to an album? You know what I mean—something sparks inside of you, and you think “If I could only sit down with this person over a good cup of tea, I know we’d be friends.” There is something powerful—even sacred at times—about the invitation into another person’s world through word and story. We see something of ourselves in them or sense a uniting point of humanity, and it enkindles within our hearts the sense that we are not alone, that our experience is not all that unique, that there are fellow travelers with similar aches and joys and visions of the world.
I sometimes sense this spark of friendship, for lack of a better word, as I learn about Christians who have gone before us. (I know, I’m a bit of a strange bird in this case.) As I read their writings and the stories recorded of them, there are certain characters who become prominent in my mind. Although we are separated by a great chasm of time and space, I feel a sense of friendship and an awareness of a kindred spirit.
One such “friend” for me is Aelred of Rievaulx. Rievaulx Abbey now stands in ruins in the countryside of northern Yorkshire, and its beloved abbot, Aelred, has been largely forgotten. But this fascinating man leaves behind a touching legacy of deep compassion, particularly towards those who are weaker in the faith.
Read moreIt’s the end of semester—the end of my very final semester of seminary. This means stress and anxiety have been the dominant themes. The hundreds of pages left to be read, the brilliant thoughts that must be conjured up or fabricated for papers, last projects, final exams—and all the while the minutes tick by and time slips away.
Do you know that feeling of stress? When your pulse feels always slightly elevated, and your mind and body are jittery with nervous energy? When you feel a knot or a churning in your gut? When you’re paralyzed and inactive from the overwhelming weight of what must be done? When your emotions are taut and delicate, at the breaking point of tears, irritation, or absurd laughter at any moment?
To increase the absurdity of the situation, in the midst of all the busyness and the pressure, I have to take a retreat. Yes, a full-day retreat, preferably in silence and solitude, exploring practices of medieval spirituality. My reaction?—I don’t have time for this. I don’t have the time to be still because I need to be productive.
Read moreWhen the winter finally thawed, I could go outside and sit looking over the creek, my back propped again the rough bark of a tree. Other days, I’d slip through the heavy doors of the chapel and sit in the silence of cold stone. I’ve been bent over the kitchen table sipping my morning coffee, curled in a hammock listening to a chorus of birdsong, seated on the cement porch of a cabin at dawn—all with Bible and journal in hand.
I grew up with a brand of spirituality which told me that the key ingredients to my growth as a Christian were to read my Bible and pray. We called it a “quiet time,” preferably alone, preferably in the morning—and the closer you got with God, the longer it was (or at least that’s what my teenage ears heard). Journaling and Scripture memories were other important practices. I think a great number of my generation who grew up in the church have had similar experiences. Many of us feel guilty for missing quiet times. We also feel guilty for not experiencing the prescribed emotional longing for our “quiet time” or the emotional uplift after its completion. It seems that so much of our spiritual life is defined by these times alone with the Lord. Our spirituality of private, personal piety is the measuring rod for the intimacy of our walk with God.
Is this really the measure of spirituality? Why must the emphasis be so internal? What if the emotions aren’t there? What if dryness sets in?
In all of our emphasis on internal piety, we can easily overlook plain old ordinary obedience. Perhaps out of our obsessive fear of works-righteousness, we’ve forgotten the biblical emphasis on our actions of obedience as disciples of Christ. Our actions matter. Our obedience matters. Jesus (and many other voices in the New Testament) seems to suggest that it’s connected to the validity of our salvation. Yes, we are saved completely by the gracious act of God on our behalf. We were hopeless—and he did everything. And yet Jesus spends so much of his time teaching us how to live. The moral of the parable I sang about as a child—“the wise man built his house upon the rock” (Matthew 7:24-27)—is not primarily about some abstract sense of putting Jesus on the throne of your heart but about obeying what he says.
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