These days my life seems to be decidedly introverted. I’ve known for years that my personality is introvert but my vocation has mostly forced me to a public life. That’s not really a contradiction; most ministers I know are introverts. We just learn how to pour ourselves out in public and then spend time recharging our spiritual batteries in private, quiet places. Or we try to learn.
During this recovery, I’ve been wondering how well I have learned the lesson of releasing the expectations of others in order to unleash whatever it is within me that is Core Me. Discovering and uncovering my Core Me is harder than I thought. But one of the ways I am doing that is through my writing.
When I was in seminary I realized that I didn’t know what I believed until I wrote it. I would type out a paragraph then read it over and often, in that re-reading, I would recognize that I didn’t actually believe what I had said. Looking at it full in the face forced me to clarify. Sometimes it even forced me to change my opinion about what I had thought was true.
It looks like that is happening again. Ministers spend a lot of time and energy minding other people’s business. It is all too easy to let that focus obscure the more intimate and challenging work of tending to our own souls. Now, in my current ministry, that’s all I have. Digging deep, unearthing, tilling hard ground, waiting, watching, listening … and then naming what I find. Naming what I believe to be true about myself and true about the world.
More often than not, when I do this naming, I discover other soul tenders who say: “Yes! That’s how I feel too.” Sherwin Nuland said: “The more personal you are willing to be and the more intimate you are willing to be about the details of your own life, the more universal you are.” Maybe not universally universal, but still – sometimes speaking the truth about who I am somehow articulates some part of Truth for others as well. I think that’s absolutely fascinating.
Uncovering truth about who I am, discovering the truth about the Core Me takes a lot of energy, but it’s an energy that propels me inward while I sit with my laptop on my sofa. My Enneagram personality identifies “sloth” as my particular temptation/bend/ challenge, and so I ponder the connection between my introversion and this acedia (a much nicer word, in my opinion). Lately especially, my life shows a decided preference for sitting on my sofa. My tendency to homebody has been exaggerated during this strange experience of colostomy and while some days the lethargy of introversion tips my scales out of balance, mostly I’m okay with this time of journeying inward from the comfort of my recliner.
I have my writing.
And my reading.
Kathleen Norris’ helpful book, Acedia & me, tells of her own journey as an introverted writer and, as Dr. Nuland said, I find that some of the details of her life arc across the universal to intersect the details of my own life.
“What does it mean,” she asks, “that I now crave the desert journey of revision as much as the initial burst of creativity and flow of words?”
What does that mean indeed? I find myself laboring over a blog as much or more than I ever labored over a sermon. But it’s a labor of love. Rhythm and rhyme; allusion and illustration; how the words feel as much as what the words say. I read and re-read, edit and re-edit. Like Jerry says: “There’s no such thing as good writing. There is only good re-writing.”
Even though I am taking this semester off from school, even though my doctoral work is on hold and even though I may decide not to complete it, still – I love my Living in The Story writing. I read these sermons that are three years old and find that many of them are not half bad. I read and re-read, edit and re-edit, then post them to the website and the Facebook page and it feels like I am doing something important.
Even though I have scaled back my work with the Coffee Party, still – I love pondering the intersections of faith, culture and politics. I’m publishing a weekly essay to the Intersections website and now to the Facebook page and often to the Coffee Party page. Every time I do this, I'm surprised that people actually read what I write. I’m even more surprised when people like what I say. But still - it feels like I am doing something important.
Even though I sit here on my sofa with my laptop, even though I live my small, introverted life in small town Paris, even though I struggle to keep my balance with my inherent (and inherited?) acedia, still – in some ways I am connected and interconnected to a larger world than I have ever been before.
Kathleen Norris’ book contains “A Widow’s Uneasy Afterword” where she ponders the dramatic changes of her external and internal life since the death of her best friend and husband. What does one do in the midst of such upending change? She admits she wants to heed the advice of Saint Ignatius Loyola: "do nothing; be patient." She admits it's hard. Indeed.
How does one persevere when there seems to be no light, no path, no future? Norris takes comfort again from Ignatius: “Desolation is meant to give us a true recognition and understanding that we may perceive interiorly that we cannot by ourselves bring on…great devotion, intense love, tears or any other spiritual consolation, but that all these are a gift and grace from God.”
It is gift and grace.
I don’t know if
this odd ostomic span of days is a grief, but it certainly is a season and the
living of it feels similar. Nevertheless, I will choose to take it as gift and
grace. I will choose to continue to unearth and till the hard fallow ground of
my soul; to wait and watch and listen and trust that, when my spring comes again, maybe - just maybe - the words will become flesh again. Sherwin Nuland (1930–2014)
Author of How We Die and How We Live and The Art of Aging
The above quote comes from a 2014 On Being interview with Krista Tippett.
http://www.onbeing.org/program/biology-spirit/184
Also see Maria Popovich’s article on Dr. Nuland at Brain Pickings
http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/01/02/sherwin-nuland-what-everybody-needs/
Kathleen Norris, Acedia & me (New York: Riverhead Books, 2008).
