I wrote this post about two months ago when I finally stopped and acknowledged I had some BIG feelings about the kids heading back to school (Cara to Kindergarten).
I haven't forgotten about the marriage mold... But it really is complicated and I've realized I don't want to stop posting what inspires me just because its not related to that topic. So...eventually.
***
I’m approaching a new threshold in my motherhood. I can feel it. Soon
the road I’ve been on for the past eight years - little kids who need me all of the time for
almost everything – is closing and a new one is opening up in front of me. This
new road is one where my kids are finding more and more of themselves separate
from me and my heart aches at this good becoming
they are doing. I’ve only just started to look up from this closing way. The
new gifts waiting for me, for them, for our family, and for our community are
not quite here yet. They are in process.
I’m going to stand present and attentive instead of trying to manipulate the
process to make me more comfortable. I’m not going to try and pacify my anxiety
and fears by banging on the door behind me, refusing to listen to the lessons
of way closing, insisting these two crazy kids can’t find life apart from
me.
***
I keep learning that letting go is something we must do over and over if
we are interested in a healthy life.
Life is full of thresholds - thresholds of change - of necessary endings.
I find myself standing on several thresholds of change these days; my mothering
perhaps the smallest among them.
I love the Quaker way of talking about listening to life, finding a
sense of direction.
It is especially meaningful for me, because as I’ve said many times
here on the blog, I have always fought off endings and I haven't been very good at listening to life.
I make life peel dead things from my vise grip. I get stuck in this
place most of the time. Letting go (see also: leaving, giving up, endings,
walking away) have been difficult for me. I focus on the sorrow of the ending.
My heart can steep in it. Mostly, in the face of endings, I redouble my efforts
to resuscitate whatever is dying refusing to accept what needs to fall away.
This is the ultimate arrogance.
But way forward is often found because
way has closed. (Quaker language.) Possibilities are often apparent once the way you thought
you would go, comes to an end. One of my favorite writers shares this wisdom: “In sixty-plus years of living, way has never opened in front of me... But a lot of way has closed behind me, and that's had the same guiding effect."
Will we humbly listen and discern way closing as a guide?
If you are like me, you often turn around to the just-closed-door and knock
and knock and knock hoping the door will open to you again. You try to find
your key. You look for a hidden key somewhere. You use your code that has
worked many times before. Maybe you sit and wait by the door for someone to
open it back up. Me? I’ve always been assertive so I would more likely wiggle
in a window if the door will not open.
But recently, I’ve been doing something different. I’ve been accepting
what life offers me, accepting the way that closes. Sometimes those doors have
slammed shut when I least expected and other times they’ve closed slowly until
at last I heard the gentle latch of closure. It’s usually the slow, quiet
latches that have broken my heart. I am practicing what it means to recognize
ending. Maybe I will even welcome them one day. I've realized I can either let way closing squeeze me out or I can participate in the process.
In the face of way-closing, I am learning to turn around and look for the possibilities in front of me.
On the current threshold places of my life, I am finding the honesty and
courage to admit that many doors have closed behind me; ways I thought I would
walk for my whole life have narrowed and come to an end.
I can stand there pounding and searching for a hidden key or I can
acknowledge the ending, turn myself around, and look out at the wide world and
what it calls me toward. This is where I find myself these days. I have stood
with my head on the closed door long enough. I have grieved over this closed
way. Now, I am turned around and the world seems alive with possibilities.
Hopefully it will not be long before I step off the stoop and onto the new path
waiting for me.
Why do we have so much trouble turning around from the closed way to look for what might be opening in front of us? I think it has something to do with threshold moments - the old has passed away but what is new hasn’t quite arrived yet. Liminality. Unknown. Uncertainty.
I know I’m not the only one who gets a little nervous when everything
starts to look unfamiliar, unpredictable or uncontrollable. I scramble around
for keys or new doors so I don’t have to wait in this tension
of old things gone but new life not yet within our reach.
The realization growing deep and wide for me is this: I always focus on the letting go but never the possibilities taking shape ahead of me. I am keenly aware of the grief that accompanies endings. When the
door begins to close, I focus on what I’m losing. Often I work harder to keep
it from going. I grow anxious at what I can’t see. But incredible growth and
insight happens in the liminal spaces if we will just stay open.
In the face of what is fleeting, we often try to capture, contain, or
deny what we are losing.
Instead we must let our hearts be filled, maybe even pierced, by the palpable
bittersweet joy of the present moments without guarantees about the next.
Instead we must stay with the difficult task of mutuality with life, its
risks and its gifts.
We must remain present to one another and to life.
We must quiet ourselves to stay with the process of discernment,
recognizing when way opens and when way is closing.
Sometimes this means admitting how we block new growth (for us and our community)
when we’ve shut our eyes and plugged our ears to endings.
We must stop pretending there is a magic blueprint (and that we have
it) guaranteeing the perfect outcome if we’ll only follow it. This is uncomfortable and
requires time and presence rather than relying on a formula that give us a false sense of control and certainty we use to buffer from the unknown. We must
stop chasing certainty if we hope to find wholeness that fosters freedom to love,
create, become more whole and help our world become more whole.
Discernment is nuanced. Its a process. It takes time, silence,
presence. There is not much room for discernment in our addiction to certainty,
our incessant opinions, and our unwillingness to wait.
Instead, we put down our stakes and we refuse to ever move them. We think
this is wisdom. We stick to all of the old roads and call it faithfulness. I
think the faithfulness-formula has been misused. Instead of a culture of
‘never-changing’, we need room for the slow process of listening for how we can end well and what must
die off to discover what is waiting to be born and nurtured. The cycles of life,
of the seasons, teach us that healthy life has seasons of change. In our seasons of ending, of things falling away, we can let go in trust and hope.
We need staying-places, yes. But we must be willing to let go, too. I
think we are afraid of endings because we are afraid of grief. We do our lives
and our communities’ so much good when we will discern endings are near or
necessary and cooperate with the process in faith, hope
and love.
I know a few people who are always bouncing around. They never seem to
stay anywhere long enough to have any real root system. It seems their
challenge is not leaving, but learning to
stay. That is a different post from a different person. My staying (clinging), or what I’ve called faithfulness, is the obsession I must release.
Often it is a difficult, spiritual labor to discern when and where to
leave or when and where to stay. Sometimes it takes time to discern what is truth,
what are lies, because the best lies always have a little bit of truth. What is humility and health and what is fear or pride? When do
we persevere and when do we honor the work of our hands and hearts and say
enough?
The way forward comes clearer in the discernment process.
Instead we love formulas for
truth that don’t require humility or ask us to re-evaluate a life or a
belief system, a career, or a wound received or inflicted.
Instead we create shibboleths for faith and life that keep
uncertainty contained, holding dissonance at bay. A process of discernment always brings the discomfort of dissonance for me. A true commitment to the process of
discernment illuminates things I have to rumble and reckon with that
are not how I like to see myself. But dissonance creates a liminal space that
can birth new life, change, becoming if I will only stop freaking out.
As we wait on the thresholds, the dissonance might require us to reconsider beliefs about ourselves, our
motivations, our choices, our people; sometimes our worldview. We will have to
try and know our heart beyond
prescriptions of who you should be or want to be.
For the dissonance to move us toward life, we will have to be willing to
reconsider the stories we have told ourselves or others have told us or maybe even the stories we have told others (this last one might be the hardest for me).
Fundamentalism taught me the lie that to look to my own heart in the
process of discernment is the biggest danger of all. By elevating the heart’s
deceit over its possibilities for love, forgiveness and a life lived in humility
with God and others, the message came through loud and clear.... Trust not
thine own soul.
Listening to life, to my soul, has been the truest guide for living a life of integrity, wisdom and faith. It has always pointed me toward True North. And yet, I still doubt her. I have been working to deprogram this messaging for years.
Instead of guiding her people in a messy and uncertain discernment process – the church usually shuts down
dissonance with her formulas that discount the human experience to inform our
faith and understanding of God.
We miss the wisdom of ordinary living showing us what is holy. We
ignore lived experience and the gifts of risk and vulnerability. We avoid the
discomfort and the humility of being uncertain. We also avoid noticing the Spirit
at work in the thresholds persuading and calling us forward. Maybe we
misread the discomfort as confirmation that we should keep pounding on the
closed door.
We pluck some verses and hold fast to doctrines that keep all people from
being able to know, hear and test the Spirit leading us toward truth,
repentance, humility, love. We pretend it’s possible to
separate our humanity from what we read as ‘Truth’. I think this is the most
dangerous of all.
These days, I am frightened by folks who don’t see their potential
toward misunderstanding, misreading, misinterpreting. I am frightened by folks
who think it is only a self-serving enterprise to look inward and understand how
your dark and light affects what you put out into the world. I am frightened by
folks who appease their dissonance by simply building thicker, higher walls
around their understanding of themselves and their beliefs instead of being willing to invite a new way. I am frightened by
people who think the rules they have discerned for their life are the rules
they have discerned for everyone else too.
It has taken me a long time to acknowledge this way closing. But I have heard the gentle latch and have finally turned around to see the possibilities shimmering in front of me.
***
What places in your life invite you to recognize way closing? What keeps you from turning around and seeing the shimmering possibilities? What wisdom have you gained in the threshold places?
