The Slow Way: On Seeking Astonishment

Answers have never been the same as faith. Faith has always been wonder, not clarity.

for the frantic strivers, serial doers, and weary achievers

Acupuncture is something I’ve done off and on since 2017. I started as a way to treat my anxiety, and it became even more important to me after my concussion in 2019, and the chronic migraines that followed.

I tried them all—and by “them all” I meant three different white ladies. There was the lady in San Francisco whose office was in the back room of a Kung Fu studio. (Loved her.) The woman in Morristown who treated several people at once in old lazy-boy recliners with sheets thrown over them. (Not my favorite.) And the lady at a medical building, fluorescent lights blaring, all cold and painted off-white, complete with You’ve Got This cat posters on the wall. (Didn’t go there long.)

And then there’s Bernard, who offices in a beautiful wellness space in the local hospital system. The space is a recent build with wavy wooden walls and cut outs of warm lights that glow once the needles have been properly placed and I’m left alone in the with a heater. I discovered Bernard this fall, after realizing the wellness center took my insurance, and didn’t use old lazy-boys as part of the treatment experience. He’s a Chinese-American man who practices the traditional craft of acupuncture, holding to its original spiritual beliefs. In other words, he doesn’t shy away from his beliefs about energy movement. And evidently, I release a lot of intense stress-filled energy. He is constantly overwhelmed by the stress I carry in my body. So much so that when the first needle goes into my foot, he usually has to leave the room because he is experiencing some overwhelming energy.

This is how it goes while he’s treating me. He puts some needles in, gets deeply moved by the intensity of it, leaves the room, and then comes back. The first time I found it remarkable. He seems to know what’s going on with my life. He says small things that he senses—my grief, my fears, whatever heavy load I’m carrying. My younger self might have been concerned by this, worried about dark forces at work, wondering why Bernard can sense some spiritual, inner turmoil in me that I haven’t verbally expressed to him. But my 45 year old self is pretty sure bodies are way more remarkable than we usually give them credit for, that intuition is more powerful than we can prove, and that the Holy Spirit reveals the really real in all kinds of ways.

Going to Bernard’s office every couple of weeks has begun to be a place where I encounter God. Bernard knows that I write about Christian faith and spiritual practices. So yesterday when the stress he felt (saw?) coming off me was too much, even for an observer, he asked a few questions. Am I stressed about my kids? Yes. Am I stressed about the country? Yes. Am I worried about my migraines getting worse? Yes, and my anxiety around the migraines is part of the cycle that leads to more. (It’s been a rough couple of weeks with the migraines.)

“You know what the remedy for stress is, don’t you?” Bernard asked me. I looked at him, needles pouring forth from my feet and hands. I was pretty sure he was going to suggest I do less, cut back on writing or ministry, get more help for my kids. None of which feels possible right now. I shrugged my shoulders like a small child. “It’s faith,” he said, and raised his eyebrows. You might know something about that.

I had woken up with a migraine that day, and had been so grateful that Chris was working from home. He brought me my medication. I covered my head and face with my cooling mask, and Chris took care of getting the kids to school. I had slept until 9, but was still weak and woozy from my body’s insistence that it complete the migraine cycle, no matter how strong my meds are. When my head is heavy, acupuncture does this remarkable thing of pulling the ache from the top of my body towards my feet. I feel it every time.

The antidote for stress is faith, he said. When he left the room I cried. There on the comfy bed, lights out except the glowing cut outs in the wall, the heater on my legs and needles sticking out of my hands while I tried to wipe my tears.

Here’s the thing: I’m stressed by my life because I have a child with severe autism who needs constant attention, because I have two teenage sons and that is a Whole Thing. Because I am a youth pastor and while I love the work I do, sometimes it’s a lot. Because I am a writer and writing requires time that can sometimes feel impossible to grasp onto. I am stressed because I have chronic and debilitating migraines that bring a lot of pain, and cut into the time I would rather spend being the mom I need to be, the youth pastor I hope to be, the writer I dream of being. This is not a unique story, I know. So many of you hold your own versions of this. If you walked into Bernard’s office, he might be overwhelmed by whatever it is he would sense in you.

But there’s something about having a witness to your anxiety and overwhelm—having another human who says, I see this, and it’s a lot. There’s something about being understood.

I’ve been reading Liz Charlotte Grant’s work of art (I’m not exaggerating; it is something really special) Knock At The Sky: Seeking God in Genesis After Losing Faith In the Bible. This is a book worthy of lingering in. Which is why, though it was released in January, I am only now writing about it here. In the book Liz combs through the stories of Genesis, using ancient midrash, modern theologians, and thinkers and believers of the Jewish and Christian traditions throughout the past two millennia to shape her own understanding of the remarkable stories of the first book of the Torah. In the process, Liz wrestles with her doubt, questions, and post-evangelical baggage.

“I used to believe that following God was simple,” she writes, “a single path, a single meaning, a single truth.” Now though, as she writes in the first chapter, she recognizes that, “doubt is just another word for imagination.” And this is the thread she pulls apart throughout the book, as she guides us through the ancient stories, asking questions, inviting us to look at these ancient tales of God and humanity from all sides.

There on the acupuncture table, I wondered about faith. My tears brought on my prayer, as life has taught me to do. “How can I ever have enough faith?” I prayed. No matter how long I’ve been loving the Person of Jesus, I am still asking the same questions I asked as a teenager in my room, when I encountered the story of Rebekah and Isaac along with a mysterious and powerful impression in my chest: Voice of God asking if I would trust enough to go wherever I was sent. Then, thirteen years old, I whispered back, “I don’t think I can do it, but I’ll try.”

What is faith? Did I have enough of it then?

“The moment doubt occurs to us, we are already different than the moment before,” Liz writes. “When we invite paradox, curiosity, and empathy to shape us, this very openness, the act of wondering, opens us to mystery.” She goes on, “Certainty was never the game. God is not the God of the enlightened but the foolish. God does not reward the certain but the doubters. Those running away become the sought, the one lost sheep pursued by the shepherd.”

Perhaps when I was thirteen, reading Genesis alone on my white metal-framed daybed in 1993, I knew more about faith than I ever could have known. Enough to pray with the man Jesus encounters in Mark 9, “I do believe; help my unbelief!” In her book, Liz invites readers to struggle with her through the stories, in pursuit of faith.

She quotes Simone Weil: “One can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of a pure regard for truth. . . If one turns aside from [Christ] to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into His arms.”

In her final chapter of the book, she focuses on Jacob’s night of wrestling with the angel, Genesis’s most powerful metaphor for faith. Of Jacob’s experience she says, “Doubt is easy; we need only to retreat. Faith, on the other hand, is sweat. Faith requires we dodge the uppercut, pin down the flailing arms of the opponent, roll in dust, and yell down our defeat. Faith requires waiting up all night. Only then will we witness the rising sun, and, by its light, the face of God.”

Faith is sweat. I felt that yesterday in the acupuncture room, letting the frustrations of my anxieties show up in the presence of God. Mine was not a wrestling match, though I’ve had plenty of those. It was the ache of being a human person with a body that frustrates me. Being a human person who loves people who can hurt me back, or simply need me more than I think I can give.

How can I find faith—Bernard’s mysterious answer to this moment of overwhelm in my life—this vague idea that can only really be understood in terms of metaphor? Can I hold the things I can’t control, and move toward the goodness God has already placed in front of me? Maybe faith doesn’t mean living unafraid. Maybe it doesn’t mean having an answer.

Liz wrestles with her faith by “rolling in the dust” with the book of Genesis, and the result is not an answer to these questions. Instead of answers, her book opens up more wonder.

Since the days in my twenties when I began to reject the idea that certainty was the same as faith, I have found myself in the mysterious middle, learning to let the scriptures take me into the awe-inspiring and confusing presence of God, believing that answers have never been the same as faith. Faith has always been wonder, not clarity.

When my time was up, Bernard took the needles out of my feet and hands. I bundled up and stepped back into the cold Friday morning—gray skies, parking lot, errands to run. What is the antidote for stress? It’s faith. What is faith? It’s marveling at the goodness of God.

As Liz says when she comes to a conclusion in her book, “I have aimed for astonishment.” That’s what we’re doing here, right? Each of us pursuing faith in the midst of the challenges of life, believing that we can aim for astonishment. In fact, that might be the whole thing.

A Slow Practice

How do we aim for astonishment?

Liz Charlotte Grant speaks of the coil of the spiritual journey as a fractal, the complex pattern we find in shells, in the “multipronged bloom of the wild carrot or the frills of a fern.” For her, it’s a shorthand for the spiritual life, “the leaving and returning, the exile and homecoming, the wrestling and holding patterns.” This rings deeply true to me.

My spiritual life has taken me in a circular pattern, through clarity and dark nights of the soul, from brilliant hope to the discouraging reality of failure. Around and around. But in the moments when I am clear-eyed, I see the pattern for what it is—my coming closer and closer along the fractal toward the center, knowing that this is the way towards astonishment.

For our practice, I’m hoping you’ll pull out your journal or a piece of paper and draw your own spiral pattern. How would you describe the center? Is it a clarity of who God is? The answer to what we’re all doing here? The comfort of going beyond the veil and finally seeing what God has seen all along? The Kingdom of God. The Really Real. The Dream of God. Write whatever you imagine The Center to be in the middle of your fractal.

Then, as you loop it around, perhaps it will help you to scratch out words that represent different moments of your spiritual life. Encounters with God, moments of joy, clarity, distance, grief, disappointment. Let yourself circle around, marking moments of your life.

When you feel you’ve completed a true visual of your spiritual life, spend some time reflecting on the power of those moments, and also where you are headed.

Close with this prayer:

Holy One, whatever faith looks like, may I be on my way. May I seek astonishment. Amen.

A List of Things:

• Hey Texas Panhandle folks! I’ll be speaking at St. Ann’s in Canyon tomorrow and Monday, Feb 23-24 at 6:30 pm, sharing about the Beatitudes as a guide into the season of Lent. I’d love for you to join us.

• If you ask my opinion, you should go buy Liz Charlotte Grant’s book here. What a gorgeous guide she’s given all of us.

• Speaking of books! Have you gotten a copy of Blessed Are The Rest of Us: How Limits and Longing Make Us Whole? You should get it here! Or find the audiobook version (I read it!) at Audible.