The Slow Way: On Seeking God, Or Living Out Whole and Healthy Faith
Whole faith must be a long-term, authentic pursuit that involves the world around us, our stories, and our particular ways of being
Yesterday I scratched out on the butcher paper block attached to the wall in my kitchen (where I continually write deep—possibly well-meaning but over-the-top— statements to my older boys about meaning and God and life, hoping that, though they tend to ignore my signs, the words might just sink into their souls when I’m not looking): “You who seek God, your hearts shall live.”
It’s from the New King James translation of Psalm 69:32, and it's been on my mind this week. My husband is reading The Sound of Life’s Unspeakable Beauty, a book written by Martin Schleske, a violin-maker, who considers his craft as a way of pointing toward the work of God in the world. Chris read a passage from the first few pages aloud to me, in which Schleske is telling the story of the journey he goes on to find the perfect tonal wood, hiking up the Alps with a friend to find a collection of trees that have been felled after a storm.
“In the Psalms it says: ‘You who seek God, your hearts shall live’. . . This verse does not speak of finding but of seeking . . . Authentic life is not a path through the lowlands where things grow quickly and are easy to find. No, life’s trail leads through the rocky places, through adversities and impasses. The many ways of searching for God all have one thing in common: passionate longing.”
Finding the wood that will make a violin sing is never an accident, he’s saying. It is a pursuit.
When Chris read it out loud to me I found myself reacting in a way that feels familiar. I get itchy when words from the religious intensity of my youth are brought back to my consciousness. The words seek and passion caused my heart to speed up a bit, my stomach to clinch. I tend to avoid those words these days when I’m talking about God. That language pulls me back to a time in my faith when “seeking God” was often spoken of with fervor, as if the entire work of the Christian faith might revolve around how intensely an individual was willing to think about, read about, and shape our lives around a certain idea of God. A God who was asking us to deny ourselves.
The denial I was taught wasn’t actually what I now believe Jesus meant when he used similar language with his disciples. Denial in the circles I moved through during my young evangelical Christianity of the late 90s and early 2000s was presented as a full-bodied loss of myself: I was to give up my dreams. I was to set aside what I thought of as me — and instead take up a fervent, passionate remaking of my purpose. I was to turn all my thoughts and actions toward making myself holy. In this idea, I heard very little about what to do with any longing for pleasure or happiness. There was little conversation (at least in my religious circles) of understanding one’s motives or gifts. But there was a lot of talk about denying our desires (for relationships, for pleasure—whether sexual or simple joys like food, art, or beauty) and throwing ourselves wholeheartedly into service and prayer, transforming our thoughts from a tendency to want comfort or ease and into self-sacrifice.
In the short term that denial, that dissolving of myself, felt like transformation: I thought a lot about the spiritual life, and also struggled with how my studies, or love of writing and literature, or longing for a boyfriend who truly knew me could have any value in the life of faith I was attempting to build. I did my best to push aside thoughts of attraction to the boys in my orbit. I felt guilt when I went out with friends for the sake of fun, unsure of how a person who seeks God could possibly be allowed to dance with abandon to Destiny’s Child as long as there were people suffering in the world. The teaching that every moment should become a pursuit of holiness became psychologically overwhelming. I wasn’t sure how to be a twenty-year-old-girl and a person committed to seeking God. The story I was told was that the girl-Micha needed to fade away. The things I loved and even the things I was good at were no longer important. I needed to dissolve so that God could beam through me.
If I did things right, if I didn’t fail to be good, God would be closer. God would be found. And hopefully (and this was the danger of self-loss), my legacy would be the transformation of other people for God’s glory. I might be giving up myself but my name would be associated with the life-change of others. And those others would transform more people. I would be part of their stories; I would matter in some cosmic spiritual pyramid scheme. I desperately wanted to matter.
After a few passionate years of working to dissolve and naming that the work of “seeking God”, I remember a heartbreaking realization: The people who were teaching me these things weren’t necessarily being transformed in the ways I was hoping to be. In fact, despite the rigor and intensity of their spiritual pursuits, they were still people who didn’t know what to do with their bodies or their longings. That was my first realization that what I’d thought was “seeking God,” was not everything, was not enough. Over the past twenty years, I’ve stopped counting the men who preached denial of our bodies, whether directly in my life or on the periphery of American Christianity, who fell explosively to sexual misconduct. Or the teachers I read or listened to who taught of training our minds to constant thoughts of God who were eventually accused of power-grabbing, narcissism, or creating unsafe psychological spaces in their churches.
It turns out that the rigorous losing of the self was only a surface level work: It didn’t transform our ways of thinking, or how we engaged with the reality of having a body, and it didn’t give us answers to what we should do with our specific gifts and loves.
I now think of the angst of that season of my life as a practice in surface level spirituality: prioritizing God-feelings and mind-tricks. The language I accepted around seeking God taught me to bury the distinctions that made me me. But I never lost who I was, I simply buried it. And that is what made this kind of spirituality unhealthy. There was a separation, a line slicing through the sacred work of life and all the human stuff. And that separation of life between the sacred and the necessary profane, made for psychological confusion. There was an abnegation of ourselves. And blanket abnegation leads to trauma.
So when Chris read that passage and the words seek and passion rose to the surface, my brain lit up with a danger alarm. This idea has hurt you! My body said to me. This is not what God wants for you! We’ve worked to plow a better path, my heart said. And since he read it, I’ve replayed the words in my head, hoping that the God who loves me and my body and my desires, might help me redefine the idea of seeking. Not to a denial of self that leads to one-dimensional spirituality that can’t survive the realities of being human, but a kind of joyous attention to the love of God.
I needed first to shake off my old notions of seeking and passion, and instead listen again to Schleske’s words and the words of the Psalmist: “Authentic life is not a path through the lowlands where things grow quickly and are easy to find. No, life’s trail leads through the rocky places, through adversities and impasses.” Any kind of pursuit of God that is authentic is never a surface denial of our desires, or a mind-trick of thinking only spiritually, or a bodily choice to consistently give up what is good for ourselves in order to do what’s good for others. Instead it is a rocky path of integrating our bodies, our desires, and our relationships with the needs of the people we love, our communities, and the world, believing that God is here in the human experience, inviting us to a life-giving love that can overflow into care for ourselves and others.
Seeking God must be a long-term, authentic pursuit that involves the world around us, our stories, and our particular ways of being. Healthy spirituality needs the body. It can never be a mind-trick. It involves the kind of integration required in knowing our habits and motives and weaknesses, and connecting those to our pursuit of the expansive love of the Divine.
“If the sound of a good violin requires traveling such difficult paths and putting in such arduous effort, how could the sound of our lives demand less?” Schleske says. My younger, passion-laden self thought that arduous effort meant rejecting social norms, denying what delighted me, and requiring my body to care for others and while pushing aside my own needs. In reality, the arduous effort actually exists in learning how loving our own bodies can transform us to love others, how paying attention to our broken relational patterns and seeking help can build life-giving communities, and how, when we stop trying to win people to our team of belief, we can be transformed to know God more deeply through true and mutually beneficial relationships. The search for God becomes integrated in our lives in the world, moving from a psychological trick we play to keep ourselves in a vague spiritual realm, and into an authentic full-self embrace of the love and care and joy of the Divine. It’s a different kind of denial of self: a whole hearted, whole minded, whole bodied recognition that I can grow in love of myself and others, and release the habits and ways of being that don’t come from love, that hurt me and others.
Rainier Maria Rilke wrote it this way, “I love you, gentlest of ways / who ripens us as we wrestle with you.” Maybe the seeking that looks like wrestling is what also leads to ripening: shaking off the patterns that hurt us or others, and allowing the gentle goodness of God to leak out of our integrated selves into the world.
A Slow Practice:
Is there a way to distinguish between surface-level spiritual mind tricks and the integration of our whole selves into the transforming love of God? How do we know what kind of self denial is inauthentic and what kind of self-denial is actually leading to a spiritual wholeness that heals our relationships and communities and world? How do we learn to seek God so that our hearts might truly live?
This might just be the entire work of the life of faith. So I don’t have an answer for you, except to say that just as a Schleske’s violin-making craft is a life-long pursuit, so our seeking of God is ongoing. And as the apostle Paul wrote in the second letter to the Corinthians (as translated in The Message): We are transformed into the image of Jesus over time, “our lives gradually becoming brighter and more beautiful as God enters our lives and we become like him.”
Can we imagine what it is to become brighter and more beautiful over time?
Let’s take a deep breath together. Breathe in, breathe out.
I want you to imagine what you think is probably necessary for the making of a beautiful instrument. You can’t use just any wood. It must be the right tone, the right substance in which sound can ring out and through. There is the time needed to find the wood, tools that cut and test and fashion. And then the craft: years of learning how to hear what matters in the making of the instrument. A particular wisdom in knowing how sound flows through the shape you’ve fashioned.
This is not a simple process, and neither is your spiritual growth. It is slow and particular and must be accomplished through tenderness and care.
What comes up when you think of yourself as a stringed instrument being crafted?
How does the idea of seeking God fall into that metaphor?
“Our lives becoming brighter and more beautiful as God enters” us, Paul wrote. What does this mean to you? How do you define the pursuit of God or the invitation to seek God’s presence in your life?
What might it mean to give yourself to a kind of whole hearted, whole bodied pursuit of God?
Let yourself sit with those questions for a while and close with this prayer: “Oh Gentlest of Ways, fashion me, not through unhealthy denial, but through a bright and beautiful transformation.”
A list of things:
Here’s that Rilke poem. And here it is put to music by the always-lovely Gungor.
I’d love to know what you think about this. I’ve really been trying to put words to what I believe is so dangerous about the ways my Christian evangelical culture talked about passion, holiness, and seeking after God. Do you resonate with my experience? I’d love to know. Leave a comment below. Let’s chat it out.
Along these lines, I’m very excited about Katelyn Beaty’s new book Celebrities for Jesus: How Personas, Platforms, and Profits Are Hurting the Church. I haven’t read it yet, but I admire Katelyn’s work, and have been listening to the podcast she cohosts with Roxy Stone, where they are going through a summer series on ideas from her book. This past week’s episode interviews my friend and former pastor Chuck DeGroat about the epidemic of narcissism in the leadership of the American Church. It’s really good.
I loved this article about young people in Ukraine who are transforming the rave and nightclub scene into service. They’re dressing up in their party clothes and bringing DJs to the rubble of bombed buildings, and working to clean and transform the places broken by war. That feels very Jesus-y to me.
I still am struggling to think through some of these things. I just accepted It was necessary to deny yourself and spent a lot of time ignoring my body and hiding the sadness i carried around. Thank you for such thoughtful gentle invitations to rethink and embody our faith
Those same words are so triggering to me too--bc it’s not just about me personally denying myself it is the rot of the leaders who didn’t take it as seriously as we did! Unpacking all of this does feel like such hard work, and your words today helped me feel less alone. Thank you for this 😭