The Slow Way: The Sacred Lives Beside The Suffering, An Epiphany Reflection
Glory somehow shows up when we suffer, not because suffering is a payment, but because it’s a truth-teller, a revealer.
The weather app might as well have forecasted dirt on top of ice on top of snow. Days of twenty degree highs. The kind of winter that looks fun but actually is not, and goes on and on, the roads more whitened by salt than the pure fluffy stuff. Yesterday, after a particularly frustrating day of feeling like my mind is foggy, my goals are being swallowed up by email, and I’m not getting enough sleep, my husband reminded me that this is actually how most people feel in the middle of winter—like we’re not able to move fast enough, like we’re not quite processing the world. This is why I wrote two weeks ago about “wintering,” because I have to keep reminding myself: We are made to slow down right now and our bodies and minds are actually asking us to. It’s just our culture’s machine that tells us we can’t.
During the season of Epiphany my church has been hosting cozy Wednesday night acoustic concerts with a few of the individual musicians who make up the collective that leads us every Sunday. A couple of nights ago I sat with my favorite high school and middle school students, all of us stunned to silence by the performance of a local twenty-something guitarist who played an instrumental set of funk, jazz and pop. We huddled together in pews, the skies dark and sharp outside, watching this man’s hands work the strings of his guitar with a surgeon’s precision, in a chapel of dark wood, stained glass, and candles. About twenty minutes in, I breathed and noticed that my center—my mind—was quiet for the first time all week. In that space I recognized the presence of rest, a sturdy sort of stillness that snuck in behind the music.
How do we encounter the sacred? I’ve been starting to think that rest is difficult for most of us, not necessarily because we have a lot to do. That’s true of course. We are all overworked and stretched by the demands of our quick-moving lives. But that’s just the outside layer of something truer underneath: Rest is difficult because rest is sacred. The sacred things are always the most elusive. In his book Everything Belongs, Richard Rohr says, “Whenever we’re led out of normalcy into sacred space, it’s going to feel like suffering. It’s letting go of what we’re used to.”
I’ve been turning that line around in my mind this week, asking myself if it’s true. Does entering into sacred time or sacred space always feel like suffering? My first thought was my youngest son Ace, who was born with Down syndrome and whose autism diagnosis has transformed my life even more deeply than his Down syndrome. Nothing has brought me into joy, wisdom, or meaning more than the presence and care of that child. And nothing has ached as deeply. The two have coexisted, and the sacredness has redeemed, and keeps redeeming, the ache.
I don’t think this is transactional. We don’t pay for the sacred with our suffering. It is not a demand that encountering God’s goodness and delight demands hurt. But I do think this is true somehow, that suffering and spiritual transformation go hand in hand. It has something to do with how we humans protect ourselves from pain, how when suffering enters our lives, when our protections fall away, often clarity finds its way in. We wake up to the world when we suffer, when life gets cold and icy. When the lights go out. And when we wake up, we see the really real (Rohr’s phrase) for what it is. Rohr also uses the word liminality—a threshold—to explain this space. All is stripped away and the true thing becomes clear.
This is what epiphany could be for us: Winter reminding us that the stripping of the trees, the darkness, and the severe tightness of the cold are all invitations to the sacred. Every moment we choose to stop, rest, and notice, we are being transformed into seeing “the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living” as the psalmist said.
Winter is our liminal space, when we’re invited to live Epiphany—the manifestation of the divine. Glory.
And glory somehow shows up when we suffer, not because suffering is a payment, but because it’s a truth-teller, a revealer. We need winter—for all its ache and ice and clarity—where Love has more space in all the sparseness to reach us.
May we let it reach us.
A Slow Practice
It’s been awhile since we pulled out our journals around here. So get your pen and paper. I have some questions for you.
At the top of your page, write “liminal moments in my life”:
Together let’s list the most significant “in between” times we’ve lived through. Moments when we weren’t sure what next step we would take—when a marriage felt insecure, a life changing decision was on the line, we or someone we loved was facing a diagnosis that could change our world completely.
After you write those liminal moments down, spend some time thinking about what you experienced in the in-between. What did you need? Where (if at all) did you find solace? What wisdom did you gain? What clarity arrived?
Finally, write down what was sacred about that season. Did you encounter God at all during that time? Why or why not? Did you walk away from that season more yourself? Did you walk away wounded? Has that season felt redeemed at all? Has it felt wasted?
Spend five to ten minutes writing down what that means to you—whether your pain has been redeemed or wasted. And what might it look like for that pain to be made whole, made into something good and beautiful?
Let’s close with this prayer:
Sacred Presence, we would rather find life in the sunshine and flowers, not in the bleak ice of winter. But we know that sometimes we can’t see the really real until everything is stripped away. Redeem our winters, you who are Love, that we might find you in the ache of transformation. Amen.
A Note:
Keep an eye out tomorrow for an announcement about some fun, new opportunities I’ll be offering my paid subscribers, including a zoom soul-care workshop I’ll be leading next month in preparation for the release of Blessed Are the Rest of Us this April. Also, you can preorder the book right now at Baker Book House, where it’s 40% off the price at other booksellers. The first 200 preorders over there will receive a signed copy and a fun little gift from me!
Love this and congrats on your book!
So good. Thank you.