The Slow Way: The Spirituality of Our Unrest
Our desire whispers how the world is not as it should be, even as we move through our daily rhythms of work and dinner making and dish washing and Netflix binging. What will do with our unrest?
Thursday night our “indoor” cat escaped after dinner. Givret the cat knows that none of us will let him outside except for his best friend Ace, who has no qualms about holding wide the back door for any person or thing who wants to move in or out of our home. Ace and I have had lots of chats about this problem. He smiles at me and moves along.
Which is how it happened that after filling his belly with smushy smelly cat food Thursday night, Givret escaped into wide dusky world via Ace’s after-dinner trampoline session. And we never saw him again until morning. This used to frighten us. We used to search for him. But he has proven over time that he always comes home for the next meal, and we’ve learned to let it be. He now gets his flea, tick and heartworm treatments, like an outdoor cat should, and always wears his collar, even as he receives a chastisement from me every time he comes home.
So Friday morning at 6:30 am, when I opened the back door to call for him, I expected his happy, post-nighttime-adventure-run toward me. Instead he emerged from the bushes holding a writhing baby chipmunk in his mouth, glad to drop it at the prospect of easier breakfast. Which he did, leaving it shaking in the grass. I doubted my cat had any intention of actually eating that chipmunk. He was playing with him. I know, animal instincts and all that. But I watched that chipmunk struggle to breathe for a bit, attempting to drag itself through the grass and away from the dangerous, open spread of the yard. Baby chipmunk didn’t get far. I went back to check on the chipmunk throughout the morning, where he lay in the same place. Until I’d decided around noon that he must be dead. I grabbed my grossest gardening gloves and a shovel to move his little rodent body to the trash, and discovered he was gone! He’d woken from his recovery slumber and returned to the wilds of my backyard bushes.
I am currently having my mind blown by Ronald Rolheiser’s book The Holy Longing: The Search For Christian Spirituality. Rolheiser is a priest and president of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio. I have until now, missed out on his books, which I will soon rectify. The Holy Longing has been around since 1988.
I’m taken by his premise that spirituality is about what we do with our desire. Here’s how he says it:
“Desire can show itself as aching pain or delicious hope… What we do with our longings, both in terms of handling the pain and the hope they bring us, that is our spirituality . . . when [Augustine] says: ‘You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.’ Spirituality is about what we do with our unrest.’”
Is it weird to say I thought about that idea when I saw my cat traumatizing a chipmunk Friday morning? And I thought about it when I sat on the porch later with my husband drinking coffee and talking about the work trip he’d just returned from. And I thought about it Friday night when, hovering over the kitchen sink, I argued with my teenage son about his attitude when I pointed out the shoddy job he’d done cleaning the pan we’d used for dinner.
Spirituality is what we do with our unrest. We talk a lot about rest around here. How it’s an intentional choice we make in a culture that will never praise our slowness. How it’s in the slowness that we encounter beauty, goodness, and presence of the divine. But I have never before considered the opposite reality as worthy of my reflection.
What do I do with my unrest? How does my unrest point me to spiritual practice?
“Spirituality is, ultimately, about what we do with…desire," Rolheiser writes. My cat takes what he wants. The chipmunk’s life is his to play with until something better and easier comes along. And, often, we humans resort to the same violence. Our desire for entertainment, for ease, for relational comfort. But there is a churning in us for meaning, for life beyond the grind, for relational connection beyond the simple meeting of animal needs, and that desire is our unrest.
It’s the same desire that whispers how the world is not as it should be, even as we move through our daily rhythms of work and dinner making and dish washing and netflix binging. What will do with our unrest?
That, Rolheiser says, is our spirituality.
We are the chipmunk in this scenario, I suppose. The beaten up, stunned, but not dead. And spirituality is the waking to find ourselves hurt and exposed. But alive. We gather enough strength to get from the yard by the swingset back to the relative safety of the bushes.
Really, there’s nothing safe about coming back to life. But what will we do with that life? After all, spirituality has never been safe.
A Slow Practice
Psalm 139 invites us to a prayer of investigation. There are words in the Bible that can cause many of us to feel uncomfortable – sin, wickedness, evil – I think of these immediately. And I wonder about what might happen if we supply a word-change for our modern-ears. (Shh, don’t tell the people in charge and we won’t get in trouble, k?)
That’s one of the reasons I like Eugene Peterson’s interpretation of the Bible, The Message. There’s just enough modernization to feel like I’m reading something that wants to be gentle.
Here are verses 23 through 24 in The Message:
Investigate my life, O God,
find out everything about me;
Cross-examine and test me,
get a clear picture of what I’m about;
See for yourself whether I’ve done anything wrong—
then guide me on the road to eternal life.
There’s a way of interpreting that 24th verse, usually translated “wicked” or even “wrong” as Peterson has written, as “hurtful.” That rings more true to me.
See if there is any hurtful way in me. See if there is a part of me that hurts others out of my own boredom, for my own selfish comfort, because I am afraid.
And lead me on a way, a path, that outlasts my own life.
This is our invitation to allow the Spirit to investigate our lives, not to see if we’ve done anything wrong out of some deity’s arbitrary attachment to rules, but out of an awareness that what we do with our unrest affects not simply the humans in our orbit, but the greater world around us. It matters.
Let me a path that outlasts my own life.
What am doing with my unrest?
Spend some time reflecting on this question, asking the presence of God to investigate your life, to show you “a clear picture of what [you’re] about.” To show you your own unrest, and what it might mean to find your spiritual life there, in the midst of it.
Close with this prayer:
Spirit of all, you are in my rest and in my unrest. Move in my discontent, in my anxiety, in my restless energy, and guide me toward a life of steady peace. Amen.
The Slow Way: The Spirituality of Our Unrest
The Holy Longing is a favorite, that I return to again and again. Glad you've discovered it!
I love this. Thank you