The Slow Way: True All the Way Through

If the love of God is true, it has to be true all the way through. All the way down to the bottom, where the monsters dwell.

for the frantic strivers, the serial doers, and the weary achievers

In 2011 and 2012, for just ten months, Chris and I lived with our two older boys in Austin, Texas. Despite its tiny blip in the story of our family, we have a lot of memories from that season: The spot in our living room where we danced with our babies, the garden in the back where we grew tomatoes and where the seesaw airplane sat in the yard. Brooksie’s first steps, August’s first soccer game, the friends who came to our house, the words I wrote from the desk in our bedroom. And our church. Our church in Austin was special. Before we moved back to San Francisco our pastor Cliff and his wife, Christine, invited us over. The walls of their kitchen were covered with butcher paper signs—poetry and quotes all written in Christine’s handwriting—a mom-decor-hack I’ve copied ever since. 

Christine was folding laundry on the floor while the four of us sat in their living room and chatted. We were telling them about why we were leaving, why Chris’s job had changed directions and was sending us back to San Francisco. There was a sense that our relationship with them was only a moment in time. Our life in SF was established. We had friends and a church and a community waiting for us. This hour in the living room was simply a chance to say thank you or goodbye or both. I don’t remember what we talked about, except for one moment in a conversation that had gone where I love for conversations to go: Jesus, and meaning, and what faith is, even if it’s braided together with doubt. Christine was holding a kid-sized t-shirt in one hand and pointing her finger into the air with the other: “If it’s true”  she said as she looked at me, “it has to be true all the way through.” 

She was talking about Jesus. This faith she and I had both given our lives to. She wasn’t talking about literal or historical evidence. She wasn’t talking about some concrete sign of proof. She was talking about us. If this story is true in us, she was saying, if Jesus is true in us, then it has to be true all the way through our stories, our experiences, our way of being in the world.

I think I only connected with Christine once or twice after that day. But I left her house holding that moment, and ten years later, I cling to it still. True all the way through. What does it mean to give our lives to more than an idea? What does it mean for faith to coexist with doubt but not be squishy or easily shaken? For us to allow it to settle in the deepest parts of us, so that it lives there sturdy and true, without pretense, without anything false? How do we hold a faith robust enough to reach the parts of us that are hardest to know, most painful to explore? 

I finished rereading Parker Palmer’s lovely book Let Your Life Speak this week and thought about Christine’s words when I read his description of the work of traveling “all the way down, through [our] inner darkness.” This is the work of the spiritual life, Palmer says. We have to be brave enough to “ride certain monsters all the way down, explore the shadows they create, and experience the transformation that can come.” 

I have walked through two major seasons of debilitating anxiety. The most recent was five years ago when Ace was two and my older boys were elementary aged. I lived between the longing to give Ace’s brothers a typical childhood and a constant fear that Ace’s health and development were dependent on my actions and knowledge. One of my older sons struggled with school and friendships and difficult behaviors, and I felt unable to hold his needs and Ace’s at the same time, like I was a loose plastic grocery bag, flung along the road, being carried by the wind wherever I was blown. I was tossed around by my circumstances until my body began to rebel with terrifying panic attacks. When your brain lives in panic, eventually your body catches up. What were my monsters? I was terrified that Ace would die. I was terrified that he’d never talk unless I picked the exact right intervention. I was terrified that I didn’t have the strength of mind or heart to give my older son what he needed. I was overwhelmed by the necessary demands of our daily life. I wanted my older boys to have sports and friends and after-school activities, but often I felt like they only had Ace’s doctor and therapy appointments. I was tired. 

Then Ace developed a strange rash on his chest. While his brothers were at school I carted him to the pediatrician and lifted his shirt for her eyes. She touched his skin where the rash didn’t blanch. It wasn’t a rash at all. It was broken blood vessels, petechiae, a sign of something much more dangerous, like blood cancer. 

Before Ace was born I took a “lay counseling” class at church, a nine month intensive where I learned about the basics of reflective listening, understanding mental health disorders, and discussing the enneagram and why we humans are often motivated in very different ways. And I remember one particular conversation about anxiety, where my friend Johnny, a therapist who taught the class, explained how sometimes the only way to move through an anxious thought is to ride it all the way down. We have to watch the possible outcomes, as awful as they could be. Because we need to know that there is something at the bottom of the worst possible scenario. 

That day the pediatrician sent Ace and I immediately to have his blood taken and tested. My body shook as I pushed his stroller the four blocks from the pediatric office to the medical center. I held his tiny two year old back against my chest and lifted his arm toward the needle, singing in his ear as the blood flowed from his vein into a medical tube. And, after he finished crying, his arm wrapped in a purple bandage, I pushed him back to the car, buckled him in his seat, and cried all the way home. 

We always drove through Golden Gate Park in those days, from the Richmond where school and most of our doctors appointments were, to the Sunset on the other side, where our house sat on a long gray block of concrete pressed in on all sides by dozens of houses. Richmond concrete to Sunset concrete, but in between was forest. Golden Gate Park is almost three miles long in a peninsula-city that’s only seven miles wide. And inside that park is an entire world of nature. The bison in Golden Gate Park roam on a patch of land just between the elementary school my kids attended and our home. And that day, ten minutes into the drive, I pulled the car over beside the bison, and sobbed. What if my baby had cancer? What if he died? I remembered Johnny saying that sometimes the only way through the anxiety is to ride it all the way down. So I breathed there in the car, my baby in the back seat. I breathed and asked God to help me imagine the worst possible scenario. If this was cancer, if we were walking into a story where life wasn’t just hard but impossible, where I spent my days caring for a toddler on chemo and then tried to play with his brothers at night. Where our time and money poured into the care of this little one we loved. If this was the worst horror of my life and it was happening now, if Chris and I might lose our son and my older boys might be left to grieve their brother. What was true then?

I didn’t have an answer that day. But I let myself go all the way down. Would you still be there, Lord? Would you still love me? All the way at the bottom of that particular story? 

Later, the hematologist would pronounce him to be a little mystery body with rare bouts of petechiae, a strange reality we’ve experienced several times since. Our story was easier than so many others whose babies entered the oncology unit and suffered in a way our little guy never had to. I didn’t have to learn the lesson of the pediatric cancer ward. But there was still a lesson sealed in me. I had lived my life terrified to confront the reality of the very worst thing that could happen. But what if I stopped pushing against it, and instead let myself walk it all the way down? Each monster a reminder that life is impossible and even so, as Mark Scandrette says when he paraphrases Romans chapter 8, “nothing can separate you from what is most essential to your well-being.” If the love of God is true, it has to be true all the way through. All the way down to the bottom, where the monsters dwell. 

If your life belongs to the Loving Creator, it still belongs, there, where everything else has been lost. 

It is a risk to believe not only in the goodness of Jesus’s teaching, but also that the presence of the Cosmic Christ is real, alive, and is offering me the love I need to survive everything that might be. Belief is the elevator ride down to the bottom of our inner landscape. Belief is only the first step we take toward the journey of the spiritual life, where we follow the monsters all the way down and explore what happens if all that’s left is “what is most essential” to our well-being. 

I can’t answer the question of what exactly that means. Martin Laird describes contemplative prayer as a process that deepens, and as it does, “it will unblock things that are getting in the way, some of these things, that we would rather not see. . . We meet our self-centeredness, we meet our wounds, our flaws, our faults but at the depths of it, if you look deeply enough into your own wounds, you see not your own face but the face of God.” 

We’re invited to go all the way down, all the way through, to the place where we are most terrified to meet ourselves. That’s where God wants to meet us. 

“But there one finds freedom, a fundamental peace. All hell may be breaking loose in your life, or everything may be going well or some combination of the two, but there is a bedrock peace that is you,” Laird says. “This deep calm gives birth to love.”

Love at the bottom of all things. All the way through. 

A Slow Practice

Around ten years ago I came across a gem of a prayer book called Psalms For Young Children. It was published in 2003 and still speaks to me. Its illustrations are beautiful and haunting and its paraphrasing of many of the Psalms are able to touch the depths of feelings and questions and angst that lives so vibrantly in the songs of the scriptures. 

Today I’d love for us to practice lectio divina, which means “sacred reading,” by sitting with a very simple paraphrasing of Psalm 69. Of course, if you’d like to find Psalm 69 on your own and meditate on the “adult” version, you’re certainly welcome to do that. But I like the idea of keeping this time simple. In some practices of lectio divina, the participant reads through the passage three times, practicing reading with the heart, as opposed to the head. This is not a time for intellectual rigor. It’s a time for openness, for engaging with the Spirit, asking for transformation. When we practice Lectio we read slowly, with silence before and after, inviting our souls to listen in a deeper way than the ways we usually come to words. 

One way to practice lectio divina is in what Ruth Haley Barton calls “four movements.” First we read and savor. We follow that by reflecting on what the passage might be saying to our lives. Then we look for a way to respond. The fourth movement is “contemplatio—to rest in God,” where we sit in the presence of the Spirit in peace and quiet. 

I’d love for you to move through this process with me. Let’s begin with savoring. Sit in silence for a moment before reading the passage aloud. Let your body become still and quiet. Then read this passage silently and slowly, allowing yourself to settle into a place where you can hear from the words. As you read, listen to what stands out, maybe a word or phrase, that is louder than the rest. After reading it, allow yourself to savor that word or phrase. (There’s always a temptation to jump quickly into a meaning behind your attraction to that word. Try to release that need and be content to sit with it without making meaning from it.)

Psalm 69, as paraphrased in Psalms for Young Children by Marie-Helene Delval:

When I am sad,

It feels like I’m underwater,

Like I’m stuck in the mud,

Or at the bottom

Of a dark hole.

Pull me from this dark place, 

God! 

Save me! I need your help!

Sit in silence.

Now reflect on the word or phrase that may have stood out to you. Read this passage again: 

When I am sad,

It feels like I’m underwater,

Like I’m stuck in the mud,

Or at the bottom

Of a dark hole.

Pull me from this dark place, 

God! 

Save me! I need your help!

Ask yourself why you might be drawn to this word or phrase. Is there something in your life that is particularly touched by this idea or concept? Is there some wisdom you might be longing for?

Now read it for a third time. 

When I am sad,

It feels like I’m underwater,

Like I’m stuck in the mud,

Or at the bottom

Of a dark hole.

Pull me from this dark place, 

God! 

Save me! I need your help!

Sit in silence. Ask the Spirit to invite or challenge you to some sort of response. Perhaps the word or phrase has allowed you to sense some hurt and anger or fear that you hadn’t realized was there before. Can you acknowledge what your response has been and make some kind of step to move from there? Let yourself express whatever your response needs to be in the silence.

And now, read it one last time: 

When I am sad,

It feels like I’m underwater,

Like I’m stuck in the mud,

Or at the bottom

Of a dark hole.

Pull me from this dark place, 

God! 

Save me! I need your help!

Your invitation now is to rest in the presence of God, to come close to God and invite God to come close to you. Allow yourself to take the word or phrase you were drawn to here and carry it with you into your day and week. 

Close your time with a deep breath. 

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

A List of Things

• I was moved by  this image supporting the women of Iran who are protesting the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who died in police custody after being arrested for refusing to wear the hijab. This week many Iranian women have cut their hair as an act of solidarity and protest over Amini’s death, and the laws in Iran that hold women captive to modesty standards that are enforced with violence. I can’t stop thinking about this image and so many like it that have been created in support of these women who are risking their lives to push against an authoritarian government. 

• Just this week I became aware of Jenny Odell’s work, and her forthcoming book Saving Time, which her publisher describes as a book that “urges us to become stewards of . . . different rhythms of life, to imagine a life, identity, and source of meaning outside of the world of work and profit, and to understand that the trajectory of our lives–or the life of the planet–is not a foregone conclusion.” She has a previous book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, that is now officially on my wishlist. 

• I saw this on Twitter this week. What happens when you invite an elderly stranger to Disneyland for the day. It’s lovely. 

• Last week’s episode of The Lucky Few Podcast was a conversation between myself, Mercedes Lara and Heather Avis about our experiences of helping our kids with disabilities find their place in the church. We talk about ableism in the church, the disability savior complex, the sometimes unintentional problem of segregation found in disability ministries, and what it might look like for churches to assume competence in welcoming people with disabilities to full-participation in the life of the church.

• This is a short read but important, for those of us who are paying serious attention to racial and disability equity in the public schools, this article from NPR touches on the serious lack of Black male school psychologists. School psychologists do more than offer counseling and social services to students; they are also the ones who assess whether or not a student has a disability. In a national school system where Black boys are “disproportionately likely to be disciplined in school, handled forcibly by police and referred for special education services,” more than 85% of school psychologists are white. There’s hope in this article, and I’m grateful to read about folks who are working toward a better way.

• I read this post from my friend and fellow writer Kimberly Coyle and was taken with her simple prayer: May God open the door of God’s choosing. And may we have the courage to walk through it.