Volume 25, No. 1-Winter, 2001
Table of Contents
More Valuable Than Gold
by Dave McLintock
Loving Kindness
by Rose Mary Dougherty
Beyond the Trampled Ground
by Alice Martin
The Propaganda of Willfulness
by Gerald May
Recovering Liberality
by Patricia Gibler Clark
Contemplating Cyberspace
by Leslie Miller
The Crystal Sea
by Nancy Eggert
More Valuable Than Gold
by Dave McLintock
J. W. is black and poor, 45 years old and addicted to alcohol and crack cocaine. But his smile and easy manner made an impression on me in our first meeting. I was serving as case manager for the men's dormitory program at a homeless shelter when he arrived in my office. He had just come into the men's dormitory from a three-story warehouse with 3' x 7' rectangles painted on a concrete floor where he had spent the better part of two weeks sleeping on his bedroll beside 200 other homeless men. He had received one hot meal per day and was able to take a shower once in a while, but that was the limit of the amenities.
In our first interview, J.W. told me he wanted to get his life together. He wanted to break the habit that had been plaguing him since he was 12 years old. "What's that?" I asked. "Drinkin'," he asserted-not in the proud manner of most alcoholics but in a tone which informed me he was both disgusted with his life and willing to change. I discerned he was ready to respond to the question that Jesus asked addicts in his day-"Do you want to be healed?"-and I asked him if he wanted to go into our program for substance abuse. When he told me he did, we shook hands and he moved his belongings into the dorm.
I, too, must be confronted with reality in order to have a chance for a new life. The Psalms have consistently been my guideposts as God has shaken me out of my comfort zone, disoriented me and then supported me in the radical reorientation of the spiritual life. But unfortunately I'm immersed in a culture where six of the seven deadly sins are seen as virtues. Sloth is the one sin that gets poor press, only because most Americans are workaholics and love to make fun of "lazy folk." Its correlative virtue-zeal-must be passion for what God is leading us to do, not what we think is best for us. Workaholism can be as slothful as laziness (maybe more so). In our consumerist culture, most folks are caught up in "keeping up with the Joneses" (greed, envy), "looking out for #1" (pride, avarice), "getting it on" (lust) and "having it your way at Burger King" (gluttony).
St. Augustine said, "Our hearts are restless until we find our rest in thee, O Lord." And if there is one common characteristic among the homeless, it is restlessness. I've seen clients like J.W. who are addicted to homelessness. They are convinced that they can continue to live life on their terms. With blurry eyes, bodies broken and decaying, minds wasting away, they stagger into my office. Some tell me they are "living large," making promises that "if I only ... then ..." it would all magically be okay. To these insane claims, the tough language of Al-Anon responds, knowing full well the addict is on a downward spiral towards "bottom." The pit is the place where each of us must go before the unmanageability of life lived apart from God can come into clear focus.
When J.W. came back to see me, he looked like a new man. He gave me a big thank-you, told me he'd been clean and sober for a month. The Higher Power he'd come to know in Narcotics Anonymous took him the way he was and offered him tools for a new life. For the last 18 months, I've had the privilege of listening as he has opened himself to God in many areas of his life. I've watched him develop the gift of discernment in the difficult life decisions facing a homeless addict. I've prayed with him before he chose to go into the psychology track at the local junior college. I've encouraged him when he chose to express his feelings to the woman who has become his wife. I've seen him grow to trust in a God who can remold dirty clay into a work of art. I've agonized with him as he asked God to provide a job in a treatment center, and I've seen him give his life back to the addicted kids there with both love and compassion.
The well-known spiritual director Baron Von Hugel was on track when he said, "Make real friends with the poor." More valuable than gold is the gift of wisdom I've received in my relationship with J.W. Remarkably, it's hardly been work at all, because God has made the yoke an easy one by placing us (two old mules!) side by side. In the relationship of spiritual direction, we both have been changed. My prayer is to continue to live stories of hope and encouragement for each other.
Dave is a graduate of Shalem's Spiritual Guidance Program, Class of 2000. This article is taken from one of his program papers.
Loving Kindness
by Rose Mary Dougherty
For the past year or so, I've been drawn into prayer around an invitation to what until recently I would have named forgiveness. It rose to my consciousness during a time of retreat when someone said to me, "Your ministry is demanding. You need to let go of the baggage you are carrying so you can live energetically in the present." I hadn't a clue as to where the comment had come from. I hadn't been talking about my past or even much about my present. I had mostly just been sitting with the person in prayer. All these months later, I realize the comment was probably inspired. I tried to dismiss it but it wouldn't go away, so I decided to "work" with it for awhile.
In my mind, the words of my friend translated into something around forgiveness. I began to pray that God would show me what I needed to let go of, whom I needed to forgive, from whom I needed to seek forgiveness. When nothing showed itself, I tried to be more actively involved in the process, prodding my memory to recall the past more vividly. Still nothing. Lots of hurtful circumstances and people came to mind. I revisited times when I felt I had hurt others. But none of what I saw seemed relevant to the "heart of the matter," though I couldn't even name what that was. My efforts seemed not only futile but also a waste of energy, like trying to stoke a fire that had already died. Finally I decided that the best thing I could do was to plant a prayer for awareness and forgiveness in my heart and watch to see what showed up as I lived the present moment.
Since planting that prayer, life has brought me a variety of opportunities to be with this theme; three stand out. One is the Merton retreat that I wrote about in my last newsletter article. There I heard two men from South Africa talk about the lingering pain of apartheid, especially for victims who felt the need to look perpetrators in the eye and forgive them but found perpetrators unwilling for this exchange. I also heard two men speak of their times of imprisonment for their "crimes" of speaking out against human atrocities. I wondered how they could forgive the people responsible for their imprisonment. Yet I sensed, in each of these men, a deep serenity that spoke to me of freedom. I heard no blame, only genuine compassion.
Soon after the Merton retreat, the son of a friend of mine died. He left behind a wife and two young children, his mother and several siblings. For me, the tragedy was not so much this man's death but the broken relationships among those closest to him. Some people literally refused to be in the same room with others except at the funeral. The funeral itself was like being in the middle of a war zone where an unspoken cease-fire was temporally in effect. At the time, I could only stand in the anguish of the situation. Driving home, I began to think about it. My reflection shed light on some of my own less volatile conflicts.
As in a war zone, it didn't matter how the conflict had begun. In fact, the original incident was probably long buried under layers of embellished memories. If the truth were known, probably each person, however unknowingly, had contributed to the conflict. Yet who could name the culpability of the other? Who could know the heart? And if they could, what did that matter now? The war now had a life of its own. What were the stakes people had in it now? What would it take to declare a unilateral surrender? What would it take to let go?
Against the backdrop of these two experiences, I read The Sunflower by Simon Wiesenthal. After telling his own story of being forced as a prisoner in a concentration camp to hear the confession of a dying Nazi soldier who asked his forgiveness, the author challenges readers to find their own response to the question, "What would you do if you were in my place?" There was no consensus among the writers who responded to his question. I tried to deal with the author's challenge myself, but I kept coming back to my own questions, "Who am I to forgive anyone? What is forgiveness anyway?" Though I once thought I knew a great deal about forgiveness, I found I now knew next to nothing about it. In the past I might have described forgiveness in this way: "You do something to hurt me, and I know you're guilty. Perhaps some day I will be able to forgive you. With grace, in due time, I am able to I say I don't hold it against you."
But that process makes no sense to me right now. It is not mine to absolve you of your guilt or to absolve myself, as though I could really know what your or my guilt is anyway. It seems the invitation to me right now is not about forgiveness, whatever that might be, but about responding to the timing and the grace of letting go. I'm not even sure what I need to let go, and I'm not sure I need to know in order to say my yes to the process. Perhaps the letting go is really being actively present as I am hollowed out.
I find my heart, encrusted as it is in all the defendedness of my holding on to the pain and disillusionment I may never be able to name, gradually turning toward the Light. Once again, I feel the invitation to acknowledge the presence of the Light, to put myself squarely in its beam and pray, "Penetrate the shell of my defended heart." There is some little fear but mostly trust. It is not my doing, only my willingness. Perhaps in time that Light, which is really loving kindness for us all, will find its way through me for our world. Maybe what I used to name forgive-ness I would now name a willingness for loving kindness.
Beyond the Trampled Ground
by Alice Martin
Mary is middle-aged, married with three children. In the tentative opening of a window into her past, she has given me occasional glimpses of an abusive father and silent mother. But she speaks more readily of her 40-50 hour job, her involvement in the overloaded schedule of her daughters, her desire to relate to her husband, and her service in the church. By her own admission, her schedule leaves little time for devotion or quiet, and she grabs an hour or so on a weekend when time permits.
Mary looks forward to our spiritual direction time together, for it is an hour or so of quiet and reflection that she does so seek, almost a place to escape the onslaught and pace of the life she lives, though she is unable to make the time for herself. Her journey and our spiritual direction times together raise many questions for me, but the one that surfaces and strikes a chord is that of freedom. What is freedom, really, beyond the word and what do we take it to mean-in the depth of the soul from where we move and breathe and have our freedom? What is the feel of freedom? What does freedom look like from the inside? What is there to trust in freedom?
The metaphor of a caterpillar, its death and its emergence into life, has always been powerful to me, and it is through that process that God is to me. Caterpillars move themselves around, often changing directions, pausing at times as if to get a sense of things. If asked about living in freedom, the caterpillar might say it was free to crawl upon the earth, to go and do whatever it wanted to do. But watching a caterpillar is a bit like watching molasses run, and I would surmise that in its entire life it traverses no more than about 100 square feet of earth. Free? Yes, and yet totally unaware of the trillions of square feet that lie outside its conscious awareness. It is held prisoner, in effect, by ignorance of what it cannot see.
Is this not our journey as well? We can perceive that we are living in freedom when, actually, freedom is being lived within the boundaries set up by our attachments, compulsions, fears, and need for approval. It is as if we are tied to a spike by a rope, all choices are already made, for no choice presents itself except that which has already been decided by the limits of the rope that binds us. Inside that space we take on more work, chase the ghost of our own abusive past, raise three children in a need to do better than our parents, please a demanding husband to please the father of our past, stay active in church to convince ourselves of our worth. Freedom? Mary would say yes, and yet....
If our vision is limited to our 100 square feet of trampled ground, isn't our vision of God limited to that space as well? In that confined space, it is as if the choices are based on rules and laws made by others to meet their approval, our own need to do as we are told Jesus would do, a need to feed our compulsions, a need to cling to our attachments. Moral choices, ethical standards are rigid and inflexible, even as our own lives are lived out in a definable space where judgments of right and wrong are inflexible and rigid as well.
What, then, causes us to begin to tug on the rope? What causes the caterpillar's movement into the cocoon? For Mary, it seems that as she pauses for our spiritual direction time, a deep contentment and peacefulness settle upon her. She recognizes her weariness at the rushed pace of her life, the monotonous repetition of the day or week before, and rising up is a question of who she is beyond the identifying characteristics of her own involvements as mother, wife, worker, Christian.
This movement toward God and beyond the God we believe we know is like the butterfly emerging from the cocoon, a journey through the dark into the light of the unknown. Now, unfettered by others' norms and expectations, having befriended and found to be friends the ghost and ghouls we had so feared, aware of the "I's" lessening and strengthening in the "Thou," aware of the possibilities of potentiality in places here-to unseen, we pause along with the butterfly on the branch and ask, "How did I get here?"
It is almost as if this place or moment was always there, but we weren't. This place of startling landscapes, vivacious colors, fragrant smells and vast space lies awaiting us, and yet we did not know of it nor the way to it. Or did we? Isn't this the place of God we sense in the bowels of our soul as we tire of the rope, as we weary of the busyness, as we pause and listen? Isn't this the place we are brought to as we struggle with letting go, befriending the shadow, loving self, hope amidst despair, the tension in being saint and sinner? And in some miraculous action, we find ourselves in the garden, unclothed and frolicking along the paths in delight-the garden that has always been there. It seems this is God's desire for us, and it seems we have arrived in spite of ourselves.
Alice was in Shalem's Spiritual Guidance Program, Class of 2000, Summer. This article is taken from one of her program papers.
The Propaganda of Willfulness
by Gerald May
My least favorite saying is "God helps those who help themselves." It has always given me the creeps, not only because of its bad, dualistic theology, but also because my mother used it on me when she thought I was being lazy. I can't get away from it; it is likely the best-known adage in the English-speaking world. A poll reports that 82% of Americans believe it comes from the Bible. But the Bible says nothing of the sort. If anything, the Bible maintains that God especially helps those who cannot help themselves.
The saying began in ancient Greece, but Benjamin Franklin popularized it for Americans in his Poor Richard's Almanack. It was well known in Europe, too. Adolph Hitler used it in speechs to rev up the Nazi war machine. He extolled the philosophy as "both pious and just." More recently, a professional cult de-programmer was quoted as saying, "I firmly believe that the Lord helps those who help themselves. A few little things like karate, mace, and handcuffs can come in handy from time to time."
When you think about it, it's really quite a nasty little saying. An even nastier and more dualistic version of the same philosophy has been infecting spiritual communities for at least four centuries. You may have heard it: "Pray as though everything depended on God and act as though everything depended on you." This version troubles me even more than the simpler form.
It appears to encourage prayer and intimacy with God, but before you know it, it tells you to act as though God weren't in the picture at all. Yet people continue to quote it without question, as if Jesus himself had said it. Upon hearing it again recently, I resolved to track down the source. Who, I wondered, had come up with this tripe?
I found the saying quoted in scores of respectable publications. Most didn't bother to cite a source. Among those that did, I found the following: Saints James, Augustine, Benedict and Ignatius; Cardinals Newman and Spellman; Salvation Army founder William Booth, Vernita Heckel, John Krumm, S. H. Payer, John Wesley, his wife Susanna Wesley, several rabbis and "a Jewish prayer book," Martin Luther, Lillian Gish, Patricia Levins, Brigham Young and a New England baseball coach. Other-definitely more accurate-citations included "Unknown," "Anonymous" and "I forget who."
St. Ignatius is among the most frequently cited sources, and it is likely that he did inspire the saying. What Ignatius said, however, is essentially the opposite of the popular version. According to Jesuit scholar John W. Padberg, the following aphorism is attributed to Ignatius:
Let this be the first rule of your undertakings: confide in God as if the success of those undertakings depended completely upon you and not at all upon God; nonetheless give your whole self to the undertakings as if you yourself would be doing nothing in them but God alone would be doing everything.
Padberg explains that if you can decipher Ignatius's paradoxical language, the emerging meaning comes close to "Pray as if everything depended upon you; and act as if everything depended upon God."
This understanding is still too dualistic for my taste, but when I actually try it out, it feels far more comfortable, natural, and right. Try it yourself, and meanwhile, don't forget that both of the popular adages are bogus, phony, and wrong. They contradict scripture and the whole lineage of contemplative spirituality. They are anti-incarnational, denying that we live and move and have our being in God. They reject Jesus's exhortations to trust God completely. They maintain that you can't expect God to just bless you with gifts; you have to make things happen instead. They would have you believe that Jesus was just exaggerating when he spoke about the lilies of the field, and that he was simply mistaken when he said Mary, not Martha, had chosen the one thing necessary.
Why are such twisted distortions so uncritically accepted? Theologically, one might trace it to a fear of quietism, that centuries-old heresy which devalued human will and intention. Although a number of contemporary theologians still keep a paranoid lookout for anyone using prayer to avoid responsibility, I believe such fears are groundless. How many actual quietists do you know-people who truly pray instead of act? I have to agree with what Thomas Merton wrote in his final book: "Absolute quietism is not exactly an ever-present danger in the world of our time."
Instead, I think such sayings are popular because they rationalize our mistrust of God and our subsequent desire to master our own destinies. They are propaganda for willfulness. The falsehood of the adages is so acceptable precisely because the Gospel truths they undermine are so radical. The Gospel truths invite a degree of trust in God that seems impossible in the so-called real world. And they require the most awful and awesome spiritual sacrifice: letting-go of control.
These sayings justify our desire to have our spiritual cake and eat it, too. We want to consider ourselves faith-filled, but we are terrified of actually letting go and letting God. We pray about decisions, but we feel we must also have logical justification for everything we do. We seek God's guidance, but we are also compelled to look like we're using our heads. We want to give our hearts to God, but never so completely that we might appear foolish.
But the Gospel is foolish. It's downright ridiculous. The Good News is just too good to be true, and it demands nothing less than everything. If we are honest, we don't need fraudulent aphorisms to rationalize that the Gospel is too much for us. Instead, let us just admit that we cannot accomplish our own faith. We cannot help ourselves, not where it counts the most. We need God's grace even to trust God's grace. And much as our willful-ness might want to deny it, God is far too intimate and loving for us to utter a single silly word about how to pray or who God does or doesn't help.
Recovering Liberality
by Patricia Gibler Clark
Being labeled a liberal is a dangerous thing these days. How can we recover some of the goodness of this word and defuse its political power? How can we name and claim the virtue of Liberality as present in beauty and grace in our world today?
You remember Liberality, don't you? She's the virtue, as described in the Catholic Encyclopedia, who observes "a reasonable mean between the opposite extremes of prodigality and stinginess in making expenditures intended for the benefit of others." Her stance is one of balance between living within our means and responding out of compassion to satisfy the needs for justice, mercy and charity for others. Her energy invites us to be generous in a spontaneous sort of way while still being sure we can respond to calls for help in response to specific needs.
Teresa of Avila said there was no way of attaining union with the Beloved other than by the practice of the "great virtues." She often wrote her sisters about the value of cultivating the virtues in order to uncover their spiritual riches. She offered the virtues as a tool for awareness; by appreciating the presence of the energy offered by the virtues, one would be able to appreciate God's presence and wisdom:
"For how can a man, unaware that he is rich, make good use of his riches and spend them liberally? It is impossible, I think, taking our nature into consideration, that anyone who fails to realize that he is favoured by God should have the courage necessary for doing great things." (Teresa of Avila, Life)
Teresa encourages us to appreciate the virtues as favors from God and as the only way to have the courage to do the great things. If we, with God's grace, can see ourselves to be "favoured by God" and created in the image of God, the virtue of Liberality will make herself known to us in our own unique and liberating way.
If the virtue Liberality is an attribute of God, as Teresa believed all the virtues to be, our own contemplative awareness, consciousness of the beauty of the moment, and presence in a space of open emptiness are our grounding tools. Rather than getting hung up in an evaluation of how much liberality there is in the world, the energy of the virtue itself encourages us simply to be present, active and good. Cultivating the balance of liberality offers a way for our daily lives to be informed in the ways of God.
Again, from the Catholic Encyclopedia: "Liberality differs from justice because what is given is not strictly owed; from mercy, because it is not evoked by the need of the beneficiary; from gratitude, because its gifts are not viewed as a return for favors received." The virtue of liberality invites us to hold an awareness of the world that does not ask for a response that's due for a specific reason. She welcomes our ran-dom act of kindness, asking us to keep something back for the future need. She favors an intuitive heart in our giving that accompanies also a logical spirit that in some way calculates our savings for what may be next. She does not allow us to rest in this position of saving for the future or wildly abandoning our fortunes to a present moment gift. Her generosity lies in the constant awareness of what's right, considering all, for now, for good, for freedom.
I invite you to welcome Liberality into your consciousness and see what form she takes. Picture a garden, perhaps, or an ecosystem where there is enough-time, money, spiritual riches-to clothe, feed and embolden all God's creatures. Where's that place of delicate balance in this moment? How does this moment inform the next? Liberality as an act, or stance, of generosity that is not owed, not evoked by need, not given in return for a favor runs counter to most of our beliefs about giving and receiving. How can we discern distribution of our earthly goods as well as moderate the extremes of prodigality and stinginess without God's guidance and love? How can any action come as an expression of Liberality without being empowered by her graceful energy of prayer and letting go?
One form that Liberality takes for me is as the guardian of my personal checkbook. As I balance my accounts, she helps me reconcile my expenses and appreciate my deposits. Liberality invites me to see what's outstanding, what's not cleared, and to see the discrepancies between my personal account balance and a larger view. Liberality is present, active and good in the accounts of my other life arenas as well. I bring some space to these marketplaces with my breath and my desire for openness in the moment.
I get great courage as well from the friends who struggle with this balance and who continue to honor the truth of this virtue. As we speak truth to power and enter into the challenges of this struggle with stumbling grace, we will be rescued over and over, in the moment, by something... something... something bigger, freer and much more powerful than all the angels and saints present today in human form. We're not alone here. Praise God from whom all blessings flow.
There is power in a dedication to the stance of balance for our polarized world. To do this we need to cultivate our inner space and look into the dark places of fear and attachment. Liberality requires that we use our open imagination to seek grounding in the fruits or sorrows of our daily bread. And then she asks to let her energy be activated to generosity in proportion to our means.
Contemplating Cyberspace
by Leslie Miller
When peaceful silence lay over all, and night had run half of her swift course, your all-powerful Word, O Lord, leaped down from heaven... -Wisdom 18, 14-15
Most late-night surfers probably think of the Internet as some combination of post office, public library and, perhaps recently, shopping mall. But I think the Net can be more than just those things--it can also be a catalyst for spiritual growth and understanding.
I started discovering this in 1985, when I joined a new online service called Quantum Link, a primitive ancestor of America Online. I cautiously began to hang out in a chat room called Crossroads Cafe, where I took the cybername Alienne--Alie for short. I thought that was quite clever, because in addition to feeling small and green in an alien online world, I believed that my masked identity was indeed "a lie"--that people couldn't really know me without knowing, at the very least, my real name and what I looked like.
But before long I discovered that while cyberspace might strip away names and titles and outward appearances, it didn't remove our identities or prevent people from knowing one another. Far from being a lie, the "Alie" that my online friends were getting to know (and that I was getting to know) was somehow more real, less constrained than my usual repertoire of identities: the "workplace me," the "family me," the "church me" and all the other roles I regularly played to fulfill what I believed were the expectations of others in the role-playing game of my so-called "real life."
In the virtual darkness of cyberspace, freed of concerns about appearances, I could stop trying to be who I thought I was supposed to be, and see who I might really be.
For me, the bright, picture-covered pages of today's Web can't outshine the illuminating darkness of those text-only days. I think that's something the 16th-century Christian mystic St. John of the Cross would have understood. The darkness helped me learn to see, as John put it, "with no other light than the one that burned in my heart."
When we talk online, we don't see the faces of the people on the other side of the screen, but like a priest in a confessional, we see deeper--with the eyes of the heart. Trying to see with this inner sight, the insight of love and compassion, can become part of our spiritual practice. Whether online or off, we can try to see beyond physical appearances, past age and race and roles, into people's hearts: how they love, when they fear, where they've been wounded by life and what they need in order to heal and become whole.
Our inner eyes are the eyes through which God sees us, and through which we see God. Someday, they'll be the only eyes we have--but we can practice using them now. Cyberspace can be a place to start.
Seeing with our inner eyes isn't the only spiritual lesson we can learn in cyberspace. We chat and send e-mail to online friends; what is prayer but a conversation with a friend we've never seen?
If we doubt the existence of another reality that "is not far from any one of us" (Acts 17), cyberspace is proof of the concept and can evoke a very real sense of ourselves as spiritual beings. It can inspire us to ponder what it might mean to be "more than our bodies" and make it easier to believe that a part of us survives when our bodies are gone. We can see that we're truly all connected. Mystics have been saying it for centuries, but online we feel it--perhaps for the first time.
I think the Net can help us relate to such insights, as well as providing a nonthreatening, nondenominational forum to share our longing for Spirit in our lives. More than 153 million Americans now have Internet access from home, and a fifth of those have sought out spiritual or religious information. Many log on late at night, when the house is dark and quiet, and enter cyberspace in search of God.
Something spiritual is happening online, though it remains to be seen whether the Internet will prove to be the "noosphere" described by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit paleontologist and mystic who died in 1955. Teilhard predicted the development of a mental and spiritual layer around the earth, the next step in what he believed is our inevitable evolution toward union with God. The Catholic Church tried to silence him, but on the Net, Teilhard has a growing number of devotees.
With all this going on, I can't believe the Internet's destiny is to be the world's biggest shopping mall.
For now, many people are merely "surfing"-skimming the surface of cyberspace, like God in Genesis 1: "And the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters." But as Rabbi Joshua Hammerman reflects in his book, thelordismyshepherd.com:
From time immemorial the surface of the water has been a locus for profound religious encounter. Moses means "taken from the water." The Hindu gods Brahma and Vishnu each carry the name Narayama, "He who walks on the waters." Eastern traditions are replete with imagery of the lotus, a sacred flower that reposes upon the water. Jesus walked on the waters of Galilee, and the Quran teaches that Allah's "throne was upon the water."
When people are ready to find God online, I'm confident that God will be there waiting. But as Hammerman points out, we have to stop surfing and dive in-because if we are to really encounter Spirit, "we can't be afraid to get wet."
Leslie is a newspaper reporter who writes about the Internet. She is also a graduate of the Shalem Group Leaders Program, Class of 2000.
The Crystal Sea
by Nancy Eggert
Spring break had arrived. My sister and I, too young for the trip from Wisconsin to Fort Lauderdale, headed for our favorite lake, proclaiming an early start to the camping season. The family station wagon was crammed with tent, sleeping bags, extra blankets, and enough food for far longer than the week we planned to spend. And strapped to the top of the car was the big red canoe that had already ferried us to many childhood adventures. At last we entered the state park and ascended the bluff overlooking the small lake.
For a moment we were not sure what we were seeing. Something threw us off balance. It was not what we expected. The lake appeared strangely dull, a grayish white. People were on the lake fishing. But those weren't boats--they were cars! They were ice fishing!
My sister and I laughed in that moment of confusion--laughing at ourselves and remembering the conspicuous red canoe strapped to the top of our car. The lake was not quite ready for spring break!
I remember that trip forty-some years later as I begin my work as executive director at Shalem. Carefully primed for my new position, brimming with excitement, I feel disoriented as I get my first glimpse of the job. There is, of course, the expected fumbling with an unfamiliar computer, and phones, fax and files. I am in strange territory. I feel like a recruit in the first week of boot camp, trying to get my bearings while I absorb vast quantities of information and adjust to a new situation. I am wondering if I have brought a big red canoe to a frozen pond!
Something even more unexpected and remarkable unfolded during that early spring break. By the end of the week, my sister and I were in the canoe, on the water, cruising through a sea of shimmering diamonds, enjoying the lake in a wondrous new way. I had never seen a spring thaw up close before. I had assumed that as the weather warmed, the ice would simply start to melt, getting ever thinner until patches of open water appeared on the lake. But this breakthrough was different--entirely different. The ice, firm enough to support large automobiles, appeared to consist of tightly packed bundles of pencil-like crystals, all linked uprightly together like tiny but incredibly powerful prayer circles. The collective support of these interlocked icicles could bear tons.
But then came the time, just the right moment, for the sparkling crystals to loosen their grip. It was as if, one sunny afternoon, the members suddenly dropped hands, the circle disappeared, and a new configuration emerged. The icicle-crystals floated free, clinking like a million champagne glasses, parting the frozen waters, and allowing a delightful spring adventure in a big red boat. The two of us boarded the canoe and exhilarated in the tinkling crystal sea, exploring the brilliant lake from one end to the other. By the next day, the crystal soup had melted and given way completely to open water. The transformation took but a moment, but the sense of wonder persists 40 years later.
But the days between our arrival and our launch-waiting, watching for something to happen to the ice-have also stayed with me. The day after we appeared with the large red canoe, the last of the ice fishermen and cars departed and left us in silence. The lake became a blank slate. What was to unfold? We checked the ice each day, anticipating, expecting. And then suddenly it happened. The lake opened up. It broke loose.
So it is for Shalem. Here we are together at a new place, feeling a bit awkward with each other, with Tilden and others playing new roles, with the new year unfolding. The landscape is not what we are used to-for any of us! Perhaps we can imagine the crystal sea that will open up in the spring. But now we watch and listen, waiting upon the Spirit to show us yet new wonders.
There was a subtle energy moving beneath that spring week. Beneath the mud, new life was being born. Animals were waking from winter sleep. And something was moving within us. Spring break offered time-time to linger in the tent, to read, to rest, and to dream. Long dinners around the campfire. Storytelling. Stargazing. Time for minds to soften, for ideas to bubble. Enjoying the spaciousness. Not demanding anything of the situation, but allowing it to offer its gifts. Knowing, somehow, deep in our hearts, that the One who gives the seasons in due time, will grant to us a grace-filled future that we will receive with wonder and gratitude.