Beyond the Trampled Ground
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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.
© 2008 The Shalem Institute.