“Meister Eckhart…says…’God becomes and God unbecomes,’ or translated it means that God is only our name for it and the closer we get to it the more it ceases to be God. So then you are on a real safari with the wildness and danger and otherness of God.”
-From a Krista Tippett interview with John O’Donohue
Give up the world; give up self; finally, give up God…
Keep this and only this:
what your heart beats loudly for
what feels heavy and full in your gut.Instructions, a poem by Sheri Hostetler
“The mystical experience of the ‘dark night of the soul,’ when old convictions and conformities dissolve into nothingness and we are called to stand naked to the terror of the unknown…When we seek to engage in debate about the ways of God, the way of unknowing reminds us of the grace of silence, of questions over answers.”
- Giving Up a Too-Small God, Christine Valters Paintner
“All ends I’ve chased after have come up empty one after the other…for all my obedience to God, effort to do the right thing and be the good person – I’ve just become the world’s doormat and neglected resident…I’ve tried to follow so much wisdom, advice and guidance that I have no convictions in my center anymore.”
- From the private journals of a dear soul-friend
“The stars, the moon, they have all been blown out
You left me in the dark
No dawn, no day, I’m always in this twilight
In the shadow of your heart”
- Cosmic Love, Florence and The Machine
We look to the ones with answers. We say, “Ah, now they are truly onto something.” We flock to their formulas and their models and their successes as if it’s the great blue Paul Bunyan ox, Babe, who has graciously promised to shoulder our problems and give us a ride, wee, wee, wee, all the way home.
But I say if you want to really be blown away watch the ones for whom the answers no longer work. The messy ones who make the emperor blush because they won’t stop screaming out, “I can see every inch of your naked flesh and I know the clothes you claim to be wearing aren’t adding a single bit of warmth to your body when a storm blows in.” Watch the ones whose only option left is to lean into the questions. The ones who are uninhibited by the unknown because they’ve jumped into that gaping hole and found themselves, by grace, unswallowable. Watch the ones who willingly stand with Feist and say, “I feel it all” even when it scares the shit out of them.
It’s not brave to have answers.
It’s brave to watch them get erased, obliterated, rubbed out with a half-chewed cheap eraser on the end of a #2 pencil, the kind that leaves black nasty smudges in the wake of that math formula that should have contained, as promised, a solvable response on the right side of that equals sign.
I don’t want the hero for which everything works out in the end. Give me the hero for which nothing ever resolves and the game plan is constantly shifting and the only certainty is the uncertain. Give me the heroine that let’s herself break so the light can get in and the soul can spill out and the ego dies away because she can’t possibly ever know a solution to this glorious obsession we call life.
Give me a hero who eats mystery for breakfast and mana for dessert and sips on hot vulnerability and fills his pockets with a gold that burns to ashes anytime he tries to cash it in as proof that he’s arrived. Give me the heroine for whom the rules are always changing, who takes the status quo that is consistently thrust upon her and absentmindedly stuffs it under her mattress, making her restless bones ache each night like the princess with her pea.
Give me the hero who has chased down every mapped road known to humanity and still hasn’t found what he’s looking for and yet doesn’t feel the need to apologize for his empty-handedness. The hero who says, like my neighbor that drives a red Mustang and counts smashed beer cans and works out everyday because it makes him happy, “I’m just gonna do me. I don’t care what anyone else thinks, I’ve gotta do me.”
Give me the heroine who burns from within with an un-snuffable pilot flame, one that has run out of soul’s to blame, including her own AND some human-smiting divinity, and has traded guilt and shame and bitterness and despair in for the fierce quest to be the sole one in charge of making something of her life. Even if that something is wallpapered in flaking black velvet question marks.
You can keep your answers, and your picket fences and your packaged boxes of pre-fabricated fantasies of a grope-able comfort. You can keep your padded cells. I want the mess that’s out there blowing in the wind, riding on feathers, climbing up trees, pulsing with tides that could just as soon drown you. Wild. Free. Heroic. Unpromised. Mysterious. Seducing. Just. Out. Of. Reach.
Give me the answerless. There-in lies my paradoxical hope.
damn girl. good.
Thanks.
Ugh … don’t make me cry … or do, because maybe I should right now. And how did you know what God is teaching me? I hadn’t found words for most of it yet … and then you said it so well that I just sit here and think, “Wow … I’m not the only one God’s working in! Why did I think I was?”
So glad this resonates.
“All ends I’ve chased after have come up empty one after the other…for all my obedience to God, effort to do the right thing and be the good person – I’ve just become the world’s doormat and neglected resident…I’ve tried to follow so much wisdom, advice and guidance that I have no convictions in my center anymore.” – These might as well have been taken from my own journal for I have said similar words in the pages of my journal and outloud to the friends closest to my soul. I find myself being pulled towards uncertainty yet tethered by the familiar and discovering just how much courage is required to move into the unknown when all that is in front are questions with no answers. Thank you for sharing and helping breathe courage into a soul tentatively moving towards the uncertain.
tethered by the familiar. this makes so much sense. i love hearing about your story as it unfolds Makeda, and I think you are brave.
The heroes that have it all together, we don’t see that or if they always suffered. They just always have the answers. We can’t relate to someone like that. But give me someone that says, “Hell I don’t know Prudence. I’ve walked this similar road as you…and I sure as hell don’t know.” That person, I can relate to. All to often I find answers too cliche: “God has a plan. Just trust. It will be okay in the end. He’s just measuring your faith.” And while all the might be true it doesn’t help. What helps is someone to come along side and say, “I know, I get it. I’m wondering the same damn thing.”
Yes ma’am. Well said.
I want to frame this, and read it over and over.
Also I want to be that heroine.
Oh and you are that heroine, because you choose to be. I bet now, more than ever, answers seem fleeting. Love to you!
… and at once I knew I was not magnificent
Hulled far from the highway aisle
(Jagged, vacance, thick with ice)
I could see for miles, miles, miles
-Holocene, BonIver
yes, Holocene: http://thisismyoffering.blogspot.com/2012/02/holocene.html
oh yes, this fits. the vastness of questions, the expanse that sometimes we reel in and sometimes makes us feel held and loved on.
“But I say if you want to really be blown away watch the ones for whom the answers no longer work…. Watch the ones whose only option left is to lean into the questions. The ones who are uninhibited by the unknown because they’ve jumped into that gaping hole and found themselves, by grace, unswallowable.”
This, Mandy, this is my heartbeat. Truly & really.
The soul spilling, the manna & the mystery.
This is why I try to breathe deep, when my head’s spinning.
I am glad to know that you and those who’ve commented so far are also in these spaces and places; it brings comfort and fresh air as I hold, sometimes, to a threadbare shred of Peace.
P.S. I love the cracked dolls and the “uncertainty” – this is definitely my favorite post of yours now, Mandy, and I know I’ll be referring back to it time and again.
Thanks Brianne. It felt powerful and alive coming out, so it’s great to know it connected so strongly with you.
so grateful that you exist in this life.
xo
likewise. <3
I appreciate the richness you lay out, midst all the despair
it is and/both
xo
yes, it is. how strange.
Saturated with gratitude for you, Mandy, and all you so willingly offer to us–broken, beautiful, lost, found. On a day when I fought with grace before sinking into it, I come here and find haven. Thank you for that.
Mentioned you and this heartwrenching/hearthealing post today: http://www.persistentgreen.com/2012/05/it-might-be-time-tidbit-tuesday.html
Love to you.
Your post is lovely and real. I love to hear of others who are feeling pulled into the unknown, sometimes quite despite themselves. I hope the fight continues to come alongside waves of grace for you. Walk in the water slow and trust the tide. This is an adventure for sure!
the mess…yes
for life is a mess
a wonderful mess of discovery and pain
love and light
challenge and redemption
all those things that continue to challenge…push the envelope, break into the boxes
those tidy boxes that house those “answers”
answers we all hold within our own selves
thank you for this today
I needed this reminder
love and light
when i read your comment i pictured boxes stacked inside each other, much like the nesting dolls pictured in this post. and how i climb out of one box and into another. at the time it doesn’t seem like i’m in a box because it’s so spacious, but eventually, as I continue to grow I get too big and I realize my wings are scraping the sides. It’s the ever-widening circles that makes life exciting I suppose. That there is always a size bigger for us to grow into. Do you suppose this continues on infinitely?
Mandy–I came to this post of yours via Amanda at Persistent Green. Her post, followed by yours, have left me limp, tears of recognition wrenched from me. Limp, but freshly hope-full. Like you said in a comment above, I think I’ve gotten too big for the box I’m currently living in . . . and yet once again, I’m finding it hard to let go of the box I know (even as it squashes me and does not allow wingspread), in order to move into a new box big enough for continued growth. Ah . . . Love’s challenge to me lately is to trust grace . . . however unfamiliar its appearing may be . . . trust grace and let go of my box . . . >Thanks to you and Amanda for being voices in the wilderness for me, leading me toward light.
There’s some fun stuff to explore out here in the wilderness if we can be patient with ourselves. Thanks for stopping by and commenting. I hope the movement continues to be reciprocal, you chasing the light and the light finding you.
i am
reading / re-reading
the interview with John O’Donohue.
i am
thank-full for BIG thinkers.
i am
thank-full for people who grapple
with communication, concepts, and words.
John O’Donohue was a huge grappler. I love sitting with his words.