When It’s an Invitation to Deep Soul Care

5/4/21

Dear friend,

We've been deepening into a series about living into our invitations when they come, exploring the practical side of what it can look like to do this.

Last week, as one window into this reality, I wrote about that time I sat down on the floor of my life.

Today, at the risk of sounding like all I do is fight with God and demonstrate my deep-seated stubbornness 😆, I'm going to share another invitation I lived into more recently that was similarly difficult but had some differences on the practical, living-it-out side of things.

This one started long before I knew it was happening, infiltrating its way into my life in 2012 and taking nearly four years to surface to my consciousness.

During those four years, I sustained a lot of loss. Loss of friendships. Loss of one of our parents. Loss of two cats. Loss of a way of being with someone I loved. Loss—deep loss—in the lives of people close to me. And the immense difficulty of naming for the first time an experience of sexual violence that had happened in my teenage years.

More happened during that time, even, but you get the idea. Loss upon loss, difficulty upon difficulty, piling up until it reached higher than I could see.

It landed me in a labyrinth in January 2016 with nothing left to give.

I stood at the center of that labyrinth, stripped and empty and angry.

It was, at that point, an invitation to truth-telling. "Go away," I said to God that day. "Just go away."

It was also an invitation to surrender to my limits. Despite being as responsible as I could to everything those years had held—I had re-enrolled in therapy, continued meeting with my spiritual director every month, added sessions with my supervisor to support the work I was doing in spiritual direction with other people—I had reached a point where I could do no more.

I was done.

How do you live into an invitation of not being able to do it anymore?

I don't have a good name for this invitation as it began to play out in my life. Sometimes I call it the season when I was in a standoff with God. Sometimes I call it my season of deep soul care. Sometimes I think of it as when I started relating to God in some new ways—less structured, more confrontational and messy.

What did the living-into-it look like?

It started with honesty—telling God and myself the truth, starting that day in the labyrinth. That led to telling the truth of where I was to other trusted people in my life.

Then it included setting down the things my heart and soul couldn't hold with integrity while I knew myself in this place. For me, this was my spiritual direction practice, which was excruciating. I'd entered the work of spiritual direction in 2008 feeling like I'd come home to what I was made to do. Who was I and what was my work without that home? Would it ever be my home again?

Then it led to additional soul care. I applied for a two-year program that was structured around quarterly 4-day retreats in the Chicago area. Thankfully, I was able to enroll for the retreat-only portion of the program, as my dry-as-dust soul could not fathom reading all the books and writing all the papers everyone else in the program had signed up to do. I just needed the regular gift of retreat, and it helped.

Eventually, the gift of Bookwifery came along, which is the company I started that offered a discernment approach to the work of bringing books into the world. This isn't something I do anymore, but it was a way for me to bring spiritual direction and discernment work to spaces where the book could sit between me and the other person. Direct soul-to-soul work didn't feel accessible to me during that season, but discernment work with a book between us? That I could do.

Lastly, it included relating to God in the ways that were possible.

Sometimes that meant the only times I prayed were when I was sitting across from my spiritual director, unable to pray on my own in the weeks between our sessions but able to pray easily when she was there.

It also meant relating to a presence in prayer that became, for me, the feminine face of God.

This happened while I kneeled in the side chapel of a Catholic Church in Oxford, England, in the summer of 2017. I knelt down, unshouldered my bag onto the floor, then looked up and found myself staring into the face of a sculpture of Christ.

I winced and looked away.

Up to that point, I'd always related to the masculine face of God in prayer without any trouble. On this day, I felt its difficulty for me. It felt too close. Too direct.

I looked up, intending to try again, but it still felt hard.

My gaze strayed up and to the left. Several tall stained-glass windows filled the front of the chapel. On the far left window, the sun shone through what looked to be the figure of a woman in a red robe.

I couldn't stop staring at her. Outside, clouds must have been moving through the sky at a rapid clip, as the sun would shine through her figure, then cloud over; shine, then cloud over. Again and again, this happened as I watched.

This woman's gaze was cast downward and to the side. While the gaze of Christ had felt too close, I could imagine this woman sitting beside me on a sidewalk bench, her eyes down but head angled toward me, listening.

Just listening.

What did I need to say? Somehow I knew she could receive it. Whatever I couldn't say to Christ, I could say to her. It felt like God's love coming to me in the way I could receive it.

What's worth noticing in this whole long story?

That our invitations can be big in our lives. That they can ask things of us—hard things—for us to give up when living into them. And that it's not always up to us to do it all. Sometimes, often times, gifts come along that help us through.

What gifts have come to you in your own invitations you've lived?

With you in the gifts,
Christianne