personal growth

This is the scary basement where I work out.

It is full, totally full, of spiderwebs. And spiders. It’s lucky I hate snakes and have a strange affinity for spiders, and not the other way around.

The ceiling is 7 feet off the ground at best. The floor is uneven, so I have to find the right level-enough spot for whatever lunge or plank or squat jump I’m doing. I took my yoga mat down there, and I’ve accepted that it’s become part of the scary basement now. Composed partially of dirt and only borrowed from the spiders.

No one forces me to work out down there. I could probably make it happen in my living room; or I could just skip it, except I’ve discovered that getting a sweat on is essential to my winter mental health. Plus WEDDING: I’m much more vain about all those photos than I ever thought I’d be. But still. The scary basement is pretty repellent.

Here is the main way I get myself into the scary basement and through the lunge jumps: I pretend I’m one of those people in a movie who is unjustly thrown into prison, but spends their time plotting revenge/getting super ripped.

I guess I think of this as a genre of movie character, but the only one I can really think of is Bruce Wayne in The Dark Knight Rises. So, yeah. I pretend to be Batman. Except I haven’t been imprisoned by a mysterious ally of the warped, brutish demagogue who plans to destroy everything I love and protect. I’m just a victim of extreme cold and my own vanity/desire to eat french fries.

Even so, after a while, having to work out in the scary basement can kind of be its own motivator. Once I had done it a couple of times without dying by spider bite or ankle twist or the wrath of the skeleton-ghost who could very well live its eerie half-dead life in the nether reaches of the darkness— once I got through it a couple of times, I felt free to consider myself A TOTAL BADASS. Sometimes I let myself feel secretly superior to my coworkers when they’re talking about their fancy gyms. “My gym is free,” I don’t say to them. “Lots of people would pay to not go there.”

I think the same thing is one part of the appeal of CrossFit, too. I’ve never been, but I get the impression there’s something people like about the no-frills, no-excuses, objectively and plainly miserable workouts: they feel like you’re getting stronger, and they feel like what you’re doing matters. You are honest about the sacrifice you have to make to get where you’re going. And your circumstances help you recognize your inner badass.

Working out is somehow easier when you feel like you’re allowed to frame your quest for greater strength as an epic battle. I wish we gave ourselves more license to understand all of our struggles that way.

Whether you’re resolved to finish a degree, to get out of debt, to be more patient with your family, to get through a day without alcohol, to keep up with your Lenten practice even though you’ve already failed multiple times, to learn a musical instrument, to care for an aging parent, to learn to love your body, or just to get out of bed again tomorrow, sometimes the most discouraging thought is that this isn’t worth it. That decay wins eventually, so why bother with growth? That you are not the kind of person who does these things. That you are making a mockery of yourself by struggling through to the end.

I don’t know if I believe in a red pointy Devil, but I believe in an Enemy. And that Enemy is those lies. Here is the truth: that thing you do wouldn’t be worth doing if it were easy. And it wouldn’t be yours to do if you weren’t up to the task. And if it weren’t worth the effort, you wouldn’t have started. You wouldn’t have stared this huge thing in the face and said, bring it on. Maybe you didn’t know just how hard it would be, just how weary you would feel. But that weariness isn’t a sign that you are too small or your problems too petty. It is a sign that you are in the midst of a great battle. It is in the daily decisions, the uncertain hours, the thousandth resolution that the warrior quietly, finally wins.

Of course there is a time in all of our lives when we must face a reality that forces us to quit on some great fight, and there is no shame in that. But I mean to talk about those things, big and small, that you know (or once knew) God has somehow placed before you for this time; those things that, in your best moments, you believe are making the world a better place. Cling to that belief. Let it compel you to go on. Even if there will never be a musical montage of your struggle, even if the darkness against which you strain is not apparent to anyone else, know that it is a great thing you do to hold once more your candle against it.

When a person is baptized in the Episcopal church, he or she is asked to assent to all sorts of absurd projects.

Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of the bread, and in the prayers?
Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?
Will you persevere in resisting evil?

These are daunting, audacious, overwhelming goals, to say the least.

The person replies: I will, with God’s help.

It is such a simple answer. We use such a humble and honest five words to make such outrageous claims. But it is enough to face down demons; even, and especially, those who tell us we are small and our struggles unimportant. It says that is no matter. It is God’s help that matters. He is the one who calls, who provides, who is sufficient.

I will, with God’s help. This is enough for one day.

One day in your life as a total badass.

 

Maybe a psychologist would yawn at this – I’m sure I’ve heard it preached a thousand times – but I’d fogotten it lately:
One of the primary tasks of adulthood is deciding which voices get to stay in your head.

I’ve done a lot of exhausting, exhilarating work on this in the past, confronting those ghosts squatting in my home, inviting their nasty friends to parties at 2 A.M. Of course I’d let them stay because they knew how to skulk around the edges of my vision, and because they were terribly, terribly frightening. But when you screw your courage to the sticking-place and put on your boots and go up to the attic to confront them in hand-to-hand combat – they might still say horribly painful things but, looking at them directly, you see they have no bones. The voices that have claimed authority over you are glorified puddles of sound and memory. One by one you look at the middle school bullies, the coaches with their own sad pasts, the grotesque cartoons pretending to be your parents at their worst; you calmly inform them that their presence will no longer be tolerated and, eventually, you watch them dribble away through the floorboards.

Then you forget how hard it is when the voices do have bones.

I’ve done some academic work on virtue ethics, which says that the things we do and the groups we join shape us fundamentally as human beings. There’s all kinds of research about this, theorizing and scientific studies alike, all these people thinking about what this basic truth means to us, and especially what it means for education; but what I wish someone had taken the time to distill down for me back when I was eighteen and worried about school is this. The voices you listen to day in and day out will always, always take up residence in your head.

The voices I’ve read in books and sat under in lectures for the past two years have been different from the voices that used to talk to me about God. I wanted to hear from a new set of people, and I’m glad that I did. I’m grateful for their presence with me, the ways that they have expanded my view of the world and posed questions about God I hadn’t thought to ask before.

Yet they didn’t often draw me towards the God who captivated my heart and mind in earlier years. They didn’t often nurture the mystic in me, the pray-er who was born in a barely-remembered year when a Sunday School teacher said Jesus came to have a relationship with you. That naive wonderer wasn’t really invited to the conversation. My teachers said, “worship brings us closer together as a community,” which is true, but they didn’t say worship delights the heart of God because God is eager to be delighted. They said, “God is on the side of the poor and oppressed,” which is true, but they didn’t often say God is with all those who hurt. They said, The Creator loves all creatures, but they didn’t bother with the truism we all need to hear every, every day – Jesus loves you.

It wasn’t exactly these academics’ job to take responsibility for my spirituality. It’s just that I didn’t have much time or space for any other voices amidst the joy and intrigue, pain, confusion, and discomfort of studying mysteries, wrestling with tradition, confronting injustice every day. Theory, vocabulary, confusion, accusation, discord, and doubt took up residence in my mind and battled daily with testimony, hope, trust, humility, simplicity.

When the words of my pastor stopped sounding like Jesus cares about you and I started to hear God cares about your unruly beliefs and behavior messing up His system – I was incredibly distressed for a while; my last trusted voice was gone. Too weary to keep up the arguments, I quit going to church when I graduated from my program. I committed to the newfound silence.

Utter, blessed silence.

Just two jobs, a boyfriend, summer fun with friends – life as an American twentysomething. Not too much to make sense of. To be honest, for the first half of this summer my life has been as close as it’s ever been to those of the unconcerned-oblivious “religious ‘nones'” people keep worrying about. If you want to talk to me, I said to God, you’re just going to have to do it. Not in a “you big jerk” kind of way, just finally throwing up my hands. It’s not that I wanted to be all agnostic and lazy; I just didn’t know another way to heal, to trust a single voice competing for my allegiance.

I’m finding out that this is an OK thing to do. You have permission to just wait it out with God.

Life with God is a curious dance, a back-and-forth between pursuing God and just waiting to be found. Being called to put some effort into something, and letting go of the things you do under your own power. Analyzing, thinking, considering and formulating with the good brain God gave you – and listening, calmly, into mystery.

My heart has its own insistent little voice with a high-school-principal sort of question: What is the meaning of all this?! And now that I have finally found myself too weary to keep chasing down rabbit trails, I am making peace with my own helplessness to summon answers. I wouldn’t say that God has spoken to me audibly quite yet; it is more that, the less I fear the silence, the less empty it becomes.

I was just getting habituated to my lackadaisical heathen existence, starting to forget what exactly had ever been so important about this church thing, wondering if God was about to drop some crisis into my life so that I would care more – and then came a nudge, do this in remembrance of me. And up I went on Sunday to the church down the street I’ve never visited. There is the voice of the reader, deep and wide, scripture tumbling glory and grace over and over as if they are the same thing. The lackluster preaching while I study the stained-glass windows. And these gifts: The body of Christ, broken for you. The blood of Christ, your cup of salvation. This voice, this food, I do not struggle to analyze; this food I believe utterly.

Finally the voice of the organ breaks loose from hymns for the postlude, alternately twinkling and roaring majors and minors: It is true! Life is a dramatic and weighty thing. We all struggle to survive, and all break through to show ourselves glorious from time to time. Those battles below the surface are real battles, but you will win if you can only keep fighting; keep waiting; keep believing that the Lord will fight for you. You need only to be still. This warm day means everything, everything, and that is all there is to know. 

I walk home, alone, in companionable silence.

There is the you that people see, and then there is the rest of you.
– Brennan Manning

The rest of me doubts and doubts and doubts, my faith and the trivial things people say and God and especially myself. The rest of me is gripped with fear of the future as she shrugs my shoulders when others ask about it. She is terrified that half the people in her life will find out that she’s a religious prude, an out-of-touch mumbo-jumbo moralistic weirdo, and that the other half will find out that she’s a backslidden liberal beer-swilling heathen. She waits to be judged as she learned to judge, listing shoulds and crafting airtight moral systems without a pause to say, ‘yes. life is harder than it looks.’

The rest of me longs for tenderness but comes up only with analysis, longs for God but comes up only with theology, longs to forgive and musters only resignation. She daily asserts her bigness while hiding behind her smallness. She equivocates, rationalizes, and then does the selfish, lazy thing.

She hopes. She harbors the most outlandish wishes, for herself and the whole entire wide world, that she hardly dares whisper to the hardwood floors of this empty house. Hopes to be remembered for listening, to be recognized for writing, to hear the voice of God again and again. Hopes for “spiritual awakening”, I glibly say, but what she means is an awesome rumble of freedom and love spilling over from city to city, drowning greed and fear. All these she keeps in the walls, moving the hiding spots and changing the passwords on her kryptonite.

She is very frightened. She never stops trying to argue her way out. She clings tightly to her judgments of others, and she is often more baffled than drawn by Jesus. She has been keeping me from writing for all my life.

She wants only one thing: to protect me.

—

Funny how you can think you’re being honest when really you’re hiding. How you can wander over to God, petulant, demanding he fix everything roiling inside your gnarly, spiny urchin-heart, without ever letting him crack it open. I’m gonna hold on to my rock-solid armor, I say to God without really meaning to; you just magic your way in there, fix things up inside, and I’ll take care of keeping them that way. I’ll stand the sentries. I’ll fortify the defenses.

Tenderness.

The word catching me up lately is tenderness. To resist hardening – here is a real kind of strength. How many of the niceties of polite society – and even the unspoken agreements between close, close friends – are aimed at allowing one another to preserve some desperate bravado, pretending not to notice others’ soft spots? Ask about the facts, never the feelings.

Tenderness – I was overwhelmed when grad school began, utterly weary of feeling for others. A few years of intense volunteer ministry and personal troubles had all the great tragedies of the world piled onto them – hurricanes, slavery, warfare and the death of Oscar Romero. Really, we were all overwhelmed by the hurt in the world, in our worlds. But diversions were afforded: cynicism, anger, alcohol, busyness, theological arguments and workarounds. It was good not to be raw all the time. I learned a great deal.

And. Yet. What is learning if we do not learn tenderness? What even is wisdom if there is not compassion first? We students have been allowed to confuse righteous anger with blind rage; our learned pomposities, too, have been indulged, along with our self-soothing tactics and addictions. Never have we simply been with our wounds, hurt together and waiting for grace. We have been too eager to protect ourselves. We have built bridges across the valley of the shadow, bridges that bear a dangerous resemblance to the tower over Babel.

Yes, I do need protection. I am only skin and sinew and some utterly unuseful bits of squish, blood flowing impossibly close to the surface – and that is why every thought of self-preservation is a lie. I do not need the protections of my other self; she wants to help, but she only creates messes. A child alongside God in the heart’s garden, encouraging easy weeds that choke late-blooming flowers, and stomping on spiders that would have consumed pests sabotaging the fruit. And here is God in a floppy hat, pulling her close, sitting her down, teaching her wisdom and patience without fear and pride.

That way lies much pain, Jesus said, but that way lies also the wide and long and high and deep love of Christ. To hide one’s heart in God – tenderness wrapped in tenderness – there is the daily task. To leave aside hardness and will, let oneself be moved even to tears – there is the invincible folly of Jesus.