Post Script | August 21, 2023

When to remain steadfast . . . and when to entertain change

Thanks for the warm welcome back last week. There are so many places you might choose to read, and I’m grateful you choose to read here!

I am glad for the time I took away, which allowed me space to finish some of the outstanding work for my MFA as well as to handle the upheaval that inevitably comes with summer. We traveled quite a bit, and two of our college-aged children were home for the summer along with our two high-school boys. I have come to understand that summer demands flexibility, and though I’m not naturally a very flexible person, I have learned it’s better to bend than break.

It may sound as if I just made an airtight case for flexibility. But the real truth is: I don’t always know when flexibility is more laxity, more faithfulness. This is a perennial question related to my rule of life practice. (PSA: there are a handful of spots remaining in my September 15^th workshop as well as my November 4^th workshop. Hope you and a friend will sign up because it’s hands-on and practical. More info here.)

A rule of life assumes a certain degree of inflexibility insofar as it’s an articulation of “the practice of patterning your life in faithful response to God’s voice.” A rule of life practice intends for regularity: in the days and weeks and months, even years. It asks us to get honest about lived faithfulness, not to entertain vague aspirations to be endlessly put off. Although a rule of life is a working document, you can’t write a rule of life, then set about overhauling it every couple of weeks. You need time to move beyond your own resistance, time for faithfulness to both be tested and formed.

Still, there are seasons when our habits of praying and serving, community and vocational work require some cooperative bending from us. This takes discernment, because there are also seasons when we are best served to dig in our heels and fight for our grounding routines and habits.

On the one hand, I am wary of giving up too soon on good habits. I am convinced that life is more plodding than ecstasy. Poet Scott Cairns, who serves at the Director of my MFA program at Seattle Pacific University, came down on the side of plodding when he gave our commencement address a couple of weeks ago. Perseverance, he said, was the watchword for both prayer and writing. You do it, no matter the mood.

But mood isn’t the only thing to beg for reprieve from routine. It’s wisdom, too, that can say: wait, hold on. Does this habit and routine still best serve the intention and desire that gave it birth in the first place? Or has my life altered in some significant way that it’s best to stop “kicking against the goads” (one of my favorite phrases in all of Scripture) and set my sails in a new direction?

Change isn’t always throwing in the towel on something hard; change can result from deep communion with God, from discerning a shift in the Wind of the Spirit.

As you can see, I don’t have this figured out: when to remain steadfast and when to entertain change. What I tend to do is interrogate from every direction. What risks am I afraid to engage (when change might be necessary)? What boredom do I seek to escape (when steadfastness is required)? What voices am I entertaining from the outside—and what is their relative attitude to change vs. stability? Am I just discouraged (and unwilling to patiently wait out the rewards of steadfastness)? Am I in need of creative redirection (and stand to benefit from change)?

Even these questions are limited in the scope of their own usefulness. Because here’s the most fundamental question: do I confidently trust God to guide?

I do trust . . . and I also know this, that God can be “Lord of indirection and ellipses” (“Prophecy,” Dana Gioia, Pity the Beautiful). We don’t get writing on walls, prophecy served up on silver platters. We don’t get blinking lights and billboards (even though that was our case when deciding to move to Cincinnati. See In Good Time to get that whole story.) Maybe this is to say that every good question is best answered in poetry, which is to say not exactly answered if entertained. Perhaps the tension I’m naming is irreducible, bearing witness to what it means to be human in this life. We are often befuddled, wandering in the dark, feeling for the switch.

God is there, too, of course. Because as the psalmist so beautifully put it, even darkness is not dark to you.

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It’s my goal to send these letters regularly to you, each week. As I’m renewing that goal, I’m also recovering the original intent of these letters. These are not polished essays, but “wilding” human correspondence. Attemps to offer some of the “hints” and “glimpses” I hope to get of reality, as T.S. Eliot put it in Four Quartets.