Idle and Blessed

what i am sometimes doing instead of going to church Yesterday I went to church. It's been a while. I often need (want) to stay in bed on Sundays, drink coffee, think my thoughts. Quiet mornings are rare and beautiful, like diamonds, or true love. Other times I'm traveling, especially this summer - to weddings or mountains or canyons and rivers. All days in the mountains are the Lord's Day. At least, that's my sense of it. Yesterday I went to church. St. Bede's Episcopal Church. A tiny home for a few members, a little group who's been doing the Sunday thing for enough years to get old together. They know the prayers, and I do too - repetition is a friend to the spiritual - and that makes me feel like I belong even if it's one Sunday per month. That and my plastic name tag available at the front. But my favorite parts of the service are always the blessings. "May the blessing of the God of Abraham and Sarah, and of Jesus Christ bo...

I am sometimes a ball of worry, often tangled up in knots, rarely the person I want to be. There's something about pain -- not the good kind, like core work, but the long kind, like migraines, uncontrollable -- and something about silence -- the long kind too, like a week at home alone -- that point to my vulnerability and fragility and fear. The soft space at my center that can be so easily wounded and broken, and can so easily lash out and wound others or act without integrity -- without integrating what I truly believe into my life. I don't want this soft center of mine to go away, or to harden or deny its own existence. Instead I think I want to feel it more, reaching out from around its protective coating of Ego, helping me live aware of it. Aware of my soft humanity, the countless ways it is hurt every day by people or words or busyness or those magazines that make me feel ugly. I want to live in such a way that I feel my pain, instead of analyzing my way out of it al...

Today at the yoga studio someone asked me what I did besides this. A moment or two of blank staring later, I replied with considerable stammering: "Uh, besides yoga? Besides working here? I, uh, well, I just graduated. I have my Masters. Just, kinda, doing this for now. You know." *Inner mental face palm* "Oh, wow! What'd you study?" "Divinity. I have a Masters of Divinity. Um, it's a theology degree." "You can study divinity?? I imagine it's kinda hard to make that lucrative, unless you want to be a holy person?" "...right. Yeah. Basically...or like work in a church." At this point I give myself a mental high five for being the dumbest MDiv ever to graduate and have this conversation. It occurs to me I could have said something about being an admin in the Center for Theology and Public Life at Mercer, but my mouth was still slightly agape at the holy person suggestion, and I haven't started the aforementioned job ...

I've been tired for so long. Grad school is over. The wedding is over. Moving is over. This month is the liminal space between the hurry of the Spring and the settled routine of the Fall, and yet it doesn't feel restful; it feels like the same old exhausting. It feels like tired. There are no ultra marathons, no big events to plan, no challenging projects, no hard jobs. There's just time with my husband, a few hours of work, cooking and baking, cleaning, resting. Running, not too far. Reading, mostly poetry. Doing yoga. But I'm tired. I don't understand the cycles of my energy. I don't know why some summers I feel like going to Russia again and others feel like this. I don't understand the delicate balance between work and rest, people and solitude, noise and quiet, or how sometimes past seasons, when not intentionally processed and prayed through, can drain me like a low-grade fever underneath the surface. But my energy is precious to me, because I ...

This piece is somewhat confessional. In roughly 30 hours my last MDiv exam will be over. I'll close the books, set down the laptop, maybe even sleep a while...and wait for it to hit me that I'm a seminary graduate. The past three years have been a long road, and it's no secret I've struggled here. I've never once been sure McAfee was the right place for me. I only feel affection for Atlanta roughly one day per month. I crave the mountains, and meaningful work, and the kind of community I had in Nashville. Some days I feel like an outsider here. But I've done good and hard things, like get married and run an ultra-marathon, and even though I've spent the last three years wrestling with God and this school, I am not sorry I came. It has been too hard, but it has not crushed me. Here are a few things I learned. 1. Choose wisely. Don't go to a Baptist seminary if you are not Baptist. Don't go to a small seminary if you want an academic religion d...

We must not portray you in king's robes, you drifting mist that bought forth the morning. Once again from the old paintboxes we take the same gold for scepter and crown that has disguised you through the ages. Piously we produce our images of you till they stand around you like a thousand walls. And when our hearts would simply open, our fervent hands hide you. -Rilke Laying down the paintbrushes today, and trying to find God in earthier places. Where and how? I'm still learning.

I haven't been very good about writing lately, privately or publicly. There is only one reason this bothers me, and it is that when I do not stop to write, time and moments speed by me like a blurry train, unexamined and unincorporated. I need to put pen to paper - to make my memories into meaning, and to find God moving in the chaos. Thankfully God does not stop talking when I do not listen well. It just takes me longer to hear anything. Lately every time I get quiet I've been thinking about the boxes I put myself in - for routine and steadiness and reassurance - boxes that paradoxically sometimes bring freedom and enlightenment and sometimes shame and limitedness. Like "I have to run 40 miles a week in the off season." And "I need 'x' amount of money in savings." And "I have to keep my 3.95 GPA." All of my arbitrary goals and shoulds that bring me so much joy when I fulfill them and so much guilt when I fail. My husband often loves ...