The Ocean
I have been seeing a Spiritual Director.
For some reason, this title tends to make people around me nervous. Essentially, it’s another fellow Christian, usually older and wiser, who has made a profession out of praying for and with others in need of guidance.
Her name is Ann and she has white blonde curly hair and high cheek bones.
She walks with a cane and has become very special to me.
We meet at the General Theological Seminary in Chelsea off of West 21st street. I love the walk there, and the homes on that block are breathtaking.
When I get there, I buzz the front desk and they open an iron gate to let me in. I walk through a beautiful little garden, on a small stone pathway, surrounded by giant brick buildings that house hundreds of young minds. There is a chapel I always pass, full of wooden pews. At 5:30 they ring the bells to summon the students.
Ann and I meet in the library.
She always has a big smile when we greet each other, and she thinks I’m funny, so my jokes on the way in usually land well. This is a relief since I feel like the rest of the time we spend together during our meetings makes me look like a very silly and indecisive twenty something.
I feel that God has brought Alex and I out here so he can really speak to the deeper parts of our hearts. It may sound paradoxical but the problem back in New Mexico was that we were hamsters on the wheel, so busy doing and helping that neither of us could really assess our own spiritual drought or need.
Out here, there’s nothing to do and nowhere to be most days!
So God has us cornered– we are finally ready to hear and see things “down in the basement”. Things that need healing and saying. Seeing things with honest perspective. Humility and admittance and repentance. I’m glad to have someone like Ann to help me navigate it all.
When we meet, we start with silent contemplative prayer, then we pray together, and then I share with her the events in my life as of late. She takes notes and listens well. She often waits a long time to say anything to me and I’m just waiting in the silence. It’s awkward for me, but she is comfortable with it. After several long seconds, she’ll ask earth shattering questions that really make me think about the spiritual landscape of my life, and what the Holy Spirit could be trying to show me.
Recently, she and I have found several themes to my life among my upbringing, the way I’ve done church, ministry, and the hardships I’ve faced in and out of it all.
Many times I’ve told her about my struggle with change and growth, thinking and believing different things as life has gone on. A slow change comes, and things can erode over time– like when someone dies, even though you prayed for their healing day after day, year after year. Or when you travel and see suffering on a whole new scale and begin to wonder about God’s presence in dark times. Or when you work behind the curtain in full time ministry. Or when life just doesn’t go the way you planned and the way you always used to read scripture isn’t covering all the holes in your life anymore.
As we were sharing, we wondered at the metaphor of water. I bring it up to her from time to time because I love to go to the waterfront here in the city to clear my head. As she noticed why I love spending time at the water so much, she suggested that perhaps, this time with God is much like a time in the ocean. Moving around with the waves, freely floating…but not being sure of exactly where I am. Not sure of exactly what is next. Definitely not sure about the bottom ocean floor or the things that are alive and sprouting way beneath the surface of the water. I think every Christian who does the work of being an honest follower of Christ will find themselves in a place like this eventually. So I guess it’s my turn.
“Maybe you used to be on the land,” she said slowly. “When you were there then, the ground was solid and you could count on it. You walked steadily and could even see the landscape. You knew what to expect. You could control where you went. But now, having released more control to God, asking him to do what only He can do, there is a freedom that comes as you move forward. Like being in the ocean. Yet, there is also a not-knowing that comes with swimming in the ocean, and that is the hard part.”
Ten years ago, embarrassing as it is to admit, I could’ve tried to explain to you why human suffering existed. Maybe I could’ve stayed late with you at my little Bible study at my public high school. Or maybe I would’ve written a blog. (HA.)
For years and years, I believe that gently and beautifully, God was letting me hold Him in my hands. Something to grasp, to hang onto, to understand. He wanted me to know that his faithfulness and goodness would always be something I could count on as I moved through high school and church camps every summer.
I learned his goodness within a box. I was young, so he allowed me think that everything had reason and rhyme and that everything made sense.
In that small cove, I fell in love with him. I learned to lean on him.
But then, I grew and grew. And I experienced the pain and sting of sickness and death and sadness and hopelessness. I asked questions that still hang in the air and probably won’t ever find answers.
Among all of that, in the doubt and loss and confusion,
I asked him to show me more of who he is.
And he answered.
Though I held him once, it’s like he is holding me now.
He’s the ocean.
It’s too vast to hang onto.
It’s too fluid to grasp completely.
But it carries me and I can learn the rhythm. I don’t have many answers anymore and I certainly cant contain God within a box of my ideas and understanding— but I can feel His presence and how it carries me over each wave, like the ocean.
I told her, in small protest, that it’s scary to “flow” in this place. Where I come from, that could lead to lax– a “hippy-dippy-God-forbid-universalist” kind of thinking.
The question that is bothering me as I float in the ocean is, what are my confines? I see no straight direction or beginning or end. What is allowed and what is not allowed? I know God is infinite. But floating out here, can I still see him as clearly as I did when I was small? When I held him in the box? As beliefs and experiences change in my heart, who am I becoming and where do I fit? I don’t ever want to let go of God. I couldn’t if I tried.
And, as though paradoxically, in this season of his ocean, I am never without him.
Somehow, with a gentle nod, Ann understood.
“Then ask him for a marker of his character!” She threw her hands up. “You want to know if you’re progressing, if you’re still going the right way. Sometimes spiritual progress can be an idol in and of itself, but if you want to make sure there is still growth and life where you are spiritually, ask him to show you.”
A marker of his character.
Something to help me know that I’m where I should be.
A lighthouse. A buoy. Something bobbing on the surface of the water.
What a beautiful thought.
“Just think of all the life in the ocean that we don’t see. All the growth and beauty that we’re unaware of. Sometimes, he is growing and stretching us and we don’t even realize it until later. In the ocean, though it’s hard to know where you are and hard to see the bottom, there is so much life, Jayne.”
Suffice to say, it’s frightening to let go. To say, “I don’t know.” To be okay with only the simplicity of being drawn to God, despite all the ugliness in life and on earth. To be okay with no answers. To stop finding purpose and assignment in “relationship with God”, quiet times in the morning like a routine board room meeting, and to instead say, as Thomas Merton did, “I have no idea where I am going…but do in me what I cannot do in myself.” To let go of all the things that prove I am going and doing and being right, being “Christian”.
To be drawn to the presence of Christ, just out here in his ocean, amidst all the beauty and peril and fear, mystery and majesty. I think this is how many of us keep “moving forward”, despite hardship and confusion on this journey with Jesus. And I am thankful that, even in huge vast depths as giant as the ocean, God is not afraid of my unknown.
He is still holding me, as I once held him.
