be

"I just don’t know, and yet I will sit here and trace the shape of this mystery."

My birthday is this weekend, and while time tells me 40 years have passed since I was born, I feel as if I’m just beginning. I am bright-eyed about all the possibilities that this year and this new decade will bring. The word I'm holding onto and has become my true north star is surrender. Last year, I had to let go of so much that was constant, comforting, and true. And while the grief is still here, I am surrendered to whatever will unfold in me and around me. Because so much, so much, of what can happen is outside of my control and mysterious.

One thing that’s helped ground me and accept all this mystery is sitting in contemplation every morning. I’m choosing to use the word contemplation rather than meditation, because, while they are essentially the same thing, I approach this time with a specific intention that I don’t think applies to meditation—I’m seeking communion in and with the presence of God.

God is the name I use for the ultimate Mystery. I heard someone once say, “God is the blanket we put over the mystery to give it a shape.” You may want to name that blanket something else. It’s not about the semantics but the humility and courage to say, “I just don’t know, and yet I will sit here and trace the shape of this mystery.”

I usually start with breathwork to settle into my body and use this mantra I learned from James Finley that comes from Psalms 46:10, “Be still and know that I am God.” You start with the entire sentence, and every time you repeat it, you take off a word or clause until you are left with “Be.”

Be still and know that I am God. 
Be still and know that I am. 
Be still and know. 
Be still.
Be.

This mantra, this prayer, has been my way of surrendering to the mystery every morning. If God’s presence is one of infinite love and grace that is always before me, then I have to be still enough to notice and enter into it. As I repeat each fading line, I discover something else I need to surrender in order for me to notice. That’s something within my control, something I can do each day. 

And in those moments where I am still enough to feel God’s presence, I can feel my soul being stitched back together, the wounds and holes left from last year slowly closing up and being disinfected with that infinite love and grace.

Be still and know that I am God. 

This is where I begin, holding the most baggage, and with the most to surrender. For much of my life, I didn’t want God to be mysterious. And Christian theology in all its rigor and orthodoxy was what helped me find certainty and truth in the Mystery. I sat in church pews, lecture halls, and conferences wanting to know and be more certain about God. I wanted to take everything I was learning and create an orthodoxy out of my day-to-day life. But as I wrote in a piece a few months ago:

“God, until then, was only seen through the lens of Christian reformed theology. A theology that has a long tradition of scholarship and teaching on specific truths about who God is and what He is doing in the world. That tradition was the foundation of the religion I was born into. It had grounded me with a fundamental certainty in an uncertain world, but now that same orthodoxy felt limiting and constricting.”

The deeper I went into this kind of theology the more specific my tenets became. And while the bold lines of my theology were helpful guardrails growing up, they started to become borders that separated me from anyone who didn’t believe exactly what I believed. There was a fear and judgment of people of other faith traditions or even other Christians who did not agree with a Reformed Protestant theology.

So as I start here, I’m surrendering the need for certainty and reassurance. I surrender the legalistic, paternalistic, patriarchal shadows of this kind of rigid theology and the need to figure everything out. I surrender myself to the awe of this divine Mystery.

Be still and know that I am.

When I can surrender the certainty I have about who God is and the need to have it all figured out, I can start to accept who He is, for who He is. This idea of contemplation unlocked for me when I realized these times aren’t to think nice thoughts about God or who he is but to experience Him for who he is. It’s as if in thinking and reading so much about someone you forget you can just bask in their presence and experience them firsthand as they are in front of you.

I experience this all the time in my coaching sessions. Really being present with someone doesn’t have much to do with what you think about them. It has to do with flow and the space you have with them at that moment. From there, so many things can emerge that neither of us could have known. We can both come in with what we expect out of a session or what we need from the session but realize what emerges is completely different but exactly what was meant to happen in our time together.

God isn’t something to figure out but to flow into. And entering into this flow allows me to descend from the intellectual heady relationship I’ve had so long with him into meeting him in my heart and my body.

Be still and know

“The glory of God is the human person fully alive.” 

Ireneus wrote that sentence back in 100 AD because he was fighting against the Gnostics who said spirit and matter are two separate things and that we should shed our material bodies as fast as we can. At the same time I was taught the right knowledge of God was good, I was also taught that my body, the carnal flesh, was bad. That everything holy and sacred was outside of me and I needed a savior and his holiness to make me good again. 

But what if everything is sacred? Even me?

What I surrender when I say these words is the shame and guilt I feel when I drop into my emotions and somatic experience of God. To know God means I have to trust the experience I have with him, something I was taught to doubt from an early age, because what I feel is usually sinful and wrong. But the truth I'm holding on to here is that yes, I’m a mess but God has created me and that means there is inherent dignity in me and I am worthy of love and belonging. And so is every living person and thing that is created. That what I know, that what is in me is battered but sacred.

Be Still

I spent so much of my life wanting to be distracted, not wanting to be bored. I always wanted some kind of stimulation, some cause to stir an effect in me. And while that desire fueled a sense of curiosity, it was mostly used to suppress or numb truths in my life that I was too afraid to face.  

Reality is tough to look at for too long. The truth is never something we want in all its truth-full-ness. I squint or wink to just see that part that I like and the rest I try and look past until the elephant is right in front of me slapping me upside the head with his trunk of truth. 

Being still is an act of surrender to reality, to truth saying, “I will do my best, truth, to stare at you right in the eyes for as long as I can.” And in that stillness, as I accept all of who I am, and what’s happening around me, I become humbled. I begin to trust that what is happening right now is what was always meant to happen, and it’s all for my good, and everything I’m experiencing is a gift from God.

Be

It’s a win for me if I can “be” here for a few seconds at a time. Sometimes I feel it for a moment, and then an enticing thought or emotion comes rushing in, and I give into the temptation to follow it down the rabbit hole. Then I suddenly realize I’m supposed to just “be”, and I need to surrender all over again.

Meditation in the way it’s been talked about was always hard for me to do, and I shamed myself for it. Why couldn’t I just be? Why couldn’t I sit on the floor, legs crossed, upright for hours, and just be there? I was too undisciplined, too frenetic, too uppity to be anything but grounded and calm. 

The big aha moment was when I realized that, I can be here, in this moment, but I am not alone. I can be present in relation to the infinite love and grace of God that is ever before me. The table is always set before me, as Jesus would say, and it’s up to me to eat from it and enjoy every morsel of food.

So by the time I am here, I am trying to surrender to any kind of striving to do anything. I am surrendering to my soul’s deep desire to just be in the presence of God. That in his presence there is a processing, healing, and care that’s beyond any conscious thought or emotion. It’s doing something underneath me and beyond me, and all I can do is try and stay there while my ego is clawing back for power and control. Everything that’s outside of my control is working to heal me from the bottom up.

It seems the practice of repeating this dimming phrase from “be still and know that I am God” to “be” mirrors my morning sits: it’s more about undoing than doing anything.