The Saint-Guides
What 3:00 AM looks like after big news, brain surgery and buckets of steroids. (Spoiler: It looks like peace.)
Dear Friend,
Almost impossible to understand all that has transpired since we last wrote. Maybe understanding is too big an ask and completely misses the point. I think so. Perhaps the better response is to let the mystery of it all wash over us and simply to marvel at what we notice. So let’s do that, instead.
I generally find myself in the washing over place when the steroids or something else gently stirs me at roughly the same time most mornings- usually right at 3:00 AM. I know the time by the ship’s clock, a relic from another lifetime, that chimes six times each morning as I stir. This is fitting because that is the time from that other life when we would assume what ships call the mid-watch. The liminal time-space on the bridge of a ship between midnight and dawn, which is how I think of myself today. I am Liminal. We have always been so, I think, but it took this recent change to recognize liminality as truth.
This week has brought a gentle wake up each morning (Less gentle for Kathryn - I think.) Not the terrifying steroid psychosis dreams I remember grabbing at my neck, but only vaguely, remember from a year ago. There is peace in the the waking these days. A softness that defies description - at least given all that has transpired, and a peace I never dared to anticipate might accompany the knowing that sea on which we sail today will certainly not go on forever, even if up until this point I may have sorta magically-thought my way into believing it might go on like as it has for the past year - forever indeed, and that the horizon was, perhaps the illusion, all along.
I have never felt less alone in my life. That seems like a strange thing to write, but it is certainly true. I feel as though I have a personal, or perhaps even a host of personal guides, for what is likely to come. While this is a tender, virgin ocean for us to be sailing, it is ancient and well-traveled. And how many have come before to this thin, well-worn place and left treasured icons of their journeys that might help to orient all who follow them by pointing to Love.
What sorts of icons? Fair question. Most mornings, the first conversations I have are related to holiness. Once when I was training to be a counselor, I spent a ridiculous couple of days considering what in the world this might mean:
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.
Genesis 1: 26
At the time, I camped out for two or three torturous days in a Richmond, Virginia Panera, writing a Counseling Theories paper trying to remember the attributes of God from my early Sunday School and Christian High years: Attributes like - Omniscient, Omnipresent, Omnipotent Of course, these simply fell apart upon first contact with our reality. That could not possibly be what God meant when they said these word: “Let us make them in our image,” We are certainly none of those things.
(There were also the bits about and reigning and dominion over the creation. Words, I believed, even then to have been so badly misappropriated to justify all sorts of abuse and violence against the first Word of God - His very creation - so I replaced ruling and dominion with words like caring for and stewardship of the gift - which changes everything.)
I added attributes that I hoped might help to guide my interactions with my clients: Attributes like Relational, Creative, Rational, and Loving, and Phenomenological (that is - what we experience is true and becomes a part of us. Eventually, this list grew and shrank, and served as a useful lens through which to love as Christ seems to love us. and as a way to help my client’s remember their beloved- ness, and remembering this simple truth always, always, always, seemed to be the first step of healing.
That listing has continued to evolve this past week. Most mornings I wake with a gentle question: What does it mean today? And most mornings, the answer seems to be converging here:
The image and likeness of God is the very seed of irresistible longing for intimacy and union with Pure Love (aka: holiness) that was carefully planted in you and in me and in each of us, and absolutely lies within each of us, waiting for our simple yes to germinate and then to thrive and to sustain us. I don’t know what else it could mean.
Other icons: A previous traveler left a link to some readings that have been very meaningful to me this week, and that demanded that I consider the manner in which I plan this particular voyage. The old me would have seized control and would have made a list of waypoints and times to get to each to mark satisfactory progress, would have encouraged me to roll up my sleeves and begin to curate my own little hunger for holiness altar. A sort of holiness bucket list.
Today, not so much. Given the number of Saint -guides around me - I’m okay with being fully where I am and paying attention to what they may have left for me to find along the shore lines or where they have dropped bread on the water. So far, these guides have remained generous and vigilant and faithful, and I do not fear losing sight of shore or getting disoriented.
Oremus,
Ć
Father,
You are are the seed of pure longing which you, yourself, planted in my soul.
And it stirs as the drops fall from your oars into the still sea, as you approach with care and tenderness.
He is nearer, yet, it tells me:
Be Still and Know.
And so I do.
Amen.
Bottom line: I am recovering well from surgery. Ravenously hungry and less irritable. All good. Hoping for a walk in the woods today. For more medical stuff: Check here:
Chris, as always your words speak to my soul. Thank you.
Hoping to see you soon!