It all started with a horseshoe crab, oddly enough.
“Comprehension of the invisible begins in the visible.”
Before rental season, my sister and I try to steal a few days at the shore to enjoy the beginning of summer. The end of the school year was a busy time, and my whole body needed to be unhooked from the demands of a schedule. Silence and nature are necessary. Early one morning, I grabbed my coffee, my binoculars, my dog, and a large bag of books (I need options, my friends). We headed to Corson’s Inlet. Right on the bay, this is a favorite spot for me, not even two miles down the road.
I sat in the car, binoculars in reach on the dash, and my Merlin app ticking away. Alert, I was hopeful…what bird was going to surprise me? Often, I get so locked into the birds, I never pull a single book out of the bag. The water was rippling along, the sky perfectly cloudy. A cool breeze beckoned me to step out and wander; I wanted to feel it. We are embodied, after all.
A small path led to the water’s rippling edge. As I rambled down, I glanced to my left and noticed a large horseshoe crab flipped upside down. Straining to flip itself over. Without a second thought, I took my shoes and socks off, tiptoed through the marshy land, and saved his life. Poor guy, he was nearly dead, weary from trying. He took a few shuffles and stopped. Offering a little more support, I picked him up and set him down right on the shoreline. Slowly, he pushed himself forward a few inches and sank into the water with a second chance at life. I love it when I get to save a creature.
I went back the next day before I headed out of town to grab a few more silent moments. Life was going to toss me back into its fray. As I moved toward the water, I was wide-eyed by what I saw. Never, in all my years at the shore, have I come upon a scene like this. A large community of horseshoe crabs, all sizes, moving about in circles, bumping into each other, climbing over each other, walking away, turning back around, some fast, some slow. A huge one right in the middle. I was completely intrigued. Certainly there was some mating going on, but was it more than that? On the shore, out of reach of the water, I saw another poor thing on its back, wriggling its legs in slow motion, with no way to flip itself over. No problem, Dawn to the rescue 🙂.
The one whose tail is closest to the bottom of this picture is the one I saved…
This scene was exciting to witness! The whole creation functions in order and patterns. Instinct and survival. It is a mystery, and it is magical. Nature confounds me. Scenarios like this one provoke a series of questions. And these days, we can quickly move from mystery to answers in less than 20 seconds with a trip to the World Wide Web (a good name for it… 😵💫). What was going on? When does this happen? Why so many today when there are hardly any on other days? Google gave me some idea. It seems that in these protected spots in a cove, at this time of year, the females have developed up to 20,00-80,000 eggs! As she lays the eggs in clusters, the males scurry around to fertilize them.
A little research, and now I know. Easy-peasy.
There’s nothing wrong with searching for answers. Curiosity expands life. It’s fun to learn about creatures and their behavior, or to understand history, and those stories of heroes tucked away in archives. Today, with the contagious spread of AI, it requires almost no effort to find an answer. What time does the Farmhouse Coffee close? What ingredient can I substitute for paprika? What color is a wren’s egg? What time is the rain going to move in? Frankly, it is astounding that this is our reality.
My life has been pulled and stirred by questions. Partly, it’s my personality. But also, every week my job as a counselor sends me into the tunnels of complexity. Day in and day out, I sit with people and try to problem-solve. Give me the pieces, and I will make sense of the mess. In my role, clearing out the fog, dislodging the parts that create the hurdle, and sending someone on their way with a little bit of hope is my sincere desire.
I’m wired this way, and I am trained this way.
For 25 years, this is how my workaday has been.
A helper.
An empath.
A thinker.
A reader.
A contemplative.
A problem-solver.
The stream underneath me is a quest to understand things. What is the nature of the problem? What theme is showing up? What old part of someone’s story is resurfacing? What lie is someone living out of? I live in the tunnels. It’s all questions, all the time.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing. In some ways, it’s the way my vocation has naturally taken shape. Talking things out and offering alternative perspectives, or affirming someone on how well they are navigating the dark, is helpful. We have all benefited from support like this. There are specific stories in my own life when I have been pulled out of the overwhelm by solid counsel. But like all things, there is a shadow side.
My posture can subtly shift away from humble dependence on the Spirit to “Let me do my magic…”
Pride is an invasive weed. It can kill lots of good growth.
Sometimes, the stories are too dark. The pain is too raw. There are no answers. I don’t have a solution. This is where I am finding myself at midlife. Living in the gray reality.
The older I get, the more painfully aware I am of my human limitations. No wonder many of us have landed in the swirl of an identity crisis…Answers don’t come so easily anymore. For me, stuck in the maze, it has been an existential crisis.
Until it was the best news…
Maybe there is a different way.
The legless beast asked Eve a question: “Did God really say…?”
His hook? “God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
Knowledge…control…power…”You will be like God…”
The desire for knowledge seems ordinary until it casts its hook into the flesh. It’s sneaky; by degrees it turns into a monster master. Information pulses into us these days like the great Niagara: with force, all the time. A succession of clicks, and, like cocaine, the more knowledge we have, the more we want. The more information we garner, the more control we think we have.
Knowledge feels like power.
I am learning to notice the trickery of pride in myself, but mostly God has hacked it at the root by undoing me, by leaving me answer-less more times than I am comfortable with.
What happens when a counselor has no good answer? For years my mom has quipped about the weather team on our local channels, “If anyone else were wrong as often as these weather reporters are wrong, they would be fired!” If your job requires you to have a helpful response for the puzzles or complications in life, what happens if there isn’t one?
The complexities of parenting teenagers don’t go away with three simple steps. Reversing those default, age-old self-protective responses doesn’t happen by trying harder. What about unresolved, decades-old regret? Or the job you took that’s been utterly disappointing and nothing like what was described? What’s the solution for living next door to a hateful person who will fight you over every single thing possible to get angry about? What does ChatGPT recommend you do with a child who puts up steel walls and refuses to interact with you? What human response does it offer for chronic pain and the loneliness it brings?
There’s no problem-solving for tragedy.
Maybe, it is something else altogether…
The Wall
Reality will take us straight to the Wall. Tragedy, with no explanation, will kick us right up to the Wall and leave us there bleeding, barely breathing. Janet O. Hagberg and Robert A. Guelich describe the Wall in their book The Critical Journey. It was the first time I ever heard anyone talk about this universal part of life with God. Some books have the potential to change one’s entire framework; this one has done that for me. Hagberg and Guelich describe the Wall this way:
The Wall represents our will meeting God’s will face to face…Although we deeply desire to give our will over to God, and even believe we are doing so, in truth, we are trying to deal with the Wall the same way we have gotten through life—on the strength of our own will or gifts. We try everything we can to scale it, circumvent it, burrow under it, leap over it, or simply ignore it…This experience is perhaps the most poignant example of mystery in the whole journey of faith. There is a deep sense of God at work in us in the Wall experience, and at the same time, we are at a loss to describe it. We enter the Wall with fear and trepidation, but we become less afraid because of God’s leading. We are on holy ground (114-115).
There is grief.
There is a profound sense of vulnerability.
Our egos dry up.
Our perfectly sound doctrine doesn’t mend our broken hearts.
Prayer feels like a paper airplane.
Our intellect can’t strong-arm the Wall.
Spiritual pride is exposed for its weak infrastructure.
“Just trust God” is a thin, non-response.
And yet somehow, in time, by God’s mysterious work, we find ourselves made new.
When the Wall is endured, personal transformation is the glorious fruit. Hard-fought for. Humility, discernment, and healing (for that which we didn’t know we needed healing) are the metamorphosis. Intimacy with Jesus is not euphoric, but authentic. The Wall is not a fast process, but it is a freeing one. In many ways, we unknow what we used to hold onto religiously. If I read the Bible every day, I will have unwavering belief. If I pray about things, they will become clear. If I attend church every week, I will have meaningful friendships. If I read the right books, I won’t doubt. If I trust him, it will all work out. The Wall dismantles bumper sticker theology.
Unknowing as a step to maturity
Unknowing, my friends, is the counterintuitive nature of spiritual AND emotional maturity, rare and good.
Knowledge isn’t a bad thing. Learning about the barn swallows or horseshoe crabs broadens me, excites me, and keeps me curious about God’s design. Reading good books on relationships, spiritual growth, or prayer is orienting and practical. Likewise, seeking, studying, praying, and asking questions is foundational to growth. Knowledge can expand our interior world. We can help each other through tough situations and offer ideas when stress has made it difficult to think straight or make decisions. I have had friends do that for me many times. Information can be a sincere blessing. But when we become so fixated on figuring out the “right way,” or we live as if there is always an answer and a solution, we forfeit the benefits of surrender and human limitation, which are a gateway to experiencing the Spirit’s nearness. We forget God, and carry on as if it’s all up to us. We factor him in, but we don’t connect with him. We scurry and panic. We wouldn’t say he doesn’t see us; we wouldn’t say he doesn’t care, but we live as we are on our own, as if our own strength and know-how is all we have. Underneath, we operate as if he is aloof and out of touch. Or worse, as though we have to win him over to get him to act. We grab the control panel.
Presence
Janet and Robert point out that no one can get through the Wall on their own. Humans need the kind, undistracted presence of one another. We need to sit in the ashes with those who are suffering. We need people to sit with us in our ashes, too. The most profound thing of all is that when we listen, sit quietly, and pray…when we embrace those who are in the darkness, the Spirit of God comes into the room. He manifests himself.
Though familiar to many of us, we can’t begin to mine the depths of John’s statement: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”
The companionship of Jesus offers something far more substantial than answers.
Maybe this is the human solution: look-you-in-the-eye presence.
This is not a quick fix; it’s too profound for that. James K. A. Smith says it this way in his new book, Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark: Mysticism, Art, and the Path of Unknowing,
Mystics like St. John of the Cross invite us to cultivate the capacity to wade into the dark. To receive the gift of unknowing as an opportunity to unlearn the habits that disappoint us. To become receptive to other gifts. This is not magic. This is an invitation to an ordeal. The path is harrowing before it is liberating…We have to undergo an emptying that finally opens us to receive what we didn’t know we’d been longing for…
St John (of the Cross) says this sense of companionship in the dark is so powerful that we might begin to prefer the communion of the night to the loneliness of clarity.
Ultimately, this is communion with God. This is the incarnation.
We have so much tension inside when we can’t fix something. Those parts of life that seem senseless or cruel are unbearable. They are for me. God can feel like the enemy. It’s painful to endure the unknowns. So, to be clear, we can and should have compassion on ourselves and others because it’s so damn hard to feel unmoored by fear.
I offer you a secret.
Sit with God in the discomfort. Hold steady. Cry, or rage to him. Say it exactly how you feel it. He welcomes vulnerability. One primary takeaway for me in the last 5 years is that vulnerability leads to attachment. So, choose what doesn’t always feel natural: notice the turmoil inside your chest, name it…and then be still. Open the windows, close your eyes, and feel the breeze brush by; as you allow this truth to move through your entire body:
The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together (Colossians 1:15-17).
ALL THINGS have been created BY HIM and FOR HIM, and all things are held together IN HIM. Not me. Malcolm Guite writes in his book My Theology, “The God whom we meet in Jesus, crucified and risen, is also the God of the Cosmos.”
If we turn off the noise and push back the clock on the demands for even ten minutes a day and sit with the awareness that we are held together and that all things are held together by the Creator who in the beginning hovered over the darkness and brought all things out of nothing, we just might catch our breath. In the same manner with which Jesus chatted with the woman at the well in her distress or sat with the disciples on the beach after all their consternation, he is also with us, Immanuel. These moments transform us. We move out of the shallows and into the depths.
Presence is more satisfying, dare I say, more bolstering, than answers and solutions. We can somehow manage a life with puzzles, but we can’t go without meaningful connection amid those puzzles. But hear me, not just someone in the room, but connection with people who have waded in the deep waters, my friends.
This morning I sat quietly. I let myself sit and breathe. I didn’t try to compute anything; I simply said, “Thank you.”
“Thank you for the contemplatives you have sent into my life…Eugene Peterson, Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, James Smith, Barbara Brown Taylor…thank you so much for Wallace Stevens, Russell Moore, Thoreau, Karen Swallow Prior, David Benner, Anne Snyder, Marilyn McEntyre, E.B. White, Parker Palmer…my mentors.
“Thank you for dear friends who manifest YOUR presence, who sit regularly with you, who choose you and your Kingdom over the kingdom of this world. Thank you for these companions.
“Thank you for the house finches, the red-bellied woodpecker, the robins, and especially the swifts who fill the summer sky in Downingtown, PA…”
When I choose to linger in the presence of God that comes through his natural world, I am less anxious. I need people at my table who have washed up on the shores of the second half of life, living with honesty and mystery, who are willing to go the uncharted way, who have embraced the questions and the gift of not knowing, of unknowing. Friends who want Jesus more than safety and comfort.
Life is unbearable without presence. I am learning, slowly and at times, painfully, that a lack of answers or solutions does not mean chaos and meaninglessness. Reality means we live with unpredictability. But there is something more significant than answers. We have a person, a companion. And he gives himself through the company of people who listen and bear witness to our joys and sorrows. Who cry with us. Who feel it all the way through. Who lighten us. Those who hold a light in the darkness. Who keep time. Waiting for the dawn to break along the horizon.
Because it will.