to return
How do you typically “return”?
A few weeks ago we returned from some time away during my daughter’s spring break. We took a week-long trip to Grand Cayman, which is for us a place of beauty and restoration. For many years it was a place where Holley and I went to “recover our souls” (Matthew 11:28-30) during the heaviest seasons of our work – mine as a pastor and Holley’s at a hospice/home care agency.
The crystal blue water serenades you, in a way, giving you a line of sight straight to the bottom of the ocean. Seeing the bottom, the deep dark of an unknowable place like the Caribbean Ocean, gave us a window into our deep places.
Deep exhaustion.
Deep knowing that this season could not – and hopefully would not – last.
Deep questions about our purpose and how to handle it with grace.
Plus a reminder that there was a depth of Spirit in both of us, and in all humanity, that if we only took a moment to look we would find it.
The last time we were in Grand Cayman was 2016.
In 2016, I was in the middle of a sabbatical that would see us make significant life changing decisions about ministry, the ripples of which we’re still processing today. So, to say our return to the island this year came with expectations and joy would be an understatement.
For many of us, we are constantly in the flow of a million great and small “attendings.”
We attend to our job – whether it is something we do for a living or something we live out for others such as parenting and caregiving.
We give attention to our health, whether the health of our body or of our relationships.
Our souls require attention, too, at least that part that describes our way of being with God or the Divine.
Of course there are other things that draw our attention in a day, week, or moment’s time – things specific to us and our story, our situation, or our family.
We become so focused on these “attendings” that we can become strangers to our own life. We can become part of the odd paradox of going through the tasks and duties of our life but as some sort of passive participant. It is possible to feel as if we are simply spectators to some event that is well beyond both our control and our influence.
The result of being a stranger to our own soul and our own life is the formation of a jagged edge.
A tear in the fabric of our life begins to grow the longer we disconnected from ourselves, watching life and faith and relationships happen to us rather than fully participating in them.
At this point, it is important to say one thing: this feeling is completely normal.
We are always imperfectly harnessing a life that is both made in the image of God (Gen.) and constantly expanding and growing from “glory to glory” (2 Corinthians 3:18). Of COURSE things will occasionally get out of hand with that much going on!
So how do we “return”?
How do you return?
What I have learned over the years is that there are places that help us return to our life with the Divine, with ourselves, and with others.
They might be beaches on islands far away. But they don’t have to be.
It might be a humble hermitage where we go for a day. But maybe not.
A specific chair in our home, during a specific time of the day when all is still, and a cup of coffee may be all we need.
The point isn’t where the “return” happens, but that it happens.
The Divine has given us places – literal places or symbolic practices – where we go to return to our lives.
When we landed on the island, I was in the process of laying down several things. The weight of a book coming into the world, the pressure of a few different roles as pastor, spiritual director, podcaster, and writer – these things in their beauty had also drained much of my energy.
My work, like the sun, is beautiful. But after starting into the sun too long your eyes will give out on you. Doing beautiful work without any chance to rest, to set things down, does basically the same thing.
Doing beautiful things without a return to the reasons, the source, the presence of the Divine that inspires them leads us to blindness and causes us to lose our way.
For the week in the Caribbean, my job was to return to my soul. No email, no writing, just the return.
But that work continues even now that we have returned to the prenatal spring working its way into Illinois. Returning to my life began in the islands but must continue on the prairie if it is to be a gift to myself, to God, and others.
The practice of returning is one that we must attend to if we are to traffic in the beauty of the Divine.
Couples return to each other.
Parents return to that original love for their child.
Artists drink deep of the art made by others and are inspired.
Physically exhausted people find a place to nap and restore their souls.
Today, how are you a passive participant in your life? Watching things go by and dutifully attending to all your attendings but without beauty? Without love?
What would it mean to return? What kind of space, activity, or time frame could return you to the core reason you “live and move and have your being” (Acts 17)?
Returning is a practice because we need to grow in proficiency.
Returning is a practice because it must be chosen, protected, and cultivated with intention.
Returning is a practice because only through practice do we learn how to leave and return in due course.
I invite you to name the ways you best “return” to yourself. Make a commitment to pursue that return sometime in the next month or two, and enlist the help of friends and family to make it happen.
As the skin peels from my sunburn, I can honestly say “Thank you” to the Divine. Why?
Because I’m back.
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
