Beneath the reality of life

Much to my dismay, I have become a “word of the year” person. And in this year of our Lord, 2019, the word has been foundation. 

I’d been living in New York for about three months when this word stuck in my head. My life had started to adopt the city’s fatal pace, and I knew that if I didn’t determine a vision for my life, New York would determine it for me. Foundation seemed like the appropriate way to break ground on a new season of life and get ahead of New York before it got ahead of me.

I thought it would look like developing healthier habits, prioritizing relationships with my family and new friends, saying no to living a tourist’s life and yes to sustainability. So I did my best to get up at 6:30 most mornings. I attempted to go to the gym once or twice a week, and honestly, the fact that I have a gym membership is a win. I started a monthly budget and found a grocery shopping / meal prepping routine that sort of works. I said frequent no’s to extraneous things and frequent yeses to relationships I wanted to cultivate and experiences that fed my soul artistically. 

But please. Who ever sets out to build better habits and reaches the point where the job is done? My life is not balanced and I don’t want it to be. Routines get thrown off, priorities change, and appetites and apathy become stronger than willpower. Laying a foundation has meant so much more than embarking on an overrated pilgrimage toward a “balanced life.”

“Beneath the reality of life is the rock of faith.” --Madeleine L’Engle, from Miracle on 10th Street 

2019 has been a year of great wrestling, great fear, and great faith. I’ve questioned almost everything I was taught to believe. I’ve approached the divine and miraculous with cynicism and doubt, self-importance and fear. I’ve assumed all of life’s answers were within the realm of my understanding, when of course, they are not. I thought I had to choose between faith and intellect, only to discover that they go hand in hand. With time and difficulty and patience from teachers greater than I, I’ve learned to seek truth urgently and with wonder, with childlikeness instead of childishness, and a foundation of faith has been revealed.

During a particularly acute season of anxiety, on a family vacation to Sedona, I found myself wrestling with two words that I both resisted and craved: humility and obedience. 

Humility: the ability to hold space for not knowing, for being wrong, for learning from others and from myself, for discovering something to be true when it simultaneously makes no sense and all the sense in the world. 

And obedience: the joyful following of Love, not rules, that brings relief, satisfaction, and deep, internal resolution, like the ending chords to a song. A denouement. 

We were sitting in an old fashioned church service in the middle of a tourist town when these two words stuck in my head and wouldn’t leave. I was floored to have such an existential breakthrough in the middle of this kitschy place, but they seemed to be necessary ingredients to the kind of faith I longed for. Over the next few months, I suspiciously tested these words, poking their unalluring flesh, curious to see if they still carried weight in the twenty-first century. And, thus far, I’ve found them to be sturdy and timeless. Things of their own. Separate from modernity and cultures past. 

With humility and obedience, faith flourishes. It becomes hopeful, possible, and real, existing at my core whether I acknowledge it or not. Faith is not a crutch for fear or ignorance, but as Madeleine L’Engle says, it is the rock beneath the reality of life. 

I’m constantly searching for more--more food, more pleasure, more intelligence, more security--when what I really want is a foundation. I eat past the point of fullness because something feels missing; I experience the larger-than-life-ness of New York and still I feel sad; I receive positive feedback from my boss and still feel anxious. What I want is not more food or experiences or job security, I want a foundation that won’t give way.

I want to be utterly still and find wholeness. I want to step away from chaos, breathe, and not consume. I want to find and remember that, in Christ, there is completion. He sounds the final chord, always. The resolution. “It is finished; Tetelestai.” 

Be still my soul. The Lord is. 

If there’s anything I’ve learned this year, it’s that I have so much to learn. I will not reach the end of this year and check “rebuild foundation” off of my list. Instead, this process of deconstructing, probing, revealing, and strengthening will be a slow build. 

This year is only the beginning, and I’m both exhausted and relieved by that thought. My job is not to make myself perfect or complete, but to allow seasons of “wintery spirituality” to reveal what’s already there. To tend the foundation, allowing its cracks and weak points to be exposed and inviting the Holy Spirit to bring wholeness. 

“Strangely I have found in my own life that it is only through a wintry spirituality that I am able to affirm summer and sunshine. A friend wrote me recently, ‘Winter reveals structure.’ Only as the structure is firmly there are we able to dress it with the lovely trappings of spring, budding leaves, rosy blossoms. Winter is the quiet, fallow time when the earth prepares for the rebirth of spring. Unless the seed is put into the ground to die, it cannot be born.” --Madeleine L’Engle, Miracle on 10th Street (58).