T.S. Tuesday: The Truth Shall Set You Free
"Human kind cannot bear very much reality.” T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton, No. 1 of 4 Quartets
Some people keep dirty little secrets from their friends and loved ones.
I keep dirty little secrets from myself. Or at least I fear that I do.
Like my nagging question, “What if I am worth hating?,” I’ve been scared that one day I’ll wake up and “realize” that all my worst fears are true: I’m ugly and fat and boring and awful and entirely unlovable. That somehow I’ve tricked myself into believing all of this unconditional love stuff.
I’ll be found out. More than that, called out, exposed.
I’ve always been mildly (to put it mildly) obsessed with self-examination. But I could only go so far, look so deep, before I came unglued. My “perfectionism was so pronounced that I was not sure I could bear facing the truth of my own darkness without becoming completely unraveled.” (Sacred Rhythms, Ruth Haley Barton)
I spent most of my life unraveled. Unraveled and weighted down by the sheer depth of my failure: my failure to love others well, my failure to connect with God, my failure to be popular and happy.
I could only bear so much reality. Self-examination was a form of cruel and unusual punishment. And my prayer life was nothing more than glorified guilt trips.
This was before I learned to bask.
In the spring of 2010, I took a spiritual disciplines class at my church where we read through the book, Sacred Rhythms, by Ruth Haley Barton. It rocked my world. For the first time, I learned to engage in healthy self-examination. In life-giving self-examination.
Since then, I’ve been learning to examine my life and God’s presence without the harsh condemnation and self-rejection that used to paralyze me. It is with the grace of God that I can even believe that self-examination could be something uplifting and transformative.
I began to find that, “When practiced rightly, [self-examination] leads us into a greater sense of God’s loving presence in our life, it fosters a celebration of our created self…”
NOT to shame and guilt and self-hatred.
It sounds so straightforward. It sounds so logical. Of course God loves us. Of course Jesus came to set us free. But I just couldn’t get it for so long. I loved to rebind the chains that God so desperately wanted to release me from.
But little by little I began to discover that self-examination could spark a journey that leads us to be fully loved and fully known by God.
A journey to be fully honest with myself about my flaws and shortcomings and failings—my reality. A journey to wake up to this darkness within me without becoming unraveled.
This week I will continue to explore self-examination and share tips and practices that have led me to greater joy and freedom and a Truth that continues to set me free.
T.S. Tuesday: Stacking up Truths
It's difficult to describe how I came back to God. To have it make sense to anyone outside of my life. There weren't too many concrete events that make tidy little blog posts. As Donald Miller said in his book Searching For God Knows What and in his blog post yesterday, there were a million steps that led me to where I am now, and even now, the steps are changing.
It was watching the Boy in the Striped Pajamas, it was dating a guy who was so much more cynical than I was that I actually started to believe something, it was stealing a Haitian woman’s parking spot, it was watching Planet Earth at the non profit organization I was interning at, it was reading ee cummings and T.S. Eliot, it was salty runs along the cliffs, it was new journals and an obsession with the Holocaust.
It was a stacking up of hundreds of little truths. In T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Dry Salvages, the third of Four Quartets, he writes:
"There is no end, but addition: the trailing
Consequence of further days and hours,
While emotion takes to itself the emotionless
Years of living among the breakage
Of what was believed in as the most reliable--
And therefore the fittest for renunciation."
Stacking hundreds of little truths up together is how I feel most connected with people--and with God.
I know it doesn’t sound much like basking, like soaking in God’s love. But my basking started with a few ideas, a few truths the size of mustard seeds, and built forward.
Love
ê
God is Love
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Love is God
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God
God is
God is here
God is here with
God is here with me.
In the last two years God has pursued me like crazy. In the ways that I like to be pursued (single men take note). I feel connected to God the same way I feel connected to people--through learning and growing, questioning, poetry, books.
God allowed me to stack up truths with him. I didn't need all the answers. I could still be cynical and skeptical and angry.
Amidst my questioning and cynicism and stacking up of truths I experienced Love. For myself. For this world. And for the God who created me.
And that was the start of the basking.
T.S. Tuesday: Consequently I rejoice
From Ash Wednesday:
“Consequently I rejoice, having constructed something upon which to rejoice.”
This line prickles the hair on my Absolute loving neck. Either something is intrinsically praiseworthy or it isn’t. How can you make it up?
On the other hand, so much of my life and my story has been shaped by my choices to move forward, to choose to hope, to choose to rejoice. To participate in actions and beliefs and moments that lead me to rejoice.
I’ve heard love is a verb, love is an action, love is an orientation. I believe Love is a choice.
The power comes not in the pat answers, clichés, or absolutes, but in the choice to seek, to hope, to live.
I will rejoice because I can rejoice. I will hope because I can hope. I will love because I can love. And consequently I rejoice.