september 1, 2023

Today, the thirty-first day since I flew back to the States, feels seasons and years removed from pilgrimage. It is a disorienting mercy—whether that be a mercy of my expanding emotional maturity or of the numbness of denial, I’m not sure yet—that I don’t feel the weight of that distance, though. It’s felt right and fitting, being back in the States with family and friends, so right that I haven’t sat down to process my thoughts and feelings about “the end” of pilgrimage, what it meant and means to me. The words below are the beginning of my articulating the significance of this “end”.

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Last summer, when all of this was just the seed of an idea in my weary imagination, I read Nouwen’s Reaching Out and it split me open, stirring and dispersing my static with ideas that felt retired but archived within me. I knew that, whatever my next move would be, it would be formed by the concepts in that book. Amongst the wreckage of all the beliefs that had stopped resonating for me stood Nouwen’s words about movement toward solitude and away from loneliness, about the differences between dead illusions and living prayers. Maybe all of this sounds like abstract jargon; maybe it is abstract jargon for you. But for me, last summer, it was a lifeline. Nouwen’s words — which are essentially his paradigm for living a spiritual life well — offered a way to simultaneously move toward my faith while moving out of the skin that my faith had shed. The language of movement, of progress and process and journey, made sense to me in a way that biblical phrases like “stand on a firm foundation” or “be still and know” did not. I was restless and on the move: spiritually, vocationally, and even literally moving out of a home I’d lived in for 2 years. Reaching Out gave me permission, even validation, for that. It empowered me to address my quotidien despair and do this thing that felt so drastic but so necessary.

It was the catalyst of my pilgrimage. Still, I didn’t expect that the book would become so fundamental for my processing during pilgrimage or so central to the words and thoughts that have come out of the past 5 months. This basic concept that growth requires movement — that progress means leaving something comfortable behind in order to move toward the better thing — has informed a lot of how I’ve reconstructed my theology, spirituality, worldview, and knowledge of self this year. I left for Norway in March with the hypothesis that this kind of movement is the essence of pilgrimage. But I only had fragments of ideas informing my understanding of pilgrimage: a memory of John Bunyan’s Christian allegory Pilgrim’s Progress, which I’d read in elementary school; a vague familiarity with the annual pilgrimages that the Jews of ancient Israel took; a fondness for the unhurried storytelling that the characters in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales practiced while pilgriming; a misleading word association with colonialism and Thanksgiving; and a handful of poems and podcasts that had used the word in a variety of contexts. It was experimental, setting out on a self-proclaimed pilgrimage when I didn’t quite know what that word even meant to me yet. But after five months of intentionally circling around the concept, reading about it and listening for it and trying to put it into practice, I’ve found that my initial hypothesis was not far off. Intentional movement — away from something and toward something, not in escape but in meditative curiosity and existential adventure — is the heartbeat of pilgrimage. Specifically the three movements Nouwen names: loneliness to solitude, hostility to hospitality, and illusion to prayer. I did not devise or force this at all, but most of my biggest learning moments on pilgrimage can be categorized as one of those three movements. 

But there is a fourth movement unmentioned by Nouwen that grew increasingly relevant for me in all the comings and goings of my pilgrimage: the movement from the grief of goodbyes to gratitude. Goodbyes are such a fundamental part of the human experience: the goodbyes elicited by death, by the rupture of a relationship, by the natural course of growing up, by any number of things. Each of us has been on both the giving and receiving end of a goodbye at some point. They are, at best, bittersweet, and at worst (and most often), deeply painful. Usually, the grief I feel in saying those goodbyes comes primarily from a presumption of entitlement and ownership; it feels unfair to part with a thing or place or person because, deep down, I feel I have the right to keep it / them all to myself. It’s a reaction to the felt injustice that I have to leave and/or share something that is “mine”. All of this is understandable, and it’s a natural instinct to hold our most beloved, treasured, important things close to the chest. To hold them with open hands, exposed and unprotected, seems like reckless negligence. Well, maybe a tighter grip would mitigate some of the loss, but it can never prevent it completely. And when the forces of inevitable life pry apart our grip on the people, places, and things we hold dearest, we’re left again with that familiar powerlessness of grief. 

I was reading Thomas Merton’s No Man Is An Island in Norway and became fascinated by his concept of “healthy detachment”. Essentially, he claims that to be detached from the world and all it offers is true spiritual health, and leaves room for whole and deep attachment to God. At first, it sounded to me like unhealthy asceticism or a critique of the investment and attachment that love cultivates within someone. But Merton’s point is that we spend so much energy attaching to things that have no permanence or guarantee; the only thing guaranteed to us, the only thing we will never be required to say goodbye to, is God. But our fear, misunderstanding, hurt, and perceived distance from God keep us from fully embracing and attaching to the One thing that has eternal staying power. The beautiful irony is that, when we detach from “the world” so that we can attach to God, we gain back both God and world. In the end, it’s a matter of prioritization, of “rightly ordered loves” as Jamie Smith puts it. The task always at hand is to believe that God is the maker and giver of every person, place, and thing we’ve ever loved and that attaching to the Giver is not forfeiting the gifts; that it is, in fact, quite the opposite.

There is so much in the world worth loving, fighting for, investing in. I’ve always felt uneasy reading 1 John 2:15: “Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them.” I do not know how to exist in the world and not love it, not want to hold onto and cherish and hoard and preserve it. But I think there is a better kind of love than this possessive attachment, which admittedly comes most naturally to humans but is powered by scarcity mindset, self-preserving ulterior motives, and a handful of other human things that are also “natural” but not ideal or exemplary. This better love is, I believe, gratitude, and it allows for —even necessitates—the coexistence of both deep investment and open-handedness. 

I’m learning slowly that gratitude is the only antidote to the grief of goodbye. There is a dead-end-ness and unregeneracy in grief, where loss is a bottomless pit and it is too painful to think in terms of “at least” or “I’m grateful”. Please hear me when I say my aim is not to criminalize this kind of grief; sometimes, the most honoring thing to do for someone or something lost is to fall deep into that pit rather than stepping around it for the sake of others’ ignorant bliss or your own avoidant numbness. But there comes a time when grief, like all things in life, must evolve. With time and processing, it has the opportunity to take on a new shape. Gratitude enables us to alchemize the loss and emptiness and irredeemability of that first form of grief and give it a new life cycle. And, though it might feel dishonoring or cheapening at first, expressing gratitude for what was lost does not diminish our love for it. In other words, acknowledging the silver lining is not ignoring it, and is actually sometimes a more faithful response to reality than the curated pessimistic gloom that refuses to acknowledge the nuances of life.

A lot of my experiential learning about grief and gratitude happened when I would leave a town I really loved or say goodbye to a kindred soul who I knew I wouldn’t see again for a long time. Thankfully, these goodbyes were not deep, traumatic losses. But still, they felt visceral and difficult every time. A friend of mine once told me, “Death, breakups, and goodbyes are the three things that convince we’re living in a broken, sin-affected world. Those kinds of endings feel so existentially unnatural.” I agree — the point is not to try and teach ourselves to love goodbyes, but to learn to bear them with grace and gratitude. 

Loans and seasons: these are the two lenses through which I have looked at my grief and attempted to convert it to gratitude this year. All things we have, be it children or money or talents or time, are given to us on loan. I love how King David puts it: “…Who am I, and who are my people, that we should be able to give as generously as this? Everything comes from you, and we have given you only what comes from your hand. Lord our God, all this abundance… comes from your hand, and all of it belongs to you.” (1 Chronicles 29:14-16) God is not a malicious, exacting lender, but he will from time to time take back what was his in the first place. We can choose to see that as theft or merely as legal, proper loan collection. And we are lent different gifts for different seasons. It is daily bread that we are given, which is meant for our enjoyment and nourishment. Bread goes stale when we try to hoard it. So, we take, eat, and enjoy what God has given us for this day and this season, then wait with empty plates and anticipatory hearts for the next season’s gifts and provisions. As we change and grow, so do our needs. God knows this better than we do, and gives and takes away accordingly. If I may mix my metaphors, God prunes and clears away so that better, more beautiful fruit can grow in the season to come. 

Putting all of this into practice on pilgrimage was a challenge, but there were opportunities every day. I found a lot of consolation in the practice of praying, “Thank you for giving me ______, for however long or short it is in my hands.” It has completely revolutionized the way I think about, among many things, the concept of home. Of course, there are houses and towns that feel concretely like home; but even those can be torn down, gentrified, taken from us in one way or another. Truthfully, the most concrete homes I have found are in people — first of all, in the persons and presence of God, and also in my family and the several tight-knit communities I’ve been a part of throughout my lifetime. And yet, it’s sobering to say, even these are on loan to me and are subject to loss and change. 

I wrote a song about this on my last day in Norway before flying back to the States, a sort of declaration to God:

You have been my home, no matter where I roam

You have been my safe place to hide

You have been my garden, you have been my rest

You are the place I belong

You have been my peace, the road beneath my feet

You have been this song in my mind

You have been my journey, you have been the end

You are the place I belong

You have been my learning, you have been my friend

You have been my yearning, you have been my mend

You are the place I belong

It’s both liberating and terrifying to realize that this home I have in God does not guarantee conventional stability, financial wellbeing, ease, or convenience. But it does promise something that a building, a neighborhood, even friends or family cannot promise: unwavering belovedness, a dimension between the present and eternity in which I am fully known and loved by my Creator, a belonging that I can nether earn nor invalidate. God walked with me and talked with me and told me I am God’s own. And the joy we shared as we tarried there, none other has ever known.

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A few more things I’ve learned about being a pilgrim:

• “A pilgrimage is a journey undertaken in the light of a story. A great event has happened; the pilgrim hears the reports and goes in search of the evidence, aspiring to be an eyewitness. The pilgrim seeks not only to confirm the experience of others firsthand but to be changed by the experience. Pilgrims often make the journey in company, but each must be changed individually; they must see for themselves, each with his or her own eyes. And as they return to ordinary life the pilgrims must tell others what they saw, recasting the story in their own terms.” (Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own)

• Pilgrimage happens in seasons, gradual and ongoing; nature is our paragon of pilgrimage!

• There is always a story. No one embarks on a pilgrimage for no reason. Get curious about others’ stories, and get familiar with your own.

• The journey is better, sweeter, more likely to succeed if you’re walking alongside others — company is key.

• “The impulse to find and inhabit an ‘other’ world over and against the present one is perhaps the most common form the religious pilgrimage takes. God, the pilgrim suspects, is other and elsewhere. There must be another world where God is. The pilgrim yearns to see God face to face, so earthly life becomes a pilgrimage toward that other place; sometimes it displaces the religious yearning and becomes a religion unto itself…” (Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own)

  • • “…Although He is right with us and in and out of us and all through us we have to go on journeys to find him.” (Thomas Merton)

• “‘The road is better than the inn,’ said Cervantes—and by this he meant that rotation is better than the alienation of everydayness.” (Walker Percy) 

  • • “Likewise, the road novel is better than the novel of home and family; and the novel of rotation, as Percy calls it, is the best hope for ‘deliverance from everydayness.’ Why? It takes place in a ‘privileged zone of possibility,’ where the hero is free to be a stranger in other people’s everydayness. And it promises a complex escape.” (Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own)

• “…The modern predicament makes pilgrimage impossible. In the modern world (now generally called postmodern), all experience is always secondhand, planned and described for one’s consumption by others in advance. Even the rare authentically direct experience is spoiled by modern self-consciousness. The modern person is doomed to an imitation of life; the self cannot escape itself and know the world or the Other.” (Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own)

  • • In other words, UNPLUG. Escape screens and social media and the news cycle and reengage with what is really real: take a walk in nature, knock on a friend’s door, do something to care for your body, read a physical book, etc.! Come back to your physical existence and detach from the simulations and meta-verses that we let control our lives.

• Searching implies the belief that there’s something to be found. Don’t let the existence of questions scare you out of believing there are answers to be found.

  • • “Life lived in search of God is real life, the only life worth living…” (Thomas Merton)

• A lot has to change for you to change even a little bit. But that big external change is infinitely worthwhile for the sake of that small, personal, internal change.

  • • “In what way does it change you and in what way does it not change you? Why do you have to travel so far to change, outwardly, so little?” (Merton)

• Homecoming, rootedness, stability: the pilgrim understands the value of these things better than anyone, is journeying so that they can one day embrace and enjoy these things

  • • “Than roaming naught else is more evil for mortals.” (Odysseus) 

    • But roaming = unintentional, with no real aim or end VS. “peregrinating” (Barbara Brown Taylor), pilgrimage = intentional roaming, with a destination and goal in mind.

• The journey is, at least in part, the destination, the discovery. The thing you wanted to find or arrive at comes to you along the way.

  • • “All the Way to Heaven is Heaven, for He said, I am the Way.” (St Catherine of Siena)

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Well, finishing this entry marks the official end of pilgrimage as I’ve known it this year. But if I’ve learned one thing (and I have, more than one), it’s that pilgrimage is a lifestyle and a state of mind. They have saved my life, these curious, adventurous, wonder-filled 5 months of walking, talking, singing, creating, dreaming, and being with my Maker. I want to live forever like that. I have spent these months relearning how to sing the old songs of ascent; learning how to sing: “The Lord has done great things for us, and we are filled with joy.” Learning how to sing: “If you, Lord, kept a record of sins, Lord, who could stand? But with you there is forgiveness, so that we can, with reverence, serve you. I wait for the Lord, my whole being waits, and in his word I put my hope. I wait for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the morning, more than watchmen wait for the morning.” 

I have learned so much about the world and her story, about my own soul and story, and about the vastness, the strangeness, the kindness, and the nearness of God. There is such synergy between these four characteristics of God. They are compatible even though they are paradoxical. We’re all bundles of riddle and paradox and contradiction — we contain multitudes, as Whitman says — bearing the image of a God that is the same way, though somehow perfect and faultlessly so. Forgive the blatant mysticism seeping through in these final thoughts. God is, to me, both question and answer, both beginning and end, the one in whom I live and move and have my being on both the worst days and the most beautiful days of my living and moving and being. God is there, and here, and always, and with. I find myself hoping and praying often these days that these lessons stay close to my chest, like badges sewn on the front left pocket of my consciousness, as I move out of this season and into the next. I am learning how absolutely true this seemingly cliché observation is: we are all pilgrims. To be human is to peregrinate (thank you, Barbara Brown Taylor, for giving me my new favorite word). Our choice is whether we pick up on that, embrace it, get intentional about it and learn to love the wonder, wandering, and wilderness of this pilgrimage we call living.

And still, there is so much more I’ve learned that I have not shared here. It feels wrong to sum up my pilgrim prose here and now, with so much still left unsaid. But I like to emulate Mary sometimes, treasuring the precious, sacred things in my heart, letting them seep into me from within and change me slowly, silently. In my favorite poet’s words, “God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night.” God is still speaking, still making, still walking with me. At its core, that is pilgrimage, and it is so beautiful.

DLY

july 6, 2023

I blinked, and suddenly two months had passed since I last wrote something here. I suppose it was only a matter of time before the pilgrim ran on ahead of the prose and the processing. I've been moving far distances and frequently. After leaving Edinburgh, I flew to Spain and met up with one of my dearest, most kindred friends. Over the course of ten days, she and I walked the last 150km of El Camino de Santiago together. Those were quite possibly the sweetest ten consecutive days of my life; I'll say more about that experience later. After the Camino, I flew to Ireland and (after spending a couple wonderful days gardening, exploring, and catching up with some relatives living just south of Dublin) did a whirlwind 8-day tour of the whole island with a friend from D.C. We saw a lot, slept very little, and had a lot of delirious adventures along the way. From Ireland, I flew back to the States for the concert and spent about a week there. After repacking my backpack with summer clothes and putting all my winter coats and sweaters in storage, I flew to Paris and spent three lovely days there with a dear friend. Then, I arrived in Rome and traveled up to Orvieto, where my family and I stayed for most of June. New guests and visitors were arriving every few days, and we were taking multiple day trips every week, so the month felt like a collection of different little journeys rather than one long stay in Italy. It was an exciting few weeks of exploration, activity, eating well, and learning a lot. At the end of the month, I met up with a few friends from college and we roadtripped along the Italian and French Riviera. By June 29, after hundreds of miles by car, a few long trainrides, and an overnight ferry, I arrived in Croatia. Four days there was not nearly enough to experience all of the beauty and heritage of that country, but it was all the time I had. And now, I'm writing this at the kitchen table of some generous friends from my Wheaton days who now live in Podgorica, Montenegro. 

Suffice to say, I am tired. Over the course of this pilgrimage, I've become more and more aware of my limits and the variables of life that affect them. I've felt myself reaching them (or being pushed to them by external forces) so often over the past couple of months, and have also noticed how low my tolerance is for hurry and busyness, much lower than before I left for Norway in March. It's exciting to see myself absorb and implement the ideas I've been learning about this spring: that slowness is a virtue and not a setback, that efficiency is not always the best method or goal, and that true rest is not a passive or easy endeavor. In stark contrast to March and April (months in which I was working and living frugally and rhythmically), May and June were fast-paced and lavish, varied and spontaneous. By the end of it all, I was feeling a complex mixture of gratitude, exhaustion, and disorientation. Amidst all of the pleasure and enjoyment and fun, I had started to ask myself the question, "What is the difference between holy enjoyment and spiritless indulgence?" Essentially, I had started thinking about fasting and feasting: the meaning and telos of both, their relationship to one another, and what it might look like to practice them with balance, moderation, and intention. In the words of Rilke, I think these are questions whose answers I must gradually live my way into. It feels so true yet so disappointing, the idea that even enjoyment is complicated. 

Fasting is the word used to describe the practice of periodically abstaining from food for the purpose of spiritual and/or health benefits, and it seems to be a habit that feels inaccessible, irrelevant, and archaic to most of Western Christian culture. With feasting, on the other hand, we are very familiar, what with our holidays, birthdays, weddings, and other celebrations, which always involve and are sometimes even centered around the tradition of sharing a meal together. I'll gently submit my conviction that, if you don't understand and practice fasting and feasting in tandem, you're not truly understanding or practicing either of them. But one thing I'm certain of, having learned it firsthand: a disposition of entitlement ruins both. When you believe that Life owes you its gifts of goodness and beauty, fasting is nonsensical. If you practice it at all, you do so begrudgingly and see it as a counterproductive waste of time. And in truth, it is, when practiced with that attitude. Fasting is intended to be a practice of humility, gratitude, and hopeful expectancy. It reminds us of our fragility, reorders our desires and priorities, and strengthens our ability to wait well. And it's always done in context, with the knowledge and excitement that a feast is on the horizon. Rather than being self-punishment or masochism, fasting ought to be an act of self-preparation for and meditation on all the undeserved goodness on which we get to feast.

Feasting with a mindset of entitlement is problematic, too. If you think you earned or were owed the feast in front of you (whether it's literal or metaphorical), it's much less enjoyable. Instead of feeling grateful, you just feel appeased. Instead of feeling fulfilled and loved and cared for, you just feel like your standards were met. Entitled, unregulated feasting is an issue of diminishing returns. Its presumption and insatiability inhibit the very thing they crave: enjoyment, or more simply, joy. So, to truly feast, it seems we have to come to the table with a posture of wonder, gratitude, humility, and expectancy -- not coincidentally, the same posture with which fasting inculcates us. 

A caveat: I think some people wrestle with unnecessary shame about embracing the good things they've been given in life. Allowing that shame to dictate what we are or are not allowed to enjoy is not what I'm suggesting we do, and it is not the kind of fasting into which we are invited by God. To notice and enjoy the goodness of God that we encounter in the land of the living is an act of worship. To hide or minimize God's blessings because of our shame is not. 

All of this to say, I think my generation in particular and our Western culture at large have a really weak theology/philosophy of enjoyment. I believe that there is such thing as sustainable rhythms of enjoyment, but in this consumerist-capitalist society which shows such blatant preference for it at the expense of sacrifice and moderation, I don't know how to begin creating these rhythms. It's been so worthwhile and eye-opening just to delve into the topic and think deeply about how the ways in which I seek enjoyment (and the lengths to which I'll go to find it) might be thwarting their own intentions. 

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Something else I've been thinking a lot about is presence. Inspired by both Merton and Comer, I've been trying to implement the practice of presence in my own life and wrap my head around what it means to inhabit the moment and be attentive to the now. My thoughts are different than when I first was thinking and writing about it in March. I'd initially adopted this view of presence that taught me to devalue or, at the very least, turn down the volume of both future and past. It trained me to be skeptical of daydreaming and nostalgia, two habits that I do admittedly rely heavily upon when I'm discontented with my present. I felt convicted that, to be present, I had to disengage with my thoughts, feelings, experiences, and dreams about both past and future. I had to solely concentrate on and think about the moment that was unfolding in front of me. 

On the Camino, however, I started to develop a new way of thinking about presence. Since we were walking all day every day, Sara Beth and I had ample time together, and we spent a lot of it telling stories from college or childhood and sharing dreams about our next seasons of life. I felt fully present to the road we were walking, fully attentive to the moment we were in and the beauty of the Nature surrounding us, and yet I was thinking and talking chiefly about the past or the future. It struck me that presence does not require the disintegration of our dimensions of time and existence, but rather an awareness of the ways that those dimensions inform one another and affect who we are in the now. It is about being in touch with reality, knowing what to hold loosely with open hands and what to hold tightly as a fact or guarantee. Getting lost in nostalgia and wistfulness will absolutely compromise the capacity to appreciate the present and inhabit the moment. But to reminisce, share stories, and simply express gratitude for the past or excitement for the future is arguably a more powerful way to practice presence than ignoring past and future altogether.

Over the course of ten days, the Camino had a profound influence on me. People walking the Camino are literally called “pilgrims” by priests, store owners, and each other. It’s an actual pilgrimage walked by actual pilgrims who are trying to discover or leave behind or process actual things. In the past, phrases like "life is a journey" always felt too cliché to resonate with me. But doing the Camino, which required me to "journey" in such a traditional and holistic way, made it click for me. The discomfort of trudging uphill through the afternoon heat, the endurance required to put one foot in front of the other and keep on walking each day, the sweetness and relief of walking the way with a friend, the beautiful experience of meeting a kindred stranger on the path who walks alongside you for a little while, the daily bread mentality that you develop -- it all felt so symbolic and relevant to how I think about life and being human. 

That being said, I expected my time on the Camino to be filled with solemn self-discoveries like that. Some of it was. But mostly, the walk was marked by so much unexpected and uncontainable joy, hilarity, and laughter. Sara Beth and I were probably the most uproarious pilgrims that have walked the Camino in recent history. There was a surprising lightness and joy that accompanied us along the way, a sweet reminder that "the journey" doesn't always have to be so serious and somber. Religion has made me forgetful of the fact that joy is a fruit and footprint of God's Spirit within me. 

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It's hard to synthesize these months of disparate trips and experiences into one common theme. I moved around a lot, communing with both friends and strangers, feasting and fasting, touring and pilgrimaging, reading and listening to lots of different things, and feeling deep rest at some moments and extreme exhaustion at others. It has been a season so different from March and April, but a season nonetheless, in which I am learning and looking and becoming. I am more aware each day that this pilgrimage's end is right around the corner, which introduces a whole host of emotional response. Some days, I'm ready for a return to relative normalcy and the comfort of being back in my native country. But most days, I feel myself bracing with preemptive nostalgia for this pivotal, sweet, unforgettable season that will soon be in the past. And even in these emotions, there is an invitation to hold life with open hands, to see it as a journey in which moving ahead requires leaving some things behind. I'm trying my best to avoid feeling entitled to this goodness and to be grateful for as long or as short as these sweet seasons last.

DLY

may 3, 2023

If you know me well, you might know how much I revere Madeleine L’Engle. I was reading an archived interview with her and Image last week where I rediscovered this quote from her stunningly beautiful memoir, Two Part Invention: “I do not want ever to be indifferent to the joys and beauties of this life. For through these, as through pain, we are enabled to see purpose in randomness, pattern in chaos. We do not have to understand in order to believe that behind the mystery and the fascination there is love.” There have been many joys and beauties throughout this pilgrimage that have helped me see Love’s purposes and patterns. I grow more confident every day that I am walking with One who loves me, and even more than that, who sees, speaks, listens, and responds. Gradually, I am becoming more and more successful in my endeavor to “pray without unceasing”, though this becoming has taken a fair amount of coaching and coaxing on God’s part. He gives a mile, I take an inch. (How many prayers need to be so loudly and conspicuously answered before we get it into our brains that God really does answer prayers? I think Gideon, Thomas, and I are all cut from the same cloth.) But still, the inches add up. 

I went for a walk on one of my first days in Scotland and prayed for two specific things: access to a piano, and a friend. Less than a week later, I had easy access Monday through Thursday to the gorgeous grand piano at Carrubber’s church, a place and community which I am permanently enamored of and indebted to. I also made friends with Pat and Doug who work in the church office during the week, and they are wittier and wiser than I deserve. In addition to Pat and Doug, I fell into a community of incredibly bright, fun, and welcoming young adults who study at University of Edinburgh and meet three times a week at Carrubber’s to study, read, pray, and share a meal. That moment when a stranger becomes a friend is still one of my favorite things about being human; I had many of those moments in Scotland, and I’m amazed by how much I learned about God through the conversations and experiences I had with these stranger-friends. It’s seasons like these that convince me that imago dei is a real and indisputable truth about who we are and how we’re created.

Last month, I also saw God answer prayers that I wouldn’t have even dared to pray and bring to fruition dreams that I’d forgotten about. He is so, so kind. April taught me that. As I search for a word or theme to encapsulate my time in Scotland, I keep coming back to the words activity and movement. So much happened to and for me in the last three and a half weeks; it was like the pace at which God and I were walking sped up to something like a wild gallop. But it wasn’t a hurried, exhausting pace. It was joyful, comfortable, and sweet. And it was marked by so much prayer and giddy conversation with the Divine. Speaking of movement, Nouwen’s three movements outlined in Reaching Out have again been on my mind as of late. The second of the three, moving away from hostility and toward hospitality, definitely characterized my time in Spain and has continued to be a lesson I’m learning here. But I feel this month in Scotland has primarily been characterized by the third movement: from illusion to prayer. I always took “illusion” in that sense to mean the infeasible desires and dreams that we have to move away from in order to get to the more brute, baseline, boldfaced realities revealed in prayer. In actuality, I think the illusions that some of us need to move away from are the illusions that God is too small, that God doesn't care enough about our dreams or desires, that God withholds things for no good reason other than realism or conservative pragmatism. This month, as I’ve witnessed the goodness of God, it’s helped me move away from those small-minded, fear-warped illusions and toward the kind of praying that asks, hopes, dreams, believes, and trusts in a vast, kind, generous God.

It’s been sweet to observe both symmetry and contrast between my time in Norway and my time here in Scotland. Both seasons were marked by learning, divine friendship, and restoration, but these things sometimes presented very differently. Whereas March was a time of stillness and listening, presence and waiting, April has been been one of movement and progress, of response and answers. The past few weeks have largely been a lesson in how to receive the good things placed in my open hands. What with the invitation to open for Jon Guerra in concert and all of the practical, financial miracles that ensued to make my “yes” to that invitation so easy and unburdened; getting accepted to my dream job, teaching at a middle school in Bordeaux, France; seeing my music flourish and hearing from total strangers that it resonates with them or has helped them through a difficult season — all of these blessings are cementing my belief that God really does have good things for me, for all of us. And if I don’t receive something that I have asked God for, I’m learning to trust that it’s because He has something coming that is better, more beautiful, and more suited for me than my own dreams and desires. In other words, I’m learning to trust that God’s definition of goodness is better than mine.

We notice so much action and activity when we tune into God’s presence. He’s constantly tossing reminders, love letters, warnings, and encouragements our way, regardless of whether we catch them or not. Last week, God kept tossing Psalm 27 to me. The song “Everlasting God” by William Murphy, which is based on that psalm, came to me seemingly out of nowhere as I was playing piano the other day. Then, when I was walking to the grocery store a few days later, this line from the psalm came so clearly and suddenly into my mind: “I remain confident of this: I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.” When Psalm 27 was the Scripture reading at church later that Sunday, I finally “caught” the message, as it were: this is a season of believing in and seeing God’s goodness happen to me in the land of the living, i.e., in the here and now, ordinary, present moments. I am well aware of the dangers of a prosperity gospel mindset. And I’m glad that a significant number of modern Christians rebuke and critique that lens of Biblical interpretation. But perhaps our fear has sent us swinging too far to the other side of the pendulum. We are all so worried about the prospect of boasting or bragging that we rarely broadcast our God-given blessings to our communities, even to close friends and family. But I think we’re putting a lampshade on God’s bright kindness by keeping quiet about the goodness of the Lord that we see in the land of the living. I digress...

I write this with a crowded heart; I am both grateful for my time here and so sad to go, excited for what’s next and nostalgic for the season I’m leaving behind. Already, I miss the cobblestone streets and closes and moody brooding skies of Edinburgh, the jovial Scottish accents and the Royal Mile’s bustle and the street corner musicians, my favorite coffeeshops and side streets and gardens. I really pitched my tent and lived here, so it is mournful but rewarding to feel such loss in saying goodbye to this city.

I’ll close with a poem that a friend of mine sent to me recently. It captures the essence and heart of pilgrimage, and has served as a reminder to me that being baffled and impeded is not a set back on the way to Life, but is actually Life itself. Perhaps the “real work” of living is to learn how to wander toward, wait on, wonder about, wrestle with, and walk alongside the Maker. 

“The Real Work” by Wendell Berry

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.

DLY

april 26, 2023

Well, after reading the first few pages of Comer's Ruthless Elimination of Hurry in that coffeeshop in Amsterdam, I felt compelled to read the rest of book. On my first day here in Edinburgh, I downloaded the audiobook and went on a walk. Turns out, my time here has consisted of a lot of walking and listening. Comer speaks about hurry the way you might expect someone to speak about mold or roaches, and it's convicting. In his words, "Hurry and love are incompatible... Hurry is a form of violence on the soul." It is something we need to flee, not just walk away from; something to exterminate, not ignore. 

The rhythm and feel of these last few weeks have been undeniably affected by Comer's words. Because I have already been practicing intentionality and presence on this pilgrimage, it's been relatively easy for me to ruthlessly eliminate hurry. This stop along my pilgrimage is the one where I have had the least obligations and the most free time; I'm not working, visiting a friend, or traveling much. My daily and weekly rhythms are self-created and self-inforced: write music, take a walk, do yoga, go get a coffee, sit in the courtyard and marvel at the tree with pink flowers, read a book, go to the grocery store, watch a French movie at the Alliance Francais headquarter building, etc. etc. Hurry feels far and unrelatable to me here, so take these musings for what they are: conclusions drawn during a time of a lot of leisure, in which I'm pretty unsusceptible to the threat of hurry and very prone and biased toward a life of slowness.

That being said, it's startling how even in a season where no duties are required of me and no one is relying on me for anything, I still feel hurry extending its hand to me, inviting me to join in on the eternal sprint it's running. There are always things I could be doing, reading, buying, learning, etc. Even in this uniquely vacant and unoccupied season, life feels un-masterable. It's made me wonder if the mastery of life and all of its opportunities is even the goal. Maybe the good life is not an efficient one but a well-examined one, in which we not only know our limits but love them. Maybe it is the balance of being responsible for the small handful of things we must do or are called to do, and then being receptive to what rest and relationship and revelation might come in the space between our obligations. A balance of responsibility and receptiveness: maybe this is a better and more attainable portrait of the good life.*

My stay in Edinburgh has ushered in a season of slowness, which is different than saying it is a slow season -- in fact, the past two weeks have been significantly eventful -- and distinct from the past season in which I was learning about and leaning into solitude. Solitude may very well be a doorway into slowness, and at a certain point the two start to work together and become quite complementary to each other's work, but I want to distinguish them from one another for the moment. Whereas solitude might be able to be achieved in the midst of rush and hurry, a posture of slowness has a direct effect on the speed of our living. It requires both internal/spiritual calm and stillness (which is essentially solitude) and external/logistical calm and stillness (which is the elimination of hurry). It is rebellious and comprehensive, incompatible and offensive to many of our modern societal values. It is certainly the enemy of social media, smart phones, streaming sites, and the pervasive force of consumerism. But I'm not here to rail against the system. I'm here to say that, as a recovering hurrier who has finally caught her breath, slowness is so much more rewarding than efficiency and so much sweeter than accomplishment and so much more sustainable than hurry. Slowness goes with the grain of our being. It's what we were made for. So at the risk of you thinking I'm being sanctimonious, I have to say that I believe a life of slowness is one lived closer to the way of Jesus and the heart of God than one of rush and hurry. 

I've been reading Brennan Manning's The Ragamuffin Gospel alongside Comer's book, and these men's words have pointed me toward a really radical discovery, one that I previously knew cerebrally but that I now understand deeply. As an ode to my Logic School glory days, I'll present it to you in the form of a syllogism:

Premise 1: The existence of grace proves our striving and earning ineffective and unnecessary (Manning)

Premise 2: Striving and earning are what cause hurry (Comer)

Conclusion: The existence of grace proves our hurried lives ineffective and unnecessary (me / Jesus / Comer and Manning / lots of other authors probably that I just never listened or paid attention to)

Slowness also enables us to open ourselves up to grace -- real grace, the unmerited and unlimited kind -- and loosen our grip on that earning-oriented, works-based way of existing that so many of us default to. Manning says, "Grace proclaims the awesome truth that all is gift. All that is good is ours not by right but by the sheer bounty of a gracious God. While there is much we may have earned... all this is possible only because we have been given so much: life itself, eyes to see and hands to touch, a mind to shape ideas, and a heart to beat with love... My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it.” I love this thought. It's so freeing. All the little things we do that we hope will boost our worthiness or identity or status are, at best, impressive to ourselves or to others -- but they don't sway God at all. And by the way, this does not mean that he's at a distance and is not swayed to come any closer; it means that he is as close as a god could possibly get, and that all of our striving and earning cannot get us closer to him or him closer to us than where he currently is -- living inside of us by his Spirit and walking alongside us as Emmanuel. But Manning's point here is even more practical and down to earth than that. Essentially, if the best things we have did not come to us by way of earning, striving, rush, and hurry but rather by grace and by God, then what's the point in keeping on with all the earning, striving, rush, and hurry?

I used to hate the phrase, "It's good enough." It afflicted and injured the perfectionist within me. My standard for my own work (which subconsciously grew to become my standard for others' work) was greatness, near-perfection, praiseworthiness and impressiveness. Last year, in a season of what I thought was laziness and retrogression but that turned out to be one of transformation and growth, I started saying to myself, "I guess that's good enough." Only recently did I realize that "good enough" is a lot closer to God's garden words about creation, "it is good," than the loftier words of praise that I was previously yearning to hear spoken over my work. "It is good" is not "it is perfect." There's a certain kind of flawlessness and beauty contained in goodness that perfection does not have. And if "good" is good enough for God, I want it to be good enough for me, too. Goodness, not perfection, has always been the aim, hasn't it? 

So, if we believe that hurry is to perfection what slowness is to goodness, and that the things we do and choose and prioritize will either lead us toward a life that is truly life or a life that is a kind of death, then I think the choice set before us is clear and the stakes are actually quite high. Moses articulated it best: 

15 See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. 16 For I command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in obedience to him, and to keep his commands, decrees and laws; then you will live and increase, and the Lordyour God will bless you in the land you are entering to possess.

17 But if your heart turns away and you are not obedient, and if you are drawn away to bow down to other gods and worship them, 18 I declare to you this day that you will certainly be destroyed. You will not live long in the land you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess.

19 This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses.Now choose life, so that you and your children may live 20 and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the Lord is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob." (Deut. 30:15-20)

DLY

*I'm sure all my Wheaton readers are smiling right now at the amount of the times I just used the phrase "the good life"... Maybe after all these years, I finally found an answer to the sleep-robbing existential question posed to us in Freshman Year Seminar, "What is the good life?") 

april 14, 2023

It's been a few weeks and a few countries since I last wrote. Since April 1, I’ve been in Norway, The Netherlands briefly, Spain, and now Scotland. To leave Norway was to realize how difficult it is to practice the philosophies I had been reading and writing about all month. Loving the way and the in-between, staying present and attentive to the now, being open-handed instead of possessive with the gifts I’m given and healthily detached from my blessings instead of anxiously clinging to them — these things are a lot harder to live than they are to believe. I always knew that my time in Herand would end and that the farm and fjord and mountains weren’t mine to keep, though when you love something, it’s the natural human response to want to hold onto it. 

But, I suppose, “if you love something, let it go.” I’ve never been a student of hackneyed modern proverbs like that one, but it’s resonating with me lately. Love and freedom seem so kindred. To our detriment, we often forget that love is an action, a way of being toward someone or something, and that this action usually entails some sort of surrender or openness or deference. Love is not possession, as much as we might wish it were, but rather the opposite. And so, my love for Herand and all of its blessings and lessons is expressed by my decision to let that season pass me by and be what it is — the past. I’m still learning how to love a memory without longing for it to be my present. These are the lessons of pilgrimage, though: to leave old things behind, to love the new things we see and learn along the way, to experience everything, and to just keep moving through and alongside and past and toward the Life that finds us on the journey. In a sense, to “put off the old self and put on the new.”

After leaving Herand, I spent a day in Bergen then flew to Sevilla. My layover between Bergen and Sevilla was eight hours in Amsterdam, so I made a day of it. Ambling down the streets, I couldn’t help thinking about the last time I was in Amsterdam with friends in 2017, and the mantra we said to each other over and over again on that trip: “Look up!”  What with all the cathedrals and beautiful sunsets and flowers hanging from the ceilings of the Bloemenmarkt tents, we were spurring each other on toward that specific brand of childlike wonder that comes from looking up. So, when I was walking the streets of Amsterdam a couple weeks ago and saw the words “look up” on the window of an old building, my recently adopted no-coincidences-only-miracles worldview compelled me to go inside. It turns out that the cafe/bookshop I walked into is owned by YWAM and run by their missionaries and volunteers. It’s called Priesthood, a nod to the shop’s mission to be a meeting place and a mediator between people and God. 

And in my experience, it accomplished that mission. My conversation with the baristas was truly divine and appointed. We talked about the city’s culture of rush and efficiency, the red light district which was just 2 blocks away, and the difference between lecturing people about Jesus and loving people toward him. There was a light and a joyfulness in the room that I can’t in good conscience ascribe to anything other than the Spirit. Priesthood’s mission is predicated on an expectancy that God wants to and wills to meet with people; they are hosting the Presence so that those who walk in the door can join the meeting. 

I picked Ruthless Elimination of Hurry off the shelf, and as I sat in the bay window reading, I met God through Comer’s words about rest and presence and Life, which were strikingly very complementary to the things I had been reading and thinking about in Norway. “Our time is our life, and our attention is the doorway to our hearts,” says Comer. “Attention is the beginning of devotion… Hurry is violence on the soul.” His words are echoes of Nouwen’s in Reaching Out and Merton’s in No Man Is An Island. All three authors draw the same conclusion: that hurry is the great enemy of the spiritual life. The things we most deeply desire — love and joy and peace and all the rest — are fertilized by an intentional, attentive, slow kind of living, which is constantly being thwarted by our hurried and anxious pursuit of the things we think we desire, like wealth and fame and success. That afternoon, I was struck by how much clearer we can see and hear the divine when we do the two things that Priesthood and Comer’s book are about: expect and slow down. 

After my moment in Amsterdam, I flew to Sevilla. I had planned to be there during the week leading up to Easter so I could experience Spain’s renowned Holy Week ceremonies and processions, commonly called Semana Santa. The week-long carnival is rooted in Catholic tradition and dates back several centuries. In most cities in Spain, there are ceremonial processions each day of Holy Week in which thousands of Spaniards don hooded robes and traditional regalia and walk around the city carrying massive marble and gold sculptures (called pasos) that depict the Stations of the Cross. Think about the ornate sculptures of different Biblical characters or events that you see lining the sides of a cathedral — structures of those proportions are hoisted up onto a stage, set in a bed of thousands of fresh flowers, then lifted up and carried for many miles and many hours. There are marching bands playing solemnly grandiose and haunting compositions, flags and banners with Latin phrases and ancient symbols, and different contingents of children and adults all accompanying the huddle of Samson-esque pallbearers who carry the structure on their shoulders. 

It was an astounding spectacle to witness, and there’s a lot of emotionality and passion in the crowds that attend and walk with the pasos. From one perspective, these events are beautiful displays of devotion and embodied worship. I personally was moved by the splendor of it all. But from the perspective of many Protestant Christians in Spain, including the friends I was visiting, Semana Santa fosters a dangerous kind of faux religion, which allows people to participate in the ceremonialism as a cultural tradition but never engage with it as a spiritual experience. It was an interestingly similar opinion to my own critique of Protestantism in the States and its ugly offshoot phenomenons of Christian nationalism and political evangelicalism. Fascinating, how much our surrounding culture and the cultural narrative into which we’re born can shape our ideas and beliefs. 

I ended up having a lot of conversations about God and spirituality in Spain. Whereas Norway hosted many conversations with God and many moments of listening directly to the Spirit, my week in Spain introduced me to a community of conduits. I think there are moments in life when we should be talking right to God, in silence and in retreat from other people; and then there are other moments when we are meant to meet God in human activity and communication, through the ideas and insights of other people. In Spain, my ongoing conversation with God — which began small, intimate, and solitary in Herand’s farms and greenhouses — grew and became much more universal. 

I befriended several saints and wonderers in Spain, and more than a few of our conversations happened to circle back to the same theme: God’s vastness. It was refreshing to encounter a community of people who wondered, questioned, imagined, wrestled, awed at, and let themselves be baffled by Vastness. It’s one of the most beautiful things about the persons and operations of the divine, that they are so otherworldly and undefinable and mysterious. If God were able to be confined or contained, he would cease to be God. And we wouldn’t want a God like that, anyway, right? God is synonymous with vastness, and this is a very good and beautiful thing. But it’s also scary, and especially unfortunate for those of us who love control and definitions — which is, by the way, every human to one degree or another. So we have to learn to love the fact that God is uncontainable. Otherwise, we confuse Truth with being right and make “God” into a mere concoction of our preferences and biases. Otherwise, we create a deity that serves us, makes us feel safe, and helps us sleep at night but who is not at all similar to a God who would say “I am who I am” or who could self-resurrect. I’ve seen so many Christians follow a warped religion that runs on legalism and tribalism, and which churns out people so focused on precision and being right that they never have to confront the truth of God’s vastness or their own fear of it. And I can’t be sure, but my hunch is that certainty is not our friend in this endeavor to get acquainted with our Maker, though agnosticism and indecision are not holier postures. I think faith, hope, and love exist between those two poles, and these are words that Jesus said quite a lot. 

I need to interject here and admit that all of this talk about my conversations and connections with friends is a bit misleading: I speak very little Spanish, so 90% of my time in Spain felt like a veritable Spanish immersion program. The other 10% was with some friends who spoke both Spanish and English fluently and were able to translate and explain to everyone what was being said. It was profoundly humbling for me to realize that I’ve gotten quite accustomed to (and fond of) the world catering to me and using my native language as its de facto lingua franca. Some of the people I interacted with knew English, but at a table of 10-15 native Spanish speakers who all knew each other, it would have been ridiculous to expect any of them to remove themselves from the conversation and speak to me in a language that is not their own. So, I spoke seldom, listened for words or phrases I might understand, and practiced a very different kind of solitude than the one I practiced in Norway. The interior life can thrive anywhere if we know how to tend to it. Silence and aloneness offer a literal and atmospheric kind of solitude, in which we mimic the environment that surrounds us. But in loud crowds and busy places, we are offered an opportunity to retreat, to be opposite and exceptional in the literal sense of the word, set apart in the silence we conjure up for ourselves despite the commotion that’s surrounding. It felt good to be steadied by this kind of solitude, and to remember that identity and life itself are made up of so much more than just the words we say aloud to one another.

Another significant theme of my Holy Week in Spain was hospitality. I was the witness and recipient of a radical and rare breed of it. I was meeting up with and staying with a friend of a friend who I met at a wedding last September. She and I get along really well and were happy to be reunited, but in terms of the standard ways you might measure a friendship’s depth — how long we’d known each other or the amount of things we had gone through together or the amount of information we knew about each other’s families — she didn’t owe me much. And yet, Esther showed me a kind of unrelenting hospitality that I have never experienced before in my life.

She picked me up from the airport, cooked for me, secretly paid for most of our meals together, drove me all over Spain in her car, showed me around three of the cities and sites that are most precious and important to her, introduced me to so many friends and let me spend time with her community, shared countless stories and thoughts and pieces of wisdom with me, let me sleep in her bed, use her metro card, and spent five days of hard-earned vacation time hosting and accommodating me. Even as I relay all of this, my heart is welling up with that kind of gratitude that feels ineffable and all-consuming. The radical hospitality that Esther showed me paid little regard to questions of how much or how long or how early or how inconvenient. Her hospitality was completely ignorant of the things that we see as finite, like time and money and space. It was a wild and interminable force of generosity, selflessness, and charity, and I felt so undeserving, which led me to the realization that perhaps that feeling is precisely the point. 

Our actions and operations in life and usually driven by what we think we and other people deserve. It’s not a sustainable or humanizing way to live, but it’s our modus operandi, all of us walking around with different visions of what’s fair and what’s deserved that have mostly been defined by the people and things who have hurt us. Living in scarcity mindset, where we believe we don’t have enough to give to others, or in self-justification, in which we give and deprive based on our own short-sighted idea of what’s right, steals away the dignity of everyone involved. Hospitality — both practicing it and receiving it — ushers us into a new way to live, one that’s unconcerned with what’s fair but is very concerned with what is good and kind and loving. Hospitality lavishes, and by lavishing, dignifies. It’s a reminder of our origin story and an echo of the unconditional Love that I believe we were all created from and for. 

To be radically hospitable, and (this is rarely taught but I believe just as important) allow others to be radically hospitable to you, is to move toward wholeness; it’s a pilgrimage of sorts, and we’re all on the journey together. So, see you out there on the road.

DLY

march 31, 2023

I really believe we were created for movement, for journeying. We’re kinetic creatures by nature. We have within us an innate dissatisfaction with stasis, and we crave growth and progress. Humans always want to be going somewhere. This drive within us is why contentment can be so hard and why presence and attention sometimes feel so impossible. But I don't think movement and presence are mutually exclusive; they inform one another, sharpening and supporting each other’s efforts. What I mean is, there is a kind of movement that is deeply present, that pays attention to what it’s passing by without fixating on the things behind or in front of it. And even in the practice of presence we are moving toward something — a state of mind, God, our true self, whatever or whoever it is you are showing up for. 

One of the major catalysts for this pilgrimage was Henri Nouwen’s book, Reaching Out. It’s essentially a book about movement. He writes about the spiritual life as a set of three movements away from some things and toward other things: 

1. from loneliness toward solitude, 

2. from hostility toward hospitality,

3. from illusion toward prayer.

Nouwen speaks about metaphorically journeying between these things, but his book inspired me think about the powerful role that literal movement can play in psychological or spiritual progress. So last fall, taking cues from Nouwen, I planned this pilgrimage to take me away from an old place and toward new places in the hopes that it would also take me away from old practices and toward new ones. And perhaps it’s too soon to say I was justified in hoping for that, but this first month of the pilgrimage has felt a lot like the first of Nouwen's three movements. I have been leaning into the practice of solitude and drinking deep from its well. It feels like one of the lost and forgotten fundamentals of being human. Herand is a petri dish for solitude. It’s not a deserted or isolated place, but it’s quiet, meek, and small — no busy highways or sirens or loud, crowded intersections. I am, most days, alone in the conventional use of the word. I don’t talk very much. It has made listening inevitable.

When I’m working, my hours are decorated with long silences and quiet concentration; after work, I usually take a walk or sit in the green house and watch as golden hour settles over the mountains and fjord. These daily rhythms have afforded me lot of time with myself, with my thoughts, with the so-called “mundane”. I’ve been forced to rewrite my definition of “wasted time” and challenged to not measure the goodness of a day by efficiency, output, or busyness.

I love Nouwen’s words about solitude too much to not share them here. Below are just a few of my favorite quotes from Reaching Out.

• "Solitude begins with a time and place for God, and him alone. If we really believe not only that God exists but also that he is actively present in our lives—healing, teaching, and guiding — we need to set aside a time and space to give him our undivided attention."

• "In solitude we become aware that our worth is not the same as our usefulness."

• “To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude. The movement from loneliness to solitude, however, is the beginning of any spiritual life because it it is the movement from the restless senses to the restful spirit, from the outward-reaching cravings to the inward-reaching search, from the fearful clinging to the fearless play.”

Ironically, much of the work of turning my deserts into gardens has happened in actual gardens. I live so close to the earth here. It’s a more connected and sustainable lifestyle than I’ve ever led. I eat mostly fruits and vegetables that were grown in the gardens that I tend each day, salmon grown in our friend’s fish farm just down the road, and dairy from the neighbor’s cows. I chop the wood that heats my house. If I need to be somewhere, I use my own two legs to get there. 

In the States, it was eerily easy for me to live outside the cycles and rhythms of the rest of Nature; to participate in a detached economy of hyper-consumerism, buying things from faraway places made by people I’ll never meet. This month, I’ve lived very differently and it’s been a deep renewal of both body and spirit. I’m learning the beauty of producing and procuring the things I need rather than just ordering and consuming them. (On a related note, I’ve always loved Wendell Berry, but I resonate with his writings now more than ever.)

Another beautiful theme of my time here has been a renewed belief in miracles. In the fear of being let down by God, I have often underestimated God’s ability (and desire) to come through for me. Not always, for God is a being and not a machine, but sometimes, we get a look behind the curtain, an unobscured look at the kindness and loving generosity that lie in Heaven’s storehouses. That’s what I think a miracle is. Herand has been a site of many, many little miracles. Here are just a few.

—

Going into this trip, I knew the Nordic countries were fairly post-religious and didn’t expect to meet anyone who followed Jesus here.  Only after I arrived in Herand did I learn that my host parents were believers. They’re in a church choir and have Bible verses framed and hung on their walls and everything. After one week in Herand, I had met 12 people, and every single one of them happened to be a radiant, kind, wise lover of God. They meet weekly for prayer and live radically in line with Jesus’s instruction to “love thy neighbor”. To have landed in this minuscule village halfway across the world and end up planted in rich Christian community is beyond the unexpected. It’s improbable. It’s miraculous. I can only imagine the mischievous smile on the lips of God as he planned this month out for me.

Another unexpected, unasked for miracle is the easy access to instruments and musicians that I have here. I was admittedly a little nervous going into this trip with just a backpack and no guitar, piano, or recording equipment. I didn’t know where or how I’d write and play music. But there are more organs, pianos, guitars, and singers in this little village than I could possibly need. One of my neighbors and closest friends here is the most sought-after harmonium and organ repair specialist in the country! He's taught me a lot about instruments, and even more about listening well and living deeply. I’ve had a lot of sweet moments with music and with the Spirit residing in the music. It’s such a reminder that my Maker knows me and will give me everything I need. He did, after all, make me.

And then there’s the fact that I saw the Northern Lights a couple weeks ago. Seeing the Aurora Borealis has been on my bucket list for years now. I think it is the most beautiful and baffling phenomenon in astronomy. It’s statistically very rare to see them this far south and this late in the winter, so whenever I prayed that I would see them — and I did, many times — my prayers were cautious and sheepish. But on my first week in Herand, I saw the Northern Lights from my backyard. When I talk about that night, I use the word miracle.

—

God has been incredibly communicative with me. I hear him everywhere: in the birds and the gardens, in the quiet of my mind, and especially in conversations with people. One week, four people who live in different parts of the world said the same sentence to me: “With God, there are no coincidences.” This month has proven that statement to be true. I wrote in a poem the other day that I am being “shaped and shifted / by the chatter of the Divine... / Have you ever known a god who talks this much? / Perhaps it’s why they call him three in one”. 

There are two conversations that I want to share with you because I think they nicely summarize a lot of what I am learning in this season.

I had the honor of meeting a very talented choir director named Proust a few weeks ago, and he told me a story about asking a Sikh man in his choir what he thought about when he sang “Praise to the Lord the Almighty”. The man replied that, whenever a song mentioned the Lord, he just replaced the word lord with life. Proust said to me, “I laughed when he said that because singing praise to the life is singing praise to the Lord! For the Lord is life.” Every day here has taught me how to better sing praise to the Life. 

The other night, I watched the movie, “The Two Popes”. It’s a fantastic, thought-provoking film about the relationship between Pope Benedict and Pope Francis. At one point in the movie, the two of them have a conversation that has been on my mind ever since I heard it.

Francis: “Nothing is static in nature or the universe, not even God.” 

Benedict: “God does not change.”

Francis: “Yes he does, he moves toward us.”

Benedict: “Where should we find him if he’s always moving?”
Francis: “On the journey.”

So, here’s to finding solitude and praising the Life on the journey.

DLY

march 8, 2023

I’m writing to you from the only cafe in the Bergen bus station center that stays open until 9pm. I’ve been traveling for 19 hours and counting: flights from DC to Lisbon, Lisbon to Oslo, and Oslo to Bergen, and now waiting for a 2-hour bus that will take me to a 30-minute ferry that will take me to Herand where my hosts live. A comically long and inefficient route. By the time I arrive in Herand tonight, I probably could have made it to Japan and back. But I digress. After all, I did resolve to use the next six months to learn how to love the way, the distances, the routes and the journeys.

Still, it’s much easier to love something when it loves you back. A couple of transportation troubles in the last two hours have worn down some of this trip’s sheen. I missed the first of the 3 connecting buses I needed to take because my plane from Oslo needed to taxi for 30 extra minutes. I caught the next one 30 minutes later, but when I got off, I was directed to the wrong station and missed the second connection. And because I missed that connection by 3 minutes, I have to wait 3 more hours for the third bus that will take me to the ferry. So now, I wait and write and try my best to stay awake. The time change and all-day travel fatigue have fully descended upon me and I’m walking around this station like a hypnotized pack mule. To say the least, the whole saga has not been a particularly cute, cinematic, or dignifying one.

But in all my grubby glory, I have been sitting here thinking about what good inconvenience can do. At first, it deflates; it’s disheartening when you’ve put so much effort, so much stock, and so much hope in a plan only to see it inconvenienced, interrupted, or foiled. But with that disruption comes a poignant reminder that there is so much out of our control, and even so much within our control that we fail to steward well. We are not entitled to life going the way we ask or want it to, and maybe that’s a good thing. Sometimes we fall into these chasms of disruption and unexpectedness in Life's topography, and what we find at the bottom are endangered species: wonder, humility, trust, curiosity. And this is a precious discovery, because I think these are the things that make us most human, most awake and alert to the wonderful world around us, most kind and loving and gracious. But for some time now, we have all been witnesses of their systematic elimination. These traits exist innately within us but consumerism and leisure and excess and ease have left them malnourished, frail, and barely there. We have to fight for their survival and seek out preservation strategies for our own humanness. Pleasure and convenience will be the death of joy--of real, true life--but only if we let them.

So let me tell my story a different way: this evening, I was afforded 3 slow hours in a quaint Norwegian cafe, where nothing was asked of me but to wait, to rest, and to watch. All I had to do was listen to an audiobook, patch these words together into sentences, listen to the snow crunch as it was reshaped by the steps of people walking by outside, and watch a sunset trickle down some faraway mountain. That was all I had and all that was required of me, and it was enough. Inconvenience procures a slow, untapped type of beauty that convenience only knows how to crush. 

DLY

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Some people-watching highlights: 

A girl across the cafe is sketching me in her journal, which you’d think would feel flattering but is actually quite strange. We keep making eye contact and now I feel obligated to model for her and not move too much and be the perfect subject of a portrait I’ll never get to see.

At the table next to me, a mom and her daughter are staging a full-on photoshoot of coffeeshop candids — both of them. It’s actually sort of endearing that it’s a symbiotic exchange and that neither are ashamed of their commotion at all. 

Since I sat down a few hours ago, I’ve seen lots of little kids walk by with skis in tow and no parents in sight. Like, a lot. I’m choosing to let that mean that this is an extremely safe city.