The inward path might seem selfish at first in our pained world. But it is also the path which transcends our ego towards Divine grace. It is probably the most needed political act of our times.
Lately, when I'm mourning what feels like a sudden lose of what the church in America used to be, I think about the history of the world, and I realize that what Kathleen Schmidt commented below is so true. There is nothing new under the sun. At seventy-two years old (how did that happen so quickly?) I have been allowing myself to go deeper. As a young woman (at 24, 28, and again at 34) I lost my brother and parents to tragedy...my brother and father to suicide and my mother to a terrible cancer. As an evangelical Christian people around me implied that I shouldn't mourn too much or for very long. I inwardly ran from that pain and told myself that God had healed me...toot suite! Well now, over 40 years later, I'm allowing myself to miss them...really miss them...and to think deeply about them and about their lives and about my own...and much more deeply about the mystery of God. My thinking is my resistance and my protest against Christian nationalism. No one can take my thoughts. I want more of this. Thank you Almut. Your words bring life.
Linda, thank you for your heartfelt comment and for being here with us! What a tragedy you had to live through in those young adult years one wants to have family at least to fall back to when needed. Yes, there has been always a tendency in faith circles to make women smile and just go on. I always say, as a therapist my job is to make people cry 😇. There are so many tears which have never been allowed and so many injuries which had to be deeply suppressed. Some was good as indeed life goes on and we cannot handle all pain at once. I also think it comes in seasons and that the soul has her own pace. We are never quite done! Blessings on your way 🙏
Thank you Almut. Yes...coincidentally I also became a therapist...late in life! But at seventy-two I am still at it trying to help people cry as well. I don't think we'll be truly done until we take our last breath. During those years in evangelicalism, I used to tell the story that I was healed...but decades later I find that I will be healing throughout my life...and it feels much more comfortable. I don't have to have a "one and done" testimony.
Thank you for this piece today. It can be so hard to know what to do in the face of so much suffering. Deepening can be a revolutionary act. I am especially intrigued by your teaching on “vita activa” and the “vita contemplativa” and will do a deep dive to learn more.
Thank you, dear friend. 🙏Vita activa and contemplativa is the equivalent of ora et labora, both describing the monastic rhythm between prayer and work. Both go hand in hand and it is what we cherish about the monastic life.
Dearest Almut, your sorrow for these times is palpable in your writing. As a historian, I'd like to offer some background on Christian nationalism in the US. It has been a part of the ugly underbelly of the country for centuries. It was used as a means to justify slavery and to exclude who were and are deemed undesirables, Its had and still has the Klu Klux Klan since after the Civil War and Reconstruction as an organization to foster its goals. (If you want to know where to get KKK gear, I unfortunately know where it's sold at a store located in Kennesaw Mountain, GA) There is an excellent documentary offered by American Experience on PBS, Nazi Town, USA which chronicles the fascist, Christian nationalist movement in the 1920's and 1930's. There is a clip of Mussolini that stopped my heart and sent a shiver down my spine. He used the phrase," make American great." It provides the questions and foundation of what we are experiencing today. It sets the stage for why Christian nationalism has been given oxygen. That, in fact, it has always been here.
While I read your pain, I was heartened by your hope. I am so grateful for your words and work to remind us that working on our inner self, reaching to Divine grace will set our feet right. And as the late John Lewis said, will lead us to make good trouble. Thank you for honest, thought provoking and nourishing writing.
kathleen, thank you so much for your cultural and historical insights and taking the time to share that with us! 🙏 Yes, the underbelly! JG Jung would call it the shadow self if we would picture in in the American soul. So what mr 45 is doing is bringing the American shadow self or as you say underbelly into the light of the day? That would mean the therapy needed would be to not just pushing it back under but to somehow realize it as what it is and that it has a long history in this country? That it is a part of the nation which still is not redeemed? Wow, let’s “make some good trouble”!😇
Donna, thank you so much for being here and supporting me in this journey. I am glad you find my thoughts nourishing for your soul. May your soul indeed be nourished and uplifted 🥰
Thank you Kelly, as you see you have helped with the break through. I had already written on a piece for quite a while, I just did not get it together. I should may be have also mentioned that I started out asking substacks AI (I find her so helpful!) how to go on when one gets stuck. She suggested to reach out to my readers. So I just wrote something in the chat I haven’t really used before. This is when your idea of news as the muse came in. So bless you for reaching out when I asked. 🙏🌞🎈
I'm glad I could be the nudge you needed. That's one of the things I'm loving about this Substack community. The conversations and connections themselves are kindling for creativity.
The inward battles sustain us in hard times. I think of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "kitchen experience." After his church was bombed, he was ready to give up. He made a pot of coffee in the night while wrestling with what to do, and felt God's presence telling him not to give up. I wonder how much of history is first won in the soul?
Lovely note, Todd. 🙏 @Diane Butler Bass wrote a great piece yesterday about Navalny and it really helped me grasp some more of the difference between a martyr and a martyr complex. And it confirms what you are saying here, the battle starts in the soul. Thus the healing must come from there, too. We can’t win the argument by not touching the soul first. This will be the hard but most needed task of our time!
It's 6:30 on a dark winter's morning and I'm about to get my kids up for school. This post has set me up for the day. I'm going to approach every task with the wisdom of my inner knowing... Thank you for this beautiful reminder of why we do the work. 💕
Michelle, Thanks for this. For decades I taught meditation without recognizing how difficult the contemplative exercises are with children in the household. Now we have our Hannah, emerging from toddlerhood into childhood. Most of my innerwardness now has been practiced late night or early morning (often reading and praying in bed).
So I have read much more into your line "It's 6:30 on a dark winter's morning and I'm about to get my kids up for school." It touched me in a way it would not have BC (before children). I would be good to talk with you and other parents about how one maintains a contemplative life with children. Thank you for being a reader.
I found it almost impossible to have a rich inner life (or even a very poor one 😊) when my children were very little. But now that they're at school and I have some time during the day, I can fill myself with stillness or thoughts or contemplations in the hours when they're away from me, and try (TRY) to be present for them when they're home. It's a daily effort. 😊
Lovely note Chuck. Though I think inwardness is broader understood than contemplation and I might have conflated them too much in this essay. Or May be not. As you can do everything with an inward or contemplative spirit, at least that is what I learned from you 🥰
Thank you so much, Michelle, so good to know that my afternoon posts actually reach you in the very morning just before the daily routine starts. Glad you are here with us <3
Lately, when I'm mourning what feels like a sudden lose of what the church in America used to be, I think about the history of the world, and I realize that what Kathleen Schmidt commented below is so true. There is nothing new under the sun. At seventy-two years old (how did that happen so quickly?) I have been allowing myself to go deeper. As a young woman (at 24, 28, and again at 34) I lost my brother and parents to tragedy...my brother and father to suicide and my mother to a terrible cancer. As an evangelical Christian people around me implied that I shouldn't mourn too much or for very long. I inwardly ran from that pain and told myself that God had healed me...toot suite! Well now, over 40 years later, I'm allowing myself to miss them...really miss them...and to think deeply about them and about their lives and about my own...and much more deeply about the mystery of God. My thinking is my resistance and my protest against Christian nationalism. No one can take my thoughts. I want more of this. Thank you Almut. Your words bring life.
Linda, thank you for your heartfelt comment and for being here with us! What a tragedy you had to live through in those young adult years one wants to have family at least to fall back to when needed. Yes, there has been always a tendency in faith circles to make women smile and just go on. I always say, as a therapist my job is to make people cry 😇. There are so many tears which have never been allowed and so many injuries which had to be deeply suppressed. Some was good as indeed life goes on and we cannot handle all pain at once. I also think it comes in seasons and that the soul has her own pace. We are never quite done! Blessings on your way 🙏
Thank you Almut. Yes...coincidentally I also became a therapist...late in life! But at seventy-two I am still at it trying to help people cry as well. I don't think we'll be truly done until we take our last breath. During those years in evangelicalism, I used to tell the story that I was healed...but decades later I find that I will be healing throughout my life...and it feels much more comfortable. I don't have to have a "one and done" testimony.
Thank you for this piece today. It can be so hard to know what to do in the face of so much suffering. Deepening can be a revolutionary act. I am especially intrigued by your teaching on “vita activa” and the “vita contemplativa” and will do a deep dive to learn more.
Thank you, dear friend. 🙏Vita activa and contemplativa is the equivalent of ora et labora, both describing the monastic rhythm between prayer and work. Both go hand in hand and it is what we cherish about the monastic life.
Dearest Almut, your sorrow for these times is palpable in your writing. As a historian, I'd like to offer some background on Christian nationalism in the US. It has been a part of the ugly underbelly of the country for centuries. It was used as a means to justify slavery and to exclude who were and are deemed undesirables, Its had and still has the Klu Klux Klan since after the Civil War and Reconstruction as an organization to foster its goals. (If you want to know where to get KKK gear, I unfortunately know where it's sold at a store located in Kennesaw Mountain, GA) There is an excellent documentary offered by American Experience on PBS, Nazi Town, USA which chronicles the fascist, Christian nationalist movement in the 1920's and 1930's. There is a clip of Mussolini that stopped my heart and sent a shiver down my spine. He used the phrase," make American great." It provides the questions and foundation of what we are experiencing today. It sets the stage for why Christian nationalism has been given oxygen. That, in fact, it has always been here.
While I read your pain, I was heartened by your hope. I am so grateful for your words and work to remind us that working on our inner self, reaching to Divine grace will set our feet right. And as the late John Lewis said, will lead us to make good trouble. Thank you for honest, thought provoking and nourishing writing.
kathleen, thank you so much for your cultural and historical insights and taking the time to share that with us! 🙏 Yes, the underbelly! JG Jung would call it the shadow self if we would picture in in the American soul. So what mr 45 is doing is bringing the American shadow self or as you say underbelly into the light of the day? That would mean the therapy needed would be to not just pushing it back under but to somehow realize it as what it is and that it has a long history in this country? That it is a part of the nation which still is not redeemed? Wow, let’s “make some good trouble”!😇
Almut, my answers to your three questions are yes, yes and yes. And a yes and amen to making good trouble!
Thanks for feeding us with these thoughts that nourish the soul.
Donna, thank you so much for being here and supporting me in this journey. I am glad you find my thoughts nourishing for your soul. May your soul indeed be nourished and uplifted 🥰
I'm amazed at how quickly you produced such a meaningful piece.
Thank you Kelly, as you see you have helped with the break through. I had already written on a piece for quite a while, I just did not get it together. I should may be have also mentioned that I started out asking substacks AI (I find her so helpful!) how to go on when one gets stuck. She suggested to reach out to my readers. So I just wrote something in the chat I haven’t really used before. This is when your idea of news as the muse came in. So bless you for reaching out when I asked. 🙏🌞🎈
I'm glad I could be the nudge you needed. That's one of the things I'm loving about this Substack community. The conversations and connections themselves are kindling for creativity.
I agree.
The inward battles sustain us in hard times. I think of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "kitchen experience." After his church was bombed, he was ready to give up. He made a pot of coffee in the night while wrestling with what to do, and felt God's presence telling him not to give up. I wonder how much of history is first won in the soul?
Lovely note, Todd. 🙏 @Diane Butler Bass wrote a great piece yesterday about Navalny and it really helped me grasp some more of the difference between a martyr and a martyr complex. And it confirms what you are saying here, the battle starts in the soul. Thus the healing must come from there, too. We can’t win the argument by not touching the soul first. This will be the hard but most needed task of our time!
I'm a huge fan of @Diane Butler Bass. She preached at my church years ago, and I subscribe too. I'm especially a fan of her book "Grounded."
Thinking of the inward path as a needed political act in these times is a perspective that I resonate with deeply. Thank you.
Thank you so much, Mary Jo. I am glad to hear that 😇.
It's 6:30 on a dark winter's morning and I'm about to get my kids up for school. This post has set me up for the day. I'm going to approach every task with the wisdom of my inner knowing... Thank you for this beautiful reminder of why we do the work. 💕
Michelle, Thanks for this. For decades I taught meditation without recognizing how difficult the contemplative exercises are with children in the household. Now we have our Hannah, emerging from toddlerhood into childhood. Most of my innerwardness now has been practiced late night or early morning (often reading and praying in bed).
So I have read much more into your line "It's 6:30 on a dark winter's morning and I'm about to get my kids up for school." It touched me in a way it would not have BC (before children). I would be good to talk with you and other parents about how one maintains a contemplative life with children. Thank you for being a reader.
I found it almost impossible to have a rich inner life (or even a very poor one 😊) when my children were very little. But now that they're at school and I have some time during the day, I can fill myself with stillness or thoughts or contemplations in the hours when they're away from me, and try (TRY) to be present for them when they're home. It's a daily effort. 😊
Lovely note Chuck. Though I think inwardness is broader understood than contemplation and I might have conflated them too much in this essay. Or May be not. As you can do everything with an inward or contemplative spirit, at least that is what I learned from you 🥰
Thank you so much, Michelle, so good to know that my afternoon posts actually reach you in the very morning just before the daily routine starts. Glad you are here with us <3