I Messed Up
...kind of. Reflecting on six months of Soulmanac and resolving to do things the ease-filled way.
Friends, can you believe that it’s been six months and twenty-one letters since we began this Soulmanac journey together?
This week I marked this halfway milestone by taking some time to review the first few letters where I set out what this experiment was all about.
I was mostly curious to meet the Jen of six months ago but I think I also expected that, in those early letters, I’d find something that I had intended to offer that I haven’t been writing about so far. I thought I’d find some clue as to what has been missing from these letters, an insight into what the second half of this journey needs.
Friends, what I discovered really surprised me.
I realised I messed up. Well, sort of.
Last summer, when the idea for Soulmanac first came to me, the overall feeling I had was ‘no big deal’. I had enjoyed a wonderful summer of being fully alive inside the skin of my own life. I remember telling my spiritual director about the authentic joy I was feeling to have a life - this life - and that God seemed to delight in me delighting in the gift of being alive in this particular body, in this particular family, in this particular place. Not because any of it is uniquely special or without problems but because this is what has been gifted to me. This is the life I have and I sensed that God - the Life -Gifter - wants me to savour it, delight in it, enjoy it, appreciate it.
A lot of the goodness that flowed that summer came from really inhabiting summer - being attuned to the season and all its particular gifts, however big or small. As I sat on a garden swing in my parents’ garden, I wondered what it looked like to continue on in this life-giving way of being and sensed the invitation was to continue living in alignment with the seasons. The intention of sharing these letters with you was simply to send you postcards from that journey.
I’ve loved this journey so far and it’s been good for me to be more disciplined about writing regularly but there have been times in the past couple of months when I have felt I am forcing myself to write rather than allowing the writing to flow. Maybe that’s healthy to a degree (I can’t expect writing always to be easy) but, looking at those first few letters, I realised how much more I’ve been telling myself I need to do than what I felt I was being nudged to do in that garden.
“What if you did less?” Love whispered in the silent places of my soul. I knew it was Love because my response was to exhale and relax.
All this amuses me because I suddenly see how often this is my pattern. I begin something in joy because the invitation of it feels so life-giving and then, because I want to honour the New Thing by doing it well, work so hard that I suck a lot of the life out of it. Instead Love gently touches the exhausted parts of me and says, “Hey, you know what? I don’t need you to work this hard. How about we try making this easy?”
I share all this for two reasons. The first is that I’m going to try to follow Love’s invitation and make the next 6 months easier on myself. If a reflective piece really isn’t what is wanting to flow, I’ll just send you a postcard from my life this week - a photo, a recipe, a quote I read. I’m sure I’ll feel the not-enoughness of that as I press send but this is what you signed up for in the first place so I’ll just have to hope it is really, truly is ok.
The other reason I’m sharing all this is that I don’t think my tendency to make the journey harder than it needs to be is purely a Jen issue. I can’t tell you the number of times that a directee has begun by saying something along the lines of “I’m finding this hard…” only to discover, through the journey of the conversation, that the right next step is actually to do less, not more. Usually that goes against their first instinct, which is to move into the hardness of whatever it is by doing more of whatever they have been doing, even if it really hasn’t been working. Slowly though, they begin to soften to the possibility that this may be a default setting (often rooted in a particular idea of God or “goodness”) rather than the way their soul is truly being invited to go. Then, we create space to let God love them right where they are in the real-ness of what they are experiencing and listen for what the right next step might be.
This Lent I’ve been sending out daily snippets from Frederick Buechner’s wonderful book The Remarkable Ordinary. Each day I send a short passage and offer a reflection prompt (it’s called 40 Days of Buechner if you want to check it out). Today’s passage is about laughter and the possibility that some things are “too good to be anything other than true”. The question I asked was:
What if what you most deeply longed to be true really is true because it’s “too good to be anything but true”? Imagine awakening to the joy of that. Imagine the relief and release. Imagine the laughter.
I wonder if something similar might apply to the places of our lives where we feel most tired or stuck. What if instead of assuming that God requires our endurance we asked ourselves what would be the most life-giving, too good to be true way ahead with this? It won’t necessarily mean quitting whatever we’re finding hard but perhaps there’s another way to approach it that might breathe fresh life into what has become dry and stale or lighten the weight of the slog.
If any of this resonates and you feel you’d like to open to an ease-filled way to approach something that is feeling burdensome, I have a simple suggestion:
Notice what’s feeling heavy in your life, ask yourself what’s feeling so hard about it and let God/Source/Love know you’re open to doing things in an easier way. “What would ease look like here?” you might ask, “Show me the ways in which I am making this harder than it needs to be?”
Sending you love and wishing you joy-filled weekends,
