reflections on going nowhere

Sometimes life feels like a series of stumbles as I grasp for reassurance that what I’ve decided to do is (or was) the right thing to do. And what I often decide is typically arranged in a linear fashion: I want to get from point A to point B.

Simple.

But life doesn’t work that way. It’s very disorienting, I must say. I think it must be very infrequent that one can say, “This is what I want and here is a sure-fire way to get it.” I think that often we change what we want in the midst of the “getting”—or we discover that the way we’ve chosen to get what we want is really not the way to get it. That path leads to something else. So, we stumble.

Sometimes I think life is the art of making peace with the fact that, though we may stumble, yet there is a grace which holds us in our stumbling. Can I live graciously in the midst of such ambiguity? That is the question. If so, how do I do that?

Lord, there is so much I simply

do.

not.

know.

Sometimes I feel like I’m just stumbling my way through life; meanwhile, the culture around me says I need to get my act together and figure out what I want to make of myself. Can you believe I’m in my late forties and I still haven’t decided what I want to do when I grow up? Well, believe it—‘cause that’s me, y’all.

I wonder if you can identify?  

And I can’t help but feel this is precisely what faith is for. Yes, it’s time for this doctor of theology to take his own medicine, methinks. Believe there is a goodness at work even in feeble fits and starts. May the eyes of our hearts see such goodness in a reality that meanders perhaps more than we would like.

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reflections on going nowhere

by troy cady

photo: “Info” by Steve Johnson on Unsplash 

Two Sides To The Story

There are a couple of stories I have told with both children and adults over the years that continue to captivate me. They are both from the curriculum called Godly Play by Jerome Berryman. They are called “The Mystery of Easter” and “The Faces of Easter”.

The first looks like a puzzle that forms a cross when completed. The second contains images of Jesus as a baby, a child and an adult. It highlights some of the major moments in his life, death and resurrection.

Each story contains a theme at the end that surprises us. As each story is initially told, pieces of the story are introduced in a rather two-dimensional fashion. But when we come to the end of each respective story, we discover there are two sides—turning the story into a three-dimensional enigma.

Specifically, one side of the story contains an element that is “sad” and “serious”. While the other side of the story represents celebration, happiness and joy. The surprise comes when we realize these are two sides of the same thing. “We can’t pull them apart. You know that with one side, the other side is always there.”

Whereas we tend to create a false duality out of life and death, Christian theology unifies them.

Some time ago, a friend forwarded me a quote by Richard Rohr that speaks to this theme. Rohr writes:

“In the third split, we separate life from death, and we think they are two separate realities. In fact, they are two sides of one coin, and this deep insight is called by Christians “the paschal mystery.” God must surely understand that humans see things “die” and seemingly disappear, starting with the first death of our pet, our grandparents, and perhaps even parents. It sure looks like either-or.

“The brilliant Ken Wilber says that ‘the fact that life and death are ‘not two’ is extremely difficult to grasp, not because it is so complex, but because it is so simple.’

“And the equally brilliant Kathleen Dowling Singh, who has given her life to hospice work, says that ‘We miss the unity of life and death at the very point where our ordinary mind begins to think about it.’”

Play is both/and. What are some other ways you’ve experienced this phenomenon in which you’ve experienced two ‘opposites’ as one?

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