All quotes from
Sue's book
It's
always difficult and risky to try to put soulmaking into words.
Crisis,
change, all the myriad upheavals that blister the spirit and leave us groping
-- they aren't voices simply of pain but also of creativity.
The
fullness of one's soul evolves slowly.
We're asked to go within to gestate the newness God is trying to form;
we're asked to collaborate with grace.
Spirit
needs a container to pour itself into.
Grace needs an arena in which to incarnate. Waiting can be such a place,
if we allow it.
Waiting
is thus both passive and passionate. It's a vibrant, contemplative work. It means descending into self, into God, into
the deeper labyrinths of prayer. It involves listening to disinherited voices
within, facing the wounded holes in the soul, the denied and undiscovered, the
places one lives falsely. It means
struggling with the vision of who we really are in God and holding the courage
to live that vision.
Transformations
come only as we go the long way round, only as we're willing to walk a
different, longer, more arduous, more inward, more prayerful route.
We
think that the "real thing" is concentrated in the next moment, the
next month, the next year. We can go on
and on, waiting for the next "happening" of life, hurrying toward it,
trying to make it happen. We live from
peak event, from brightness to brightness, resisting the flat terrain of
ordinary time -- the in-between time.
Waiting is the in-between time.
It calls us to be in this moment, this season, without leaning so far
into the future that we tear our roots from the present.
To
create newness you have to cover the soul and let grace rise. You must come to the place where there's
nothing to do but brood, as God brooded over the deep, and pray and be still
and trust that the holiness that ferments the galaxies is working in you
too.
Waiting
is the yeasting of the human soul.
The
door of entry to the soul is prayer and reflection.
Change
begins with the recognition that we're not so much an "I" as a
"they". We may like to think
that we're individuals living out our own unique truth, but more often we're
scripts written collectively by society, family, church, job, friends, and
traditions.
The
waiting process actually has three distinct phases that need to be maneuvered:
separation, transformation, and emergence.
Understand
the source of the crisis. There are
three basics sources: developmental transitions, intrusive events, and internal
uprisings.
Developmental
transitions are like the tapered neck of an hourglass -- difficult but
necessary passages that we have to navigate in order to emerge into the next
era of life.
Intrusive
events...impinge on us from without.
These crisis come in many forms and usually take us by surprise. A death, an illness, an accident, a lost job,
a broken relationship, an unwelcome move, a dashed dream, an empty rest, a
betrayal.
An
internal uprising could be as simple as a vague sense of restlessness, some
floating disenchantment, a whispering but relentless voice that says, There has
to be more than this. ... Or the uprising may take the form of stress, burnout,
a chronic sense of exhaustion, inner voices desperately trying to tell us
something.
While
soulmaking can be fraught with tears, it doesn't require the abandonment of
joy.
Letting
go isn't one step but many. It's a
winding, spiralling process that happens on deep levels and we must begin at
the beginning: by confronting our ambivalence.
There
has to be a phase of active praying, hanging on, turning loose, sweating,
trying, and trying again.
The
opposite of courage isn't only fear but security.
Where
there's no risk, there's no becoming; and where there's no becoming, there's no
real life.
In
ways large and small we must cooperate with the inevitability of change.
Aligning
ourselves -- heart, body, mind, and spirit -- into unique positions of
stillness creates the special environment we need.
Everything
incubates in darkness.
We're
containers filled with an ego elixir we've brewed ourselves.
Our
wounds become the womb.
When
we enter the crucible of darkness and bring the painful tensions of our lives
together to simmer creatively, a threshold level is eventually reached in which
healing, "knowing", strength -- a new synthesis of being -- takes
place.
Spiritual
experiences aren't meant to be homogeneous, only harmonious -- not in unison,
but in unity.
Religion
is not to be believed, but danced.
The
words nowhere and now here have the same arrangement of letters; the letters
are merely separated by a small space in the latter. Likewise, a fine space separates us from
experiencing life as nowhere or now here.
Time
isn't a straight line along which we travel, but a deep dot in which we dwell.
Many
times we starve our souls, although we wouldn't dream of starving our bodies.
When I
fail to feed my soul, I soon notice that I have less strength for living
authentically. At time my energy becomes depleted. Weakened, I'm more apt to revert to old
patterns.
