Lexie Carroll’s Reviews > Field Notes for the Wilderness: Practices for an Evolving Faith > Status Update

“More & more, I crave being part of a congregation, a group with whom I can gather to reflect & contemplate, to hear how others have solved this puzzling problem of existence. Most of all, I want them to hold me to account, to keep on track, to urge me towards doing good. Holding spiritual beliefs on my own is lonely. I want to be part of a group that makes me return to ideas that bewilder & challenge me.” K. May

We often have a real yearning to idealize the early Church, but most of Paul’s letters (and so much of our NT) exists because of all the ways the church was not living up to its ideals. The one consistent thing in the Church through the ages is messy people. So perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Church nowadays continues to balance precariously between our ideals and our realities.

Repentance isn’t just cognitive or emotional, done right it is an embodied atonement. “Repentance is not a one-time event involving expressions of apology and forgiveness. It is the gateway to moral repair and to new life, that is, the gateway to conversion.” (Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes)
Repentance is answering the call to reconciliation (reparation) and transformation.

Repentance is actually a beautiful, life-giving reorientation toward God’s good path of flourishing with ourselves, our neighbors, and our world. Metanoia is the changing of a mind that leads to the changing of a life. This generous view of repentance reminds us that sin, at the core, is a turning away from Love. Repentance is turning back toward that path of Love- continual reorientation to Love.

When we say “I don’t know yet,” it can feel like an admission of weakness or ignorance at first. It’s actually wisdom. You’re learning to let things settle, to let some answers emerge over time and other questions fade away. Maybe what you really need is to practice loving-kindness and the gift of time. This is the slower path, and there are no shortcuts, no rewards for being done first [or knowing it all].

Lament interrupts our tendency to move too quickly, skipping over suffering, finding too-easy answers that gloss over complexity and pain. Lament clears the path for the fullness of God’s love in our heartbreak, not settling for ‘be-blessed-and-highly-favored’ chirping. Learning to integrate our hope with our lament is the work of the Gospel, too.

Lament is not simply the presentation of a list of complaints, nor merely the expression of sadness over difficult circumstances. Lament in the Bible is a LITURGICAL response to the reality of suffering and engages God in the context of pain and trouble. The hope of lament is for God to respond to human suffering. Unfortunately, lament is often missing from the narrative of the American church.”
Dr. Soong-Chan Rah

Spiritual Bypassing:
“The tendency to try to avoid or prematurely transcend basic human needs, feelings, and developmental tasks.” (Psychologist John Selwood 1984)
(The Winter Solstice can help us) sit in, acknowledge and bless a time of darkness- to make room for grief & collective processing, and remember God is with us here too.

The truth is that we cannot love a God who isn’t present precisely when we are sad, scared, worried, anxious and angry. I want nothing to do with a God who isn’t weeping, too. The God of overcomers and victors is also in the gutter with those of us whose hearts have been broken.
Don’t worry though: God is your Midwife, and She has a very finely tuned bullshit detector after all.

RE: Loss & Grief:
“I don’t know what you’ve lost so far, but I’m sorry.

I also know that even you don’t fully know the depth of the losses yet.

Part of what we are invited to learn out here in the wilderness is how to metabolize that loss into compassion rather than bitterness, into welcome rather than caution.”