When the Heart Waits by Sue Monk Kidd

Author:Sue Monk Kidd
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-08-20T00:00:00+00:00

PART 3

PASSAGE OF TRANSFORMATION

CHAPTER 6

Concentrated Stillness

There should always be more waiting than striving in a Christian’s prayer.

EVELYN UNDERHILL

Nothing in all creation is so like God as stillness.

MEISTER ECKHART

I came home from the redwoods of California ready to learn the art of spinning a chrysalis. But where would I begin? What do we humans know about creating a cocoon for spiritual transformation? How do we fashion an environment in which we become stripped and stilled, in which the ego patterns of a lifetime begin to move away from the center and our innermost spiritual life is reconstellated? How do we create the threads that hold us in the painful, uncertain, solitary darkness of waiting—and hold us not only in the waiting but through the waiting?

Those were the questions I asked myself. Finding answers was made more difficult by the fact that so little attention is paid in our culture to the value of waiting. I could find no books about the process of the waiting journey, no blueprints for a chrysalis, no classes on how to wait. One evening I heard Professor James Fowler of Candler School of Theology at Emory University lecture. He lamented, “We are always wanting to put people on escalators to go to the next stage of faith as quickly as possible.” The comment struck me as true; yet if Christianity is geared to escalator spirituality rather than the spirituality of the cocoon, where would I look for guidance in spinning a chrysalis?

Well, I said to myself, I’ll look to God. I’ll look within.

I’ve been impressed with the emphasis that Quakers place on the concept of Christ as one who teaches us from within, of the Holy Spirit as the Inward Guide. What would happen if we took this seriously? What if we turned to the Inward Guide to lead us through our waiting?

Referring to this Guide, Thomas Merton said, “We don’t have to rush after it. It was there all the time and if we give it time, it will make itself known to us.”1 In the weeks and months that followed my crossing of the bridge I learned the truth of these words. I learned that there’s hardly anything upon which God heaps more grace and guidance than chrysalis making. God dreamed up the idea of the cocoon, and I believe that God invests in the waiting of every creature who enters one. If we’re tuned to epiphanies—those guiding flashes of sacred insight—they happen, usually just when we need them most.

When Ann was six, she lost her doll, Cindy. We searched for days. Cindy became a regular part of bedtime prayers. One day, while Ann was eating lunch, she mystified me by laying down her fork, going to the backyard, and crawling under the forsythia bush. There was Cindy. We could only imagine that the dog had dragged her there. “How did you know to look under the forsythia?” I asked. My daughter shrugged. “I just knew it inside,” she said. The inner guiding grace.

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