The Journey of Unknowing (part 4): Trust the Slow Work of God

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.

[Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ, in Hearts on Fire: Praying with Jesuits, 58.]


I'll not comment on these oft-heard words, written by Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin. They are worth your time and slow meditation, phrase by phrase. But I will offer some questions that might help you reflect on them for your own experience. You might reflect on these words over several days, allowing the words to speak to you over time.

**What do you hear in these words?

**In what ways do you identify with phrases or ideas de Chardin shares?

**What challenges you?

**To what do you feel resistance?

**What might be God's invitation to you in these words?

**Is there some concrete action or step you might take to allow these words to be worked more fully into your self?

The Journey of Unknowing (part 3): "The Journey" by Mary Oliver

The Journey
Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.

(Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems: Volume One, Beacon Press)


It is possible to spend a life waiting for just the right circumstance to arise in order to live your "one wild and precious life" . . . waiting for the way to come clear, waiting for the obvious marker or the clear sign that illumines the path ahead of you.

And further, it is possible to know there is a path calling to you and even to search for that path, while at the same time making all kinds of contingency plans that will catch you if the path does not work out. These safety nets -- "a life of contingency," I heard someone once call it -- are constructed of all our fears . . . the fears that we will not be as successful in the path as we had hoped, or that we might be misunderstood if we take an alternative path, or that we'll be embarrassed before peers to be seen on this less-traveled road.

Yet, there is also a weariness to the life of contingency, a sense of exhaustion that comes from continually creating safety nets that can catch us when we fail. We grow weary of life, and even weary of our own efforts to control and manipulate our own lives according to self-made plans and dreams.

And then, a few times in every life there come moments when "you finally know what you have to do, and you begin" . . . against all odds, against your well-trained instincts, against the bad advice of your controlling mind, against the grain of your friends and family.

You begin. Finally. You set out, though you cannot see where the journey will take you, and you cannot see clearly the road you are traveling. You simply know that you must walk this way. You finally know what you have to do, led by your soul . . . and you begin, led by your feet.

The long waiting waiting waiting for this moment to arrive may itself be a kind of procrastination, frozen in place waiting for just the right recipe of ingredients to be mixed together, waiting for clarity about the way forward, waiting for an unobscured view of what the days ahead look like.

When I get frozen in this place, perhaps "knowing what I have to do," and yet without the courage to "begin," it sometimes takes a life-jolt, some unexpected event to push me where I have not been willing to go on my own . . . a separation or divorce, a betrayal, a difficult diagnosis, an unexpected loss . . . something that more or less presses my position or forces my hand. I find in those moments, then, the struggle is not so much to move onward to a new path, but rather to stay where I am -- it would take more energy to stay put than to embark on a different path.

The image is something like the baby bird who wants to stay in the comfort of the nest, yet finally must step out into the vast unknown.

In fact, the place of comfort and safety where we have made our nest may not be as comfortable and safe as we think. And to be "pushed out" of that place may actually mark the beginning of "life."

Of course, there are all sorts of reasons not to set out on a journey which is largely unknown to us. So many valid excuses can hold us in place, paralyzing us in shame . . . or keeping us locked in a small room of fear . . . or warning us about dangers of going where there is no security . . . or reminding us of the unknown obstacles that are not evident from where we currently stand.

In fact, the voices from within me "shouting their bad advice" may be louder than those coming from outside me.

For all the reasoned excuses for not taking this path, Mary Oliver writes, "But you didn't stop. You knew what you had to do."

This is the very nature of the spiritual journey, of the path which is not visible. Understanding and seeing are not necessary for this journey, or at least seeing in the sense of an outer seeing.

On this journey, we learn to see with the inner eye. We learn to notice the interior landscape more than the exterior landscape (because in the "cloud of unknowing," we cannot see the exterior landscape!). With increasingly sharp focus, we see what our own inner self looks like, what we have believed, what has shaped us, what we have trusted (and mistrusted), what ideas we have built life around, what we have clung to for life which could not possible give life.

The what's, where's, and how's of the outer journey simply become tools for the more interior work which is our life's work . . . unfolding to be the persons we were created to be.

The Journey of Unknowing (part 2): Two Maxims

Those looking for certainties are seldom long on a deepening spiritual path. Many of us have experienced that the life of the Spirit does not offer an abundance of answers as we journey on, but rather more questions. At the same time, however, there also grows more tolerance for the questions, more willingness to let things be unresolved, more acceptance of what we do not know, more willingness to step into areas that seem dark and foreboding in the soul's landscape.

I try to keep these two maxims about spiritual growth before me always. They help me to stay open to whatever is next, whatever comes, whatever is.

1. The spiritual journey is going to take you to a place you cannot imagine.

If you think you know what the destination of your journey looks like, it is not truly a spiritual journey -- that is, guided by Spirit. The spiritual journey means stepping into the unknown, into cloud and darkness, without have a predetermined notion of what the outcome will be.

Many of us begin the journey because we want some specific outcome from it. That's fine. Go ahead and begin the journey that way. But hold the outcome loosely, because eventually you will find your own expectations altered as you realize God has an altogether different goal in mind for you.

Thomas Merton wrote about this sense in which we travel without knowing where exactly we will land.

"No amount of imagination and metaphor can begin to convey what is meant by contemplative experience of God present in one's own soul. . . . It is a kind of interior revolution, drawing the soul inexplicably out of its normal routines of thought and desire to seek what cannot be thought and to grasp what lies beyond all desire. . . . The soul simply plunges into the darkness without knowing why, and tends blindly toward something it knows not. Only later is there a strong, subjective verification of the truth that this "something" toward which the soul is groping is really God Himself and not just an idea of God or a velleity for union with Him." (Merton, The Inner Experience, "Infused Contemplation," pp. 72-73.)

2. The road that takes you to your destination will not be the road you would have chosen for yourself.

Most always, the road that leads to our destination is full of difficulties and the pain of letting go the things -- ideas, beliefs, people, possessions, achievements, and so on -- to which we have clung for happiness over the years or decades. At the very least, we are invited over the course of the journey to be in relationship with those "things" in very different ways than previously.

In reality, we don't get to choose what appears on the path. The road we walk is itself out of our control, beyond our ability to manage, at least if it is a true spiritual path. We don't get to choose the options that are necessarily easy or pain-free, the courses of travel that have least resistance.

For example, I don't have the option of choosing yes or no on the cancers, the deaths, the forced terminations, the hurricanes and floods, the economy, the random acts of violence, the divide between me and family members.

In her classic poem "The Journey," Mary Oliver describes the path that seems to choose many of us. In the middle of the poem she describes the impediments on the journey in this way:

It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
(Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems: Volume One, Boston: Beacon Press)

"The road full of fallen branches and stones" . . . who chooses that? Yet, most always the spiritual path will be littered with various fallen branches and stones.

As I said previously, if you can imagine the journey's outcome and the path you need to take in order to get there, then you may be on a journey of your own design and your own making. The spiritual journey is a journey laid out, guided, and shepherded by the Spirit of God . . . a journey to which we are invited in trust and faith, not in certainties and absolutes.

The Journey of Unknowing (part 1): The Parable

In the summer of 2000, I was newly unemployed and seeking direction for the days ahead. My spiritual director suggested an 8-day retreat to help me see more clearly where I was standing, and how I might step into the coming days. So I went off for an 8-day directed retreat (after the fact I learned it was a retreat with the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola), during which I met daily with my spiritual director. She provided me with scripture and material for reflection (from the Spiritual Exercises). I spent the days praying and meditating, then talking with her about my experience of prayer.

It must have been obvious to her that I had my life-plan mapped out. Though jobless, I had already decided there was a certain kind of person I wanted to be and a certain kind of work I wanted to do in order to be that person.

Early in the week, she handed me this parable, instructing me to pray with it for the next 24 hours.


Jesus also said, “This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain—first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it, because the harvest has come.”
(Mark 4:26 - 29)


Of course, I had read the parable before, in fact many times through the years. But its meaning had never been so clear. I was reading these words from a different place, and hearing them as if for the first time. The seed grows, whether the farmer is asleep or awake. The seed grows, not dependent on the farmer to know how it happens or to control the outcome. The seed grows, and the end result is out of the farmer's control.

Perhaps I could have reacted to this new revelation with dismay, but I did not. Rather, a flood of relief fell over me, a lightness of being I had never experienced. My life is not about how well I control it, how well I manage my surroundings and my situation, how well I manipulate the environment in order to get the outcomes I prefer.

Most humans are controllers. If there is a scale, I probably rate higher than average on the control-meter. I cannot say I was forever changed by this moment in the summer of 2000. It was a beginning point, but these 18 years later I'm still working out what this means for me, how to enter each day without squeezing the life out of it, how to go with the flow, how to surrender my tendency to manage people and things toward my desired wishes.

The spiritual life is, by definition, an endeavor of God's Spirit. Human knowledge and understanding are not the cornerstones of the spiritual journey. To be sure, you and I are invited into this life of connection with God which makes a difference in who we are with God, self, others, and the world. We are participants, and our intention to set ourselves to the journey is crucial. But according to the parable, we are not the final determiners of the harvest.

In fact, much of the growth of God's kingdom within us happens when we are in the darkness, when we are asleep, unconscious, unaware. I've come to believe this is so because for many of us, literal sleep is the only time we have our hands off the remote control, the only time we are not managing our world. We lay our defenses down and go to sleep . . . for a few hours giving God's Spirit an opening into our well-defended life.

[I've heard entrepreneurs and other people considered "highly successful" by society talk about how little they sleep at night because they are driven to be successful. Society at large applauds that ambitious drive. I wonder, though, if some of their sleeplessness is simply the fear of taking their hand off life's remote control, even to sleep . . . the anxiety that something may happen while they are asleep that they cannot manage or manipulate . . . so their fear masquerades as the drive to succeed!)

Through the years, some people have said to me this is why they will not participate in a silent retreat . . . because they would have to lay aside their newspaper, put away their cell phone, and be out of touch for a few hours. One person actually said to me, "What if something happened in the world while I was on retreat, and I knew nothing about it?!" It was impossible for her to imagine being out of control and out of "the know", even for a few hours.

In the landscape of the parable, Jesus describes a farmer who scattered and tended the seed, but who both slept and stayed awake, and who experienced that the growth of the seed did not depend on his efforts, nor on her understanding. It is a wonderful little parable, and a marvelously clear image of how spiritual growth and fruitfulness, are not functions of my planning, my manipulation, my management, my control, my expertise. Other forces are at work and other designs shape how the seed grows.

For today, listen to the parable for yourself.
What does it say to you about your spiritual journey?
What invitation do you hear in it?
Is there some action which would help you step more fully into God's invitation as you hear it in these words?