Shalom – Stillness of Spirit

“Cease striving (in some translations – be still) 

and know that I am God.” Psalm 46:10 

Wholeness.  When you’re whole, there is a sense of “cease striving” that allows you to truly experience acceptance and affirmation that only God can provide.  Without wholeness, you strive for it constantly – some unseen reality, a standard too high, an undefined nirvana.  Even if you’re the achiever-type and who can visualize exactly what success will look like, what your 3, 6 and 12-month plans are to get closer to that, achievement is not always what it’s cracked up to be. 

Especially for achiever-types, and I know this because I am one, achievements only open the door to other things you need to do to get to the next level of achievement.  I started graduate school in 2000, and just graduated in May with my Ph.D.  As if writing a dissertation and getting it approved wasn’t enough, my advisor is adamant about having publications come from it, which truly is a wise thing.  Then the other mentors on my committee are also after me to present my findings at conferences. Another wise thing. But these things only lead to more work, which leads inevitably to more work.  It’s like I’m always a step away – as if I’m walking up the wrong-way escalator.  Each time I get up a step to the top, another appears.  My lack of excitement at my graduation has mystified some of the people I work with.  I should be excited about this achievement.  But one achievement’s children become the next stairs on the escalator that leads only to new stairs. It’s quite a tail-chasing way to live. 

 In the middle of all of this, I’ve been dealing with some very important identity issues related to how I will choose to live the rest of my life.  I have friends for whom the search for a husband is the most important part of their lives right now.  I have other friends for whom getting rid of their husbands (or wives) is the most important thing they have ever done for themselves.  Some of my friends spend all of their mental and emotional energy investing in their children or taking care of their aging parents.  I don’t have any of those things in my life right now, so sometimes their stories are just entertaining rather than instructive for me, and sometimes they just make me feel bad for the storyteller.  It makes me perversely glad that I’m not in those shoes.

I feel most whole when dealing in the land of ideas, concepts and translation of those ideas into the lives of others.  Maybe I don’t need a romantic relationship to feel whole, don’t need a family of my own, don’t need to invest my life in those kinds of things.  Maybe ideas are all I need.  I have questioned for years whether the romance/marriage thing was something I really wanted or whether it was a social norm that I didn't want to conform to.  I even considered very seriously becoming Catholic so I could become a nun.  That's a pretty serious statement coming from a Baptist girl.

Maybe I’ve been looking at the wholeness thing all wrong.  What if instead of achieving in order to be whole, Shalom comes for me through simplicity, through stripping down what’s not necessary, through becoming poor in spirit.  And poor might not mean having nothing, but having only what's most important.  It may come particularly for me through peeling away layers of ideas and experience to get down to what I really need – to feel accepted even with my own flaws, with my own createdness in all its uniqueness including being at home in the land of ideas and big high sounding words.  And only God truly provides that kind of stillness, that all-inclusive wholeness, that depth of affirmation.  I feel myself wanting to jump off that escalator all of a sudden. Maybe someday I will.

Proud Mom of 3 Graduate Degrees

An article by Slate.com recently explored the experiences, motivations and rationale for women who remain childless.  Since I am a childless woman who is nearly 40, I was fascinated.  I’ve always said that my excuse was that I had my nose in the books and didn’t have time for boys.  Come on, I have three graduate degrees that I have collected in the past 12 years – that’s a lot of attention on the text on the page instead of the dudes across the room.

The first real truth is that I would love to find a man.  I just would like him to already have kids.  The men I know who have become dads since I’ve known them have expressed the most wonderful qualities since their kids have come along.  I remember my younger brother having a complete freak fest when he held my niece for the first time.  Now, he’s the primary care provider for his two kids, ages 2 and 6 months.  He’s more patient, more gentle, more relaxed, and has become the king of follow-through, bath time and diaper changing.  With my niece, he was in denial that there was even a living creature in the baby burrito much less was he willing to deal with the contents of her diapers.  The problem with the single men I know is that they need to be trained – in soooo many ways. 

The second real truth is that all of the moms I know who have young children is that they have lost themselves in their kids.  You see this on TLC’s What Not To Wear all the time – women who have become frumpy and without any thought of a gym membership.  No wonder it seems like celebrity moms buy their children on Rodeo Drive.  I touched base with an old friend over the weekend because I saw something that reminded me of her, and she told me she had no memory of it – which was odd because it was so much a part of who she was for all the years that I knew her.  I wondered at her response for a moment, and decided that my sister-in-law (mother of 2 under 10) swears that motherhood kills your brain cells.  My friend agreed but had to quit the conversation to go chase her boy down because he was being too quiet. 

So, between wanting a man who already has gone through the delightful dad metamorphosis and not wanting the medusa mom transformation to happen to me, I am childless and proud to be an aunt of 4 fabulous young people whom I love to spoil on a regular basis.  The possibility of children is not off the table – for me, it might be about finding the right person who could become the delightful dad and temper my medusa mom.  But for the time being, I’ll stick with the story that my graduate degrees are my children – at least if they are too quiet in the next room, I know that all’s well in there.  

Can you imagine a place without God?

            This was my first thought when I woke up this morning.  Strange, I guess – but this is fairly normal for me – having deep thought type questions wake me up at 6:34 on Saturday mornings.  This one connects to Psalm 139:7-8 “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I run from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there.  If I make my bed in the depths, you are there.” 

                So, can I imagine a place far from God?  I have to remember times when I felt far from God to get at this one.  I feel far from God when I am in the wrong kind of relationships. I dated a kid in college who was the wrong kind of person: more charisma than good sense, manipulative, gauged his self worth by how many people followed his lead of getting coffee and dessert after eating out at the restaurant…you know – a real winner (or so I thought at that time).  I very consciously turned my back on a lot of things that made me “me” to keep him.  I felt very far from God in that relationship. 

                I feel far from God when I hit this rock-bottom thought: “What am I gonna do?”  This is usually accompanied by rubbing of the forehead with both hands and a sense of deep panic that I feel even now just because I’m writing about it.  When I hit this thought, it has usually been triggered by some thought about the future, uncertainty about my present array of choices, or feeling like I’ve aged out of the dating market. This is a question that comes from a place of desperation, a place where I feel like all of the things I’m doing and have done have led me to a dead end and I only have bad options to choose from. I feel very far from God when I feel like I don't have any good options.

                So imagining a place far from God is for me about feeling like I’ve been painted into a corner where I have to deal with my own choices.  Being far from God feels cold and panicky to me, so should feeling close to God feel the opposite?  Should feeling close to God be warm and certain, planned and logical? 

                I am facing the most precipitous of moments less than two weeks from today: graduation.  In these times, it is a dangerous cliff indeed.  I feel like I’m being pushed toward it by the flow of time.  The closer it gets, the more panicky I feel about my future prospects.  I would love to be in a place where I could be in the right kinds of relationships and not have the question “What am I gonna do?” hang over my head.  It’s difficult for me to think that I could make these choices anywhere I am.  I guess it brings a sense of calmness to think about the prospect of new relationships and new options to choose from that God will still be there, no matter where I am or how I’m feeling about where I am.  That said, I would sure love to stay close to my support system of people I know and love.  I also would love to have a satisfactory answer to "What am I gonna do?"  I think that is the bigger issue for me -