What Direction?

Sometimes folks joke with me when I tell them I am a Spiritual Director.  They ask me, “What direction are you going?”  I have had to develop a short elevator speech for this moment and now am well practiced at centering my body and bringing my hands to my chest.

“We go deep inside, and then out into the Mystery”, finishing with my arms outstretched.  This is true.  I believe the heart of the spiritual life and the heart of my work is to go deeply within my core to find my own truth and voice and then to bring it out into loving action in the world.  This is what I help others do individually and in groups.  The direction we go is always the same; in and out.  My job is to do this work in my own life as a practice for my work with others, but it isn’t to direct people in the sense that I tell them where to go or what to do.  I follow their own revelation as it moves within and beyond them.  We uncover the particulars of their truth and their loving action together.

This weekend I was moved my a message delivered in my faith community of transformation in the form of a hatching chick.  From the perspective of the chick, this work is quite dramatic.  It is starving and pressed from all sides and desperately needs to break free of its shell.  The work of hatching is tireless and messy, exhausting and difficult and then there is this whole big world on the other side of birth that is nothing at all like where we have emerged from.

I sat listening to the description of the chick and felt in myself the wild struggle in my own life to move from constriction into freedom.  This reality is so present for me at this time that I was in and out of tears this week…which is exactly where I should be as I peck away at this shell, hungry and fatigued.  And today, on this Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, I also brought that impulse and truth in me out into the streets….shutting down the Lake Street bridge with other Black Lives Matter activists.  This feels like the smallest peck to a shell that doesn’t want to crack, but it feels true and it feels honest.  I know my freedom is tied to the freedom of every one of us.  I need to be out in the frigid cold with others, tears streaming to remind myself that I have been, am now, deformed by the racism that permeates our lives.

This isn’t someone else’s problem.  It’s my problem.  And this problem is not separate at all from the ways I harm myself and others out of fear.  It is the same failure of love that I try to meet in my own shadow projected out everywhere.  Inner transformation is essential for outer transformation.  If we expect to change the whole country it starts in my heart and your heart.  This isn’t a pollyanna wish for us to be nice to each other.  Love unleashed is the most powerful force there is.  Take back our Love from fear and see what happens.  What else could possibly inspire us to keep pecking when we are tired and delirious and desperate for freedom?  The only real change will come from love.  When we love one another, we will be unable to hurt one another as we do.  So start now.  Go in.  Find your truth; find your voice.  And then go out into the world with the force of Love and help the transformation birth something new.