FEARING NOT THE HEAT WHEN IT COMES

FEARING NOT THE HEAT WHEN IT COMES:
An Experience of God through Lectio Divina

Thus says the LORD: Cursed is the man who trusts in human beings, who seeks his strength in flesh, whose heart turns away from the LORD. He is like a barren bush in the desert that enjoys no change of season, But stands in a lava waste, a salt and empty earth. Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD, whose hope is the LORD. He is like a tree planted beside the waters that stretches out its roots to the stream: It fears not the heat when it comes, its leaves stay green; In the year of drought it shows no distress, but still bears fruit.( Jeremiah 17:5-8)

Heart and Mind in Tandem

Lectio Divina suits my personality fine. I can bask under the warm glow of feelings for as long as I want. I can also bathe in the refreshing waters of novel insights born of a more mind-based reflection. There is abundance of the heart and free-flowing cooperation of the mind in this ancient process-prayer that puts the heart and mind in a dynamic mode of cooperation. As a basically heart person, trained, for the most part, to be a thinker, lectio divina is an experience that brings me more in touch with my strong feeling component.

A passage from Jeremiah quoted above, part of the responsory in the Office of Readings for one of the last weeks of ordinary time is what I base this reflection on.

Nature as Nurturing Mother

I love nature. I can spend hours gazing at a stream, and lolling on the grassy embankment. I am spiritually energized every time I go up mountains and trek by gorges and heights. In the countless foot journeys up mountains I have done in life, passing by refreshing rivers, gurgling and glinting under the sun, after a long, dry spell of seemingly endless, thirst-inducing trek, has always been a welcome treat. It has always led me to think about God as present in nature, a God who cares for weary trekkers like us, who could use a refreshing, reinvigorating time with mother nature.

Jeremiah’s image of a tree planted beside water is one that I found myself very much at home with, for actual and existential reasons.

Falling Leaves, Faltering Hopes

It is nearing autumn once again (even if I live in the torrid tropics!). Four years ago, when I was deep in further studies in Baltimore, Maryland, me and my siblings, along with a great many relatives and friends, buried an older sister, the second in our large family, taken away at a relatively young age at 56, by a cruel and unforgiving disease called cancer.

Not long after that, it was once more “autumn” in my life. Just when I thought we were just getting started on our downhill trek towards recovery, the shattering news came that another sister, younger this time, has a similar cancer … and then another, still more recently … third in a row!

To shift metaphors, I am once more on the uphill climb, up towards a barren, dry, and hot, lava-seared landscape that reminded me of a mountain I climbed 19 years ago. I am once more struggling and groveling up the lava waste of an experience that saps away hope, that dries up tender saplings of trust in God-nurturing-mother who seems to have walked out on us, on me, once again.

My sisters’ and the rest of my surviving siblings’ own “Goldengrove,” in allusion to Manley-Hopkins’ poignant poem addressed to the young Margaret, “grieving,” is now once more “unleaving.” The falling leaves speak not only of both actual and potential losses. They speak to me of unwanted endings. They remind me of “hope growing grey hairs,” of what the same Jesuit poet refers to as an experience in which “all I endeavor in disappointment end.”

What No Mind, Nor Thought Can Express

The prayer experience proved to be, as usual, an oasis for my thirsty soul. “As runs the thirsting deer to find where cooling waters flow, so rush the wishes of my heart to come before you Lord,” was a refrain of an old, old song back in seminary days that I kept on repeating. Jeremiah’s prophetic utterance could not have come at a better time. I dwelt on it. I mulled over it for a long while. I allowed images of me actually peering over the crater of a hot, smoking volcano (something I actually did in that climb 19 years ago), and then running down for dear life to the safety and refreshing coolness of regurgitating waters further down refreshing me. “What no mind, no, nor heart expressed, ghost guessed” … the possibility that I could actually be not that kind of tree Jeremiah may be speaking of.

Searing Pain, Healing Word

The rhythm of the prayer, with its four stages, that allowed me to rock back and forth lectio, meditatio, oratio, and contemplatio, brought up to me images of a nurturing mother lulling her child to safety and warmth. The pain I felt was real and deeply searing. But the prayer experience, based on the Word, came out as a healing experience. More than that, it offered me reassurance. And even more than that, it gave fresh insights. Hope falters when love’s conviction alters. When one is far from the life-giving waters; when one is not rightly planted near where grace flows, hope shrivels at the root.

Searching and Finding

I have always wondered at the internalized object I have been associating with God all this time. I have always wondered how best for me to think of God and how best to relate to this internalized object-image I learned from when I was a child. My search did not go in vain, at least as far as this prayer experience is concerned. The experience convinced me, more than ever, that my internalized object-image of God has always been that of a parent, a caring, nurturing mother, to be exact. Although thinking of God as father was not entirely distasteful to me, I realized I could “taste and see the goodness of God” more if I imagined Him as a provident parent. No wonder I always found it easier to commune with Him in and through nature. No wonder images of deer running to the water always strike me. No wonder, too, that Francis Thompson’s poems delight me, particularly his “God and the Child,” and “The Hound of Heaven.”

Fearing No the Heat When It Comes

I am afraid of the worst for my two other siblings just as I had been eight years ago. I am afraid of so many things, including what the future has in store for me and the rest of what used to be a big family. The realization that our genetic make-up is not that resilient to disease comes to me as one “long dry spell of searing heat,” placing me in a situation where I can “enjoy no change of season,” as Jeremiah wrote.

But it is precisely at times like these that prayer becomes more meaningful. It is only when one’s faith is sorely tested, when one’s love is forcibly “altered” by both pleasant and unpleasant circumstances, that one’s hope shines. Earth is, indeed, “crammed with heaven, and every bush is afire with God,” as Elizabeth Barrett-Browning so nicely puts it. But “only he who sees takes off his shoes and worships.” Only he who sees far beyond … Only he who sees can understand the meaning behind things and events, including a bush – nothing more and nothing else, but a manifestation of God.

I still do not understand the “heat” that has once too often come into my life. But prayer at least helps me to accept what is unfathomable and what is unacceptable. It, at least, helps me gain back precious perspective. Most importantly, it shows me who I basically am, someone who may need to draw closer to the stream, someone who may need to remain planted beside the waters, if I want to be, and remain a tree that “fears not when the heat comes, and whose leaves stay green.”

BEING STILL AND STILL MOVING

Reflecting Further on my Ongoing Midlife Journey

I am using these words of T.S. Eliot quoted in an earlier post to open these reflections that continue, broaden, deepen, and dovetail with that same earlier post located below.

Old men ought to be explorers

Here and there does not matter

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion

Through the dark cold and empty desolation,

The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

(T.S. Eliot, “East Coker”)

From Confusion to Fusion

T.S. Eliot’s (1971) powerful tapestry of words gives me a perfect backdrop for this reflection. It conjures up images that seem impossibly irreconcilable: being old and being explorers, being still and still moving, intensity in the midst of desolation, and endings as beginnings.

Eliot strikes at the heart of the paradoxical situation that middle adulthood essentially is all about. Eliot puts me right into the field marked by a need for a fusion of opposites – the arena of my midlife self and the seemingly contradictory changes and challenges it offers.

Fusion, I must say, began with some confusion. As I began stepping onto that initially dreaded land of the “experienced,” the territory of the so-called mentoring group, those who are considered “senior” partners in whatever human enterprise they find themselves in, a bewildering array of changes began to take place in my life. As I was pushing past 40, I knew I was in my midlife transition stage (Levinson, 1978). The frenetic pace I was keeping at work, the energy I was putting into so many initiatives, the “edifice complex” that was keeping me busy all day, most days, as I ran myself weary from one activity to another, the many more plans I had on the drawing board, having been given authority and power quite early on in my “career” – everything that for me, then, seemed “brilliant and outstanding,” at some point, began to fray at the edges.

The fabric of my life – or what I thought it was – was beginning to take on a new “structure” (Levinson, 1978, p. 41, 61). I had what most men in their late thirties aspired for – advancement, affirmation, position, power and concomitant prestige. I was accorded a much-coveted position of leadership and authority. By 38, having occupied various posts and earned a postgraduate degree abroad, and rewarded with two concurrent and even more prestigious posts, I had “become my own man” (p. 144). I had arrived. Or so I thought.

Dark Cold and Empty Desolation

The appellation “flourishing forties” (Sheehy, 1999) could not have been more apt for me. The much-sought-after “culminating event” (Levinson, 1978, p. 31) rang more than true for me as I basked under the glow of relative success and popularity. I felt high up on the ladder. Being an avid and regular mountain trekker, I compared my life to the exhilaration of being on the summit of some mountain, on top of the world, as it were.

But it did not take long for me to feel the pull of the more, the higher, the better, the nobler, even as I also felt dragged by disillusionment and disappointment. A crisis soon loomed in the horizon of what, up till then, I thought was an illusion-free adulthood. Coming as I was from the “morning and spring” of my life, (Jung, 1933) busy as I was with my search for “individuation,” that crisis precipitated a bewildering “slide into darkness” (Wicks, 2003). A situation similar to the one I alluded to earlier in an earlier post has once again brought me face to face with the need for what Levinson refers to as “de-illusionment” (Levinson, 1978, p. 192). A certain erosion of trust on my part and that of others has once more led me to come to grips with more than just the crisis of limits. It had led me through my own desert experience, to the “dark cold and empty desolation” of being suddenly considered a pariah by those who were not exactly sympathetic to my personal life-dream. And it had to happen just when I thought I had gone past the midlife transition stage without glitches, just when I have reasons enough to believe that I have in some sense “arrived” with hardly any scratches.

I am staring what Levinson seems to be referring to as a “marker event” in the face (Levinson, 1978, p.54).

That “marker event” of what I still feel is a personal rejection has again catapulted me to a personal Passover replete with my own figurative unleavened, tasteless bread dipped in the bitter herb of disappointment and disillusionment.

From Fusion to Integration

A sudden “reversal of fortune,” on second thought and deeper reflection, actually does me good. In my mind, I have always known with the New Testament letter writer that “here we have no lasting city” (Hebrews 3:14). Conceptually, I agreed with Jung who said, that in the autumn of a man’s life, “man’s values and even his body tend to undergo a reversal into the opposite” (1933, p. 107). From college and on into postgraduate work, I have always subscribed to developmentalists like Erikson, who thought of psychological balance as a fusion of opposites: trust and mistrust, autonomy and a sense of doubt, intimacy and isolation, etc.

But my experience of rejection leads me now, to more than just a superficial understanding of Jung’s and Erikson’s ideas of wholeness as a mere fusion of opposites. This midlife issue that is before me, I would like to think, continues to bring me to the heart of what integration really stands for, what midlife individuation is all about - a change in the whole area of relationships with myself, the world, and others (Levinson, 1978, p. 195). I know I am at the crossroads of Erikson’s “generativity and stagnation” stage. I am face to face with the famous polarities of midlife individuation (pp.197-198). But I am realizing very gradually that this process of individuation is never an either/or situation, nor is it a shuttling back and forth the two extremes, now acting this way, now acting that way, in a mutually exclusive sort of way, but more akin to an acceptance of mystery in one’s life, the capacity to live with paradox, more like the ability to “have patience with everything unresolved and try to love the very questions themselves” (Rilke, 1934).

This crisis, like others that took place before, is leading me into the heart of the need for me to go from mere fusion towards full integration.

Relinquishing and Receiving

Levinson (pp. 197-198) spoke of only four polarities that needed to be worked through: the young/old polarity, destruction/creation polarity, masculine/feminine polarity, and the attachment/separateness polarity. He spoke of the need for “resolution” of each of the four. Coming as they do, more or less at the same time frame as Erikson’s seventh psychosocial stage of development called generativity versus stagnation, and given the stage’s central issue as that of coming to terms with one’s own mortality (Jacques, cited in Levinson, 1978, p.196), the consequent call towards interiority (Neugarten, cited by Levinson, p.196), towards a gentle turning inward to the self, all lend themselves more closely to notions of spiritual growth and faith development.

The crises that I faced, and still face, as I navigate through midlife brought me, and still bring me, right into the core of Levinson’s fourfold polarities, Kohlberg’s (1984) Postconventional stage of morality based on Universal Ethical Principles, Erikson’s (1963) generativity versus stagnation stage, and Fowler’s (1981) 5^th and 6^th stages, namely conjunctive faith and universalizing faith respectively. For many years since my ordination, I have been occupied with mentoring tasks as a counselor and teacher. I felt generative and productive in the various pursuits I undertook as a superior and as a clergyman. Though a celibate living in the context of religious life, I was gradually finding wholeness in a relatively happy and well-adjusted big seminary community which I both “fathered” and “mothered” in a sense through the charism of leadership. I was cognizant of my “need to be needed” (Erikson, 1963, p. 266) and I felt on the whole fulfilled to be “establishing and guiding the next generation” (p. 267). Generativity for me assumed a variety of forms, from counseling and teaching young people, planting hundreds of trees, to constructing new buildings and organizing three non-governmental organizations to help the poor members of the surrounding communities where I was. I lived the equivalents of “productivity and creativity” (p. 267). My “life structure” (Levinson, 1978, p. 193) felt like it was pretty well set even as I went through my midlife transition, that is, until the crisis set in.

When that happened, I knew that Levinson’s “resolution” tasks (p. 198) were not sufficient by themselves. I knew I needed to do more than just grapple with the four polarities. That was when Erikson and Fowler particularly proved insightful and helpful. Erikson taught me that focusing solely on “generativity,” as I did in those earlier frenetic years, was not what integration is all about. I realized that I also needed some form of “stagnation” if I were to weather through the crisis. I realized I needed also some “fallow time” to sift things through, to pause awhile and mull over life in general and to restructure it along broader and deeper lines that cannot be answered for solely by success and achievement. Fowler (1981) taught me that growth entailed moving away from a dichotomous “either/or” form of knowing towards one that is more “dialogical” (p.185), one that is able to see the many sides of an issue simultaneously, one that sees lasting value and truth even in the “sacrament of defeat” (p. 198). Fowler touched me immensely as I grappled with losses big and small, but which opened me to the ever-expanding vistas of love, justice, and the call to social responsibility and human solidarity.

My slide into darkness has brought me, and still affords me, the possibility to rise once more into a certain newness and freshness of perspective. The path towards integration now looks more like a journey with “two crucial and difficult moves, relinquishment and receiving” (Brueggemann, 1986, p.3). Like the Biblical prophets, I feel like being called to go beyond performing mere roles, and help deliver people out of stifling self-centeredness and barren self-serving commitments. But that relinquishment and receiving has to happen to me first. I realize now I have to relinquish so much in order to receive a whole lot more.

Naming the Ghosts that Haunted Me

This “dark night” that I began to experience with the onset of my crisis, helped in no small measure by my Christian faith and my training and total life experience, led me to identify some illusions that I was clinging to for dear life. Two of the ways by which I tried to bolster myself during these confusing times were what Sheehy calls RAMM and SNAG (Sheehy, 1999, pp. 69-71). I was, and still partly am, that “resurgent angry macho man (RAMM),” and the “sensitive new age guy (SNAG).” At times, I foundd myself often dwelling on my losses and defeats. I saw myself repeatedly rehashing in my mind the affront and the perceived “injustice” done to me. My resentment showed the extent of what appears to be my narcissistic injury, and forgiveness didn’t come easy in my heart. My anger and touchy sensitivity literally kept me snagged and snarled in many senses. Like St. Paul, I found myself in between the horns of a dilemma, “for I do not do the good I want, but I do the evil I do not want” (Romans 7:19).

With therapy and a whole lot of enlightened reflection, I am becoming adept at pinning down the issues behind my low grade resentment at life and the world. I gradually realize the extent to which I hitch my self-definition and my self-esteem on external realities, not excluding power and position. A great deal of my self-image, I now realize, is tied up to my role, or the roles I do, as perceived by people around me. The fact that I have been given such roles early on in my early adulthood all through the midlife transition years may have led me to put my midlife transition issues on hold for some time. When the “marker event” came, everything came rushing down on me with full force, thus releasing the highly defensive stances of my vulnerable-sensitive self.

I found myself as the epitome of what Dostoevsky’s character of the Grand Inquisitor in his Brothers Karamazov (1990) says about men in general – that they have always been attracted to “magic, mystery, and authority” (p. 255, cited by Yalom, 2003). I was in search for illusions, that is, magic (or “miracle” in the aforecited translation). In the same way, I was always in search for answers, instead of “loving the questions themselves.” And authority stood for the prestige that I thought I was entitled to.

The stagnation pole of Erikson’s seventh stage now assumes the form of a stepping down from power, and taking on only teaching and mentoring roles, directing retreats and conducting seminars for various groups. I know, by experience that, sooner than I think, the stagnation phase would revert back to the pole of generativity as I am sure to find immense fulfillment in doing what I now know, I really love to do: writing, teaching, counseling, and preaching.

A deeper reflection on Fowler makes me examine the foundations and moorings of my faith and now find myself hovering between stage 5 and stage 6, conjunctive and universalizing faith, respectively.

A Pilgrimage of the Heart: Faith to the Rescue

As I get to the process of de-illusionment, and coming to terms gradually with the backlog of midlife issues that have come tumbling down on me, a concomitant reflection on my life of faith proves beneficial. I find myself beyond being categorical and monolithic in many ways. I realize that “faith is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart” (Heschel, in Dresner, 2002, p. 15). There is more openness to truth in me no matter where it comes from, and I have noticed my ever-growing passion and commitment to justice and solidarity. As a professor of Moral Theology, I find these realizations tying up with what appears to be the stage of moral development that I find myself in, if I were to use that model of Kohlberg as the only model – the stage of Universal Ethical Principles (Kohlberg, 1984, pp.173-175). For a long time now, I know I have moved from a rule-oriented towards a principle-oriented moral reasoning that values persons never as means but ends in themselves. I have long graduated from that narrow definition of moral as legal, and I knew that, though there are some moral absolutes, their application in concrete, and in vivo can never be absolute in every case. The symbols and rites of my Catholic faith tradition have become more than just meaningful to me but fostering them, celebrating them, and presiding over them have become a source of immense fulfillment and gives a lot more meaning to my life at this stage in my life.

At the same time, I feel a strong pull to work for greater human solidarity, unity and universal compassion for all races, religions, and nations deep inside me. The widening rift between the so-called Christian and Muslim states continues to bother and challenge me in a positive sense, leading me to dream on and devise ways by which I could contribute towards the attainment of such noble dreams. Vicariously, I share in the successes of individuals like Mother Teresa, Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela and others whose vision for the world goes much farther than their short early lives could take them.

Into Another Intensity

My pilgrimage is far from over. Reeling as I still am, from both my perceived and real slights and injuries, I see myself still as the perpetual and consummate mountain trekker who may have conquered heights, but not the final summit of everyone’s ultimate dream. The road is long and winding. The challenges remain, and the stakes are high, but the reward is certain. There is still a lot of need for inner work and self-processing. “God ain’t done with me yet,” as an old 70s era poster puts it. But with St. Augustine, I am a firm believer that in this pilgrimage of life and faith, “solvitur ambulando” (cited by Cousineau, 1998, p. 104). Things are solved while walking. For while one mountain’s peak can make me “be still” and breathless for a short while, the ultimate summit of perfection and spiritual growth would have me “still moving into another intensity, a further union, a deeper communion.”

References:

Brueggemann, Walter (1986). Hopeful imagination: Prophetic voices in exile. Philadelphia: Fortress Press.

Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, and the United States Catholic Conference (1991). The new American bible. South Bend, Indiana: Greenlawn Press.

Cousineau, Phil (1998). The art of pilgrimage: The seeker’s guide to making travel sacred. Boston: Conari Press.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor (1990). The brothers Karamazov. Translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Dresner, Samuel H. (Ed.) (1983). I asked for wonder: A spiritual anthology by Abraham Joshua Heschel. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company.

Eliot, Thomas Stearns (1971). Four quartets. New York: Harcourt Publishers.

Erikson, Erik H. (1963). Childhood and society. 2^nd Edition. New York: W.W. Norton and Company.

Fowler, James W. (1981). Stages of faith: The psychology of human development and the quest for meaning. New York: Harper Collins Publishers.

Jung, Carl G. (1933). Modern man in search of a soul. Translated by W.S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc.

Kohlberg, Lawrence (1984). The psychology of moral development: The nature and validity of moral stages. Essays on Moral Development. Volume II. San Francisco: Harper and Row, Publishers.

Levinson, Daniel J. (1978). The seasons of a man’s life. New York: Ballantine Books.

Rilke, Rainier Maria (1934). Letters to a young poet. Translated by M.D. Herter Norton. Revised Edition. New York: W.W. Norton and Company.

Sheehy, Gail (1999). Understanding men’s passages: Discovering the new map of men’s lives. New York: Ballantine Books.

Yalom, Irvin D. (2002). The gift of therapy: An open letter to a new generation of therapists and their patients. New York: Harper Collins Publishers.

SOLVITUR AMBULANDO: Some Milestones in my Ongoing Journey of Faith and Life

Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter.
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark, cold, and empty desolation.
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
(T.S. Eliot, “East Coker”)

Introduction

Pilgrim Learner on the March

Longstanding Christian tradition has always used the analogy of the “way” when referring to the path of Christian belief and spirituality. At some point in the history of Christian spirituality, in fact, a believer was oftentimes referred to as a viator, a wayfarer (McGrath, 1999, p. 78).

This short essay deals with some select milestones in my own personal spiritual journey as a viator. As a contribution to Don Bosco Center of Studies’ pastoral-theological journal LANTAYAN, it veers away from the purely theological mode, and goes more towards the side of the pastoral – and somewhat more psycho-spiritual, and integrative – pole.

As one who has always loved nature, and who, for long has been passionate about long treks and hikes up mountains, the traditional image of wayfarer strikes me as more than just an empty analogue, but an existential reality. It has led me to define myself, through a personal mission statement, as was the fad in the late 80s, as “pilgrim learner,” a perpetual wayfarer and student in the school of life.

A Pilgrim’s On-going Story: Loving the Very Questions Themselves

Per Agrum ad Sacrum

Climbing up mountains is an arduous activity that is not for the faint of heart and weak of knees. It costs. It pains; and it can be discouraging at some point. But for those who persist and persevere, the rewards are great. Such rewards do not primarily have to do with achievement, such as reaching one’s goal, the summit. They have to do with the very struggle, the process itself of conquering one’s limitations, fears, and insecurities, and the consequent ability to transcend oneself and go beyond said limitations. Beyond these psychic rewards, though, are those that ultimately stand for one who is in search for inner meaning and connectivity to a God who makes Himself known in one’s daily experience.

For almost two decades now, I have learned to see life and faith as epitomized by those long and arduous climbs as a pilgrimage, a path that leads one through rough, uncharted terrain, a path that has taught me that quick answers to perennial questions do not come easy, and that as one plods on through life’s vicissitudes, one learns to have “patience with everything unresolved,” and “to love the very questions themselves”(Rilke, 1934). Like the pilgrims of old, who braved the elements out in the rough, I have learned to live life as a pilgrim, a viator, who may need to go through difficulties and trials (per agrum) and, hopefully find connection and intimacy with the sacred (ad sacrum), the divine, the God who is to be found in all things, who reveals Himself in my daily experience. Per agrum ad sacrum has thus become my own concrete image representation of this ongoing search for meaning and intimate connectivity with the God I have always claimed I believed in.

Per Agrum: The Dark Cold and Empty Desolation

Poetry and music, apart from nature, have been my faithful companions in my pilgrimage. They have put me in touch, not only with my own self, but also with the deepest core of common personhood that I share with the rest of struggling – and victorious - humanity. Poets have been my “mighty good companions” in the journey (Morneau, 1995, p. 151). Rachmaninoff’s deeply moving melodic masterpieces, Tchaickovsky’s bombastic, brilliant, and colorful chords, Hopkins’(Gardner, 1953) plaintive poetic prayers, Thompson’s (1979) faith-filled and flowing verses – why, even pop songs belted out by unsuspecting chanteurs and chanteuses – all reflect, for me, the wondrous reality that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God” (Gardner, p.27). Sharers all in the same human nature, they spoke to me of that “holy longing” that Rolheiser (1999) sees as the basis of all spirituality. T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (1971), particularly “East Coker,” spoke to me in a particular way as I entered through my midlife transition just as I underwent what Wicks (2003) calls a bewildering “slide into darkness.” A confluence of events, that happened after giving my best all through the most productive years of my early adult life, led me “through the dark cold and empty desolation” that Eliot (1971), I would like to believe, was speaking about.

Home Is Where One Starts From

To say that I underwent the dreaded midlife crisis precipitated or aggravated by the confluence of events I refer to above is an understatement. After ten years in leadership and enjoying the trust of superiors, and after pouring my heart out to tasks assigned to me, tasks which I would like to believe, I did responsibly and well, the unforeseen turn of events after the change of guards brought me to the dark basement of disappointment and anger. I was disappointed with people who I thought were friends. I was angry with God for allowing me to suffer unjustly. I was even angrier at those who, to my mind, caused my suffering. And I suffered deep within for feeling that way at all against anyone. I was tested to the core, and my spirituality was put in the proverbial crucible. My “operational theology” as against my “professed theology” (Jordan, 1986) was put to the mettle. But deep inside, I knew that there was no way I could skirt the process of growth that this crisis was leading me through – the naming, claiming, and the taming process that psychological and spiritual growth is all about. “Home is where one starts from,” as Eliot (1971) wisely counsels. It was a call to come home to myself, a call to self-responsibility. As in the story of Adam, God asked him to “name” every creature if he was to have dominion over them (Gn 1:20), I knew I was being called to “name the ghosts that haunted me,” as it were. I was being called to put a handle on whatever it was I felt, to name my issues and claim them for my own, instead of resorting to blame. Only then can the taming process begin.

Peregrinatio as a Coming Home to Self

My recent inward journey precipitated by my crisis experience gives full meaning to the root word (agrum) of what the pilgrims of old engaged in. For the dedicated pilgrims committed to finding what Countryman (1999) calls the “hidden holy,” it was far from going on a luxury vacation. It meant going through the agrum of discomfort, danger, and difficulty. It meant going out of their comfort zones, as they engaged not so much in searching for answers, as trying to find their “way.”
My own inward pilgrimage was helped by some invaluable mentors. I dug deep in my treasure trove of personages and idealized figures of the past, and found myself not wanting for models to emulate. Said group of mentors ranged from poets to prophets, from mystics to former mischief-makers – saints in their own right who were really sinners like me and the rest of humanity – who found, not so much answers, as a path that leads to love, a path that leads to meaning, to integrity, and to holiness, understood as wholeness. Nouwen, Merton, Kreeft, Tillich, Kushner, Rupp, Augustine, Therese of Lisieux, Teresa de Jesus, John Bosco, Hopkins, Thompson, Paul of Tarsus, Barrett-Browning, Rosetti, Unamuno, Hammarksjöld, Bocelli, Church, Groban, and a host of others, accompanied me as I wended my way through the “longest journey, the journey inward”(Hammarskjöld, 1976). With their help, I gradually came to realize that wholeness is a journey that starts from oneself, ineluctably marred by brokenness; that life is all about “growing strong at broken places” (Ripple, 1986), and that “home is where one starts from.” Through their prose, poetry, music, and musings, I was able to do a reading of God manifesting Himself in daily life, and find His indwelling presence in all things, in the tradition of St. Ignatius. Poets, in a special way, like Hammarskjöld did, offered me “markings that point the way to God and the Kingdom” (Morneau, 1995, p. 148). Pilgrimage for me, meant not only going up mountains, but also, and more importantly, going deep into myself and finding the stirrings of a God who really was calling me to wholeness and holiness, a God who was speaking in and through the unfolding history of my personal life.

Milestones along the Way

This pilgrim’s approach to life taught me that living and growing entail constantly making a “step into the unknown territory,” “a continual moving forward” (Chödrön, 1997, p. 20). It connotes having to go through uncharted, unpaved, and therefore, difficult paths, where milestones are a welcome gift to guide one’s journey. In retrospect, as I went inward and backwards through prayerful reflection, I realized I had been blessed by not just a few such milestones. As I grappled with midlife issues made more intense by the series of events referred to above, I came face-to-face with God’s invisible hand which guided me all along, starting from my childhood. Blessed with two loving and doting grandmothers in my early years, I learned about God through the mediation of two strong-willed, brilliant, and prayerful women. Although I saw a pattern of insecure, ambivalent attachment to my mother due to her absence on certain significant occasions, I realized I had internalized a caring, watchful, and tender object representation of God early on (Rizzutto, 1979). Object relations theorists and their work came in handy as a tool for my inward journey. I therefore find no difficulty relating to an image of God, not so much as father, but more so as mother.

Writing, and the ability to pen down insights, thoughts, and reflection, especially through journaling, has helped hone my skills, both at getting to the core meaning of experiences, and seeing the hand of God in unfolding events. Apart from affording me a valuable means for emotional catharsis, journaling has given me a tool to do a reading of God’s presence in daily experience. Since the time I slid into the basement of desolation with my personal and developmental crisis, I found a solace not so much in reading others’ works, as writing my own thoughts and insights on the dryness and desolation that enveloped me.

What constituted another milestone in this pilgrimage to my inner self were the many friends and confreres whose lives and experiences resonated with my own. By writing, I “read” God’s wondrous and mysterious workings in and through my pain and solitude. By resonating with my thoughts, I found valuable companions who walked with me through my Emmaus experience of abandonment, disappointment, and anger. Through the tears that often flowed in abundance, both literally and figuratively, the “parched land, desert and steppes” representing my proud, defiant, blaming, self-sufficient, and untamed self, began to “bloom with the abundant flowers” (Is 35:1-6)of self-acceptance, forgiveness, and inner serenity.

Looking back at my life, I find that there were certain trigger events that could either make or break a pilgrim’s resolve. Said trigger events, are, of themselves, clear milestones in the path to growth. One such trigger event happened just as I was just moving into the sixth full year of priestly ministry. Young and relatively brimming with energy, I was getting bored with the routinary and functionary job I was doing as school administrator. I wanted more. I longed to be given the chance to go for further studies, a desire that, in my low self-esteem, I could not verbalize before superiors. Just when I felt I was at my lowest ebb, just when I was dreaming of something big to please my parents and do them proud, the news that my mother, who lived 9,000 miles away, had suddenly died at a relatively young age of 63, came to me. The jarring news immediately plunged me to a deep emotional crisis. It opened up issues related to my ambivalent relationship and insecure attachment to my mother. It was a case of my inner world collapsing under the weight of clashing emotions that see-sawed from grief to anger, from dejection to disappointment, and from deep sadness to self-pity. The event released a Pandora’s box of issues I never knew, let alone acknowledge, I had. It was to be another important and significant milestone that dotted my pilgrim’s path to wholeness.

The crisis that the loss of my mother engendered led me years later to investigate a little more closely on the role of my family of origin in the development of who I became. Owing to a sense of abandonment, and belonging as I did to a big family where parental attention had to be divided between work and children, I realized that what Jordan (1999) refers to as “self-atonement procedures” as far as I was concerned had to do with achievement, being over-responsible, reliable and self-reliant. Behind the façade of responsibility and fidelity to duty, however, there lay a subtle film of anger, resentment, and a conflicted, ambivalent, and paradoxical intimacy with my mother. No wonder I could be overcritical and impatient on many occasions with her, even as I nurtured tender and loving feelings for her. Instead of naming and acknowledging the stories I really told myself, stories of “abandonment,” I blamed her and projected on her my unacknowledged inadequacies and insecurities. The depth and intensity of my grief when she died suddenly became a wake-up call for me to work towards a reframing of my personal story. My mother ended up being my most influential mentor in life and in death, and her passing a major milestone in the pathway that gradually led to my coming home to myself.

Work, Duty, Responsibility, and Self-Differentiation

The immediately foregoing milestone neatly dovetails with the next, which is the experience of being in control, in power, and saddled with a big responsibility. After I eventually earned my ecclesiastical graduate degree abroad, I was suddenly catapulted to leadership roles, something that I knew I needed in order to prove my self-worth to my parents, and again, do them proud. But by then, my mother had died. Even so, I found myself pouring out myself totally to my work. I did more than was expected of me. I found immense fulfillment in achieving, in performing, in keeping myself in the limelight. Ten years after, with the shift in top leadership, from which inner circle I also had to step down, I saw myself as one of those whom Nouwen (1981)calls the “filled and unfulfilled” (p. 23). I realized that my story was that of an “abandoned” child driven by an inner resolve never to abandon my charge, my community, my responsibility, and my multiple tasks and commitments. At the end of ten long and, by any standard, highly productive years, I felt limp and depleted like an empty sack, angry and disappointed that no one was there to appreciate all the work I put into my role. It was once again, a wake-up call for me to do an overhaul of my “self-definition”(Jordan, 1999, p. 78). It was clear I had not, in the words of structural family therapists (Friedman, 1985), adequately “differentiated” myself from my family of origin, as was obvious in the level of anxiety I felt about not coming up short with my tasks and responsibilities. Ten years being in the thick of things, while at the same time being on the thin ice of self-definition was too big and influential a milestone to be glossed over. Once again, a crisis eventually became an impetus, and a painful one at that, for growth and further development.

Being Still and Still Moving: Integration via Spirituality

My adventure up mountains in long multi-day treks started when I was bored as a young priest. Basically afraid of heights, I took up the challenge, and formed a climbing group. With the energy that came from the anxiety that a less-than-ideal sense of self-definition engendered, I found fulfillment and escape in long distance and cross-country treks. Paradoxically, I learned the art of being still while still moving in the famous words of Eliot (1971). Close to nature, awed and interiorly silenced by the majesty of God’s creation, I found connectivity with the God on whom I also projected my disappointments and resentments. As I trudged and traipsed mostly in exterior silence, I fell interiorly still. I was blessed with endless hours of reflection and introspection. I learned the art of communing with God through the awesome majesty of creation, whose presence showed itself through brilliant light by day, and cold, howling winds by night. Poetry, prayer, and presence before the pure, pristine beauty of the world-mothering God became integral to my expanding spirituality. I was “being still,” but “still moving.” I may have been a “pseudo-poet” who gloried in the words borrowed from others, but I was on the way to becoming authentically faithful to who I was, less driven to serve and worship what Jordan (1986) calls the “idols” that I have created for myself. At about the time I got the passion of trekking, I started the habit of going regularly for short reflective walks early in the morning, whilst the rest of the world around me was just awakening.

Peregrinatio as God-Think

Both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures are redolent with stories of journeys and setting out on foot. Abraham, for one, was told to “go forth … to a land that [I] will show you” (Gn 12:1). He was even told to contemplate nature and see “the dust of the earth,” “the length and breadth of the land,” (Gn 13:16-17), and to “look up at the sky and count the stars” (Gn 15:5), and see in them signs of God’s forthcoming abundant blessings. His descendants, led by Moses, wandered through the desert for forty years, en route to the promised land (Ex 16 ff). In both cases, the journey was clearly one that was per agrum ad sacrum, a pilgrimage fraught with as much promise as pain, delight as well as disappointment, fulfillment along with failure.

But it was precisely the “dark, cold and empty desolation” that led to “a further union, a deeper communion.” The journey itself, the process, the moving forward, are what brought God’s people to inward stillness, that eventually convinced them of the veracity of God’s promises: “Fear not … I am your shield” (Gn 15:1). It was their “still moving” that led them to “be still.” It was what made them think and see for themselves the glory of God understood as presence, as shekinah, as dwelling in their midst. Theological reflection, as these stories tell us, is, at bottom, first and foremost, God-think, before it becomes God-talk. And both happen only when we are willing to go through the reflective and prayerful movement called peregrinatio.

Conclusion

Solvitur Ambulando: Journeying with the Risen Christ to Emmaus

We have now come back to where we started. All the milestones presented above speak of an ongoing journey. My path as a pilgrim-learner is dotted by a growing list of such milestones, some more important and significant than others, not one of them any less growth-enhancing and purifying in the long run. Each and every one points to the reality of life as a calling to move on, a calling to journey on through the rough fields and uncharted pathways that may even be filled with grief, disappointment, and a whole lot of “unresolved questions.” But the story of the grieving disciples on the way to Emmaus (Lk 24:13-23), reflecting as they walked, tells us that all along, the Risen Christ was journeying with them. They set out on foot dejected and forlorn. Little did they realize that, as they walked and as they talked, as they prayed, reflected, and swapped stories, a new chapter of God’s story – the story of God’s indwelling and salvific presence to His people in Christ, was being written. The two disciples’ grief and sorrow, like mine, were becoming major milestones in the ever expanding pathway toward fullness and fulfillment in Christ.

St. Augustine, the great mischief-maker turned mystic and saint, ever so earthly, ever so practical, one whose God-think fueled so much God-talk down through centuries of systematic theological reflection, a saint as worldly as he is heavenly, a man who traversed his own version of “per agrum ad sacrum,” who single-handedly became mentor and model to so many, including myself, had a flash of divine inspiration when he said: “solvitur ambulando” (Cousineau, 1998, p. 104). Things are solved while walking.

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