In times both “normal” and stressful, and I think this current economic climate qualifies as stressful, to put it mildly, it’s important to pay attention to the rhythms that we are moving to, consciously and unconsciously.

A word from the natural world makes this clear: “Entrainment.” It refers to the tendency in nature for beings to gradually start to move together… whether it’s crickets making sounds at the same time, women in college dorms whose monthly cycles start to align, clocks whose pendulums start to match swings. The point is, according to Sue Monk Kidd in her classic book “When the Heart Waits, “we tend to align ourselves with the rhythm and pace around us.”

So if the people around you, if the climate around you, are frantic, well… it’s only natural for you to catch a whiff of that and become frantic yourself. I fall into this so easily; it takes a diet of only one beloved Paul Krugman NYTimes editorial on current economics and I start to go up the walls, perhaps rightfully so.

Amidst so many amazing feelings after the election, I am still struck by one unexpected one: a strong sense of light and space, a weight lifted.

Until the election happened, I was not fully aware of how much psychic space was taken up by the day-to-day iterations, the ups and downs, the attacks, the talking heads. This nervous and nerve-wracking anticipation, while par for the course, provokes anxiety and  leaves us with little space or energy for anything else.

And now. Amidst all that has shifted, all the ways God has said, “Behold, I am doing a new thing, do you not perceive it?” I feel a new space and energy to take up work, life, relationships... all in a new way. I don’t know what this will look like yet, but the invitation is palpable.

The other day I had the occasion to take Jet Blue from JFK to Syracuse, not the usual set-up for a theophany, the appearance of something of God, but as the Lotto folks say, hey, you never know.

I was vaguely aware that Jet Blue was building a badly needed new terminal at JFK, but did not realize that the day I traveled was the very first day the terminal was open… indeed, I was there for its first few hours.

Even not knowing this, I was palpably aware I had arrived in a charged, special space. Everything was shiny, new and felt like some other city far away, and most likely from the future. (Or if not from the future, then Dubai.)

It’s true: For about the last 15 years I have regularly sought refuge from so-called normal life at retreat centers. Ever since an Episcopal priest and future mentor looked at me kindly but shrewdly, amidst a crumbling personal life, and said, “You need to go to this monastery I know,” well… that was that. And, however incongruous that advice may have seemed (monasteries were pretty far from my realm of possibility then) she was utterly right, and I have been going to them (and to convents) ever since.

Why? Because there is some sort of re-calibration that happens in places dedicated to prayer and silence. You are folded into a container designed for rest and for listening and for God, and you cannot help but drink from it.

(Note to readers: Many centers are near NYC and on public transportation, too. Many take individuals looking to get away. Drop me an email for more info)

Greetings from a silent retreat in Northern California, an annual pilgrimage for my husband and myself. Maybe it's the impossibly golden light, or the clear air, or the sheer blessing of just walking here, but this quote from a recent issue of "Sojourners" magazine that I read on the trip has lodged in my heart. It's by the wonderful writer Richard Rohr, author and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico:

"Most of the world's religions have become 'belonging systems' and moral systems, but we lost the very transformative and revelatory gift of time and grace itself. Probably they are the same thing. Time is grace—always... Sometime, we all need to ask, "Is my life passing by without me? Am I so caught up in my life dramas and daily situations, that I miss the Big Life, the One Life, the Shared Life that is floating and immense beneath it all?"

I was traveling last week and brought along a new book by a favorite author, Jungian analyst Robert Johnson. It’s called “Living Your Unlived Life,” and at one point he gives the original definition of the word “heresy.”

This potent word, what we think of as a large sin against God or against some rules of the faith, originally meant “to be off balance.” In Johnson’s words, “to overrate one side or the other of a basic equilibrium.”

There is something both very forgiving and very challenging in this classic definition. For one thing, we are all heretics, and the invitation is to be aware of my heresy on any given day. Not in a narcissistic, self-flagellating way, but as an exercise in greater consciousness and awareness.

Am I going too fast or too slow? Being too negative or too positive? Too stubborn or too pliable? Where am I living (read: clinging) to one way of being or thinking that, however comfortable and familiar, is ultimately something I should outgrow? What unlived parts of me are tired of living in the basement and are starting to pound on the door and come into the house?

Often I see a quote, theological or otherwise, that gets me thinking, and then spinning some more, and then one thing leads to another, and... you get the idea. A lot of good noodling, but maybe not much else.

Other times, however, the quote is short, pithy. And the attendant reflection it demands needs to be as honed as the quote itself. 

These are the scary quotes; the direct questions. Like Jesus saying: “Who do you say that I am?”

So, in the spirit of brevity, not something my blogs are known for, here is a favorite, front-and-center, look-at-your-life quote:

Before We Die

“All people should strive to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.” -James Thurber

True, extreme relocation story: Some good friends of ours, Nancy and Marv, were living in coastal Maine. It was a dark and stormy night (of course), and some strangers, three women, came knocking at their door. (Sounds like a scene from “Macbeth,” I realize.) Our friends write a contemplative journal, and the women were subscribers. Our friends invited them in; the women had a mission: they had come from rural Virginia to say—you need to move to our town and work and write there. And so it was; our friends ended up moving to that part of Virginia.

I remember being stunned when I first heard Nancy tell this story. I said something along the lines of how extraordinary, or how rare, or unique such a visitation and resultant move are. She looked at me and said, actually, rather than thinking of that knocking as a rare event, they “depend” on events like that. That stunned me even more.

Fall is upon us, with its invitations (if not insistence) of new season and fresh starts. The eternal school year inside us is all about forward movement, a pilgrimage, a setting out into a new year that in some deep-rooted way, begins now.

The Bible is filled with folk called to leave old land behind, to set out, not knowing, but trusting. I love the mysterious idea of pilgrimage: part voluntary, part kicking and screaming, with all its elements of uncertainty, doubt, and fear... and its promise of radical amazement, too.

Pilgrimage can apply to our own sense of self, to our relationships, to our work lives. We set out on them when the old ways no longer work, when we need to be stripped down to something essential and core. And to find that essence, we have to leave the old ways and venture into wilderness space. As a client said to me tonight, with sudden feeling: “I must have some new conversations!” As in deeper topics, newer, truer ways of being, of connecting. That too is a pilgrimage cry.