“You are on a sacred journey,” she said to me.
“Sacred journey?” I thought. “This doesn’t feel sacred. It feels chaotic, haphazard. It feels like falling apart.”
I understood my friend to be referring to the season I was then in. I was doing some inner work. It was a time of changes in my understanding of myself and those around me. A sacred journey.
The reminder of the holiness of that season helped me to tolerate with more patience the difficult moments. I stopped being anxious about putting myself back together, and instead allowed God to do that according to Her wisdom. Knowing it was a sacred journey helped me approach both my experiences and my self with greater compassion.
These transformative seasons, I have found, are beautiful and wondrous … in retrospect. On the other side of the change, when things are put together and feel right once again. When the lesson has been discerned and I am living into it. When less of all that has happened is a mystery. After my heart has been broken and is beginning to mend.
The process of transformation, of change, can be hard. It is hard because it often involves what theologian James Alison describes as “a joyous breaking of heart.”1 This is a breaking open of my heart. It can be hard because my defenses come down, and those things I’ve built up to keep myself separate from you are dismantled. Before God I stand, vulnerable.
Through this process I become “more easily able to relax into being loved.”2 My heart opens to accept myself and others more fully. Some of my dehumanizing tendencies are transformed, and I am able to relate to you as a fellow sibling before God.
What a journey.
Wait.
Isn’t this whole life of ours sacred? What is to say this part is sacred and this other part is not? How can I even recognize the holy as it’s happening? Those things which appear absolutely mundane – doing the laundry, taking the dog for a walk – can be some of my greatest spiritual teachers.
The whole of this life is a sacred journey. I do not need to be in the midst of a great transformation for this to be true. God is present for all of it. Every blessed minute of this life contains opportunities for me to learn and live into greater love.
And as my friend’s reminder helped me through a difficult time, remembering every day that this journey is sacred, helps me. I am, every day, better able to tolerate with more patience the difficult moments. My anxiety lessens, and I allow God’s wisdom to guide me. I have greater compassion for my experiences, for myself, for you. That is a holy thing any time, any day.
Friends, fellow siblings before God, remember this:
You are on a sacred journey.
Amen.
Rachael
1 From the Introduction: Alison, James. Faith Beyond Resentment. The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2001.
2 Ibid.