I won’t mince any words. The past six weeks have run the gamut from delightful to downright awful.

In early December, I woke up with heart-pounding, stomach-clenching anxiety like I haven’t had since comp exams.

And it continued. And continued. I finally called my dear friend Kimberlee and she packed me up to her house, put me on the couch, and fed me dinner.  Jack and Jane drew me pictures, which I have taped above my sink. A few days before all hell broke loose, I had waxed poetic to Jack about the Book of Kells and showed him pictures of the illuminated manuscript on-line. He drew me an illuminated picture of my name. I could not see it for the tears.

Later, Kimberlee and I sat by candle-light late into the evening and talked about dreams and regrets and hopes. A healing, holy moment. For awhile the panic abated.

Yet over the next weeks, I continued to lose sleep, have migraines, and stomach aches.  The fear and trembling would strike at the oddest times, then disappear.

At one point, pacing around the living room where I’d had the worst of the panic, I kept saying, “I don’t want to go there again.”

But as clear as can be, I sensed a surprising response: “But Susan, it is a door to your heart, to love and compassion for others. Don’t look at it like a pit you can’t escape, but a door to my redemption.”

Pit or door. Idol or icon.

Suffering can become an idol. We flee from it in terror or sacrifice to it in hopes of relief.  We don’t want to ever go through it again, so we build the walls to keep it out. We move away, or hide away. We offer it tokens to buy an uneasy peace. It can become a petty god, demanding our lives in submission. Idols stop our gaze at themselves–there seems to be nothing more to life.

Or, suffering can be an icon. Never as an end in itself, never to be sought, but when experienced, walked through as a door into a wider reality, a reality where hearts of stone can break and reveal the flesh of Christ’s own love.

A heart that feels grief can also find love painfully present. When I focused on the love, the door opened wide.

I stopped at the exact spot on the carpet where, the night before, grief had filled me,  a beige shag abyss of panic, and realized that I never need flee or appease the suffering again. I could simply step into it…and through. I continued to feel the panic in my very marrow and cry out of the depths with the psalmist, but I did not fear it. God could and would redeem the experience. Every experience. No matter what. And not for me alone, but for others, too. The icon beckoned me beyond.

“God comforts us, not to make us comfortable, but to make us comforters.” –J. Henry Jowett

Or as scripture tells us:

“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort,  who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ.” –2 Corinthians 1:3-5

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(Not long after this, I got on a plane, weary and spent, to visit my parents for Christmas. During the two wonderful weeks there, my heart began to ease through their loving care and conversation. And a trip to the hospital revealed that, whatever else may be going on, I have acid reflux, which can have very similar symptoms to heart-pounding panic. The treatment helped and I finally slept. Thanks be to God!)

This year, I’m trying a radical (for me) practice: not journaling. After 26 years and thousands of pages, it felt like time to invest that writing energy into my dissertation, blog, and other projects, as well as to take time to go back through the journals to see if there were seed ideas I could develop. I will be occasionally posting excerpts, such as the one below.

From July 23, 2002:

I used to want to be a saint and now I say–

I’ll do what I can in the life I’ve been given, no more, and with no grandiose goal.

Knowing when to say ‘enough’ and rest is more important than spiritual olympics.

God sits with me now and points out the many different colors of green in the trees and that is enough.

Just being present to where I am is enough.

Just to hear the cry of the loon is enough.

Life resolutions from Clyde Kilby (1902-1986), professor of English Literature at Wheaton College and one of the first scholars on the life and writings of CS Lewis and Inklings:

1. At least once every day I shall look steadily up at the sky and remember that I, a consciousness with a conscience, am on a planet traveling in space with wonderfully mysterious things above and about me.

2. Instead of the accustomed idea of a mindless and endless evolutionary change to which we can neither add nor subtract, I shall suppose the universe guided by an Intelligence which, as Aristotle said of Greek drama, requires a beginning, a middle and an end. I think this will save me from the cynicism expressed by Bertrand Russell before his death, when he said: “There is darkness without, and when I die there will be darkness within. There is no splendour, no vastness anywhere, only triviality for a moment, and then nothing.”

3. I shall not fall into the falsehood that this day, or any day, is merely another ambiguous and plodding twenty-four hours, but rather a unique event, filled, if I so wish, with worthy potentialities. I shall not be fool enough to suppose that trouble and pain are wholly evil parentheses in my existence but just as likely ladders to be climbed toward moral and spiritual [woman]hood.

4. I shall not turn my life into a thin straight line which prefers abstractions to reality. I shall know what I am doing when I abstract, which of course I shall often have to do.

5. I shall not demean my own uniqueness by envy of others. I shall stop boring into myself to discover what psychological or social categories I might belong to. Mostly I shall simply forget about myself and do my work.

6. I shall open my eyes and ears. Once every day I shall simply stare at a tree, a flower, a cloud, or a person. I shall not then be concerned at all to ask what they are but simply be glad that they are. I shall joyfully allow them the mystery of what Lewis calls their “divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic” existence.

7. I shall sometimes look back at the freshness of vision I had in childhood and try, at least for a little while, to be, in the words of Lewis Carroll, the “child of the pure unclouded brow, and dreaming eyes of wonder.”

8. I shall follow Darwin’s advice and turn frequently to imaginative things such as good literature and good music, preferably, as Lewis suggests, an old book and timeless music.

9. I shall not allow the devilish onrush of this century to usurp all my energies but will instead, as Charles Williams suggested, “fulfill the moment as the moment.” I shall try to live well just now because the only time that exists is now.

10. Even if I turn out to be wrong, I shall bet my life on the assumption that this world is not idiotic, neither run by an absentee landlord, but that today, this very day, some stroke is being added to the cosmic canvas that in due course I shall understand with joy as a stroke made by the architect who calls himself Alpha and Omega.

The Benedictine Latin motto, ora et labora, means pray and work.

In contrast to the later religious orders which were often called active  for their focus on ministry beyond the Order’s walls,  monasticism placed daily psalmic prayer, the Liturgy of the Hours, as the cornerstone of the monk’s life. Interspersed between these short times of communal prayer were periods of labor. These monks were not inactive, and many Benedictine monasteries became centers of education and scholarship, but they chose to focus their practice on a rhythm of life delineated by the walls of the community and time itself.

I’m Benedictine in my heart of hearts. The balance of Benedict’s Rule, trying to integrate these two ways of life into one resonates.

The more I reflect on it, the more I realize that prayer and work are one in the same pursuit, each providing the necessary balance to the other.

Without prayer, work becomes an idol. It ceases to have a deeper purpose than financial gain, affirmation, or simply a way to pass the time. Prayer connects work to a larger tapestry and at times, opens the laborer to glimpse the larger vision of the Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.

Prayer can refresh labor that is simply wearisome, but it is not only refreshment. Prayer is also the door to motivation for work. Recently, I’ve found that my work has suffered because I was not listening in prayer–I was only using it for good feelings, a shallow peace, and to shore up my own sense of self as a prayerful person and a good Christian.

When prayer becomes too complacent, labor acts as the balance. Work gives feet to prayer, makes it live and breathe rather than remain a good idea, a romantic pursuit, a performance mask for approval, or safe harbor of peaceful feelings.  Benedictines believe that if prayer is dry, empty or lifeless, then it’s not the prayer practice that is the trouble, but the labor surrounding it.

Eugene Peterson describes the prayer that is done “on our knees” as the precursor to prayer. Prayer for him actually begins when we stand up and start working. It is not that prayer-on-our-knees is unimportant, but that it must be woven into the fabric of our lives of labor–whatever the work is before us in this moment.

The desert fathers, those early pre-Benedictines of the 4th and 5th centuries, tell a story to describe the relationship between prayer and work. Abba Anthony was dealing with acedia, a listless apathy and boredom that was affecting his life. He asked for help and the Lord gave him a vision of a monk working (these monks wove baskets for a living) and then taking time to pray, then going back to working, then praying. Abba Anthony realized that the healing for his acedia was live into a rhythm of prayer and work.

This all sounds beautiful in writing. But the lived practice of ora et labora is both the easiest thing of all and the hardest. It is easy because it is simply saying to whatever is before you right now: “You are my work,” and then do it alternating with prayer, until the sun goes down. It is hardest because the work may require more of us than we believe we have to give.

For me, the work before me is my dissertation and living in the solitude of this labor when so many around me have families. When I refuse to do the work before me, I go out looking for whatever I can to get me out of the solitude and into a sense of belonging. In the end, I do not pray or work when I’m resisting the work before me.

Others may have work that calls them into daily, constant relationship–such as raising children. The idealized image of the monk in silence and solitude praying seems worlds apart from family life with little ones. But the monk in solitude has no better chance of praying than a mother with toddlers. The challenges are simply different.

Prayer itself is an intimate response to the Spirit. Solitude or community, work or rest, silence or noise, these are simply contexts in which we find ourselves, through which the Spirit uniquely speaks to us, and from which we respond. What matters is whether we bring whatever our labor is into prayer, and bring prayer into our labor. When the labor or the prayer is hard, exhausting, painful, or lonely, when we wonder if there was a better or easier path we could have taken, this is when it is critical to embrace the rhythm.

With Abba Anthony, today (and tomorrow and on), I will weave my dissertation basket, pray, and then weave some more.  Writing this blog post has been my prayer this morning.

And as the Spirit weaves in me, I will look for the Advent of Christ born in this work.

But even if I do not yet see, I will continue to weave. And pray. And weave.

In my prayer today, I pray for you, dear readers, as you weave your work. Would you pray for me?

Hungry and tired, she waited for the campus bus, the visible world reduced to the lamp light’s reach. The chill made her burrow deeper into her jacket, the library’s warmth only a memory in the foggy twilight.

Decisions yet to be made pressed in upon her. She worried at all the questions as she worried at her frayed sleeve, plucking threads and watching the fabric unravel. A familiar sting pricked her eyes.

Clenching her teeth, she shoved her hands back into her pockets, roughly setting her thoughts against the ache and her eyes to look for distant headlights.

And there, on the sidewalk, she saw them, just at the edge between sight and obscurity:

Paw prints.

Large paw prints, like some gigantic creature only meant for the wilds had stepped through paint and then sprinted into the darkening fog.

She half-turned away. It was cold. Late. I’ll take a closer look tomorrow, she decided. 

Pinpricks of bus lights cut through the fog. Supper and bed beckoned. Warmth and sleep wooed.

Yet her eyes kept finding their way back to the prints. Even in the fog, she could just make out more marking a path into the distance. A little spark of adventure flickered to life in her heart. A little less weariness weighed down her limbs.

She hardly noticed stepping out from the certainty of the stop.

She followed, up and around, down and back, street lamps lighting her way, one moment certain she had lost the trail only to find it again further up and further in, until the paw prints finally stopped.

And she stopped; breathing deep from the chase, hope of a deeper magic rising in her heart.

At the end of the trail, scrawled joyfully on the pavement, were two shimmering words from her childhood, catching her up in the Story, breaking past all her doubts, filling the ache, until her heart spilled over in laughter and tears and laughter again:

ASLAN LIVES!!

(And edited repost from the archives, in honor of CS Lewis Day, and based on Deborah Smith Douglas’ mention of finding paw prints on Duke University’s campus and following them to the joyful words.  She writes: “I simply, with all my heart, recognized the transforming truth of the affirmation. Aslan is alive. Resurrection happens. Christ is risen.  In a single leap, Aslan had bounded past the watchful dragons of my mind and all the intervening years to return…Because my whole childhood rose up to greet the Lion, my tenuously sophisticated young-adult self had no defenses against the saving “allelujah!” truth of that moment.” –Weavings, Jan/Feb 1997, 21)

For each day, from now until Epiphany, I’ve thought of one thing I can do to practice joy and gratitude, and to give love,  putting it on a calendar that draws on ancient Advent and Christmas traditions.

In the 6th century, the Celtic Christians celebrated Advent during the 40 days before Christmas, as a mirror to the period of Lent before Easter.  In this age of  blurring of holy-days and consumerism, I like the idea of starting Advent earlier, so that Thanksgiving is included, but also so there can be a longer, more intentional preparation for Christ’s coming.

Another tradition from around the 6th century (and probably earlier) was the “O” antiphons. An antiphon, from the Latin antiphona, meaning sounding against, was a repeated line of scripture used as bookends to the psalms in daily prayer and the Eucharist. The antiphon was a prayer “sound-byte,” capturing the most important aspect of the reading, helping those gathered remember through repetition. The “O” antiphons highlight a scriptural name of Christ and offer a jumping off point for reflection. Most people would recognize a version of these antiphons as the verses of the Advent carol O Come, O Come Emmanuel. They are still prayed in many churches–as they have been for more than 1500 years–from December 17 to December 23.

Finally, Christmas seems to end abruptly on December 26th in our consumer-culture celebration. Another lost tradition marks the Twelve Days from Christmas to Epiphany.  Epiphany means appearance or manifestation and remembers the angels, Magi and shepherds visiting Jesus,  as well as Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan–the public revelation that he is God’s Son.  The period from December 25 to January 6th is an ideal time for reflecting on the Light that has come into the world with the birth of Christ.

Pulling these three traditions together, I’ve created a calendar of ideas for living each day intentionally and joyfully.  Here is a PDF version. Please feel free to make copies and share with your friends and church.

The ability to give and experience love and joy doesn’t just happen, it needs to be stretched and strengthened. And over time, the capacity to love and to joy increases.

Let the Holy Spirit lead!