by Stephen W. Smith
Note: Many of you who will read this will not be familiar with our own journey of moving to North Carolina after living in Colorado for twenty years: after founding a global ministry, travelling extensively and working way too much! The following insights and confession come only after enduring the long pandemic, social isolation and navigating my own inner world at each turn of this new path we are walking these days. I hope my insights might shed light on the path for some of you. (SWS 6/16/20)
It has taken ten months for John O’Donohue’s poignant poem, “For One Who is Exhausted” to find a landing spot in my soul. (Find the poem at the end of this article). I read that poem a hundred times—but for other people. It was my work to read that poem. It always seemed to help others. But I did not let it help me. I didn’t think that “I” would need this poem. I was wrong—dead wrong.
I’ve been busy transitioning. I’ve been tirelessly repositioning a ministry we founded—or so I thought. I’ve been helping a staff to find their own voices and places to do their own calling. I didn’t have time to be tired. There was a Board to manage, new people to onboard and boxes to pack and unpack. It was a whirlwind yet I had to be grounded, rooted and stay alive—so much depended on my staying alive to help everyone else, it seemed.
Then the Pandemic Hit
Then the pandemic hit. The pandemic interrupted our lives and forced us to enter empty time—a space we often ignore or are afraid of all together. Who wants their address to say, “Empty Time Lives Here!” Not me. Having been shaped by a theology and work ethos where everything moves up and to the right, the pandemic shattered all my gauges to inform me of how I was really doing. Our hectic schedules; our unattended stress; the increasing weight of all we are doing—it just has a way of sneaking up on us. It snuck up on me and kicked me in the butt. It has brought me to my knees—a place and a posture I resisted. Through the interruption of my life by the pandemic, I found myself feeling exhausted without having done much of anything at all. “Exhaustion.” That very word—I disdained it. Like O’Donohue reminds us, “Weariness invades your spirit” and “gravity begins falling inside you, dragging down every bone.” But the more I read the word, the more it became the address of my soul. This word does describe the state of my soul. I do not want to admit it but I am now confessing it here and now.
At first, I thought it might be the mild depression that everyone around me was saying they felt-- because our normal lives had been disrupted and we could not do what we always had been doing to bring us back to life. There was no church to go to; no songs to sing; no dinner groups to enjoy. It was a growing sense of empty time—that space where there was nothing to do and nothing that could be done. All of this isolation—I think it has done a number on us all and we have not yet realized the costs we will all pay in our soul due to moving on to higher ground.
It was at this moment that I picked up O’Donohue’s poem, which I had read in my talks and spiritual direction sessions to hundreds of people over the years. As the old saying goes, “When the student is ready, the teacher will come.” The teacher came in John O’Donohue’s poem and I may be finally learning a great lesson. This lesson feels as necessary as learning that two plus two equals four. When I learned how to add, I did not take into account how adding more and more would eventually kill me. The poem somehow became a sort of national anthem for the many of us who were tired, worn out and burned out on religion, job or a relationship—even a relationship with God. For most people I am hearing from, God seems further off and away than at any other time in their lives. But few can admit it now for some reason.
In July 2019, I had to do an audit of my travel and work for the previous year. In looking back over my schedule and calendar, I discovered how I myself had violated the very principles I stood for as a soul care guy. So much was on my shoulders. I had to raise money, ask for donations; speak, manage and do my own work. But in the doing of my work, I saw that: I travelled way too much. I spoke way too much. I did too many retreats. I led too many events and I pressed on thinking I was being careful—assuring myself that I was indeed taking time off to recharge and reconnect. Gwen and I wrote a book together—my tenth book-- and all the residue of all of that giving out—all that water going out of my soul to other people—all the obligations, meetings, zoom calls and one on ones helped me run my life on empty. A collapse was imminent but I was blind to it.
The Pandemic Ushered Me Into Slow Time
The slow time through the pandemic uncovered how utterly tired I actually was. Bone tired. Cynical in heart where joy once flourished. Listless. Depressed. Alone. Filled with lament about nearly everything and everyone. Sleeping was hard. Everything was hard. Everyone was hard. Do I sound bitter? Well, let’s just add that to the long litany of my inner world adjectives then!
Then, we had to face some illusions of what we thought our new life was going to be like: living near family for the first time; being near our roots and finally not being so remote in where we lived and how we did our life. The very day the moving truck arrived in our new city, my sister had a medical emergency and has still not recovered. She will not recover. It’s been a slow, long walk to witness her physical, emotional, mental withering. It’s been draining beyond what I ever imagined. To grieve a person’s death before they die is hard work and heavy lifting. When one is in transition, one rarely plans for so many interruptions. But as the song says, “Life is what happens to you when, you’re making plans.”
Nothing has turned out like I once thought and dreamed. We perhaps could have managed all this change fine…but the damn pandemic screwed up so much, didn’t it? Should I say, “damn?” Because in my work, some will unfriend me for saying what I’ve said here. But the word just fits.
It’s been a steady realignment of my illusions of starting life over in a new place, the hunt of finding a new church, a new geography where you are not known, do not belong and see yourself always on the outside. I told a pastor of a church we had visited, “I can’t seem to find the doors of this church to go through to get to the ‘inside.” He admitted, “Oh, we do a horrible job of welcoming new people.” I sigh because I am the outsider now. I kept silent but still wish I had really spoken my mind. Maybe, I thought, if I could just get “it” out, I’d finally feel better. But as we know, so few ask and fewer still ever really want to know what is really going on. I was caught in that lonely space with a forceful hurricane building strength within me.
As the pandemic took root, all my speaking events cancelled. All my retreats folded and all my plans disintegrated into emptiness. I began to come to my senses and feel the gravity inside and chose to just sit with it—to sit in it. As we say in the soul care world when you face a wall, “You can’t go around it. You can’t go under it. You can’t go over it. You HAVE to go through it.” So, I began to do the task of going through this wall—a wall that prevented me from getting to the other side.
Silence Has To Do What Only Silence Can Do
I walked up a long flight of stairs in our home to sit quietly in an upper room—of all places-- and allowed whatever was inside that needed to come out to leak out. Day after day, week after week, this was and continues to be my daily routine. I had to let silence do what only silence can do—to help me face my inner demons. It was for me, two hours of silence every day, where I could journal, pray, read— and do this all, ever so slowly because it’s the only way I could comprehend anything in my dull mind.
If I felt a trickle of hope inside—I began to cut through the emotional and mental thicket to find the source of that hope. One day, I told Gwen, “I’m still looking for Eden!” It was the best I could do to synthesize my emotional chaos and spiritual pilgrimage. Eden –as in the garden of innocence and beauty must still be somewhere in this world.
One day a week, in an attempt to have an “Mental Health Day” (and probably also to have an escape), I began to take a weekly drive up into the Blue Ridge mountains. I was lured there perhaps because of my soul missing the Colorado Rockies where I had lived for twenty years until now. In the thick rhododendron and blossoming mountain laurel, I saw glimpses of Eden. The shimmering mountain streams; the pristine forests and the choir of singing birds seem to be a clarion call to wake up from a long, long coma I had found myself in--a coma of so much change, transition and modification that I barely recognized my life.
Wendell Berry calls the forests, a “tall timbered choir.” I listened to the air move between the bass branches and the alto leaves. It was joy. It was a trickle of life. It was a good sign. I was not dead.
Ever so slowly, I am finding myself coming back to life. But first I needed to confess my sin. To be good to myself; to actually love myself, I need to confess another adulterous affair that gets applauded in my line of work: when one works hard, one is promoted not reprimanded.
I found the courage to one day tell Gwen my sin—my revelation—my epiphany: That I was exhausted. That I was bone tired. That I needed to rest.
Returning to Life
O’Donohue writes in the last stanza of his inspired poem, “Gradually you will return to yourself having learned a new respect for your heart and the joy that dwells far within slow time.” Each word of that verse is pregnant with meaning and promise for people like me who admit how tired they actually are; by life’s events and unresolved inner garbage that had to be dealt with.
The return to myself—I think that is still a ways off. I am finding that most men are not honest about how long it really takes them to transition from their work life to a slow life. When I asked my own brother, I got the most honest answer I have ever heard. I asked, “How long did it take you to transition off the hamster wheel of work to a new place of being “retired?” He did not hesitate when he simply said, “About seven years.”
So the good news is that, as of today, I am ten months into my own evolution. I have a ways to go—do you? I am recovering my life. Little by little and step by step. I am beginning again. I am always beginning again.
A Blessing For One Who Is Exhausted by John O’Donohue
When the rhythm of the heart becomes hectic,
Time takes on the strain until it breaks;
Then all the unattended stress falls in
On the mind like an endless, increasing weight,
The light in the mind becomes dim.
Things you could take in your stride before
Now become laboursome events of will.
Weariness invades your spirit.
Gravity begins falling inside you,
Dragging down every bone.
The tide you never valued has gone out.
And you are marooned on unsure ground.
Something within you has closed down;
And you cannot push yourself back to life.
You have been forced to enter empty time.
The desire that drove you has relinquished.
There is nothing else to do now but rest
And patiently learn to receive the self
You have forsaken for the race of days.
At first your thinking will darken
And sadness take over like listless weather.
The flow of unwept tears will frighten you.
You have travelled too fast over false ground;
Now your soul has come to take you back.
Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through.
Become inclined to watch the way of rain
When it falls slow and free.
Imitate the habit of twilight,
Taking time to open the well of colour
That fostered the brightness of day.
Draw alongside the silence of stone
Until its calmness can claim you.
Be excessively gentle with yourself.
Stay clear of those vexed in spirit.
Learn to linger around someone of ease
Who feels they have all the time in the world.
Gradually, you will return to yourself,
Having learned a new respect for your heart
And the joy that dwells far within slow time.