Seeking Clarity
I can’t seem to separate the phrase seeking clarity from the Indigo Girls’ song…before I know it, I’m thinking about Rasputin and beards and solace and mountains...to the point that the other weekend, as I was surrounded by absolute silence and beauty next to a lake, surrounded by centuries-old trees, completely by myself, I sighed out a prayer for clarity and found myself humming the lyrics:
“I'm trying to tell you something 'bout my life,
Maybe give me insight between black and white”
I like the black and whites because I, like many perfectionists, am an all-or-nothing person. So the idea of seeking clarity in the space between black and white feels counterintuitive at best, dead wrong at worst. My therapist Amanda is always calling me out on this, but I respond, “Amanda, vaccine or no vaccine, mask or anti-mask, liberal or conservative...we live in a world of polarization, of extremes.” She scribbles something down on her notepad, and I can tell that she’s tallying up the points I’ve made in the margins, in the score I imagine that she keeps as I try to win therapy.
But there are black and whites to battle in my own life, outside of the public arenas of politics and school board decisions. Just this month, I’ve had conversations with three separate moms who have all echoed the same angst:
I feel so bad when I choose to do ____ and not be with my kids,
and when I’m with my kids, I feel so bad for not doing ____.
(Fill in the blank with your passion of choice)
All or nothing. Black and white.
This confusion, this lack of clarity, was a primary driver of my plans last weekend. I left Eric and the kids behind, checked myself into a simple guesthouse, run by a Benedictine order of monks, and I found myself with 48-hours of silence. Upon my first hour of arrival, I sat myself down lakeside, sighing out prayers for clarity.
How much time should I be writing? What about the side-hustle of social media in the realities of the 2021 publishing world? What about my kids? They’re getting old so quickly. And friends? Neighbors? Family? How do I possibly split up my time and energy to give to all of these things what they need? What they deserve?
I sat in silence for a few minutes, with these questions swirling around me...until I heard it:
faint honks, coming from behind me, growing louder with each second. And then, directly overhead, a flock of geese, V-formation on point, flying towards the far end of the lake. Within the next five minutes, two more flocks did the same, and I laughed and thought of the simplicity of geesehood.
Honk. Make Vs. Fly together. Find water and food. Mate.
I felt something like jealousy.
I spent a lot of time that weekend reading through Psalm 73...it’s a popular one, with perennial favorites like, “Whom have I in heaven but you." and "God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever."
But what caught my attention was something a little earlier in the chapter:
“But when I thought how to understand this,
it seemed to me a wearisome task,
until I went into the sanctuary of God.”
It struck me that while i resonated deeply with the idea that I am wearied by what I do not understand, I didn’t know what going to the sanctuary of God actually meant. For me, the silence I was surrounded by, the swaying pines, the wind in the cottonwoods, often feels more like sanctuary to me than a Sunday morning at church, in which I am constantly reminding my children to keep their masks up, handing out a snack every four minutes, and making sure each of my kids is amply supplied with coloring books, crayons, and water.
I looked it up.
Sanctuary means a place of refuge or safety.
But it’s also, a place apart from our everyday life.
Charles Spurgeon puts it this way:
"The motions of the planets appear most discordant from this world which is itself a planet; they appear as 'progressive, retrograde, and standing still;' but could we fix our observatory in the sun, which is the centre of the system, we should perceive all the planets moving in perfect circle around the head of the great solar family. "
I think in this case, sanctuary is a place that invites us to shift our point of view, the telescope on the sun’s surface, a place from which the disorder in our life actually looks like peace, a place in which we are reminded that the God who outlives cottonwoods actually has a pulse on our tiny sparrow lives...that He sees what has been before and what will be, and to him, it makes sense.
He has ultimate clarity.
What I felt in the moment that I read this was a very strong pull at my spirit:
Do you trust me?
Do I trust that God has ordered the planets and has ordered my days? Do I trust that there is truth amidst the blacks and whites, the alls and nothings? Does the clarity of God extend into the muddy middle of pouring out my life for my kids and pouring words onto a page for others?
Do I trust him?
The other day, my kids and I went on a nearly all-day outing. It’s September in Minnesota, which means when you wake up, you want socks and cozy blankets, and by mid-afternoon, it feels hot enough to go swimming.
We were preparing and packing and dressing for the day, and my daughter came down in fuzzy socks, warm sweatpants, a hooded sweatshirt, and her go-to Wonder Woman winter hat. As I made sandwiches and bagged up fruit, I told her to head back upstairs and grab a pair of shorts and a thinner long-sleeve layer. You know, typical mom stuff.
She protested, and proceeded to have a small tantrum, slamming windows closed around our house because MOOOOM, it’s SOOO cold in here!! and telling me how she would never want to wear shorts today and how she didn’t want to go back upstairs and get more clothes and how could I possibly ask her to do such a thing.
I (mostly) stayed calm. I explained how, just like yesterday, the day would warm up, and she’d be too hot in the clothes she was currently wearing. She continued to protest, and I realized... she doesn’t trust me.
She doesn't believe that I have planned out this day. That I have looked ahead at the weather. That I have lived 31 more years than she has and know that this is just how September days go. I have clarity. She does not.
Eventually, I convinced/forced her to go back upstairs and pack some different layers, which she did begrudgingly. And she was sheepishly thankful at 2 pm, when she hid in the back of our car to change out of her pants and into shorts. I tried not to look smug. You know, typical mom stuff.
I left the monks last weekend and drove home with a little more clarity than I had before. Mostly, words like quiet, rest, slow are flying overhead, in perfect V-formation, pointing the way, though the destination is unclear, and I continually have to slow down my wings and remind myself to glide once in a while. I am trying, once a day, to slip into a quiet sanctuary - sometimes while I walk the dog towards the part of the creek where the cottonwoods grow biggest, sometimes standing over the kitchen counter in the morning in the 3 minutes I squeeze in before I hear the kids’ footsteps thumping out of their beds and heading down the stairs. I am trying to get that that higher vantage point, the one of clarity and seeing, the one of trust.
As I seek to carve out my own sanctuary moments in the everyday of cereal and laundry and Candyland and dishes, I want to know what it looks like for you to go to the sanctuary...where and how are you finding clarity these days?
