Leshem Shamayim: “For the sake of heaven.”

It seems these days I look to academics for redemption of a life I wanted to dream up  when I was too young to believe in anything other than dreams and fairy tales. It’s funny what out God can use to drive home this undying love that should be permeating our existences… some of us persist so hard in old guilts that something like a rusty knife exposing the only places of our hearts that have been frostbitten for so long that they haven’t seen the light, a children’s song on the grace of heaven which gives the hope for the world we have long been craving… the only things which are usual enough to get beneath the surface of armor-plated skin.

Self-knighted quested, you travel the roads of fortune, mystery, adventure untold,
Melancholic, you have learned a seriousness beyond your years,
Perhaps forfeiting a belief in joy to wander the graver planes of contemplation.
The sun-baked leather of your skin has become tougher than plates of armor,
Grating as you trudge on a way that you imagine is the only likeness of joy.
You were too young to take this road with so much life beyond you,
But a fatalist since birth, there seemed no other option, no diversion to intensity.
Once you uncovered a fire so bright it entranced your thoughts and intentions,
Perhaps it was in the most innocence that you began to play with fire
So hot that its blaze raved through you uncontrolled upon opening; You were too young.
Opening the fire, you had discovered the treasure of greatest cost, something never imagined..
Or at least it seemed to be in the few moments you opened it before diving too deeply.
Perhaps it is that the most precious things are like the most delicate flowers of spring
Which must be permitted to bloom and grow, not pried too early or shut up too tightly.
And having dived so deep, the flower stands too tenderly exposed to the sun,
You fear you have killed it, and trap a box over the whole plant, keeping diligent watch
Over a flower which has little enough chance of life to be guarded at all.
Is it too late to unveil the flower and care for it, can you imagine it flourishing,
Or have you sealed it to one death or another?
So the wanderer must continue the quest of life, a never-ending journey,
Leaving behind the flower without faith, a globe trapped over it in suffocation,
Preferring death of the blossom rather than trusting that a better caretaker could restore,
Extinguishing the fire which has seemed to encompass all the forest from the wanderer’s gaze,
But really is merely an obsession with the small rose, which though singed retains color.
The wanderer has moved on, however, the intensity of the flames was too alluring to watch,
And so has diverted all care for the flower, leaving it to rot under its cover.
Averting gaze from every blossom passed in future travels for fear of renewing a futile hope,
The melancholy settles into a thick darkness that could take on a life of its own,
Pervading every hope and turning joy and dreams into empty endeavors.
Without the warmth of a fire, the frost settles over and the wanderer is petrified… on the surface.
Mystery becomes a shroud, and unknowing the mourners lingering ghostly beside the wanderer,
An empty purpose gaping like the grave to swallow on every side, life is the path before:
One foot in front of another, one step after each step, continued searching.
The aim has been lost, perpetuation of the journey evidences hope of its resurrection.
The flower is frozen into ice, more fragilely preserved then when the wind whipped by it.
Aimless meandering permits the possibility that one will pass previously trod paths;
Such is the case with such a wanderer… and into the glade where the moon was born anew,
Where the rose bud planted in the heart of a human spring into being in the flash of a phoenix
Which has since surrendered to a pile of forgotten ashes scattered around the empty glade.
All that is left is the box of ice, the frozen rose blossom, hidden away from the sun,
Trodden under foot of all who pass by, yet somehow retaining the sap of life from a source beyond itself or the hope of the one seeking after the end of the nightmare.
But the dream has ended and wakefulness has broken over this solitary soul.
Will the fire rise from eternity and melt away what has been forgotten to permit
An embracing of the rest of the garden? Who warns the wayfarer before its too late?

The cry of my heart is a supplication I continually find myself making on worn out knees, “may the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Your sight, O God my Savior.” So often the above must not be true, so often I am distracted from the One whom I know is the greatest desire of everything in me, the only fill for the ache that defines my life. I know the ways I am gifted to be strong because they are the places of incomparable weakness, keeping me running back to Jesus and trying to keep my hand in His.

Ah, life, what a mystery it is to live. A new year, another place, the change of which is far more frequent than the digits of the date. What a whirlwind 2008 was, yet in it, somewhere amid the high frequency of change, I found a strain of quiet in which to sit and be honest. I realized that running is all well and good, but it is only until we stop running from ourselves that we can know God. I haven’t come anywhere closer to pinning down the specific direction and goal of my life, but I am reminded again by the season of advent that my place in the body of Christ is one to honor Him and bring Him glory by being a radiant reflection of Christ. Somehow, the mystical descriptions and imaginations of this always lead me back to the action of obedience as the closest place to God’s heart. Yet life’s rivers and oceans enjoy challenging this obedience in no uncertain terms.

Recalling to mind how God reminded me of Himself in 2008, let me share to where He is showing me the need I know I have for Him and the ache that is constantly pursuing Him need to be in the Now, preparing for whatever the Then brings. January of 2008, an era of my life ended with the break of an engagement to a long-time close friend. That initially jarring shift was an accurate precursor to the months and weeks walking near God in the personhood He has given me. Last January, I stepped out of a human engagement with a sense that I could not be in that relationship and giving myself to God all in the same action. But the break was not as cut, dry, and clean, nor did life move on as I thought it might after the relationship was removed from my immediate focus. I must say, however, that Spring 2008 semester at Davis College was the most amazing and transforming semesters to date. Then I’ve always thought that about the one just gone by.

I began a new conversation with Jesus, literally pouring all my energies into the academics on my plate and the relationships in my immediate surroundings, though previously I had been resisting human closeness because I knew that love comes with goodbyes, distance, separation. Moving to February, I found the relationships around me and the readings I was doing in school to have something of the Holy Ghost’s inspiration in them as I wondered about the impossibilities of my future. I had long been tired of settling for a spirituality that was handed to me, and decided to take some steps (considered bold) in my commitment with Jesus. Steps to a fuller honesty, where previously I tried to hold things back or encode them in a poetry that hid my own heart from me. February brought the expansion of my exploration, because I no longer felt I had anything to hold back for, nothing keeping me from reaching out and touching the hand of Jesus. It was an amazing beginning of a new form of prayer, communication with God.

In March, I think, I began to speak about Jesus in terms of marriage: my motivation was to constantly be mindful about Jesus, what would He do, was my heart in line with how His would be, were my actions a reflection of His incarnation? It struck me that if I spoke to Him as if I were somehow mystically married to Him and considered it so in my spirit, then I would be more forcibly accountable for how I treated others, the temple of my own body, because everything I did would be visually affecting my covenant with Jesus. As the months passed, I got perhaps a bit carried away with this analogy, in part because of the human issues I could not avoid in the break of an engagement to another person. Yet the following months were some of the sweetest communions I have had with my God in all the years I have known Him. A change from the desperate clinging and hiding in I did for years and years, to being so overjoyed in Him and wanting to be near. Yet in a sense, the hiding continued, though the sweetness overwhelmed. I was full of a joy in ways I rarely remember having been. Knowing this joy was food for hope in later times.

Receiving confirmation that I had been accepted to the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology where I am now enrolled in graduate courses was a dream come true for me, and encouraged me to aim high in the challenges I placed out for myself in God. Yet I set some severe conditions which would affect me in ways I didn’t then imagine: no debt to go to school, whatever it took. What a fleece to pitch God, but if I was willing to work, I knew it could be possible. The semester concluded so quickly in early May, at which graduation was a shock to my entire world. I was so grateful to have another several weeks in which to process myriads of articles I was reading about faith, the practice of faith, intellectually stimulating the experiences I’d had with God during the semester, but more importantly, helping me transition away from a place that had been such a tool of growth in my life over the past 2 years. Looking back, so much was going on, I can hardly picture it all (thankfully I was keeping copious journals).

Summer was another challenge with God, one which He presented this time, not me: From the beginning of June until August, I worked at His Mansion Ministries, a farm habilitation community in the Hills of New Hampshire. Somewhere over the end of the semester, I lost my nerve, knowing this would be a community-immersion experience. I had planned summer 2007 to work on the Hill, but I think God had reasons for allowing my to fellowship there before California. I have written loads about that experience, and it was so vast, I can only recount it in terms of major themes that were not always vocalized in the writing: I was apprehensive arriving there, gritting my teeth to endure, really, but was surprised by joy again through a really dark night. Everyday was a different journey with God, could be so different, and needed so much more consistency than I often afforded each moment. Sometimes, the aloneness I found myself handed was far deeper than I had expected: to truly be alone and unable to do anything but face the honest depths of the soul, one’s place before God is truly stilling. From time to time being too much in my own head caused me to wonder and ask God if He really was. The mountain tops of life can be places of flying so high we tempt the sun to melt our wings, eh?

Old doubts were begun to be faced, and movements made to shake loose the things that I had been running from my whole life long. Some of those were manifested most obviously by the earlier break-up, some took a little longer to surface in their depths. I remember fearing from time to time that I would end up as a resident. But the community was so helpful, sharing life in its everyday realities of mud, giggles, songs, life changes. I was hesitant to share, but by the final two weeks, a trip with my friend Aaron to Boston and a final ebbing of self-sustaining pride made a sizeable cut into community. The hard work was good, the emotional and spiritual everyday miracles amazing, and I found Jesus drawing on my heart in ways I couldn’t even fully identify. 2 short weeks after leaving the Hill, I was in California.

Summing up this semester is an impossibility beyond words. I have met Jesus in real life, or have at least encountered the belief that I don’t need to leave this life to find Him. Maybe I will share the experiences of the Christmas holiday in England, which I feel are an accurate summation of the semester’s climax: here studying theology is another world than a typical university; I have been provided for the by the grace and mercies of Christ through His living body on earth with prayers, encouragement, and practical realities such as work, much-needed questioning, communion, housing, etc. I have met Jesus in so many persons being out here, perhaps because I am more intensely looking for Him, and more anxious to know Him more fully. But the real simplicity of it all came up and smacked me in the face over Christmas, where I found much time again, like the hours I stole in the wee nights of time at the Hill, to come before God as I am. But somehow, the end of the semester coming when it did in England made me realize just how much I have taken back that I thought was once in Jesus’ hands—or maybe it wasn’t fully there.

Reexamining all my ambitions, hopes and plans, I found the end is still unknown to me, so what am I doing with all the anxiety inside. I have known for a long time that I am something of a perfectionist, and over this year, if there has been one thing I learned, Jesus has shown me through some hard lessons in my own life that His mercy is deeper than any sin I could fall into. Grace to dream again, when the last dream has been dashed to pieces. I am in a state of limbo again, reevaluating many beliefs and thoughts, but secure in the knowing of my Jesus… at least I always have the Word in the Bible as something clear to fall back on. Every other formulation I come up with is never as important… so my theology resting for a time, I threw myself into the raw scripture while in England, and met in there the reflection of truth I needed to right myself and the confusion in my heart. I am not saying its all gone, but I know its there now, and recognition is the first step in restoration.

But what grace has been lavished on me, I have spent so much time reflecting in awe and wonder at the healing my Savior has done to this soul that is guilty of harming itself over and over again with foolishness and pride. He is caring for me, inspiring me, and leading me in ways which I am sure I am not fully detecting. So one can only wonder at what the journey is bringing.

May this new year find you hoping in our God with great expectation.

In the Love of Christ Jesus,
Hannah