Trust the slow work of God

God, my guy, I'm really not digging your timing.

At each monthly meeting during our discernment process, which stretched from Lent of one year to Lent of the next, we listened to the chant of a Teilhard de Chardin poem, which we also read aloud at the end of those meetings, bookending our big conversations about the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives:

“Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new. And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability— and that it may take a very long time. And so I think it is with you; your ideas mature gradually—let them grow, let them shape themselves, without undue haste. Don’t try to force them on, as though you could be today what time (that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will) will make of you tomorrow. Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be. Give Our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.”

Sometimes, I got a little impatient with that part of our discernment meetings. Mike and the kids had been eating dinner and catching up on their days while I talked with strangers (who grew very quickly to be not-strangers) about what I believed to be my call to the priesthood. Sometimes I had grants to write and emails to return after our meetings, which pressed on my mind as we wrapped up our meeting. Yes, I get it, this whole thing feels very, very slow, especially considering this call had been swirling around for almost thirty years. 

All this, while being told I was “quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.” Indeed.

But, oh, how important the words of this poem have come to be, and how challenging! We’re a week into classes, and I just want to learn EVERYTHING. I feel like the Veruca Salt of Biblical and Liturgical Knowledge: “I want it NOW!” We get a morsel of knowledge in the reading and in the didactics, and I feel a million questions rise up inside of me along with a deep need to just KNOW. I want to stop and examine the role of children in antiquity in reference to what Jesus says in Matthew, and take a further look at where sin is first mentioned in the Bible (not with Eve!), and know what the concept of ownership was when God brought the Israelites out of Egypt. I’m told to wait, that’s week three. And I inwardly sigh and writhe and understand that these books upon books upon books and discussion and commentary and discernment aren’t just going to jump into my head by force of will.

A pity, really. 

And at the same time, three years seems so short! We have to learn ALL of this in just three years? There are so many classes I won’t have time to take, so many books I won’t have time to read, invitations and opportunities that just won’t all physically fit into our limited time and, frankly, emotional resources. God, I’m trying to trust in your slow work, but this is all going so fast!

Outside of the classroom (and our impromptu reading discussions at the Episcopool), there’s also the life that carries on from before seminary and, boy, has it been a doozy.

Marriage is hard. Life is hard. Sometimes things happen that make it even harder. Sometimes we have to take a pause and re-examine what it means to have a marriage, to have a life together, to be parents, to live among others, and what each of those things means to us, and what it means to the other. 

Recently, we hit a bump in trust that reactivated my PTSD. I thought maybe that perimenopause had caused my medication to really go off the rails, because it felt like it had stopped working. Every day, I was hyperventilating due to a panic attack, or three. I felt like my nerve endings were all raw. I cried at the drop of a hat. My ability to regulate my emotions was just gone, despite all of my best DBT tricks. Sometimes, after a hard conversation or following a cluster of intrusive thoughts, I thought about just leaving my body. I felt everything inside of me emptying out, leaving me a hollow shell, devoid of feeling and thought and speech and all of the things that hurt. I thought about starting to restrict my food intake again, which I didn’t do, and starting to purge again, which I did. It had been almost fifteen years since I’d purged, and suddenly that maladaptive coping method popped right back up.

A few days after we got here, I saw an outstanding psychiatric nurse practitioner, who rightly pinpointed that PTSD was creeping back through. No wonder sounds were making me jump. No wonder touch was making me recoil. No wonder I was being thrown back to thoughts of not being protected from harm as a child, or trauma in my early adulthood--things I hadn’t perseverated on in years. I was having a physiological response. I wasn’t going crazy.

But I was pretty angry. When you’ve done so much work, over years and years, to deal with trauma--overhauling my life choices, working through years of medication management to find an effective combination, building a solid marriage based on trust and intimacy, EMDR, two years of DBT, and on and on and on--having it just swing back into your life like a shitty ex-boyfriend showing up on your front porch felt like a slap in the face. I did the slow work, God. It was real slow. It was real hard. So what the fuck is this?

We’re working on some medication tweaks to manage things, and I just started with a therapist who is empathetic and thoughtful and pushes back on some of my problematic thought patterns. Things will get better. But right now, life looks like running on five or six hours of sleep most days because of late night panic attacks. It’s hard to concentrate in class sometimes, and quiet moments in chapel that should be spent in contemplation get taken up by racing or intrusive thoughts. 

But as one of our professors is wont to say, “It’s all formation.”

And it is. It’s certainly not the worst thing I’ve weathered in life. I’m absolutely, totally, head over heels in love with seminary life. We’ve fallen into the most wonderful community of students, their families, the faculty, and the staff--truly, unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. Our kids have settled into a comfort and familiarity I thought would take months to develop. Mike loves his job, and I get to see his brain work in ways that make my heart swell with pride. We have a renewed appreciation for each other and a new sense of delight in our time together. We get to hang out with old friends and new friends and get library cards and good beer. And those warm HEB tortillas would probably make it all worth it on their own. 

I can’t say I’m fully trusting the slow work. I can say I’m trying. I can say that I’m trusting, maybe with a little trepidation, but still trusting, that the anxious bits will soften, that the impatience will be subdued, that things will move at the pace that forms us best, even if I can’t see it in the moment. I’m trusting, God. Sometimes you move so very quickly that it makes me forget just how slowly you move, too. Deep breaths, deep prayers, and faith, exercised like a muscle, every day.

In the spirit of our discernment process, I’ll close with the words with which we began, the words I so desperately need to hear:

“Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new. And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability— and that it may take a very long time. And so I think it is with you; your ideas mature gradually—let them grow, let them shape themselves, without undue haste. Don’t try to force them on, as though you could be today what time (that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will) will make of you tomorrow. Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be. Give Our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.”