Creating Sanctuary in Your Everyday Life

“Sanctuary is finding a place to regain our bearings, reclaim our soul, heal our wounds and return to the world as a wounded healer. It’s not merely about finding shelter from the story - it’s about spiritual survival and the capacity to carry on.”

Parker Palmer

When Pete and I head to the lake at summer’s end for a break in our action-packed life, we are seeking shelter. We shelter from our routine and our tendency to work more than we play. I start thinking about returning to our shelter as we pack up to leave the lake. After loading the kayaks and floats, the workout equipment and leftover food, we back the car out of the garage and begin the steep climb up the driveway towards home. I do not look back. I look ahead. I think about the next time we will return to this wonderful place of leisure, quiet, wildlife, a comfortable dock to perch on and launch ourselves into the glassy lake.

This is not a sanctuary - it’s shelter.

If I waited until I was on our lake vacation to experience sanctuary, I would be in big trouble mentally, emotionally and spiritually. Sanctuary is finding a place moment-by-moment, hour-by-hour, day-by-day...on and on marching across the timeline of our lives.

This is new information for me. I consider our vacations the ideal time to experience sanctuary, and it is true enough that we do find that during those weeks of solitude, stillness and silence. But we bring it with us. It isn’t the environment, it is the essence of our lives that allow or resist finding sanctuary.

One way I find sanctuary is using the practice of The Welcoming Prayer. I go slow with it. I talk back to it. There are more formal, codified ways to practice the welcoming prayer and if you want more details contact me and I will send you some lovely details about such things. But this is how I personally find myself using it.

When I pray The Welcoming Prayer, I am practicing faith even when filled with doubt, courage even when overcome with fear. I dare to pray this prayer as a way of intending to believe that God is for me, not against me; that his hand is upon me as support and encouragement, not as punishment or manipulation. It is a short but specific way I admit to God and myself that my assessment may feel certain in the moment but have often proven unreliable. I commit my intention to let go of those false strategies that honestly, never worked that great anyway. I let go of my desire to control ife, rather than surrender to God’s presence in my life.

It begins like this: Welcome, welcome, welcome.

Today, I invite you to sit quietly and welcome God into your sanctuary. Invite yourself to participate in God’s work - equipping you for spiritual survival and giving you the capacity to carry on.

Let’s pray...The Welcoming Prayer by Mary Mrozowski

Welcome, welcome, welcome.

Spiritual sanctuary is not about retreats and the perfect candle. Although, both are lovely. But if we only think about sanctuary and our idealized view of its necessary accoutrements, we are missing out. To welcome God into our life requires that we acknowledge that what God does once he gets there is really none of our business.

I welcome everything that comes to me in this moment because I know it is for my healing.

In the welcoming prayer, we are - welcoming. We trust that the world is a healing place, a place of hope, a creation of God intended to bless us and others. Sometimes this is an act of fierce will, often it feels like crazy talk to believe this about our germy world. But this is the work of faith.

I welcome all thoughts, feelings, emotions, persons, situations and conditions.

We trust ourselves. We trust that we can handle all that is real and true about ourselves. We get curious and stop all the self-judgment and self-doubt.

I let go of my desire for security, approval and control.

Some days my desires are so long I have to take a break for lunch before I complete the list of things I am holding onto for security, the people I am looking to for approval and ALL the ways I am trying to exert control. It is what it is.

I let go of my desire to change any situation, condition, person or myself.

We let go of the desire, and then ask God to show us how to apply it to our daily decisions. This prayer is a commitment!

I open to the love and presence of God and the healing action and grace within.

Oh blessed relief. And, dare I say it? Perhaps the toughest part of this prayer. To trust God. To admit that his work in me is none of my business. I open up, and after that - it’s up to God to decide what happens next. Or doesn’t feel like it is happening at all. We open. We rise and take on the day.

Amen

The Hard Work of Self-Confrontation

So far this blog has just been a bundle of optimism! Rethink loneliness I suggested! Don’t run from suffering! What pain are you avoiding? I inquired. These are the words people seeking maturity and wisdom need to hear. They are not easy words. But they are necessary words.

We will not heal as a nation, we will not unify as a people, we will not deny our baser instincts, unless a few of us are willing to do the hard work of self-confrontation. So. In order to do this work, we need to find a sanctuary.

I cannot tell you what your sanctuary looks like or where to find it. But I can tell you my understanding of the concept.

“Sanctuary is finding a place to regain our bearings, reclaim our soul, heal our wounds and return to the world as a wounded healer. It’s not merely about finding shelter from the story - it’s about spiritual survival and the capacity to carry on.”

Parker Palmer

My sanctuary is mostly solitary, but when necessary, I have trusted mentors who I ask to join me. I do this by inviting them to hear my story. I share my pain. I tell them the things I hope no one ever knows about me, because these truths embarrass me. I’ve made some whopper mistakes when it comes to trusting people but for the most part, as I age, I get a bit better at finding trustworthy mentors.

May we find sanctuary, one and all!

Loneliness is an Essential Part of Growth - Whether We Like It or Not

Loneliness improves concentration and cognitive functions and is actually conducive to self-development, identity consolidation and heightened creativity. Love the poetry of Mary Oliver? She was not exactly a social butterfly but I swear her time spent in the fields with the butterflies and God’s creatures sparked her creativity and has healed my heart with her beautiful writings on many a day when her words were the thing that got me up and going.

The Handbook of Solitude emphasizes that loneliness can help us gain insight into ourselves, have therapeutic benefits and can help us deal with political and social pressures. They report that those who experience loneliness are able to form better and more lasting relationships than those who have not. AND...loneliness can immunize us against future social isolation.

Maybe we are not experiencing an epidemic of loneliness so much as we are experiencing monophobia - a fear of loneliness. Maybe we are incompetently treating what ails us with increasing and intensifying contact with others. Maybe our problem is less about loneliness and more about our inability to cope with alone time.

Consider this: If you are not your own best company, what do you want/need to change about you? If you chase after everyone, how are you nurturing the small cadre of people who have demonstrated how much they want to be in your company?

If we can let go of fear of loneliness, we can perhaps pay more attention. Are there people in our life who we need to let go of? Maybe the relationship has run its course. Or maybe, upon reflection, the mutual relationship was perhaps not as solid as you thought? Remember that some folks have more to take and less to give. Sometimes that person is us. But we absolutely do not have to feel obligated to live in one-sided relationships. And each of us gets to decide what that means to us, depending on our own temperament, maturity, and capacity for wisdom.

Now, the exception clause. Sometimes people you love are suffering and unable to pick up the phone and call or respond to your reach outs. This is not personal and no offense or judgment needs to be expressed. Our work is to decide, after long and hard consideration, prayer and soul searching, if this is the end of a relationship or a time to hang in with your friend. It can go either way. But if this friend has been a good friend in the past, maybe this is the time when we extend them the grace they have so often extended us. After all, no one has a friend for a while without having to extend grace. In situations like this, we try not to be a stalker and we work hard to manage our own feelings of loss. We find ways to reach out that are not too burdensome to our friend. We do the best we can. They do the best they can.

Just remember: there are worse things than loneliness.

Love one another.

A new year offers us the opportunity to reflect and consider our future selves. Inevitably, we all have different perspectives on resolutions and such. After the year our world has just experienced, it might be hard to muster unbridled enthusiasm and optimism for 2021. Good.

We don’t need it. The endless possibilities; the big dreams; these are not the things that build character and resilience. In the future, it is far more likely that the suffering of 2020 will stimulate creativity and spiritual awakenings the likes of which art camp and retreats could never accomplish.

Suffering is an essential part of growth - whether we like it or not. I am not suggesting we seek out suffering - that’s masochism. But I do hope this allows us to think of our suffering as something we walk through, not run from.

Do you have regrets? A boatload of remorse? Ok. Tempted to blame others? That’s normal. Trying to pretend that you DON’T feel these painful things? Sounds about right.

If 2021 is going to provide us with growth and maturity and wisdom, there is one crucial question we must ask ourselves: What pain are we avoiding? T. S. Eliot said, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”

But some humans learn that bearing reality is actually a super power.

Believe in the integrity and value of the jagged path. We don’t always do the right thing on our way to rightness. Cheryl Strayed

Let’s pray….

Jesus said this one time to a group of people. Read these verses and imagine him saying this exact same thing to you:

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

Matthew 11:28-30 NIV

Quality Versus Quantity...

In 2019 a team at Trinity College Dublin researched 1,839 adult Americans between the ages of 18 and 70. They found that the quality of their relationships had a far greater impact on their mental health than the number of their relationships. Those with toxic relationships turned out to be far worse in terms of mental health than those with very few relationships - those whom we might call loners.

We have other research that shows the risk of heart disease increases for women in bad marriages and hypertension is more frequent among couples who assess their marriage negatively. All this is still correlational data - so we have to take it with the same grain of salt we apply to the studies on loneliness. But at a minimum, it should give us pause.

There are many potential benefits to this added perspective, especially during a pandemic. Maybe we should focus more on the relationships we have rather than fretting about the gatherings we are temporarily losing.

Let me get super vulnerable here for a minute. I hate not being with my community several times a week. Like most pastors, I literally am at our church almost every time the doors open and often when I have to unlock them to gain entry. I like my life this way. But this was my pre-pandemic life.

At some point I had to grow up and realize that nothing was stopping me from having connections and human contact except my own lethargy about picking up the phone. Has contact with all my relationships survived this loss of personal contact? No they have not. But I suspect there is much for me to learn here about the nature of those relationships. Did the pandemic cause me to lose these relationships? Not really.

What about the ones I’ve gained and strengthened? Nothing like a good pandemic to find out who your friends are!! And it is instructive to examine ourselves and notice who we have been inclined to contact and who we have not (and vice versa). This reach out and touch someone is a two-way street.

Before you assume that I am going to encourage you to make contact with everyone in your phone list - stop. Don’t go there! We’ll unpack this more in tomorrow’s blog post.

We live in a world that defines us by our “isms”. Don’t buy into that nonsense. Spend time today and every day in gratitude for you being you - warts and all.

Striking a Balance Between Loneliness and Connection

Lately it has become one of those things that we say all the time in recovery - we need community. AND WE DO!! This is true. This is very true. But it is not the only truth.

If the opposite of loneliness is too many relationships, then that is also a concern for long term recovery - especially unhealthy relationships. Too much intense contact with others can lead to serious health problems and - in many species of animals - death. Biologists call this “intraspecific competition”. It happens when the same species becomes so over-populated in a given area that there is a scarcity of resources. This leads to infighting; the weaker of the species loses; the strong prevail.

I’m not suggesting that we need to let the strong eliminate the weak. That would fly in the face of biblical perspective. (“The meek shall inherit the earth.”) But what I am suggesting is that the work of spiritual wisdom and maturity is to behave DIFFERENTLY from the animal kingdom. We are to grow up and help the weak build stronger muscles. We mature and realize that our work includes giving those who are marginalized a hand up, a way out of their vulnerability to predatory attack. This is what differentiates us from wild beasts. In theory.

For humans, our vulnerabilities come when we suffer the negative effects of bad relationships, selfishness and immaturity. Other people - and how we interact with them - cause the strongest negative emotions that we experience. It is the “other” or ourselves who cheat and disappoint. Jean Paul Sartre wrote: “Hell is other people.” A quote I love to hate; but for some people, this is true.

The mom who wants to get her child back from social services is perhaps unaware that this child begged to NOT be returned to the home where she was regularly left alone at night and went days without a meal. Mom believes that her daughter is lonely in foster care and would be better off with her. And she would. If mom was gaining in wisdom and maturity and able to care for her kid. I can count on one hand the number of people who have lamented their loneliness over the years but me and all the people I have ever met combined do not have enough fingers and toes to count the ways we hurt others and others hurt us. Just to be clear - loneliness is not great AND it may not be the central problem we need to address in order to become stronger spiritually.

But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

Matthew 6:6 NIV