In the Dark

[Editorial for this week's Chicago Seminarian]

I’m kind of bummed, moping around lately like I don’t want to do anything. In fact, I will proclaim at random intervals, “I don’t wanna do ANYTHING!” So there.

I actually do want to do some stuff, it’s just not necessarily seminary stuff. This could be senioritis. This could be feeling like four years in seminary has been long enough. This could be feeling like there’s a whole world out there and I wanna be in it, only, I’m in here.

That feeling hasn’t abated much since I dropped to part-time to devote more time to my activism. However, I do think my activism has kept me sane. It gives me a space in which I get to meet lots of new people, see new places, and do something that feels real. I’m learning the practical skills that one can only begin to learn through a field site. So, even when it wears me out, it feels otherwise kind of right.

However, lately, I’ve found myself even procrastinating on my organizing tasks, those things which I say I do truly love. Because of this, I started wondering if I was truly called to do these things. I wondered if I’d gone wrong somehow, or hadn’t listened to God well enough. I wondered if I was a little crazy, or crazier than usual. It seems like the clear vision and the drive to get there that I’d felt even a few weeks earlier was missing.

The upcoming conference about the recently-published letters of Mother The-resa helped me to understand this and stay calm. Here is a woman who really had no idea for decades of her life if she was doing what God wanted her to do, and yet she found the faith to do remarkable things in our world. Some people have since ridiculed her as a fool. Rather, I think she is a help to all of us in ministry, when the light seems to go out and we are unsure of the way.

For me these days, the path is not as clear as I’d like, but I still believe it is a good one. And I had a few glimpses of what it could be, that were quite clear actually, earlier in the year--and they are helping me to get by now. And where these aren’t enough, I have a circle of friends and mentors who can reflect to me that it is a good vision, a good path, and to keep trying and not give up.

So I prepare for School of the Americas, I keep editing the Seminarian, I pack my bags for Iran, and I keep trying to fundraise for a monastery that would make a wonderful home for the Center for Faith and Peacemaking. Perhaps it is all possible.

Even in the darkness or the fog, may you find enough glimpses to carry you through; may you have enough mirrors to push the shadows aside.

Peace,

Le Anne