Recovering My Voice
Last night I joined the congregation I am working with right now for an Ash Wednesday service at a nearby church we are partnered with for community mission. The pastor talked about the usual practices of “giving up” something for Lent and then asked us to rethink that and go a little deeper.
Quite honestly, I don’t think I heard exactly what he said next because as soon as he brought up the issue of giving up something, my mind immediately clicked. “What I need to do is give up the emotional barriers that seem to be getting in the way of claiming my voice again.” Said another way, this Lent I don’t need to give something up so much as I need to recover something that I seem to have lost.
Looking back over my posts I realized that I wrote 25 posts in the five months before September 1 when I left to walk the Camino de Santiago. I have only written six posts in the four and a half months since I returned.
The reason is simple. The amount of change in my life over the last six months has been dizzying—walking 500 miles across Spain, pilgrim hospitality research in England, moving to a new part of Oregon, renting out my house as an Airbnb, stepping into a 6-month, 1/2 time contract, housesitting, and then all the usual things of trying to get oriented in a new place while preparing for the next transition by May 1.
It has been dizzying!
But, last night at the Ash Wednesday service I felt like I had the perfect invitation to recover my voice. What if I just used the 40-day period of Lent to find my way back into the conversation with all of you, with our culture, and with the internal dialogue that has driven me for the past decade or so.
Lent provides the perfect backdrop for me since whatever this thing is that I am doing has to do with articulating the death of something in our Western world while signs of the birth of something new seem to erupt here and there like bulbs peeking through a snow-covered garden. Lent ends with Holy Week and the stories of death and resurrection. Somehow my calling, my work, my passion and my voice are about articulating a cultural death and resurrection that we are in the messy middle of.
I sometimes wonder if what we are experiencing are the birth pangs of a new creation along with the grief of an imagined, illusory life that we are losing. I don’t know, but I do feel it and even the circumstances of the last twelve months of my life bear out this reality of something dying, something being born.
But, damn—it is dizzying, disorienting and very uncomfortable!
So here is the deal. I am not sure exactly what I am going to write over the next six weeks. I do know that I have still have two blog posts to finish up on the “Life as Pilgrimage” series. There are some developments on the Trail of Tears project to report as well.
I also know that people have noticed that I have written almost nothing about the extraordinary experience of walking the 500-mile Camino Frances and the two weeks of research in England. It has been so strange to know that I have had these rich experiences only to have them go underground during this period of dizzying transition.
What I can tell you is that I will invite you to tag along on this personal Lenten journey to simply recover my voice. I am not back yet. But I have forty days to let it emerge.
Quite honestly, I am a little nervous. Is this what I need to get grounded in my core being again or will this just add to the dizzying complexity of my life? We’ll see. But more complexity or not, it’s time to write again. It’s time to reflect. It’s time to recover my voice.
It’s time to step back into my life.