Not knowing what shape this service might take, I threw myself into acting, writing, psychology, spiritual studies, and a stint working with mentally ill homeless people in New York City. I traveled, and made a point to be open and intently present to whomever I encountered, even when this landed me in awkward situations. I knew I didn’t need or want much, materially speaking, and, professional ambition held no real allure for me, either. I just wanted to find “my place” – a context and role in which I could fully surrender, a place where whatever I had to give was needed, was enough. Then, and only then, could I finally extinguish my self upon the fire of a need greater than my own. Then, and only then, could I escape the pain and confusion of my personal history. Then, and only then (I thought), could I find peace and true security.
Though I was still struggling to identify just what it was I had to give, I was convinced there was a need that fit my gifts like a glove. Further, as I emerged from a childhood of chaos, tragedy, divorce, and financial unrest, I came to believe that security was a futile, perhaps even impossible goal. Conventional visions of predetermined career tracks or substantial salary and benefit packages could not have been further my idealistic young mind. I found more reason in the life of a monk, who offers his devout service in exchange for the modest necessities of shelter, food, community, and time and space to reflect. Take the struggle for material gain out of the picture, I thought, and you free up more time and energy for spiritual growth and for serving as and where you are needed.
Through the humbling lens of hindsight, I can see just how much of a role my own physical awkwardness and discomfort with my femininity played in my desire to detach from the world of worldliness. I did not understand how to handle my sexuality, and did not feel in control of my body. My identity as a woman, and as a physical being, was a shrouded in shadow and shame. I dwelt more comfortably in the spiritual and mental realms, and secretly sought a role that would relieve me of the burden of my stunted womanhood.
Fear also drove my search for a life of service. I had seen my own parents strive for financial and material abundance, only to wind up in debt, distanced from one another, and surrounded by a material wealth that felt empty against the backdrop of the stress, anxiety, and leadenness that lurked at the fringes of it all. We, like so many American families, lived beyond our means in pursuit of what we were taught was our inalienable right to a home of our own, two cars in the driveway, and a life of modest luxury and enjoyment. Everyone else seemed able to pull it off – never mind the mounting credit card debt or discrepancy between the money going out and coming in – so why couldn’t, why shouldn’t, we? In direct reaction to this object lesson, my 18-year-old self had decided she didn’t want to want material things. She didn’t want to want to accumulate wealth or goods. By setting my sights on service, in a context that could provide for my basic needs, I would liberate myself from the hell of worldly greed and desire, which had yielded so much pain and emptiness in the lives of those around me.
Life, as we know, proves far more complicated than it appears through the eyes of an eighteen year old. There are so many things your 18 year-old self cannot see, because she does not comprehend them – things she has not yet learned to recognize. I struggled for years with the tension between my desire to surrender to a life of service, and my dawning awareness of my embodiment, my worldly needs, of my physical, mental, and psychological limitations. I wrestled internally, semi-consciously, with shame as my own physicality and femininity emerged, demanding attention. I wondered – still wonder, at times – whether I was intended for a life of partnership, or whether I would be of greater service to humanity and myself by journeying solo. I pushed through guilt and past years of self-imposed asceticism to discover that I find joy and self-expression in what I wear and how I adorn myself. My inner ascetic still rages against my inner goddess when I schedule a haircut or buy $40 worth of clothes from Target. These things may seem trivial, but they have been part and parcel of a search for my rightful place in this world.
Up until a little over a year ago, I was still hurling myself on the pyre, by and large, of my chosen path of service as a teacher of art. I spent nearly every waking hour either teaching at one of four venues, working on lesson plans, promoting upcoming classes, working on applications for full-time teaching positions, working on my own art, promoting my own art, submitting applications to regional and national art exhibitions, and doing whatever part-time work I could to scrape together a feeble living. After 15 years invested in the path of an artist and art teacher, I had surrendered to this particular life of service, and I was determined to endure any amount of sleeplessness, pennilessness, and indignation if only it could land me, at last, in my rightful place – a full-time teaching position that I could fully surrender to, at an institution that valued what I had to give and would pay me enough so that I could “get by.” That was truly all I hoped for, and all I asked.
I will never know what combination of factors conspired to bring about the events of last summer. But after being a finalist for three college teaching positions, and really believing I had earned one of these outright, I was not chosen for any, and something in me snapped. This marked another instance of the worldly me rushing in where the idealistic me had held us aloft for so long. Suddenly, my limitations came closing in like walls in an epic earthquake.
A surrender of a different nature came over me. This time, rather than giving up my attachment to my worldly self, I was compelled to give up the delusion that I was magnanimous and without limits. I was forced to surrender the belief that I could endure any number of sleepless, workaholic nights, any litany of months barely scraping by, any plethora of missed opportunities for spending time with my partner, Jason, or with family and friends, so long as I was devoted to the selfless goal of finding gainful employment as an art teacher, which surely would come to pass if only I remained wholeheartedly surrendered to the path.
Here Life was, shaking me by the shoulders, demanding that I give up this mental “martyr” construct whose fumes I had run on for 15 years, in exchange for a new kind of surrender. Life was inviting me to stop, first and foremost: to stop long enough to acknowledge the reality, the needs and limitations, of my own embodiment; to stop long enough to recognize and accept the choices I had made, and to live up to the present-moment reality of those choices. I was in a relationship, living with a man I loved, but I gave so little time to him, feeling justified by my endless pursuit of a goal I felt was essential to my, and to our, future well-being. I sacrificed the present in exchange for some hypothetical future that continued to elude me. He felt my absence, and my mood swings, tired and overworked as I so often was. I began to see how I’d been giving the best of me, often, to my students – doing work I loved, but alas, cheating my partner of the love and presence he deserved.
When, half a year later, I read the following words by teacher and author Parker J. Palmer, pangs of recognition resounded in me like peals of a monastery bell during the daily call to prayer. While Palmer uses this passage to describe his bouts with depression, and while I am not certain my own experience involved clinical depression, I can describe my experience as one of my life and misguided sense of identity imploding in a short span of time, and the bewilderment I felt as I attempted to find the will and way forward from that devastated place. In the end, this sounds an awful lot like what Palmer describes here:
“The altitude at which I was living had been achieved by at least four means. First, I had been trained as an intellectual not only to think – an activity I greatly value – but also to live largely in my head, the place in the human body farthest from the ground. Second, I had embraced a form of Christian faith devoted less to the experience of God than to abstractions about God, a fact that now baffles me. Third, my altitude had been achieved by my ego, an inflated ego that led me to think more of myself than was warranted in order to mask my fear that I was less than I should have been. Finally, it had been achieved by my ethic, a distorted ethic that led me to live by images of who I ought to be or what I ought to do, rather than by insight into my own reality, into what was true and possible and life-giving for me. I never stopped to ask, ‘How does such-and-such fit my God-given nature?’ Eventually, I developed my own image of the ‘befriending’ impulse behind my depression. Imagine that from early in my life, a friendly figure, standing a block away, was trying to get my attention by shouting my name, wanting to teach me some hard but healing truths about myself. The figure calling to me all those years, was, I believe, what Thomas Merton calls ‘true self.’ This is not the ego self that wants to inflate us, not the intellectual self that wants to hover above the mess of life in clear but ungrounded ideas, not the ethical self that wants to live by some abstract moral code. It is the self planted in us by the God who made us in God’s own image- the self that wants nothing more, or less, than for us to be who we were created to be. True self is true friend. One ignores or rejects such friendship only at one’s peril.” - Parker J. Palmer, from Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation
To Be Continued