4
Seeds of Desire
Facing your deepest brokenness
God comes to me where I live and loves me where I am. If I am not where I am, God cannot meet me.
—Brennan Manning, Souvenirs of Solitude
Eyes watering with fatigue, I stumbled across the concrete, the roar of the airplane engine fading into the background. Inside the terminal, the crowd swirled around me. Everywhere there was chaos, movement, and noise—families embracing, young children crying, travelers wrenching suitcases from the baggage conveyor, a cacophony of voices, a whirlwind of frenzied gesticulation. I smelled coffee, rich and strong. Next to me a couple kissed long, like a scene from a movie. All around me the air rang with words I could not understand.
I had arrived in Italy for a ten-day spiritual writers’ retreat. For months, ever since I had mailed in my deposit, I had fretted over this trip. I realize this is more than a little ridiculous. After all, it’s not like I was journeying to Botswana or Bangladesh: it was Italy, for heaven’s sake—land of gelato and beautiful handcrafted leather goods. The truth is, though, I’m not much of a traveler. My favorite place in the world is my own backyard. The one and only time I had ever traveled overseas was twenty-four years prior, when I was in college and visited a friend in London, where, I feel compelled to remind you, they speak English. (And even then, when I sat next to a couple of Scots on the train to Edinburgh, I literally couldn’t understand a word they said. I spent eight hours nodding and smiling awkwardly.)
I worried about every detail of this trip to Italy in the weeks and months leading up to my departure, from the language barrier to the long flight to the foreign currency. I know myself. My ability to do simple math vanishes under pressure. I panic when I have to make change in a New York City cab, inevitably undertipping or overtipping—and that’s with American currency. How will I figure out the euro? How will I pay the cab driver and the gelato seller? I fretted in the middle of the night.
I’d jotted a dozen or so words and phrases in my journal and practiced pronouncing them over and over with Google translator—grazie, bagno, buon giorno, per favore, bene—but my inability to trill my r’s properly was a dead giveaway. Languages are not my forte. In high school I’d taken four years of Latin—a dead language . . . need I say more? What if I can’t find my driver at the airport? How will I get to the hotel with my nonexistent Italian and math paralysis?
And then there were the flights—one hour to Chicago, ten hours from Chicago to Munich, one hour from Munich to Florence. I am a notoriously anxious flyer, terrified of turbulence and germs and dying. The first thing I do upon boarding an airplane is to furiously scrub down the armrests, seatbelt buckle, and tray table with multiple Clorox wipes. The second thing I do is check the seat pocket for the “in case of motion discomfort” bag. Once we are airborne, the slightest jostle prompts me to commence humming “Silent Night” under my breath, an odd but surprisingly effective coping mechanism. I was convinced I would not survive twelve hours of air travel.
I survived. Barely. There was a lot of humming, and, despite the fact that the man next to me donned an eye mask, pushed in earbuds, queued up the latest Batman movie, and proceeded to sleep more soundly than I have ever slept in my very own bed, I did not sleep. Not five minutes in twelve hours. Instead, I was the lunatic standing in the back of the airplane next to the restrooms doing calisthenics while humming “Silent Night.” What can I say? In addition to germ phobia and an inclination toward motion sickness, I also suffer from the occasional, inopportunely timed bout of restless leg syndrome.
Obviously, by the time I found myself sitting on the cool steps outside a Florence church with the rest of my group on my first day in Italy, I was bleary with exhaustion. I and the thirteen other participants in the Tuscany Writers’ Retreat had gathered for a session with the spiritual director who would be with us on the trip. I don’t remember much of what Jamin said to us that first night; my memories of the entire two days we spent in Florence are blurred by the effects of jet lag and sleep deprivation. In fact, I was so tired, when Jamin led us in prayer that evening outside the church, I bowed my head, closed my eyes, and pitched forward, asleep, off the step on which I was perched. Jolting awake mere seconds before dashing my face against the concrete, I glanced around to see if any of my fellow travelers had noticed my precarious slumber.
The one thing I do recall from that foggy first meeting is Jamin’s advice that we each, to the best of our ability, release whatever expectations we had packed along with our Bibles, journals, and comfortable walking shoes. “God can and will work powerfully in you during this time,” he assured us. “The Spirit may surprise you with something unexpected, if you allow yourself to be open to receive.”
The next morning, Jamin sent us into the courtyard garden of our hotel for forty-five minutes of prayerful reflection and journaling. The theme of that morning’s session was watchfulness. “Let not your thoughts float like feathers on the surface of the water, but sink to the bottom like lead,” he advised before dismissing us.
I tucked myself into a wrought-iron chair in the shade of a towering hedge, opened my journal, and read the Scripture reading from the first chapter of Ephesians before moving on to the prompts: “Consider the ways in which you have seen God active and working in your life these past three months. To what degree have you been watchful of the story God has been writing in your life? Also consider the ways you have not been watchful of God’s presence in your life. Ask God to show you the ways in which he has been present and active, but you have not been attending to such realities.”
Immediately I began to record my response.
How can I know where I’m going or what I should do if I don’t know who I am? And how do I know who I am if I don’t know who God is? The reason I’m not clear on what to do (my calling) is because I don’t truly know who I am—my authentic self—and the reason I don’t know who I am is because I don’t truly know God in a deep and intimate way. In fact, I don’t know if I know God at all. I don’t know “the hope he has called me to” [Eph. 1:18] because I don’t know him.
Paging through my journal a year later, I’m still shocked at the bald truth of the words I wrote that morning in the quiet courtyard. Yet I’m not altogether surprised that those were the thoughts that immediately bubbled to the surface on my very first day in Italy. Sheer exhaustion had opened me to a raw, vulnerable place. I was like the bare, exposed spot on the pin oak in my backyard. Stripped of my many layers of self-protection, in the hush of a Florentine courtyard, with no responsibilities to distract me and fatigue wearing me thin, a glimpse of my innermost self was visible for the first time in a long time. Perhaps for the first time ever.
The words I wrote in my journal that morning in response to the prompts and verses from Ephesians didn’t surprise me in the moment, not because they weren’t utterly unexpected—they were—but because I processed them through a haze of sleep deprivation. Jet lag stripped me of my defenses, but at the same time it protected me, wrapping my mind in fuzziness. Everything from those first two days—from what I ate and who I talked to, to what I saw and thought—was experienced as if through a layer of protective gauze. That morning in the courtyard I furiously scribbled my thoughts into my journal, and then, clapping the book shut with a thwap that echoed off the stone walls around me, I stood and joined my group for a tour of Florence. I didn’t give the words I’d written another thought until the next day, when, well rested and refreshed, I was alone again.
It was Sunday morning, the Sabbath. Early the evening before, we’d arrived at the stunningly beautiful Villa La Foce in the heart of Tuscany. Following an alfresco breakfast under the wisteria-draped pergola and a spiritual session on the theme of rest, Jamin had dismissed us into the garden, journals in hand, to reflect and write.
“What does it mean for you that rest is found in God?” he’d asked us. “What does it mean that we are restless when we are away from him?”
I wandered La Foce’s extensive grounds, noting the quiet spaces—a concrete bench and table tucked under an enormous, sculpted shrub; a shady patch of lush grass next to a row of fragrant lavender plants, bees burrowing into the blooms, the heady scent perfuming the morning air. The stone pavers tipped and clinked beneath my feet as I meandered, gliding my palm flat along the perfectly manicured hedge that ran parallel to the path. I stopped to take in the view—golden wheat fields, stately cypress lining a winding road, a haze settling low between the distant hills—and sighed with contentment, hardly able to believe that I was in Tuscany with an entire day of rest and enjoyment unfurling ahead of me.
I finally settled on a grassy spot beneath a grove of trees. Taking off my sandals, I sat with my back against a tree trunk, turned my face toward the Tuscan hills, and opened my journal. Except for the occasional buzzing of a nearby bee and the breeze in the leaves above my head, there was no noise—no traffic sounds, no human voices, no barking dogs, no tumble of a dryer or swish of a dishwasher. There was no agenda, no to-do list, no deadlines. It was just me, the view, and my own thoughts.
I wrote only one sentence in my journal during the forty-five minutes I spent under the Tuscan trees that morning: “I don’t have rest in my life because I don’t have rest in God.” And with that single sentence, everything became devastatingly, heartbreakingly clear. Suddenly I knew why, months prior, the unnerving question about intimacy had floated to the surface during my daily quiet time on the park bench. Suddenly I knew the truth. I didn’t have rest in my life because I didn’t have rest in God. I didn’t have clarity in my vocation, in my calling as a writer, because I didn’t know who I was in God. I didn’t know who I was, period, because I didn’t know who I was in God. And I didn’t know who I was in God because I didn’t know God himself. In an instant I knew in my heart, mind, and marrow that everything, everything, begins with our relationship with God. And in an instant my heart broke, because I knew the truth: I didn’t know God.
I cried underneath the Tuscan trees for forty-five minutes straight—not gentle, soft weeping, mind you, but nose-running, gulping, gasping sobbing. I didn’t even have a single Kleenex with me—why would I have? I certainly hadn’t wandered into one of the most beautiful, serene places on Earth expecting to have a complete and utter breakdown. I sweated. My hands shook. I was short of breath. My mouth went cottony, and I thought I might throw up, right there on the Tuscan hillside. Even when it was time to reconvene as a group beneath the pergola, I was barely able to keep my composure. I slid my sweaty feet out of my sandals and rested them on the stone pavers, grateful for the coolness on my soles as I swiped away the tears rolling from beneath my sunglasses.
I thought I’d come to Tuscany to find answers to my vocational unrest and to refill my creative and spiritual wells. But the truth revealed to me that morning was that I’d come to Tuscany to recognize, confront, and name my deepest brokenness. The truth was, I didn’t know God. I didn’t have a relationship with him. I still wrestled with deep questions of doubt and even, at times, with unbelief, and I still struggled fiercely in my faith.
Stepping Out of Hiding
In the Gospel of Luke we are introduced to a woman who has suffered from incessant bleeding for twelve years. Desperate for a cure, Luke tells us, she slips in between the throngs of people who have gathered for a glimpse of the one proclaimed to be the Messiah. She creeps up behind Jesus and discreetly touches the hem of his robe, hoping beyond all reasonable hope that she will finally be healed. Jesus, feeling his power released, spins around, demanding to know who touched him. “When the woman realized that she couldn’t remain hidden,” Luke tells us, “she knelt trembling before him. In front of all the people, she blurted out her story—why she touched him and how at that same moment she was healed” (Luke 8:47 Message).
Read that bit again: “When the woman realized that she couldn’t remain hidden . . . she blurted out her story.” Why does the bleeding woman try to hide? Why does she want to remain hidden, invisible, unseen? Because she is ashamed of her condition, her brokenness. Rejected by society, she feels unworthy of love.
Like the bleeding woman, we, too, hide our worst selves, our shadow sides, from God. It’s a little bit silly if you think about it—after all, God is omniscient and therefore knows our thoughts before we even think them ourselves. But it’s true: we hide our most broken parts from God because we feel ashamed and unworthy of love.
Think for a moment about Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. After they succumb to temptation and eat the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, what do the first man and woman, God’s Beloved, do? They clothe themselves to hide their shame, and then, when they hear God strolling around the garden in the coolness of the evening, Adam and Eve hide from God himself (see Gen. 3:8). When God calls out, “Where are you?” (v. 9 Message), Adam answers, “I heard you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked. And I hid” (v. 10 Message).
Adam does what we often do: he hides. Adam hides behind literal leaves and branches. He and Eve cover their naked bodies with fig leaves, and they hide amid the shadows of the trees. Adam also doesn’t tell God the whole truth, at least at first. Instead, he stalls, saying only that he is afraid because he is naked. It’s only when God demands a full confession from them that Adam and Eve ultimately name their sin (though even then, they don’t take full responsibility: Adam blames Eve, and Eve blames the serpent).
Like Adam and Eve, we are ashamed and afraid, and so we hide too. We don’t have fig leaves or the lush foliage of the Garden of Eden to shield ourselves, but we use our many figurative leaves and branches to camouflage ourselves just the same. And why? Because, like Adam and Eve, we don’t trust God’s goodness. We don’t trust that he loves us enough to accept our whole flawed and broken selves. We don’t fully believe he has our best interests in mind. And so we hedge our bets. We reveal only parts of our story, bits and pieces of our true selves, keeping our worst fears and our deepest sins hidden, not only from ourselves but from the One who knows us best. Fear and distrust prevent us from answering God’s invitation into intimacy and healing. Fear and distrust prevent us from standing, picking up our mats, and walking. Like the bleeding woman and Adam and Eve in the garden, we often only step out of hiding to tell our story when we are called out by God himself.
Answering God’s Call to Name Your Deepest Brokenness
As I mentioned earlier, I am a type Three in the Enneagram personality type system. Often called “The Achiever” or, perhaps even more telling, “The Performer,” Threes are “ambitious, competent, and energetic, status-conscious and highly driven for advancement. They are diplomatic and poised, but can also be overly concerned with their image and what others think of them.” Threes also typically have problems with workaholism and competitiveness, and our key motivations are affirmation, attention, admiration, and to be distinguished from others. In short, we Threes aspire to present our best selves at all times. Failure is anathema to Threes, and therefore we avoid it at all costs, even at the expense of authenticity and, at times, truth.1
Each Enneagram type is associated with a particular sin, and for Threes, the sin is deceit. When I first learned I was a Three, I was initially surprised by the fact that my hallmark sin is deceit. It didn’t make sense to me that a writer, particularly a writer who has written a memoir, would be deceitful. After all, I reasoned, isn’t memoir the be-all-and-end-all of truth-telling and authenticity? Aren’t memoir writers the most transparent, the most authentic?
I realize now that “transparent” memoir writing was actually a way for me to control my story and the image of myself that I presented to others and to my own self. I didn’t fabricate any parts of my story, but I see now how I used humor in my memoir as a way to convince people to like me, as well as a shield to protect myself from the judgment of others, and perhaps even to protect myself from hard truths about myself.
Turns out, I’ve been using humor this way for a long time. My sister and I actually have a name for it: we call it “clowning out.” She does it too. When we find ourselves in a potentially awkward or uncomfortable social situation, or among people we want to impress, we perform. The hallmarks of clowning out include highly animated storytelling, often with ourselves as the butt of the joke; wild gesticulating; loud, fast talking; maniacal laughter; and general buffoonery. Our intent is to entertain people, make them laugh, and ultimately, make them like us. Not only is clowning out exhausting—sometimes I feel like a circus monkey, performing tricks for approval and dancing as fast as I can—it’s also a remarkably effective way of keeping others at arm’s length. If I’m the performer, I control the show. And in controlling the show, I can choose how much or how little I want to reveal of myself and how close I will allow myself to get to someone else. Clowning out, and, to some extent, my use of humor overall, are yet more leaves on my tree—manifestations of my false self that’s clamoring to create a sense of worth and identity.
Your deepest brokenness is likely not the same as mine. Your tree contains a different variety of branches and leaves. My shadow side is doubt, and for most of my life, I’ve used busyness, productivity, striving, achievement, and even humor as masks to shield myself from this deepest, darkest part of myself. I don’t know what your shadow side is, but I do know this: you have one. We all do. There is undoubtedly something that, unless it’s acknowledged, will inhibit you from entering into intimate relationship with God. Maybe it’s lack of trust or need for control. Maybe the deep wounds you carry from your past are a barrier between you and God. Maybe it’s something else entirely. Only you can identify your false self. Only you can answer God’s call to name your deepest brokenness, and only you can offer that brokenness up to God.
“We are not good at recognizing illusions,” Thomas Merton wrote, “least of all the ones we have about ourselves—the ones we are born with and which feed the roots of sin.”2 I am a master at deception, and there is no one I have deceived more than myself. I refused to face my deepest flaws and my darkest sins because I was afraid they were unforgiveable and made me unredeemable and unlovable. Like Adam and Eve, I hid among the trees. The dense foliage of my life—busyness, distraction, social media, my to-do list, and, above all, my striving to achieve, succeed, and please—protected me from my deepest self, from both my sins and my desires. Like the bleeding woman, I told my story—I confessed—only when I was called out and could stay hidden no more.
As Ruth Haley Barton observes, “It can be frightening to allow ourselves to want something we’re not sure we can have, especially if it is something as essential as the presence of God in our lives. In many of us, the fear of not getting what our heart longs for has led us to develop an unconscious pattern of distancing ourselves from our desire in order to avoid the pain of its lack of fulfillment.”3 I couldn’t bring myself to face the fact that even after my return to faith, even after writing a whole book about that journey back to God, even after pursuing a career and calling as a Christian writer, I still wrestled with doubt and unbelief. I couldn’t name it, not only because acknowledging my struggle made me feel like a complete and utter fraud, but also because while my deepest desire was to know God, my deepest fear was that to know him was, for me, impossible.
I didn’t realize it that morning, but my revelation under the Tuscan trees was a confession of sorts. Like Jesus, who called out the bleeding woman who had touched his robe, God called me out and demanded I tell my story—the whole story. For the first time in a long time I admitted both to myself and to God that I still wrestled with unbelief. I revealed my sin, my shadow side. I named my deepest brokenness, and in doing so, gave voice not only to my sin, but also to my desire.
Remember the words I quoted from Ruth Haley Barton in chapter 2? “The willingness to see ourselves as we are and name it in God’s presence is at the very heart of the spiritual journey.”4 In that moment on the ground in Tuscany, I saw myself as I was, and I named it in God’s presence. Like the bleeding woman who only confessed when she realized she could not remain hidden, I knew, in that moment, that I could no longer stay hidden, that I had, in fact, never been hidden. I saw my sin—that I didn’t know God—and my desire—that I yearned to know God.
For the first time in my life I saw and understood that relationship with God is the foundation of everything. I saw that all things—intimacy in marriage, parenting, and friendships; relationship to community; vocation; knowledge of self—are built on knowing and being in relationship with God. I saw that my identity as a child of God is everything. I saw that without that, I have nothing; without that, I am nothing. I finally named not only my brokenness but my desire to be whole. Like the man by the pool of Bethesda, I finally heard and answered Jesus’ question. I answered, Yes, I want to get well, and I picked up my mat.
Is there some piece of yourself or your story that is inhibiting you from understanding and stepping into your true identity as a beloved child of God? It may not be doubt or unbelief keeping you from experiencing the fullness of God’s presence, like it was (and sometimes, if I am totally honest, still is) for me. It may be something different altogether—perhaps a past wound, a deep fear, a lack of trust, or a need for control. God is calling you like he called Adam and Eve, like he called the hemorrhaging woman, to step out of hiding—to recognize and confront yourself as you really are and name it in God’s presence. God is calling you to stand, pick up your mat, and walk like the man at the pool of Bethesda toward him.
I need to tell you, though, that this stepping out, this walking toward, won’t necessarily be easy. In fact, the way it played out for me that morning under the Tuscan trees and in the aftermath of my revelation was not beautiful at all. It was not a peaceful, joyful epiphany with singing cherubs and a crescendo of violins. It was not a moment of healing, hope, and freedom like it was for the bleeding woman who touched the hem of Jesus’ robe or the invalid at the pool of Bethesda who rose triumphantly to his feet.
My moment of confession, of stepping out of hiding and into the blinding light of truth, was the opposite. It was terrifying and painful, dark, lonely, and empty. It felt wildly out of control, a visceral experience not unlike a labor of sorts. I didn’t understand what was happening. I thought I was having a panic attack. I wondered if I’d simply drunk too much strong Italian coffee that morning at breakfast; I thought maybe the mix of jet lag and caffeine had produced a cataclysmic chemical reaction in my body.
In fact, it wasn’t the effects of caffeine or jet lag or even a panic attack. Naming my sin and my desire, as painful and frightening as that was, was my first tenuous but necessary step toward uncovering my true self, but it was also a step into uncertainty. What I experienced on the Tuscan hillside that morning was, I know now, a plunge into the dark night of the soul.
GOING DEEPER
It’s no coincidence that my revelation took place on that Tuscan hillside, but it was the uninterrupted solitude and the quiet rather than the setting itself that made the difference. Freed from the constraints of my daily five minutes, I had plenty of opportunity in which to settle deep into my thoughts, and when I did, the parts of myself that I’d avoided for so long quickly made themselves known.
Stepping out of hiding, acknowledging your false self, and naming your deepest brokenness is daunting work, but I urge you to continue to take time, as you are able, to sit quietly in solitude and allow this process to unfold and take shape. Here are some questions to consider as you begin to recognize and name both your sins and your deepest desires:
- Do you ever feel that God is calling you out of hiding? What parts of your story could you be keeping from yourself and from God? Where are you most comfortable hiding? What might that tell you in terms of identifying your true self?
- Consider the questions Jamin asked my retreat group: “What does it mean for you that rest is found in God? What does it mean that we are restless when we are away from him?” Do those questions provoke any thoughts or stir any emotions in you? Do you feel restful or restless these days?
- Why do you think God called out “Where are you?” to Adam and Eve when they were hiding in the garden?
- What illusions do you have about yourself? How can they “feed the roots of [your] sin,” as Thomas Merton said? Why do you think you hold on to them?
- Are you ready to name your sins?