When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life's Sacred Questions

DEDICATION

To Sandy,

who has risked newness

along with me

EPIGRAPH

I said to my soul, be still, and wait. . . .

So the darkness shall be the light,

and the stillness the dancing.

T. S. ELIOT

CONTENTS

Dedication

Epigraph

Preface

PART 1

WAITING AND TRANSFORMATION

Chapter 1   The Long Way Round

Chapter 2   Quickaholic Spirituality

Chapter 3   From False Self to True Self

PART 2

PASSAGE OF SEPARATION

Chapter 4   Crisis as Opportunity

Chapter 5   Letting Go

PART 3

PASSAGE OF TRANSFORMATION

Chapter 6   Concentrated Stillness

Chapter 7   Incubating the Darkness

PART 4

PASSAGE OF EMERGENCE

Chapter 8   Unfurling New Wings

Learn More about Sue Monk Kidd

Notes

When the Heart Waits Leader’s Guide Questions

About the Author

Also by Sue Monk Kidd

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Copyright

About the Publisher

PREFACE

When the Heart Waits was written from a place deep inside me. It comes out of the well of my own journey and midlife experience. It’s always difficult and risky to try to put soulmaking into words. I found that to be especially true with this book. It asked much of me. It called for a painful honesty and vulnerability that I found daunting. It asked me to go deep into myself, to open my story, to invite you into what I can only call a merciful coming together of reader and author.

I’ve tried to grapple with the sacred questions of life, with the journey and mystery of the human soul as it grows spiritually, moving through passages most have forgotten exist. You’ll find me talking a lot about waiting, for in many ways waiting is the missing link in the transformation process. I’m not referring to waiting as we’re accustomed to it, but waiting as the passionate and contemplative crucible in which new life and spiritual wholeness can be birthed.

During the past few years, various people have talked with me about spiritual direction for their lives. They’ve told me that God was summoning them to get in touch with the flow of their interior lives, with the deep and beautiful work of soulmaking. This book is an attempt to help them—and you—with this endeavor.

I’ve tried to open up a path before you—one grounded in the Bible, in centuries of Christian spiritual writing, and in contemporary spiritual direction and developmental psychology. I’ve tried to offer down-to-earth truths from my own life, as well as profound truths from the great tradition of Christian spirituality. It has been my task to weave them together to make a tapestry of storytelling and teaching that might open your eyes to the transforming Christ-journey we’re all called to make.

My deepest hope is that you’ll read not only with your mind but also with your heart, for that is when God strikes music and life into any author’s words.

When referring to God, I’ve used language which highlights that God is neither male or female. Masculine pronouns appear only when I’m quoting from another source.

This book has already been a merciful coming together of many people who helped me during the writing process. First of all, I owe a great debt to my friends and colleagues at Harper & Row, who have been helpful and supportive of my writing. I’m especially grateful to Rebecca Laird, who edited this book and delicately wove for me an environment of creative freedom, direction, and encouragement. A special word of gratitude also goes to Jan Johnson, whose constant support has meant more to me than she knows.

I’m indebted to the many friends who supported me during the writing of this book. To Roy M. Carlisle, who helped me birth the original concept and offered enthusiasm for developing the idea into a book; to the women of Grace Episcopal Church in Anderson, South Carolina, who invited me to address them concerning the themes and material in the book while it was still in progress and whose affirming response gave me new energy toward completing it; to those who waited with me through the journey I describe in the book—John, Betty, and Mary Page. They supplied listening hearts and a loving participation in my story.

I thank Betty Blackerby, who has become the sister I never had. Her presence and the sharing of her own experience have graced me and this project.

I’m grateful to my children, Bob and Ann, for their patience as I wrote, as well as for the richness of their lives, which overflows into these pages. My deepest thank you goes to my husband, Sandy, for believing in me and in this book throughout. His love, help, and encouragement have been an immense gift.

Today is the Feast Day of St. Francis of Assisi. As I finish this book, I think of one particular line from his beautiful prayer: Where there is darkness, let me sow light. May it be so.

Sue Monk Kidd

Anderson, South Carolina

PART 1

WAITING AND TRANSFORMATION

CHAPTER 1

The Long Way Round

Midway this way of life we’re bound upon,

I woke to find myself in a dark wood,

Where the right road was wholly lost and gone. . . .

It is so bitter it goes nigh to death.

DANTE

Patience is everything.

RAINER MARIA RILKE

Overhead a thickening of clouds wreathed everything in grayness. It was February, when the earth of South Carolina seems mired in the dregs of winter. I had been walking for miles; I don’t know how many. I could feel neither my toes inside my shoes nor the wind on my face. I could feel nothing at all but an intense aching in my soul.

For some months I had been lost in a baffling crisis of spirit. Back in the autumn I had awakened to a growing darkness and cacophony, as if something in my depths were crying out. A whole chorus of voices. Orphaned voices. They seemed to speak for all the unlived parts of me, and they came with a force and dazzle that I couldn’t contain. They seemed to explode the boundaries of my existence. I know now that they were the clamor of a new self struggling to be born.

MIDLIFE DARKNESS

I was standing on the shifting ground of midlife, having come upon that time in life when one is summoned to an inner transformation, to a crossing over from one identity to another. When change-winds swirl through our lives, especially at midlife, they often call us to undertake a new passage of the spiritual journey: that of confronting the lost and counterfeit places within us and releasing our deeper, innermost self—our true self. They call us to come home to ourselves, to become who we really are.

That winter of my discontent, I had no real idea of any of this. I was mystified by the inner upheaval I felt. This sort of thing couldn’t be happening to me, I told myself. I had already been on an inner spiritual quest—one that had begun eight years earlier with an experience of chest pains and stress. My journey had taught me a more contemplative way of being in the world and had given me the first real centeredness I’d known. Discovering myself loved by God and forging new dimensions of intimacy with God’s presence had brought much healing to my fragmented life.

I should have remembered, though, that the life of the spirit is never static. We’re born on one level, only to find some new struggle toward wholeness gestating within. That’s the sacred intent of life, of God—to move us continuously toward growth, toward recovering all that is lost and orphaned within us and restoring the divine image imprinted on our soul. And rarely do significant shifts come without a sense of our being lost in dark woods, or in what T. S. Eliot called the vacant interstellar spaces.¹

I kept walking through the fogged afternoon light as if the mere ritual of putting one foot in front of the other would lead me out of my pain. I buried my hands in the pockets of my coat and watched the wind blow a paper cup along the gutter. I was approaching the college campus. Was it possible that I had walked so far? The sun was beginning to fade now. I started to turn back but felt weighted inside, as if I couldn’t move.

I dragged myself to a little bench wedged among the trees. Sitting there, I studied their bony arms and felt their emptiness, their desperate reach for sky and light. Tears rimmed my eyes and burned on my cheeks. It made no sense. I’d never really believed in midlife crises. They had seemed too trendy, another cliché-ridden piece of Americana. But here I was having one, and it was frighteningly real.

The familiar circles of my life left me with a suffocating feeling. My marriage suddenly seemed stale, unfulfilling; my religious structures, stifling. Things that used to matter no longer did; things that had never mattered were paramount. My life had curled up into the frightening mark of a question.

Each day I went about my responsibilities as always, writing through the morning and early afternoon, picking my children up from school, answering mail, shopping for groceries, cooking—plowing through the never-ending list of duties. I’ve always been accomplished at being dutiful (even during a crisis). Outwardly I appeared just fine. Inside I was in turmoil.

My husband, Sandy, was as exasperated by my experience as he was bewildered. He wanted things to go back to the comfortable way they were before. He wanted me to snap out of it. I did too, of course. I had ordered myself to do just that numerous times. But it was sort of like looking at an encroaching wave and telling it to recede. Demanding didn’t make it happen.

I sighed, my mind wandering to the picture I’d sketched the night before. (I have a hobby of charcoal drawing, and lately I’d found solace in my sketch pad.) The previous evening I’d drawn a tent in the middle of some wind-howling woods. The stakes that secured the bottom of the tent were uprooted, and the flaps were flailing in the wind. As I put down my pencil, I said to myself, That’s my life. Indeed, it seemed as if the stakes that had secured my neat, safe existence—stakes that I had spent most of my life carefully nailing down—had been pulled up, and everything was tossing about. Underneath the sketch I wrote, Midlife.

Now, as I thought of the drawing, I recognized what a tent dweller I had been. Maybe I was supposed to go wandering in a new part of my inner landscape. Maybe that’s what midlife was about: pilgrimage.

I drew up the collar of my coat and thought of my external, everyday self—the self I presented to the world. I contemplated the masks I’d worn, the inner selves or dominant patterns embedded within me that had influenced my way in the world.

Referring to this multiplicity of inner selves that inhabit each person, Elizabeth O’Conner wrote, It was during a time of painful conflict that I first began to experience myself as more than one. It was as though I sat in the midst of many selves.²

I too sat in the midst of many selves. The Pleaser, the Performer, the Perfectionist—my trinity of P’s. I was learning how closely these old roles were connected to another powerful role that I played out: the Good Little Girl.

She was that part of me that had little self-validation or autonomy, who tended to define life by others and their expectations, by collective values and projections. As a woman I sometimes felt that I had been scripted to be all things to all people. But when I tried, I usually ended up forfeiting my deepest identity, my own unique truth as God’s creature.

My Good Little Girl endured everything sweetly, feared coloring outside of the traditional lines, and frequently cut herself off from her real thoughts and feelings. She was well adapted to thinking other people’s thoughts and following the path of least resistance.

At times she seemed like an orchid in a hothouse: fragile, pleasing, someone who always ended up being pressed between the pages of someone else’s scrapbook. Much of my life I’d found my principal roles expressed mainly in the pages of someone else’s life. I was someone’s mother, someone’s wife, someone’s Sunday school teacher, someone’s employee. Wonderful things. But down deep, at soul level, who was I?

Now, oddly, I could feel the intimations of an unknown woman locked away inside of me who wanted life and breath, who wanted to shed what wasn’t real and vital and recover that which was. I felt the vibrations of a deeper, authentic self who wanted to live out her own unique vision of individuality and embrace her own mystery. Who was this self inside of me who cried out to be?

During the previous few weeks I had been reading the poetry of T. S. Eliot, who at times seemed like a soulmate to me. In his Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock I found my story, the quiet agony of someone who came upon an unsuspecting darkness buried in midlife and met the overwhelming question: Do I dare/Disturb the universe?/ . . . I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;/I know the voices dying with a dying fall/Beneath the music from a farther room.³

My life felt measured out in lumps too small. And there was a bewitching music from a distant room I couldn’t find. Voices dying to be heard. Did I dare disturb the universe within myself?

Believe me, I wanted to shove all this away and pretend it didn’t exist. But I couldn’t. Life tasted of cardboard and smelled of stagnant air. At times I found myself shut in a closet of pain, unable to find the door. In my blackest moments I actually fantasized about running away from home to find the vital part of me that I had lost.

ENTERING THE QUESTION

As I sat on the bench that day beneath the low-slung gray sky, everything was fomenting, turning end over end like the paper cup I had watched in the street. And suddenly, at the height of my chaos, I began to entertain the overwhelming question confronting me. I had been circling it for a long while, but now, at last, I walked right into the center of it. It was a dangerous thing to do, for those who enter the heart of a sacred question and feel the searing heat it gives off are usually compelled to live on into the answer.

Is it possible, I asked myself, that I’m being summoned from some deep and holy place within? Am I being asked to enter a new passage in the spiritual life—the journey from false self to true self? Am I being asked to dismantle old masks and patterns and unfold a deeper, more authentic self—the one God created me to be? Am I being compelled to disturb my inner universe in quest of the undiscovered being who clamors from within?

Unfortunately, there has been little emphasis on this summons within Christian circles. When it comes, we don’t understand that we’re being thrust into personal transformation, into the task of birthing an I that is not yet. We write it off as just another predicament or plight—perhaps the result of burnout or our dissatisfaction with life.

I believe, however, that in such a summons we’re actually being presented with a spiritual developmental task. We’re being asked to unfold a deeper self—what we might call the life of Christ within us.

To embark on this task involves a deep and profound movement of soul that takes us from an identification with the collective they to a discovery of the individual I, and finally, as we shall eventually see, to an embracing of the compassionate we. This task is truly one of the more precarious and mysterious pathways in the spiritual life, for how it’s navigated radically affects one’s alignment with oneself, with God, and with the world.

As I reflected on my struggle that afternoon, my thoughts turned to the discoveries I’d made in the writings of Swiss psychiatrist C. G. Jung. I had been studying his works in earnest for the previous four years. A friend had suggested that I was looking for truth in unorthodox places, but that, of course, is where God often puts it.

Back at the beginning of my spiritual journey I had read avidly through the Western spiritual classics, finding heroes in St. Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Julian of Norwich, Meister Eckhart, and especially the contemporary monk and writer Thomas Merton. Again and again I had read about the contemplative journey into God that entails entering the depths of oneself. Later, when I began to read Jung, I was staggered at how much of his work in depth psychology paralleled the spirituality I’d come to know, and at how they enriched one another.

Jung believed that every midlife crisis is a spiritual crisis, that we are called to die to the old self (ego), the fruit of the first half of life and liberate the new man or woman within us.⁴ Here is a hidden and misunderstood turning point of the soul, I thought. Sadly, not every person will maneuver its convoluted mazes. Would I?

I recalled Jung’s words in Stages of Life:

Wholly unprepared, they embark upon the second half of life. Or are there perhaps colleges for forty-year-olds which prepare them for their coming life and its demands as the ordinary colleges introduce our young people to a knowledge of the world and of life? No, there are none. Thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life; worse still, we take this step with the false presupposition that our truths and ideas will serve as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life’s morning—for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.⁵

Jung divided life into two phases. The first phase, or morning, is reserved for relating and orienting to the outer world by developing the ego. The second half, or afternoon, is for adapting to the inner world by developing the full and true self. The midlife transition between these two Jung likened to a difficult birth.

This transition is difficult because it involves a real breakdown of our old spiritual and psychic structures—the old masks and personas that have served us well in the past but that no longer fit. The overarching roles that created the theme song for my life—Perfectionist, Performer, Pleaser, Good Little Girl, submissive churchgoer, passive and traditional wife—began to lose their music. It’s anguish to come to that place in life where you know all the words but none of the music.

In our youth we set up inner myths and stories to live by, but around the midlife juncture these patterns begin to crumble. It feels to us like a collapsing of all that is, but it’s a holy quaking. When order crumbles, writes John Shea, Mystery rises.⁶

One of my favorite pieces of Scripture comes from Ecclesiastes. "To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted (Eccles. 3:1–2, KJV, emphasis added). We need reassurance that it’s okay to let the old masks die, to pluck up" what was planted long ago.

I often need permission to do daring things. And when I can’t get it from myself, God often sends someone else to give it to me. As I struggled with whether to embrace this experience or banish it, a friend said to me, If you think God leads you only beside still waters, think again. God will also lead you beside turbulent waters. If you have the courage to enter, you’ll think you’re drowning. But actually you’re being churned into something new. It’s okay, Sue, dive in.

When the fullness of time comes, a sacred voice at the heart of us cries out, shaking the old foundation. It draws us into a turbulence that forces us to confront our deepest issues. It’s as if some inner, divine grace seeks our growth and becoming and will plunge us, if need be, into a cauldron that seethes with questions and voices we would just as soon not hear. One way or another, the false roles, identities, and illusions spill over the sides of our life, and we’re forced