Further Up and Further In: Ten Years of Ardent Devotion

Last month marked ten years since I started writing this blog. In August 2011, as a precocious, competitive, spiritually juvenile 15-year-old, I began attending youth group and girls group, and immediately thereupon decided my new religious insights needed a written output. And so Ardent Devotion was born.

For years I thought I had a lot of interesting things to say. I didn’t mind who read them or didn’t, I simply wanted to express everything the Holy Spirit was doing in my mind, heart, and soul. During my NET years, my early university study, and my discernment of religious life, I felt called to share my depths with the internet, to “throw open the doors of this work in progress, that all may come to know Him who builds.”

But in the second half of 2018, my zeal for blogging began to dwindle. Two things had happened: I started dating someone, and my dad was diagnosed with incurable cancer. 

The first – beginning a relationship with my now-fiancé Callum – made vulnerability a different kettle of fish. My heart was not just my own - and Jesus’s - to share all over the internet. Writing about my depths necessarily meant dragging another person’s intimate personal life into the (very small-scale) limelight. And while Callum was mostly okay with me writing about our emerging life together, something had shifted in me. I was terrified of writing something profound and beautiful about our relationship only to have that relationship fall apart. I was scared to admit how much joy and peace dating was bringing me after so long thinking I was meant to be a nun. I felt I was dealing with something very precious, fragile, and to a large extent indescribable. Writing about it felt wrong, like shouting in a sacred space.

 

The second – Dad’s cancer – was similarly difficult to put into words. I wanted to respect my family’s privacy, and I also felt wholly out of my depth. I’d had so little experience of suffering in my life before that. The lessons I was learning were gruelling and often heart-breaking, and I didn’t know how to share them without somehow discouraging others’ faith in God. I never had a ‘dark night of the soul’, per se – the tender, merciful voice of Jesus always felt close even at the hardest moments – but I was ashamed of my own fatigue and self-pity and anger and anxiety. I feared that my writing would sound vitriolic, or worse, trite and inauthentic. 

And so a few years have passed with only a smattering of blog posts. The dating years, the Dad-has-cancer years, the coronavirus pandemic years, the working-in-administration years, the getting-a-masters-degree years. A time of inner turmoil and exponential growth. A time wherein my faith has gained substance and become three-dimensional, nuanced, mercy-oriented, confusing, and unexpectedly beautiful.

Silence has made sense. Like the Virgin Mary's early months of pregnancy, these years have been a time where the Word of God has been growing quietly within me, too little and vulnerable to bring into the light. I haven't been able to describe the details of that tiny, miraculous growth, even though every day has brought with it a noticeable change in my own shape and identity. 

Even when I've wanted or been asked to write, the Holy Spirit has gently pressed me towards patience:

"She treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart." Luke 2:19

In quiet, in darkness, in joyful hope and patient longing, His Word is being knit together within me. That knowledge brings with it a reverence and awe, a thrill of fear and a heightened appreciation of God's mystery. I cannot fathom how, when, or what the end result will be. But I trust that this long Advent of unanswered questions, hidden growth, and breathtaking sacredness will bear its fruit in due season. 

~~~

For anyone for whom this has been resonating, I want to offer a few words of encouragement for the complex season you find yourself in:

1. You don't have to know how to summarise it (to most people)

"How are you doing?" they ask. And you wish you could say, "Better and worse than I've ever been in my life. Exhausted, confused, sad, anxious, despondent; hopeful, excited, humbled, grateful. In short: a bit all over the place, really." 

To people who aren't in your season, or who haven't already lived through a similar one, this strange and hidden journey can't really be explained. There is a gravity and darkness in the language you would put around it that alienates some people and makes others worry about you. But you aren't worried about yourself. Jesus is in this with you, closer and more tangible than perhaps ever before. That's part of what is scary: God is realer than you realised. The demands of Christianity are tougher than you signed up for. Suffering is calling forth an integrity in your soul that you hadn't realised it was capable of, nor had you realised it was falling short of. Truth is sharper and cuts you quick.

This can be a lonely season. Many even of your Christian friends don't really understand it. It's an intensely interior journey that permeates all of your external experiences. It evades easy summary, and so the temptation is to avoid sharing with anyone. Almost worse than the loneliness of invulnerability is the loneliness that follows vulnerable sharing that is poorly responded to. 

But take heart. The Lord is faithful. Ask Him for one person - just one - who gets it and to whom you can entrust all the tumult of your soul's journey. And when you find that person - a close friend, spiritual director, or mentor - be as real with them as you can be. Don't sugarcoat the mess. Don't try to find the superficial 'moral of the story'. Let it be complex and all-over-the-place and filled with Truth. 

2. Downward is still further up; the chasm is the only way forward

From personal experience and from accompanying a few friends on similar journeys, I've realised God often leads us to a point in our spiritual lives where we find ourselves on the edge of an enormous cliff.

Going back isn't an option; jumping into the chasm seems like idiocy. And so we end up sitting on the edge of the cliff for a really long time, confused and inert and frustrated with God. Our instincts and formation tell us that we should be going upwards, but it doesn't appear possible. Cliff-jumping is risky, and the void below is black and unknown, and we're safe up here. 

You gotta jump. And fall. And crash, just a bit. Because somehow 'broken, disenchanted, paralysed and more humiliated than we've been in a long time' is exactly where God needs us to be before then next part of the journey can continue. In a way, it's a rite of passage in sanctity. Until we can risk the leap and the breaking of our ego, He cannot bless us with the knowledge of the humility and suffering of God that leads to glory. There is no resurrection without death. 

If you feel like you are dying to yourself in a million-and-one ways, it means you are exactly where you need to be. If you are in the Valley of Humiliation, crying bitter tears of regret that you aren't where you used to be - praise be to God. Follow it lower still. Follow it to Calvary. Jesus is there, and in uniting your broken body and soul with His, you will be made new. 

3. Trust His timing: This too shall pass

A normal part of pregnancy seems to be the absurd sensation of waiting at the end. Your body has nurtured and grown a new life inside, which by all medical evidence is ready to exist on its own in the world. And yet that baby is still inside of you while you wait - heavy, exhausted, and aching - for things to get moving.

Realistically, all mothers know that pregnancy cannot last forever. The baby will come out and a new season of life will begin. But the days and weeks of unknowing can seem endless.

The same is true in our spiritual lives. The Advent of waiting, the silent growth, the Valley of Humiliation, the indescribable and lonely season of not knowing the answers -  these things are not forever. However absurd and interminable the waiting may seem, God alone knows just when His Word is ready to enter the world through you. If He is calling you to still carry it hidden inside for days or weeks (or, in the spiritual life, even months or years) more, then trust Him. Don't seek to bring it forth precipitously - you risk your own health and that of the Lord's precious, vulnerable fruit in the process. 

For a long time, I've been praying that Jesus will lead me back to the summit - beyond 'treasuring up and pondering in my heart' back to 'go make disciples of all nations'. And He will. But in His time, not mine. 

~~~

Life in Christ, faithfully lived, is always 'further up and further in', even when appearances are deceiving and strange valleys of silence demand new kinds of hope from us. 

As we read and pray in Psalm 84:

"They are happy, whose strength is in You

in whose hearts are the roads to Sion.

As they go through the Bitter Valley

they make it a place of springs,

the autumn rain covers it with blessings.

They walk with ever-growing strength;

they will see the God of gods in Sion."

Every day my soul is stronger and fitter than it has ever been. Every day is a rite of passage transforming my virginal heart - snow-white and untouched by suffering - into the full-blown, rose-red, expansive heart of a spiritual mother. And while so much of that journey is hidden and mysterious, I firmly believe that Christ is creating in me and through me the sort of fruit that will last. 

My love and prayers are with you in your journey, friend.

~~~

AMDG