This used to be, for a while at least, the place I tried to better enunciate my inner life. For a while the words dried up and I was left with pictures. Not very good pictures, but sometimes interesting nevertheless.

As is often the case with my writing, I find myself returning to pondering whenever I hit a rut. I’ve not been in a rut in a while, I suppose.

But now I’m back here and that says something quite clear.

I’m in a rut.

Which is kind of a odd way of putting it, really. A rut is a groove in a road made by people going somewhere. More specifically by wagons, with so many over a long period of time making it so the scar in the earth deepens. I saw the picture the other day of how there was still places along the old Oregon trail where the ruts were so thorough that nothing would grow.

But that’s a sidenote, to whatever this main note might be.

I’m in a rut.

In the post below written a couple months after being married I noted the stress of school, that it wasn’t a heavy class load as much as it was a heavy reading load in combination with the pressure of doing well enough to keep up a scholarship. That school year ended and my fellowship was indeed renewed. A 4.0 gpa and a nice amount of other work certainly helps. This past year, my 2nd year, also ended with a continued 4.0 gpa and other apparent successes. But there was no fellowship. Fuller, they tell us, ran out of money.

But, there’s money to be had where they want money to be had, so for me and others, we found ourselves having done enough and well beyond enough, but not finding any associated validation of the effort. Financial validation at least.

I received a one quarter fellowship, which will pay for my upcoming Fall quarter. But after that? It’s all a mystery. Friends of mine in the same situation did not even get that much, even as they did as much or more, so I certainly don’t feel singled out. But, they also had mentors and others who opened up doors. They’re teaching in the Fall.

So, for me, I did all I had to do and beyond. I spoke at conferences, I got an article published in a decent journal, I have a new book coming out at some point before the end of the year. I wrote a 60 page essay for my class this past quarter, and I figure that because I’ve written a lot with my dissertation topic in mind in other courses, I have about 80 pages of my dissertation written. I’m speaking at a Church History conference in early October and I was invited to contribute an article to a book on Spirits in the World edited by Amos Yong, Kirsteen Kim, and Veli-Matti Karkkainen. I’m contributing to a major online Worship project being developed by Augsberg Fortress Press.

Only because of the rather disheartening non-renewal of my fellowship, and the decided lack of other more palpable areas of participation I am struggling with feeling extremely deflated.

And, being that I live in the city now, my usual tactics for renewal are much more difficult to come by.

I’m attending a church, though “involved in” would be a strong stretch of words, since I really still do not have any idea how to get involved. My attempts at more personal connections seem to fall flat. Everyone is nice, and everyone is very busy. So, I yet again struggle in my spiritual and emotional questions without any mentor. This is the common trend in my life, to be sure. I’ve never had a mentor, other than the writings of great spiritual leaders from centuries past.

But they don’t exactly help open up doors or point out what it means to be a budding theologian in a 21st century post-modern world.

This is the place of my struggle now. There are many people around, but I struggle with being quite bifurcated. My deepest self involves a decided mysticism, a spiritual awareness and pull, that for the sake of participation I seem to need to keep almost always buried and hidden. I make jokes and I offer long sentences of increasingly complex analysis.

But I do not feel rooted with God or his people. And I have no idea how to find a renewed sense of spiritual liveliness, one that does not encompass wandering off into isolation–which has been my path in the past.

Theology, in the West at least, is not a mystical enterprise. It’s mostly about tasks and statements and busyness.

Life with Amy is really nice. I love her and I enjoy her friendship every single day. I am not in the safe situation I was just a few years ago.

I’m in this different place, but being here I find my spiritual self not shriveled as much as shadowed and disguised. I’m much better about looking like I am participating in a world in which I feel a permanent outsider.

An image came to me the other day. When I was younger, working at NewSong, I was spiritually and emotionally volatile. I celebrated and I raged. I leaped into the rushing waters of church life as long as I could, and beaten against rocks I still tried to swim. I discovered new heights of creative contributions and new lows of frustrating negation.

Then it all disappeared. Like Moses after hitting the Egyptian, I fled the life I knew and wandered into the wilderness. I found healing there, profound deep healing, and even wrote a couple of books.

But I haven’t found my way back. I don’t even know if there is a back.

Which leaves me wandering about with this rising spiritual consternation within me, a sadness that wells up when I find a quiet moment, with tears never quite fully forming, but a burgeoning weeping touching the back of my eyes and suggesting a deeply stirred soul that can’t quite find the words or the touch to help find my way out of the caves.

This mystical reality that is my true home–much more than the physical world that I seem to occupy–roused me and stirred me over the course of my life — thrusting me into questions that were too big and answers that were just enough to spur me to see how much more there was to this whole reality. Which then pushed more and more questions.

Which is why I began to study church history and which was why I started seminary. Because I had questions that no one around me could answer, and yet I knew — for the deepest parts of my soul told me — that there were indeed answers to be found.

But now?

I’m in a rut.

Again. Which is the basis of this post. This isn’t the blog where I try to say something interesting or witty or point out the goings on of some trip into nature. This is my soul blog, where I try to sort out what it is that is going on.

Because I have hope.

But I don’t, right now, have any answers to what is plaguing my soul — this deeply disheartened feeling of being untethered to any real community and all my efforts being but chasing after the wind.

So I write a bit, because I want to find a return. A return if not to an explicable lifestyle, then at least to a contented purpose and holistic peace that there is promise awaiting.

I haven’t written here in a while. And I haven’t written here regularly for a much longer while.

No real excuses.

I got to the point where documenting my inner state wasn’t opening new insights. I was going in circles as the state of my life remained in the same limbo. I had the freedom of time and a forest of sorts outside.

But never my own real space to let my thoughts wander and explore.

There was always busyness about the house as I lived with my parents during a time of their need and my need intersecting.

There was, all too often, construction of busy neighbors who came to the mountains, it seems, less for the ambience and more for the tinkering, image, or some other hidden trait, forcing their near constant noise outward.

I tried to be a monastic. But a monk, it seems, needs a monastery of either quiet or action. I was in limbo.

Limbo taught a lot. Not a lot about what I thought I needed to learn. Not a lot about theophanies or perichoresis or intimate encounters of prayer. I lost so much of my earnestness, my pursuit of finding prayer spaces, my seeking after seclusion.

But, I learned how to be irritated. Not that this itself needs a lesson. It’s the response to that, responding to other people’s noises and disturbances and inadvertant life that always seems to get in the way of my rhythms.

Everyone is playing a song, and it’s almost always a different song than the one I am playing or trying to listen to. The one I’m trying to listen to is God’s music. That’s the music to dance with. If we can find others who are also listening rather than playing than a real great time can be had.

But that’s rare. And that’s a gift. A great intersection of God’s people in a season of openness.

I’ve not had that for a long, long while. I don’t know how to find that and I’m honestly exhausted trying to find it, force it.

Limbo taught me how to be, however, when things aren’t as I would manage them and how to be when everything that is almost satisfying never quite gets there. A stream of constant frustrations about seeing what I would need and not being able to embrace it, knowing that it would have been an easy fix for God to arrange and manage the circumstances to allow for the communion I sought with him.

He never did. And that led to some bitterness, irritations, loss of caring, loss of the earnest attempts to find the windows in which I could commune with eternity and step out of the limited life that I led, if even for a small moment.

I lost the spiritual drive. I didn’t feel like God cared about reciprocating. I was trying to manage the relationship, through trying to manage what was indeed a strong desire for quiet time, reflection, and all those good things that people say are mandatory for our spiritual developments.

I learned to dance, I suppose. But not too well, and not without too easily giving in to the other tunes that danced in so many directions. I was flappable. Quite flabbable. And that was used against me.

The environment is different now.

I have my own apartment for the first time in 5+ years. I’m married now. I live in Pasadena rather than in the mountains.

I have a heavy school load, not classes but a lot of reading and pressure that comes from trying to do well enough to maintain a yearly renewed scholarship.

The dance hall I used to be in is now different.

But God’s song is the same. And as limbo transitions now into a semblance of a real person’s life, I cannot let go either the drive or the goals that the spiritual call has placed upon me. Now that life has changed I see again the victories and failures of my past season, seeing how I’ve grown and how I’ve remained so strikingly immature in faith and prayer and devotion. I have so much more hope and faith and stability and stillness now. But there remains much more to grow in these as I stretch towards a wholeness that I’ve tasted but am still so far from embracing as my own.

The last few days I’ve been poked by my spiritual life. Now that all the frantic busyness of wedding and moving and new studies have settled down into what seems to be the new reality I’m faced with my self, my God, my God with me and myself with others.

A new reality begins in which I feel drawn to discover the spirituality of this life as it happens, honing my strengths and maybe finding a way past the weaknesses so that I might become a better participant in God’s work and with him in the way that he asks.

Maybe this might even mean a return to regular musings on this page.

“Still, I must have faith”. That’s how I ended the last post. Sounds terribly anemic, doesn’t it? Oh, well, at least I should have faith.

“Now faith,” the book of Hebrews says, “is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.”

Being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. This implies something and it doesn’t imply what we normally mean when the word faith is bandied about.

Faith means something. It’s not a nebulous hope rooted in a vague expectation of future changes. It pushes and prods, evident not when we utter words but when we commit to actions, actions that speak of an already settled expectation that reality may not be fully expressed in the present.

Faith provokes action. Sometimes this action may be a letting go, or a stepping back, done out of patient expectation of God’s work. Sometimes this action may mean decided changes.

Saying there can be only faith means to continue to press on towards God without evidence of his present work, assuming on a deep level his work is moving forward.

There are, however, pseudo-faith expressions which have the appearance of faithfulness but betray an inner lack. The first comes out in the constant dependence on another for faithful confidence. This sort of pseudo-faith is in continual need of reassurance about the promises, and if left alone or isolated falls into a pit of despair. Without the grounding, this pseudo-faith becomes a leech on the community, drawing away rather than contributing. It can, however, look really faithful, as such a faith is almost always extremely religious in expression, seeking to be close to those who seem confident and active in whatever means might reassure their soul. This faith is like a battery that cannot hold a charge.

Another pseudo-faith is a militant sort of faith that seeks assurance by trying to drown out any opposing voice. They want their whole surroundings to be one refrain, and anything that disturbs this refrain must be stifled. This appears faithful because it is so active in the defense of the faith and uses a great deal of moral and Scriptural language to support the action. Only, it has no reserves. Any disturbance shatters the foundation. They have no capacity to overcome inner doubt and so betray a substantial lack of true belief in the God who can and does save.

Then there is the pseudo-faith that tries to philosophize its way out of difficulties, lessening the expectation, lowering the standards, making the promises into allegorical points about emulating important life principles. This is a hard one to clarify, as it uses all the right words, only there is little depth of meaning behind these words.

I don’t need any of these kinds of faiths and they would be a total waste of my time.

What I need to hold onto is the living, palpable, action influencing faith that can weather the storm or the drought.

This is the faith that prompted Peter to step out of the boat, and later to preach on the streets of Jerusalem.

This is the faith I must hold onto, come what may.