In-between: a wilderness journey

A last invitation to join me for an online retreat this coming Sunday...

Hello fellow pilgrims,

(Want to skip to retreat registration? Here is the link!)

Photo by Artur Łuczka on Unsplash

This coming Sunday, my friend Debbie and I are hosting an online retreat called “inbetween”. Last week, as I sat on the sofa late Wednesday night after the Ash Wednesday service, I texted her and wrote, 

“I noticed how in-between it was… from dust to dust. Our whole lives are in between, with earth as the space we travel from and to…”

(this is the kind of late night text my close friends get from me! #sorrynotsorry)

Lent is the in-between space of the Christian calendar. We enter the wilderness with Jesus and we wander there for forty days, reckoning with our mortality, our dust-ness, with absence of all we knew and held to be true. 

You are in this time of the interim
Where everything seems withheld.
The path you took to get here has washed out;
The way forward is still concealed from you.
“The old is not old enough to have died away;
The new is still too young to be born.”

- For the Interim Time, by John O’Donohue

For many of us, these wilderness seasons have felt like the absence of God, “where things pass and / the Lord is in none of them”, as the poet R.S. Thomas wrote¹. When everything we thought we knew is stripped away and all we have is wordlessness, the concepts of God that were concrete and tangible and utterable vanish too. 

And yet, the gospel writer tells us that Jesus was “led by the Spirit” into the wilderness, just as the stories of old told that God led the Israelites into and through the wilderness.

The in-between feels like an invitation then, to consent to a necessary burning away of everything that no longer serves us, that something new might grow in its place.

Susan Fisher captured this in her evocative short poem: 

Sometimes the landscape of my soul
seems like this burnt hillside,
the wind rattling orange leaves on black twigs,
the soil full of ash between the stones.
Sometimes the landscape of my soul
seems like this terrible waste of dead trees.

Walking this afternoon among the charred remains
I found a black stump sprouting leaves
and new grass thinly veiling
a delicate oak sapling
in this, the ravaged landscape of my soul.

I’m not interested in pretending the in-between spaces of our lives are delightful or comfortable. They rarely are. They are places to wrestle and strip away and rage and mourn. And yet they are usually not harmful, particularly when we have the support to lean into their invitation.

And most tantalisingly, for me at least, is the possibility of more expansive ways of seeing God, of realising that what I took for absence was a different way of experiencing Presence. Like R.S.Thomas says, “What to do but, like Michelangelo’s Adam, put my hand out into unknown space, hoping for the reciprocating touch?”

That is what Debbie and I are hoping to offer you in our online afternoon retreat this coming Sunday 25th February (morning for those of you in North America).

We’ll be curious about what it means to move through the thin spaces of our lives, in a (spoiler alert) journey of home-coming. We’ll hold hope of that reciprocating touch of the Divine. And we’ll use creative prompts to bless those in-between spaces. 

Registration is still open (on a tiered scale to hopefully make it accessible to all - message me if the price is still too much and I’ll sort you out with a free place) and we would love to see you there!

1. I love R.S. Thomas’ poetry. He is like a patron saint of deconstruction! Doing priestly work deep in rural Wales and doubting the whole thing. The two quotes here are from his poem Thresholds.