Fellow Reflection: Olivia Stanley

I’m writing this reflection from the annual Life Together Advent Retreat at the Bethany House of Prayer. Last Advent I was gearing up for my second to last finals season. I remember the feeling of anticipation to finish my last Advent semester at Sewanee. The period of waiting to be done with all of the exams is long, hopeful, and preoccupying. I had to work hard to recount the semester in two weeks in order to enjoy my reward: a long break from school. I expected a clear reward for all of my waiting.

Where I was last year compared to where I am now in Advent is a mirror of this life I once lived. I always want a break; the feelings of anticipating something are resurfacing as my body prepares for the finals season it’s been used to for so long. There are no tests to take, all nighters to pull, and the people around me are very different. No academic pressure, just the same old waiting. This Advent I’m reflecting on questions around lingering. Why are we waiting? Do we want things to be better or just different? What are we waiting on? What makes us wait? Henri Nouwen offers some answers to these questions:

“Open-ended waiting is hard for us because we tend to wait for something very concrete, for something that we wish to have…for this reason, a lot of our waiting is not open-ended. Instead our waiting is a way of controlling the future. We want the future to go in a very specific direction, and if it does not happen we are disappointed and can even slip into despair.” !!!!!!

I am someone that tries to control the uncontrollable. And fix everything. To change. To be better and do better, all the time. I am feeling so lost about what I’m waiting for this season because I have had control of my direction, up until this point. I am a college educated young adult with anxiety that does not want to make the wrong move – and there is a bleeding and suffering world that needs a lot of tending to – how am I supposed to know how I can best heal the wound? There is so much to do it feels impossible to know when is the right time to take action and how to do it right.

Rebecca Solnit writes about human existence in the 21st century in the book Hope in the Dark:

“This is an extraordinary time full of vital, transformative movements that could not be foreseen. It’s also a nightmarish time. Full engagement [in the world] requires the ability to see both…The 21st century has seen the rise of hideous economic inequality, working conditions, and social services…the elites who forgot they conceded to some of these things in the hope of avoiding revolution…Hope doesn’t mean denying these realities [CLIMATE CHANGE]. It means facing them and addressing them by remembering what else the 21st century has brought, including the movements, heroes, and shifts in consciousness that address these things now…This has been a truly remarkable decade for movement-building, social change, and deep profound shifts in ideas, perspectives, frameworks for broad parts of the population.”

I am an Enneagram 4, the type known as the Individualist – I dream up lives I could spend forever waiting for. I have a vast imagination and I love to fantasize about the world I could live in. Particularly I dream up lives I think have worth, and they often do not align with my reality. Having unrealistic expectations of myself can be really unfair to me, and also to those that support me because it can prevent me from being grateful for my reality. Easing into open-ended waiting and embracing the in-between can make it easier to accept our best. Showing up authentically as ourselves and uplifting the support that carries us through the waiting combats self-isolation. Life Together has been a time of waiting for me – I am taking a gap year in between college and graduate school. An intentional gap year can produce beautiful products out of the waiting. I am trying to ease into not having control over what is next for me. I am able to do this because of the immense intention I have put into waiting. Even though it feels like I have been passively waiting for life to happen to me, I have been seriously discerning my vocation and purpose in the world. There will come a point when we have to stop waiting for the perfect moment to respond to the world’s needs and just do it. I hope that one day I will understand that while I was waiting for God to give me the full image of my life, God was painting on me the whole time. It has no allusion to worthiness being in good grades, or a list of letters behind my name. But it’s an image of a fulfilled call and a life well-loved.

December Newsletter from Executive Director Kelsey Rice Bogdan

Back in my first year as Executive Director, I wrote a piece for this newsletter in which I spoke of the “cold barrenness of winter.” One of our fantastic alumni, who is an environmental educator, wrote back a few days later: the land is NOT barren in winter, far from it. Under the blanket of snow, microorganisms are preparing the ground for growth. The cold kills off harmful pests. Winter prepares the way for new life in the spring.

Maybe it makes sense, then, that the two seasons of preparation in the church calendar, Advent and Lent, fall in the darkest and coldest months in the northern hemisphere. During those seasons, we are called to slow down, to be quiet, so that we can hear the still, small voice calling out the seeds of new life within us. But at Christmas, too often we settle for the cheap version of preparation that we see modeled around us: lengthy shopping lists, perfect home decor, or for some of us, plowing through the landslide of work tasks before wearily putting on the holiday out-of-office message. Convinced that the quiet and darkness are barren spaces, we ward them off with the noise and glitzy light of our busy-ness. And the soil of our souls remains malnourished.

Yet I’m drawn to what Black author Cole Arthur Riley writes on Instagram (@BlackLiturgies) about Advent: “As we wait, we remind ourselves that darkness (which is far too often reduced to a trite symbol for sin and death), actually has the unique capacity to bear the divine. In Advent, we reclaim the holy dark.” What would it mean, in these final days of Advent, to reclaim that darkness, to recognize its divine potential? What would shift within us?

When I think about the holy dark, I think about reflection, openness, willingness to let the cold kill off what no longer helps me so that I can make space for growth. And it is in that spirit of holy dark that Life Together is entering its own season of reflection over the next few months. Accompanied by consultants from the Capacity Institute, we will explore where Life Together has been in the darkness of this pandemic season, and where it is going in the years ahead. We want to reflect on the needs of Gen Z young adults and what we are called to offer the next generation of prayerful and prophetic leaders. It is a chance to prepare the soil for a new season in our organizational life. I am eager to begin this work, and excited to share what we are learning with you in the coming months.

May you embrace the holy dark of these final days of Advent, and find the joy of new life this Christmas. Happy holidays to all of you in our Life Together community!