While the holidays begin to swirl around me and I feel things starting to rev up, I am surprised that, this week, I feel nudged to share about slowing down.
The need for the slow down, and the difficulty of effecting it, is not a new topic for me. There have been moments throughout my life when it became painfully obvious that I needed to slow down, and, sometimes, some truly awful things had to happen for me to pay attention to slowing my pace.
I delved into this topic deeper than I had before and choked up with tears in front of all my colleagues and superiors when I shared about this at a retreat at the end of covid.
At my old school, we sometimes had assemblies with the students, just like at any school, and we also sometimes had gatherings of just the faculty and staff. Because I worked at a Catholic school, some of the faculty gatherings were retreats.
In the best way that I understand it, a retreat is when something happens deep in your soul. I have, since I first started going on real retreats when I was a teenager, taken to heart the advice of our campus minister, Don Clarke: I try to come into retreats open and honest and, if I am asked to give a Talk on a retreat, I try to be as open and honest–as real as possible–in that Talk.
I was asked to give a Talk on the faculty retreat when we were coming out of covid, when schools were starting to come back after the pandemic. I was asked to talk on the deceptively simple question: What has God been doing in YOU during the pandemic?
Here is what I wrote and what I shared with all of my colleagues and supervisors. I decided to change it only very little; it is written from the stance of coming out of covid, of noticing what effect that had on me. I find so much of this to be true now, and I find that the wisdom I needed in that time of slow down is wisdom that I still need.
So here it is, as real as I can possibly relate it:
‘I’m Christina Barry and I’m going to talk to you about what God has been doing in me during covid.
Whenever I have read a prayer at a faculty or department meeting, it’s always the same one: “Above all, trust in the slow work of God.” I always read this prayer because I am so horribly bad at it.
My whole adult life and especially since I have had children, I have been pulled hard in two directions: To teach and work outside the home, OR to stay home with my kids and care for my family full time. My students know this about me: when I teach them discernment, when I teach consolation and desolation, I always talk to them about how, every summer, I go through the discernment of whether or not I will return to teaching. I am always so frustrated that I don’t feel completely at peace with the direction of my life. It seemed like I was missing something: wouldn’t God’s call to me be clearer? Wouldn’t it feel more peaceful within me? Shouldn’t there be less conflict?
When I was pregnant with our first child and I had just quit my first teaching job, I went to a counselor to seek clarity on this issue, this difficulty in deciding to stay in the professional game or to double down on family. I will never forget what he said to me: he told me he had never met someone who was so drawn toward staying home with her family and so driven to do something more. Though his insight was illuminating, it utterly did not help me at all in my discernment of where God was calling me to give my time and energy. I was NOT okay with how unsettled I felt, and felt sure that God’s calling would make me feel more settled.
This feeling was unsettling to me before the word “unsettling” became, along with “unprecedented”, the most-used word in the pandemic years. I don’t know what everyone else calls those times, but my husband and I call them “covid”. My experience of covid might well be different than many others’. Over the past couple of years, my unsettled feeling of not knowing exactly where I am called, and my difficulty in trusting in the slow work of God, have come to a head. I have come closer to facing many of my demons than I had previously, including, most importantly, in my family and in my marriage. I have also faced personal demons within myself, and I have come closer to quitting teaching, in a calm way, than I ever entertained before.
Getting so close to these moments of possible disaster has, maybe ironically, proven very life-giving to me. I find that, the more God helps me face the things I have been afraid of for so long, the more I come out of it more myself, more calm, more real, and more loving.
In the past two years, among many other things, I put to sleep my 15 year old black lab, I taught my 3-year-old the F-word, and I turned 40. I decided I don’t want to drink every night. I have gone through two seasons of Advent: I don’t even remember the first one, but this one is about not criticizing my husband so much. I decided to coach track over two different seasons (the first one was two weeks long), and I’ve noticed that it’s not so hard to say “yes” to things anymore—I think it’s because my kids are getting older. But as I get to say yes to coordinating an Encounter retreat and coaching more than one day per week, I also get to experience my oldest child yelling at me that he hates me and trying to explain sex to my 10-year-old. The ups and downs of covid highlighted the ups and downs of my life: These ups and downs are always here, but most of the time there are distractions from them. In covid, I have found that the distractions have fallen away…so now it is just me, here, with my ups and downs.
My Rombach family of origin calls this experience “the beachhouse”. When we were kids, we went to a beachhouse owned by a family friend. There was no TV at this beachhouse, and no one had cell phones or tablets in those days. It was just us, some blankets, a chess set, and the ocean. It seemed idyllic–for about 2 hours…and then we would all get into a wicked fight. This pattern seemed destructive and depressing, made more so by the seeming inevitability of it: why did this ALWAYS HAPPEN? Why did we ALWAYS end up fighting at the beachhouse, when it should have been happy family time? It has taken me into my adult life to understand the answer: our lives are so busy, so full, so constant, that we do not notice that there are issues beneath the surface. We do not notice that these issues need attention, because they’re so easy to cover up. The only way these issues get to the surface is if we slow down.
In my life, the slow down is almost never voluntary. Usually God ends up throwing a brick at me to get me to slow the pace, to get me to notice what I have become practiced at not seeing. This has been covid for me: for us, we have not had the tragedy of many others, of lives lost and deep, deep pain. Rather, for us, it has been SLOW. It has been the slow realization of problems in our marriage that need attention. The slow, agonizing difficulty of helping a son with learning difficulties navigate the changing academic landscape. The painstaking process of realizing that being ONLY with each other is not idyllic for long…and that that’s okay. Part of covid for me has been realizing that I can still love my family more than anyone else, while also realizing that we need other people, too. That perhaps that’s God’s guidance for me in balancing both teaching and commitment to family.
The beachhouse moments during covid have included some stories that I honestly don’t want to admit to anyone, of me having very low parenting moments and worse wife moments. And, at the same time, I know that I, at least, could probably not have learned these lessons of patience, humility, steadfastness, and prudence any other way. The simple, unfortunate truth for me is that I need the forced slow down, the beachhouse disaster, to teach me to trust the slow work of God.
I can hear de Chardin saying to me, “And so I think it is with you. Let your ideas mature gradually, let them grow without undue haste. You cannot be today what time will make of you tomorrow.” I can hear Jennie Cournia Kuenz saying to me, the bulbs NEED the dark to bloom. I can hear that damn unhelpful counselor saying to me, Huh, maybe you are called in both directions: home AND working. Never mind that you can’t figure out how that works. And I can hear the country singer, Brett Eldredge, singing to me about a moment of almost giving up on love, “I’ll bring you back. I’ll bring you back to love.” I can HEAR these things because of the SLOW DOWN. I can hear these things because of covid.
As I also tell my students, the biggest thing that brought be back from not believing in God when I was a teenager was that I started noticing that, everywhere, good things were coming out of bad things…and that makes no logical sense. Something good must be bringing these good things out of bad things…and that good thing is God. Covid-19 is not a good thing, but I see good things in my life coming out of it. I see God bringing me back to love, facing my demons, leaning into the beachhouse moments of my failures and letting them soften me into loving better. I feel myself living into Ignatius’s insight more: that all things can bring us closer to God.
As I live into the holidays and the new year, into another new reality, my prayer is the same and yet I understand it differently. “Holy Spirit, you are welcome here. I will try not to be afraid because you are with me. Help me trust in your slow work.”
Reflection Questions for Your Life:
At this moment in your life, where do you need to slow down? How do you know?
When has something good come out of something bad for you, personally? Write about that experience, and notice what your attitude was and if you were open to that learning. It is often our openness that helps goodness and life come out of a bad situation.
Consider your vocations, your callings. Do you ever feel they are at odds with each other? Do you notice God or Love reconciling them to each other? Do you consider if what you spend your life DOING is, in fact, a calling?
Possible songs to listen to while reflecting:
Holy Spirit by Francesca Battistelli
Bring You Back by Brett Eldredge
Winter Song by The Head and the Heart
Let’s Be Still by The Head and the Heart
You Are Mine by David Haas
All peace and love to you while you look inside your own life.
Peace and love, until next time.