Letter from the Editor: “surrender to the unknown”

(Image from Instagram @bohemian_whimsea)

Dear reader,

It’s October 5th. The first month of Fall 2023 has passed. 

Whether that’s exciting, depressing, or relieving news for you, I hope my words will allow you to pause, take a step back from the incessantness of Union, and re-enter at will.

A month in, and I still find myself figuring things out. Still learning what my weekly workload looks like, still finessing my schedule and adding and subtracting things from my plate, and still struggling to leave my room (and the Union bubble) more…or at all, really. Within this continuing instability, I find myself coming back to attempts at finding myself, or rather, my Self. 

This past summer, I preached a sermon inspired by Socrates’s declaration, “Know thyself,” and led a subsequent chapel on knowing thyself beyond words. I began recognizing that the space that lies at the edge of what words can offer, and which in reality goes beyond what our human brains can sense or even conceptualize, is a recurring spawn point for finding my Self.

I, and perhaps you too, came to Union in pursuit of finding my Self. When people asked me why I decided to attend Union, I always replied, “An existential crisis.” 

I was desperate to discover who I really was, already sick of who I had always been trying to be(come), and ready to try something else. But having spent my whole life, so far, living according to stringent moralizing, normalizing, and Model Minoritizing standards, when “set free,” I refused to let go.

Not because I didn’t want to, but because I didn’t know how to stand on my own feet. I didn’t know where to go or what, even, to do without something that I thought was anchoring me down, taking responsibility for me, and holding me accountable. In this confusion, I was further confused by the general experience of being a first-year MDiv student at Union, along with moving back to a city that now felt most like home, and learning how to let Spirit/God/The Universe/The Unknown/That Which is Beyond Me into my body.

This feeling of confusion and transition—which, to a certain extent, persists today, though in new forms and at different volumes—started feeling increasingly unceasing, and within the first month of my first year, I found my Self saying, “I’m sick of this unending period of transition, I just want to be something!” 

I loathed this freedom, this true unknown, because while I felt like I was going somewhere, I had no idea where the destination was. I was desperate to turn around and go back to where I started—back to what I knew, what was stable, what was certain and guaranteed.

Having grown up in Seventh-Day Adventism, I entered Union with no spiritual life to speak of, or more accurately, no spiritual life of mine to speak of. 

Of course, I had a spiritual life; one defined by intellect, logic, and abstract theory. My spiritual life was theological, categorizable, and certain, but it wasn’t alive because I felt nothing, or rather, God felt so incredibly, impossibly far away and absent.

My spirituality wasn’t growing, because spirituality as defined by the faith tradition I was raised in doesn’t make room for or straight up forbids any changes, differences, and otherwise possibilities to what is considered and defined as faith and spirituality. My spirituality was enclosed and tightly kept in dogmas and creeds which were then neatly organized with clear definitions, parameters, and performative standards.

But something was wrong. What I knew to be True, what I was told needed to be True, felt fundamentally wrong.

It took a gamut of embodied practices, growing pains in self-awareness, and a real incentive to do the dirty, ugly, unfun work of digging out beliefs that no longer serve me, to get to a place where I could start thinking and start cultivating open, recently-made-available spaces for other ways of spiritual being and becoming.

Little did I know that my body, no, my Body, was the keystone this whole time.

But of course, I didn’t know this. How could I have come to such an outlandish, nonsensical conclusion—that my Body, my flesh, my irrational and undefinable “gut feelings” could somehow guide my way—under the pressure of conforming to and helping to maintain a body-denying/body-phobic, anti-sexual, purity culture that spans across several Evangelical strands of Christianity?

It took a real, unflinching, barefaced delving into my Body, my psyche, my soul, to even begin figuring out what sets me on the path toward my greatest well-being: what gives me life, what nourishes my soul, what brings me peace. 

Or as my friend put it, “What makes my heart feel alive.”

The spirituality of knowing your Self stops, then, being a game of essentializing and instead turns into an evolving practice of checking in with your Self. It becomes a continual attuning and re-attuning to what your Body, your Self really needs; a self-aware developing of how you really need to take care of your Self and how your Self really needs to be taken care of by others; a process of self-determining what excites you, motivates you, imbues in you the will to continue getting up every day. 

This, of course, is easier said than done, and to be clear, I’m not arguing for hedonism. Don’t do whatever you want, blindly following whatever feels good to you in the moment, potentially hurting yourself and others in the process. That’s not what I’m talking about. 

I’m speaking of something much larger, much more complex, and confusing to navigate than the singular thought, “This feels good.” 

I’m speaking of something I can only describe as an internal compass; one with its lodestone trained and attuned to divine fields of magnetism that transcend the ones we know. It’s something inconceivably infinite, almost impossible to grasp onto yet intuitive all the same.

It’s not something that is easily known. In fact, its very quality as an unknown is the means through which you can begin knowing. It is a kind of category-resisting, blatantly indistinct, and blurry kind of knowing that is really an unraveling of knowing: an un-knowing, a non-knowing, an anti-knowing. It’s never “knowledge,” because it’s not a noun but a verb. It’s a knowing that is first a doing.

So where does this leave you? Where does this leave me? Us?

“𝓼𝓾𝓻𝓻𝓮𝓷𝓭𝓮𝓻 𝓽𝓸 𝓽𝓱𝓮 𝓾𝓷𝓴𝓷𝓸𝔀𝓷,” that’s all I can confidently offer you. 

Surrender to your dreams, to the dreams you know you’ll never forget after waking, to the dreams you never want to wake up from, that you wish were real life. 

Surrender to knowing thy Self, not through pithy definitions and clever descriptions but through everyday practices and rituals that remind you to attend and relate to your Self with mindfulness, compassion, and careful attention; for the purpose of directing your Self toward the path of greatest wellness and flourishing. 

Surrender to the practice and promise of un-knowing, and in doing so, surrender into the unknown. 

Sink deeply, comfortably, and continually, into that which can be called divine will/karma/fate/God’s hand/organized chaos/dark matter/the Universe/the Unknown/That Which is Beyond You/etc. but is better communicated on a plane that is beyond words.

Pause, take a step back. Then come back when you will.

Love,

Kathy