There’s no escaping a divine appointment.
It’s at the dusty crossroads, with a stone in your shoe and the sun in your eyes.
You feel it in the limping and the blindness.
It’s in the heavy bag, with it’s unrelenting pressure on your brittle bones.
You hear it in the call of the carrion, arching low through the empty sky… the hot, dense air redolent with the smell of baked mud and dry pools.
You feel it in the yielding to an endless horizon… in the realisation that there is no destination, only unrelenting road to be made, blistering and wavering off into the distance in a heated haze of vapourised promises and hopes un-quenched.
You taste it on your dry and swollen tongue, and feel it scratching, clawing at your throat.
Dust. Ashes. Earth.
A whisper-wind.
Tiny particles loose themselves… lodge themselves in all the small places of your soul.
You breathe them in, inhale the ground, the sand, the path.
You breathe it in – that divine appointment with the death of who you tried to be, who you thought you would become – until all you are is dust.
Until you are swallowed.
The cracked and broken path absorbs you, welcomes you, returns you to the clay, and there is a perishing and a silence broken only by the soft sweeping of a wasted wind.
It is here, in this place of lessening, of surrender – relinquishing your grip on all you have held so tightly… In this place of ceasing – the wind kicks up the dust…
A simmering sky advances, boils over, unleashes droplets of sweet relief, leeching into the thirsty soil.
You soak it up, it moves you, brings to life the dormant places, now moving like mud in your depths.
You are freshly turned, fertile, surrendered to the holy ground, and the process of a thousand tiny deaths.
***
We Make the Road by Walking: A year-long quest for Spiritual Formation, Reorientation and Activation is the new book from Brian D. McLaren.
“The title suggests that faith was never intended to be a destination, a status, a holding tank, or a warehouse. Instead, it was to be a road, a path, a way out of old and destructive patterns into new and creative ones.”
I have been anticipating this book’s release for the last few months and it’s finally available! Looking back through my notebook from six months ago I came across the words I’ve shared above, and was taken aback by the thematic similarities with a book I didn’t realise yet existed, and a process I was only really just beginning, so I thought it would be a great opportunity to share that, as a chance promote Brian’s book to you all! I’ve read the first few chapters and I’m looking forward to really getting into it with a group of like-minded people who may be feeling burned-out, lost, forgotten, or otherwise disinterested in or disengaged from their traditional church expressions. If this sounds like you, won’t you join me? I’d love to hear your story.
I’m sure I’ll be sharing some more bits and pieces with you as the weeks and months roll on, but if you feel like checking out the book for yourself, you can find all the info on Brian’s website.
For more on the book, check out this review
And here you will find Brian’s responses to a Q&A with reader’s of Rachel Held Evans’ blog. I was seriously blown away by this post!
Happy Reading 🙂
“If a spiritual community only points back to where it has been or if it only digs in its heels where it is now, it is a dead end or a parking lot, not a way. To be a living tradition, a living way, it must forever open itself forward and forever remain unfinished – even as it forever cherishes and learns from the growing treasury of its past.”
– We Make the Road by Walking #WeMakeTheRoad
