It was a difficult year for me. It’s not easy to convey what it was like. To begin with, I’m one of those people who started working in high school with part-time odd jobs. I always had something going on. Then, unexpectedly, I lost my job and was receiving unemployment benefits. I was burnt out. I was depressed. I didn’t know what to do.
I spent a year just stuck. I felt lost and like I was a boat tossed about on the water without an anchor. While I had some job offers, nothing seemed right. I needed something different. In November of 1997, I went all in and took a huge risk. I moved from Miami Beach to Tucson without a job. Having sold my home, I decided to live off the money from the sale and start over. It was a bold move. I’m grateful to be able to report that it turned out to be the right thing to do.
In an earlier posting, I wrote about transformation. In that posting, I explained Walter Brueggemann’s model for understanding the movement found in the Biblical Book of Psalms. He describes a movement from secure orientation, through painful disorientation, to surprising reorientation. While Brueggemann is categorizing the Psalms, these phases provide great insight into our experience of transformation in life.
That year of unemployment when I was depressed and burned out was a time of painful disorientation. I did about ten hours of work each week under the table for cash. A few people simply gave me money while others took me for meals. A long-time friend took me on vacation. People were generous to me so that I was able to pay my mortgage and other bills. But that didn’t help the disorientation.
I was a minister who by most standards was successful. I had written a few books, started a new church, had been the director of a regional program to develop services for people with HIV/AIDS, and served as administrator of an international mission program. I even earned a Ph.D. All that before I was forty years old. As a minister, I had a secure orientation to life.
But things came falling down. I know now that a significant factor in my crash was that I hadn’t taken good enough care of myself. I was exhausted and had given too much. I had an active prayer life, but prayer at that time of my life was really like re-charging myself to give more. My spiritual practice wasn’t what I’d call transformative. It’s was maintenance. Ultimately, I fell into a crisis when the agency where I was the clinical director went belly-up due to a financial scandal. That was the external cause of my crisis. But because I didn’t have sufficient grounding internally, I fell hard when the external crisis happened. What I didn’t realize at the time – and couldn’t realize till much later — was that this painful disorientation was a profound gift to me.
I chose Tucson as my new home. I visited there because I was asked to consider the pastorate at a church. It wasn’t right for me. What I found that was right for me was that I prayed in the desert like I hadn’t prayed in years. I found myself deeply rooted in an instant. On top of that, I wandered into a Benedictine monastery where the daily liturgy of the hours was chanted in simple harmony. The liturgy of the hours had been a practice I observed for years – but a community open to guests for prayer, that was an amazing grace!
I moved without a job and started my life over. Within about a year, I was pastoring again as well as working with others in spiritual development. But most importantly, I moved through a transformation to a surprising reorientation. My daily spiritual practice moved from a maintenance practice to sustain my busy schedule to become a hallmark of the way I live. Early morning meditation walks, morning and evening prayer at the monastery, and regular meditation sitting helped that a great deal.
We often think that spiritual transformation happens in an instant. Perhaps there are times when a specific event draws us to some new way of being. But more often, spiritual transformation is a process which takes time. The transformation related to my move from Miami to Tucson took a few years and great investment on my part. But it was worth the risk and the uncertainty of embracing the painful disorientation with the faith that somehow I’d come out the other side.
As I made the move from Miami and over my first two years in Tucson, I wrote a series of essays – reflections that helped to both sort out what I was experiencing and to serve as mile markers for myself on my journey. I eventually published those essays in the book, Stumbling into Life’s Lessons: Reflections of the Spiritual Life. I’m including a link to that book. Perhaps some of those essays will support your process of transition from secure orientation through pain disorientation to surprising reorientation.
Yes, transition moves from a secure orientation through painful disorientation. My experience is that I was truly surprised by how life became reoriented. It’s been a wonderful gift.
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