Introduction

The Birth of This Book

             St. Paul had a revelation on the road to Damascus. It temporarily blinded him, knocked him off his course, utterly changed his self-image, and irrevocably transformed his understanding of the purpose of his life.

             My journey has not been marked by such a singular, life-changing revelation.  Sometimes I am embarrassed by the way in which my life has gone, for it seems that it is in tiny, almost unnoticeable happenings that my greatest learnings have come.  There is a Biblical parable for this.  Jesus tells of the mustard seed,… the tiny unnoticeable seed out of which God can grow towering mustard trees.

             Elijah also discovered the power of the small.  When he escaped into the desert to avoid the wrath of Jezebel, he encountered God. The Bible recounts a strange series of natural wonders that occurred while Elijah hid in a cave, but assures us that it was not in these dramatic events that Elijah found God. Although first there was a wind that tore the very rocks and mountains apart, then an earthquake, then a fire, the text says that God was not in the wind, the earthquake or the fire.  Instead God came in what is variously translated as “a still small voice”, “a gentle whisper”, and “a sound of sheer silence.”  For Elijah too, God comes in the little, the quiet, the almost unnoticeable.

             In my work as a teacher, retreat leader, and spiritual director I have found others encouraging me to share the stories of my mustard seeds, which I now call my “revelations on the road.”  For I believe that these fragments of my story are not mine to hoard but are there to be passed on.  This belief has evolved from promptings that come either directly during prayer or indirectly from other people.  I am grateful for all these promptings.

                         I believe in the importance of story and story sharing.  The belief is so strong that I call it my credo, and include it in my professional brochure: 

My Credo

               I believe that the greatest gift we can offer to each other is the telling of and listening to our stories.  This empow­ers us to appropriate and live out our own stories, unifies us in di­versity, and leads to reconcilia­tion.

      I  believe that this theme of story unifies all I do: including work with older adults (who have a developmental as well as a spiritu­al need to recover and share their stories); evangelism (the sharing of how my story, your story and "the story" connect); spiritual direction (an intimate vehicle for explor­ing and living into one's story); lay pastoral care training (helping people learn how to elicit and validate others' stories); retreat work (an opportunity to gather with others to explore our stories), and work with congregations and judicatory bodies (which have their own stories).

             I also believe in community: the people God has provided to accompany us for a time on our journeys.  My community consists not only of those I see and talk to in person, but those whose lives I have been blessed to touch through biography, through prayer (in the Communion of Saints), and through their writings.

             Shortly before beginning this book I spent almost six weeks in a very restful space-required (and permitted) by my need to recover from a bout with pneumonia.  During that time I experienced the community of writers in a powerful way, finding one introducing me to another, that one to yet another.  Even the themes they addressed seemed to interconnect in powerful ways.  Two of the authors were contemporary women who had written personal, spiritual journey books that mined their own life experience and offered the discovered (and refined) ore to others, including me.

             My first activity after the illness was to participate in a conference at which the author of one of those books, Jane Thibault, was also present.  Her book had also gestated for a long time, and had been given birth only after a rest enforced by an injury.  Jane encouraged me to write this book, and I am grateful to her.  Another presenter at the same conference was Richard Morgan, who, two years before, had come up to me and said, “Lynn, you should be writing.  I’ve just had a book published, and if you decide you want to do this, I’ll try to help you.”  So I felt supported by and welcomed into the community of contemporary spiritual writers.

             Some time after I was well into the writing I began to feel very vulnerable.  I feared that I might be engaged in a narcissistic exercise of interest to myself alone, and questioned whether it really was a ministry to others.  I was also aware of having written things that I know in my head to be true, but which I knew I had not yet fully learned to live out in practice, and doubted I had the right to share them.

             Then, upon the rare and strong insistence of my spiritual director, I read Jean Shinolda Bohlen’s Crossing to Avalon.  Bohlen ends the book with a comment about story-sharing, which came as a gift to me, in part because of her use of the word “revelations.”

To bring about a paradigm shift in the culture that will change assumptions and attitudes, a critical number of us have to tell the stories of our personal revelations and transformations [emphasis included].... The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them.  If stories come to you, care for them.  And learn to give them away where they are needed.  Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive, (pp. 272-273).  

             Synchronicity, the apparently accidental coming together of things that have meaning, is something that I believe is often not accidental at all.  Your reading this book at this time is no accident. My going to that conference right after recovering from pneumonia was no accident.  One of my favorite sayings is, “A coincidence is a miracle in which God wishes to remain anonymous.”  So, prompted by these many urgings and nudgings, I offer you some gleanings from my life, in hopes that you may join this community of pilgrims and thereby find yourself affirmed and challenged.