Out of Sorts 1 Out of Sorts A BEGINNING Once upon a time, you had it all beautifully sorted out. Then you didn''t. * * * Out of Sorts: a state of being in one''s heart or mind or body. Often used to describe one''s sense of self at a time when you feel like everything you once knew for sure has to be figured out all over again. Nothing feels quite right. Nothing is quite where it belongs anymore. Everything moved . or maybe you moved.

Either way, you feel disoriented. Then: "How''s your walk with God these days, sister?" "Oh, glory to glory, brother! I''m blessed and highly favored!" Now: "How''s your walk with God these days, sister?" "Oh, it''s . I''m . a bit . out of sorts." At sixes and sevens. Bewildered. Baffled.

Caught between what-was and what-will-be. Walking away from something, perhaps, but not quite sure where you''re even headed. * * * This book isn''t an argument to make or a point to take. It isn''t a single story with a plot and a climax and a denouement, and it doesn''t have a simple three-step program to follow with nicely spaced headers. I don''t think this book will be turned into a calendar for the gift shop. It''s about loss and how we cope with change. It''s about Jesus and why I love Him and follow Him. It''s about church and church people and why both make me crazy but why I can''t seem to quit either.

It''s about embracing a faith, which evolves, and the stuff I used to think about God but I don''t think anymore, and it''s about the new things I think and believe that turned out to be old. It''s about the evolution of a soul and the ways I''ve failed; it''s about letting go of the fear and walking out into the unknown. It''s about the beautiful things we might reclaim and the stuff we may decide to kick to the curb. It''s a book about making peace with unanswered questions and being content to live into the answers as they come. It''s about being comfortable with where we land for now, while holding our hands open for where the Spirit leads us next. It''s about not apologizing for our transformation and change in response to the unchanging Christ. Really, it''s a book about not being afraid. This book is my way of leaving the light on for the ones who are wandering.

* * * I''ve heard that most of our theology is formed by autobiography. This is true in my case and maybe it''s true for you too. I think that is why I love reading or hearing other people''s stories of faith--the conversion, the wrestling, the falling away, the calling, the triumphs, the tenderness, the questions, the why behind all of it. I feel like I''ll know Jesus better if I hear about how you love Him or how you find Him or how you experience the divine in your life. Emily Dickinson wrote, Tell all the truth, but tell it slant-- . The truth must dazzle gradually, or every man be blind.1 Come at it sideways, let me hear the truth, but let the truth find me too. We''re all still being slowly dazzled.

* * * I am still wrestling with some aspects of my Mother Church. Perhaps you are too. Resting in the in-betweens is okay for now. You may find, like me, that you are reclaiming more and more, fighting your way through the weeds of over-realization or extreme cases or weirdness or wounding, to find the seed of the real that is still there. After the fury, after the rebellion, after the wrestling, after the weighing and the sifting and the casting off and putting on, after the contemplation and the wilderness--after the sorting--comes the end of the striving and then comes rest. Søren Kierkegaard said, "It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards."2 Perhaps we are never really free from the ones who came before us; we simply make our peace with the ways they haunt us still.

* * * A while ago, a new friend, Nadia, drove me to the airport in Denver after a conference. We spoke of the power of resurrection in our lives, how the very things that used to hurt us were instruments of our healing. We talked about all the ways that our lives had been changed, how our eyes had been opened, how our worlds had been made new because of this man from Nazareth. "Look at us!" I was laughing through my tears. "What in the world? It''s like we''ve been born again, all over again!" That''s when Nadia told me that it was a real thing. She called it the "second naiveté." And she said, "That''s us. We''re naive all over again.

By choice." Nadia was referencing the work of French philosopher Paul Ricoeur. Ricoeur thought we began our lives in the first naiveté: basically, we take everything we are taught at face value. Some of us never move out of this stage in our spiritual formation and growth. We simply stay faithful to what we were taught at the beginning. But most of us, at some point, will encounter the second stage, which he called "critical distance." This is the time in our formation when we begin to . well, doubt.

We begin to question. We hold our faith up to the light and see only the holes and inconsistencies. In a modern world, few of us can escape a logical look at our faith without some serious intellectual dishonesty. A lot of what our ancient-future religion teaches doesn''t hold up to modern logic. Many of us simply stay in this rational stage, and sadly, when we become rational, some magic and beauty is lost to us. Yet he writes, "Beyond the desert of criticism, we wish to be called again."3 I remember crying out to God once while in the midst of what I called my wilderness, what Ricoeur calls the critical distance, because I was longing to "go back." It was somehow easier when life and faith and God were an exercise in rule making and literalism, in black-and-white cause and effect.

I found it was not enough to live without the magic and the beauty, without the wonder. I couldn''t return to my first naiveté and I missed the simplicity of it. I wanted to be called again, to hear the voice of God again, perhaps never more wildly than when it felt like the God I once knew was disappearing like steam on a mirror. But those who continue to press forward can find what Ricoeur called a second naiveté. I didn''t know it, but I was pressing through my wilderness to deliverance, toward that place on the other side of rationality, when we reengage with our faith with new eyes. We take responsibility for what we believe and do. We understand our texts or ideas or practices differently, yes, but also with a sweetness because we are there by choice. As Richard Rohr writes, "the same passion which leads us away from God can also lead us back to God and to our true selves.

"4 In my own journey, I witness this trajectory: the first naiveté of my faith, then the bitter struggle and relief in the critical distance, and now, a second, sweet naiveté. The second naiveté is life after the death of what was once so alive, after the sorting through what remains, after the rummage sale perhaps. We have an inheritance that we have carefully curated. No wonder Nadia and I were crying in the car. We had sorted through our faith. We were still tossing what needed to be thrown out and reclaiming what needed to be treasured. We had found beauty and pain were threaded together. We were choosing this life, this Jesus, over and over again.

* * * I''ve come to believe that there is always a bit of grief to the sorting out of a life, to making sense of the stories and the moments and intersections, in our ability to move forward with integrity. We figure out what we need to keep, what we need to throw away, and what we need to repurpose. Sometimes what looks like junk becomes precious because of the memories it holds. Other times, the memories are painful, and so we hold them to remind ourselves: never again. But as we make small piles of treasures and trash, we are sorting through a life and through our grief, making the way clear to move forward. This happens when someone we love dies, you know. We remember the person''s life and we sort through our grief, our memories, our experiences, so we can find a way to move forward. For instance, I clearly remember sitting in my maternal granny''s hospital room while she was dying.

I was curled up in one of those plastic-covered hospital chairs in the corner, five months pregnant with my eldest daughter. We granddaughters took turns in that room, ostensibly there to offer our mothers a respite. In reality, while the respite was offered, they never took us up on it: they never left her side. One afternoon, I sat in that chair with a Styrofoam cup of tepid Red Rose tea in my hand. Red Rose is the tea of hospitals, funerals, and church basements. My mother sat on one side of her mother''s bed; her older sister sat on the other. They never moved as the last hours stretched out. They simply sat in her presence, holding her hands while she slept within the morphine, ticking the clock toward death.

I watched them minister to her and to ea.