Everything is miraculous and soaked in holiness

a couch, a tapestry, a stopwatch, a story

Years ago, jobs ago, offices ago, I ran a retreat program for college students. I’ve loved every role I’ve ever had, but goodness, that work lit my soul up.

The whole aim of the retreat, called “Kairos,” was to remind participants that they were loved, and that love could be traced back to God. Twelve times a year (!), I sent sixty students off for a phoneless weekend with a bunch of strangers where they listened to each other, took “a long loving look at the real” of themselves, and hopefully returned to campus reminded of their own inherent goodness and emboldened to share that love profligately. It wasn’t always perfect, but it always delivered.

I was invited to teach a course on retreat facilitation near the end of my time in that role, and I wrote a little Instagram caption about it that coincided with starting my fifth year in the job:

“I’m marking the start of Year 5 with Kairos (ugh chronos ik) by teaching a class on “Retreat Preparation and Facilitation” this weekend and I’m struck by what didn’t make it into my lecture notes:

How do I share that handwriting the name of every student on their materials before their retreat departs is a wild, humbling surrender of trust; that everything from the playlists to the pineapples to the string lights to the snacks is at once silly and sacred and prophetic? Where on my syllabus do I note that if 4 years ago someone whispered in my ear all the ways this job would contour my life — the relationships, the chaos, the podiums and pulpits and award ceremonies and plane tickets (!) — I doubt I’d have believed them; that for a girl voted “Loudest” and “Most Likely to Rule the World” in 8th grade to have found a job that contains space for all my unbridled emotion and energy eclipses most dreams I ever had for myself?

When Brian Doyle writes of the “deep crazy insistence that everything is miraculous and soaked in holiness,” I can’t help but think of Kairos. An “extraordinary ordinary succinct ancient naked stunning perfect simple ferocious love” is the love I have for this community and this work, and love is why we’re all here.

How do I teach that every Kairos weekend courts a miracle: a vast and varied body of people converge, share stories, and recognize with renewed vigor the power of their inherent belovedness? Relentless grace ruptures our reality, and we map anew the terrain of our spiritual landscapes. The perennial revelation of this enduring grace continues to surprise me despite its unfailing persistence. This enduring grace is embodied in love, of course, which I might, during my lecture, repeat for emphasis is “why we’re all here,” but again, when?

When do I share that as I’ve hurtled through these last four years, I’ve known all along that “thank you” could never be enough?”

I wrote again about Kairos: this time, about the sacred hours I spent balancing spiritual direction and live editorial exchange while listening to student leader talks for the retreat weekend. I’d welcome students to my office, make a bit of chit chat, set some ground rules, and then we’d get after it: with my stopwatch running, I’d lean back in my office chair and listen. I never took notes: I wanted to listen organically to what surfaced and what stuck. And then, we’d talk through how the talk felt to share, how we might need to “rearrange the furniture” in the “room” that was the talk as a gesture of hospitality to listeners, name details needed, note details not, and shape a sacred story into something shareable. Those hours were holy, and wholly, among the best of my professional life.

My essay on the sacred listening that happened on my office couch, beneath my big, sprawling tapestry, can be found here.

I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to pen this column for LMU Magazine, honoring the thinnest place on the map of my professional terrain.

mice literally fell from the ceiling in this office

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Elsewhere:

• Pretty big week in Catholic news! I’m grateful for reflections on Magnifica Humanitas that humanize rather than analyze. Kudos to John Dougherty for his essay in America and Eric A. Clayton for his piece in NCR. Both brought this encyclical into dialogue with culture and therefore brought it to life for me.

• Speaking of The Social Network, we interrupt our regularly scheduled spiritual programming for a brief dispatch from Instagram, where Tall Order (formerly the Thirsty Scholar Pub) is having a moment. This matters 1) because it's my cousin's bar, and 2) because Facebook was hatched there. The algorithms demand that I mention at least one of these facts.

• Okay, OKAY. One more Magnifica Humanitas post. But only because you asked! “Being human means being authentically moved in your own heart in mysterious ways by revelations that don’t originate from aggregated data about other people collected by other people. Only you can know what it feels like for you to read Hamlet, see a solar eclipse, or hear your child’s heartbeat.”

• Art and expansive Catholicity? Yes please. Had all sorts of fun volleying about this with Alli Bobzien.

  

  “that everything from the playlists to the pineapples to the string lights to the snacks is at once silly and sacred and prophetic”