Out of Sorts

Once upon a time, you had it all beautifully sorted out. Then you didn’t. Sarah Bessey begins to try and make peace with her evolving faith and finds the gift of space for sorting through a life …

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 favoured!”

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.

* * *

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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 each other in silence. They would catch eyes sometimes, and I knew an entire conversation was happening between them across that bed. The sisters were waiting, but they were waiting in peace.

Later that day, my granny’s husband of ten years, her late-in-life love, crawled into her bed with her. Owen curled around her while she slept away from us, and he held her close till nearly her last breath.

She died, and we all felt the peace of it.

After she died, her children gathered in her apartment. Owen gave them the gift of space to sort things out and to remember. My granny didn’t have much worldly treasure: she lived on an old-age pension in a tiny apartment in Edmonton. Humble or not, that final sort-through after death is a place of reckoning and it’s an altar.

They stayed up through the night, reconnecting with their mother by telling the stories of her things, choosing items for themselves and assigning gifts to the grandchildren. My mother came home with a box of Granny’s things, but she couldn’t bring herself to really sort through it for quite a while. The grief was still too new. That box sat in the basement. When she was ready to sort through, it was there waiting. In the meantime, she began to learn how to live without her mother.

A year after the funeral, we met up at my auntie’s house for Easter weekend. We looked at old pictures. We told the stories to each other so we would remember; we each had such different experiences of her, we needed to share our narratives to gather the full complexity of her life. We even talked about her things and what we had done with them, how they travelled with us through our lives and where they lived in our homes.

Later that night, when everyone else had gone home, I tucked my then six-month-old daughter into her fold-and-go bassinet in the guest room. I stayed up too late, sitting on the couch beside my mother and her sister with a recently discovered box of old letters, receipts, and scraps of photos. They went through them, sometimes laughing, sometimes crying, sometimes angry or sad. They passed the bits of paper and photographs to me: Hold this one, they said. And this one. Remember this? Oh, let me tell you about this one! It was their instinct to fill in the blanks for me, to help me see the truth of their mother, to love her better because of how they had loved her.

I didn’t say much that night; sometimes our most holy calling is to listen, to bear witness. I held the scraps and the stories of what remained from the sort, my legacy.

This is an extract from Sarah Bessey’s new book, Out of Sorts: Making Peace With An Evolving Faith. It is published in paperback and eBook by DLT later this month, priced £9.99.