Losing Track
“Jesus called them finding life, losing life, and finding life again, with the paradoxical promise that finders will be losers while those who lose their lives for his sake will wind up finding them again. In Greek the word is psyche, meaning not only ‘life’ but also the conscious self, the personality, the soul. You do not have to die in order to discover the truth of this teaching…You only need to lose track of who you are, or who you thought you were supposed to be, so that you end up lying flat on the dirt floor basement of your heart. Do this, Jesus says, and you will live.”
Barbara Brown Taylor
Leaving Church
Have you ever lost track of who you are? Have you ever been going about your life with certainty and run smack into a door that said, ‘No more?’ You are no longer a ---you fill in the blank. It could be ‘a spouse’ or ‘an employee’ or ‘a homeowner’ or ‘a healthy person.’ Sometimes we are confidently striding through life believing that everything is as it should be, when some unkind hand pulls the rug right out from under our feet and we land ‘flat on the dirt floor basement’ of our lives.
I have a friend who has been working for twenty-plus years in a clinic helping people with cancer fight their disease. She loves her work and her patients and tries to help them identify with the part of themselves that is healthy and determined to live. She sees her work as holy, and it is. A couple of months ago, she was relieved of her job for reasons that seem completely arbitrary. The act of being fired was like having the wind kicked out of her. She struggles now to determine what comes next, what God expects of her. The sensation is like falling through space and not knowing where the bottom is, or how hard the landing will be.
It would be unusual to go through one’s life and not have this disorientating experience more than once. It is never welcome and somehow never expected. And yet, this is an opportunity for spirit to work miracles large and small. It is the act of dying to one reality and being resurrected to another. Sometimes we get too comfortable where we are and we stop paying attention to spirit’s call. Sometimes we need a little unwelcome kick in the pants to move us forward. And sometimes life serves it up when we neither need nor want it. All the same, it is ‘psyche,’ it is life, it is spirit.
Losing track of who you are is usually a dark night passage. You need a strong boat, and some help with the paddles to make it safe to the other side. It is time to reach out to people who love you and let them row for a while; let them hold a flashlight to guide you. We are promised that when we lose our lives, we will gain them again. Having made the journey more than once, I believe the promise. I hope you believe it, too.
Shalom,
Jane
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