“We often try to domesticate God and to make spirituality about happiness or feeling good. We try and tie things up in neat packages. The spiritual journey is about none of these. It demands something of us and calls us to stand in uncomfortable places while the deserts of our lives strip away ego and power and identity. It calls us to embrace the God of wild borderlands.
Lent, for me, is always about dwelling in the border spaces of my life and recognizing those places and experiences that do not offer me easy answers, those fierce edges of life where things are not as clear-cut as I hope for them to be. There is beauty in the border spaces, those places of ambiguity and mystery.“ – Christine Valters Paintner
It is far from being Lent yet, but this quote which I had saved from some time ago describes how I feel at the turn of the new year. For the longer I walk in the interior journey, the more I experience this call to embrace “the God of wild borderlands” – the God who lives and loves in the peripheries of my own being; the very peripheries I am afraid to enter for fear of losing my way. And yet the old certainties that used to give me clarity no longer comfort me but instead confine my restless being. Further into the borderlands I must go for my soul hears the voice of my Beloved beckoning me to follow…
In the last week of 2023 I have realised just how much I have missed writing here. What I do here in this space is perhaps what I would term “soul-writing”. I write from the depths, from the unknown, from hope and fear and joy and sometimes an incomprehensible mix of everything I cannot yet name.
When I write here (at least when I am inspired to), it feels like my soul is allowed to breathe through my words. I’m not making it a resolution (I am so very bad at keeping them!), but I wish to name and share my desire to let my soul breathe more in this space in 2024.
Here’s to you, fellow pilgrims, who may be also feeling called to enter into the wilderness and let go of old certainties so as to encounter the God of wild borderlands!
Journey of the Heart 