Learning to Return

A quiet reading. from What Remains

There are days now when companionship feels more healing than certainty.

Life keeps arriving concretely:
through people,
through needs,
through tenderness,
through loss,
through small moments that do not announce themselves as sacred while they are happening.

I think this is one reason accompaniment has become more important to me than understanding.

Not because understanding is unimportant, but because human beings rarely survive on explanation alone.

We survive through being seen.
Through not carrying everything alone.

I think about this often when I remember patients from years ago.

Many details have faded now. Faces blur. Names disappear. For a while this troubled me. I worried that forgetting details somehow dishonored the people themselves.

But over time another awareness emerged.

The encounters remained even when the stories faded.

The years of listening.
The years of sitting near suffering.
The years of trying to remain present when there was very little to say.

Surely those years shaped something inside me even after the individual memories faded.

Perhaps much of spiritual formation happens this way.

Quietly.
Gradually.
Beneath conscious awareness.

A softening here.
A relinquishment there.
A slightly different way of listening.
A reduced need to win every argument.
A greater willingness to remain near uncertainty.

None of this feels dramatic from the inside.

In fact, it often feels incomplete.

There are still days when I become impatient.
Still days when I tighten against life.
Still days when prayer feels distracted and thin.

But I no longer believe the spiritual life is primarily about becoming spiritually impressive.

It is more about becoming inhabitable.
More truthful.
More capable of remaining near reality without fleeing so quickly.

Reality can be painful.

There are losses I still do not know how to carry.
Questions that have not become clearer with age.
Fears that still surface unexpectedly. 

And yet the older I become, the less interested I am in spiritual performances.

I feel more drawn toward honesty now.
Toward conversations that leave room for silence.
Toward relationships where presence itself is enough.

This may be one reason I continue writing.

Not because I have figured life out, but because writing allows me to remain near the questions.
Near the movements underneath ordinary experience.

Sometimes writing feels less like producing something and more like listening long enough for recognition to occur.

Not creating meaning.
Recognizing it.

There was a time earlier in life when I believed maturity meant increasing mastery.

Now I wonder whether some forms of maturity involve increasing consent instead.

Consent to limitation.
Consent to uncertainty.
Consent to dependence.
Consent to being carried by forms of grace we did not manufacture ourselves.

Grace itself feels more ordinary to me now.

A spouse remembering what I forgot.
A friend calling unexpectedly.
Laughter returning after grief.
Another quiet morning arriving.

None of these solve life.

But they accompany it.

Perhaps accompaniment itself is closer to holiness than I understood earlier in life.

Not fixing.
Not escaping.

Staying near.

I do not live this consistently.

There are still days when I hurry.
Days when I avoid.
Days when I tighten against life again.

But I no longer believe the spiritual life is measured by uninterrupted serenity.

It is measured more by return.

The willingness to return again:
to prayer,
to people,
to honesty,
to presence,
to one’s own life.

Even after distraction.
Even after fear.
Even after fatigue.

Especially then.

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