The Grace of Not Knowing

This is a story about not knowing. And about how, out of a place of not knowing, one can emerge healed, hopeful, and postured to offer the same to others.

In recent months, I’ve been asked more than once about the various hats I currently wear. What’s funny is that as a Christian woman at the fabulous age of 50, I do not play the typical caretaking roles that many expect. I am not a wife or a mother—at least not to any human children. I do not take care of elderly parents, my own having long passed away. I am a single, Black/Afro-Latina, female pastor, spiritual director, and seminary chaplain, and a fur-baby mama to two occasionally demanding cats and one regularly needy dog. My life is divided between my home, my house church, and my campus life, along with the questions that each of these generate. (At home: Is everyone healthy? Who needs what? Will the ends meet? At the house church: Who’s on this Sunday? How can we grow? Why aren’t we growing? Whose idea was this? In campus life: What week are we on? Who is my next appointment? How can we reach more staff? Do they know we are here for them?) So, while I ultimately do a lot of “taking care of,” I don’t do so in traditional or expected ways.

When my many roles come up in conversation, I’m often asked how they are distinct from each other and how they are alike. Margaret Guenther’s metaphor of midwife, offered in her book Holy Listening, is a fitting descriptor of the ways I see these roles overlapping and how the Spirit moves in and through them to offer hope and healing. But my journey did not begin with this metaphor in mind. Looking back, what stands out to me is that, at the start of it all, I knew nothing. And it’s been on my journey from knowing nothing to making meaning a step at a time that God has birthed hope and healing in and through me.

At the beginning of 2019, I had just left the church that had been my home for over a decade. I was leaving with wounds that were in the process of healing and with a distinct sense of release from God that there was something more in store for me. It seemed an odd time to leave, having just fought my way to being ordained, but the release was clear, because the fight had been arduous and I was ready to go. So off I went, with no plan and no real direction.

The first place I landed was a local Vineyard church, which was familiar territory because Anaheim Vineyard was where I first met Jesus, and because my sister and brother-in-deed pastor a Vineyard church. I sat there for a couple of months, happily anonymous, no one knowing who I was. It was especially luxurious having no one know that I was ordained, or that I had a Fuller degree, or that I worked (at that time) as a full-time hospital chaplain. I was a lazy pew member for the first time ever—and it was wonderful.

But soon enough, I had to start talking to folks and getting to know people, and next thing I knew, the Holy Spirit was (inevitably) prompting me to participate. My little hiatus was over. While I didn’t go into full-blown volunteer mode, I found myself in a season of discerning what was next and sensing again that God was pointing toward something new. I could have sworn I heard some prompting around church planting, but since I didn’t know anything about that, I busily ignored anything in that arena. Surely Jesus wasn’t suggesting that I should plant a church, since that was completely outside my expertise. Swiping left on that, I moved on.

I had begun to train as a spiritual director and that felt life giving. It was a calling that overlapped with the work of chaplaincy in many ways, but also aligned with the contemplative practices I had been growing in over the past decade. Suddenly the Ignatian spirituality that was central to my own relationship with Jesus was teaming up with the listening and presence practices of chaplaincy. These things made sense! Swipe right on that, I thought, and nodded approvingly at Jesus—who smiled knowingly. Perhaps too knowingly.

Which brings us to January 2020. Having for some time ignored the perpetual nudges—nay, billboards—from the Holy Spirit to lean into church planting, I relented by registering for Vineyard’s church planting conference. I was attending in order to “check off the box” since, in my heart, I had already decided that the fundraising, big-church-launch model was not for me. I had no interest in the amount of glad-handing and overhead required for that sort of church plant. Not only was I not gifted in these ways, but it was not the church model that I felt was life-giving for me any longer.

I’d been moving away from the preacher-centered model of Sunday service and longing for something different. A place where people could encounter Jesus for themselves, personally—the Word, Jesus, not someone else’s words. I had heard of a few contemplative churches and wondered at the possibilities, but I attended the conference, just wanting my ticket punched so I could show God that I came, I saw, and I’m not planting a big church.

Of course, this is the story about how I ended up with a house church. The conference turned out to be much different than I’d expected. Keynote speaker after keynote speaker, and one breakout session after another, all talked about how microchurches and house churches are a growing movement in the church planting world. My eyes were opened to a world of possibility, and I distinctly remember thinking to myself, “Well, that I could do.”

The full vision for what would become Neighborhood Abbey Vineyard wasn’t born there and then, but it was the beginning of my heart being open to something new. The dreams I had for a contemplative church seemed possible, and there was room in the church planting world for my own giftings. What was born, or perhaps reborn, at that conference was my own capacity to hope again and to allow space for God’s ability to surprise me. Not knowing left me able to be surprised by the work of hope and healing God wanted to do in me—and, in the chapter that has followed, through me.

As pastor of a house church in its nascent stage (that is, experimental and optimistic), I’m hopeful that removing the pastor from the center and replacing the focus on Jesus will allow us to stay mindful of these sorts of truths: that God is always present and waiting for us, even (or perhaps especially) in our not knowing. We keep rhythms of spiritual practices in community as a way of fostering formation, by providing what each person needs to better know God at the place they currently are. Every Sunday is different, which we have seen modeled by other contemplative communities here in the States and in Canada. We begin our month with Lectio Divina, then cycle through Centering Prayer/Breath Prayers/Visio Divina. One Sunday, we have a message or sermon of just 15 or 20 minutes, and the responsibility for this is shared across the leaders.

All of this is so unexpected. And honestly, I still don’t know much. Will it work? Is it working? How will I know? I still carry so many questions as I go. What has become clear to me is that God is in the process and about the process, as much as or more than the results. My hope is that it won’t fail—yet even my own history tells me that failures are simply wisdom with a less attractive label. And isn’t wisdom something to hope for, to be glad for, despite the packaging?

Encouraging people to embrace not knowing is also powerful in my ministry of spiritual direction. Working through sticking points that many thoughtful seekers find themselves in while in relationship with God, attempting to get through to the other side of a thing—or developing an image of God that is broader, freer, looser, more loving than what they’ve known before—is a process. It’s a messy, meandering, winding road of not knowing—and it’s the road where God meets us.

What I love about being a spiritual director is that I feel no pressure to know. I am simply present to listen and observe, not to have answers. There’s great freedom in this. What’s marvelous too is that the freedom is both theirs and mine. Session by session over the course of time I have the privilege of watching and waiting as the Spirit does her work on behalf of a certain directee—healing an old wound, for example. Yet in that process, I notice also, without fail, that witnessing someone else’s healing allows a little overflow in my direction. The messy and communal work of God in a space of unknowing brings a healing to all of us, never just one of us.

And so it comes full circle: God provides hope and healing to all in intimate spaces where seekers enter with questions, with their not knowing. Sometimes, we don’t even know the questions we have; we just know we are broken. Other times, we find ourselves asking a question that ultimately isn’t the one that God is looking to resolve.

These days, I lead in a couple of these spaces. One, where I light a candle, read a psalm or poem, meet with a directee one on one, and wait to see how the Spirit shows up. Another, in a slightly larger space, where I light a candle and a group of 10 or so, ages 10 to 71, forms an unlikely house church with two cats and a dog. A welcome prayer is read, a gathering song is sung, the Holy Spirit is invited to speak to us, and we wait in hopeful, silent anticipation for what she might say this week.

The thing is, in both spaces, we never know. Our hopes, our plans, our healing. We hold it all loosely. But we also hold it together.

It’s very easy to confuse contemplative practice with a “just me and Jesus” stillness journey into some remote, mountain location. But whether done one on one or in community, formational spiritual practices like centering prayer or Lectio Divina or Examen don’t survive alone in the wild. While each of these spiritual practices can be done, and ought to be done, as part of one’s own daily or weekly disciplines, they are not meant to be always done alone. Alone, it becomes easy to question whether or not one is hearing from God. On one’s own, there’s no one to gift you confirmation or even challenge you with an observation that may bring up a question that you had yet to consider.

Contemplative practice should draw us into community, which draws us toward the Spirit with her ever-guiding arms and deep wisdom; toward Jesus, as he gladly journeys alongside us in every human high and human low; toward God our Mother and Father, our eternal Parent, the true director and pastor of our lives, lovingly rooting us on as we figure out the way. And as we lean into the mystery of it all, we slowly discover that perhaps this journey is less about knowing and more about simply going.