What is From Every Side?

An introduction and my hopes for this space

One of the best college essays I read as a teacher was from a student who wrote about driving to Walmart. Just about everyone on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota where I lived and taught, or in any small rural town around it, shopped at Walmart. To get there, a good distance of driving is required. Weekend shopping was a ritual of sorts: loading up coolers in the trunk, waving to every car you passed on the winding country highway knowing they probably were at Walmart just before you, bumping into all the other people you know in the store, and deciding where you would eat lunch in the “big city” afterwards.

And this is what Josie, my student, wrote her college entrance essay about. She described her long drive through Nebraska to get to Walmart, falling asleep and the familiar speed bump near her home finally waking her up as the journey concluded. She recalled the most ordinary details: asking her mom for a cherry slushie, the googly eyes of the dolls she would play with in the toy aisle as a girl, and her and her grandma both asking her mom to go to McDonalds afterwards for a Happy Meal.

Sunset on the Red Shirt Highway, South Dakota

To this day, it still moves me. The insight that Josie had was remarkable. “Often our most ordinary days can help us form who we are as human beings,” she wrote. How true and overlooked this is. The moments and memories of mundane experiences such as your mom buying you a cherry slushie or the familiar speed bump on a country highway waking you up form us. The routines of daily life, lived with those who are closest to us, often form us in ways that are deeper than the most dramatic or romantic events of our lives.

One of my favorite spiritual writers, Sister Wendy Becket, wrote, “God is always coming to us, but from every side. He comes in ‘life,’ just as it is. The as-it-isness is precisely how He comes.” So many of us want to experience God, but even with such a desire, we are reticent to accept that God is coming to as in life just as it is. Sister Wendy continues by saying that the “the natural tendency is to romanticise the way of His coming,” but in reality, if we only look for God in grand ways, we only receive a fraction of His coming. If we are willing to receive from every side, in the as-it-isness, we will receive all of God.

I still have the tendency to romanticise the way of God’s coming to me, but reading these words from Sister Wendy years ago significantly shifted my spiritual life. God is coming to us in the memories of cherry slushies and speedbumps. I now try much harder to pay attention to God coming to me from every side and, perhaps more importantly, I try to adjust my romantic expectations of God’s coming.

Sister Wendy Becket. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/26/obituaries/sister-wendy-beckett-dead.html

Today, I find my own memories, the mundane ones like Josie’s trip to Walmart, just as spiritually significant as recalling graces from a 30-day silent retreat. I find the memory of my grandfather’s voice, for instance, just as much an example of God coming to me as a profound experience at Mass.

Writing has helped me cultivate this discipline of adjusting expectations and trying to notice the as-it-isness of God’s coming. I hope this newsletter will be a way into sharing that with others who find it useful for their own lives.

I have also found theology and ritual very fruitful in my spiritual life and have been shaped by religious practices and tradition. I know of so many people who find the religion or theology handed to them as young people very inadequate in responding to the questions of their heart today. For some, Christianity has even become a source of pain, even if they still hold sincere questions about faith and spirituality. I hope this newsletter can be a space for people to re-engage some of those questions and perhaps encounter new and helpful theological, spiritual, or religious insights.

I don’t claim to be an expert on any of this! But I’m grateful to currently be studying theology and often feel like what I’m reading or hearing in classrooms would be so helpful to so many others. So, along with reflections on the as-it-isness, I will try to distill some of what I’m learning in theology studies for those who might be interested. Sometimes, this newsletter may simply take the form of a summary of the points I’ve found moving or thought-provoking in my classes in a given week and the questions they’d led to.

In this way, my desire is that From Every Side honors the expansive ways God encounters us and provides some inspiration or accompaniment as we try to receive and wonder at this Mystery. You can expect short essays, poems, prayers, and questions that bring together all the themes above, and probably more.

I pray that it will find readers who are also yearning to give attention to the transcendent, those longings and questions that often launch from the most ordinary moments or memories of our lives, or those who don’t identify with any transcendent experiences, but are curious about it nonetheless.

If this is you, welcome! I hope you enjoy and take something away. If there are others you think would be interested in this, please pass this along to them. Feel free to respond or comment on things that resonate with you, share further thoughts or reflections, or submit topics you’d like to hear about.

Thanks for being here!