I used to find such solace in the line, “There’s nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be,” from “All You Need Is Love.” Part of me still does, though I don’t repeat it to myself as a mantra anymore. I want to believe it, but there’s a certain irony to an atheist assuring me that providence will keep me where I should be.
Maybe it can be so even if the messenger doesn’t have a direct, organic connection to the message. Balaam can deliver the word of the Lord (in spite of taking the job from Balak) to curse Israel, right? And Caiaphas, eager to put the problematic Nazarene to death, prophesies in spite of himself (Jn 11:51). So maybe John Lennon can similarly impart something profoundly true even if he doesn’t personally believe the basis of its truth.
I do, however, know there is a difference between now and then. Reflecting on it now, I recognize that the solace I have derived from those lyrics was due to how I received them as an endorsement of passivity. Wherever I am or may yet be, I’m set. I’m along for a ride, but I have assurance that it’s a good one — or at least the best one someone like me could reasonably expect. Even the way Paul McCartney begins singing a half time rendition of, “She Loves You,” at the end reinforced this image to me, as I always imagined him as a friend on the sidelines, enthusiastically drawing my attention to how this girl unmistakably likes me — me! And I felt like I would need precisely that assurance as otherwise I couldn’t be sure someone really did. I needed this coach who could verify that something was, in fact, going my way, and that I could welcome it and be neither disappointed nor brought to ruin.
“There’s nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be,” was comforting to me because I was accustomed to others possessing more power and agency than me: others would determine what was going on, what was happening next, what the goals were, and how they would be pursued. I would be there, playing the part given to me. The assurance was that anything that took place — anything — was good and proper and best and that therefore I didn’t have to worry.
Providence held me in its hand; all was well and could be nothing otherwise. So I fed that false assurance for years by repressing from consciousness how bad some things really were: girlfriends, work, maddening familial issues, friends moving in different directions previously thought impossible … I stayed put, though.
Clenching onto the need for “nowhere I can be that isn’t where I’m meant to be” became its own kind of prison. Holding on to the raft of divine certainty, I circled the drain for a long time, unsatisfied, but psychically unfit to admit it and deal with the consequences of acknowledging reality.
I’ve had to confront over the past few years the conditioning that defaults to passivity and it’s been extremely unpleasant looking back on that time, living as though I was driftwood, tossed about on the waves of others’ agency, floating who knows where and trying to convince myself, “This is what’s meant to be.” My inaction is my responsibility, however much I was formed to approve of and enact others’ wills. Development into greater responsibility and understanding wouldn’t have been possible without owning that lack of ownership that was characteristic of me for far too long. I had to decide to use whatever power I had to conduct myself differently.
Perhaps, then, “There’s nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be,” but its meaning must be parsed differently: none of my circumstances can jeopardize the possibility of my choosing well but that it is still incumbent upon me to do so. Even “choosing well” is relative based on the situations which befall me: there may never be a perfect outcome I can abstractly opt for, but there are better routes to take, better responses to make, given this.
I attended my first silent retreat three years ago, on the very cusp of locking down and sheltering at home. With some prior coaching, I arrived willing to hear the quietness in which God might speak. The silence was frightening as I recognized quickly that I employ sound not solely for the enjoyment I derive from music or audiobooks or podcasts, but to keep at bay the thoughts and impulses that emerge in the quiet. Decibels cannot keep the demons at bay, but their voices are definitely dampened in the thrum of these other sounds. Without them, I would have to expose myself to the frequency range of their harassment.
The initial contemplative exercises led me to recognize that the deepest craving of my heart is all-encompassing, one-sided love and acceptance: the kind of acceptance that welcomes the broken misfits of the world and grants them full belongingness and full rights as a part of the family. I was guided to stay with my loneliness for an extended period; to silently dwell within it rather than frantically trying to dispel it or focus my attention elsewhere. In the loneliness I would find what I was most searching for in the world, and thus from God.
By silently waiting for Jesus to attend to my persistent heartache, I recognized how superficially Christians generally treat loneliness and ignore — or perhaps repress? — its pervasiveness. “Loneliness,” Rowan Williams writes in his book A Ray of Darkness,
has to do with the sudden clefts we experience in every human relation, the gaps that open up with stomach-turning unexpectedness. In a brief moment, I and my brother or sister have moved away into different worlds, and there is no language we can share. It is when I see what my words or actions have done to someone else, or when I realize what picture someone else has of me. It is when things that matter to me are met with polite incomprehension, and when I cannot hear and understand the importance of what someone is trying to tell me. (p. 121).
That loneliness hurts, but I do not help myself in any meaningful way by trying to escape it, which only distances me further from the truth of my condition and from any relief or solace. I remember walking outside at the retreat center and envying the goose who had no self-awareness whatsoever over its ludicrous honk, who simply honked because that was what it was given to do. I had been in countless situations where I did what I was given to do, but that thing wasn’t worth doing and didn’t nourish my soul: it only benefited others. That goose, however, had its call to echo along that frozen shore and into the woods and in its ridiculousness there was a triumphant note of freedom. I was made to be this; now behold the wonder of my being so.
Later that morning, I prayerfully journaled about how afraid I have been for so much of my life that others either could not satisfy my needs or, worse, would not. Reflecting on his invitation to abide in him in John 15:4 and his promise that he would never leave or forsake me in Hebrews 13:5, I suddenly felt prompted to ask, “Lord, do you love me?” What I received was Jesus answering, “I want you to be with me where I am.” I was given to see him fiercely embracing me, cradling my head as I wept on his breast. And I wept what felt like a lifetime’s worth of tears, that in spite of all the folly and outright iniquity I had amassed over the years he wanted me. Not begrudgingly, but enthusiastically. “Stay where I am,” I heard him repeating. “Stay where I am.”
This was not the end of loneliness nor a sudden translation into otherworldly sainthood. I have not arrived at invulnerability or being beyond need. I am still a feeble creature whose best isn’t always particularly good. But I was assured that my most fundamental need is not a source of exasperation for my maker; that the risk of continuing the search for fellowship will, in fact, result in my needs ultimately being fulfilled.
I recently went on another silent retreat, though this one was far less terrifying than the first (and thankfully didn’t end in a long quarantine). It did, however, prompt me to reread my journal from three years before and reflect on how that cleft still arises. What freshly wrecked me, though, was hearing my son, Theo, sing “The Holy Heart” with his class during his school’s spring program last week. Hearing those third grader voices singing, “For me he was forsaken / For me he died alone / My sin forever taken / That I might be his own,” conveying a gravity greater than their experience could substantiate because it was truer than any of them could yet know.
I am more convinced than ever that honest acknowledgment of these aching needs that arise and never truly leave is the only way you and we can position ourselves to receive what we truly need. And just because we will need it again and again and again doesn’t mean it isn’t the real deal. It’s the nature of our creaturehood: we never download a once-for-all anything that permanently satisfies our want. But we routinely pretend otherwise and settle for counterfeits. To be human is to lack; to be someone with integrity is to risk the little we have for something that is unquantifiable, that adheres to no metric. I’ve found that the only way forward comes by inhabiting this tension and nourishing the fellowship that emerges out of the hurt of life together. Because within that sudden cleft of life is the One who emptied himself to the utmost to make us his own.
I like this,
“…we never download a once-for-all anything that permanently satisfies our want. But we routinely pretend otherwise and settle for counterfeits. To be human is to lack; to be someone with integrity is to risk the little we have for something that is unquantifiable, that adheres to no metric. I’ve found that the only way forward comes by inhabiting this tension and nourishing the fellowship that emerges out of the hurt of life together.”