Choosing to Hang from the Cliff-face

I’ve been feeling compelled lately to write about trust.

I often write about the idyllic nature of the Atrium—and rightfully so, because it’s a worthy, beautiful, transfixing goal that compels me forward.

But there’s an idyllic picture of the Atrium at work and then there’s the less-spoken-of reality. Sometimes these circles intersect, but not always. In the space each week, we are confronted with the messiness of humanity as children go about the business of being. This Be-ing is in bodies and minds that are being met by the materials of the space in a graceful and developmentally appropriate way. Each day that the children work in the atrium, intention and actuality overlap more and more, but that pace is often hard for those of us who are creating, maintaining, and guiding in the space. It requires a great deal of patience and, above all, trust.

What a wild thing trust is. Even those of us who try to be self-sufficient enough to avoid it can never truly escape it. There are a million ways that our lives depend on trust—though we are very good at creating elaborate illusions of control and security and independence to try to deny it.

Despite the “proofs” we experience in our loved ones, our communities, our employers, our world, there is a whole realm of hidden-ness that we can’t access in order to be absolutely without a doubt sure that our trusts are not misplaced. The human heart is capable of heroic love as much as it’s capable of stunning deceit and betrayal. We can never be sure-sure-sure which it’ll be. Even in nature, plants that appear healthy may disappoint our hopes by failing to flourish without apparent reason. Educators show up every day to impart invisible gifts to minds that are capable of so much and yet have a wild lack of control, often in ways that hinder their own advancement (or so it seems). We experience dismay at this wasted potential and yet, many of us have also had the opportunity to encounter students later in life who are doing quite well and are even able to articulate our impact on their lives in ways that baffle us. Our sight and knowledge is limited—and I believe, far more limited that we acknowledge or can even perceive.

It behooves us to place value in things other than results in this world. The results are so often out of our control, but conversely, we can make choices about what we do and how we do it. I believe that both our faith and the faithful work that springs from it are worthy and good and purposeful in their own right, even though we can’t “prove” that definitively. What a deep mystery this all is.

Back to CGS: For the adults involved, it is a work of profound trust in the unseen. This is a very normal requirement for people who work with children. Often, we are able to force our idea of proof out of them, or at least frantically interpret observations of them as proof of the validity and effectiveness of our work. We use things like “good behavior” and laudable acts such as kindness and generosity to assure us that we are on the right path. But much of a person’s work of growth is internal and hidden, and frequently doesn’t conform to the skewed standards of the world. (Besides, it’s extremely inappropriate to use another person to justify ourselves, though we do it constantly!)

In the Atrium, everything is hidden. It is all external work that is about the cultivation of secret internal work. We very very rarely see visible results of this in real time, and so to be in the Atrium working with the children is a constant practice of trusting that God is present and powerful. There are things that we can do: provide material, give direction (and re-direction!), adapt the space to our best interpretation of the children’s needs. We are certainly invited to be active participants in the work. But the rythm of our work is to labor and then submit quietly in trust to the One who actually knows and sees it all. The One who, thankfully, has a far purer and enduring love for the souls in the space then we do (including for our own souls).

It is very hard to give so much time, hope, and energy to the Atrium and then have a session that results in a table full of drawings of Pokemon. We would much rather observe the children drawing profundity from the scripture being read, observe them showing care for each other and the environment, hear them reciting verses or Biblical facts from memory, or watch them sitting silently at the prayer table in contemplation. We want to see proofs that their hearts are being changed, and have to fight hard against the impulse to correct their work and force them onto a different path (a better one, right??) then the one they seem to be on. We are given so few glimpses into that internal work, and it’s very easy to doubt that transformation is actually taking place.

In the Atrium, our trust looks like doing our work in spite of frequent lack of physical proof that their work is moving towards the desired results. It looks like rarely—almost never—interrupting, correcting, or redirecting a child’s work even when we can’t see value in it. It looks like walking an invisible path in the dark, led by a light that is sometimes barely visible.

Here I go being idyllic again. I believe so much in the ideal—in fact, that belief is often the only thing keeping me on this trajectory. But here’s my reality: I frequently wonder if this is all quite pointless. I worry that I am wasting people’s time and money, including my own, and fear that eventually, everyone will realize it and abandon the work and me. I fight the anxiety that I am spending time on this when there’s some better, more effective method of spiritual formation out there that I should be giving my children instead. I don’t want to wake up one day and regret the massive amount of resources I’ve poured into this.

I could tell you the examples I see that give me hope and motivation to continue, but that’s not what this post is about. This post is about practicing trust in long proof-less seasons. About staying the course when you can’t see the course. The truth is, it wouldn’t be a very wise thing to do if there wasn’t a trustworthy Trail-leader at the head. That “Pillar of Light” that I follow is not always clearly visible but often manifests as an internal instinct that I can’t explain and other’s can’t feel in the way I can.

I often feel self-conscious asking people to participate in this work because of this aspect—in a very uncomplicated, un-nuanced sense, it really is just asking people to blindly hop on board a train I’m riding (although I think the Conductor is trustworthy!) without giving any proofs of where we’re going and when (if?) we’ll ever arrive. It’s a lot of pressure to have people actually “get on” with their very real resources that are very costly to them. But they are doing it anyway, and I have to remind myself that I can let folks do their own work of generosity and trust and, yes, risk.

I don’t want to let people down. I don’t want to fail. I don’t want people to think that I am untrustworthy, silly, stupid, wasteful, crazy—or worse. And I have no garauntee that some people won’t. Maybe this will make some people hurt. Even angry. This is my work of trust—in the word of others, in the leading of this inner voice, in the love of others and their offerings through that love.

It’s all quite scary, but the reward is often worth the risk. And in order to NOT turn this post into yet another pie-in-the-sky idealism post, that’s pretty much where I will have to leave it. Mostly what I want to say, is that if you are feeling the pangs of fear and worry about the areas in which you’re required to practice trust, know that I’m in the same boat. Every day, if not every moment. We are sharing the growing pains of trust. I see you. I’m with you. I’m here, too. I love you.