spring beginnings: on ambition, contentment and reclaiming quiet

I guess I have a lot of catching up to do since it’s been 8 months since I last posted here.

Every now and then, I have a spark of creative energy which makes me think about this space, but in between moving house, getting pregnant with #2, and watching our rambunctious 18 month old grow up, all the remaining writing energy I have summoned has been channeled towards churning out a PhD thesis.

Thankfully, last fall bore the brunt of all those big life changes, and since January hit and Noah now spends his days at daycare, I am finding I am finally able to hear my thoughts again. 

February felt quiet and slow, with many mornings sitting in my nursing chair watching snowflakes falling fast and hard on the pine tree outside our bedroom window.

As many of you on the East Coast might have experienced, Montreal was hit by two gigantic snowstorms back to back, the result being our neighborhood morphing into a tundra, sidewalks obliterated by the sheer volume of snow and each of us digging our own personal ice tunnel from our house to the driveway just to access our cars.

It was thus quite apt that I was making my way through the book, “Reclaiming Quiet” by Sarah Clarkson, a beautiful meditation on how to cultivate a life of holy attention. The concept of quietness further reinforced by me losing my voice for a full three weeks in February (cue lemon honey tea and Halls lozenges!)

There are so many gems of truth in the book; it is one that makes you linger over each page. But I just wanted to share one thought from the chapter on prayer.

In this chapter, Sarah shares her frustration with wanting to pray more but constantly getting interrupted by anything from her phone to her children’s needs. How we often compare ourselves to those who can pray for long hours in silence and then shy away from it because we feel we cannot measure up.

I found myself nodding in agreement – how often I wished my prayer life was more focused, more intense, more like it was back when I was single and passionate.

But then she writes,

If we define a life of prayer as one measured only by the subtraction of relationship, service and creativity, then we will think prayer is something we cannot attain and ought not try for.

But prayer is that inmost communion with God that roots and nourishes the entirety of our lives.

Prayer is an inward conversation, the yielding of all things we find in the tumble of our days to the God who orders and holds them fast. We need its rooting as surely as the mystics, however different the vocations and expressions such prayer fuels.

Brother Lawrence, that humble monk who found God in the washing of dishes, once said that ‘the least little remembrance will always be the most pleasing to Him. One need not cry out very loudly; He is nearer to us than we think.’

In hearing her words, it was as if a burden lifted off my shoulders.

Could it be that a simple turning of my attention to God amidst the wails of Noah scraping unfinished oatmeal off his high chair onto the floor be counted as prayer?

What about the noticing of the grey-blue shimmer of a cloudy winter sky as I pull Noah on his sled through the tundra of our neighborhood at 7:30a.m.?

What about when I sit on my nursing chair with my Bible on my lap open to Psalm 91 waiting quietly for a word before my eyes succumb to the heaviness of sleep and all I can do is climb into bed, praying that God speaks to me in my dreams?

A constant desiring and reaching although never fully grasping.

A daily yielding of my scattered heart to the only One who can hold me together.

I have to confess, that is what prayer looks like right now.

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The other strain of thoughts I’ve been mulling over have to do with the tension of ambition and contentment.

What is the role of ambition in a Christian life?

How does that intersect with the call to contentment and trusting God?

It’s been a recurring thread in my life – being raised to memorize Psalm 23 (“The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want) but also to do well at school so you can get into a top university like Princeton.

To ask for the leadership opportunity you want or the award you feel you deserve, but that when people congratulate you for it, you reply with, “Praise God.”

As I prepare to enter the professional working world in less than week, the questions are once again re-surfacing.

On Monday this week, a dear friend in software engineering took me out for hojicha lattes to celebrate the job offer and we started talking about the tension of negotiating a salary as a Christian.

On one hand, it is normal practice in the working world to “ask for what’s yours” and yet as Christians, we trust that God can provide no matter what salary we end up with.

So how does one enter a world where one’s worth is determined by a salary figure or a job title and a culture where it is normal to jostle and fight to climb the ladder to higher salaries or job titles?

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In our sermon series at church, we have been going through the life of Jacob.

It seems to me like Jacob was quite the ambitious character: he cheated his brother to get a blessing from his father, worked seven more years because he wanted Rachel and not Leah and used a special feeding technique to grow his flock of goats.

One thing my husband reminds me of often as we’ve gone through this series is that we are so tempted to call Bible characters either villains or heroes but then we encounter a character like Jacob, and we don’t know which box to put him in.

It is obvious that Jacob is scared to lose what is his. He feels it is on him to fend for himself and so he devises all these techniques to get him what he thinks will grant him security.

And yet. God keeps apprehending him in every place Jacob runs to.

He opens up the heavens so Jacob can see angels going from heaven to earth on a ladder, while reminding him of the promise He had given to Abraham (Genesis 28: 11 – 22)

When Jacob is petrified that his brother Esau will take his life, God comes to him in the form of a man who wrestles with him until daybreak (Genesis 32:24 – 32).

It’s almost as if God understands the complicated mix of fear and ambition that consumes Jacob and knows that the only way to speak to him is a hand-to-hand combat, where he is wrestled into peace.

“Do you think Jacob trusts God yet?” I remember asking after the sermon on Jacob wrestling with God.

The answer the Bible gives is unclear, precisely because I think it mirrors the way our hearts go back and forth between the fearful ambition that makes Jacob fight for his own and the restful contentment Jacob caught a glimpse of, perhaps right when the angel touched his hip or the moment he exclaimed “Surely the Lord is in this place!”

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If I were to be honest, my first reaction to this sort of tension is to run away from “the world”.

Wouldn’t it be easier to be content if I could just live a simple life with chickens and a veggie garden, sequestered away in some village in a remote corner of the world?

Wouldn’t the path to holiness be easier if I lived more like a monk, away from phones and technology and all the things that steal the quiet?

But in picking up an old favorite of mine, “An Altar in this World” by Barbara Brown Taylor, she reminded me that this divide I perceive between the sacred and secular is of my own creation:

People encounter God under shady oak trees, on riverbanks, at the tops of mountains and in long stretches of barren wilderness.

God shows up in whirlwinds, starry skies, burning bushes and perfect strangers.

When people want to know more about God, the son of God tells them to pay attention to the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, to women kneading bread and workers lining up for their pay…human beings may separate things into as many piles as we wish – separating spirit from flesh, sacred from secular, church from world.

But we should not be surprised when God does not recognize the distinctions we make between the two.

I will work through the tension between ambition and contentment within my own heart as I enter the working world, is what I think Barbara would say to my situation.

But in the same way little moments of turning my attention to God is a way of reclaiming quiet, purposely looking for altars of worship in this world will also become a spiritual practice.

Not running away, but leaning into this season of new beginnings – of finding new rhythms of quiet and prayer, of desiring contentment amidst all the other competing desires of my heart, and of waking up to all the ways this world is burning with God’s glory.

These are my spring beginnings.