FREEDOM JOURNEY | PART 1

As we are only days away from going to Malaysia, writing a new chapter of our life, it feels necessary and rather fitting to look back at where this chapter has started. After a tumultuous and challenging leadership years especially with an ending I did not foresee coming and with a sense of betrayal, I quickly scrambled out of a survival mode to request a yearlong sabbatical, to save and free myself. Months later, my sabbatical finally arrived. The date was November 18, 2019. I remember the day like yesterday. With the typically warm and sunny southern California weather in November, I knew what we wanted to do: drive along the Pacific Coast Highway and visit Serra Retreat overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Malibu. My wife loves watching the waves tirelessly hugging the shore and gazing into endless shimmering water where the ocean and sky become one. Serra Retreat also happens to be where my wife’s spiritual direction Opening Residency took place two years prior.

I started journaling daily on that day which eventually turned into starting my blog. I “knew” I had to write. Below is a portion of my first paragraph from the November 18, 2019, entry.

The last activity we did today was to walk the labyrinth pictured above. During the walk, what captured my imagination and heart was the thought that this long-winded path with turns and twists is to be my path for discovering my true self and vocation for this coming year and beyond. And that it is directly tied to discerning and deciphering what God has for me and Grace in this next season of our life together. Furthermore, I sensed strongly that this path (both the journeying and the destination) would be of help to many others. The path that I will be walking will become the very path for many others. After the walk, I noticed a little memorial statue and, on the plaque, it read, “Walk this labyrinth not just for yourself but for all those who cannot find their way.” Hmmm.

The last four years’ chapter can be titled as freedom journey. It has been a journey of discovering my true inner self and identifying and articulating the systems and powers that deter and discourage the inner freedom journey. I realized that both had to be dealt with vigor and thoughtfulness unless I was called to live as a hermit in a cave. THAT was not going to happen.

The inner journey’s first requirement came with an unexpected gift of slowing down. Slow naturally came with a sabbatical but the unforeseeable pandemic forced unprecedented isolation and stretches of social lockdown as well as a seeming cosmic halt which translated into an extraordinary slow. During this time, I discovered nature as a fine teacher of my soul as life meets life. Decay and death were not decay and death but another beginning of life. The truth of the matter is that I would not have deemed nature as a teacher unless I slowed down. In slow, one sees and hears things that one has not seen or heard before. Slow creates a necessary space and distance to see things that never were visible. Slow creates a margin to linger and ask questions that I normally have not asked. To be sure, the margin can be terrifying because margin exposes isolation as desolation and thus can force us to fill the margin with busy and mind-numbing activities. When healthy, margin turns isolation and loneliness into a “garden of solitude” without needing to stuff our calendar with stuff.

The second requirement, looking back, is honesty with myself. Being honest with my emotions without ego boost or ego condemnation has required a discipline of naming the emotions I was holding. Naming and owning a season of death, deconstruction, and detachment in an honest appraisal of my life’s journey helped to embrace darkness as a friend. I would not have discovered darkness can be a friend and teacher and that darkness imbues a blinding radiance of grace.

The other requirement has been courage: courage to be, courage to do, and courage to become. We become what we love or behold. Becoming integrates the notion of being and doing. I have needed to commit to becoming me, which is an act of discovery, of how God has shaped me from the beginning. It is the primal and existential courage. Out of the courage to be, we act accordingly to do. It is the lifetime of doing based on primal courage, sometimes swimming against the stream, sometimes going with the flow, or sometimes sitting idly on the bank. We become how God created us to be which is God’s creative love in action: love begets love. This way, we become like God who created us—love, which is divine union.