Margaret's Bench 
 

 

In January and February, I told about my early years on the winding path toward (and around and through) vocation and profession in life. At the end of last month’s piece, I was headed to graduate school at Ohio University, marching steadily toward what I saw as my true destiny: to become a professor of English literature and composition in an accredited institution of higher learning.

It didn’t happen that way.

We’ll skip the details on how I ended up outside academia. The long version is too long to tell here, and the short version too short to make much sense. I’ll just say that after three years, I left grad school with a master’s degree in English literature but not the doctorate needed to start a career in higher education. Over-educated and under-qualified, I moved across country to Seattle, took odd jobs, wrote a couple of novels that no one was fool enough to publish, stumbled into a career as a technical writer, earned some money, had a religious conversion, and found myself writing about that.

In the year 2000, while working on parts of what would become Stumbling Toward God, my first published book that is truly my own (that is, not technical writing for hire), a memory from childhood flashed to mind. I suddenly remembered being about ten years old, looking ahead to the millennium, and seeing myself not the teacher I’d always expected to be, but, to my disbelieving eyes, a real writer.

I was both literally and figuratively taken aback. That childhood vision, which felt so unlikely at the time, had actually been a premonition.

Today I am the author of three books about one aspect or another of the spiritual path. My books are not best-sellers (yet), but I know that they make a difference, because I occasionally hear from readers who tell me so. And—another surprise—after a long hiatus I have dipped into teaching again, wondering if I might actually turn into the teacher I always thought I would be.

It’s strongly tempting to suggest that everything wraps up neatly, and that one finally “arrives” at one’s rightful destination. But the truth is never so simple. Life is a journey with many way stations but no destinations, or at least none that I have seen. Some of the paths feel right and true, others like a long detour through a dank wilderness. At any step on the way I can tumble once again into confusion and doubt, forever asking or demanding of the Cosmos and the Creator—
 

What am I supposed to be doing?

Where am I going?

When will I get there?

WHO AM I?

The answers, as far as I can tell, are in the doing and the going, in the hope and the faith, in the confusion and the doubt, in the road ahead.

 

                   

On February 6, 2010, I met with five other women at St. Placid Priory in Lacey, Washington, for a retreat called “Stumbling Toward God.” At the close of the day, we joined together in a brief worship service, each of us offering a prayer or blessing for our time together.

Here are our prayers, offered for your inspiration and blessing, with the promise that wherever you are on the stumbling path of life, you are not alone.

"Yours is the day, O God, yours also the night; you established the moon and the sun.

You fixed all the boundaries of the earth; you made both summer and winter."  

-- Psalm 74:15-16

 

 

And bless us all, you and me and everyone else, on this surprising road into life.

 

 

      --  Margaret