Misfits.
Now at this cultural moment there…are a whole, whole lot of people who are future-worlders. Their sense of the future is actually much stronger than their sense of the past…. These people are destiny-sensitive; they are very sensitive to what calls, what pulls from the not-yet… thus these people don’t fit in very well. Mostly, they cover this discomfort and don’t show it…. As you can well imagine, these people don’t get along so well in the collective world.
~ Robert Sardello
Kellie and I were walking down stairs this week when her right achilles scraped painfully on the step… just like six months ago when her left achilles was seriously damaged the same way! In exasperation, she said, “I’m just not made for this world.”
Have you ever felt that way?
As beautiful and sacred as this world can be, we really aren’t made for it; we’re made the next world. For a “new heaven and a new earth.” But our journey through this world is not accidental! It is deeply purposeful, even when we feel like a misfit. Remember the Christmas movie pictured above? I think many of us feel that way uncomfortably often, which is why we are so desperate to belong somewhere. The church is often where we find that sense of belonging… until we don’t. And when we feel disenfranchised by the organized church, it’s hard to know where to go.
Which just happens to be the primary mission of The Vining Center: to welcome the spiritually displaced into safe community around the contemplative tradition. You don’t have to be a misfit. You belong—with all your questions, uncertainties, hurts, and hopes! We can know God intimately and serve our world redemptively without the need for theological uniformity, moral exclusion, power hierarchies, and political entanglement.
I’m staying at a retreat center in Virginia this week that envisions a radical community weaving together short/mid-term communal living with retreat hospitality and monastic rhythms of prayer, work, and study. It is an intentional movement away from the fragmentation and isolation of modern culture and commerce toward something that resembles the discipleship community that surrounded Jesus, not to mention the early church of Acts 2. Could this be a small outpost of “new earth,” of kingdom culture?
It reminds me of the desert Mothers and Fathers of the 4th-century who escaped the church-become-empire to carry their spiritual passion and compassion to the edge of society where they made intercession and tended to spiritual seekers as counselors. This role found its way into the monastic life of the middle ages and then resurrected in 18th-century Russian spirituality as the “poustinia” (Russian for desert). These misfits also moved to the edge of town to immerse themselves in spiritual silence while remaining available to the needs of the village at large.
If we don’t feel a certain amount of dissonance between our spiritual vocation to know God and heal our world… and our commercial vocation to make our way in a broken world culture, then we have lost our prophetic voice. If we don’t struggle with the commission to be in the world but not of the world (Jn 17:15-16), then our spiritual potency for inner and outer transformation has evaporated. This creative spiritual tension is meant to fuel our dual roles of engagement and disengagement, of action and contemplation that only together re-incarnate the presence of Christ in our beautiful and broken world.
If you feel like a misfit, maybe you’re just unwilling to toe the line of today’s church-become-empire.
growing your soul
Where do you need to lean in to the poustinia / desert of silence and solitude?
serving our world
Where do you need to lean in to working for justice and healing in your world?
takeaway
You belong!