Meeting Your Edge

suggested scripture reading: Matthew 4:1-11

On this month’s website, I want to talk about the hard places in life.
Buddhist nun Pema Chodron offers the image of people climbing a mountain.
It turns out to be pretty steep.

A little way up, a few of them look down and see how high up they are.
They panic; they can’t go any farther.
They have come up against their edge.

Another group goes higher, laughing, feeling confident,
but as the climb gets scarier, more people stop, give up.
All the way up the mountain there are places where people meet their edge,
and think they can’t go farther.

It doesn’t matter where you meet your edge,
at some point you will.

Even the people who made it to the top are going to meet their edge somewhere else. 1
Life is a journey of meeting your edge again and again.
It’s at the places where we meet our edge that we’re challenged to grow.

It’s at those places we get the chance to see
if we can live the values we’ve been claiming.
It’s at those places where God does God’s spiritual work on us,
stretching us into a more expansive consciousness,
a more radical trust,
more Christ-likeness.

Can you identify places where you’ve met your edge?

Your relationship is in trouble;
you are tempted to run; that’s easier than facing what needs to be faced.
You’ve met your edge.

You’re in the midst of a health crises,
anticipating more tests or more procedures.
It’s gone on a long time and you are worn out,
not to mention scared to your bones.
You don’t know if you can keep going.
You’ve met your edge.

You’ve been closeted all these years,
and it’s worked for you; there have been perks for being closeted.
But now you have this new Someone Special in your life
who doesn’t believe in closets.
Can you risk everything and come out?
But if you don’t come out, aren’t you also risking everything?
You don’t know what to do.
You’ve met your edge.

It comforts me to know that Jesus met his edge, too, often,
and we have records of it.

It happened in the wilderness when he was tempted.
That story is in Matthew 4.
Jesus is on a kind of vision quest,
or maybe just a profound inner struggle about the meaning of his life.

Matthew tells the story quickly; it takes only takes a few verses,
but I’m sure that’s because it isn’t really all there.
Matthew was on his laptop and the battery was about out,
so he had to hurry and he just skipped all the details.

He left out the part about Jesus anguishing, grappling:
If I do turn the stone to bread, whom would it hurt?
Don’t I need my strength to do this ministry?
Couldn’t this offer of bread be from God, really?

Matthew left out the part where Jesus in his wrestling
says some words he never learned from Mary.
He left out the part where Jesus cries,
knowing what is right, not having the strength for it, moaning,
I just can’t.
Jesus had met his edge.

It happened for Jesus, too, in the relentless daily demands,
the crowds always at him,
someone always wanting something from him.
Every parent of young children knows that edge.

It happened in the Garden of Gethsemane (Father, let this cup pass…)
and even on the cross (My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?)
Jesus met his edge over and over.

Two years ago I left the local church I’d served as pastor
in order to follow a call to another form of ministry.
I began my new life by moving for the summer to the Montana Rockies,
living in a log cabin with no electricity, phone, running water, or bathroom.
I had all kinds of expectations for the summer,
and for this new life I was starting.
I was full of dreams and confidence and visions of what was going to be.
What happened instead was that I met my edge.

I met my edge physically
(hauling wood and water, climbing the hill to the outhouse)
and professionally
(I missed serving a local church; I missed the community I’d left.)
I met my edge emotionally

(I was lonely and isolated, far from my support systems.)
I met my edge in my faith, too.
(Did I still trust God and my deepest self? Was God paying attention?)

Especially as time passed, and the new vision did not unfold as I expected,
I felt that I had let go of one trapeze, but the new one was not appearing.
In this leap of faith, was I going to get caught?
On every front, I met my edge.

Sometimes when we meet our edge,
we really can’t go farther,
we really have reached our true limits,
and our spiritual challenge is to accept that.
That is very hard.

More often when we meet our edge
our spiritual task is to find the courage to take
that next step beyond the edge,
that next step into the unknown,
that letting-go of one trapeze before we’ve grabbed hold of the other,
and no safety net in sight.

That is also very hard.

Two images help me.

The first thing to do when we meet our edge is to let go.
Let go, for starters, of our agenda, our expectations:
now there’s a spiritual practice for you.

How this life
or this day
or this job
or this body
or this relationship
was supposed to turn out:
let it go.

We need also to let go of our need to control the outcome.
I commit myself to working for peace,
and I write and I boycott and I march and I pray and I vote and I protest.
I do all that I can to do,
and then I let go of any need to control the outcome.

And here’s one:
let go of self-pity, let go of the drama,
let go of being the victim in your own personal soap-opera.
Try that one out next time you’re in the mood for a miserable challenge.

And this:
let go of our resistance.
It is appalling to me to discover how much energy I waste resisting.
I resist what’s happening because it isn’t what I wanted to happen.
I resist my feelings, because they’re uncomfortable.
I resist the truth, because I like my illusions.
I resist the present moment
because I want the present moment to be different.

Let go:
of agendas, of expectations,
of our need to control the outcome,
of self-pity, of being victim,
of resistance:
letting go is the first thing we need to do when we meet our edge.

And the second thing is to hang on.
Hang on to whatever smidgeons of trust and courage you can find.
Thomas Merton said, Courage comes and goes; hang on for the next supply.

Hang on to the present moment.
Have you ever noticed how rarely you are in pain in the present moment?
Oh, it happens: a toothache comes to mind,
or discovering that Baskin-Robbins ran out of Jamocha Almond Fudge
just before you got there.

But most of our suffering is not about now.
It is about what happened in the past,
or what we fear will happen in the future.
When we meet our edge, we need to hang on to the present moment.

Hang on to prayer,
even if all you can do is sit silent,
even if all you can do is cry,
even if all you can do is shake your fist and scream at God,
hang on to prayer.

Hang on to community.
Years ago, all alone in France, I faced numerous challenges and hardships.
What sustained me was the support I got
from far away family and friends and from strangers.
I came home knowing this:
everything is expendable except community.
Hang on to community.

Hang on to grace.
Grace is the goodness inherent in life, the blessing of it.
It is the abundant love of God
which can’t be earned but only accepted.
Faith is deciding to commit yourself to grace
even when you don’t know how life is going to turn out.
Hang on to grace.

When you meet your edge, hang on:
to trust and courage,
to the present moment,
to prayer,
to community,
to grace.

Sometime we choose to meet our edge.
We climb a mountain or take on the white waters or we face a fear.
We want to see what we’re made of.

More often, we don’t choose our edge, we just stumble against it.
That’s one reason why, in the spiritual journey,
we are instructed to do daily practices
like meditation, yoga, forgiveness, prayer, spiritual reading,
so that when we meet our edge, we’ll have the resources we need.
In Jesus’ wilderness struggle,
one of those times when he met his edge,
we see that he found the resources he needed, eventually, to move forward.

I’m into my third year of this new life,
this life that isn’t so far unfolding like I thought it would unfold.
Some things have been all that I hoped for.
Other dreams still elude me.
Professional, emotional and financial security is still just out of reach,
and the future is still even more unknown than the future always is.
I keep meeting new edges,
and as I do, I try to remember:

I need to let go
of agendas, expectations,
of self-pity, of being victim,
of the need to control the outcome,
of my resistance.

And I need to hang on
to the present moment,
to whatever trust and courage I can find,
to prayer,
to community,
to grace.

My prayer for you is that the Holy One will bless you
with the ability to let go and to hang on
in your edge-meeting times.

1 Chodron, Pema. The Wisdom of No Escape. p.53.

© Janice Jean Springer 2006