Be, don’t seem

Hiddenness for the soul, and John of the Cross.

Woman wearing gold mask, by Anna Deli at Unsplash

I’m coming to the end of a six month sprint of pushing a book out into the world. I wrote The Soul Formation of Promotion at the mid point about the risks of this season. My fear, moving into writing and speaking more personally in these spaces was being a “clanging gong, a resounding cymbal”, all noise and no substance. I worried it would form me in ways that might, ironically, make me less fully alive, less the kind of person the world actually needs.

Has it? Maybe. Lots has been really life giving. Speaking, particularly in person, to those who have felt helped by the book, getting quickly to depth in many more conversations than I usually would, has been a balm. I love travel, and have done radically less of it in recent years for climate, cost and childcare reasons, so the nomad in me relished the adventure of that bit. There have been mitigating structures too - especially our community house. Even at my busiest and most public, I have been praying with, having dinner with, washing up beside people who know all of me. They can see when I’m surgically attached to my phone, absent and snappy with my family, avoiding difficult conversations and turning my eyes from injustice. They remind me of (and occasionally hold me accountable to) the deeper, private stuff, the embodied practices we have committed to together.

Still. I feel emptied now. The individual (rather than collective) practices I wrote about as so helpful in my own life have largely slipped. Speaking to a friend about this tension of cultivating a healthy inner life in a public world, he quoted one of his favourite maxims to me, from Cicero: Esse quam videri, which means “be, don’t seem”. Dear God, I thought, immediately, protect me from being (even more of) a hypocrite.

It’s time to retreat.

I had a long period of hiddenness before Fully Alive became public. I was mainly parenting and working to birth our intentional community. I was in proper, sustained (individual and collective) spiritual rhythms for the first time in my life. Honestly, I think it’s the only reason I had anything to say. I have been asked whether I am writing a next book, because our output-and-achievement orientated culture is always pushing. My honest response is “Good Lord, not yet”. The idea of having anything substantial worth people’s time without a longish period of growth first seems madness. Which is another reason I probably need a break.

Statue of woman with veiled face, by Guenifi Ouassim at Unsplash

All of which is to say, this substack will be dormant for August. More consequentially, soul wise, I will be totally off social media until September. This is the formative practice which feels most likely to de-form me, so I am withdrawing. No more offerings to the algorithmic Gods of the acediac economy for a while. Despite the fact that our planned European family train holiday would make great “content“. Despite various Big Deal podcasts coming out in that period. They will just have to find their way to people without me jumping up and down about them, or not. I need to be, not seem. Receive, not perform. Call it a fast, call it Liz’s Emergency Medicine for Stopping Her Becoming a Full Blown Ego-Monster, I am partly telling you here because I need accountability. To my shame, I am that addicted.

I’m hoping to turn my attention instead towards my loved ones, poetry, games, the natural world and reading the Bible in more than short snatches. I need to put my roots down deep again, go forth, as St John of the Cross invites, unobserved¹.

The Dark Night of the Soul²

I.

In a dark night,

With anxious love inflamed,

O, happy lot!

Forth unobserved I went,

My house being now at rest.

II.

In darkness and in safety,

By the secret ladder, disguised,

O, happy lot!

In darkness and concealment,

My house being now at rest.

III.

In that happy night,

In secret, seen of none,

Seeing nought myself,

Without other light or guide

Save that which in my heart was burning.

IV.

That light guided me

More surely than the noonday sun

To the place where He was waiting for me,

Whom I knew well,

And where none appeared.

V.

O, guiding night;

O, night more lovely than the dawn;

O, night that hast united

The lover with His beloved,

And changed her into her love.

…

VIII.

I continued in oblivion lost,

My head was resting on my love;

Lost to all things and myself,

And, amid the lilies forgotten,

Threw all my cares away.

BY ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS

Meanwhile, some things I have been up to.

• On the Should I Quit podcast I had a lovely conversation not directly about the book, but about my wrestle between idealism and pragmatism.

• I spoke to Washington Post editor

  Damir Marusic
  for Faith Angle Forum.

• … was on Maiden Mother Matriarch with Louise Perry.

• And appeared on ABC Radio in Australia on the Soul Search programme.

• Finally, we’ve just wrapped our special Fully Alive series of The Sacred, and it was a great one. You can listen to conversations with Peter Hitchens, Gretchen Rubin, Caroline Lucas, Luke Turner, Dacher Keltner, Lakwena, Tim Dixon and my housemates.

1. I realise the irony of telling you about it here. This is why I need a break from the formation of being public.

2. I would be remiss not to tell you that Nick Cave has a new single out called Long Dark Night.