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The Exquisite Risk of Letting the Dark Do Its Work

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There is a photograph I have carried in my memory for decades — not one taken on film, but one pressed into the body the way cold presses into bone. It is a winter morning in Detroit, still dark at six a.m., and I am standing at the kitchen window watching my mother mix paint in the silence before the house woke up. She wasn’t sad. She wasn’t lost. She was in that rare place artists sometimes go — a place that looks like emptiness from the outside but is, from the inside, a particular kind of waiting. A necessary hollow. I didn’t have words for it then. I do now.

The mystics called it la noche oscura — the dark night of the soul.

When the Ground Falls Away

Most of us arrive at the dark night not by choice but by collapse. Something that once held meaning — a career, a faith practice, a sense of self, a relationship — gives way beneath us. The fall is disorienting precisely because we didn’t see it coming, and because the things we reach for on the way down don’t hold.

This is not ordinary sadness. It is not burnout, though it can look like it. It is not clinical depression, though it can travel alongside it, and if it is significantly impairing your daily life or generating thoughts of self-harm, please reach out to a licensed professional — that is not weakness, it is wisdom.

What distinguishes the dark night is its spiritual texture: the loss isn’t just of energy or motivation but of meaning itself. Things that once lit you up feel hollow. Your spiritual practices go silent. You withdraw. You wonder, quietly or loudly, whether you have lost God, or whether God was ever there at all.

St. John of the Cross — a sixteenth-century Spanish mystic who wrote from inside a prison cell no larger than a closet, where he had been confined by the very religious order he was trying to reform — would say: you are exactly where you need to be.

That is hard to hear in the dark. It was for me.

 

The Poem That Knows the Way

What John wrote in that cell was not a lament. It was, against all reason, a love poem.

“Dark Night of the Soul” — in Mirabai Starr’s luminous translation opens not in despair but in secret motion. The soul slips out of the house while everything is still. She travels in darkness, not despite the darkness but through it, guided not by any external lamp but by something burning in her own chest.

No other light, no other guide Than the one burning in my heart. — St. John of the Cross, trans. Mirabai Starr

This is the paradox the dark night holds: what feels like abandonment is, in John’s vision, a form of being led. The stripping away of every consolation — every spiritual feeling, every certainty, every framework that once made sense — is not punishment. It is preparation. The soul is being emptied so that something truer can fill it.

The poem ends not in the darkness but in a garden. In rest. In transformation. Lover transformed in Beloved.

John doesn’t promise the journey will be short. He doesn’t promise it won’t hurt. He promises it goes somewhere.

What Emotional Intelligence Has to Do with It

Here is where the contemplative tradition and emotional intelligence meet in a way I find profound: both ask us to stay present with what is, rather than immediately managing it away.

One of the core competencies in the Six Seconds model of EQ is what we call Feel Your Feelings — the capacity to move toward your inner experience rather than away from it. Not to be consumed by it. Not to perform it. But to let it be what it is, without premature resolution.

The dark night, spiritually understood, asks for the same posture. It resists the fixes we reach for — the productivity systems, the five-step frameworks, the urgent need to locate the lesson and extract it. Those impulses are understandable. They are also, in the dark night, exactly what is being dismantled.

What the dark night wants from you is not your solutions. It wants your surrender.

And surrender — in the contemplative sense — is not passivity. It is a particular kind of courage: the willingness to stop managing the mystery and begin inhabiting it.

 

Five Things to Do When You Are in the Dark

I want to offer not a ladder out but a way of being in. These are not performance targets. They are invitations.

Stay close to your body.  The dark night is disorienting in the mind, but the body often knows more than we credit it with. Walk. Sit with your back against something solid. Pay attention to what you can smell, hear, feel. The Incarnation — God taking on a body — is itself a theological argument that matter matters. You are allowed to be a creature.

Release the spiritual performance.  If your prayer feels empty, don’t force it into the shape it used to have. John wrote from inside a prison cell with nothing but scraps of cloth and the words forming in him in the dark. The form of devotion may need to change entirely. Let it.

Find one trustworthy companion.  Not someone who will rush you to resolution, but someone who can sit in the not-knowing with you. A spiritual director. A therapist. A friend formed in contemplative patience. The dark night is not meant to be survived alone, even when it demands solitude.

Practice lectio divina with the darkness itself.  What if you read the darkness the way monastics read scripture — slowly, with openness, asking not what does this mean but what is this forming in me? The dark night, John insists, is doing something. You may not be able to name it yet. That is alright.

Trust the heart that burns inside.  Even when you cannot feel it. Even when the candle seems to have gone out. John’s soul travels the whole dark journey guided by what is burning inside her chest — not what she can see, not what makes rational sense, but what is alive in her. There is something in you that has not gone out. It may be very quiet. Tend it like an ember.

What the Darkness Already Knows Reflection Guide

 

What the Darkness Already Knows

My mother would finish her mixing before the sun came up, and then she would begin. I used to think the dark hours were the waiting. I understand now they were the work.

The dark night of the soul is not a detour from the spiritual life. For John of the Cross, for Meister Eckhart, for Howard Thurman writing from the underside of suffering, for Julian of Norwich holding her visions in the midst of plague — the darkness has always been the passage. Not the destination. But not the obstacle either.

It is, to borrow Mirabai Starr’s phrase, an exquisite risk.

And if you are in it right now — if the house has gone still and everything you reached for is no longer where you left it — you are not broken. You are, perhaps, being made.

The night that joins the lover with the Beloved does not announce itself. It simply comes. And it leads.

St. John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul, translated by Mirabai Starr, Riverhead Books, 2002 —

If this found you in a threshold season, we’d be honored to walk alongside you — explore spirit of EQ’s community on Substack or join us in our Mighty Networks space for ongoing conversation.

Peace and every good.

Detroit Eight: From Fury to Integrated Nonviolence

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I grew up in Detroit, a city of factories and funeral parades, Motown records and mended fences. The streets I learned to walk on were loud with engines and louder still with ambition. In that city — in that era, especially — toughness was currency. I learned early to stand my ground, to protect my own, to make my small kingdom unassailable. I was quick to anger, 0 to 60 in a tenth of a second. I would ask myself, (because I did not like who I was) what’s wrong with me? No answer came that felt right, and the pattern repeated and repeated: I’d lash out, hurt people I loved, and then retreat into shame. For a long while that cycle defined me.

It took a long time — and a lot of embarrassing, painful failures — before I started to look for explanations that could become pathways instead of the same dead ends. That search, over the last 45 years, led me through countless trainings, retreats, and relationships. I studied plenty of systems and skills, but one of the most meaningful things I discovered was the Narrative Enneagram. Within that circle of nine, I found my number. I was an Eight! At first, being an Eight offered relief — finally a label that explained the force that drove me. But labels can also be prisons. I saw that I was not “integrated.” I was functioning at half speed, armed and dangerous, without most of the inward tools that make a life human.

 

When people talk about Detroit in the 1960s, they talk about dynamism and danger together. It was a place of industrial might — auto plants humming, assembly lines that made America mobile — and it was also a city simmering with social change, racial tension, and the scream of a neighborhood that felt squeezed. The Detroit of my youth carried the echoes of the Great Migration and the rising voice of civil rights. The city’s heartbeat was Motown: Berry Gordy’s miracle where Black voices found national airwaves and a kind of dignity that shimmered in lacquered records. Yet alongside that soundtrack was the sound of helicopters over riots, the crack of police batons, and the heavy grief of lives upended in streets that once felt safe.

 

In that environment, my Eight side learned to armor up fast. Eights, by temperament, protect themselves and others. We can be decisive, direct, and resolute. But when an Eight is not integrated — when the strength becomes defensiveness, when the will becomes domination — the results are destructive. I protected, but too often that protection translated into control. I could make things erupt and keep going long after the battle was over. Nonviolence? It felt distant, like a lighthouse across a foggy dreamscape — brilliant and unreachable.

The turning point was not a single dramatic event. It was a slow bringing together of consequences: the relationships I broke, the loneliness that followed victories, the growing realization that power without wisdom made me small, not big. I began to understand that being an Eight did not have to mean living in constant fight or flight. My work — a lifetime of practice — became a work of integration: bringing heart into will, softness into strength. Becoming a Narrative Enneagram Teacher was more than a credential; it was a map and a mirror. The map helped me see the directions toward healthier functioning. The mirror showed me what I had been avoiding: pain, vulnerability, and the need to learn how to love without expecting payment.

 

Part of what made this path possible was a latent contemplative streak. Even as a tough kid in Detroit, I had a part of myself drawn to silence, to long walks, to listening. But that contemplative part and my Eight-protector part were at war. It took years, and a lot of gentle but relentless practice, to let the contemplative side come in and lead sometimes. Nonviolence slowly revealed itself not as weakness, but as another kind of courage — a deeper, riskier courage that asks you to enter the world without armor and to offer dignity to people who may not deserve it by any conventional measure.

 

Nonviolence as an ethic is often mistaken for passivity. But the courage to be nonviolent is active; it is fiercely moral. It expects nothing in return. It sees others with dignity and honor. It listens more than it talks. It walks with, sits with, eats with, cries with, works with, and is present with. For me, this shift was seismic. I began practicing presence, sitting still with discomfort instead of scattering it with aggression. I learned restraint — not the brittle restraint of suppressing emotion so it later detonates, but the integrated restraint of feeling fully and choosing a wise response.

Detroit taught me a lot that helped on this path. In the 60s, the city showed both the worst and the best of human responses to pressure. It taught an appreciation for community — neighbors who checked on one another, churches that organized, and storefronts that doubled as meeting houses. It taught resilience. Coming out of factories and through hard winters taught people how to persevere; it taught me, too, that endurance can be tempered with tenderness. The music was a school of its own. Motown taught us how to turn sorrow into voice, outrage into rhythm, and marginalization into artistry. That artistry taught me how expression can be both a release and a bridge.

 

Becoming a healthy Eight required that I relearn power. True power, I discovered, is not about the loudest voice or the most forceful stance. True power is presence. It is the capacity to hold complexity without collapsing into defensiveness. It is the humility to ask for help. It is the willingness to risk being known as imperfect. I practiced sitting with people I feared, letting them see me, letting me see them. I practiced listening without planning my rebuttal. I practiced the kind of attentiveness that honors the other as worthy.

 

Was it easy? No. I would be lying if I claimed to have become saintly. Old habits die slowly and some are stubborn in their refusal to die. I am still not perfect. But the change has been profound. The storms have calmed. I have real peace now — a presence that feels more alive and less like a bluff. And that peace has given me the capacity to teach from a place of empathy rather than coercion. As a Narrative Enneagram Teacher, MCC (Master Certified Coach), and a Spiritual Director I don’t just help people identify their numbers; I help them see the paths toward integration: how to bring heart to will, how to temper justice with mercy, how to turn fierce protection into compassionate stewardship.

 

This journey taught me a lesson that reaches beyond personality systems: transformation is possible when courage is directed inward. The bravest thing I did was not a heroic outward act, but a quiet, repeated turning inward — to ask hard questions, to allow grief and shame to be felt, and to choose differently each time. From Detroit’s fists and furnace, I forged a softer kind of steel: resilient, flexible, and honest.

 

If you are an Eight reading this, or the loved one of an Eight, know this: your force can be your greatest gift when it is integrated with tenderness. Try to see the lighthouse of nonviolence not as a retreat but as a harbor. If you are someone who grew up in tough places — in cities of industry and unrest, where survival required a hard face — know you can let down that face without losing yourself. You can keep your dignity while showing vulnerability. You can hold others without crushing them.

 

If you are not an Eight, perhaps you recognize in this story a pattern you know well: a part of you that is reactive; a part that wants to protect at all costs. Our work is similar: to find the courage to be less sure, more present, more generous with silence and attention. To listen. To walk with. To sit with.

 

I won’t pretend the path is quick. It took me decades to move from a default of fury to a life where peace is possible. But the effort is worth it. The city taught me that too — to endure, to repair, to keep making music even when the world is cracked. There is a tenderness in Detroit that does not compromise grit. There is a sanctity in power when it is used to steward rather than dominate.

 

Try it. Sit in an uncomfortable silence, and don’t fill it with force. Walk toward someone you fear and stay long enough to see them. Speak quietly when the instinct is to roar. You might be surprised by how powerful you can be when you are softer. You might just like it.

Peace and every good.

Lynette’s DMin: Deepening Spiritual-Emotional Care

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There are moments in life when personal accomplishment and communal mission converge in a way that changes everything. Lynette’s completion of her Doctor of Ministry  in Spiritual Direction is precisely one of those moments. This degree represents years of disciplined study, late nights balancing family and ministry, deep reflection, and the courage to push into new theological and practical territory. But beyond the diploma lies the person I’ve always known, compassionate, inquisitive, disciplined, and humble—someone who models faithful service and thoughtful leadership. Her DMin is not merely a credential; it is a deepening of the wisdom and skill she brings to everything she touches. For our family, for me personally, and for everyone connected to Spirit of EQ, it is a cause for celebration and renewed purpose. I am profoundly proud of Lynette, and my admiration for her grows with every step she takes in service to others.

As we move forward at Spirit of EQ, Lynette’s scholarship and pastoral insight will shape how we support individuals, leaders, and communities in cultivating emotional and spiritual maturity. The Spiritual Emotional Intelligence Assessment (the SEQ) has long been our foundational tool—designed to help people name where they are spiritually and emotionally, and to chart a path toward greater resilience, clarity, and wholeness. With Lynette’s advanced training in integrating theology, emotional intelligence and practical ministry, the SEQ will become even more robust. Expect enhancements that will weave research with pastoral sensitivity: richer assessment items that capture relational patterns and spiritual practices, evidence-informed interpretation guides, and culturally attuned frameworks that honor diversity of belief, experience, and context. The goal is not simply to measure, but to illuminate—helping clients see the intersections of their inner life, relationships, and spiritual formation so they can move toward healing and flourishing.

 

Practically, the work we will do with clients will deepen across several dimensions. First, our assessment process will be more integrative. Rather than offering a static score, the SEQ will provide a narrative map that identifies strengths, vulnerabilities, and possibilities—linking emotional regulation and spiritual practices. This map will be used in collaborative coaching and spiritual direction contexts, helping clients translate insight into sustainable practices. Second, our interventions will be more evidenced-informed and pastorally sensitive. Using evidence-based modalities—such as emotion-focused techniques, narrative practices, and contemplative disciplines—paired with Lynette’s pastoral spiritual direction training, we will support people in learning practical tools for self-regulation, conflict navigation, and meaning-making. Third, we will expand our training offerings for leaders and teams. Churches, nonprofits, and organizations seeking emotionally intelligent spiritual leadership will find workshops, retreats, and certification tracks that marry theological depth with applied emotional skills: how to lead with empathy under pressure, how to sustain pastoral identity over a long ministry career, and how to cultivate staff and congregational wellbeing without sacrificing mission.

One of the most exciting changes is how we will incorporate qualitative, story-centered work alongside quantitative assessment. People are not numbers; their lives are narratives. Lynette’s project work emphasized case-based learning—listening deeply to life stories, isolating turning points, and carrying those insights into tailored growth plans. At Spirit of EQ, that means every person who comes to us will receive an assessment that honors their story: how they were formed, how they are coping now, and what practices or relational shifts can help them move forward. For couples and families, this approach will allow us to identify not only individual spiritual-emotional patterns but the relational rhythms that either support or undermine flourishing. For leaders, it will highlight vocational strengths, blind spots, and sustainable rhythms of work and rest that preserve long-term effectiveness.

We will also broaden our community offerings. Lynette’s work has deepened our capacity to design group experiences that cultivate corrective emotional and spiritual experiences—small groups, peer supervision cohorts for clergy, and community healing circles that use structured practices to promote trust and transformation. These community modalities are powerful because they provide both accountability and belonging. People practice new ways of relating in safe contexts and then carry those practices back into their families, workplaces, and congregations. The ripple effects are significant. When a leader learns to regulate under pressure, their staff experience decreases in burnout and increases in trust. When congregation members learn compassionate ways of speaking about pain, the entire community can become a cradle for healing rather than a site of hidden suffering.

We are also committed to elevating accessibility and cultural relevance in all our work. Lynette’s DMin emphasized contextual theology through spiritual direction application and culturally sensitive care, and that emphasis will shape how we adapt the SEQ for diverse populations. Assessments, coaching curricula, and training materials will be offered in ways that respect linguistic, cultural, and theological differences—so that people from all backgrounds can find the language and tools that resonate with their faith and experience. We will invest in partnerships with local congregations and community organizations to co-create programs that address specific needs: supporting immigrant communities, equipping inner-city pastors, or providing transitional support for people moving through major life changes.

Finally, this degree enhances our capacity to contribute to broader conversations about spiritual and emotional health. With Lynette’s research skills and pastoral credibility, Spirit of EQ will produce resources—white papers, training manuals, podcasts, and workshops—that synthesize best practices at the intersection of faith and emotional intelligence. We want to equip not only individual clients but also the wider fields of ministry, counseling, and organizational leadership with tools that are both theologically grounded and psychologically sound. Our aim is to be a resource hub: offering practical, scalable interventions that help people live not just coping lives, but flourishing lives.

None of this would be possible without the love, perseverance, and integrity Lynette has shown throughout her journey. Her achievement is both deeply personal and profoundly public—an example of how disciplined study and faithful service can amplify a mission. I am endlessly proud of her and grateful for how she continues to shape our shared work. As Spirit of EQ enters this new season, we do so with greater clarity, deeper resources, and renewed hope: to help people name their struggles, cultivate practices that sustain them, build relationships that heal, and live into the fullness of their spiritual and emotional calling. If you or someone you love is seeking a compassionate, rigorous, and practical pathway to greater wholeness, we are here to walk alongside you—now with even more training, heart, and skill than ever before.

Hide-and-Seek of the Soul: Learning to Be Found…

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When I was a child, summer evenings meant the sweet, damp smell of grass and the soft thud of bare feet on the lawn as we played hide-and-seek until the light thinned to the color of my old side of our old house. I remember crouching behind brick walls in that ethnic area of Detroit called Hamtramck, my breath held, counting on my hands while my young friends scattered like leaves on the wind. The delight of being both pursued and hidden—of waiting in a secret pocket of the world until someone found me—stayed with me. That game was, in miniature, a schooling in the rhythms of life: the thrill of discovery, the quiet of waiting, the embarrassment and laughter when the hiding place failed. Beginning here, with that memory of hide-and-seek, helped me see how the hidden things of life are part of the same pattern we practiced as children.

One moment we are walking along, sure of our path, and the next moment something rises from below the surface—a memory, a grief, a joy so bright it takes our breath away. We jump, we scream, we wonder, we are grateful, sometimes all in the same moment. These small detonations and soft arrivals are reminders that we are alive. They are also invitations: invitations to pay attention, to name, to bear witness.

In spiritual direction, I have found that the time spent sitting with clients and listening to the story that unfolds usually brings about those hidden things that want to bubble to the surface. There is a kind of safety in the slow arc of attentive listening. As someone tells their story—staggering details together with ordinary moments, explanations scribbled in the margins—those tucked-away parts of experience begin to show themselves. A pause becomes pregnant with meaning. A stray tear draws out a knot of memory. An offhand joke reveals a wound. The directed space is not magic; it is relational and structured, and that structure matters. It offers permission to the hidden to be seen.

Why do hidden things remain hidden in the first place? Often because we have learned survival strategies that require us to ignore certain sensations or thoughts. We may have been taught that some feelings are inappropriate, unspiritual, or unwise to voice. We may fear the consequences of acknowledgement—shame, judgment, or a sense of being overwhelmed. Or we may be so immersed in the busyness of living—work, caretaking, the small daily duties—that we simply do not have the patience to notice the subtleties at work in our inner life. But life has a way of insisting. The hidden, like water, finds the path of least resistance. It leaks through in dreams, in somatic signals, in sudden irritations, in wonderings that won’t let us go.

When those pesky hidden things are asking to be seen, what do you normally do? Stuff them down, let them out, ignore them? That’s me, Ignore them! This simple question is an important litmus test for our way of managing interior life. Each of these options—suppressing, expressing, or ignoring—carries consequences.

Stuffing things down can be a short-term coping mechanism. It may allow us to function under pressure, to remain reliable for others, or to dodge the immediate pain of facing something difficult. But suppression is porous. Pain that is not metabolized finds another expression: chronic anxiety, irritability, sleep disturbances, or unexpected explosions of emotion. Over time, what we have buried can calcify, making it harder to access and integrate. Spiritually, suppression can feel like a closing off from the grace that often arrives when we name the truth of our condition. It can turn our inner landscape into a desert.

Letting things out—expressing raw emotion—can be liberating. A cry, a fierce conversation, an honest confession, a journal entry that spills secrets onto the page: these can unbind what was stuck. But unrestrained release without discernment can also cause harm. If the expression is directed at vulnerable others or enacted impulsively, it can fracture relationships and create new wounds. What helps is a tempered expression: naming what is present without launching it like a spear at someone else. Finding appropriate outlets—trusted friends, therapists, spiritual directors, creative acts—can channel release in healing ways.

Ignoring is its own form of avoidance, subtly different from stuffing. To ignore is too busy ourselves with neutral or distracting activities—scrolling, workaholism, noise—so that we do not have the space to meet whatever is asking for attention. Ignoring can feel safe because it delays the inevitable. Yet the hidden things have stamina. They may return more persistently or in altered forms. Ignoring is a passive collusion with fear.

So, what is the middle way? From the practice of spiritual direction and from the rhythms of contemplative life, a few patterns emerge that help make the hidden visible without being consumed by them.

  1. Cultivate a listening posture. Listening is not merely the absence of speaking; it is an orientation of attention. When you cultivate a listening posture toward yourself—pausing, closing the gap between stimulus and reaction—you give the hidden a chance to emerge. Practices that cultivate listening include silence, breath awareness, journaling, and prayerful attention. In a listening posture, you loosen the habit of immediate reactions and make space for discovery.
  1. Name gently. When something surfaces, name it as precisely as you can. “I am feeling afraid,” “I notice grief behind my anger,” “There is shame when I think about that conversation.” Naming is enacting a tiny liturgy of truth: you acknowledge a reality and thereby diminish its power to run you unconsciously. Naming need not be a full-blown analysis—often a brief, compassionate descriptor will do.
  1. Use trusted containers. Not every feeling needs to be told to everyone. Spiritual direction, therapy, close friendships, creative outlets, and ritual provide containers where the hidden can be explored safely. A good container holds both tenderness and truth. It helps you stay with a feeling long enough to learn from it without being overwhelmed.
  1. Practice curiosity, not judgment. Hidden things often come with a script—a voice that tells us we are broken, weak, or unworthy. Replace condemnation with curiosity. Ask, what is this wanting from me? How old is this pattern? Where did I first learn this response? Curiosity opens pathways of understanding that judgment seals shut.
  1. Attend to body and imagination. The hidden speaks not only through thought but through the body and imagination. An ache in the chest, a clenching in the jaw, a dream, an image that keeps returning—these are languages of the soul. Attend to them. They often carry the metaphorical shape of what’s needing attention. Let your imagination be a map, not a liar; test its images against gentle reality-checks. As an example, I tend to hold stress in my neck and at times becomes so painful that I cannot use one of my arms and when I check in with my body, I can usually find the reason.

When I think back to hide-and-seek on the lawn, I notice how the children’s version of the game allowed for a safe reveal. We knew, inherently, that being found wasn’t the end of the world—it was part of the play. That trust made hiding feel not like concealment but like a temporary, innocent withholding. In adult life we often forget that being found can be met with gentleness rather than punishment. Spiritual direction, friendships, and practices of presence restore that simple truth: the world, and the people we trust, can be safe places to be seen.

Reflections on life’s hiddenness inevitably led to paradox. The very things that surprise us—the sudden joy, the spontaneous grief—are both evidence of our vulnerability and of our depth. They remind us that life is not a list of accomplishments but a living relation. When we make room for these hidden things, they can become sacramental: ordinary moments that reveal deeper truth. A tear can be a doorway; an unexpected laugh can be grace.

In the end, how we respond to the hidden shapes the arc of our lives. Do we cultivate a posture of listening and curiosity, or do we keep building higher walls? Do we find companions who can sit with the messy reality of us, or do we continue a lonely performance? The invitation is simple and relentless: pay attention.

And so, I come back, as the sun sank on those summer evenings, to the hush of hiding and the laughter of being found. The child who crouched behind the hedge trusted that discovery would not be punishment but part of play; the adult who sits in a quiet room with a spiritual director or a friend can relearn that same trust. To let the hidden things surface is not to expose ourselves to harm but to return to a game we once knew well—the risky, delightful art of being seen. If we remember how play taught us that being found often brings relief, connection, and a burst of laughter, then perhaps we can meet our inner surprises with less dread and more curiosity. Hide-and-seek becomes a small theology: what is hidden will be found, and what is found can become fuel for deeper life. Trust the finding.

Eastertide: Living into Easter for Forty Days

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Today’s blog post is about Easter from a deeply methodist standpoint in the form of a sermon. As a spiritual director I felt with all that is going on in the world we could take a moment and breathe into a deeply felt practice. And yes, I know that some of my brothers and sisters do not practice this form of worship, thank you for reading, and, lastly for those of you that do not have an active faith, consider acts of kindness you can perform.

When I was a child, one of the greatest joys of Easter was not the church service—but the Cadbury chocolate bunny ears. I don’t know about you, but I could not wait for Easter morning: the thrill of hunting for hidden eggs, the bright colors winking from the grass, baskets overflowing with candy, and the small, necessary negotiations with my brother over the Peeps I didn’t like. It became a ritual I could not escape, one that shaped my expectations for finding hidden treasures. I learned to look for delight in the ordinary places; I learned that joy is often buried, waiting to be discovered.

For those of us who celebrate this holy week for a man called Jesus, and for brothers and sisters from other traditions who know how important this time is for Christians, I want to offer a few thoughts. Do you think we might have missed the point? We faithfully observe Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and finally Easter Sunday. We come to our respective places of worship, we sing the hymns, we share the sacrament, we kneel and we weep and we laugh. But then—when the baskets are put away until next year, and in my case the last of the chocolate bunny has met his end—what do we do with the days that follow?

Eastertide. The church calendar gives us a word for the season we so often forget: Eastertide, the fifty days from Easter Sunday to Pentecost. Within that season is another mark: the forty days after Easter—the days in which the risen Christ we believe in continued to appear among his disciples, teaching, encouraging, healing, and preparing them. Luke, in Acts 1:3, tells us that Jesus “presented himself alive to them by many proofs” and “appeared to them for forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God.” Forty days—long enough to be formative, not a mere moment but a way of life being reframed.

Think for a moment of the bunny ears. As a child I associated them with surprise and delight; they trained my eye to pay attention to the small, hidden places where joy could be found. But if Easter for us is only the morning we find the chocolate, if that joy is only the counter of an Easter Sunday, then we have turned a lifetime into a holiday. We have reduced a movement of God—into a seasonal confection. Jesus does not show up for one photograph and then leave. He walks with the disciples for forty days and more; he breaks bread, he opens scriptures, he commissions them to go out. This Easter life spills over into ordinary days.

This is the pastoral point I want to leave with you: Easter is not an event to be consumed. It is a reality to be inhabited. The forty days after Easter are practice sessions. They are an apprenticeship in what it means to live in the knowing of Christ. The early church did not celebrate Easter and then go back to business as usual. They kept the feast. They lingered in the light of Jesus until their habits, their affections, their deeds, were reshaped.

What does that reshaping look like? Allow me to name a few practices—simple, Methodist (me being Methodist), and practical—that can help us live Eastertide as more than memory.

  1. Keep the feast of the Jesus. The Wesleyan tradition talks about “means of grace”: prayer, scripture, the sacraments, fasting, and works of mercy. During the forty days, make a habit of coming to the table. Let the sacrament of Holy Communion remind you that resurrection is a feast to be shared.
  1. Read these Easter stories slowly. Don’t rush past the Easter narratives as if you know how they go. Re-read Luke 24, John 20–21 and Acts 1. Hear the bewilderment, the fear, the doubts of the disciples. Notice how often Jesus invites them into ordinary things: eating fish, walking on the road, opening scripture. We are invited into this relationship not as a leap into fantasy but as a transformation of the everyday.
  1. Practice visibility and testimony. The early disciples were given the task to witness. But witness is not merely verbal proof; it is a life that reflects the truth of the faith. This Eastertide season, decide on one way to make faith visible: meals with a neighbor, forgiveness offered where resentment lingered, a note to someone who is lonely, a visit to someone in prison, charity given without fanfare. Let your life be an Easter basket for others.
  1. Re-learn to look for hidden things. The chocolate bunny ear was hidden to be found—and that shaped my anticipation. Similarly, Jesus revealed that God hides grace in unlikely places: in failure, in loss, in hospital rooms, in apologies. Train your eyes to find the small, bright things of God. Keep a journal for forty days in which you note one “hidden treasure” you noticed each day—an unexpected kindness, a phrase of Scripture that struck you, a sunrise you had not seen before. By the end of forty days, your instincts will be reoriented toward noticing God.
  1. Tend to doubt honestly. Thomas’s doubt is part of the story (John 20:24–29). The forty days included questions and skepticism. Methodism, for all its joy, has room for honest uncertainty. Bring your questions to God. Bring them to your community. The Easter story is not weakened by doubt; it is made credible by a God big enough to meet us in our honest, messy searching.
  1. Remember the promise of mission. The forty days end in a commission. The Christ prepares his followers to be sent. The direction is outward. Our discipleship, formed in Eastertide, must lead us into the world with mercy, justice, and love. Easter is always an announcement that something new has begun; it calls the church to participate in God’s new creation.

And finally, let us talk for a minute about ritual and memory. The practice of an Easter egg hunt—hidden treasures, bright colors, baskets—wasn’t a failure as ritual. It taught me to expect joy. But if we do not let that expectation reach beyond candy, if we do not allow it to inform how we look at the poor, how we treat our spouse, how we speak to our children, then the ritual has become a trap. The chocolate bunny taught me how to search. The Christ teaches us where to look in the broken, the overlooked, the hurting—and in those places we find the glory of God waiting, like an egg, for discovery.

So, if you find yourself this week putting the baskets away and wondering what to do next, I invite you to spend these forty days as if your life depends on it—because it does. Begin with small things: a daily prayer of thanksgiving for one surprising thing you noticed; one act of mercy each week; one conversation about faith with someone who does not belong to the church; a regular reading of the Easter narratives. Practice being a people who not only celebrate an event but live a new life.

We believe that Christ is risen. This is not an idea to be tucked away in a corner like last year’s candy. It is the force that calls us out of the habit of fear, despair, and selfishness. It is the promise that our old life will not have the last word. And it is a call to spend the next forty days—and the next forty years—looking for and making visible the hidden treasure of God’s kingdom.

Jesus, you appeared to your disciples and walked with them in ordinary days. Walk with us these forty days. Open our eyes to the hidden places where you hide your grace. Teach us to feast, to witness, to forgive, and to love. Shape our expectations so that we look for you not only on high festival mornings but in the faces at our table, in the poor at our gate, in the breaking of bread each day. Send us forth with Easter joy, and fill us with the Spirit of surprising, steadfast love. Amen.

Go now my friends, with ears attuned to the small, bright things of God—and with baskets ready to give away what you have been given. Alleluia.

Presence Over Pressure: Rethinking Adulthood at 32

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I have started todays blog with a paraphrased story to illustrate this important study for coaching and spiritual direction.

When my friend Lila brought her twenty-four–year–old nephew, Jonah, to the small group at our church last spring, I expected the usual restless energy of someone caught between college and a first job. Jonah sat quietly through the opening prayer, his hands folded, eyes darting now and then to his phone. Then he listened as a woman in her fifties talked about grief; he asked a thoughtful question about responsibility. By the time the meeting ended he admitted, with a nervous laugh, that he sometimes felt like he was “pretending to be an adult.” He wasn’t sure whether that was a confession or a relief.

This part is dense reading but worth the time if you are a coach or spiritual director. The conversation Jonah sparked has stayed with me, (Jim) because it maps a striking piece of science that demands we rethink how we guide young people in coaching and spiritual formation. IN the latest issue of “Presence” a Spiritual Directors International publication it states this study from 2025 that neuroscientists from Cambridge University published in Nature Communications (Mousley et al.) that compared diffusion MRI scans from nearly four thousand human brains ranging from infancy to ninety years old. Rather than finding a smooth, linear path of maturation, they reported discrete shifts at roughly ages nine, thirty-two, sixty-six, and eighty-three. One of the most provocative takeaways: adolescence, in neurological terms, appears to stretch well beyond what most social norms call “adulthood” — actual adulthood, the study suggests, may not begin until around age thirty-two.

This finding upends a lot of assumptions we make in churches, coaching programs, and spiritual direction. If brains remain in a significant developmental flux into the late twenties and early thirties, how should mentors, pastors, and spiritual directors show up for people like Jonah — or for us — in ways that match their neurodevelopment reality?

What the study suggests….

Mousley and colleagues used diffusion MRI to map patterns of white matter — the brain’s communication highways — across the lifespan. Prior to age thirty-two, the brain is still reorganizing: white matter is growing, neural pathways are becoming more efficient, and connectivity patterns are shifting. After roughly thirty-two, the researchers found a more stabilized architecture that often persists for about three decades, followed by later-life shifts around sixty-six and eighty-three. These aren’t just trivia about neurons; they have implications for how people form identity, sustain relationships, and engage with meaning and purpose.

A short story: the mentor, the millennial, the map When I met Jonah months later for coffee, he’d switched jobs twice and was enrolled in a night course on ethics. He confessed he dreaded the “adult checkboxes” — house, marriage, stable job — yet felt impatient with peers who seemed to have them. We talked about mentors: he wanted guidance but bristled at being told what to do. I told him about the Cambridge study — he laughed, then listened.

“Maybe being older isn’t the only way to be wise,” he said. “Maybe people can help me without trying to make me into something I’m not yet.”

That line captures the pastoral (presence) pivot we need: to offer presence without premature pressure, to accompany without imposing finished forms. The neuroscientific finding invites humility and patience. It asks us to honor the ongoing developmental work young adults are doing — neurologically, emotionally, spiritually — while providing steady practices and relational spaces that support maturation without rushing it.

Two ways for us to be present

  1. Practice steady attunement through embodied listening What it is: Embodied listening means attending to the whole person — voice, posture, affect, silence — and not just the words. It requires slowing down, modulating one’s own responses, and noticing shifts in emotion and cognitive framing without immediately correcting or advising.

How to do it:

  • Create predictable space and rhythm: offer recurring meetings that give the person time to try on insights between sessions. Stability matters to a brain still organizing its networks.
  • Use nonverbal check-ins: begin with a single question — “Where is your attention?” — allow a minute of silence, then reflect what you notice about tone and posture before asking probing questions.
  • Resist the fix: when you sense the urge to “solve” identity questions, mirror instead. “I hear uncertainty about responsibility and a desire for meaning.” This models a mind that can hold complexity without collapsing into premade answers.

Why it helps:

For a brain in flux, steady attunement supports the integration of new patterns. It offers a relational scaffold where the young adult can test emerging values and neural pathways safely.

  1. Offer scaffolded practices that combine exploration with ritual What it is: Scaffolded practices are simple, repeatable spiritual exercises that invite both experimentation and the formation of habit. They recognize that neurodevelopment thrives on both novelty (to build new connections) and repetition (to consolidate them).

How to do it:

  • Introduce three-month “experiment” cycles: choose one spiritual practice (e.g., contemplative journaling, short daily silence, or service with reflection) to try for 90 days. Check in weekly for the first month, then biweekly.
  • Combine short, diverse practices with a consistent ritual frame: begin and end with a five-minute centering practice (breath or scripture reading), then introduce a varied middle (creative reflection, dialogue, or action).
  • Encourage meta-reflection: every month, ask: “What patterns do you notice in your responses? What feels alive? What drains you?” This helps the maturing brain integrate experience into identity.

Why it helps: This approach respects the brain’s dual needs: novelty for growth and repetition for stability. Ritual gives a predictable platform for experimentation, reducing anxiety while encouraging exploration.

Why this matters to coaching and spiritual direction

  1. Developmentally informed accompaniment improves outcomes coaching and spiritual direction aim to catalyze growth: in habits, vocation, moral discernment, and interior integration. If the brain continues to rewire well into the late twenties and early thirties, then coaching strategies that treat early adulthood as a finished stage may be ineffective or even harmful. A developmental lens encourages coaches and directors to calibrate expectations, scaffold change plans over longer timelines, and attend to the neurobiological rhythms of consolidation and plasticity.
  2. It reframes maturity as a process, not a milestone spiritual direction, at its best, is about guiding people into deeper coherence — integrating emotions, beliefs, and actions. The Cambridge study reminds us that coherence can be emergent and slow. Rather than treating a thirty-year-old’s doubts as failures, we can see them as part of ongoing integration. This reduces shame and normalizes the nonlinear trajectory of faith and identity formation.
  3. It demands relational humility and patience Both coaching and spiritual direction rely on relationship. Neuroscience underscores that relationship is not merely a context but a mechanism for change: safe, attuned relationships shape neural development. Coaches and directors who cultivate attunement, ritual, and scaffolded experimentation are not just providing tools — they are offering the relational conditions in which the brain can reconfigure toward more adaptive patterns.
  4. It broadens the role of community If individual neurodevelopment unfolds across decades, community becomes a crucial resource — not merely a backdrop. Churches, peer groups, mentorship networks, and coaching cohorts can offer the recurring, low-stakes opportunities to practice new moral habits, relationships, and vocational identities. Programs that build long-term relational continuity will likely be more aligned with how brains mature.

A closing note to mentors and leaders:

When you sit across from someone like Jonah, remember you are not simply transferring information. You’re participating in a slow, relational craft of formation. The Cambridge findings do not strip away responsibility; they expand it. We must give space for the messy apprenticeship of being an adult, provide practices that balance novelty with ritual, and be present in ways that allow the nervous system and the soul to settle into new patterns of coherence.

Jonah eventually stopped checking his phone during our meetings. He still questions, still wanders in and out of certainty. But he’s started keeping a short weekly journal and meets once a month with an older mentor who listens without solving. Watching him, I’m learning to be less anxious about boxes checked and more attentive to the small, steady shifts that mark maturation. That’s the work neuroscience is asking us to honor: presence over pressure, accompaniment over answers, and the patient trust that growing up is a journey that may take longer — and be more sacred — than we thought.

Thank you for reading this study and helpful guide for professionals who coach and do spiritual direction.

Mousley, A., et al. (2025). (2025). Nature Communications. [Mousley et al., 2025, Nature Communications — diffusion MRI lifespan study]

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41290675/