Barefoot & Preaching is a syndicated monthly column in The Catholic Register.

Holding an intention – instead of forcing a resolution

Holding an intention – instead of forcing a resolution

Snow has finally starting falling in Saskatchewan, as January brings in a new year and its usual push for resolutions. At the same time, my social media feed is also full of gentle reminders that it is okay to just have made it through. I have been thinking about how these two extremes can be healthily connected at the heart of things. Like snow falls gently over the ground, and fog wraps its way over the earth, it is a gently held intention that allows us to move peacefully through the season we are in.

First, I want to consider the autumns and winters of our lives, the seasons of rest after the harvest and hibernation, of decline and death. There can be so many reasons we find ourselves in a time in which we cannot set lofty goals. Some of them might be under- or unemployment, caregiving, serious mental or physical illness, grief, or exhaustion.

In these seasons, resolutions can feel like a tempting way to jumpstart something new. (If that works for you, please go ahead.) For me, intense resolutions have resulted in a variety of failures. Sometimes, I made significant purchases I could not really afford to try to force myself to comply with a goal that felt valuable, despite its impossibility. Other times, I pushed myself harder into exhaustion and overwhelm, only to fail and then cause further destruction by nasty self-criticism. And I have rejected resolutions and just bathed in self-pity a few times too.

In the darkest and most draining seasons of my life, I found compassion at the end of my capacity. Crawling out of depression, loss, and grief taught me that there is a different kind of resolve held in a soft and open heart that holds intention. Where darkness pulled me under in depression, I held gently allowed the tiniest bits of light to reach me. In loss, I gave myself permission to fall apart. Grief pushed me to choose beauty alongside heartache.

The intention that lies under mounds of snow and layers of fog keeps something tiny and warm close to my heart while ice forms on my eyelashes and wind whips at my face. The intention does not change the difficulties of intense seasons, but it does allow me to surrender to surviving what must be endured before things get better.

Seasons do eventually arrive in my life that are more like spring and summer. Times that are about planting and building, dreaming and hard work, pushing toward and realizing things hoped for. The soft intention tends to work better that rigid and extrinsic resolutions for me in these brighter seasons too. Every seed that is planted has a unique shoot that grows. Depending on the amount of water and sunlight, the time and space for weeding, the direction of the wind, the plant that grows changes in real-time response to the environment as it grows. The plan for the plant ideally evolves in light of what actually happens in my life.

For example, I hold an intention to honour the ache to write. Rather than resolving to write for an hour a day, I come up with three to five different ways that writing can happen in the midst of my full life, including 5 minutes of journaling, a list of writing ideas on the counter, making a writing appointment with myself, or putting a single word or phrase down to paper. It is possible to honour my intention even when a full hour of writing isn’t going to be possible. I consider three things I could stop doing and write instead.

I make my choices, moment by moment, and observe them without judgement to see if the ache to write emerges into the desire and capacity to actually do so. When the seeds of the intention start to push up shoots, I can see and respond to the growth.

There will be seasons for surviving and falling apart. For building little fences around the tiniest bits of hope. There are times ripe for good enough and making do. For showing up for someone else and coming second. And there are times where everything comes together. For deep satisfaction. May a soft intention for something beautiful and good lie under it all.

Less – and the Mess in my Heart

Less – and the Mess in my Heart

Owning less has been a necessity and a goal as we downsized our home with our last move. And last fall, I took up the Wool& Challenge to wear the same dress for 100 days in a row. I was intrigued (as a knitter) by the prospect of wearing wool, exhausted by the choices in my closet every morning, and challenged by the impact fashion has on the environment.

Writing the story of a life

Writing the story of a life

In writing the story of my life, however, I live through a lot of moments that won’t make the cut in the highlights or the bloopers. Our world is currently obsessed with capturing the moments and sharing them, but there is so much (and maybe more) value in the things that happen between photographs and bonfires.

Resurrection practice in the wake of surviving suffering

Resurrection practice in the wake of surviving suffering

Even while we hold our own and the world’s pain, we can practice resurrection. We can take a walk and delight in the signs of spring. We can count the buds forming on trees, the flowers breaking through cold earth. We can set our prayers for the suffering in the arms of God for an hour and let ourselves laugh till our sides ache.

Embracing complexity to find a simple peace

Embracing complexity to find a simple peace

Complexity is piling up like snowbanks on my lawn. We just get one wet snowfall shoveled in time for the next one to blow into a bank around the door. The piles started out neatly enough. But it is late winter now and the ice threatens to freeze my heart along with the missing mittens. The chaos and division desperately need some spring.

Flowing grace: Responding to the call with gentleness

Flowing grace: Responding to the call with gentleness

After a major trauma, it has been my experience that human capacity for intentional progress on goals is diminished. My therapists reminded me constantly that healing is rarely linear, and though we participate in it, we respond to life in healing ways rather than direct our own healing. I dislike this. And still, I have found it to be true. Healing is a flow of grace that comes from beyond me.

On Being Barefoot…

Before the burning bush, God asks Moses to take off his sandals, to notice and reverence that he walks on holy land. This holy land continues to burn before me, before us, signaling God’s presence before we arrived rather than because we did. This life we are living was holy before we existed in it. This land and creation we call home is the first book of revelation, God’s love letter to us, bearing witness to the Creator of it all.Our lives and the moments that make them up are the stuff of sainthood, our invitations to participate in Divine life to be swallowed up and fulfilled by God. At the grocery store, in the false solitude of our cars and commutes, in our laundry rooms, and over text messages. My shoes run the risk of “protecting” me from the sacredness of this naked moment. And how I love shoes, and how my sensitive toes resist the prickles of grass and the mess of sand. But barefoot is how my spirituality works, daring to live an embodied and earthy love of Jesus who took on flesh. I’m wandering through this life, yearning to let go of my shoes, to walk reverently and with deep attention to what passes under my feet and to what isn’t yet my path. Barefoot is how I write, how I speak, how I work. Experience shored up against an insatiable thirst for knowledge; direct honesty honed by sensitivity; and vulnerability chained to a commitment to competency. And an unapologetically barefoot tendency to speak it as I feel it, which leads me to…

…and Preaching

I’m a preacher without a pulpit, with words that burn until they are spoken ~ aloud or on a page.

My ministry is one of colliding words and ideas, reaching out to find a connection with God’s amazing people.

The world seems to me to be spilling over with grace and we seem to be people who, all too quickly forget that all of this is pure gift.

When I’m driving, eating, visiting, resting, cleaning, working, playing, and almost everything else, I’m frequently stunned by the pure miracle of what simply is.

It’s not all promised joy and ease, but it is all presenced and remembered by the One who gives it. And I can’t stop talking about it, proclaiming it, preaching this good news that we have not been forgotten or forsaken in any moment of this life.

For reasons I don’t quite understand, my words seem to be given to encourage and inspire. In a world where women and girls are still too-often silenced or secondary, I’m barefoot and preaching because my soul won’t rest any other way. If my words can be a gift to you, then that is a gift for me.

Subscribe To Barefoot & Preaching

Join Leah Perrault's mailing list to receive the latest column from 'Barefoot & Preaching', right to your inbox.

You have Successfully Subscribed!