Rules - Or, Bumping Into Grace

One of the best things I did for myself (regarding this blog) was to make myself a rule....the "one square inch rule" - write something, anything, a square inch worth, everyday. You know, give myself structure. A discipline. A rule.

One of the next best things I did for myself, was to break it.

I know, I know. Rules are necessary. Structure, order, goals....yes, yes I understand. I am a military child and have been a military spouse. Believe me, I get it. More than once I have packed up and moved an entire household in a matter of days. I know how critical it is to break down a big project into small, daily segments to accomplish the mission - how to eat the proverbial elephant one bite at a time. I appreciate organization, systemization; especially in the midst of chaos. I am not anti-discipline. I'm just not good at it for long periods of time. In spurts, I am dynamite. I've got it down. I can accomplish a lot. But it's that daily thing, day after day, that starts to choke something inside me....that I start transforming from an aide, into a noose.

I have taught classes on the Classic Spiritual Disciplines, and I think my biggest take-away in preparing and teaching the material, was the impossibility of living by discipline. There's something audacious about the human psyche that believes it can master chaos; that it can order an internal/eternal cosmos. We do possess a kinship with order; we are created in sync with macro and micro systems that astound and dumbfound us in their orderliness. Just think about the atom, or a galaxy. Our craving for systems, for rules that make sense, that demonstrate how things work, satisfies an innate part of our beings. We love to manage; we are made for it. But managing is not the whole of living.

Living is about the breath of life. It is about being. It is about partnership with Creation. By it's very nature, it is about origins - originality, uniqueness, something that's never been before. There is no pre-existent system, order, rule, or discipline that is the base-line structure for creative power. Creation is. The biblical Creator said it best. I am that I am. And we also possess this we are that we are, kinship. We have this raw, random urge that defies structure; that yearns for beautious expression; that seeks to explode into existence. We are existential - we are akin to this free wildness that creates existences. This is the very nature of choice; to choose is to create.

And so, I'm walking the beach, surrounded by a power-punch of creative beauty. I'm captured. And I'm struggling; feeling guilty that I'm spending way too much time absorbing this raw majesty. My little self-imposed discipline starts yelling. I should be setting aside time for writing....I didn't write yesterday, or the day before.....you know Carol, you're doing it again....you start something....yada yada. The louder my cry for order, the deeper my resistance - and the more tangled up I become in my guilt. Until fed-up and frustrated, I shout back at myself - aw, just forget it! This is impossible. You cannot NOT break rules. And when I gave myself permission to accept my limitations, I discovered something deeply liberating. I bumped into grace in a whole new way.

Colliding into two truths, two opposing truths grating against each other like tectonic plates, I discovered - grace resides on the grinding edge of paradox. It seems the place where order and originality smash into each another, there exists a crack in the universe. It is the place where Grace abides, and holds it all together. And that is where I am designed to live, and breathe, and find my being as I choose how to create and manage my cosmos.