“…God will always give you exactly what you truly want and desire. So make sure you desire, desire deeply, desire yourself, desire God, desire everything good, true and beautiful.”

Father Richard Rohr Falling Upward

As I write this post today I can say only that I have found Father Rohr’s words to be true in my own life. His words here were instructive and pivotal for me when I was in a really broken place.

The year was 2011 and I was on break for the Minnesota’s teachers convention in October. I had battled acid reflux for several years by this point so decided that the fundoplication surgery recommended for me was the way to stop it. The procedure involves a wrap around the esophagus near the entrance to the stomach so that you are unable to reflux. Continual reflux, as well as being a nuisance, puts you at a higher risk for esophageal cancer so it was to be the best solution for me. It became instead, the nightmare before Christmas on steroids!

Five days post op my stomach flipped up into my chest wall through a repaired hiatal hernia. Whisked by ambulance to Abbott Hospital in Minneapolis, I had the surgery repeated in the middle of the night. It was brutal. The next day after the surgeon came in and abruptly whipped the NG tube from my nose she said almost with glee that she didn’t put a drain in my chest wall. Six weeks later the fate of that decision hit me full on.

I became more ill than I had ever been that Thanksgiving in Nebraska. After multiple trips to the ER I was told to return to Abbot ASAP. I had a severe plural effusion that was unable to be drained by a chest tube. Arriving there, they tried to drain it again and were unsuccessful. Upon consultation with a thoracic surgeon I was told that my lower left lung had also collapsed and that in a few hours I would be having surgery to inflate it and drain the effusion. Just prior to surgery my doctor while speaking to my husband (!!!!!) with me on the gurney waiting to be wheeled into the OR said that he used the VATS (video assisted thoracic surgery) method and that it would normally require just a few incisions…BUT in about 10% of his patients he has to open the chest. Dean and I both knew that would be me. It was.

Almost one month later to the day I ate lunch with Dean when he came home from work and an hour later drove myself to the hospital. Gallbladder attack. Surgery number four. The local hospital wouldn’t touch me so it was back to Minneapolis.

The next two years were full of chronic pain, the end of my professional career and the most severe depression I have ever experienced. It became so bad that we moved closer to the Twin Cities in hopes that the change would help. When, after 18 months, little had changed, we went back to our beloved Cache Valley in N Utah. It helped to get away from the dark and lengthy northern winters but the fight to find life and meaning was arduous and constant. It was as if the multiple surgeries and especially the opening of my chest took out the center of me and if I let go of the desire to live for one real minute, I would entirely disappear.

Dean was my rock and with him I could be honest. I promised not to take my life but told him repeatedly that I my only desire to live was because of the pain my disappearance would bring to him, Stephen and Hannah. I would like to say that those days are way, way behind me. They are further behind than they have ever been but the darkness is ever present.

Father Rohr’s book Falling Upward was published in 2011. It was on my radar after I had read his book Everything Belongs where upon reading it I understood so much about my own seemingly odd spiritual journey. It was natural to expect that his next book would be equally validating and important for me. I asked Dean to bring it to me in the hospital. I had no idea that it would become a life manual and still be here by my side in 2023 reorienting me once more as I break through yet another really dark season.

This time, alongside Father Rohr’s guidance another deep soul, the poet David Whyte, has once again arrived right on time with a series of talks he’s giving this next three weeks on how to return to a single focus and an undistracted mind. In essence I’m simply returning to the real. The life that is my own.

David talks about leaning into the conversation and hearing what our lives are speaking to us. Inhabiting our surroundings as our real life – our present life as it actually is.

Today when I picked up Falling Upward, Father Rohr’s words…

“Most people confuse their life situation with their actual life, which is an underlying flow beneath everyday events.” reminded me again that life – actual life is the one thing I genuinely desire. I really do dislike the superficial and it makes me such a hard friend and family member. I’m sorry but equally not sorry if you’ve encountered that part of me. Going deeper puts off so many people that it can be quite lonely. That said too much introspection and I it’s just another way to escape the work of inhabiting the conversation of my real life. Contemplation is vital to spiritual and personal growth but truly if it doesn’t enter my real, there is no point.

I believe that the words I shared at the beginning reflect the redirection that always comes and proves itself to be required for me to move out from under heavy burden of darkness that comes with clinical depression often brought on in my life by medical procedures (and navigating the system) Antidepressant medication is vital for me because my brain has lost so much of the natural feel good chemicals it once possessed but meds alone wouldn’t be sufficient. I must always find the will to desire again and then to desire deeply. I can only do that when I am in the conversation of my real life – the real of my surroundings are guiding me to be present, to be here. Hands down – this return guides me through the seasons full of really hard days and I am so very grateful. I believe that desire in the purest form lives only in the present moment and that once realized there, all other forms of healthy and good desire begin again…and move us forward.

It’s just incredible.