Dare to Be a Beginner
on being a baby poet and learning to pray…again
Dare to be a beginner.
Those words sat in the left-hand corner of my computer screen for the better part of a year. Sure, they were just words scribbled onto a strip of a highlighter yellow post-it note, but they became a blessing.
When self-doubt was loud, those words allowed.
Day after quiet day, I glanced up at my own permission slip and placed poems on pages before I felt competent enough to publish them. I was under contract and on a deadline for The Book of Common Courage, but the truth was my publisher believed in my poetry more than I did. I scrawled out stanza after stanza in my notebook and then scratched half of them out to find the heart of what I hoped you could hear best. When inadequacy got intense, I took poetry masterclasses online. When sickness sidelined me altogether, I sat by quiet streams and let them sing me back into speech.
The blessing came before my becoming.
Be a beginner.
The Saturday before The Book of Common Courage was released I drove windy roads into the nearby mountains and spent the day cross-country skiing for the first time. As the days before the book release got smaller, my stress got higher. (Book release season is…a lot. Especially as an introvert.) I didn’t think I had time to go on an adventure, but I thanked my one-month-prior self who had the foresight to know I’d need a big dose of fresh air to enter book release week feeling free. Every mile into the mountains felt like an exhale.
I had convinced my dear friend Bess to join me, and we signed up for a group nordic skiing lesson. We figured, rather than totally flailing in our first starts, we might as well have someone show us how it’s done. We clicked into our bindings and listened as our instructor Deb welcomed each student, asking why we wanted to learn how to cross-country ski and quite impressively committing every single one of our names to memory.
Deb showed us how to shuffle-shuffle-glide and instructed us to sense into the bottoms of our feet to find our balance and to lift one heel after the other to make it up hills. To learn how to cross-country ski, I had to listen to my limbs in ways I normally don’t. And I smiled at the effort, at the way my body can mirror what she sees modeled and move in ways she hasn’t tried before.
We fell. Some of us more than others. (I think Bess’s ass might still be mad at me.) And I kept forgetting important things like putting my arms in front of me when going downhill. I haven’t laughed so hard at myself—or anything—in months.
We kept following our leader and the other 15 or so adults up and down little hills. And at one point I looked down the line of all of us in our tracks and reveled in the thought: “When was the last time I was with a group of adults all gathered just to learn something new?”
No one judged. Everyone laughed.
We were beginners together, and there was freedom in fumbling and falling and finding our way. Perfection and performance weren’t the point. Being able to be present in a beautiful place was.
When did we stop blessing beginning? When did we trade mastery for the magic of starting anew?
The origin of the word beginning in Old English is to attempt and to undertake. But even farther back, the prefix be- in West Germanic means “to open, open up.” And I don’t know about you, but there is a literal layer of armor on my chest and between my shoulder blades in the form of fascia that has tightened to protect me from being open in a world that overwhelms and oppresses.
I bet most of us don’t bless beginning because we are afraid of what it will bring inside. And I bet most of us don’t begin because we are afraid that who we are underneath our armor won’t be accepted.
Last month I sat in a circle of friends, all of whom no longer know our place in the institutional church. Our host, Pat, asked us what prayer means to us now and what it looks like—if it looks like anything at all. Some shared how prayer is a struggle, a void, and a place of pain. Others dared to say they stopped praying altogether.
When I decided to share, I laughed. I told my friends that I had a book of prayers about to release, but what prayer looks like for me most days is not writing words but witnessing what is here. Most days, prayer is silence. Prayer is breathing. Prayer is living my day like I am not alone.
I used to place my pain after praise, studiously tiptoeing toward the God someone taught me wants my ACTs. (Adoration first. Confession second. Thanksgiving third! Anyone else remember that?) So much of the way I learned how to pray was actually gaslighting grief with spiritual proclamations. It was prayer as performance.
I learned the language of exaltation but no one taught me the language of emotion. I learned how to praise but I didn’t know how to witness pain.
Prayer used to be prim. Now prayer can be salty. I yell “I’m not okay!” into the sanctuary of my car. I shed my shame over somehow believing I’m supposed to always be doing better than I am.
Prayer used to be pleasing God above all else. Now prayer is receiving that God is already pleased.
Prayer used to be doing. Now prayer is un-doing. I lay on a bolster in the morning sun and I let my breath become steady, deep, and full. I open my armored heart to the presence of the God I cannot see but can trust.
And when the words come—like the words I wrote for us in The Book of Common Courage—they well up from this witnessing. My words are just a response to the Word Made Flesh, who is with us every single day everywhere we go.
I wonder: is your heart also armored?
Do you feel the steel of a shield between your heart and a spirituality that asks you to strive but doesn’t allow you to be soothed?
I think you know this in your gut: the religion that structured our lives around shoulds wasn’t spirituality but superstition.
Having to have a quiet time to feel like God is pleased with you or present with you isn’t faith; it’s fear management.
I have a hunch that many of you feel like my friends in that circle, who dared to say they’ve stopped praying and don’t yet know how to practice a new way. Most of us just don’t have places where we get to be that honest—where we are allowed to set down our shields and be beginners at belief again.
To begin is to open. To begin is to befriend the self behind the armor, who still needs to be embraced by a Love that will not let her go.
Right now I am sitting in one of my favorite coffee shops, in the exact spot where I wrote so many of the prayers and poems in The Book of Common Courage. This is the place where I began to be a poet, where I let the posture of presence become words on a page that can be prayed or pushed away. I had to write myself that permission slip to dare to be a beginner because I knew that beginning to open a new part of myself to the world comes with the risk of being rejected but also holds the possibility of presence.
From this seat, at this point in the story, I know the beauty that was beckoning me was worth fumbling towards. Sure, one reviewer on Amazon left a one-star review of my new book and called me “too woke” (LOL)… But so many of you are already finding these poems and prayers to be soft places to practice new postures of presence, to let yourself fall, and to find your way into a fuller faith.
So I’m giving you the permission slip I had to write for myself: Dare to be a beginner.
Dare to let the old shielded self and their shoulds fall away into a story where your whole, vulnerable self is safe to be seen.
Dare to allow prayer to shift from performance to presence.
Dare to open to the God who is already delighted to be with you.
The prefix of begin is the same as beloved. As Saint Benedict of Nursia said, “Always, we begin again,” for we are ever opening to receive the reality of how beloved we already are.
You can get your copy of The Book of Common Courage today.
I hope it gives you permission to pray with your whole self and perhaps to begin again to believe that you are one whom God fully loves.
Just a few other things to enjoy:
To listen:
Here’s the video of my talk in Charlotte, NC last month with ICUtalks. It was such a joy to meet so many of you!
There are several new podcast interviews out, including this one with Untangled Faith, this one with Your Enneagram Coach, and this two-part series on The Place We Find Ourselves.
To read:
This generous feature of The Book of Common Courage in Fathom Mag, plus some very honest thoughts from me about being a beginner at poetry.
The blessing I wrote for myself first…about having courage to be a beginner. Page 152.
To gather:
Colorado folks! I’ll be reading from The Book of Common Courage and signing copies at Tattered Cover Aspen Grove on Wednesday, February 15th. It’s free, and I hope I will get to meet you!
As always, if you’ve already read my new book and loved it, I’d be honored to hear your thoughts in a review. Reviews really do help others know whether a book is worth beginning!
I just wrote in a note to a friend the other night, “I have a lot of months of hard therapy ahead and I’m nervous to find out who I am on the other side of it.” Thank you for the encouragement to dare to find out 🤍
Glad my ass had this experience with you 🤣🤣🤣