outWORD by Matte Downey

This summer, I spent a lot of time walking in the park. As soon as it was warm enough and the paths were clear of snow, I started trekking through the green spaces near my house, eager to see signs of new life. The first few weeks were heady; every new bud, every spurt of green, every tender young leaf caught my eye. I was enthralled by the birds and bugs and breezes and every sign of new life around me. As time went on, this sense of wonder did not continue with the same intensity. Near the end of August, I found myself walking through the park, oftentimes lost in thought, somewhat oblivious to the long stems of grass along the water and the shiny, silver tendrils of the bushes beside the path. I was busy thinking about a writing project or a tricky relationship or a book I was reading, and as a result, I did not see what was right in front of me. But still, on occasion, I noticed. Like the time I got off the bus and started walking home, only to note that the grasses and flowers a...

When you search for images of someone praying, you see a lot of this: person with hands folded, head bowed, eyes closed, on their knees, with a Bible. Interestingly, their mouths are usually closed. However, conversing with the Creator is so much more than the standard pictures suggest. I recently finished Eugene Peterson's book, Tell It Slant . In the latter half of the volume, he deals with the prayers of Jesus. As I was reading, I realized that for much of my life, I have seen prayer as a task, a responsibility, a job, a burden, a required discipline for all who claim to follow Jesus. But Jesus never presents prayer like that. When his disciples make the request, "Teach us to pray," Jesus starts off with, "Our Father..." He makes use of the inclusive pronouns "us" and "we." Instead of giving the disciples a task, Jesus invites them to join him in what he is doing: communing with the Father. Perhaps prayer is not so much a spiritual di...

The clock on my wall I am at the stage in my doctoral studies where I am waiting to hear back from my supervisors before I embark on the next big writing phase. It's a sort of limbo; one thing is completed and I am waiting for the next thing to start. Hard to know what to do in limbo sometimes. In this period of waiting to hear from my supervisors, there is a lot of work I could be doing such as reading books and articles which pertain to my research, preparing an article or two for publication, setting up a research trip, and creating a syllabus for the course I am teaching next year (to name just a few projects). And yet, I find it hard to get motivated to do any of these important tasks. I would rather sit outside with the cat, read some fiction, research real estate, or even do laundry and wash dishes. Why is that? Am I just a procrastinator? Perhaps. But I also know that what I do during in-between times like this reveals something about my overall mental and spiritual sta...

It is the night before Christmas. I have the jitters. Mid-torso butterflies, spurts of adrenaline that make my heart beat faster. I hold my breath without meaning to.  1......2.....3......4 (exhale) I am 10. I have hand-picked a small brown doll with eyes that shut when she sleeps and wrapped it carefully in newspaper for my sister. My fingertips are still inky from the exercise - hiding the gift in smudged paper in order to more splendidly reveal my timid, thoughtful attempt at generosity. Will she love it as much as I want her to? Will I have brought her joy not only for a few moments but for days and weeks to come? I wait for her to pull open the grimy paper and get a peek inside.  1......2......3......4 (exhale) Anticipation. The knowledge that something is about to happen. Something exciting and definitely good but unpredictable and maybe a teensy bit messy because somehow it will change my world in ways I can't quite imagine. To become be...

I am currently in Alexandria, Virginia. That's just 15 minutes outside of Washington, DC, in case you were having trouble placing it on the world map. I am sitting here in a dorm room at Virginia Theological Seminary, sipping tea and putting off getting to the evening's homework after spending several hours in the archives researching thesis stuff. Not that much different than at home, really, except there is no loud television playing some 'guy show' in the background and this particular library houses an Evelyn Underhill Collection. I took a 16-hour train ride yesterday to get here. It was interesting, to say the least. Some of the people that crossed my path, ever so briefly, are still with me in some way. I don't know what to make of them, and honestly, I guess I don't need to make anything of them. That would be bordering on judging. Spending a week pretty much by myself, without a single soul that I know and only a few people in sight (the seminary is virt...

This morning I booked hotel rooms for our trip to London, England in 2 weeks. If you have ever checked it out, you will know that London is an expensive place to visit, especially when you are used to Canadian prices. I just don't think that breakfast at a hotel is worth 25 pounds, or 45 Canadian dollars, do you? They obviously think that I can eat 45 dollars worth of food, so perhaps I should give the Brits credit for their extreme optimism. Anyway, after weeks of research and asking around, during which time I found a lot of overpriced hotels, a few reasonably priced rooms accompanied by horrible reviews, and one or two deals that disappeared while I thought about them, everything fell into place last night. It's funny how waiting can bring clarity. The foggy impossibility of the task, given the myriad of locations to research and the limited budget we were working with, vanished as the right choices became clear, like someone was highlighting them. It was all so obvious last...

Things are starting to turn green. There is still a lot of brown going on, but the green is definitely on the increase. There is transition in the air, in the plants, in the soil, in the crazy spring-feverish cats, in our lives and in the lives of a lot of my friends. Sometimes I feel a deep longing in my soul, a craving for more of something, but what that something is, I cannot tell. I felt it again last week. I have mistaken this sensation for loneliness, for hunger, for fatigue, for failure, and many times for emotional instability. But it is none of those, at least not primarily. At the core of my personality is this insatiable desire to experience life in a deep and profound manner, in spirit and soul and body. When I see all of nature straining towards rebirth as it does every spring, it awakens my own longings. There must be more to this life than what I am doing at the present time. My relationships must go deeper or become broader or both. I must give myself more fully...