A Brief Word to Those Who’ve Wondered
I may owe you a brief explanation, or at least a word of reassurance. Several of you have reached out to ask whether everything is alright. I get it. A post with nothing more than the words, “The Descent” and a prayer can be jolting. I’m grateful for the concern. It suggests that you care, and that’s heartening to say the least. So let me say clearly: I am well. Better than well, actually. I’ve entered a season, deliberately and prayerfully, of what I’m calling The Descent.
That word might need a little explaining, because I understand its connotations. We often associate descent with decline, with things going wrong, with a trajectory that nobody wants to be on. But in the grammar of the Kingdom, descent has always been the prerequisite to ascent. St. Benedict structured his entire ladder of humility as a downward climb, observing that we descend by exalting ourselves and ascend by humbling ourselves. Jesus himself moved downward before he moved upward, into flesh, into poverty, into a borrowed tomb, and then into resurrection glory. The grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies before it bears fruit. He must increase, John said, but I must decrease. The Beatitudes open with a blessing on the spiritually poor, not the spiritually accomplished. The way up has always been down. That isn’t a paradox Christianity has to explain away. It’s the very shape of the Gospel.
So, The Descent is not a crisis. It’s a season of deliberate and joyful withdrawal from content production in order to do the kind of interior work that producing content can, ironically, prevent… at least for me. I’m spending this time in Scripture, working slowly through the Psalms, as well as the parables and prayers of Jesus in Luke’s Gospel, praying, reading deeply, and working through some books I’ve always wanted to read, but never made time for, and that will ask more of me than my usual pace of reading allows. I want to be formed by what I’m reading before I turn it into something for someone else. That last part is actually a spiritual discipline for me, and not an easy one. The reflex to produce, to harvest, to turn every good thing immediately into content, is strong. Fasting from it requires intention. I’m fasting from something genuinely good in order to, I hope, receive something deeper.
I’ll check in from time to time, perhaps when I finish one phase of my reading and share the list, not as a book report, but simply to say what I’ve been working through and to invite you to pray for me in it. The posting will resume in God’s good time, and I trust that whatever comes up afterward will have roots that go further down than what has come before. For now, I’m grateful for your patience, glad you’re there, and asking the Lord to do in this season whatever he does in the quiet that I’m too busy to let him do when I’m producing.
Your brother in Christ,
Dale
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