Sue Monk Kidd - Gods Joyful Surprise: Finding Yourself Loved

G ODS JOYFUL SURPRISE marks its thirtieth anniversary this year. I wrote this book, my first, while in my mid-thirties. I couldnt have imagined back then that three decades later it would still be finding readers. Recently, I pulled it off the shelf and reread it, surprised that the narrative of a young woman struggling to experience Gods love and presence in the quiet center of herself still spoke to me.

When the book opens, Im twenty-nine years old, married, a mom with two toddlers, working as a nurse, and caught in a profusion of stress and busyness, struggling to balance my life and keep pace with all sorts of demands, many of which were related to my church and my understanding of what it meant to be a good Christian.

I wrote: For years there was an awful hole in my heart that I tried to fill in an odd assortment of ways. But those ways werent so odd, really. They were common activities born out of familiar shoulds and oughts and from a misguided quest for perfection. I grew up in the Baptist church. I knew about doing for God. What I didnt know was how to be in Gods presence. I didnt know how to be still and let God love me.

My stress-filled life led to fragmentation, chest pains, and little blue tranquilizers. Sometimes a crisis can become a summons to a new self, and this crisismy first real oneinitiated a spiritual awakening and a search that eventually led me to what I called Gods joyful surprise. By that I meant a contemplative being with God in which I came to know a love that set me free, that brought me wholeness, that created an all-rightness deep inside of me that I couldnt have imagined when I began my journey. The discovery woke me not only to the reality of the interior lifethat illusive place inside where Jesus told us the kingdom of God dwellsbut also to the lost art of cultivating an intimacy with divine presence.

In the book, I describe my earliest attempts to find ways into the heart of God. I describe my encounters with ancient means of prayer, with Scripture, with meditative experiences, as well as with new ways of being still, listening, and dissolving the lines between the holy and the ordinary. Today, Im grateful for how those practices once helped me to tend to my soul and immersed me in the experience of Gods love.

Rereading it all, I began to see that despite being written long ago, the book possessed an enduring relevance. Today it seems even easier to become besieged by life. Like so many, Im affected by the tumult whirling around me: the barrage of information, the toxicity of noise and cynicism, the artificial sense of urgency, the rapidity and anxiety, not to mention the pressures and demands within and without. In fact, now, to pause and sync our souls to God, to come away and rest as Jesus famously did, or to be still and know, as the Psalm advised, may be an even more radical act of faith.

These days I experience Gods presence in prayers that are both worded and wordless. I encounter it through the simplicity, solitude, and silence that I build into my days, and more and more through the quality of attention I try to bring to common moments. I experience it in morning walks that often remind me of Thomas Mertons words: The sky is my prayer. The birds are my prayer. The wind in the trees is my prayer. For God is all in all.

As I reread this book, I was aware of the passage of time. I marveled that the young woman in these pages is now a grandmother of three. Once or twice I wanted to tap her shoulder as she grappled with all that stress and tell her it would turn out okay.

And it came to me, too, that if I were to write about this long-ago experience today, the writer in me might choose different words and stories. I would perhaps try to illuminate the contemplative experience of divine love with the deeper understandings that Ive gleaned over the decades as I continued my search. I would make my references to God inclusive, acknowledging that God is beyond gender.

Yet, I must tell you, such things paled for me in comparison to the spiritual journey at the core of the book. Most of all, what I felt was gratitude to the twenty-nine-year-old who embarked on it, who despite being a beginner tried to put the experience into words. And I recognized, maybe for the first time, how this journey set the course of my life. The surprise I discovered so long ago became one of the most formative and impactful realizations of my life, and surely the most beautiful.

SUE MONK KIDD

February 8, 2017