Reality As It Is: Resting in the Midst of Chaos

Last week, I went away on retreat, hoping for rest and restoration. Admittedly, after more than a year of navigating chaos, that may have been a lot of pressure to place on just four and a half days! So it shouldn’t have surprised me that, no matter where I went, I was met with distraction after distraction.

Something—or someone—was always interrupting my peace (or at least the way I envisioned peace). It took time before I could accept and surrender to what we might call Reality As It Is. When I finally did, I began to savor the small things, like a rainy walk in the woods, and even let the interruptions become part of the retreat.

Instead of irritation, I felt compassion. I sat with other retreat guests, including a couple who had survived a terrifying, car-totaling wreck on their way there. They needed someone to simply be with them. By the end, I realized the retreat had offered me wisdom for this season of life. My soul was tended to—just not in the way I expected.

Listening in the Chaos

This experience reminded me how my approach in spiritual direction has been shifting over the past few years. Chaos has become a recurring theme for many of those I accompany. I hear the exhaustion and worry in their voices. I see the overwhelm in their faces.

In years past, I would guide them into a meditation, inviting them to imagine a peaceful place where the Divine tended to them. But lately, I’ve sensed their experience is more like the moment in Mark 6 when Jesus invites his weary disciples to “come away to a quiet place all by yourselves and rest awhile”—only to be met by crowds who had raced ahead and were already waiting.

So rather than asking my directees to imagine a peaceful escape, I now invite them to describe reality as it is—in their bodies and souls.

• “How would you image this season?”
• “What does the landscape of your life look like right now?”
• “What hand gestures or physical sensations describe where you are?”
• “How does this live in your body?”

Their answers are vivid: lost on a crowded street, stuck in a swamp, drowning in deep water, tense in the chest, a heavy weight on the shoulders. These aren’t places anyone wants to stay. Most come hoping for a way out—or at least a brief break for an hour. But instead of escaping, we pause and notice.

Listening to Life Within

As they turn their attention to the imagery and bodily sensations, I ask questions like: 

• Do you notice any signs of life here? Any sense of Divine Presence?
• Where does this sensation want to move?
• How might Wisdom be speaking through your body?

And every time, something stirs. They discover a small movement of Life—music from a street busker, the ability to breathe underwater instead of drowning, a knot softening into tears, a quiet awareness of being held.

I hear them say things like:

“I didn’t expect anything to happen. Wow.”
“My circumstances haven’t changed, yet I feel so grounded now and can be more grounded in the midst of what is happening.”
“It’s like the anxiety was trying to show me what I really needed.”
“I sense God with me here—an arm around me, walking me through.”

And like Jesus' response to the crowds who interrupted his retreat, people discover they have compassion toward themselves and others.

Wisdom’s Way

Yes, let’s keep going away to quiet places to rest awhile. Retreat rhythms nourish body, mind, and soul.

But perhaps, in seasons of chaos, Wisdom comes to us through disruption—teaching us to take a contemplative, long, loving look at “the real,” right in the middle of the noise.

There, in the very center of what feels unmanageable and overwhelming, we find that what we need has been here all along—within us, among us, and through us.

-Kasey Hitt, MDiv, WTC Co-founder & Director of the School of Spiritual Direction,

Told to wear an orange vest while hiking since it's archery hunting season in Tennessee, Kasey chose to wear a vest and sing while she walked through the woods!