Still Synchronizing

I stand in terror before the world.

A young man vulnerable to all his unknowing,

A heart protected by history,

Kept still in fantasies of inadequacy,

Stories of what I am not, who I will never be-

Daring to breathe a moment,

Daring to notice a

Heartbeat.

Daring to notice my own soul whisper.

I am, I will be, I will do.

My terror makes itself vicious and visible.

Who do you think you are?

I am, I will be, I will do.

Da dum, da da dum, da dum.

Two years ago, I started a blog. I published one piece. That was it. I’m sure I spent a couple of weeks ashamed of falling short of my lofty goals of being a blog writer, before trading gut churning shame for the freedom of letting go of the project entirely.

I titled the blog Synchronizing Heartbeats, as I sought to orient my writing towards the powerful experience of human connection in theatrical spaces and beyond. I quoted a NYT article, which discussed the physiological response of human bodies in a theatre. According to the article, humans’ heartbeats sync up while witnessing powerful theatrical performances. This concept mesmerized me, as I hoped to muse on what it meant for the heartbeats of all sorts of people to synchronize in a single space.

My goals for the blog were like many I have at the beginning of a new year. I wanted to be launched forward. I wanted permission to create. I wanted people to tell me that I was a good writer. I wanted people to marvel at my lofty goal. I wanted people to tell me that what I was writing about was important, or noble, or at least mildly interesting. I wanted people to say, “Look! That’s something.”

Well, I accomplished my goal. I think a couple of people told me they were excited to see what was next (Here’s your permission, validation, “That’s something!”).

And I never delivered on “what was next.”

For two years, this blog has remained untouched.

And the haunting question comes:

How often have I not delivered on what comes next?

I grew up in the Church of Christ. I went to a Church of Christ school. I was baptized, I date a boy who is also a baptized Christ-follower. I am struggling with church. I am struggling with Christianity (and currently being supported through my wrestling by the writings of the late and remarkable, Rachel Held Evans). I have sometimes imagined that if I were to choose between publically declaring faith or accepting a really wonderful acting job, I would quickly choose the latter.

And yet, here, thanks in large part to journeys made far beyond church walls, I feel more holistically-oriented to knowing, experiencing and building community with God than I have my whole life.

I have often created my own dichotomous world: a world where God can be, and a world where God cannot be. Being gay makes this easy, being an artist makes this easy, being a young adult in 2020 makes this easy. Until it doesn’t.

Because the truth is, I think I always knew the largeness within me came from God. And I think I always believed that God saw me as good, because I was created by God. And I think I always believed God had compassion for every part of me, no matter what it looked like, no matter how gender-conformed, or gay, or violent, or hypocritical, or lying, or how tightly I held to my white privilege.

And God leads me back to what comes next.

In the past few months, I have completed Julia Cameron’s 12-week program, The Artist’s Way. I’m sure you will find hundreds of rekindled blogs that credit her book with leading them to back to work, back to play, back to showing up habitually with curiosity and a capacity for wonder. The Artist’s Way is a spiritual journey. Cameron makes the bold statement that on this journey one cannot be an artist without in some way meeting the divine source of all Creation and all Creativity.

Cameron asks those on the journey to write three complete pages every morning freehand. These are called morning pages. Most days I write about nothing of consequence for two and half pages and then a few sentences with some real substance. Throughout the journey, Cameron asks us how our concept of God is doing. Is it expanding? As someone who’d already spent lots of time searching for God in the ways he was told were right, it didn’t make sense that my imaginative capacity around God could be expanding through these jottings down in the early morning. Still, it was.

What I found was that the Creator would come and meet me on these pages. These morning pages that started with a sentence or two about how awfully I’d slept, became prayerful. I began to consider that every morning the God I’d grown up hearing about was visiting me with morning breath or on a dirty Subway riding to work at 4:30 AM. This God who I often felt I was grabbing at and missing just came to these pages. This epic Creator now came to me on a scrap piece of paper and asked what we were going to share today. What were we going to create together? What would we dare try?

What comes next?

I believe that what happens on this journey is the synchronization of my heart to the heart of the Creator of the universe.

I am clumsy and fall flat on my face, because I will myself to creation, rather than allow. Rather than trust the simple meeting in the early morning. I try and follow the rules my intellect knows, and I realize, terrifyingly, that I am being led to a place where only that Creator is. I am not alone, and we must have community, but I dare to believe, where we are going is nothing like where we have been before. Who we become through creation, is not who we started as.

That is far scarier than just letting the blog go and calling it quits. That is far scarier than not going to the audition. That is far scarier than not writing the play or going to the class with the teacher who might ask you to start again.

If I believe the Creator of the Universe is leading me on a creative journey, it is terrifying because it means that I am only at the beginning and know quite little about what is ahead and will have to be vulnerable and honest and stumble my way through. I will need help. I will need to change and grow. I will need to rely on things that rock inside me- throwing my inner world into disagreement and frustration.

I am determined to synchronize my heartbeat with the Creator’s, not, as I often do, with the opinions, values, and yearnings of all around me. I am determined to follow the Artist’s Way.

I believe that only when the artist’s heartbeat is oriented to something far larger than their self, seeking synchronicity, is when heartbeats in audience begin to beat in tandem.

Here I will continue to meet synchronicity, and find the Creator’s Way for me, because only a heartbeat sits between me and God.