"Patience is everything."
- Rainer Maria Rilke, quoted in When the Heart Waits, page 3
"There is nothing instant or automatic in spiritual development."- Alan Jones, quoted in When the Heart Waits, page 21
Tracing the actual journey of a larva from chrysalis to butterfly across her winter of discontent, the author comes to realize that upheaval need not only denote suffering. If we would just listen, we might hear the proverbial “dark night of the soul” as an opportunity for creativity and release from old ways-of-being.
Indeed, waiting doesn’t equate to doing nothing. We ironically achieve our greatest progress standing still. It’s just that many wish to avoid necessary pain in favor of instant gratification, as evidenced by The Threefold Cycle of Waiting:
"The shell must be cracked apart if what is in it is to come out, for if you want the kernel, you must break the shell."- Meister Eckhart, quoted in When the Heart Waits, page 45
We may like to think we’re individuals living out our unique truth, but more frequently we’re defined by collective scripts inherited from society, family, jobs, friends and traditions. If we’re to evolve, we must differentiate ourselves from the roles we play.
In Sue’s case, those roles included: Little Girl with a Curl (be perfect and keep every hair in place); Pleaser (tell me who you want me to be and I’ll be it); and Tinsel Star (constantly seeking accolades). Add into the mix classic fairy tale figures like Rapunzel (perceived helplessness), Little Red Hen (martyr), and Chicken Little (fear of life), and you have a rich lexicon from which to draw for your examination.
Every false self contains a wound yearning to be healed. Only by confronting and embracing our masks can we liberate the True Self. Two great next-steps are:
"If I have inside me the stuff to make cocoons, maybe the stuff of butterflies is there too."- When the Heart Waits, page 175
One unexpected day, eyes raised to the pot of African violets on her desktop, the author witnessed a startling black wing etched with blue and orange dots protruding above the rim. The chrysalis had opened!
When the time is right, the cocooned soul begins to emerge. New life arrives slowly and awkwardly, not unusually on wobbly wings. What happens when the Pleaser stops pleasing or the Martyr ceases to sacrifice on the altar of duty? What will folks do when Chicken Little no longer hides but takes up their courage to meet life head-on?
As such, we would do well to answer for ourselves these pivotal questions:
Either way, know that transformation in one family member inevitably transforms the unit in some way. Integration and adjustment are not an overnight process, however.
The hope in it all is this: There’s a self within each one of us aching to be born. We’ll survive as human beings to the degree that we stop being individuals struggling alone with our pain and instead become a community sharing our suffering.
Quoting the writings of Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung in Stages of Life: “We cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning – for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie”.
As Sue Monk Kidd implores, let us trust our waiting hearts enough to risk entering them. And, when they unfurl, love your wings!!
Sue Monk Kidd’s first novel, The Secret Life of Bees, spent more than one hundred weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, has sold nearly six million copies, and was chosen as the 2004 BookSense Paperback Book of the Year and Good Morning America’s “Read This!” Book Club pick. It was adapted into an award-winning movie in 2008. Her second novel, The Mermaid Chair, a #1 New York Times bestseller, won the 2005 Quill Book Award for Best General Fiction and was adapted into a television movie. Her novels have been published in more than thirty countries. She is also the author of several acclaimed memoirs and the recipient of many awards, including a Poets & Writers Award. She lives near Charleston, South Carolina.
