Mark I: Spiritual Formation

“I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in Love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the Love of Christ, and to know this Love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.” Ephesians 3:16-21

Some discover it in childhood. Some through suffering. Some while standing at a hospital bedside. I discovered mine gradually, through a lifetime of losing certainty and finding, again and again, that Love remained.

As a child growing up in rural Idaho, I loved Jesus with the wholehearted devotion that only a child can offer. Faith was immediate and unquestioned. I memorized Scripture, prayed fervently, and wondered each morning if this would be the day Christ would return. Even then, I sensed that my life was somehow oriented toward the Holy, though I could not yet imagine what form that calling would take.

Years later, living in Malaysia, my understanding of God was profoundly unsettled. Encountering Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu neighbors expanded my world beyond the theological boundaries of my upbringing. Questions I had never allowed myself to ask became impossible to ignore. The certainty that had once sustained me gave way to a long wilderness of doubt.

Looking back, I now recognize that wilderness as one of the greatest gifts of my spiritual life.

Like Israel wandering through the desert, or St. John of the Cross writing of the Dark Night, I discovered that God was not absent in uncertainty. Rather, uncertainty became the place where my image of God was gently transformed. What I had once understood primarily through certainty and doctrine gradually became an experience of Presence.

That journey eventually led me to rename myself.

After my marriage ended, I chose the surname Wilder. At the time, I believed I was simply leaving behind family names that no longer reflected who I was becoming. Only later did I discover the deeper meaning of the word itself: to wander, to be bewildered, to come from the wilderness.

In many ways, my name became a blessing before I knew it.

My ministry has been formed in the wilderness.

Not because God abandoned me there, but because Love patiently accompanied me until I was ready to recognize that the wilderness itself had become holy ground.

During Clinical Pastoral Education, that truth became embodied in a single encounter.

Late one afternoon, I noticed an Indian gentleman receiving an infusion. Through the curtain I saw him reading from his phone and wearing a hearing aid. Without realizing it, I immediately began constructing a story. Perhaps he would not want to speak with a Christian chaplain. Perhaps I would interrupt him. Perhaps I would be unwelcome.

Before I had entered the room, I had already burdened both of us with assumptions.

Earlier that week my supervisor, René Brandt, had gently challenged me to notice how my fear of inadequacy could appear as distance or even bias. Her observation became an invitation to trust the Spirit rather than my fears.

I entered the room.

For thirty minutes he told me stories of traveling the world simply to witness sunrises and sunsets. He described how no sunrise is ever the same—not even from the same window—because the world is always changing, and so are we. Every dawn reveals not only a different horizon but a different person standing before it.

I left that room realizing that every pastoral encounter is exactly like that sunrise.

Each visit is a new creation.

Each conversation is an unrepeatable revelation of God's image in another human being.

Paul writes,

"If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation." (2 Corinthians 5:17)

For many years I understood that passage as describing a single moment of conversion.

Today I hear it differently.

Through contemplative prayer, the witness of St. Teresa of Ávila, St. John of the Cross, Thomas Merton, and countless moments beside the sick and dying, I have come to experience new creation as an ongoing work of grace. Every encounter invites me to release my assumptions, die to the stories my ego constructs, and become newly available to the movement of the Holy Spirit.

I do not believe this diminishes the Gospel.

I believe it deepens my participation in it.

Resurrection is not only an event to remember.

It is a pattern of living.

Again and again, Love invites me to surrender certainty so that compassion may be born anew.

This understanding has transformed the way I pray.

Prayer is no longer primarily speaking to God.

Prayer is learning to become present enough to recognize that God has already arrived.

Sometimes that prayer is silence beside a hospital bed.

Sometimes it is playing the piano for patients and families.

Sometimes it is holding the hand of someone who is dying.

Sometimes it is listening to a frightened family discover words they did not know they possessed.

Every one of these moments draws from the same well.

My spiritual life today is nourished by Scripture, worship, the sacraments, contemplative prayer, participation in the life of the United Church of Christ, continuing theological study, spiritual direction, and the daily practice of accompanying people through suffering with humility and hope. The writings of Teresa of Ávila and the Christian wisdom tradition have given language to the inward journey, while my chaplaincy has continually returned me to the ministry of Jesus, whose compassion crossed every boundary and whose presence revealed the heart of God.

Ordination, for me, is not the culmination of spiritual formation.

It is another invitation to keep drawing water.

Like the traveler who crossed oceans to witness a sunrise, I continue to discover that no day, no patient, no prayer, and no act of ministry is ever repeated.

Each is a new creation.

Each is an intimate moment of infinite detail.

Each reveals, in ways both ordinary and extraordinary,

What Wondrous Love is this.