Last New Year’s Eve my friends were staying. My closest friend married 20 years ago and the three of us have journeyed together since. Our friendship has been enriching and challenging, joyous and stressful, with all the potential imbalances of threeness at times. Recently however it has become a place where we’ve tested out the possibility of allowing all our fears, delights, shame, dreams, losses, follies, misapprehensions, hurts and intentions to be shared in an atmosphere of trust and unconditional acceptance.
It’s not like a prayer triplet where we tell each other our stories and select our needs and then pray. We assume when we talk we are held in the embrace of another Three… we are protectively encircled, embued with the freedom to risk a coming out, given the gift of compassionate listening to receive disclosures with warm attention and the power of discernment to draw out more understanding. It sounds quite intense but there is plenty of teasing, irony and hilarity.
Last year we stumbled on the idea of choosing qualities we desired to grow into during 2023. We each chose three. As the year has progressed we’ve been astonished at how one in particular of each of our words has defined our becoming, and we can see how we’ve each been shaped into its likeness. A little as though the Trinity had been at our 2022 New Year’s Eve gathering like a team of bespoke tailors and offered us possible inner clothing to adopt for the coming year, and then fashioned it to us through the circumstances of our daily lives; then watched with pride and delight as the qualities began to infect the world around us.
I made up my word last year: it was ‘unperformance’. I didn’t really know what it meant except it expressed a desire to live without having to please an audience. It has been a very freeing word to live into, culminating I think in my singleness advent diary, where I said important things I’d held inside for decades out of fear of alienating people I care about and isolating myself. It felt like a coming out. All three of us chose words that meant we could live more deeply into our truest, God-dreamed selves.
My friends and I met again earlier this evening. This year we had discerned words for each other as well as for ourselves. It is such a privilege to receive a sense of the person you are becoming from someone else and triangulate this with your own deepest desires and know this is also God’s dream for you in this season. This year what can you expect to see from me? I’ll give you one word: heartfulness. Again, I don’t really know what it means. That is yet to be revealed.
