From What Remains

Beneath the Coats

An excerpt from the book.

The formation weekends were four and a half hours away.
Strangely, I never fully encountered them until I got into the car.

Before that, the weekends existed mostly as idea and anticipation. I could think about them calmly enough while packing the bag or reviewing the schedule. But once I backed out of the driveway and turned onto the highway, something shifted internally.

The exposure began.
 

I could feel it in my stomach immediately.
Not panic exactly.
The sensation of moving toward something that mattered
greatly to me while also fearing what it might reveal.

Looking back now, part of me believed the program might finally help me become the kind of person I admired in others. My sister was a nun and a spiritual director. To me she seemed contemplative in a way I was not—grounded, present, at ease in a relationship with God that felt inhabitable rather than merely discussed.

Somewhere inside me was the hope that formation might slowly make me more like that.
Or perhaps more honestly:
more like the people I imagined truly belonged there.

The strange thing is that my anticipation grew alongside the anxiety. I wanted to be there. I wanted whatever this was. I admired the formators. I admired the possibility that a person could live differently from how I had learned to live.

But admiration and inhabitation are not the same thing.
 

The closer the weekends came, the more exposed I felt.
Even then, though I could not yet name it clearly, I think I feared being revealed as less spiritually real than I hoped myself to be.

That fear would follow me for years.

I did not understand then how easily longing itself can become entangled with performance.
I thought I was searching for contemplative life.

Looking back now, I can see that I was also searching for reassurance.
Reassurance that I belonged in the room.
Reassurance that I was spiritually real.
Reassurance that there might be something beneath the roles and responsibilities through which I had organized so much of my life.

Medicine had formed me profoundly by then.

Responsibility had formed me.
Competence had formed me.
Being useful had formed me.

What I did not yet understand was how much of my own life had already become organized around performance and evaluation, and the fear of inadequacy.

Formation did not create those structures.
It exposed them.

I remember giving a presentation sometime after joining the formation team. Beforehand, I felt the familiar internal tension—not wanting to do well, but wanting reassurance afterward that I belonged there at all.

The presentation itself went reasonably well.
Nothing disastrous happened.
But afterward, the feedback I received was practical and ordinary:
The font on the slides needed to be larger.

There was nothing wrong with the comment.Yet I remember feeling a small collapse internally that seemed far larger than the situation justified.
As though I had brought something deeply personal into the room and the room had responded only to formatting.

Looking back now, I can see that what I truly wanted was not presentation feedback.
I wanted confirmation.

Confirmation that I was real there.
That I was enough there.

For a while I occasionally served as the Zoom host for formation meetings. Technically speaking, the role was not difficult. I managed it reasonably well.
Yet I dreaded those meetings until they were over.
Not that catastrophe was likely.
More because I could never perform the role well enough to satisfy myself.
There was always some detail I should have handled differently.
Some transition that could have gone smoother.

Some moment I replayed afterward wondering whether I had appeared competent enough, calm enough, prepared enough.

Looking back now, I can see how exhausting it is to inhabit life primarily through evaluation.
Even ministry can become another stage upon which the self continually negotiates worthiness.

Since retiring, I have been asked medical questions more times than I can count.
People knew me as a physician for a very long time. In many ways, I knew myself that way too.
But when I retired, I made a decision that felt more important emotionally than I fully understood at the time:

I would take the hat off.

I covered the practice one day after retirement while a colleague was away.
One day was enough.I remember leaving with a strange clarity:
No more.

I did not renew my medical license.

Even now I occasionally correct people when they refer to me as a doctor.
I know historically that I am one.
But internally I keep removing the hat.

Every day, in small ways, I keep removing it.

 
The other day I had the “pleasure” of doing the grocery shopping alone. Usually my wife and I go together, but on that day I happily volunteered to go alone. Only after arriving at the store did I realize I had left the list sitting at home.

The disappointment I felt with myself arrived immediately and disproportionately.
Still, part of me briefly considered not mentioning it to my wife afterward.
Eventually I told her anyway.
The conversation felt oddly confessional.
But she understood immediately.
More than that, she laughed.
Not mockingly.
Tenderly.
The kind of laughter that seemed to say:
you are still loved here.