• Eat breakfast? Check.
• Teeth brushed? Check.
• Hair in order? Check.
• Socks match? Yikes…glad I checked.

What was different on this particular morning was that I happened to glance down at the swirling pattern of my fingerprint on my left index finger. It occurred to me that I hadn’t looked this closely at my finger since I was 5 or 6 years old, if not younger. I was struck by the complexity of the pattern and astounded by how unfamiliar it looked to me. I wondered, “How on earth have I been bearing these marks on my fingers for all of this time and yet failed to notice them, literally, for decades?”

If this was true about the pattern of my fingertip, how much more is it true regarding the complexity of the whole of who I am? I have an idea of self, but how closely have I looked at what is really there? Is it possible that there are parts of my self that, like my fingerprints, exist beneath the surface of my awareness? I became aware that my understanding of myself and of others is likely incomplete and certainly not fully accurate. Initially, this was unsettling since I had constructed a life on the foundation of who I knew myself to be.

We often define what we believe to be possible in our lives based on what has happened in the past. We tend to lack curiosity because we have a sense that we already know what to expect from ourselves, from others, and from the world around us. Unfortunately, this knowing often becomes a foregone conclusion, which vastly limits the realm of possibility. We miss so much because of how much we know.

Over time – and through The Seattle School – I have learned the value of being willing to engage what I know with a sense of curiosity.  As a therapist I have found this to be enormously helpful with my clients.  Often, clients are most stuck in the areas that they are most familiar with and least curious about. It could be a job, a relationship, an addiction, or even just their way of being in and making sense of their world.  It is common that the places clients feel most hopeless in their lives are the very places in which they claim to know themselves the best.  Familiarity breeds comfort even in misery.  How many people do you know who seem unhappy with their life, but do absolutely nothing to change it? It is easy for people to become comfortably miserable. This type of comfort lends itself to a false sense of safety, which is insidious in relation to hope and desire because its primary ingredients are a mixture of complacency and a fear of the unknown.

It is the hope of psychotherapy that the client will gain a growing sense of curiosity about themselves and about their relationships outside the therapeutic environment; that over time they will gain the courage to risk engaging what they know with curiosity about what else may be dancing just beneath the surface of their awareness. Where there is curiosity there is room for possibility. Where there is room for possibility there is room for hope and change.

Bryan Nixon graduated from the Counseling Psychology program in 2007. He is currently a psychotherapist at the Christian Counseling Center in Grand Rapids, MI.

We recently commissioned Blaine Hogan to write up a post about our school on his blog. It’s a great read and highlights the-very-messy-but-always-worth-it transformation that happens through our education:

They believe (as do I) that with intentionality, sacrifice, and a dot of hope, glorious things can be redeemed through the process of uncovering your story…It was in this intersection that I began to discover what I referred to above as my “full self.” It is because I ventured into this intersection that I’m starting to tell more truth and create continually better work.

Give the post a read, and be sure to subscribe to Blaine’s great blog.

Blaine’s also been very busy himself! This summer, he published his first book, aptly titled UNTITLED: Thoughts on the Creative Process.

UNTITLED will walk you through the creative process of attacking the blank page, executing vision, believing in the importance of contemplation, fighting the beast of resistance, learning from your failures, and creating beauty from the inside out.

This book is my manifesto and I hope it becomes yours as well.

You should buy two copies of his book: one for you and one for a friends!

As if that wasn’t enough, Blaine is currently working on a short film. He’s blogging a bit about the process and we can’t wait to watch it. This teaser is making us itch for more!

Reaching Alice (look & feel teaser)

It was the first day of orientation. I was walking toward that red brick building and I was terrified. I had given up so much to pursue this journey, and suddenly, here I was at the end of the process. I was at the doorstep of matriculation, and I didn’t know if I was ready.

My first few weeks in Seattle were heavy and light. I arrived a month before the beginning of school, and I found out my move-in date a week before I was supposed to be there. I quickly packed up my life in Atlanta, GA and soon found myself in Seattle, feeling unprepared and overwhelmed. For the first week, I lay on my couch reading, watching movies and weeping. The tears came naturally, and there were many moments when I could not even name what was causing them. I slowly realized that with the move came a sense of release – the discovery of a place that was safe enough, and far enough from home, to allow myself the space to grieve losses I had never acknowledged existed. It was beautiful and painful and new, those first few days of allowing myself to speak. I had never done that willingly before.

The light came in the weeks following, as classmates responded with open arms to my arrival. My weeks were full of coffee dates and explorations of my new city. I discovered peaceful parks, great reading spots and life-giving conversations almost everywhere I went. I found myself in a place where I came alive, where everything was an adventure, a glorious dance of passion and fresh air.

I treasured these things as I crossed the street that would lead me to my new life’s front door. I remembered the process of becoming, the moments of pain and beauty that had already taken place in this new city. It overwhelmed me, and filled me with a deep curiosity. I took a deep breath and I opened the door.

The best way I know how to explain those first few days of orientation and classes is that I stepped into a world of colour. The school was full of people who were kind and engaging, who were committed to honesty and education. There was art everywhere, pieces that touched my soul and filled me with the inspiration I had been longing to rediscover. There was music, candlelight and singing at Vespers, and a heavy sense of honouring, mutual commitment between students, faculty and staff at Convocation. There was laughter and tears and encouragement in the company of people I could actually trust to hold my story well. There were classes that terrified and excited me, that introduced thoughts and ideas I had never known existed.

I left everyday feeling exhausted and satisfied. I was full of life and ready for rest. As I lay in bed one night, reflecting on the whirlwind pace of the last few weeks, I finally found the word to express this experience in the deepest way I knew how: home. I was home.

Kelly Pattison is a first year MACP student. She is in the process of discovering how to work hard, rest well and actually enjoy the taste of black coffee. You can read more of her [significantly less formulated] thoughts on her blog.

This first year spits me out

Sweaty and satisfied.

I’m not spinning.

I’m facing forward.

I’m thanking That Great One

—the one we moved in, and found our rest in—

For the greatest year of my life.

Jocelyn Skillman was born in the Seattle area and attended the University of Puget Sound where she studied Comparative Sociology and Ancient Greek. She is involved in sketch comedy in Seattle and loves yummy food, gibberish, and playing pretend!

While I could write volumes about my journey at Mars Hill Graduate School, I am sitting here trying to retell a story of transformation in a few paragraphs. As I attempt to distill what has defined my MHGS experience, two snapshots continue flashing into and back out of my conscious thought. The first is of sitting at my orientation in the first week of school; the second is of sitting at my expected graduation, watching from the general audience as my classmates walked across the stage without me. Together, these stories symbolize essential elements of my MHGS story.

At my orientation we performed an exercise to discover which one of us most embodied the typical MHGS student. As I sat down, bumped out of the running early on by virtue of being a married student, little did I know how different my experience of Mars Hill would be from what I expected. As it turned out, my journey would take almost 5 years and would include much more than the labor of obtaining a degree but would revolve around the labor of becoming a mother, not once, but twice while I earned my degree. When my husband and I learned we were unexpectedly expecting a child during my second semester at Mars Hill, all I could see was how a child would be a set back to my education. What I could not see was the deep blessing that God knows both what I need and what I deeply desire better than I do. I could not have known that bearing children would be essential to my heart’s ability to receive all that God had for me at MHGS.

What did God have for me on this wild journey? In summation: death and life. The apostle Paul taught that unless a seed dies, life will never spring forth from it. As I sat in the audience at the graduation of my friends three weeks before the birth of my second child, I was keenly aware of the deaths I had suffered: the loss of my expectations of what my experience would be, the loss of some deeply held theologies that were challenged and changed, the loss of friendships as I dropped to half time credits and my friends advanced without me, the loss of my freedom and my identity as I transitioned into role of mother. In the midst of these feelings of loss came a still, small revelation deep in my heart. I would not have been ready to graduate when I originally intended. It was true. I needed more time in this place to heal the wounds that had been opened up in this place – something I would not have known without a mandatory slowing of my progress provided by becoming a mom.

But death is never intended by God to be an end in itself. Death is always a doorway to new life. How deeply I have come to know this each day in pregnancy as I bore death in my own body in order to bring forth the life of my children. The death of morning sickness, fatigue, body aches, etc. pales next to the death of labor and both are miniscule in light of the daily deaths I face in rearing small children. Yet, the life that springs forth, both for me and for my children, is a blessing beyond compare. Poetically, this physical death-springs-into-life metaphor of birthing, exactly mirrors the spiritual and emotional death-springs-into-life experience I needed at MHGS.

Let me explain. Each day as a parent and student held more than I could reasonably accomplish. Over the years, I’ve had many classmates ask me how I do it; kids and school? I often cheekily reply that I’m crazy, “Ya know, it takes one to know one.” If you push me I might offer the practicalities such as using naptime efficiently, speed-reading, and saying “no” to many things so that I could say “yes” to school. But when it comes down to it, what got me through was grace. I don’t mean to be cliché, but looking back I can account for my survival only by daily relying on grace from God, from my husband, from my professors and classmates, from my children, and most profoundly, from myself. And this is what I most deeply needed: an invitation to stop relying on my own competence and strength, an invitation I could not accept until I had exhausted all my resources by trying to do it all alone.

But as I have yielded to death and received grace, new life has sprung up – life I could never have forseen or created. I have lived what the apostle Paul taught about death and resurrection: observation of the seed can never predict what the plant will be like when it grows. The invitation to die and receive new life continues to present itself daily, but I receive and often accept the invitation in ways I never could before. The ability to delight in receiving, to give back out of fullness in the face of emptiness, to love God and others more deeply and know that I am loved more deeply than I can hope – this is the life that has sprung up for me by becoming a mom in the midst of journeying at Mars Hill. It’s a gift I never could have imagined.

Shannon received her Masters of Counseling Psychology from Mars Hill Graduate School. She currently researches human growth and development and practices attachment psychology in the comfort of her domestic laboratory with her husband and two daughers. She hopes to write, speak, and counsel outside of her home as her children grow and opportunities to enter the field of counseling present themselves.

Christy: “Hey babe, the realtor called and wants to know if we are ready to make an offer on the condo?”
Andrew: “Well, actually, I have a different idea.”
Christy: “Oh, really?”
Andrew: “I think we should buy land in Malawi and start a non-profit to fight global poverty.”
Christy: “Hmm… Yes, let’s do it.”

I both love and fear my wife, Christy. She understands and encourages my moments of divine delirium. She holds loosely to the dreams of this world and is willing to pursue passions that promise to fill our lives with sacred meaning.

A few months after our wedding we were considering using our wedding money as a down payment for a condo. However, a previous trip to Malawi, Africa was fresh on our hearts. During our time there we fell in love with the people of Malawi. They are a joyous people despite their lack of material wealth. They had something we had little familiarity with: contentment, authentic community and conversations consistently filled with deep resounding laughter.

Ever since our trip we had a lingering sense, or might I suggest call, that we could use our privilege and wealth to help the people of Malawi. So instead of purchasing the condo, we decided to put our wedding money towards the purchase of an 11 acre plot of land outside of Lilongwe, Malawi. With the help of our church we launched a non-profit organization Collective Hope to manage and steward the farm and the work that will occur through it. The vision of Collective Hope is to fight global poverty through renewing hope, re-establishing dignity, and redeeming love.

The last year and a half has been a whirlwind of growth and development. We now have 14 volunteer staff members comprised of Americans and Malawians. Development on the land includes a house occupied by a caretaker and his family, a water well for irrigation, and an 8-acre teaching farm that will be harvested in June 2011. Furthermore, we have formed a local Malawian committee representing 37 villages near the farm. They have received their first micro loan that supports their own farms that serve over 67 families and 14 individuals living with HIV/AIDS. This is the first of many sustainable businesses we hope to create in Malawi in order to alleviate poverty.

As a student at Mars Hill Graduate School I learned to engage our world with humility and with hope, as a learner and a teacher, a bringer of redemption and one in need of redemption. This is the posture that Christy and I attempt to embody as we lead Collective Hope. MHGS taught me to enter into my own story in order to enter into the stories of despair and hope within our broken world. I have learned that in order to serve my hands must be open; I must embody a defenseless posture with a willingness to be impacted and transformed by those I hope to serve. Collective Hope would not have happened without MHGS opening my eyes to the fullness of the gospel story. God’s dreams for this world are audacious. They invite our collective participation in the incredible redemption of Christ. They produce in us a Collective Hope.

Andrew Bauman graduated from MHGS in 2010 with an M.A. in Counseling Psychology. Besides leading Collective Hope, Andrew is a professional therapist as well as a Practicum Facilitator at MHGS. He also loves hiking in the woods with Christy and his golden lab Ballard, coaching high school soccer, as well as excelling in the sport of Ping-Pong. For more info visit collectivehope.org.

The second semester is a curious one for the MACP student.  We’ve been at this grad school thing for a while now and we think maybe, just maybe, we’ve got the hang of it.  We are different people than when we arrived: more confident, more self-aware, kinder, bolder. We know our APA, we can write a WDP in our sleep – we’ve got this.

Then certain rumblings become audible in the hallways, side conversations become tense during class breaks over open laptops and hot coffee, long hugs that say “you are okay” instead of just “hi” are exchanged between friends. The anxiety begins to build… Internship? Wait a second, that starts now? Does everyone else already have their internship figured out? Does everyone else have this therapy thing figured out? Am I the only one who doesn’t feel ready to be a thrown into the ring? Am I the only one who’s afraid to actually put this stuff into practice and – gasp! – “sit with someone”?

All those conversations spent speculating about the therapeutic context are finally just around the corner.  Actual clients with actual diagnoses and actual transference, evoking actual countertransference, await us.  It’s an exciting and frightening time. In many ways, we are ripe, eager, and just as prepared for the field as other graduate level interns (if not more, given that many other programs send their students out after a few months in a program, compared to our two years).  And yet we cannot deny the disquieting hyperactivity of our nerves. Our defenses are activated. We’re regressing and we feel it.  Are we up to this task?  Are we ready for the real world?

The closer I get to it, the more I am comfortable with a resounding NOYES.  I know, I know, how very MHGS of me.  But seriously, perhaps the primary gift we’ve been given by this graduate school is the capacity and willingness to embrace ambivalence and tension. We’re both exceptionally gifted and terribly inexperienced. We’re both primed for the task and we’ll mess it up plenty. We’re both thankful and afraid, self-accepting and insecure. We’re ready and we never will be. The fact that we are all of these things – and that we are becoming okay with it – is the mark of this school on our lives. It is why we came here and why we stay. It’s why we are willing to weep and create and dream and grieve, all for a diploma. It’s what makes us a little bit crazy – and it’s what makes us as ready as we’ll ever be.

Real world, look out.

Rebecca Canlis is a 2nd year MACP student.  She also works on the MHGS Advancement Team, focusing on the school’s Seattle Strategy.  She lives just two blocks from MHGS with her husband Brian and their puppy Mirabel.  She is obsessed with many things, including building her very own library, trying new food and drink recipes, and keeping alive the art of the mixed tape.

I graduate in 2 weeks and 3 days.

The thing is, coming into this place, I never really expected to get out.  They said things like, “You’ll counsel one of your classmates while 6 other students and two facilitators watch and critique.”  Ok, SURE. They said, “Write a paper expressing what you know of the issues and dynamics of your family of origin, and how its influenced and implicated your style of relating.”  YEAH, uh huh. And they said, “Obtain an internship at at an eligible site and be a therapist to real people for hundreds of hours.”  Wha… “Oh, and of course you’ll be unprepared and inadequate to do so.  That’s what internships are for!”

For reasons I have been called to name, though I won’t do so here, I really expected to be able to get out of some of these things.  I expected a big “Just kidding!  Wouldn’t that have been RIDICULOUS?!?!” or at least an “April Fools!”  But no. They weren’t kidding about any of it. They really asked us to do that stuff. And we did it. But the most unbelievable part is what they’re saying now: “Congratulations. You’ve finished.”

When Kristen Houston: Registrar EXTRAORDINAIRE, said those words to me, I came back with a quick, “Well what if I don’t want to be!? What if I WANT to take more classes this summer? What if I don’t want to go?!”

I don’t want to go. Nearing the end of three years at Mars Hill Graduate School, I am taking inventory of friends and transformations, but also of moments missed. I am grieving the classes I spent online shopping and Facebook leering. I am struggling with the limits of my mind, my soul, and my concentration that were taxed before the terms were over. I want back the office hours I neglected to schedule, the happy hours I opted out of, and the reading groups I just couldn’t engage after that class. You don’t get a chance at 3 years of Mars Hill Graduate School just any day.  My time is nearly spent.

Now it’s Spring (believe it or not, Seattlelites). And it’s Lent. So we’re reminded at the same time that after seasons of death there is life, and that our lives are like the wind and we are dust. There is death in ending at Mars Hill Graduate School. Friends will move away, we’ll all have to get real jobs, and grocery shopping at noon on a Tuesday is just over. But I also have so much life in me coming out of these three years. I know it because all my grief (read: utter denial) is not without tiny blossoms of new dreams budding. There are once again things on the horizon of my life that sound completely absurd – but I know now what I can expect from myself when the expectation seems impossible.

So until I walk with my cohort on June 25, you’ll find me in that beautiful building when I have no business there, sitting in on classes I’ve already “completed”, and hugging people for longer than may be socially normal. And after that – after all this – you’ll see me go.

Jari Hackmeister is a third-year MACP student at MHGS, and is the humbled and honored facilitator of Anamchara. She lives in Belltown in a studio you’re always invited to nap in, should you need it. Unless you don’t know her.

It’s research paper time and I just got back from the library with this stack of books in my arms. I had a list of three books, but after just a few minutes in the aisles, here we are with eight. I shared my research paper topic with some friends back home, saying, “I don’t know my thesis yet, but I’m researching how male victims of childhood sexual abuse harm themselves sexually as adults.”

Their response? “That sounds awful. You’re crazy.”

Yes, the research paper topic sounds awful. But not in the way you might think. My friends thought it was awful to subject myself to such a topic. I think it’s awful that the topic exists in the first place. Why on Earth must we have libraries full of books on how to heal heinous abuse? I long for a world without any hint of abuse. As a Christian, I will not stand for the perpetuation of sin. I will not stand idly by when the thief has come to steal, kill and destroy souls with abuse. I will fight to offer life and life abundantly.

Of course I’m crazy. As Dan Allender says, I’ve volunteered to be infantry parachuting behind enemy lines. If I wanted safety I’d do something else.

I’ve learned that my capacity to help others is directly informed by my ability to go there in myself and treat myself with grace and kindness. I always thought that the only way to help others was to be a martyr. But Christ’s call was not a call to total self-annihilation, but to kill destructive and numb ways of being while resurrecting the beauty that remains. It hurts – all death does – but its resurrection is so very sweet. Its resurrection creates an authentic heart capable of both the deepest joy and the deepest grief.

So. A research paper on how sexually abused boys harm themselves sexually as adults? Bring it on. Not a macho, beat my chest kind of “bring it on.” This “bring it on” means tears for every childhood shattered, means every keystroke is weighted with the trauma of shame. It also means that each raise of the finger to press the next key is a prayer for redemption, a defiant gesture that says shame doesn’t win. It’s a part of the story, but it is not the story.

This paper is written from every place where I am kind to myself – places of joy, places of grief. It’s written on the acupuncture table as the Holy Spirit catches the tears I stored throughout my body and massages forgiveness into my pores; it’s written with my feet grounded in my therapist’s shag carpet, with my eyes holding the gaze of my friends; it’s written with my dog sleeping on my chest, Patty Griffin’s words ringing true: the voices inside me that filled me with dread have been replaced with thousands of angels instead. I wake up in the morning privileged to share those angels’ voices with the world.

Jonathan Merker likes cloudy weather more than sunny weather, and thus prefers living in Seattle over anywhere else in the US.  He can often be found drinking tea in the Ballard neighborhood, and is probably singing along with a Patty Griffin or The Wailin’ Jennys song as you read this. His dog Orion acts like a cross between a rabbit and a cat and responds to the sound of a gentle breeze as if it is the harbinger of Satan.

I’ve been an avid journal-writer since my 10^th grade English teacher provided time for journaling in class. (Thanks, Miss Morrison. I apologize for not including you in my Acknowledgments.) My journal-writing went from avid to feverish, however, upon enrolling at MHGS. Even so, never in my wildest dreams, did I imagine that my journaling would materialize into a book.

But the volume on my coffee table, titled, Grounds for Marriage: A Fresh Starting Point for Couples in Crisis, published just one month ago, is proof positive when I become most doubtful.

Actually, I didn’t want to write this book, and I put it off over and over again, partly because I didn’t want my personal story of failure to be out there for everyone to know and critique. Plus, the message of this book doesn’t necessarily conform to the standard message of the Christian faith community. I expect that some will call me a heretic at worst, and misguided at best. I expect that others will share the sorrow that drove the writing of this book. In the end, however, I had to write the book to cool the “fire in my belly,” to borrow Jeremiah’s words, from which it arose.

If calling us to true intimacy is heretical, then I guess I’ll take my place with the heretics.

In Grounds for Marriage, I synchronize personal story, anecdotes from my work as a Licensed Professional Counselor, and a review of literature in psychology and theology, helping couples in crisis and their counselors to:

• study the scriptures to discover what a covenant is…and isn’t
• recognize how both partners contribute to failure in their marriage, and
• heal from old wounds so they can be in covenantal relationship with God and with a covenant companion

With no-nonsense directness and high-definition clarity, my goal is to help readers envision how human covenantal commitments must function in order to mirror intimacy with God. I present the criteria of wholehearted covenant as a measuring stick for relational intimacy (grounds for marriage), without which we cannot determine what comprises broken intimacy (grounds for divorce). From a covenantal/relational perspective, we can maintain scriptural integrity, understanding, and wisdom as we evaluate marriages in crisis.

Grounds for Marriage includes a 50-page study guide to help readers personalize the concepts presented and to provide people-helpers with a complete foundational resource to facilitate individual and group therapy sessions.

Comments from the pilot therapy group that I facilitated with this material are included in the front matter of the book, along with comments from a critique group of therapeutic professionals. These comments provide a snapshot of how real people—clients and therapists—have experienced this material.

I’ve published Grounds for Marriage under a pseudonym, Jade G. Stone, for the protection of those whose stories I tell therein. Although details of stories have been altered and individuals in stories given pseudonyms, it seemed best to take a pseudonym myself, as well. My friends know of my pseudonym, of course, and since you have some connection with MHGS, I consider you a friend.