Student Spiritual Biography Series
Installment 8 - Nicole Reinhart
Shortly after the birth of her youngest child, my grandmother left a cup of strong black tea on the counter to go cold, gathered her youngest child and walked down the hill to deliver the utility bill. At the end of the block, she sat down on a crumbling stone wall, and she did not get up. The tired beauty of the Presidential Mountains stretched out before her eyes unseen. My grandfather found her there when he walked up the hill from the mechanic’s garage where he worked six days a week. He knelt down his compact frame, chiseled from a line of no-nonsense ancestors who had worked the farmland of Québec since the days of Samuel de Champlain. He looked into my grandmother’s empty stare and simply said, “Woman, pull yourself together.” And she did. She walked back up the hill, and part of her never came down again.
As is the nature of family legends, I cannot tell you what of this story is precisely true, except that something of it certainly happened. I also cannot tell you how another might tell my family stories, for memories are personal and fickle, and human perspective is singular. What I can say is, arriving into the stream of a family deeply wounded by multi-faceted untreated mental illness and intergenerational trauma, begins a life that can have more or less only two directions: to death, or through death into His life. It begins a life in which the threshold between spirit and earth, self and other, I and world, inside and outside, can be a dangerous place. It begins a life precariously balanced between tentative hope and self preservation, and an existential need to find good in the midst of brokenness.
My cross was laid out before me. And for much of my life I carried it from my own hill, a good place to retreat, but a lonely place to reside. My story is not exceptional, but it is the one that He has given to me as an invitation to walk through the doorway to His loving faithfulness. And so the small part of the story of human becoming that belongs to me, the small part of His story – it longs to be told.
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The Catholic Church was the church of my childhood. Later would come the Anglican Church. My mother, by some residue of Catholic guilt, or sudden fear for our eternal souls, or perhaps even a desire to find God anew for herself (she never spoke of why), walked my brother and me right through a red door of one or another of St Paul’s sanctuaries and had us both baptized. That was a warm place, and the reward for not wiggling during services was donuts. Naturally, six year old Nicole did not have too many complaints about that! I loved the choir, the Christmas pageant and candlelight service. But the Catholic Church held my heart. I went with my grandparents. I felt a deep sense of comfort in the kneeling-standing-sitting-crossing-calling-mumbled-responding-rhythm that was the Mass. Through a weaving of destiny, I was somehow protected by the open wounds my parents carried from the Catholic Church, the quieter ones my grandparents carried, and back and back before them. What captivated me most was the floor-to-ceiling organ that resounded in my bones. Music became a core part of my path, and a doorway into knowing Jesus Christ through community.
My mother would also be the doorway to a profound childhood encounter in which I had the great honor of planting a tree with Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama. The unconditional compassion that radiated from his joyous face and effervescent laughter rooted itself in my heart until the day I came to see this same light raying from the heart of Jesus Christ. My adolescent curiosity in Buddhism eventually ripened into Christian devotion.
In my young adulthood I was pulled along by a yearning to understand religious communities. Somehow I felt this understanding could allow me to come down from my hill in earnest. From the Reform Synagogue in my neighborhood to the mosques of Zanzibar, the Shinto shrines of Japan to the Orthodox cathedrals of Bulgaria, the Carnival celebrations of Brazil to the Isenheim Altar of Alsace, the Buddhist monasteries of Myanmar to the animist places of the Masai Mara, I received glimpses into the rainbow of human devotion. While the colors have faded over time, the substance of the Being of Jesus shining through so many faces has not.
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In adulthood I was invited to the Christian Community by a friend in our Waldorf community. I entered deeply into the congregation in Denver. I found there something of the religious home I had been seeking. The threshold into Communion was vast however, and I did not come forward to the altar for many months. My interest in the priesthood and the seminary was nearly immediate. I began drinking in what lay before me in the sacraments, as well as what Rudolf Steiner had unveiled to us from the realm of spirit through his lectures and writings. But life revealed to me that it was not the moment for the seminary. At the same time this question began to unfold, my husband and I welcomed the arrival of our three children in quick succession, and my focus shifted. Simultaneously I received a life changing medical diagnosis which enveloped me in a new cloak of darkness. The fallout of this health crisis, as a mother of young children, in combination with my inheritance of soul illness, knocked me from the top of my hill and propelled me into a spiral that led only into the abyss. I was 33 years old.
During this time my relationship to the altar changed. I was frail in body and soul, and I was not yet strong enough in Jesus. I met Him at the altar, but I also met the forces that would seek to derail us from our humanity. I needed a break from the Eucharist. Thankfully, a dear priest and the opportunity to support the life of our congregation through the Children’s Program allowed me to stay connected to our community while I walked a journey of healing. A journey that continues to this day.
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In middle life my family moved from the Front Range of the American Rockies back to the steel gray waters of the North Atlantic. I found myself in a small affiliate, our home congregation more than two hours away. I experienced this as a very lonely time, and from this loneliness I began to seek out sources to deepen my understanding of Jesus. This is when the Light in Everything podcast became my onramp to what would become my seminary path.
With our move came a shift in career directions away from teaching and toward nursing. I began working in a large hospital. Caring for sick people in acute care settings, when modern medicine has been distilled down to reading digital charts, fixing broken parts, and asking caregivers to work under impossible conditions, well, it’s not for the faint of heart. I could not have done it without Jesus. Each day I sat with Him in prayer. Each day I read scripture. And each day I felt that little by little I began to understand the speaking of His heart. And yet, the absence of one event remained deeply painful—I had had no Damascus moment. No Emmaus moment. No Samaritan Woman at the Well moment. Each day I turned my heart to Him and I tried to walk the good road, and each day I seemed to be receiving radio silence into my heart.
And then one day He spoke.
I was driving to work, across a sand bar with salt water coves on both sides. The tide was out, exposing mudflats on the seabed, and the sun was rising, pink-rose and green. I had been caring for a particularly difficult patient who was emotionally labile and verbally abusive toward staff. Deep in my heart I wanted to offer her some small healing light, but I had reached the limits of my own capacities, and for some reason, as I dipped my bucket into God’s healing well, I came up empty. I was, as they say, at the end of my rope.
In a moment of wrestling prayer, a grand stream of all of the people I had ever wounded in my life began to flow before my mind’s eye. People from my many years ago, and from my just yesterdays. I saw the places my heart was bitter, and the hearts I could not forgive. My experience of shame was profound.
But then He was standing—shining—before me, overflowing with love. Love that surrounded the whole periphery of the earth, and also penetrated directly into the center of my singular heart. It was as if He were telling me, “Now I know you are with me, for me, in me. I cannot undo the harm that you have done, but it does not change the depth and width of my love for you. And now we can begin.”
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This turning point of my life was accompanied by a new name. Shortly after my birth, I was given a diminutive and was rarely called the name originally given to me: Nicole. As a result, I had a tension with this name, and as I came to realize, the rejection of my Cross. Within the vessel of the Sacrament of Consultation I received the words “Your name is Nicole.” Somehow, I knew that these words were calling me off my hill. Translated from the Greek, Nicole means “victory of the people.” I was beginning to learn that the courage to willingly enter the valley had to begin within the humility to serve others through submission to His will. It had to begin in receiving His full–hearted desire to gain victory not for selfish reasons, but for all humankind. It had to begin with Golgatha. For like Abraham on Mt Moriah who would willingly return his most precious gift back to God, we receive our blessings so that “our offspring shall possess the gate of his enemies, and in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because you have obeyed my voice.” Gen 22:17
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My house is a stone’s throw away from the river I grew up on. It still bears its Wabanaki name “Androscoggin,” which means “the fishing place.” I spent my childhood pulling trout out of its headwaters with my grandfather’s pole. It winds its way through the mountains of New Hampshire and Maine and empties into the threshold of Merry Meeting Bay where it joins again the salty sea close to my home. In the fourth year of my journey with the seminary, I look back upon the twists and turns of the river of my biography and feel with certainty that the straight line of my life has emerged: it was always leading to Him. Each day with the seminary, Jesus reveals new parts of His heart to me, my community of life with Him grows richer, and He calls to me from the abyss where He stands between the powers that would keep us from fulfilling God’s greatest creation and deepest love: us. I pray that in my humble devotion, I will receive the strength to meet Him there and serve the weaving of the garment of the true human being that He offers to us all. I pray He will shape me into a fisher of men.
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My grandmother is still with me. I hope she will find the courage to come off the hill, and join me there with Him.
Nicole Reinhart is a “Knowing Christ” student in Toronto. Through the activities of her nursing work in a large hospital, she has the great gift of bringing the light of Jesus into the darkest moments of human lives. When she is not roping her husband and three teenagers in her latest garden project, you will find her at the piano or walking in the tidal pools and pine forests of Maine. You can read more about her seminary journey on her Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/hearttree
This is a blog entry by The Seminary of the Christian Community in North America. These are posted weekly by the student blog team of Athena Masilungan, Nicole Reinhart, and Lincoln Earle-Centers. For more information about our seminary, see the website: www.christiancommunityseminary.ca and for more video/audio content check out the Seminary’s Patreon page: www.patreon.com/ccseminary/posts.
The views expressed in this blog entry are the views of its author, and do not necessarily represent the views of the Seminary, its directors, or the Christian Community.