Keep Your Eyes Open for Holy Relics

There's More going on here than meets the eye, and the More is for you not against you.

“The eagle is searching for the updraft.”

I was sitting along the river in my hometown on my monthly call with my spiritual director, when he said those words.

Moments earlier, I’d told him I was distracted by a bald eagle on the other side of the river, flying back and forth over the water, like a sprinter running between goal posts on a football field. He suggested we get quiet and watch it. Seconds later, it extended its wings to their full length and corkscrewed upward, heavenward, until it was a dark dot against the azure sky. It never flapped its wings once.

“You see, Kelly,” he said, “you flap your wings up and down the river of your life, thinking more effort will get you where you long to go. But the eagle knows there’s an updraft present here somewhere and, if it can find it, it will soar to places it could never reach under its own power, and with almost no effort at all. The eagle is just searching for the updraft.”

In his book, Telling Secrets, Frederick Buechner tells of a time he found the updraft:

I remember sitting parked by the roadside once, terribly depressed and afraid about my daughter's illness and what was going on in our family, when out of nowhere a car came along down the highway with a license plate that bore on it the one word out of all the words in the dictionary that I needed most to see exactly then. The word was TRUST. What do you call a moment like that? Something to laugh off as the kind of joke life plays on us every once in a while? The word of God? I am willing to believe that maybe it was something of both, but for me it was an epiphany. The owner of the car turned out to be, as I'd suspected, a trust officer in a bank, and not long ago, having read an account I wrote of the incident somewhere, he found out where I lived and one afternoon brought me the license plate itself, which sits propped up on a bookshelf in my house to this day. It is rusty around the edges and a little battered, and it is also as holy a relic as I have ever seen.

These days, I call a moment like that an updraft, and I believe such updrafts are everywhere, but we miss them because we’re trying to get somewhere instead of allowing ourselves to be taken somewhere. At some point, we have to let go of being driven from within, and we must allow ourselves to be drawn from without. Not pushed forward, but pulled upward. Instead of flapping our wings in an effort to become something worth seeing, we can extend our wings and surrender to something unseen.

The best things in life aren’t hard to achieve, they’re hard to believe.

Last week, I was struggling. I’ve been writing behind the scenes for two years, flapping fiercely—I’ve written a whole novel and half of a non-fiction manuscript, and I have no book contract to show for it. Just some blood, sweat, tears, and all those haunting writerly questions about whether or not I’m really meant to be an author. In a totally unrelated moment, I mentioned to my wife that, for the first time in the nine years since we moved to a rural town, we were about to run out of my favorite peanut butter, which can only be purchased in the Chicago suburbs.

It’s silly, I know, but I love that peanut butter.

The next morning, an old high school friend I hadn’t spoken to in over a year sent me a text. He said he was in the suburbs for one of his kid’s athletic events and, when they passed a Trader Joe’s, he thought of me and my peanut butter. So he’d stopped and picked up a jar, and he would put it in my mailbox.

When is a jar of peanut butter more than peanut butter? When it’s an updraft. When it’s an eagle corkscrewing upward, reassuring you to rest into the flow of things rather than thinking you are the flow. When it’s a license plate that improbably, miraculously, is just the reminder you need that it’s all going to be okay. When it feels like a sort of telepathy between the souls of two old friends—a reminder that there’s More going on here than meets the eye, and the More is for you not against you.

That jar of peanut butter was as holy a relic as I’ve ever seen.

In a way, though, my old friend was the real relic. You see, he didn’t just search for the updraft, nor did he merely find it and get swept up in it—no, on a simple Saturday morning, with a single jar of peanut butter, he became a part of the updraft for me.

Indeed, he reminded me why I started writing in the first place, why I’ve been writing tirelessly the last two years, and why I will continue to write no matter how much of it sees the light of day. I want to be a part of the updraft that lifts other human beings to higher heights, because when I do we all rise together—and together is the point of it all.

Keep your eyes open for holy relics. For updrafts. They’re everywhere. And when you find one, don’t forget to extend your wings.

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What are your reactions to this post? Does it ring true, or does it seem too good to be true? Feel free to become a part of the updraft yourself by sharing about a holy relic you’ve encountered along the way.