For our recent Continuing Conversations alumni newsletter, we talked with Ryan about vocation, shame, how his education at 天美视频 informs his work, and the rhythms and practices that sustain him in his calling.

In what ways has your story impacted, shaped, or inspired your vocation?

For several years before attending 天美视频, I worked in the realm of international relief and development in South Sudan, Kenya, South Africa, Mozambique, India, the Caribbean, and Europe. At one point, everything came crashing down. My whole life collapsed. I was mentally, physically, and spiritually bankrupt, and my understanding of my vocation and what it meant to serve the materially poor in difficult contexts began to shift. The bottom fell out, and that forced me to go inside myself, to examine everything I鈥檇 been doing and to enter into a long, arduous process of questioning my old assumptions and beliefs. In many ways, the convergence of vocation and the collapse of vocation鈥攁t least how I understood it then鈥攂ecame the crucible in which the next season of my story was molded.

Eventually, I came to a point where I knew I needed to go to seminary to have the context in which to go deeper theologically, but also psycho-spiritually. A key part of that season was the years I spent at 天美视频. There, I was able to deepen my personal, interior journey while also engaging mission and cross-cultural ministry from an academic perspective. The book I wrote which was published in June, From the Inside Out, began to take shape as I worked on integrating my personal narrative and experiences working overseas with theology and missiology. The seeds of the book were planted through doing this work of integration.

How has your work been informed by your education at 天美视频?

With regard to ministry, it is rare that we reflect on our own trauma, wounds, style of relating, unmet needs, and how all of that impacts how we show up somewhere to serve marginalized people. 天美视频 invited me to stop trying to escape my own story and instead, engage my story as a bridge into the heart of my vocation and the heart of the gospel. We can never escape our own stories, yet so often that is what we are told we must do鈥攖o live above it all on the journey to do what we are called to do with our lives. But that is a lie. The movement to escape is a movement into further disintegration and unhealth. It also moves us away from the gospel. We enter into the gospel when we enter into our own pain. And when we enter into the sites of our own suffering, that is when ministry ceases to be a one-way street where the 鈥渨hole鈥� condescend to help the 鈥渂roken鈥� and instead, ministry becomes a context in which there is the potential for robust mutuality, in which the false dichotomy of 鈥渨hole鈥� and 鈥渂roken鈥� collapses. We recognize shared brokenness and live out of that place, learning to lead with wounds open and exposed rather than hidden.

What breaks your heart, and how is your work informed by that kind of shattering?

So many things break my heart. With regard to the work I am engaged in, the shame-poverty cycle is certainly one. Poverty and shame go hand-in-hand because blame is so often assigned to individuals and communities living in the indignity of severe economic conditions. Blame has to be re-assigned to a different realm, a realm that underlies their situation: the systems and structures of inequality that give rise to these conditions in the first place. Is there personal responsibility involved? Yes, of course. We each have choices to make regardless of where we live. But there is a myth that personal responsibility is the only factor. It isn’t. We all live within systems鈥攑olitical, social, economic, religious. Those systems work for some of us and offer benefits to some of us. For others, it is just the opposite. These systems keep some locked into this shame-poverty cycle.

In order for economic poverty to be addressed, there is a primary need for judgment to be shifted from those suffering from poverty to the systems that create and sustain it. Again, to address and work with shame is key here. But often foreigners show up somewhere with the best of intentions without understanding the deeper dynamics of poverty. And so they unwittingly perpetuate a sense of shame and helplessness, reinforcing harmful historical patterns without realizing it. If we don鈥檛 see the root of poverty clearly, how we try to address it will often create more problems, contributing to a sense of helplessness and hopelessness, which then leads to self-blame and more shame. I see this as a key aspect of working with vulnerable communities across cultures, and it is something I try to center in my own current work in Colombia.

What vocational rhythms or practices have you implemented?

It is easy to become captive to an idea that we are called to only change the world while ignoring ourselves. But that is only half the gospel鈥攖he half that I am continually tempted to live according to. Contemplation has been a key practice in being true to my vocation rather than believing and living according to the illusions of the false self that claims I should ignore myself and my own needs. Contemplative prayer reminds me I am finite, limited, not in control鈥攁nd it does so in a way in which I can rest in the One who is everything that I can never be and do not need to be. As the false self fades into the background, I can sense that God is not the source of the drivenness and the compulsions that push me to exhaustion and disintegration.

Through contemplative prayer, I can sense that God is drawing me into greater health and integrity and transformation, and I can rest in that. The striving ceases. The need to be important fades. And I can sense my belovedness. Healthy ministry then flows out of this centered, grounded place.

About Ryan Kuja鈥檚 New Book

weaves together stories from my own experience living with marginalized people around the globe with biblical and theological reflection, psychology, and spiritual formation. It challenges many widespread misconceptions of cross-cultural ministry and invites us to awaken to a fresh and liberating engagement with God’s redeeming work in the world, while offering a new way forward marked by memory, mysticism, mutuality, and imagination.

To hear more Ryan’s journey and the work he does in the world, check out 辞苍听A Sacred Journey, a podcast from fellow alumnus Lacy Clark Ellman (MA in Theology & Culture, ’12).

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Genesis 1:2 describes what it was like in the beginning, when the earth was a dark, watery void. 聽It was formless, empty, and deep. The Message says that 鈥渆arth was a soup of nothingness, a bottomless emptiness, an inky blackness.鈥� The author of this creation poem paints a picture of a place devoid of life. Soupy. Dark. Empty. Like an abyss. But the same verse says that the Spirit of God was there, hovering over the chaos. Which is important to note, because it means that the watery void of nothingness wasn鈥檛 all there was. There was more. God was present in the very midst of this barren, soggy, soiled wasteland, and when God spoke, something shifted. Light and life and form and order came into the dark, watery blackness.

Cosmos entered the chaos.

The Spirit in the Greek version of this text is called pneuma, which translates as breath. It was the breath of God that hovered over the lifeless void, the breath that animated the dark waters with a life it had not yet known. The Spirit was the catalyst for life in the space of that which was not-life. There is an interesting linguistic link between pneuma and another Greek word, psyche, which in ancient Greek philosophy meant 鈥渢he breath of life.鈥� It loosely translates to English as 鈥渟oul鈥� and is the root of the word 鈥減sychology.鈥� But it wasn鈥檛 limited to the mind as it is in popular psychology today. The ancient understanding of was capacious. It was the energy that animated all of life, a person鈥檚 deep, mysterious core essence. They differentiated between that which was living and breathing and that which was lifeless鈥攂etween the animate and the inanimate, between life and not-life.

So when we talk about psychology, we are talking about more than just the mind. We are talking about a lot more than Dr. Phil, psychotherapy, antidepressants, Freud, and Hollywood stars who had bad childhoods. Because the psyche is as much about the soul as it is the mind. Psychology is as much about the Spirit as it is about laying on a psychoanalyst鈥檚 couch while an old man with a white beard takes notes.

The psyche is as much about the soul as it is the mind.

This creation story at the beginning of Genesis is the first time in the Biblical canon that we hear about the soul. And the soul has something to do with breath and creation and the transformation of darkness and chaos into light and form. So when we talk about psychology, we are actually talking about creation. This story of creation that the Hebrew scriptures begin with is a poetic rendition of the creative movement of God. It is about order (cosmos) infiltrating disorder (chaos). The earth was devoid of life and the Spirit was present to this space of void and darkness which was all that was in existence. Into this space of not-life the Spirit brought something fresh and new and glorious. This creative act was the divine breath infiltrating the dark formlessness and infusing it with life, something the earth had not yet known. The old gave way to the new by the breath of God. And that is what the Spirit does, hovers over the spaces of not-life, renewing and enlivening and animating. Psychology is about this new life infiltrating the spaces of brokenness and darkness within us. So when we talk about psychology, we are talking about the creation of something fresh and new.

In telling the story of God鈥檚 first creative movement that initiated the life of the cosmos, Genesis is also speaking to a broader pattern of life emerging in darkness. Just as God hovered over the lifeless void in the beginning, God is hovering over us, over the dark places of wounds and trauma that we have experienced, the spaces of shame and contempt that keep us locked into patterns of harm and abuse, bidding us entrance into the chaos of our own selves. Just as the Spirit hovered over the chaotic waters, so too does the Spirit hover over the chaos of our lives, the darkness and pain that reside deep within us. It is from here, from this understanding, that psychology transcends the standard therapeutic box in which it has been placed and becomes a central tenet of the Biblical narrative鈥攐f the the story of God鈥檚 ongoing work of redemption, restoration, and renewal of all things.

According to Genesis, psychology is all about a God that initiates life in the spaces of pain, void and darkness in our own lives. When we enter into the territory of the psyche and the unconscious, we are stepping into the sacred terrain of the soul, a space inhabited by shadow and light, repressed pain and dramatic bliss, harm and beauty. As He did in the beginning at creation, God is inviting movement into greater life wholeness, within the world and within each and every one of us. It is the Spirit, in the beginning as now, who brings life to spaces of not-life while inviting us into the same. This is something we can do with the assurance of knowing that the Spirit never hovered in judgment and condemnation, but rather in desire for life to the full.

It is the Spirit, in the beginning as now, who brings life to spaces of not-life while inviting us into the same.

Engaging psychologically with our own personal narratives, especially the places where harm has been done, is a necessary task, especially if we are to engage in mission practices that are healthy for ourselves and people who dwell in the margins of the global village. People who are forced to live in the economic inequality, the short end of misaligned economic policy of global superpowers, in the chaos and darkness of poverty, injustice, and death. We cannot enter well the darkness of those dwelling in poverty if we have not first replied to the Spirit鈥檚 invitation to enter our own.

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Not long ago when I was living in Seattle, I walked down the street to a local coffee shop near my house. I ordered the usual, a tall Americano, stirred in a teaspoon of white sugar and some cream, and began walking the two blocks back home.

It was late afternoon, and the sun was in the midst of its descent into that mysterious place under the horizon where daily it goes to disappear. The sky was inflamed with a bursting orange hue, pockmarked with deep reds and brilliant yellows. I stopped for a moment, mesmerized by the magnificent intensity of the blazing patterns in front of me.

Having taken in my fill of the sky鈥檚 display, I began walking again, still enthralled by the colors and oblivious to my surroundings.聽I had gone 15 or 20 feet when I noticed out of the corner of my left eye a green figure, standing there frozen in stillness. The way the creature looked struck me with a force that made me stop in my tracks for the second time: a contorted face tilted sideways, scowling in anguish. It was a statue of a gargoyle sitting atop a low cement wall that lined someone鈥檚 front yard. I stared into the creature鈥檚 face. It exuded a look of dejection and misery that impacted me in a way that made me want nothing more than to look away. It gave me the feeling that he had something to say but was too locked up in the agony of shame and rejection to speak. He stood there, grimacing in silent agitation.

I made it back to my house and went inside, coffee in hand, my mind gyrating between the ethereal beauty of the sunset and the dejected, contemptuous gargoyle鈥攐n the same short walk, two opposing encounters. One that represented beauty, the other pain. One light, the other darkness. One love, the other shame.

This walk down the road was like a microcosm of the space we inhabit as humans, where opposites are colliding all around us. We are constantly being pulled to one pole or the other鈥攖oward our light, power, and beauty or toward the darkness, helplessness, and pain. Within this pulling polarity we live our lives, ever in the tension of opposites. Our existence happens at the frontier between physical and spiritual, heaven and earth, death and life, despair and hope, darkness and light, fear and love. We exist in a world of gargoyles and sunsets, both burning with intensity.

We exist in a world of gargoyles and sunsets, both burning with intensity.

And we feel this deeply. Many of us are very sensitive to these opposites that exist within and around us. Those of us who struggle with depression or mental illness continually battle the dark waters of emotional pain that threaten to drown us day after day. We have fought more than our fair share of contemptuous gargoyles. How often I wish them to be slain with a fiery sword.

But that walk home from the coffee shop did something else inside of me, too. The encounter with the gargoyle put me back in contact with the rejected parts of myself, those I have kept hidden away in the basement of my psyche鈥攚here they crawl around, alone and angry, with contorted looks on their faces. These are the parts of me that I have abandoned, the parts of me whose voices I have silenced.

Yet, I also remembered that inside of me resides the sunset, too. I wonder what it would look like if the two met: gargoyle meets sunset, rejection meets kindness, shame meets tenderness. My hunch is that the face of the gargoyle would be lit up by the flaming sunset, the reddish orange of the light penetrating into his sunken, glazed eyes, his body morphing out of its contortion and into a soft repose.

And he would speak for the first time.

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It鈥檚 9 AM. I am walking up a steep hill along a country road in the north of Spain, surrounded by undulating hills that descend to the Bay of Biscay, where waves lap at the emerald cusp of the seashore. All would be well, except for one thing: I can鈥檛 breathe.

My chest is tight and I am short of breath. A very disconcerting feeling it is, sucking wind like this鈥攁nd not because I鈥檓 out of shape or sick. I know exactly why I can鈥檛 breathe. But at this moment, halfway up this way-too-damn-long of a hill, with four fellow pilgrims in front of me and nine behind, I feel powerless to do anything about it.

Grief is like that, at least for me. It sneaks up on you. 聽It鈥檚 hard to know what to do with it, and even harder to face it head on. And when I ignore it, stuff it down, refuse its voice, this is what it does. It heads straight for my lungs, often at the most inopportune of times. Like now, on the morning of the second day of the Camino Peace Pilgrimage, the second morning of grief-clogged lungs.

I am feeling foolish. I had prepared for the physical aspect of this 100-mile journey by hiking, walking, and running for a few months leading up to the trip. I had prepared intellectually and mentally by spending time reading, writing, and reflecting on religious conflict, its root causes, and how it has been approached through an interfaith perspective. I was well prepared for the outward aspects of the pilgrimage, for walking ten to fifteen miles each day and for engaging in sensitive dialogue with Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and Jews about enhancing religious understanding.

But I had not expected that this interfaith pilgrimage would be such an intensely personal, inner journey that would become the context for such raw grief to emerge. It shocked me, and it certainly shocked my lungs. I was not ready for what the Camino was going to do with me and my emotions and my organs.

As we near the top of the hill, one of the other pilgrims walks up on my left side.

鈥淗ow are you doing?鈥� she asks.

Though I don鈥檛 know her, I sense a degree of sincerity in her face.

鈥淚 can鈥檛 breathe.鈥�

鈥淲hat are you feeling?鈥� she responds.

鈥淕rief. It鈥檚 in my lungs.鈥�

As I say it, a single tear slides out of my eye and rolls down my right cheek. I inhale again and notice the tightness has eased ever so slightly.

鈥淚 think they鈥檙e opening,鈥� I say to her with a bit of relief. We continue walking as I allow the feelings to rise. I stay present to the grief. I feel it, really feel it and let it be, let it rise, let it have its way.

Pilgrimage is such an embodied experience, even without grief-choked lungs: tasting unfamiliar foods, good wine, clear, cold water from village fountains; listening while in conversation with others, to the inner voice, and to the ever present voice-in-the-head; walking the road, taking step after step after step with pain in the feet and legs. The walking induces a plethora of benefits in the body. Being in close contact with the natural world can itself release a salve of neurotransmitters that calm, soothe, and restore. But none of that is at the core of the biology of pilgrimage as I have come to know it.

In , I told of the physical healing that my body experienced after visiting Lourdes, France. It was nearly a decade ago in that place that the biology of pilgrimage became a real, enfleshed reality: the blood disorder I had been diagnosed with was no longer a biological reality in my body. Medical science had confirmed it. In that post, I talked about how the healing of my blood offered me hope of the eschatological sort, regarding the future and the Kingdom manifest in its fullness. For me, healing is an eschatological category as well as a very present one. The tension between the two is what the pilgrim intentionally bears. The pilgrim is a vessel for unifying the duality between the 鈥渁lready鈥� and the 鈥渘ot yet鈥� of the Kingdom, of the restoration of body, humanity, all of creation.

The biology of pilgrimage is about blood and healing, as I had experienced at Lourdes. But the biology of pilgrimage is also about lungs and another type of healing: the shifts that occur when we allow grief to rise and we let ourselves enter into it and emerge connected to more love and joy than before. The Camino taught me that pilgrimage can expose the places in us where we have carefully hidden pain away, neat and tidy. Pilgrimage, if we surrender to it, can unzip our core鈥攅specially when we鈥檙e not prepared. Walking on the Camino, I became very aware of the particularity of my body and lungs and their interplay with grief.

The hill finally begins to level as we arrive at an ornate old church, probably from the 17th century if not earlier. We stop to take a break and one of the pilgrims leads us in contemplative silence. My breath is now smooth and free, lungs doing what they are designed to do. By this time my whole body is at rest. A shift on a biological level has occurred, leaving me connected to a felt sense of love, a love very present around me and inside of me, subtle but real.

Pilgrimage, it turns out, is about more than blood and eschatology. It is an encounter with the biological as much as an encounter with the spiritual, one that is walked鈥攁nd lived鈥攊n the tension between grief and love.

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The first time I went on a pilgrimage, I cheated. I didn鈥檛 walk at all. There was no grueling test of legs and feet and mind over days or weeks of demanding terrain, as is often the case for pilgrims. I knew walking to the sacred destination was meant to be a metaphor for the journey through life with all its pain and trials, beauty and delight. But I had neither the time nor the desire to walk, so I opted for the train.

The year was 2006. I had recently been diagnosed with a rare blood clotting disorder. The doctor who ran the tests said I鈥檇 have to take medicine every day for the rest of my life. It wasn鈥檛 necessarily a life threatening illness, but it came as a disheartening shock. I remember receiving that phone call and listening to the words as my stomach knotted up tensely and the muscles in my body went limp.

I had recently planned a trip to the Netherlands to attend a training with a humanitarian aid organization that I would be working with in sub-Saharan Africa. After the training, I decided to visit Lourdes, the sacred site in the Pyrenees of France where, in the 1850鈥檚, a young girl named Bernadette received a series of apparitions of the Virgin Mary. Since that time, scores of faithful have come seeking healing. There are hundreds of stories of miraculous cures, 69 of which have been officially verified by the Catholic Church.

I arrived in Lourdes by train from Paris, clutching a hope that a cure lay in wait, too, for me. I was a pilgrim seeking physical healing from the disorder in my blood.

One morning I spent some time at the Grotto鈥攖he place where the young Bernadette had received the apparitions. The birds were chirping. It was sunny and pleasant. I sat and listened to the silence, allowing my desire for healing to rise up fully. It was then that a voice鈥攗nmistakably feminine, so gentle and sweet that not even a child could become afraid鈥攔everberated in the hidden, deep space within: 鈥淵ou will not have to worry about this problem anymore.鈥�

After arriving back in the United States, I decided to see a hematologist to be tested again. The results confirmed what I had heard: no trace of the condition. Gone. Healed, as if it had never been.

That was my first experience of pilgrimage. A train. 聽A Voice. Healing of my blood.

I am preparing to embark on another pilgrimage, this time to take part in the , an interfaith pilgrimage to enhance understanding across religious boundaries with John Philip Newell鈥檚 organization, Heartbeat Journeys. I was selected as a representative of the Christian tradition, one of 12 participants from the Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish, and Christian faiths. We will come together on the Camino de Santiago in Spain to engage the global need for greater understanding and dialogue among the world鈥檚 religions.

Together we will walk a 100-mile section of the Way of St. James, representing a small step on the way toward healing all that remains in a state of dis-ease within each of us and within our respective traditions. The cure of dis-ease鈥攑hysical, emotional, spiritual, religious or otherwise鈥攈as pointed me toward a cosmic renewal and the restoration of all things. In the restoration of my blood, I find hope for the world, hope of the eschatological type.

It is a vision of heaven on earth, of the Kingdom of God manifest in its fullness, arriving in the midst of broken bodies, broken places, broken religious traditions, the broken body of Christ, the broken body of humanity. It is something I won鈥檛 live to see. But I have lived to see the miraculous. I have lived to hear a Voice, and I cling to the hope that it will make itself heard in the midst of this upcoming journey toward religious understanding.

I embark again seeking healing, this time not of my blood but of the blood spilled through religious conflict, for the blood of humanity. I leave again bound to hope, that the blood of Christ will awaken religious understanding, rather than suspicion and violence.

That first pilgrimage to Lourdes has, nine years later, left me with an eschatological hope, the hope that is embedded within the art of pilgrimage itself, that we will one day, together as faith traditions, claim: no trace of the condition. Gone. Healed, as if it had never been.

Pilgrimage, it turns out, is more than metaphor. It鈥檚 about eschatology and blood.

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The ancient seafaring people of Polynesia paddled small outrigger canoes thousands of miles on epic inter-island voyages. They were master wayfinders, navigating only by the stars, the presence of certain birds that indicated land was close by, and their intuition. The great expanses of sea between islands was like a middle territory for these migrant peoples, a place between solid ground, between what was and what was yet to come, between the old and the new, the past and future.

Graduation day聽marks the day each of us is entering a similar middle territory, a watery terrain of disorientation and uncertainty鈥攖he stretch of sea between the firm ground of the island on which we have been dwelling, 天美视频, and the one on which we will situate ourselves, the new places and people on whose shores we will arrive. This middle space between old and new is the place we are entering as we graduate and leave behind all that was.

On graduation day, we are people of the threshold, on the cusp of the sea of unknowing. Six months ago I completed my degree at 天美视频. Six months ago the outgoing tide began drawing me away from the shore where I had made a home and into the liminal space of crossing, a time that has been marked by both persistent anxiety and hope about reaching the far shore. Land cannot come soon enough.

This time beyond the end and before the beginning is often choked with fear and with desire, with doubt and ambivalence. Many of us are feeling so many disagreeing emotions today. That is what often happens as we near the frontier of the middle. We are asked to make decisions without the information we need, living by the questions alone, the answers swallowed up by the steep ocean swell. We are forced to rely, like the Polynesians, on our intuition and a discerning spirit as we anticipate the arrival for which we so ache, for solid ground on which to stand once more.

A cautious pursuit replaces the relentless chasing of dreams as we pine slowly and awkwardly, steering our ship through the faint luminescence of the deep, controlling nothing and surrendering everything.

We wait and watch.

We listen and feel.

Passage making at sea is by its very nature hazardous and disorienting. The passage we are beginning now also holds its own dangers. The rhetoric of the false self often grows particularly loud in this watery middle place, delivering its all too predictable messages of shame, taunting us with claims that we will never arrive anywhere else, that we have gone off course.

That we are not good enough and don鈥檛 deserve that for which our hearts yearn.

The voice of the shadow is persuasive in its effort to make us cave in to the temptation of self-blame. In the middle, it takes the true self鈥檚 voice of kindness to combat these inner discourses that make us feel that our ship is sinking.

We all come from the sea, and to the sea we will return, whether the crossing is akin to a quick ferry ride to Bainbridge Island a few miles away or a wild passage across the expanse of the Pacific Ocean.

Whether the crossing is long or short, just like the ancient Polynesians, we won鈥檛 live at sea forever. The in-between of crossing is a space made for passing through, not for staying indefinitely. And whoever survives the crossing is, in some way, reborn when their feet encounter the firm, dry earth on the other side.

Voyaging by sea is as old as time itself. And so are the returns home to the shore, to the terrain that we can trust, and to the places and people and vocations which await us.

May the sea we are entering give way to the secure ground for which we yearn.

May each of us navigate safely to the next island with stars to guide our course, birds to reveal land鈥檚 presence, and the intuition needed to trust the voyage home.

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The focus of my adult vocational pursuit has been engaging global issues of the Majority World through humanitarian aid, community development and missions work, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa. Since coming to 天美视频, my stance toward this type of work, in particular, global mission, has shifted momentously. As I see differently, I engage the world differently. As I begin to see with more expansive eyes, I embrace the world more expansively. My desire to “help” and “rescue from” has been replaced with a desire to inhabit with, to be present with people in these communities who are marginalized and oppressed. I now espouse a paradigm that is at its core incarnational rather than paternalistic. I have let go of the worn-out, harmful approach of the colonial and modern eras. I cannot perform the messianic tasks of saving and rescuing. 聽I cannot even “help” without hurting. But what I can do is enter into relationship with those who, like me, are wounded and suffering, I can inhabit with and be present and listen well. I can share my passion for surfing. I can relax and be myself and allow the divine mystery to make Her voice known.

I have suffered immensely while engaging issues of grinding poverty in difficult places like Sudan, Kenya, Mozambique, South Africa and India. My heart has been ground to a fine pulp while being in these places; the trauma of violence, illness and poverty wreaking havoc on my being. Yet, I have begun to understand that as I bring myself in all of its crucified-ness to another, to the pain of the suffering other, something happens. Through a cosmic mystery, something life-giving is birthed in that space in between us. Something opens up. Space is created. And sometimes, our mutual suffering is transformed.

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