When the Heart Waits

Sue Monk Kidd, a Christian writer and former nurse, recounts a period of spiritual crisis at midlife that led her through a transformative journey of waiting, self-confrontation, and inner renewal. Blending personal narrative with insights from Christian mysticism, Jungian psychology, and contemplative spirituality, Kidd traces how she moved from a life defined by false roles and ego masks toward a more authentic selfhood rooted in what she calls the True Self: the indwelling image of God.

The book opens on a February day in South Carolina. Kidd walked for miles through the winter cold, consumed by an aching that had been building since the previous autumn. Though she had undergone a spiritual awakening eight years earlier, a new darkness had overtaken her. Her marriage to her husband, Sandy, felt stale, and her religious life felt stifling. The roles she had spent her life inhabiting, which she identifies as the Pleaser, the Performer, the Perfectionist, and the Good Little Girl, no longer held meaning. She sketched a charcoal drawing of a tent with its stakes uprooted in howling winds and labeled it "Midlife."

Kidd draws on the work of Swiss psychiatrist C. G. Jung, whose depth psychology she had studied for four years. Jung divided life into a "morning" devoted to building the ego and an "afternoon" devoted to developing the full, true self. Kidd also draws on the Christian mystics, particularly Thomas Merton, Meister Eckhart, and Hildegard of Bingen, whose writings affirm that the spiritual life requires shedding false selves to reveal the God-image planted in the soul.

The turning point arrived during that February walk, when Kidd discovered a cocoon hanging from a dogwood tree. She carried it home and taped it to a crab-apple tree. Standing at the window, watching it hang like an upside-down question mark, she heard an inner whisper to live the question and resolved to embrace contemplative waiting rather than fleeing her pain. That night she dreamed of reading her own obituary. A white-haired old woman wrapped her in purple cloth, drew a circle on the floor, and told her to remain inside it. Kidd interprets the dream as a map: Newness requires dying to the old, submitting to incubation, and trusting the process until emergence.

As winter turned toward spring, Kidd confronted her resistance to waiting. She traveled to St. Meinrad Archabbey for a retreat, where a monk told her that waiting is not doing nothing but allowing her soul to grow up. Kidd identifies three cultural rules that undermine waiting: the compulsion to keep moving, the bias that life only happens when one is making it happen, and the impulse to skip pain for gratification. Against these she sets the concept of wu wei, a Chinese term for a posture of expectant beingness.

In March, Kidd began the work she calls spiritual "whittling," confronting and naming six false-self patterns that had governed her life: the Little Girl with a Curl, who suppresses her voice to win approval; the Tinsel Star, whose perfectionist dazzle masks insecurity; Rapunzel, who waits for rescue rather than tapping her own strength; the Little Red Hen, the martyr driven by duty to spiritual bankruptcy; the Tin Woodman, cut off from feelings and body; and Chicken Little, who retreats into safety rather than risking growth. Kidd argues that only by confronting and embracing these broken parts of oneself can one liberate the True Self.

Kidd frames the waiting process as a threefold cycle of separation, transformation, and emergence, finding this pattern in the Exodus narrative, the story of Jonah, and Dorothy's journey in The Wizard of Oz. In her reading of Exodus, Egypt represents false-self imprisonment, the burning bush the divine summons, the wilderness the cocoon of transformation, and the promised land emergence. She identifies three sources of crisis: developmental transitions like midlife, intrusive events like illness, and internal uprisings like spiritual doubt.

The passage of letting go proved agonizing. Kidd describes the "diapause," a term from butterfly biology for the state in which caterpillars resist entering the cocoon. She outlines two levels of surrender: The first involves active effort; the second requires releasing even one's own letting go and allowing God to work. Several experiences gradually uncurled her grip, among them finding a Christmas card inscribed "Let it be," reflecting on Jesus' surrender at Gethsemane, and visiting Merton's hermitage with Sandy. In northern California, she crossed a bridge spanning a chasm in a redwood forest as a ritual of letting go.

Kidd entered the passage of transformation by weaving what she calls a cocoon of concentrated stillness, a form of prayer rooted in interior postures of the spirit. She describes three postures of waiting prayer drawn from biblical scenes: sitting at Jesus' feet, representing attentiveness and devotion; sitting while Jesus prays, representing holy repose; and sitting by the road like the blind beggar Bartimaeus, representing radical trust.

The week before Easter, Kidd sank into unprecedented inner darkness. At the Holy Saturday service she watched the Paschal candle, the large ceremonial candle lit during the Easter Vigil, flicker and nearly die, then saw the priest cup his hands around the flame. This image became central: She must cup her hands around the tiny Easter fire within her soul and coax it to grow. She coins the term "eastering" to describe the ongoing work of letting the Christ-life incubate within darkness, turning the tomb into a womb.

Throughout the spring and summer she practiced two disciplines: living the questions, drawing on the poet Rainer Maria Rilke's counsel to love questions rather than force answers, and holding the tensions between opposing forces within her. She held tensions in her marriage, eventually reaching a turning point during a walk with Sandy at a lakeside cabin, where they discovered a new oak shoot growing from a scarred stump. She slipped her hand into his and said "I love you" for the first time in a long while, and they began to rebuild their relationship.

One morning Kidd went to her study and noticed a rustling from the pot of African violets on her desk. A black butterfly with blue and orange dots had emerged from the chrysalis. She carried the pot outside and watched it fly. Her own emergence, Kidd reflects, was similarly gradual, as pain diminished, questions sprouted insight, and a new vision of life took shape.

Kidd describes several gifts of the soul that emerged through the waiting process: delight, a capacity for joy carved by suffering; the mothering of God, an experience of the divine as nurturing, feminine presence; a return to the earth, a deepening oneness with creation; attunement, a refined presence to the here and now; authenticity, the ongoing work of owning one's True Self; and compassion, the movement from the authentic "I" toward a compassionate "we."

Kidd closes by returning to the dogwood tree where she first discovered the cocoon two years earlier. She recalls watching a young bird perch at the edge of its nest, afraid to fly, until the mother bird gave it a gentle push and it soared. She expresses hope that readers will trust their waiting hearts, listen for the voice that bids them come to the edge, and welcome the gentle push of God, "who is both our wings and the wind that bears them up" (205).