I am a person drawn to complexities, often choosing to make things more difficult than they need to be. Sometimes, it is a gift that allows me to think precisely. On the other hand, there’s a part of me that seeks out something to push against, to wrestle with…all the while telling myself it’s good for me. I realize, though, that while some complexities forge my soul, others drain it.

I can manufacture complications either because I’m caught up in something that really doesn’t matter, or because I’m avoiding something that does. There are days when I keep hammering away, wanting one result, and getting another. I wonder how much my creating (=controlling?) my own complications gets in the way of seeing the ones that arise naturally in a spiritual life, a life with God.

This brings me to a couple of Sundays ago when many of us heard this brief verse from Matthew 11: “Yet Wisdom is justified by her children.” I confess I never paid much attention to it before. This time, though, the invocation of Wisdom rang a bell, and drew my thoughts to the Serenity Prayer.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.

When I first came into the rooms of recovery, there was a saying that all you needed for a valid meeting was two people and the Serenity Prayer.

The overwhelming intention of the prayer seems to be serenity—a sort of time-out, invoking a sense of detachment to slow down the hamster wheel of stressors. But, on that Sunday morning, I found myself recalling that the prayer asks for three things: serenity, courage, and wisdom. If Wisdom is justified by her children, I wondered how I could become one of those children.

The echoes of Wisdom got louder when we got to that famous invitation: “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.”

For Episcopalians, these verses form part of the “Comfortable Words,” a series of Bible verses following the Absolution of Sin in Rite I. On their face, the words are comfortable, and have spawned countless samplers, greeting cards, and memes; not to mention some terrific music in Handel’s Messiah. But is Jesus’ yoke easy, and is his burden light? There’s a lot of evidence to the contrary.

Given my own battles with complexification (see? I even like using complicated words!), I wonder if some of the difficulty and heaviness that I experience within me and observe in others comes from the human tendency to try to do it all myself, to make my own damn way, rather than nurturing a connection with the One who is the Way, and who walks beside me.

Maybe, just maybe, this passage means that walking with Jesus (= a Higher Power of your understanding) isn’t necessarily uncomplicated, but if I’m focused on my relationship with him, the road before me opens with less resistance and less striving on my part.

I struggle with the image of a yoke. To me, a yoke indicates bondage or servitude, the lack of freedom and choice. But then, I realize that I have in my mind a single-user yoke, such as on a water carrier, or an enslaved person, or an addict. But what about double yokes, designed for working animals to pull in tandem?

What happens when I imagine a double yoke as the yoke Jesus was offering – a yoke that I don’t have to pull alone? A yoke that the God of my understanding wears with me?

If I nurture this kind of connection with the God who labors alongside me, it becomes possible to walk with courage through the complicated realms that my soul sometimes faces. I also have hope that I may be granted some degree of wisdom in choosing between the complexities that deepen me and those that deaden me.

When I am yoked with a Higher Power, I am set free to step off the hamster wheel of obsessions—of self and the world; free to live no longer for myself, but for the good of others.

Twelve Step programs were designed for people seeking to change those things to which they are yoked. So, I find it worth taking time occasionally to ponder exactly what I am attached to. I think that people are always bound, however subtly, to something: people, places, things, habits, possessions, beliefs, ways of being in the world. What or whom am I yoked to right now? Are these connections I chose, or have they been imposed on me? Do they deepen me or deaden me? Do they draw me closer to my Higher Power or drive me further away? Do they connect me to the power, freedom, and choice that God gives me, or do they diminish my power, freedom, and choice?

What if Jesus isn’t part of the God of your understanding? I like to think that when he addressed the crowd that day, Jesus was drawing from a deep and ancient well of Wisdom literature that continues to refresh and encourage us today.

Come to Wisdom with all your soul,
and keep her ways with all your might.

Then her fetters will become for you a strong defense,
and her yoke a golden ornament.
(Ecclesiasticus 6:26-30)

Paul J.
Muncie, IN