Spiritual Journey – Page 7 – Feminism and Religion

Devotion by Molly Remer

There are things that ask
to be remembered
or, is it that I ask to remember?
The everyday enchantments
of our living
words forming slices of
memory.
A white squirrel watching
from a sycamore tree
the sounds of black
crows calling
from within the secret
passages
between oak tree
and neighborhood
footprints of a shy orange
coastal fox in the sand.
Rays of sunlight
forming individual white rainbows
stretching from cloud
to water.
I no longer feel like I have anything
to teach
I just want to tell you about the
shell I found today
the sandy pink color
of its wave-shaped spiral
the way the pine needles
form a canopy under
which orange monarchs dance
the surprising softness and bright
green hue of thin fingers of grass
the pretty purple pollen cones
of a longleaf pine.
The colors of a morning woven
into a tapestry of devotion.
That is the word for this feeling
in my chest.
Devotion
to noticing.

Devotion is not a word that I have previously felt particularly inspired by or connected to. Perhaps it is too heavy, too responsible, or even “too religious”—carrying connotations of dogma or roteness. However, in the last month or so, something has opened up for me to consider the word, and the process, in a different way. Continue reading “Devotion by Molly Remer”

Bringing About the Revolution by Xochitl Alvizo

Happy day friends. It’s Sunday – maybe you have a day off from your income-making labor, maybe you’re home with the kiddos working more than usual since they have no school, or maybe it’s a day you have all to yourself – whatever is before you, I have a word I’d like to share with you today – enjoy being with you.

I say this because it’s the word I have needed for myself for a little while now. I have not enjoyed myself lately – neither being with myself nor being myself. As of late, I had lost touch with the fact that I am, or can be, an enjoyable person to be around. I know that sounds like a funny thing to say, and I don’t mean it in any weird or arrogant way; I just mean that yesterday morning I remembered that I can be quite fun. I can be goofy, loving, encouraging, friendly, attentive, thoughtful, strong, grounded, intellectually engaged…and, because of all this, I make pretty good company—even to myself! Continue reading “Bringing About the Revolution by Xochitl Alvizo”

Honoring the Completion of the Year, by Molly Remer

“Beginnings and endings are so very sacred, to give honor to all that has transpired, every experience, every joy, every pain, is a doorway to the magical. Hold your entire year between your hands, every day, every thought, every breath. Now bless it with gratitude, love and humility. You have done more to transform this new year than a thousand resolutions.”

–K. Allen Kay

Two years ago, at the end of the year, I was supposed to hold a closing ceremony for a year-long Ariadne’s Thread study group I had been guiding throughout the year. Every member of the circle ended up backing out of the closing circle at the last minute, but I held the ceremony in full anyway, alone in my front yard, just for myself, and expanding it to include acknowledging and appreciating all the work I had completed in 2016, including my D.Min degree. People’s reasons for backing out of the ceremony were very valid and while on a cognitive level I understood why they couldn’t come, on an emotional level I still felt let down and disappointed at being “abandoned” by them. Holding the closing ceremony for myself anyway and acknowledging that I kept my own commitment to doing a full year of this work in circle, felt like a powerful declaration and affirmation of my own worth. In fact, it was such a validating and powerful experience that I continued the practice with a personal year-end closing ceremony for 2017 as well and I will do the same for myself this year too. Continue reading “Honoring the Completion of the Year, by Molly Remer”

Longing for (Dis)Connection by Katey Zeh

yuzki-yuqing-wang-585257-unsplash As I type this post, I have another browser window open to track the path of Hurricane Florence due to make landfall in my area sometime later this week. Though I now live a few hours inland, I grew up in a coastal town, so I know how unpredictable storms like these can be. It’s entirely possible that we will get a bit of rain and wind and nothing else–and it’s just as possible that we’ll be spending quite some time without power. I pray that the latter is the absolute worst of what we all endure here.

In preparing for the storm and potential power outage, I was reminded of a time about a year ago when I was returning home after dropping off my daughter at school. As I approached the first stoplight on my route, I noticed that it wasn’t working. That’s odd, I thought. I drove on, navigating through another half dozen malfunctioning traffic lights before arriving safely back home only to discover that the power was out there too. Continue reading “Longing for (Dis)Connection by Katey Zeh”

The Personal Book of Shadows: Compendium of Sacred and Scientific Knowledge, Wisdom, and Evolving Experimentation by Elisabeth Schilling

I’m the type of insecure wallflower who has deleted social media accounts, blogs, photos, poems, and journals because 1. I am not good at commitment or planning, 2. I shame myself for being eclectic and lacking consistency, and 3. a sentiment I have either created or exists in some form externally prods me to brand myself, something I cannot do well (see no.1 and no.2). Oh, that doesn’t mean I don’t find the brand smart, and maybe calling it a “brand” condemns it to consumerism and commodities, when really it is being focused where I am distracted and a frivolous sensationalist.

On the whole, currently, I suppose I’m experimenting with accepting this all-over-the place eclecticism that has seemed to follow me my entire non-linear life and trying to commit to embracing whatever mess I create, even if it feels disjointed and that I can never have a nice, clean, mono-personality. Who am I? About 8 different people. Can anyone relate? Okay, maybe I just need to grow up. I have a feeling it will just have to happen in my next life. Continue reading “The Personal Book of Shadows: Compendium of Sacred and Scientific Knowledge, Wisdom, and Evolving Experimentation by Elisabeth Schilling”

Sustaining Myself by Molly Remer

I touch the earth and offer gratitude
for this land I call home.
I reach towards the sky and offer gratitude
for sun, moon, and stars.
I place my hand on my heart
and breathe deep, offering gratitude
for all that I am and all that I have
and for the many blessings of my life…

June 2016

I am finishing my last semester of college teaching. I have four children ranging from 18 months to 12 years and a thriving home business. I am exhausted. I feel wrung out, weary, overloaded, sped up, and on the edge of collapse. My dominant fantasy, the one that pops unbidden to my mind as I work through my never-ending to-do list is to just lie on the floor, flat on my back. I tell my husband, “this isn’t a sustainable pace for me. If I keep going like this, something bad is going to happen to me.”

I keep going.

Continue reading “Sustaining Myself by Molly Remer”

Creating Space for Wisdom Sharing by Katey Zeh

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Along with spending more time in silence, another spiritual practice I’m cultivating is creating space for the wisdom of the room to emerge. At a basic level this involves talking less and listening more.

Keeping quiet is a discipline I’ve had to learn. I was the type of kid who raised my hand to speak in class at every opportunity. One day in fifth grade I was especially especially eager to give the right answer to our class’s math problem. The moment I heard my name called I promptly began articulating the solution. I was so caught up in sharing that I didn’t realize that my teacher actually hadn’t called on me to respond, but instead had called on on another student with the same name. Whoops

A decade later in a different classroom, I sat silently and a bit uncomfortably while the woman across from me talked for what seemed like an eternity. This exercise for our pastoral care class was for my conversation partner to speak for two full minutes (not quite an eternity) while I maintained eye contact and nodded but gave no verbal feedback. Afterwards I was to share with her what I had heard her say. That simple act of mirroring revealed how unnatural it was for me to listen. For so much of my life I had been jockeying for more space to speak. Not talking took focus and listening attentively required skill, but there were also great rewards in doing so: better understanding, deeper truth, and more compassion.

Last week I received this fitting bit of wisdom in an email from the Enneagram Institute:

Listen to others: they are often right, too. And even if they are not, there is almost always a kernel of truth to the point of view they are expressing. By listening to others, you not only will learn more but will become more informed and sensitive. Don Richard Riso, Understanding the Enneagram

Since graduating from seminary ten years ago I have found myself applying the discipline of sacred listening in my group facilitation work and while presenting at conferences. How many of us have attended a workshop or conference breakout session only to spend the majority of the time listening to one person lecture? I’ve decided that I no longer want to reinforce that kind of lopsided dynamic, which leaves little space for others to share their truth. How much wisdom have we all been missing as a result?

Recently, in a room full of wise women gathered for the United Methodist Women’s Assembly, I invited those attending my workshops to dive into the same biblical texts that I focus on in my forthcoming book Women Rise Up. I divided them into small groups, assigned each one a story, and asked them to explore together two simple, though not necessarily easy questions about the passage:

What about this story troubles you?
What about it inspires you?

As I passed the mic from table to table, I was moved by the thoughtful reflections they shared, and I was heartened to hear that some of their understandings aligned with my own. But then one woman shared an insight about the Book of Ruth that was so profound that it sent a shiver down my spine. In all the time I had spent studying and reflecting on this story I had never read the passage in quite that way.

Her wisdom-sharing transformed and deepened the conversation in the room. And it reinforced for me the importance of cultivating space for the wisdom held in the room to emerge. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve approached a text, even a situation, with the belief that nothing new could come from it. I was thankful to be proven wrong once again by the wisdom in the room.

Rev. Katey Zeh is an ordained Baptist minister, a nonprofit strategist, writer, and speaker at the intersections of faith and gender justice. She is the co-host of Kindreds, a podcast for soul sisters. Her book Women Rise Up will be published by the FAR Press this year. Find her on Twitter at @kateyzeh or on her website kateyzeh.com.

Spiritual Ideas, Existential and Eastern, in Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Elisabeth Schilling

After my year of teaching high school students, I found a kinship with them in their frustrations, longing, apathy, hopelessness, and hope. Fortunately, we studied together Jean Paul Sartre, whom I want to get to know more intimately, but we, the teens and myself, could take the spiritual answer to our questions about the meaning of life (is there one? What is it?): The meaning of life is to give it meaning.

I am not sure about their generation, but adolescence for me, in mine, was about discovering, not necessarily creating. Of course, now I think it is a little of both.

Sometimes I wonder if there is also a lesson. Being an academic, perhaps I love learning and teaching. I demonstrate my love as Jonathan Livingston Seagull does, by offering to others, perhaps a specific community of others, those who have chosen or must be in a state of learning (easily found in institutions of high school and college), the truths I have gathered (59). Of course ‘truth’ is a word that tastes a bit tannic, for it needs to be rolled around by the tongue a bit to be cleansed; perhaps to mitigate its toxic potential, we can never consume it undigested, but must gestate it and transform it within our warm bodies, just at the cliff, before we allow it to permeate our organs in a chemical structure that serves us.

Continue reading “Spiritual Ideas, Existential and Eastern, in Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Elisabeth Schilling”

When Spirit Speaks by Katey Zeh

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Though I couldn’t call myself a skeptic in general, I’m always a bit dubious when someone claims to have an audible connection with the divine. I’ve found sacred guidance to be more subtle than that, revealed slowly over time through snippets of conversations and on the pages journals and during walks in the woods with my dog. Revelations are rarely sudden for me. They tend to emerge piece by piece, like clues to a puzzle, until the clarity eventually comes.

Imagine my surprise and subsequent doubt when I heard a voice say recently, “You are already doing the work you want to do.” Continue reading “When Spirit Speaks by Katey Zeh”

Crowding into the Spirit World: Reclaiming a Metaphysics of Multiplicity by Jill Hammer

A number of years ago, I had the opportunity to take a class with Chava Weissler, a scholar at Lehigh University who studies Jewish history, community, and sacred practices– particularly those practices related to women. My fellow students in the class were other rabbis, taking a break from their work in order to do some learning. Dr. Weissler was teaching about an Ashkenazi Jewish women’s practice known as “soul candles”—the making of candles during the High Holiday season to honor the dead of the community as well as the mythic ancestors. Candles for Abraham and Sarah were made alongside candles for grandparents and other deceased relatives, using wicks that had been laid out along the graves to take the “measure” of the dead. During the making of the candles, the candlemakers would ask that these ancestors would pray for the living, just as the living prayed for the dead. As Dr. Weissler described this practice, a nervous giggle passed through the room.

I remember being shocked. I understand that my colleagues have varying beliefs around life after death and around spirit in general. And, hearing my colleagues laugh at such a ritual and its attendant beliefs surprised me. Those same colleagues would never laugh at the idea that God wrote the Torah (even if not all of them believe that) or at the idea that God answers prayers (even though I’m sure many of them struggle with that idea too). But the belief in ancestors who could intercede on behalf of their relatives was alien enough to be funny. This caused me to notice that the contemporary spirit world, for some Jews, is rather empty. It contains an abstract God, and no one else.

Continue reading “Crowding into the Spirit World: Reclaiming a Metaphysics of Multiplicity by Jill Hammer”