At the age of fourteen, I began to question the Mormon faith of my family. I embarked on a life long personal and scholarly quest for truth. While teaching comparative religion and philosophy, I was drawn to the work of supporting women through labor and holding compassionate space for the dying.
In my book, “Birth, Breath, and Death,” I share moving tales of birth and death while drawing on my work as a doula, hospital chaplain, and mother. I weave together these stories with philosophical reflections on truth, meaning, and Spirit.
This is an excerpt taken from the first chapter entitled “Search.”
I spent much of my early twenties traveling throughout The Middle East and India. I lost track of time gazing at an ancient copy of Homer’s Iliad at a museum in Cairo. I remember sleeping through a freezing cold night on Mt. Sinai and awakening to a brilliant sunrise over the Arabian Peninsula. I climbed the pyramids in Egypt and protested the Israeli occupation of the West Bank with Arab and Jewish women peace activists. For a year, I studied in Jerusalem. Later, I dedicated myself to the practice of meditation at an ashram in the Himalayas.
A lively mix of debate and discussion characterized my Hebrew University days. In the evenings, I worked illegally as a waitress in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City. Adorned in Roman attire, I served fantastic platters of Middle Eastern cuisine and performed folk songs and dance routines for photo-snapping tourists. I was nineteen and living in Jerusalem, a place saturated in religious symbolism. Known as Al-Quds in Arabic and Yerushalim in Hebrew, Jerusalem is a city renewed and ravaged due to contested paradigms of poetry and politics. Continue reading “Meditating on Oneness by Amy Wright Glenn”
Feminism and Religion 