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Wrestling with Complexity
Everything is layered and complex. God didn’t intend for so many things to be happening that are happening right now … the deeply ailing earth, the sex trafficking, the crime, the wars in Israel and Ukraine, the obesity and drug epidemics in America, the loudness and divisiveness of the world … but these things and more are happening nonetheless. I regularly lean into the truth that my beloved teacher, James Finley, speaks often, ‘God protects us from nothing yet sustains us in all things.’ The question is: what is my work in the world regarding the madness I see (and deeply feel) every day? Yesterday I read a Facebook post that read “God save us” related to the Productive Rights Amendment, Issue 1, passing in Ohio. I read another that read “Good day for ladies and bodily autonomy.” I feel both deeply. The issue…
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Wisdom through Lived Experience
I have been on a spiritual journey for years, and am amazed at the way ideas merge and converge, especially related to matters of the heart. God is always leading us. Nothing stands in isolation. I truly believe that. Which is why I believe God is speaking to us every day … God is speaking directly to us, through our embodied lived reality. During my experience in the Living School, we learned of a ‘tricycle model’ of spirituality … the front wheel is lived experience and the back wheels are tradition and scripture. All three are important if we want the tricycle to work. Lived experience without the other two leaves us misguided and on our own. Tradition and scripture without lived experience discounts very real ways we can know. (Note: our culture, capitalism, politics and the ‘matrix’ of 21st century life does its…
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Gazing
Lately I’ve been pondering my inner life and exploring various ways of being, specifically contemplative ways of being as it’s such a beautiful way of life. Interestingly, the yoga path is also a contemplative path, with its emphasis on embodiment, unity (of heart, mind, body and spirit), and conscious awareness. Life is pretty amazing, when you think about it. I couldn’t have planned it the way it’s worked out. All praise to God for leading me down the roads I needed to travel to become more of who I’m supposed to be. But I digress, back to the topic at hand … as we move into the cooler months of the year, it’s pretty typical for me to go deeper inward. While we are who we are, we also have great choice in the ways we live our lives. It’s easy to go through…
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Anam Cara for Grief, Loss and Trauma
What follows below is my Reflective Expression for a module about grief, loss and trauma as part of my Spiritual Direction Training … Reflect on your experience learning about grief, loss and trauma through a spiritual guidance lens. What wants to be uplifted from this module in terms of your unfolding understanding of who you are as an SG and how you can compassionately companion others? As I sit to write, I realize that this module was hard for me to get through. I knew it before writing—-I just didn’t have the desire to finish after I started. Now as I write, I’m reflecting about why that is … It’s been a wild summer, a life-changing one. My therapist commented that I was grieving when I last spoke to her about a month ago. I believe she was talking about me grieving my old…
