Seeking Authentic Voice

The other day Jan Richardson's online Lenten retreat pondered this: If you're familiar with the practice of lectio divina (a Greek term that means "sacred reading"), you know that it is an ancient form of prayer, a way of entering the scriptures in a meditative fashion. ... Traditionally done with passages from the Bible, lectio can also be used with visual art and with any text, including the sacred text of our own life -- the story that God is creating within each of us.  If our longings are a gift from God and a place of connection with God in the unfolding story of our life, then spending time in prayer with them can help reveal how God lives within our longings and may speak to us through them. As you linger with your list, here are a few questions for your lectio on longing. Feel free to contemplate any or all of these questions, and notice what other questions may come up for you as you reflect. - Which desire has the most en

Recently, in Jan Richardson's Lenten retreat she offered this: "Tell them about how you're never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there's always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don't speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside."                                                                --Audre Lorde's daughter, speaking to Audre     and then this poem: She Untames Her Tongue For years her tongue was trained in soothing tastes: chamomile and chocolate, peppermint and rosemary. She specialized in pleasant words that eased from her lips, murmuring apologies and niceties, consolations and lullabies till the day her tongue went suddenly numb. Saying the comfortable words  more loudly didn't help, and neither d

Top of the Rockies, highway 89 heading north toward Salt Lake City, view is looking northeast, altitude 9000+ feet I've learned some interesting information about adrenal fatigue, such as the complexity of diagnosing it. In 2008 and 2009 I was having some health issues which eventually led to a hysterectomy. During that time I had blood work done (and in the years since), which indicated that my adrenal function was on the low side of normal. Adrenal function has a wide range of "normal" and medical doctors only diagnose adrenal issues when a person has gone into adrenal failure and developed Addison's disorder or Cushings syndrome. Prior to the onset of those, adrenal fatigue can set in and bring with it a host of complications which can also be associated with many other life conditions: unexplained weight gain, especially around the belly; sleep disturbances; muscle fatigue; heart palpitations; back pain; foggy-headedness; low blood pressure; a chronic sense

Following Jan Richardson and the on-line Lenten Retreat, I am struck by her words last week when she reflected on wilderness and landscape. Pondering Jesus' forty days in the wilderness she writes that the wilderness, while not desired, is nonetheless formative for without time spent in that landscape we can never have clarity. Clarity like this doesn't come cheap. It takes a wilderness. Perhaps not a literal one. But a space where we can shed something of the familiar, the habitual, the comfortable and known; the routines and rhythms that we have shaped our lives around -- or perhaps bent and broken our lives upon. And in that space, we begin to see and to know: who we are, what we have been formed and fashioned to be in this world. I'm thinking about the landscape of my interior life, the thoughts in my head and how it feels for me to be living in this body right now. It's an odd time. I have much to be grateful for. I ought to feel at ease, peaceful and

Deb, over at the RevGals blog offers this timely Friday Five:      Frodo : I can't do this, Sam.   Sam : I know. It's all wrong. By rights we shouldn't even be here. But we are. It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.   Frodo : What are we holding onto, Sa

 (published in The Monthly Caucus of the Episcopal Women's Caucus) When I was a little girl my mother made certain I could accomplish two things: that I would be the first woman in my immediate family to go to college and I would have a career. Her primary goal was that I become financially self-sufficient and thus I would not be dependent upon a husband to “take care of me.”   A lot has changed since 1963 when my mother, influenced in part by Betty Friedan’s book the “Feminine Mystique,” instilled in me the dreams and fears she had for her only daughter.   Fifty years later I hold two master’s degrees and have a vocation as an Episcopal priest. I’ve been married to the same man for almost thirty years. And, for a time I was a stay-at-home mother tending to our two children while my husband worked outside the home and earned the money we lived on. Both my mother’s dreams and her fears became my reality, but not with the outcome she worried about.  As a priest and a wom

Here we are, the first Sunday of Lent. As you can tell by looking at our worship space, the season of Lent has some distinctive features to it: the baptismal font filled with rocks reminding us that a life of faith is often rocky. But like this water fountain in the midst of the rocks, God is with us on the journey – sustaining us, nurturing us, and nourishing us.  The dried plants remind us that our spiritual lives can be dry, dusty, and barren, wintery.    Lent is a season that calls us to do three things: 1.        Remember who we are – a people of God, made in God’s image – made good to do good. 2.        Become intentional in our practice of faith 3.        Focus on gratitude Our reading from Deuteronomy opens this season with a clear call to remembrance – the Hebrew people have finally come to the end of their forty years of wandering in the wilderness of a dry and barren desert   – their promised land is in sight. They spend time remembering and ce