What I've Learned About My Own Parents' Threshold into Aging?

[...a 40th year question, asked by a Fire&Water friend...]

I’ve been simmering with this invitation, this question, for several weeks now. I know there is a substantial subterranean work going on in me at the moment, but I am utterly at a loss to articulate or describe it. I am yearning deeply for a more enchanted life than I am currently living. Outlander viewing continues to companion my waking hours, some sleeping ones. The Wilde Grove series (novels 1-6) beckons. Just picked up another book Encountering Dragonfly by Brooke Williams, the husband of Terry Tempest Williams (who wrote When Women Were Birds--one of my all-time favorite books). Each of these has a clear investment--fiction or nonfiction--in the more expansive world we imagine but rarely live within. Notes on the journey into reenchantment? I wonder…

Writing about my parents–or my own observance of their aging, thresholds of their own–is a complicated matter, to be sure. Perhaps too many words. Or words that have taken on much less flavor than once they had. Given we are Midwesterners in my family, unaccustomed to much spiciness, perhaps that’s the best, eh? The last 10-15 years have been the most complicated ones for me with respect to my folks. My spiritual proclivities and callings diverging so clearly from their own. Or my perception of their refusal to grow spiritually, emotionally. The first is the intellectual frame; the second is the wounded emotional one. I love my folks dearly. They offered me precisely the childhood and young adulthood that my soul needed. I want nothing but what’s best for their own journey(s), into their own choices. All underlaid with a deep sense of grief and feeling largely unseen, unheard, most of my life, amidst their devotion to religious tradition(s), my father’s family-ethos (and refusal to feel), pride.

Beginning with this “now”...? I find myself a blessed daughter, given my folks were quite forward-thinking in their own later-life-care-decisions. I have cousins who are just entering the challenges of later-life care with proud German-American parents/fathers, or tender-hearted ones unwilling to challenge the strong-willedness of his wife, their stepmother/aunt. These cousins are struggling a bit, to both discern what is loving and what is necessary. In quite unexpected (at the time) fashion, my folks chose to move across the country, to Portland, Oregon, about 6 months before their eightieth birthdays. My father’s brother, Dale, chose a beautiful CCRC (Continuous Care Retirement Community) and urged his brother, both my folks, to come join him (and his wife, Bette). The timing of this choice has always struck me as significant–more about that below–but it meant that I have absolutely no guilt or regret about living elsewhere than my folks. So many here in Ohio lament that their children have moved away, to larger cities, better work, etc. My folks were the ones to abandon me, so to choose their new life in Oregon. I’m convinced they ‘bought’ themselves another decade, at least, in such a choice. I’m really happy for them.

 

 

We laugh today at how my own assumptions led me to be so surprised, and not a little irked. Being the good daughter, taking care of my aging parents, was going to be my ticket out of United, my ability to retire early, tend to family. Then they up and deserted me for their new life out there. I’ve teased them about that, using a “how dare you” kind of tone. They were shocked with the presumption on my part, and I now see how proud they are. They would never have withstood my caring for them with such intimacy as they age. Hesses are such proud people. Yes, me included. 🙂

The timing for their choice has always struck me as significant, though I’d never broach the subject or share my observation with them. They chose to leave the Dayton area at nearly the height of the Troubles, as I call them. My refusals to buffer their marriage anymore. My ‘growing up’ and differentiating into a more whole Feminine within me, my body. This movement utterly terrified them, given their own ancestral wounds and inabilities to know emotional growth, inner work. One time of coffee with my mom, when I overtly refused to pick up her emotional venting, her grief, she said to me, utterly void of any emotion: “Well, I guess you’re dead to me then.” No daughter ever truly recovers from such a statement, sensation, though I took it in stride then and denied it to her face. “Clearly I’m not, because here I sit.” She and I have never talked about it, and I’m sure she’d not remember it today. My folks have triangulated in power-over ways with me in my marriage, attempting to ally with Brian against me or manipulate connection with him at expense of my own. Sure sign of ancestral wound, safety only in competitive connection with the male of the family. At one point, at the height of the Troubles, the statement was (whether from Mom or Dad, I don’t remember, as they work(ed) as a unit): “Lisa has grown so strange, we wouldn’t be surprised if you wanted a divorce.” When this came out in a couples’ therapy session with Brian, during this time, I physically withdrew, stunned and hurt. [One strange assurance in this morbid tale is that Brian’s an attorney, if inactive in terms of the Board. His memory for court-cases, or in this case, for his own emotional alliances, I trust wholeheartedly. I have no doubt that my folks would say something like that to him, then.] So, my folks’ fears were a painful weapon in my own maturation into who I am today.

It was amidst this climate that my folks all of a sudden chose to put their names on the list for the Holladay Park Plaza, the CCRC where Dale & Bette were living. They left in 2019, and made it into their apartment 30 days before Covid lockdown. Now that we have moved past the Troubles, if not really through them toward healing, none of us touches the tender strands of that time in our lives. I don’t observe aloud my awareness of what they were getting away from (me, facing their own fears, incapacities). No point that I can imagine. I do attempt to celebrate that they have landed in a place good for them, extending their lives into new relationships, a larger community within which to belong, beautiful settings and long-term care.

Brian was quick to summarize when we got home from my birthday dinner–which they chose to tell me they were going to move to Portland, making my celebration all about them instead…classic move by my folks: “You realize this means you won’t be with them when they die…?” I startled at this bluntness, but it is how he deals with sensitive emotional things. “You’re probably right,” I must have said, “yet no one knows when or how anyway. It will be as it will be.” It has arisen in my memory several times over these last years, of course, making me wonder whether I’ve already grieved the loss of my parents in some substantial way. Or I regularly grieve their loss, even as I attempt to welcome what connection does remain between us.

In our (mostly) weekly Zoom calls, we maintain a connect that seems to please them, satisfy their needs. I sometimes feel like I don’t even need to be there, however. I dance a thin line between sharing my life with them and simply giving glimpses of things that might trigger their fears, their refusals to see me as I am. I try to get out there to visit 1-2 times a year, once “just me” for a couple days, and once both Brian and me. Our plan is to visit them this summer, late July, when we visit with them for 2-3 days, then go to the coast with my cousin, Dan, and his wife Veronica, with whom Brian and I are close (enough). Then we come back for 1-2 days with my folks before flying back home. My folks surprised me by flying back to Ohio in November 2024, for Brian’s 10-year anniversary celebration with his church. I’m glad they came, even though it was like a wedding when the happy couple can never spend any real time with everybody.

Even from this distance, I notice the little things going–memory, short-term especially; physical capacity (my mom, especially); narrowing worlds… They have been huge civically-involved supporters of local city life, so are tipping toward clinical depression with what’s happening in the States. They’ve created their sense of safety in the world by serving, leading in their ways, and now it looks like it’s all been for nothing.

I practice bowing to their experience(s), their sadnesses, while working hard not to buffer, pick them up, pretend I can have any impact in their lives like that. Hard for a “parentified daughter” whose visceral reality is connecting safety with shame. When I feel shame, they must care for me is the sick version of this, but what I grew up with. What they grew up with. As they’ve watched my own freedom grow, strengthen, they get curious sometimes. Maybe a bit envious. But I doubt enough to be able to change eight decades of life’s habits. But who knows? I surely don’t, speaking with them by Zoom an hour a week.

 

 

I spend my efforts attempting to encourage my mother in her own ways, habits, hobbies–needlework, she loves, as well as knitting, etc. We share delights in jigsaw puzzles and sharing the family news, whatever direction it may be coming–them to us, us to them. I spend effort in encouraging my dad’s old and new loves–scripture, tradition (old) but also poetry now (quite new). Moving there, getting outside his own identity as physician and uber-elder in the Presbyterian Church, Dad has discovered the emotional happening that poetry can be. He seems to be continuing to grow, to get curious about things, to see more. I know he has fears about how Mom is growing more and more insular, never needing to leave the apartment if she can help it. He’s much more the extrovert, we’re finding, which counters the narrative of most of their life together. But he was swamped with personal connection and contact as a physician, so would come home needing solitude, silence, time with his family. Now I see him reaching outside himself a whole lot more for the kind of connections he needs, alongside Mom or on his own.

Overall, I think I have already grieved the loss of my mother, for all intents and purposes. I stay connected to Mom in the ways she is able while recognizing that all those yearnings I’ve lived with will never be met by her. Perhaps could never have been met by her, which is what drove me to my sacred work in the world. I don’t hold this as some divine plan, but I do hold it as making beautiful lemonade out of the lemons I inherited. I spent years lamenting all my mother could never offer me–connection to my own body, love of my physical form, deep intimacies with another–all while feeling a deep belly sadness for all she must have survived simply to survive as she did. Her dissociation from her own body happened way before I arrived, after all. Doesn’t (and did not) have anything to do with me. And now I know to be care-full around women whose relationship with their mother was/is visceral, affectionate, loving of body, curious of the world. Without my own awareness activated and bounded, I’ve landed in deep attachments with potential of harming me or the other (usually a ‘her). Those attachments have healed so very much in me, AND it’s been costly for those who companioned me. (Even as I trust it’s been providential and healing for them too…that’s how attachment works, after all). The grief I will feel when my mother’s body dies is something I cannot imagine, though I know it will come–heavy or light, known or only eventually discovered as I go. I have wondered whether my relationship with Mom will be easier, once she’s on the ancestral plane? I’m hopeful there…

In some ways, I’ve grieved the loss of my father as well, though his death will probably impact me much more. He and I had a deep closeness for most of my young life. Probably too close, given it limited my willingness to risk relationships with my peers until I was in my late 20’s. He and two of his brothers were my emotional home, which made sense I’d land in higher education then. Differentiating from Dad happened earlier, in my late-20’s, as I learned family-of-origin patterns, as I began to learn my life was different from his, from theirs. That my own body’s sensations were not shame-ful, even though in a woman’s body. He knew not how to handle my becoming a conscious feminine woman, so mostly hid behind my mother, who was furious, felt abandoned (or so I imagine today). As was healthier, they became an emotional unit, more important than the one I had had as primary with my father. I grieved the loss of that centrality, but also breathed in the oxygen I needed to become more who I am. Ever since The Troubles, then, Dad and I have tried to dance a connection we share while not disturbing Mom’s insecurities. Sometimes it’s simply too much effort. So I’ve grieved the loss of that connection, in various ways. Relief that the dysfunction of entanglement-for-safety is no longer necessary. Pleasure in watching his delight in his life out in Portland, the little-boy glee he sometimes shares when he gets to share a poem with a resident or a movie with floor-neighbors.

All of this is complicated more recently as “end of life decisions” have had to be made, signed, shared across the family web. Dad shared their will&testament with Brian, who will basically be the executor of the estate when they die. My folks’ values–the choices they have made bequeathing inheritance–differ from Brian’s, so he’s furious with them, feeling they are once again not valuing or honoring me in who I am. I don’t know the details–don’t need to know them–but I watch it play out in subterranean ways–Brian’s withdrawal from them, sharing any space with them on Zoom, his fierceness for me which can lean toward disrespect of them, which incites my own family loyalty…etc. Blah blah blah. 🙂All in all, Brian and I have saved ferociously, knowing we decided not to have children, so I’m not concerned about the money, the inheritance or not. I trust we’ll be fine, and anger’s too heavy to carry for such things. But Brian will have to do his own work with that–or not… Not my journey, even if it is my circus, and arguably, my monkeys. 🙂

Time to jump in the shower, heading into the high-holy-day that today is (Maundy Thursday). I knew I wanted to–needed to–come to some speech about all this, even as I hold both lament and love side by side. I wish so much more for my folks–more peace, more ease, more intimacy–even as I know they are making precisely the choices they are able to make, want to make, that don’t prioritize those things. I don’t have regrets about this journey, though the sadness is never very far away. I’m coming to accept that my ancestral woundedness will never truly heal, and that’s as it needs to be. I will always yearn to be seen and heard more deeply than seems available to me, and I will avoid risking into those gifts, for fear of losing my own safety, security. Except glimpses and daring still come, reminding me life is not done until it’s done.  There’s always a new opportunity to risk deeper love, deeper connection. It’s not all on me, but I do have to–get to–co-create, participate in it all.

My ‘baba-yaga’ in the woods, Susan, gave me the best framework to hold all this for me. She observed that when it was time for my parents to incarnate, each chose their path so to serve their soul’s path, with impact for my own growth, maturation, resilience, delight. I would not be who I am today, or have offered the work I am offering today, but for their incapacities as much as their capacities, conscious intentions. I am grateful, in the end. I do love my family, quirks and hurts and all.

He's a Grandmother, Perhaps

What is the gift of the ‘messy cry’? In a world, or in a community, in which such things go beyond expectation or comfort?

A colleague of 19 years finishes out his professional responsibilities today with a commencement address. Yesterday was his final Board meeting and last night was the formal-institutional farewell for him and his wife–a time of reflections-recollections offered by faculty, staff, and a very well spoken student on a video (given he could not attend in person). I was one of the faculty colleagues who offered up some words, which were (blessedly, with relief) well received. Emotion. Laughter in the right places. A bit of collegial rib-poking: intellectual virtue? the F/feminine? Potato, po-tah-to. A good day and evening all around, if exhausting and frustrating, sad, bittersweet.

My own grief befuddles me, leaving me uncertain and a little unnerved. Knowing today will be a crowded and overwhelming mess of people, I was sure to say my goodbye and share a hug last night. The messy cry waxed and waned on the way home, but erupted with a bit more force as I debriefed with Brian, then as I wrote to some colleagues about the more official ‘business’ aspects of my work with Board members yesterday. Such a visceral response is way out of proportion for who this colleague is, has been, for me.  Who is David for me, in my soul’s journeying, such that the grief is so pronounced? 

I have kept a care-full distance over the years, respecting the professional boundaries and his role as my supervisor in academic things. We have been professionally quite friendly, sharing in the inanities of academic/vocational life at United with laughter, some cynicism, frustration and celebration too. But I would not call him close, in the ways I know close friends. His dry Texan masculinity prevents the kind of connection I know with other male spirit-friends in my life (thinking Irwin, Brad, for instance). He is inordinately uncomfortable with overt expressions of emotion, so I have kept a tight rein on this large, deep-feeling part of me. I don’t emote at United, by and large, and academic colleagues appreciate it, methinks.

Then Brian said something last night, something that touched a piece of it at least: he’s a grandmother, perhaps. The first image that came to my awareness was a drum circle, strangely enough. The steady beat that holds the center, around which all other drummers weave their rhythms in and out, is called the Grandmother Beat. David has certainly been a steady beat at the heart of United for a very long time. His leadership style and his spiritual work sacrificed much so to insure United’s stability, or if not that, then more security than it had before he arrived.

That’s not what Brian was saying, though. He was suggesting that David touches the life-strand of my paternal grandmother, Ruth Berger Hess. I’m not quite sure how to name how that is true, but I feel the truth of it all the same.

My Grandma Ruth is a complicated figure in my storyline–a scriptural literalist who grew increasingly rigid in her faith as she aged; an absolute rock around which her family revolved. She was the masculine in my family line (while my Grandpa Ben stewarded the F/feminine). Fierce. Loving. Unbending. Overbearing. And for me, emotionally unreachable. Her faith expression meant that she bonded well with my sister, if not with me. My father informed me toward the end of her life that she thought I hated her. Or at least did not love her. I wrote her a card of affection, but there was always this emotional distance between us, perhaps born of familiarity or similarity that made her uncomfortable. (I wasn’t self-reflective enough at that age to have much feeling about it…) [Ruth Berger Hess, with her eldest son, Karl, both of blessed memory].

My uncle and my father have both noted how much I am like my grandmother, if not in these faith-family ways. Grandma Ruth was a young woman with will, and an autonomy deeply impacted by an overbearing German-American father. She developed close friendships, even toward the end of her life. She was the first woman writer of my family line, writing a weekly family letter (with three mimeographed-copies) for over forty years. But she was a woman with a powerful agency in her own indirect way(s). She always found a way to pursue her ends, even if it was indirect and situationally adept, plausibly acceptable for the system in which she lived, served, loved. She was a force to be reckoned with, unsure what to do when her granddaughter demonstrated similar force.

About five years ago, the grief I have for how little emotional access I had with her surfaced in some intensity. (She died in the mid-80’s, after a beautiful day of a doctor’s appointment, a hug of her son–my father–lunch with a friend, getting her hair done, dinner, then a post-dinner nap-heart attack). Decades after her death, I began to express my own lament at how little I knew her. How complicated my relationship was with her. My deep appreciation for her, even as we were not emotionally close, in my sense of things. Blessedly, one of her best friends in life, Yvonne Becker, was still living up in Troy. I arranged to visit with her and recorded our lengthy conversation on my phone. I learned more about Grandma’s and my similarities, but also how connected my own path of Spirit has been with the friendships my grandmother sustained for so long. The largest bit being how overwhelming life in the Spirit can be in today’s congregational, fear-driven churches. Godde wants to offer so much more than our currently configured communities know how to receive, withstand, sustain.

David does touch a lot of this emotional weather in my soul’s journeying. He and I have little overt emotion expressed between us. We are vastly different in the Spirit that yet holds our path in a oneness I can feel, sense. We belong together in this faith family, yet struggle to understand or see one another as we are. And to have so little access to the emotional expressions underlying such belonging creates a sense of sadness or yearning in me. Intensely, at times, aware of the spirited-belonging yet also the lived separations of personality, narrative, familiarity.

Departure into leadership of another seminary doesn’t alter any of this, really, which is why my own grief befuddles, I guess. I will miss the competence and articulate leadership he brought into my professional world, but the professional world of United is such a small fraction of my sacred work that it won’t be a huge loss for my spirit. [I care about United, but not as he does, did, does. Part of our differentiation...]. I suppose I had some dreams of working on an intellectual-project of some kind with David, demonstrating how to live and love in ecclesial difference. I grieve the sense of easy-access to that kind of possibility, perhaps. Particularly as his new role will surely be all-consuming of his time, focus.

In the end, David’s movement into leadership at Asbury won’t dramatically alter my own sacred work in the world, though I will miss the steady heartbeat of what he brought to United. [I will say that I crafted my summer course differently, recognizing that there was no longer an institutional need to hold a center-bridge across differences. I felt much freer to just do what I do as who I am, letting the both/and commitment go, just as United has let it go...] David's lack of proximity won’t alter the immediacy of text-access and the occasional nudge in to see how Spirit is tending his spirit. I may have even more access or availability to the writings and speaking-leadership contributions he makes, given I do care for him in the way that I do. I will wind up prioritizing my time to receive those things, missing the regular informal connections we had with proximity.

Brian was perceptive to sense that the emotional-visceral griefwork does touch into my paternal grandmother storyline. I will always want and need more emotional expression than any dry Texan man could imagine for himself. I wouldn’t want David to change that in the slightest, of course, and my heart is always big for the intensity of Spirit-spirit friendship borne in faithful human connection. I will always yearn for more than David knows how to express. Grandma Ruth in spades.

Words and Words and Words…Where is my HEART here?

My dear spirit-friend:

The writing during Holy Week begins to find me at different times each year, with different nudges, Nudges. This year has involved three I want to name before diving into my "What does resurrection mean to me today?" musings. A dear friend from Canada is turning 40 this September, so she wrote me a handwritten letter (4 pages long!), inviting reflections on a variety of topics. One prompt was to remember my 40th birthday, with any insights from it. What a gift it was for me to reflect on that with her--my Upper West Side Jewish Immersion Experience, visiting you and your family, your communities, given we'd just finished teaching the Wisdom Formation course. [Long prose, but if you're curious, here.] Second, Brian and I received a sweet note from Brad Friday morning, which is not unusual. We often touch base on our holidays, with a nod or a card or whatever. But this time, he asked us to reflect with him on Good Friday, if we were willing. I was already 5 pages into this week's writings, but this request shifted my attention a little. I shared with him this Holy Week practice so important to me, to give him context, even as I cloaked you, personally. Not sure why, but I felt protective of this space, for myself, for how this is our thing, yours and mine.

[My note to him: I was moved by your note, by your invitation this morning. No reason to have ever mentioned it, but I've long had an annual practice of reflecting on "What does resurrection mean to me now?" It began over 15 years ago, with a dream where I was sitting at table, talking with a Buddhist lama and a Jewish spirit-friend I'd just met. "I don't even know what resurrection even means anymore!" I exclaimed with some frustration. Which is when I woke up. Each year, ever since, I've asked and mused on the question for Easter morning--sometimes intimate, sometimes professionally-tinged and blog-worthy.  Sometimes it's a bit each day--Maundy Thursday through Easter morning--sometimes it's just some paragraphs about the whole week/day/season. This note is just to you, as I rarely share my words with Brian. He and I are in such different spaces, as you know, though I do share orally with him, what seems to rise as share-able. Usually after he's had a stiff drink, up on the shore/Grand Marais, given his poor churchman's soul rarely knows what to do with me. :):):) The Good Friday musings for this year are pasted in below.]

The third thing was then sitting with an old spirit-friend who I'd lost track of through Covid and life, but with whom I have since reconnected: Mary Reaman is her name. Our conversation brought the Unseen Song back into my awareness, and I've not been able to stop listening to it. It's been the soundtrack of what's emerging for me here...

I think I’m too Jewish to be Christian (as understood today) and too Christian to be anything else. 

Jesus, the name above all names, so I’ve been shaped to hear, to know.

Jesus, the one who emptied himself–though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited (Phillipians 2:5-9).

Jesus, the One who I suspect would be dumbfounded today with what we’ve created in his name, in the Church, outside of the Church.

I have done my level best to hold the both/and Jesus models in his Person, in his life-death resurrection, yet this year, I find myself wondering if my need to reconcile who he is to me, for me, is not the very attachment it is time for me to release…? Not releasing him. Not releasing what I know to be true within Christian wisdom streams. But beginning to encourage it all as path, not proclamation; pointing forth, not rehearsal for some future reconciliation. [It strikes me as significant that the substantial transition my own institution is undergoing is relevant here. For over a decade, the current Dean has inspired community able to hold both/ands in relationship despite polarizations and even a denominational schism. The current Board’s inability to breathe into this vision has now led to the Dean’s departure to become President of another seminary (Asbury Seminary). The both/and work I have always been about now seems to have no immediate context of community-lived. Post-election, I have less energy for both/and too. Not surprisingly, then, here we are in Holy Week, the spiritual-soil-sample of where I’m feeling Led…Perhaps my both/and work is done?]

Brian became on fire this spring as he preached through the Letter to the Hebrews for his congregation, for the season of Lent. The message he received? That atonement does not actually center on the Crucifixion, as so much Christian theology idolizes it, but on the Ascension. On the offering of Life back into Life that every Israelite priest would recognize in Temple observance. It’s not about the blood, in other words, but the Life that blood signifies. Brian came to Life himself with the awareness, the excitement in him in this new learning for him. While I didn’t draw Brian’s attention to it, I had already learned the offering of Life back into Life as I prayed the Rosary with the Way of the Rose community. I had already learned the cyclical nature of life into death into new life, a pinnacle reached when the Queen of Heaven receives her crown but which only continues to live as the Jesus story begins again. And again. Then again. 

 

More and more of my own visceral receivings, seekings, have breathed in this awareness that resurrection is not actually unnatural, but a divinely configured reality within what Cynthia Bourgeault named (for me) the Imaginal Realm, in the overlap of worlds in which energy and materiality dance. I no longer need one specific Resurrection, embodied in one man 2000 years ago, to drop my jaw with wonder at the spiritual mysteries, enchanted worlds within which we catch glimpses of Connection, Communion that can never be undone. Only changed. Never lost. None of which requires me to deny the embodied resurrection of this one man, 2000 years ago. It simply places this Wonder alongside named and unnamed Wonders, some of which I’ve been blessed to experience, most of which, I only catch the Glimpses Given me. But such an observation suggests I’m more Jewish than Christian, in a traditional sense.

The primary yearning in my life right now is to live in as enchanted–re-enchanted–a world as I can withstand, as I can imagine. I don’t doubt the challenge of this, given my primary soul partner (an Enneagram Six, governed by anxiety and fears of poverty) has made choices defined almost completely by the ecclesial worlds in which he now has standing, status. [Which is not to say he’s shallow or solely ego-driven or whatever, but he is one less adept at adventure and risk, is all. His maven-competence with history means that he attends almost entirely in seeing the depraved or concrete parts of our worlds he can imagine as grounded in what has come before. I am not burdened by that, except through him!] I am hungry for a transformed world, a world with more hope and possibility, however foolishly postured. My Outlander obsession drove me to re-listen to my birth-chart interpretation, given nearly 16 years ago now. I wanted to know if one of the previous lives this interpreter told me was in the Scottish highlands. [No, if you put stock in such things. One in Germany interested me, of course, having done all my dissertation work in a similar era, on Hildegard of Bingen. And no, it wasn’t that I was Hildegard, but simply a young woman with avid religious yearnings, ripped out of a convent for political purposes by her own father, used as a political pawn for things she didn’t see in time. But who knows? I certainly smile at the presumptions here…!] I’m also immersed in the Wilde Grove series of novels, set in the just-post-Covid world, England, with The Grove–a pre-Christian monastic community that Christians would fear and call pagan–and its symbiotic partner, Wellsford Church–an Anglican parish, whose rector has just arrived, startled now that she can see the dead. Morghan, the Lady of the Grove, and Winsome Clarke, the rector, become friends and companions in shepherding the dead safely to their Rest. But the characters are compelling, with an expansive “the veil is dropping between the Worlds” kind of worldview. Which I find so compelling right now.

I seem to be living in this week as an Easter Portal, yes, but not in the traditionally liturgical significance I’ve known for so long. I have journeyed with Mary Magdalene in a shamanic journey led by Cissi Williams (in England), witnessing so much of the Passion Week in my own life, the many ways in which I crucify others, myself, again and again. To sit with the innumerable ways I fail to love deeply–my soul-partner, my folks, my sister, my colleagues, those unknown to me–and to really feel that death-dealing energy within me. To allow it. To release it into the hands, the energies, of Holy Helpers wiser and more adept than I. It met my need to bring this story closer to Home, closer to the ones I know and do love, however imperfectly.

 

Which I realize is more of what I yearn for… To claw our attentions away from this one heroic self-sacrificial figure, so to bring our hearts–our attentions–back to spaces in between us all, immersed in our real humanity, shared in all its ugliness and beauty. Scripture, worship, Jesus…all has seemed to become idolatrous, distracting, deadening. Preventing us from feeling, from remembering clearly, from knowing all the interconnection we refuse in our perceived and real separations. Preventing Christians from actually being grounded in the historic tradition, which posits a Trinity, a relationality so complicated and paradoxical that no one could truly define it all. My year’s work has been coming to terms with this energetic reality, this Force or Flow that seems to never let me go, as a renewed and renewing trinitarianism, grounded in the community led by my elders of faith but not confined nor determined by it, them. The continuity matters to me. I am not separate from “my root tradition,” but deeply grounded within it, pointing to what I’ve been given to see, to feel, to know within my woman’s body. I seek not legitimation from others, validating my experiences, but I do seek collaboration, co-creation, participation in imagining What Could Be, were we to move from interconnection instead of separation, Life instead of fear of Death we proclaim is broken, so to receive liberation from our fear. 

I think I’m too Jewish to be Christian (as understood today) and too Christian to be anything else. (Part II)

Not to move into cliche or to make light of the sh*tshow that is today’s inhumanity to humanity, but this year’s Good Friday brings me a vastly different message, Invitation, than I’ve entertained before. What we attend to, we create more of. Christianity’s obsessive focus upon the excruciating suffering of one man has been an attempt to give meaning and purpose to senseless suffering, to proclaim Good News of Salvation through the heroic self-surrender of a God-Man. My conscious feminine spidey-sense simply doesn’t buy it anymore, but has no interest in arguing about it. What we attend to, we create more of. What are we creating most today, collectively? Senseless suffering. What faith might it require to attend to Life first, to interconnection first, to how we are one another, first? More than religious traditions can inspire or imagine.

 

Which is not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, by any means, but simply to begin to make a case for what’s been growing in me for weeks, months: this restless yearning for a world way more enchanted and mysterious than the one(s) I’m living in in day job(s), even in my own home, overwhelmed by church as it always is by this time in Lent, Holy Week, two days before blessed time away. My sense of faith has vastly changed, though I will argue it's actually more true to my tradition than what we've been taught for centuries. And then I was returned to a song yesterday that found me about a year ago. Unseen Song, by Samara Jade. Worth a listen, to feel into what is to come here… I am hearing this Unseen Song everywhere these days...

 

Good Friday for me hasn’t been about the passion of Jesus for years now. Jesus has become an idol for most Christians I encounter [which is what makes me more Jewish than Christian today]. I remember when the emotional import of the crucifixion landed in me, probably 2008 or 2009, after a rabbinic Jew came into my life as spirit-friend across the distances. I was sitting in the downtown cathedral church, Westminster Presbyterian Church, next to Brian, the noon Good Friday service he and I could attend together as participants, not leaders. The jolt of awareness landed in my body, what it might have felt like to see one’s teacher, one’s friend, up on the cross. I had a face and a name now, of a Jewish friend and teacher, co-learner. Deep belly sobs erupted out of me, which I attempted to swallow, keep quiet. The liturgy shifted ever after for me that day, to the connections with spirit-friends utterly disregarded, violently refused, to the interconnection refused between spirit-beings, to the preferences for an objectified suffering of one man purported to save us from our sin. I remember thinking what a literate-minded, body-dissociated idea such salvation seemed to be. So like the men in my family, in my marriage (though I love them dearly). But what if it need not be like that at all? What if the sacred liturgical purposes I’d lived for so long had been served, now needed to be changed for a planet groaning under dissociation, separation and senseless suffering? This move does not argue with the liturgical significance, in other words, but simply shows it to be insufficient unto the day. And of course it would be. 

Don't go to war with the way things are; create alternative realities, I am reminded.  That Good Friday, I began to refuse prioritizing tradition(s) over persons, honing my heart-spirit energies into the relationality that literally breathed my life anew. Not just one, to be clear, but numerous, all with a charged energy of spirit I recognized as sacred, even Christ-centered (as my language of the time required). More and more of us are ready for this kind of interconnection, though our faith communities can often make it difficult.

 

Ever since, I can no longer stomach Christian congregation’s focus on the suffering of this one man, for sacred purposes they’ve been taught, while disregarding the suffering all around us. I’m too Jewish now. I honestly don’t think Jesus would want to be worshipped, would want his crucifixion to become the focal point of well-meaning but misguided patriarchal attempts to bring meaning to life out of death. Human beings deeply grounded in the sacredness of their own bodies, deeply steeped in the Silence interconnected with earth, earthlings, would never think this way. Traditional Christian proclamation here is so very insular, narrow, self-serving for uniqueness in an ironic way.

 

Praying the rosary with the Way of the Rose community solidified a different awareness for me, in my body, interconnected with earth-earthlings, as the Mysteries move past the crucifixion into resurrection, but not even only resurrection but the Holy Spirit, the Ascension, and the crowning of the Queen of Heaven…before playing out the pre-birth, birth, life, death, resurrection, post-death, new life rhythm all over again. And again. And yet again. Then this spring, Brian becomes on fire in his reading, exegeting, then preaching on the Letter to the Hebrews, realizing that atonement is not centered on the cross but on the ascension. The offering of Life to Life, which any Israelite priest would have recognized. Christians focus on fear and death being broken by a savior, but the priestly work is offering Life to Life. Death is a sideshow, a necessary part of Life. A Life we regularly refuse so to enjoy the stability of a traditioned familiar Sacred. We refuse the Unseen Song, not out of malice or even awareness…

 

So I listen again and again to the Unseen Song today, recognizing my faith journey, my own priestly work of offering Life to Life, nodding to death but honoring its limited role(s). Listening to silence…til it was no longer silence. Sunset til it was no longer sunset, but a darkened sky filled up with stars. Flowers, no longer flowers, wilting, drooping, dying, turning to seeds and back to flowers. Answers into questions, shining light upon the answers that had been there all along.

 

Something in this speaks to what I have written before… More and more of my own visceral receivings, seekings, have breathed in an awareness that resurrection is not actually unnatural, but a divinely configured reality within a much more mysterious, energetically unimaginable world–what Cynthia Bourgeault names the Imaginal Realm–with an overlap of worlds in which energy and materiality dance. Only with contemplation, with extended practices of silence into the Great Silence, does such a possibility even become visceral, sensible, plausible. I don’t expect to be perceived well in this new sensibility, knowing. But for my purposes here, I no longer need one specific Resurrection, embodied in one man 2000 years ago, to drop my jaw with wonder at the spiritual mysteries, enchanted worlds within which we catch glimpses of Connection, Communion that can never be undone. Never lost. Only changed. Jesus points to it throughout his recollected words, acts–healing, body-wholeness, communion. I think he’s horrified that he’s become such a holy distraction.

 

None of which requires me to deny the embodied resurrection of this one man, 2000 years ago. It simply places this Wonder alongside named and unnamed Wonders, some of which I’ve been blessed to experience, most of which, I only catch the Glimpses Given me. My own dance with Jesus has always been one of Path more than his Person, his pointing the way forward more than our proclaiming the Good News some historic community can articulate in words, or Word, now flattened into print and weaponized in fear. Jesus points to the radical invitations to participate in Godde’s creative and redemptive work, to lend one’s body to the energetics of a renewed and renewing Trinitarianism the church will rarely allow in its ecclesial grasping. [Which must serve a purpose, as it’s so prevalent…?] So I shrug my shoulders, trusting and honoring, moving beyond as much of my own grasping as I can into the re-enchanted world that beckons, through suffering, focused laser-like on Life, visceral, deep feeling, grounded in the earth.

 

It doesn’t make suffering any easier to bear, of course. It actually increases the pain felt, suffering willingly engaged, when you allow yourself to feel the sentience all around you–dissociated, unconscious, conceptually and actually violent in such a potentially beautiful world. So it seems to me, that the stronger work of spirit, of S/spirit, is to tend to Life in all things. Not disregarding or neglecting the forces that distract, that create anxiety and fear. Not to deny the everpresent force of evil, so obvious today, so heart-wrenching and death-dealing. But breathing into body, into Life, into grace, and through them, seeing–imagining, hoping for…? Life. Prioritizing joy, which is both grief/praise. 

 

The grief work required…the energetic practices of transmuting the suffering around you into Light (as in tonglen, Buddhist traditions)...are exhausting even as they are life-giving too. “Freedom on the other side of forgiveness,” as it (and such a phrase) has found me. Completely insensible. Illogical. No less visceral for all that, however.

 

Tonight, I will dress in my black robe, read two of the scriptural pericopes retelling the Passion of Jesus, then pick up the Christ candle, removing it from the sanctuary in a ritual way, singing acapella “Were You There?” all the way into the fellowship hall. The effect for the congregation is the Light of Christ being moved away from us all, into the mysteries of Holy Saturday, the day in-between, the liminal space of waiting in Christian liturgical traditions celebrating his crucifixion-death, until we proclaim that Death Breaks in Jesus’s saving work.  I am happy to offer my voice for such dramatic effect. I even enjoy it.

 

There is usually a litany honoring Jesus’s crucifixion where the congregational response is “We worship you.” In this, as well as throughout the liturgy, I remain silent throughout the service, but for the pieces I’m asked to lead. I serve in the norms of those in Brian’s community, his norms, in other words, all the while knowing a dissonance with and freedom from all of it. Only Love can sit in the incongruities, I find. I can offer my gifts here (and at United, for that matter), though my own journeying moves further and further down that Road to Emmaus, walking along with an unrecognized but welcome Teacher Whom I feel again and again in my life as spirit-friends connect, share their lives with me, suffer with me in all that today is. Who has led me to this Life I know, beyond forgiveness, in the lesser-dense realms of mercy, compassion, wonder. 

 

Thank Godde I am not required to make sense of any of it, eh? I know my path is one of Feeling. Letting the grief take me, in sobs and tears I often cry without any sense of why or what-for. Allowing any Light within me to transmute all I sense in the sh*tshow of today, any I encounter, particularly those who irritate or anger me. Always my go-to in refused grief. So how to breathe Life, hold space at the Center, look for the next small act lived in a world often only I (and some dear friends, with whom I stay sane) can see. Enough for now. We’ll see what Holy Saturday, Easter morning, instigates…

Holy Saturday

The last several years, I have led worship with Brian in his church in the evening Good Friday service--reading a couple scripture pericopes, then removing the Christ candle from the sanctuary in a formal, liturgical act of slowly leaving the room while singing "Were You There." It's been meaningful to many and I am heartened to be able to serve in this way. The liturgy itself is increasingly problematic for me, given my own faithing distrusts the church's fascination with sacrificial atonement and worship of Jesus, which contradicts his own life relinquishing divinity, finding it not to be exploited. But church does what it does, and I'm there to sing, not worship. Hold reverence, yes. Unbeknownst to me until midway through the service, I saw I was to read Matthew 27's rendition of Jesus's death. I glanced it over, making sure I knew any Hebrew phrases or unfamiliar names. 

This perfunctory posture of soul did not prepare me to read the text aloud, however. My scholar self held the text's question just fine: "Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?" but my bodysoul was not prepared to read aloud to my husband's congregation, "...that is, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Unbidden tears arose. My voice choked. I paused, unable to read further for a time...then got it together enough to finish the reading. My body's memory was sitting on the couch in my living room, reading Cheryl Bridges Johns’s essay in a Brill volume whose name I forget now, her weaving of scripture into the warrant for all that would come in the Pentecostal Feminist writings therein. 

On this side of it, I am struck by what a gift it was to be assigned that particular text, that particular liturgy. I winced inside as Brian and others ascribed their own assumptions as to the meaning for me, which for good or ill had little to do with Jesus's death, as horrific as it was. So I sit here at Pettibone Coffee in Dayton, finalizing a summer syllabus in preparation for some sacred days away with Brian up at our Lake Superior 'hermitage' (East Bay Suites, Grand Marais!), wondering at the undesired gift of it all. It was good to say it aloud, in that setting; it was painful that no one around me could receive (last night) what my own experience was, to be seen, witnessed, honored. It’s good to have spirit-friends with whom I can be seen, heard, in what is actually significant for me here.

Fire&Water Musings, as Invited by NicoleF

Fire&Water continues to evolve, as every living thing does–in itself, with a new cohort and a finishing one, but also within me, part of the second cohort, winter 2021-summer 2022. First collaboratively with one friend, then with another, I have co-facilitated (informally, lightly) a monthly coffee-club gathering of F&W folks via Zoom. I am feeling that coming to its own completion, even if the connection I feel within the F&W lineage remains lively within me. Having been in the lineage of a couple different circle-way communities, I often find myself musing on the arc of life-death-rebirth each has held for me, as well as the communal reflections instigated by such arcs. It’s easy to presume something is wrong in the later part of the arc, even as I suspect impermanence is simply the way of things here. Everything in its season. Everything in its own lifespan. 

Doesn’t hurt to muse ‘aloud’ what rises, I figure, and perhaps something in me yearns to find out what I’m feeling, thinking, here.

Living in the loneliness-era (or epidemic, depending upon one’s energetic spin on the whole thing) places me in a near-constant yearning for deeper intimacy, deeper connection. My entire life’s work has been a “clawing my way back to my body” in hopes of actually participating in such things, not solely thinking-writing about them. The overwhelmingly disconnected and even dissociated age we live in makes forays into deeper community episodic, at best. Human beings in this time come together seeking new-ancient ways to gather, to remember collaboration, to co-create, even to experiment with making decisions in other ways than apparently available in declining institutions, grasping for stability and power-over. True memory is recovered in intentionally crafted, short-duration ways: a colloquy, a fellowship, a leadership program lasting anywhere from 1-2 years. Separation. Threshold. Integration.

It’s the integration work that ultimately makes the difference in transforming a life, I think, even as completing such work means just that: completion. Endings that are then new beginnings. Separation. This is hard, particularly when one then separates from–leaves–some or all of one’s (previous?) intimates in the journey, so to grow into the next round. 

What does remaining part of the community mean? 

What remains in each of us from our shared, deep intimacies as members of the community continue to evolve, to mature (hopefully), to strengthen in their own life’s work?

What does community mean when such seekers are often cycle-breakers in historically-wounded lineages, when such folks are more comfortable with the periphery of transformations than with being in any communal center?

These questions have lived with me for several years now, long before I landed in Fire&Water’s leadership-initiation work. The circle-way community within which I dove most deeply, committed most fully for over ten years, offered me a life-death-rebirth journey I’m only conscious of completing relatively recently. The discovery of community and the invitation to Life these circles brought me (2012-2024) enlivened and transformed almost every aspect of my life–personal-embodied, marital, vocational, spiritual, familial, communal and more. I suffered for years through my own refusals of the death(s) required in such a growth journey. Not only had this way of gathering transformed my own life, I had committed my own professional-vocational life to crafting-holding circles for others’ lives to be transformed. I had evolved into recognized leadership of the leadership trainings, finally offering the Conscious Feminine Leadership Academy training in 2017 for the mother-school. I was therefore not remotely prepared to have the dying-to-rebirth part of the arc begin to “happen to me.” I refused to surrender to the obvious: I was outgrowing the community’s capacity for change. I was pushing for the vision I thought we had shared, but which “we” did not. Or at least in the same way (to be diplomatic about it). Knowing myself as a teacher, I spent years trying to teach a community how to learn what it did not want to know, at least from me. 

One of the largest challenges the leadership sisters wrestled with was how to retain that sense of shared intimacy, known so deeply in specific leadership cohorts, across the leadership cohorts that came after. An annual retreat of leadership sisters was the obvious choice, which worked well enough for nearly a decade, maybe more. As the number of leadership sisters grew, however, the ethos and possibilities began to change. Those playing more executive leadership roles began to discern how to limit, to control the size of the gatherings, so to retain the intimacy of the whole. Except that changed the ethos of the circle-way wisdom from ‘y’all come’ to ‘come if you merit being here.’ No critique or blame, here. It’s an un-solvable (so far) challenge of community evolution in an era losing its wisdom about community’s depth and growth, breadth and evolution.

All of which led me into Fire&Water, though I almost refused this invitation to rebirth. I had lost faith in the power of human circles to sustain community that mattered. I was in a hopeless place, convinced that entering in was ultimately a fruitless pipe-dream, an idealistic waste of time. The piece I had been missing was how to grieve. How to surrender into the death-into-rebirth part of the arc.

I’m sure I’m still missing important parts I will learn in the times to come, about the invitations to Life, the necessity of death, the energies of rebirth.  How it never seems to end, but only simmer or boil along. I remain sad a good portion of the time, grieving what I perceive to be the sh*tshow of today’s “falling apart,” today’s “Great Turning,” but the sadness no longer drives my body-ship, nor does it determine my spirit’s wonder, curiosity, renewed willingness. I sit with it, in other words. It no longer sits on me, suffocating me.

Yet the questions named above–about community, its longevity, its authenticity–remain active and invitational within me. I see my active participation in Fire&Water coming to some close, though I remain with a deep sense of connection to my own cohort’s companions. Particularly as some have been woven into the leadership of new cohorts, in roles of apprentice to its founder, Quanita Roberson. I recognize they are moving forward within the F&W circling in a way inaccessible to the rest of us, without sense of lack or loss. Just different roles, ways of service. The friendships that are to be a part of my own growth path continue to nourish us both. Those that were more part of the ‘rim’ of the circle begin to fade away into memory. But the grief is quite close to praise, recognizing this to be part of the impermanence of things. I am so very grateful for rim-holders, even as I am grateful for those closer in to my own journeying today.

It seems to be the divine order of things today for our “found communities” to wax and wane in their cycles of life-death-rebirth. Each lineage makes its contribution into the whole, for the lifespan in which it strives to remain, to contribute, to thrive. I hope Fire&Water continues to teach us all this impermanent path and I bow to the realities of its evolution that may or may not require anything of me, overtly. 

One of the greatest gifts it has given me, which I hope to mirror back and offer as often as welcome, is that pursuing one’s own particular work sometimes means feeling like one is differentiating from the community while pursuing the Work that beckons. Not disconnecting, per se, but committing to the Work more than staying in stagnant or life-draining roles familiar to the community-of-the-moment. It feels a bit like something is dying, perhaps because it is, but trusting the arc as a whole leads to rebirth, eventually. 

Given we are all connected…given we are each other…all becomes well, all will be well.