Beginning to Re-Story Wisdom as She Beckons...

One fall day in 1996, I sought my plausible dissertation advisor, James E. Loder , on the fifth floor of the classroom building, Stuart Hall, knowing he had a precept class ending at lunchtime. What I received in that encounter was not what I wanted, nor what I sought, but what I needed, and so much more powerful than what I had imagined. Today, over thirty years later, the encounter in that classroom arises in my awareness as an icon of sorts, a crystallization of trust in a process that would send deep roots into the soul-soil of my vocational journey I can still recognize today. I was Given a trust in prayer , but not as I was taught to pray. Prayer sometimes happens to us, when we allow it to do so. Providing a trust in the visceral wisdom of the body, if and when we allow it, discern it, recognize it as not our own yet intimately our own . This moment also demonstrated the faithful response and willingness to unknow together , whether as individuals or in an entire witnessing com...

...or simply move it back inside one's spiritual-embodied womb, trusting it will find fertile ground in its own time...in Spirit's tether? Today was a hard day, pretending into a shared future no one can feel or see yet. It’s exciting to be on the cusp of new opportunities, new colleagues, new possibilities. Anxiety creating for some of us, but I am more and more aware that there may be more oxygen in the years to come. I celebrate that. But ‘pretending’ is the right word for what we did today. A different author might choose ‘imagining’ or ‘discerning.’ Imagining and discerning happen in grounded communities of practice, of faith. I love how those activities feel when human beings get to engage one another like that. In our case, however, pretend names more precisely the collective pretenses we were asked to hold today, without naming our own experiences, without transparent honoring or active listening into the woundedness the Board would just like to be over…but which is s...