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

… the words that bubbled out of me toward the end of an exuberant evening, our friends’ daughter’s wedding in Modern Orthodox observance. Over-the-top hospitality, food buffets (yes, plural), drinks (yes, plural), joviality and more. Seeing old friends we hadn’t seen in a couple years. The wedding blessings-service was beautiful, of course. Mostly Hebrew then a smattering of English renditions of the blessings, lots of opportunities for family and friends to be involved. A rabbinic invitation and teaching. Singing of the ketubah (wedding covenant, engraved glass for the new home). The raucous singing and dancing at the end of the service. The carb-first-course to fuel the raucous dancing upon the arrival of bride and groom into the banquet hall–women in one swirling mass, men in another. I felt the tears welling up when the bride danced with both of her grandmothers at once– so powerful to witness. The drawing-close and swirling away of young women, hoping to get chosen by the bride t...

  …had I presence of mind amidst both devotion and polite or impolitic intrusion. To Perdita Finn and Clark Strand, then, arms full of puppies, me standing on your porch: “Deep bow to each of you, both of you, for your intuitions and ways of living into bewilderment in the world today. I am thankful for all of your work(s)--books, community tending/holding/practice, etc.--and glad you are both in the world right now. I, too, live in a mystically-layered combination of worlds, often feeling a bit alone (or crazy) in the academic/ecclesial communities in which I serve, surrounded by those who do not live in an open-hearted way to all of that. Your co-creating world(s) in which more of the unseen becomes seen, or more of the holy-darkness can beckon, has made a real difference in my own life. I am so very grateful. While I don’t pop into as much Way of the Rose circling as I used to, my ability to stay with my own mystical layering is nourished by all you do. Oh, and Magic of Mothers...

“Has anyone done a retrospective of the life and work of James Loder?” asked a colleague while we were standing in the academic processional line, awaiting a Convocation for a Doctor of Ministry intensive. “Yes, of course,” I answered. “But he was quite complicated and complicating, in his great light and great shadow.” I fleshed out what I meant in conversation with her, and the academic procession began. I’ve been thinking about this exchange ever since, with a felt-sense of invitation or a beckoning of some kind. Spirit plants seeds for our learning/teaching like this, I’ve found…[image from 2001, the last graduation Loder was to attend]. Thirty years ago I began my doctoral work with James E. Loder, after graduating with my masters and completing a senior thesis with him, in independent study “of how he arrived at what he offered.” Science and theology. Soren Kierkegaard. Michael Polanyi’s work and his own journey through a “transformative moment” into what he called the logic of t...

My gut is tight this morning amidst some emergent soulwork I had not expected, nor even desired. [Isn’t that the way of it, though? The soulwork that really matters is often quite disagreeable to the ego, to the feelings of personal preference. Such things tighten guts and send us to our amygdala for self-preservation, when the invitation is to get curious and expand…].  I think I fear losing a narrative that has been deeply sacred to me but is no longer tenable or shared with the person with whom it all unfolded, over a period of years . What does a sacred unfolding mean when one of you knows it to be of God/de and the other moves into questioning, sadness, fear, and shame/shaming? Who gets to tell the story shared, and how does the connection deepen if the stories diverge into a difference that had been nourishing for us, remains nourishing now only for one? Saddening or painful for the other? Part of the soulwork then, for me, must be empowering and living into my own anti-shame...

The last six days have been a lot . I have wanted to find a quiet or jazzy space to muse 'aloud' here on the page, to see what I’m learning, mostly because there are at least 70 times 7 different entries into the feelings of it all. Beginning with sentence summaries may help…nodes of energies within each: I was reminded of the gift and burden of wordlessness , encountering a deep heart-ache about which I can do nothing but pray, holding fierceness for Life and Abundance from a safe distance. [By wordlessness –a sacred haven of learning for me over the last 15 years–I mean honoring situations and relational energies by being-with more than interpreting-explaining-doing anything within them. Apophatic spaces, where unknowing or bewilderment is more necessary than any language, attempted sacred or not. Kenotic spaces, where surrender into nothingness–dying to self so to live into Self–insists itself somehow. It feels like dying, loss, when it can be gestating or rebirth. It m...