Beloved –

One day in seminary, I was lamenting to a friend, Asha – praise, petition, lament, we do a lot of that sort of thing in seminary – about my ill-spent youth and how I regretted being so fat and having been so sexually active when I was younger and having such money problems and still not understanding what it meant to “be an adult.” (Or as we might say now, “to adult.”)

She stopped me in my tracks.

She told me it sounded like I was saying I had to attain some status of virtue or experience or way of being that was other from the way I was—and am—in the world before I could move forward into the work God was calling me to. She said, “God didn’t call some slim Catharine. God called you. Just like God didn’t call Asha who wasn’t a mom. God’s calling me.”

Now, that might not be language you’re using, and that’s fine.

The point, as Asha got to, was that our whole lives point toward the moment we’re in now. Everything that has ever happened to us has led to this moment.

This place.

Even if we’re not sure what “this place” is or what we’re doing here or where we’re going, we are not alone. Not only are we accompanied by our own pasts, our own failures and shortcomings, our own hearts…

Not only are we accompanied by those who know and love us even though we are flawed and have sometimes had to feel our ways through, when we could not perceive what our next move should be…

Not only are we accompanied by the other creatures, from persistent viruses to the great blue whale, who share this gorgeous planet with us…

We are accompanied by the very Spirit that gives life to all of that. We are accompanied by the Source –that is, it is always available – of Love that always has more and more and more for us.

But if you’ve been around for a while, you’ve heard me say these things.

You’ve heard me talk about how we are all part of the Big Picture. How we are linked in beautiful chains of light and energy to all other things, an inexpressible, impossibly complex web; you’ve heard it all before.

I am still fat. And nowadays I have mobility challenges to boot, things I’m shy about, ways that make being in public really hard to manage, physically and emotionally hard.

I still find money hard to manage. I still want to spend money when I want to spend money! Darn it, money may not buy happiness, but sometimes I think if I just had one more bottle of pretty ink for my fountain pens…

I’m snippy. I’m defensive. I’m moody. I forget things – boy, howdy, do I forget things! – and I lose things (which is really just forgetting where they are).

But see, what Asha said to me is that all of that, all of every single little thing – every slight I have endured, every time I have been unkind, every unloving thing I have ever done, every way I have not taken care – these are as much a part of me as the rest.

And all of it, all of it, she said, is part of my testimony.

Testimony.

Our testimony is simply the story of how we came to understand ourselves in relationship with the Source of Love. How did I get here? What am I doing now? How am I striving and failing and trying again?

Testimony is no less than the story of your life, with all its confusions and mistakes and glories and delights.

And it is the story of a call. A call to be exactly yourself. Not to wait until you’re some kind of perfect version of an imagined self. But the self you are.  And even the self you have been, you know that one you don’t really want people to know about?

The saying from Frederich Beuchner, so often repeated among vocation directors and ministers and seminary professors is that our vocation, our call, what we are alluringly drawn to be in this world is just this: Where our own deep joy meets the needs of the world.

It’s not that we have to tackle every single need of the world. We don’t have to have a savior complex. It’s not all ours to be. It’s also what brings us deep joy. And that deep joy comes from knowing ourselves well, from understanding our own joys and sorrows, what our secret happinesses and hopes are.

“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
The world offers itself to your imagination,”

Those lines of Mary Oliver’s stay with me. Whoever you are. Not the perfect version you find yourself hoping or waiting for. You have a work to do in this world, a beingness that is yours and yours alone, and you may see it reflected in the world around you, in the world with all its “forms most beautiful,” offering itself to you and your discerning mind.

Blessings to you and to your testimony, my loves. And may the days of the ancestors have been good to you –

~Catharine~

PS – Oh! Before I forget! (Remember, I said I forget things!) December 14^th, that Saturday before the winter solstice, we will observe the fifth annual Going into the Dark event. There is an Early Bird bonus for signing up on the front end, and I think we’re going to have a tremendous group this year! So check out the Going into the Dark registration link, or the email you got from me last week, and let’s get ready for the close and holy darkness!

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Beloved—

Sometimes in our discernment, there is no clear way forward. We know that we cannot stay as we have been, and yet we are unclear as to how to proceed. We just know that something inside us has changed and our current circumstances feel constraining or like they’re twisting us into something we don’t want to be; they feel intolerable.

At least in moments.

We want out. We want to do something different.

But Way does not seem to open.

We have begun the discernment process, we have the unsettled feeling that can lead to wise decision making. We know that where we are is not right.

“The unhatched chick 

Does not know how or even what it is to fly.  

She does not have vision or know what it is to see  

The world from above. 

She does not even know what it is to have 

Feathers, dry, soft, carrying her aloft on wide wings. 

She has only two things: 

One tooth, 

And the clear knowledge that where she is 

Is too small for her.” 

David Whyte says something similar in his poem, “Sweet Darkness” when he writes, “The world was made to be free in. / Give up all the worlds / except the one to which you belong. / Sometimes it takes darkness and / the sweet confinement of your aloneness / to learn / anything or anyone / that does not bring you alive / is too small for you.”

But how do we give up the world when we don’t know where to go next?

Ignatian disciplines suggest, “Don’t just do something; stay there,” or, if you prefer, “stand there.” That is to say, the Ignatian way of thinking about discernment suggests that it is not enough to escape where we are. We have to have some sense of moving forward. Not simply away, but toward.

It may be toward freedom.

It may be toward opening our wings.

It may be toward a new understanding of ourselves that is only just growing within us.

But in general, it should not simply be “away.” Let me be clear: I am not arguing that anyone must or even should stay in abusive situations. But even then, it is important to have a safer place to go. One cannot merely take oneself and one’s children into the snow, at least under most circumstances, no?

In general, if Way seems not to have opened, if we have not yet realized that there are possibilities outside the shell, then we don’t yet need our one tooth.

In general, if we can’t imagine that there’s something on the other side of the shell, then we’re not ready to start. We don’t have that inkling, that inchoate knowing that there is More, Deeper, Truer on the other side of where we are now.

When we know that there’s More, then we start scratching. Then we start pushing. Then we start pecking and stretching. Then we give up the worlds we have been trying to inhabit and we move towards the world that is ours. The one world, as Whyte says, to which we belong.

I think that too often, we try to belong to many worlds, many ways, many faces, many personae at once.

To what world do I belong?

Who am I?

What am I built to do?

These are central questions of discernment. How can we live into the Good Life, as ancient philosophers would say? How can we be virtuous people—according to the virtues our hearts and minds demand?

Love is the central virtue of my life, followed closely by four that proceed from it: Authenticity, Integrity, Compassion, and Wisdom. They are what I strive for, and figuring out what I’m doing and whether it’s the right thing is often helped by its being held up against those virtues. Is what I’m doing in keeping with my heart’s demands for who I want to be.

After all, who we are can be expressed in any circumstance. (See Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl, about the camps of the Second World War. Aie, even mentioning them makes me think of the concentration camps at the US southern border.)

What are the central virtues that you hope to guide your life?

What are the virtues that are not guiding you, but that you wish for?

These questions are worth writing about. And they will help you get to What’s Next.

Don’t just do something, stay there.

Hold still.

Wait.

Attend.

Pray.

Wait.

Listen.

Pray.

Wait

Watch.

Pray.

Wait.

Feel.

Sometimes it doesn’t take all this. Sometimes Way opens and we are given amazing gifts by the Source of Life that we can hardly believe. Synchronicity opens up and the next step ahead is just what we need.

Maybe the next place is only a waystation, a jumping-off point, and that’s okay. But resist, my friends, resist the impulse only to move away from what you don’t or what feels distasteful.

Resist simple escape.

You don’t have to know what to do next. But the truth of “wherever you go, there you are,” is indeed inescapable. You bring yourself and all your questions, all your concerns, all your worries with you no matter where you go.

“Give up all the other worlds,” says David Whyte. What do you have to give up in order to find the Way? What are the sacrifices we are called upon to make?

I think of the time I precipitously quit a job because I was uncomfortable and afraid of being fired. In quitting my job, I dropped our household income by a third, I didn’t get unemployment or severance, and I injured our financial life for years afterward.

I had no going toward, just the compulsion I found impossible to resist at that time, to get OUT.

Eventually, I found my way stumbling through, and happily, my wife didn’t divorce me. I was younger than I am now, but still a grown-ass adult. And wouldn’t it have been nice if I had recognized the opportunity for discernment, instead of just jumping out of the fear that was governing my actions?

And that is the lesson, isn’t it?

Let us not be governed only by fear, but rather by possibility. By openness to the world. As Mary Oliver says, “The world offers itself to your imagination, / Calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting, / Announcing your place in the family of things.”

Where are you today in the family of things? Where would you like to be? Do you need to wait and listen, pray to perceive the next step? Or is it time to use that one tooth because you know your world has become too small for you and the possibilities outside are endless?

So much love –

~Catharine~

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Beloved—

Oh my Beloved, there is so much I want to tell you. There is so much bubbling up at The Way of the River. So much.

I have put in some small notes in PS-es of late, but I wanted to take some time and tell you what’s up and where you might able to “plug into” some of what’s happening around here. Things are going on that are different from my ongoing spiritual accompaniment ministry. That ministry is always available to you, and you can find information about it on The Way of the River site. I love my 1:1 work, and I am delighted every time I receive a new client into that work.

But there’s even more happening than is on the site! More going on! More that is moving and shaking and changing the face of The Way of the River ministries!

Small Group Spiritual Deepening Ministry

First, I have opened a group of monthly, online, small groups to do intentional accompaniment together – only 4-6 people per group – once a month. One of the groups is for queer and neurodivergent people only, and as of this writing has ONE spot left. The group will begin meeting on October 13. Yes! So soon! And so WONDERFUL!

There are two other groups that are not identity-based, but to which queer and neurodivergent people are particularly invited.

One will also begin in October, and it is on the third Sunday of the month.

The other will begin in January and will be on the third Tuesday of the month.

Why am I offering these groups? Well, for one thing, WE NEED THEM! My people need them!. People who are like me, who want to spending some time really listening deeply, sharing bravely, and learning profoundly, need space and time to do that. And some of us find that we do it more easily in groups that we do 1:1. For one thing, there are more hearts “in the room,” as it were.

I am inviting folks to make a six-month commitment to the group they’re in, and if there’s not room in the group you’re interested in, I’ll keeping a waitlist, never fear!

Furthermore, if you’re an existing client of mine, or if you want to work 1:1, but you think the small group might be good for you as well, feel free! The options are not mutually exclusive. The Spiritual Deepening group sign-up does not include support between meetings, but you are welcome to sign up for 1:1 accompaniment added to a group membership. Contact me for more information about this option.

Wraparound Spiritual Accompaniment

Some of us are finding ourselves really desiring… not a monastic experience, exactly, that’s not what I mean… What is it? A deeper, more consistent spiritual focus, a way to connect1:1 and to curiously, honestly, bravely discuss matters of the heart and soul.

When I was asked, “How do you think you could best serve your clients?” the answer came to me immediately. When I thought of the deep, seeking, thoughtful people, I serve, I knew immediately what I should offer. I knew immediately what I would want, were I in the shoes of someone seeking spiritual accompaniment and depth work in my life.

The best way I can serve folks who are the mystics among us is by what I am calling Wraparound. And not even just the mystics, but the seminarians among us who are in discernment, those of us trying to decide what to do next, and those of us who know that our awareness of Spirit has been missing from our lives. We are thirsty for the Water of the Limitless Well, and we really want to take a deep drink.

Wraparound folks meet with me 1:1 twice a month, and also share email and Messenger contact with me in between times.

This is an opportunity for really deep work, work where you can feel held in all our complexity, where I will hold you close to my heart with unconditional positive regard, and where we can move together into the Land of Spirit together in a deep way. Again, find me and we’ll talk about this option if it feels like something you can use.

MFC Coaching

I remain committed, absolutely committed, to helping Unitarian Universalist Candidates for ministry get to the other side of their Ministerial Fellowship Committee interviews. Despite other changes, I love my MFC coaching so much, it gives me so much joy, I love watching my clients succeed and grow into their ministries.

While I cannot ever promise that anyone will “get a particular number,” or pass with a certain kind of commentary, I can in all honesty say this:  My clients, every one of them, have done well with the MFC. Now, there is of course, some self-selection there. My clients have time, energy, financial resources, and focus for their work on the MFC packets. I acknowledge that. But I also like to think that I have something to do with their success, as well.

My website is clear. It says, “My mission is to provide you, the MFC candidate, with a safe container in which you come to know yourself better: to understand and articulate your strengths, vulnerabilities, and growing edges, so you can minister as well as possible and reduce the anxiety that is often inherent in the process of preparing for the MFC.”

You can do it. You can get through the MFC to the other side, to Preliminary Fellowship with the Unitarian Universalist Association, ready for a fuller expression of your ministry. I am here to support you, so please do be in touch at any phase of your preparation and we’ll talk about it!

Whew!

That’s a lot.

I feel a little tired, just having written it all out! How do you feel? Even if you’re not in a place where you heart is called to connect with any of these ministries, perhaps you know someone who might need one of them. Feel free to share my email: magic@thewayoftheriver.com or send people to the Contact Page on The Way of the River site to schedule a chat with me about who they are, who I am, and whether we might connect more deeply.

I’d love to meet you, if we haven’t met before. I’d love to talk, face to face, to learn about you, your hopes and dreams, the desires of your heart, and how I might be able to help you.

In the meantime, keep your peeled on this space for more updates and exciting news as we shake things over and find ourselves navigating the rapids on The Way of the River.

So much love and care –

~Catharine~

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Dear ones –

I write to you under the azure sky of a sunny autumn afternoon. These days are beautiful in the Pacific Northwest, when the rains have begun but aren’t yet constant. The dogwood in the courtyard is turning the most lovely and unexpected russety red. We have put new lilies into the ground, lilies named after our comrade Judy Welles’s mother, in fact. The bulbs are going in. The annuals coming out. More deadheading, a third round of roses blooming, “God’s in His Heaven, and all’s right with the world.”

At least, that’s how it feels to me, with the sun streaming in at its autumnal slant, shining on the plants above my workspace where they are overseen by a statue of Aphrodite as a mermaid braiding her hair.

This is what I see every day. I am so blessed.

And I realize how happy this vision makes me. How I have written to you, over and over again about how beautiful the lilac has been, how astonishing the roses—rose after rose after rose after the one crimson rose just in front of the kitchen sink window—the clematis, the lavender… How we bought too many annuals in the spring and ended up with them everydamnwhere.

I was reminded today that plants, especially flowers, make me happy.

They just make me happy.

Like the aforementioned Rev. Judy Welles, I love to have flowers on my dining room table, on the side tables, in my workspace.

Flowers say celebration to me. When I was a little girl, one of the things I imagined about my wedding—you know, as some young children do—is that there would be lots of flowers.

So when the time came, I went to the florist. I went to a florist recommended by friends, a place in downtown DC owned by two aging gay men who had run the place for thirty years and more. Well. The gentleman with whom I spoke was appalled that I was wearing a BLACK underdress. Never mind that the corset I was wearing over it was fuchsia dupioni silk shot with gold; black was unacceptable. So there was that. And THEN there was the vast expense. Holy guacamole, friends! Flowers from a florist in downtown DC.

Let’s just say, my pocketbook doesn’t recommend it.

So plan B.

Plan B was that we would give friends some money to go to the Eastern Market the day of our wedding (we were being married at 8:30 that evening), and buy as many flowers of as many different kinds as they could with the money we gave them. I’m certain they contributed to the cause, because they came back with a car STUFFED with flowers. I mean, it was stuffed. They had five-gallon buckets of flowers!

And flowers of all kinds. It was high summer and there were just all kinds of cut flowers growing. Roses, of course, but hydrangea, the late-bulb lilies, statice and other amaranths…just everything of every color. Forget, “My colors, Mama, are Blush and Bashful.” Our colors became every color imaginable.

And we had pitchers and candleholders and tall glasses, and oh yes, vases too. And where there weren’t lanterns or twinkly lights or torches… where there were window sills or tables… where there were the heads of our oh-so-indulgent attendants (one for each of the Four Directions)…in all these places there were flowers.

I had gotten my little girl’s dream. Flowers. Flowers. Flowers everywhere, and a gorgeous display on our altar. All put together by our comrade from The Way of the River, Ingrid Parsons. All of it. Poor thing; by the end of the day, all she wanted was a gin and tonic and never to see another flower again!

But I got my dream. My racous-color-loving wife was happy, and I was over the moon.

That was a special night. One of the most special of my entire life, for certain. (I know people say that all the time, but it’s true!)

And I’m telling you this story in such detail because I want you to think.

What makes you happy?

What makes you happy? 

Is it blueberries for breakfast, as it is for our comrade Kerry Pitt?

Is it paint chips of every imaginable color? (Yep, that’s Julie again.  )

Is it the taste of real whipped cream with not too much sugar, but whipped, thick, fluffy, and delicious? I won’t call it decadent or bad or sinful, no, because all that implies that anything about this delectable stuff is bad or wrong or associated with the fall of the Roman Empire. Does it make you happy?

What makes you happy? 

And yes, I’m talking about a special happy.

But for you, is it the kind when you’ve accomplished something that’s been put off for a long time, and you get to stand back and say, yep, that wall is orange and it has art on it: I did it.

Is it when you put that altar to rights? You set up the tools and the images, the statues and the offerings. You made it look the way you’ve so desperately wanted it to look since you moved there.

Is it that little candle that smells like home in the wintertime?

Is it someone rubbing your feet, your back, your hands with aromatic oil?

What makes you happy? 

I’m asking, because I’m encouraging you to do something for yourself that makes you happy. Not out of “self-care.” Not because you need something to soothe the violence of the status quo out of you. Not because justice will be accomplished if you get your nails done. Not because a feeling of abundance will bring abundance to all the world…

Not because any of this will be undone.

But because every one of us deserves a bit of celebration just for being here. Just for making it through.

We are resilient. We have made it through 100% of the days that have come our way so far. And one day, we won’t, but today, we have. And for that, I am grateful. I am grateful for you.

And gratitude is the thing. Celebration that emerges out of gratitude is just beautiful. So what have you to be grateful for today? How can you celebrate that thing, those people, that accomplishment, that beauty you’ve created?

For my part, I’m getting some flowers. (And maybe a new fountain pen.  ) Some really pretty ones, with a rose and some statice tucked in there. Yeah, baby. Bring on the flowers! Bring on the gratitude! Bring on the celebration!

So much love—

~Catharine~

PS – I still have room in my spiritual deepening group that will meet on the second Tuesday of each month at 8 pm Eastern. Interested in learning more? Email me at magic@thewayoftheriver.com and we’ll set up a time to talk!

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Dear hearts –

Today, as I say in my video, is all about the light.

It’s all about the middle of autumn, the height, or the midst, if you will, of the light’s dimming. Of the light’s slanting, here in the Northern Hemisphere where, even as we grow closer to Sol, our yellow star, our sun, the light grows flatter, more golden, less bright.

Here in the Pacific Northwest, the rains have returned. The flowers that are left are the varieties of coxcomb, aster, statice, some daisies (the ones on my table are, as you can see, a bit sad), and the remnants of alyssum, coleus, and the other flowers we planted what seems so long ago in our whiskey half-barrels.

The light is shifting, my friends.

We have just had the climate strike day, and even all this week, some folks who are able to “take the hit,” as it were, are striking, following youth all over the world, led by Greta Thunberg, that gorgeous, tiny, autistic prophet. We are demanding that those in power do better, that, as Greta said, they “try harder,” and “listen to science.”

The light is shifting.

What will the Dark, the close and holy darkness, bring for you this year?

What nuts are you hiding away to get you through, like the squirrel digging into what’s left of my petunia’s, hiding away her giant, green acorn?

How will you meet the slanting of the light?

Blessings of the dimming light to you, blessings of the feast of Michael and All Angels, Michaelmas, that marker of the season of autumn in full swing.

Blessing, blessings, and blessings on all of us, that we may be blessings to Earth, our only home, the only Eden we will ever know…

~Catharine~

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My dear comrades –  

Today’s tiny, short video includes a song written by our own comrade, Eldritch, many years ago. It was also sung at the Stones Family Gathering over Labor Day weekend, a festival to raise a 3-ton trilithon gate on the land at Stone Song Center in Flintstone, Maryland. Roles, ropes, sledges, winches, pulleys, and lots of hard work pulled those Stones and raised them. No tractors. No trucks. Just many people working together to pull and pull and pull together.  

The song included in the video goes like this: 

Come and be one. 

Become one. 

Become. 

Be. 

It is a reminder for us all to remember that in order to do the hard work of life, we need to be where we are, each of us with our own comrades. Each of us working toward a better world, pulling together. Each of us in our own becoming, our own evolution. Each of us exactly where we are, with whom we are, and who we are this moment. 

Let us take a breath… 

Let us just be. 

I love you –  

~Catharine~ 

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Dear friends –

Sometimes, let’s face it, we all get overwhelmed. We just beat our fists into the air or against our legs or into a wall and we just feel like we can’t take it.

Sometimes, we want to be anywhere but just where we are. Sometimes we’re in a place that just isn’t another place. Another place where we feel or believe that we’d rather be.

Sometimes, we feel behind, as though everyone in our cohort, our class, our age, has passed on by, and we are trudging along, having so much trouble getting traction, getting what we hope for, getting even what we need.

I am not here to tell you not to need what you need, nor even, nor certainly, not to tell you to want what you want.

Your wants and needs are your own, and they are here, present, real. They are part of you, part of your makeup right now. And as such, they are sacred. They are sacred because they are part of you and you are sacred in every molecule, in every inch, in every ounce.

But sometimes, I don’t know about you, but sometimes I find myself just feeling so hemmed in by needing to be someplace else.

Maybe your ministry, however you serve the world, isn’t where you’d like it to be. Or you’re not making the money you’d like to be helping support your household. Or you’re struggling in your relationship. Or someone you love is dying. Or you yourself are actively dying, facing the end of your life, and facing the question, “Has mine been a life well-lived?” And wondering, when you get the answer(s) to that question, what to do between now and the end.

There is always someplace else we could be.

But we are here now, my friends, and in a very real way, we are together. My fingers type on this keyboard made by hands and minds and people with hopes and hearts that are not mine. But they are inextricably bound up with me because it is through them—all of them—that I come to be here writing to you.

And you, yes you, the one whose name I do not know, who either has been reading these Reflections off and on for some time or is new to our group of comrades… to you, I especially say, I am with you.

We are caught up together. We are bound together by these words, by not only my heart and my thoughts, but also by all the decisions you made to bring you to read these words in your own way, with your own thoughts, with your own unique understanding.

The words I write are not the words you read. Most certainly not. They are your words.

Any preacher can tell you that! Preacher friends, am I right?

But our words, our thoughts, our reading and being read to, all of these bind us together. Any one of you is part of me, and we are all part of one another – and yes, I mean in the existence way, sure. In the way that my dear friend meant when he first said, “Being is the only game in town. And it is a team sport.” The universe is that town. There is no way to be alone because all of us are connected in that “garment of mutuality” the Rev. Dr. King made famous.

But you are not alone in many other ways. There are people you know and people you don’t, people who are thinking of you right now—I know you think, some of you, at least one of you, that it’s not true, but I guarantee you it is. I guarantee you they are. And it is in part because you are reading these words at this moment, at this place, at this time, and you are gathered together with everyone else who is reading these words at this time and in this place, this virtual space.

You could be doing something else, for sure. But instead, we are here together, you and I and all of us.

I say all of this to say this: Of course you could be someplace else. And you will be in moments, in hours, in days, in years…nothing of you will be lost. We are all worm food, my beloveds, and Earth will one day have Her way with us, no matter how embalmed we are.

So I ask you to turn toward your heart. I ask you to turn your heart toward that which is the Source of All Blessing, the Source of All Love, the Limitless Well. Whatever that is for you, however you call it. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about Nuit, Aphrodite Urania, and the Star Goddess Whose body encircles the universe. But that’s just me. However you call on that Source that can be Male, Female, All, or None, I invite you to turn toward it and simply ask a question.

What is it in this moment now, that I need? What is the lesson or the feeling or the intimation or the sense of priority that I need now? If you, if we, need it now, then there is no other time we could have had it. Only this moment carries the unique gifts of now.

Do you understand what I’m saying?

There is something for you here. There is something for me.

I came to this page deeply unsettled. Deeply ashamed for not making my dearest ones as happy as I think I can—as they think I can. Deeply worried and anxious and feeling pretty terrible about myself. Deeply wounded.

But I realized that I am not alone in those feelings. And that by giving a small, tender voice to those feelings, maybe someone, maybe you, might feel less alone.

You are doing your best, my love.

It is a new day – or it will be when I send this out to you – and the moments of this day are filled with possibility. Even the moments of the evening when I typed these words were filled with possibility. Even now. Even now. Even now.

Even if all you can do is rest, it is enough.

If all you can do is admit that you’re frustrated and sad and afraid and angry—as I had to do today—that’s enough.

If all you can do is love someone in the silence of the deep sanctuary of your heart, it is enough.

So yes, maybe we feel as though others have “passed” us somehow. But they are always and only in there own “here” too. They have their own hurts and terrors of which we can only dream or speculate – and we really oughtn’t speculate, eh?

What is here now? What can you be shown that is here in this moment? This very one? What is most pulling on your heart to do? Can you do it, and do it with goodness and kindness? Really, can you?

Then by all means, go do so. Because these moments pass quickly, my friends. They pass all too quickly.

A thousand blessings—

~Catharine~

PS – This edition of Reflections is in memory of Penn Ronson Weis, who was a friendly acquaintance of mine and a good friend to several of my friends. He died in his sleep this past week at the age of 41, leaving behind all manner of family. He was, as Odysseus is described in the opening of The Odyssey, a complicated man, a man of many turns. Beloved of some. Broken and whole. Making good choices and bad ones.

Penn spoke deeply with me a few months ago, “Because, Catharine, you know about God.” (Oh help! I thought, Oh help!) He spoke to me because he needed to tell someone how he had met God and spoken with Him. And how God had encouraged him, Penn, to do better in this life. And that Penn had determined he was going to do so. For the sake of the holy conversation he had, and for the sake of the generations after him, he would try to do better. I hope he knew that the Source of Love was with him in that encouragement, somehow.

Requiescat in pace et lux perpetua luceat ei.

The post What is Here for Me? appeared first on The Way of the River.

Friends, I am in a mood. I am in a mood and I’m going to write—yes again, now sit down!—about niceness, about yes and no, and about seduction, persuasion, cajoling, coercion, and assault. Yepper, that’s what’s on the menu today.

I write for the nice ones among us, and I write for those who have not always heard or attended to the words behind the words of nice people.

Not only am I writing this, but it’s something I wrote about not even that long ago. But I have heard, loud and clear, that it is something I must write about again. There is apparently always more, always more to the dangers of niceness and to anything less than yeses that mean yes and nos that mean no.

I wrote about niceness some time ago, and I received some lovely and important notes back. One of those, from our comrade the Rev. Judy Welles, reminded me that “No is a complete sentence.” And someone else reminded me that someone can be saying no by saying, “I don’t want to…” “I’m not going to…” or “I can’t…” Or even by saying, “I’m not sure…”

This is not news. This is nothing to bellow from the rooftops of Southwest Portland, to yell and shout my “barbaric yawp” about.

Except it kinda is. And not only for those of us who do these things, who fall back into niceness.

It’s also news for some of us, those of us who would un-build the patriarchy, brick by brick, even when we benefit from it. It’s also news for those of us who need to learn to check in, to see whether something we’re not clear about is an attempt to set a boundary or just to plain say no.

Don’t get me wrong. I believe that everyone who receives Reflections in our inboxes is an adult. And adults are responsible for using our words, yes, and for being clear. And for setting our own boundaries so that others know what those boundaries are and have the chance, at least, to respect them.

I have the obligation to say no when I mean no.

And that obligation is wrapped up in years and decades of training that tell people, tell me and often other (though not exclusively) people assigned female at birth, that we must never say no when someone else wants something. Anything, really. Time. Energy. Bodies. Life force. Expertise. Money.

I have the obligation to try as hard as I can to unlearn all of this.

To unlearn what our comrade Molly was indicating toward when they said that “maybe” more often than not really means, in our heart of hearts, “no.”

And what is THAT about?! I mean, really?!

I do it. I say, “maybe” when I should say “no.” I say that I “can’t” have a social engagement, rather than, “I really don’t feel like it.” I feel as though I have to explain myself when I just want time with myself or time with my wife or unscheduled time or I just. don’t. feel. like. it.

I don’t have to explain myself, friends, and neither do you.

Oh, and then there’s the kind of no that is so easily overruled: the “no” of the intoxicated. The “I really don’t think this is a good idea,” which means, “I’m ambivalent,” which means “I’m not sure,” which really, friends, at the very least should be a yellow light, if not a red one. A time to stop, to check in—is this person, this one saying, “I really don’t think this is a good idea…”—are they conscious enough to make a good decision on their own behalf.

Are they conscious enough to offer a good decision on your behalf.

What on earth does that mean?

It means, Beloved, that some of us have committed assault. It means if someone’s not offering you a yes that is clearly a YES, you must consider whether they can give it to you.

Some of us reading this right now have ignored “no,” and ploughed ahead, and that’s just plain, clear as the nose on your face, rape, yes it is. Some of us. Some of us. Some of us.

We all know people who have committed rape. I would venture to say that we’re probably all friends with someone who has committed rape. There are people reading this right now who have committed rape. Rape, which is to say, having sex with someone who did not or could not give their consent.

Beyond that, some of us have also taken advantage, have ignored what would be clear if we had bothered to read the body language of the person we were with. And some of us have just pushed and pushed and coerced and cajoled until “I’m not going to…” or “I don’t want to…” turned into a giving over because it was more trouble to keep trying to tell us no than it was to just get it over with.

Yes, some of us here, have assaulted or been party to the assault of another human being. I mean, this list is over 400 people long. I cannot help thinking of the numbers. One in three women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime, and one in six men. And if I could guess, I’d say that a whooooooole lot of trans people are sexually assaulted over their lifetimes. (Given how many trans women, especially, are murdered each year, it just makes a terrible kind of sense.)

That’s a lot of people, and there are people doing the assaulting, not listening or watching or attending or caring about the “no” that comes in so many forms.

We need to learn to let our no be no and our yes be yes, that is true. That is absolutely true. And yet, that admonition does not justify so much that is justified by the press, by the courts, or by the courts of popular opinion.

Because what about when one is intoxicated or exhausted or drugged, then what?

Then there may be only the ineffectual pushing away. The attempts to cover oneself. The being frozen by fear. The “I don’t know,” or the “I don’t think this is a good idea.” Or the one that makes my throat tighten and my hands feel cold, the plain old being passed out.

Here’s some news for you, friends: If in a sexual situation, if it’s anything less than a yes, you are pulling some shit. If you’re with someone you love and it’s been a long time and so you can badger them into it and you know it, it’s manipulation, at best. If you’re dating someone and they want to slow down in the middle of things and you say, “Come on, baby, it’s okay,” it’s not okay.

Both sets of these things are true. Adults need to let our yes be yes and our no be no.

And shouldn’t even taking the risk that you might be demanding sexual attention from someone who doesn’t want to, doesn’t feel like it, is too tired to care…shouldn’t that be enough to stop you in your tracks? And if it doesn’t, if you have some fucked-up idea about “conjugal rights” or some shit, then you need to stop right now and think about what you’re doing.

I say these things because both the trans and cis women as well as the non-binary people I know have put up with some serious shit and it needs to stop.

Rape at knife point.

Multiple rapes while too intoxicated to say yes or no.

Multiple counts of statutory rape.

Too many instances of in-relationship coercion for me to even imagine or count.

And let me tell you, on that that last one in particular, am I sure I have always listened? Always paid attention? Always watched or asked or checked in? No. I am not sure.

Where do seduction, persuasion, cajoling, coercion, and assault blend into one another?

I am not sure. And that does stop me in my tracks. Because they do blur and blend, let’s be real.

But there are some lines, and those of us who are on the … the “pursuing” end of things … we need to be paying closer attention to where those lines are.

So let’s all of us, all of us here at The Way of the River, whatever our pasts may be, let’s make a pact. For one thing, let’s practice our no being our no and our yes being our yes. Yep. Let’s do that. And let us also never, ever ignore our sexual partners, whether they are the people we are closest to in body for just one night, or closest over years in heart and soul. Let us never ignore what might be a no in favor of our own desires telling us, “Oh, it’s fine.”

Pinky swear? Yeah, friend, pinky swear.

Because it’s not fine, dude. It’s not fine.

This cranky lecture brought to you by me, who loves you, yes, all of you.

~Catharine~

PS – After all this, all this pent-up outrage and frustration and desire for change, sometimes it can feel as though the life of the Spirit just doesn’t hardly matter at all. But it does. Turning toward Love always matters. Turning toward the One Who is Many, who is all genders and none and any individual—that turning always matters. And I always welcome the chance to help you make that turn.

So please know, especially if you are part of what our comrade Rhodes Perry calls the “Rainbow Family,” but which I generally identify as the queer community…. Please know most especially if you are a trans or non-binary or gender non-conforming person, I am here for you. I am here for you and for the depth of the spiritual feeling that is in you that you cannot even describe.

I am here for you, you who yearn for Something or Someone, but who don’t feel as though there’s any space or place that’s safe enough to explore that yearning.

Check me out on this page, and then set up a time. We’ll talk.

Thanks.

~Rev. C~

The post WE Need to Read This Again appeared first on The Way of the River.

This edition of Reflections is an update of one I sent in the spring of 2016, when things seemed very different from the way they seem today, somehow. Still, the message to care for one another and ourselves seems more and more important. 

Dear ones—

I hope this day finds you well and aware of blessing. What has gone right today so far? I have found that I needed to ask myself that question today. I’ve been tired and inclined to forget how many beautiful things have gone right to bring me to this moment, this page, this writing to wonderful YOU!

So thank you, Universe, for all the blessings you are showering on me at every moment. I so appreciate them!

I want to write to you today about self-care and self-compassion. About what it is, who are the “selves” we’re caring for, and how we do it.

“Self” is a slippery word. There are ways in which we have no “self” at all. Rather, we are part of the Great Sea of Being, entirely undifferentiated from any other thing in the Universe. And they, in turn, are undifferentiated from us.

But we have this thing called consciousness, and the other thing called ego, and they help us maintain boundaries around ourselves. Those boundaries are not bad, per se, but they can be difficult to manage in healthy, skillful ways.

It is the boundaried Self that I suggest today we care for.

So how do we do it?

I’m realizing as I write this, that I could write article after article on just this subject, so forgive me if there is much I leave behind at the moment.

How do we do it?

For one thing, I think it’s important to identify those parts of ourselves that make up a life: Platonic relationships, physical well-being, romantic and/or sexual relationships, spiritual connection, mental health, emotional centeredness, right livelihood, etc. What are the parts that feel solid, where you feel as though you are giving yourself the nourishment you need?

And where are the parts where you feel you have your work cut out for you? Where do you feel a longing, a lack, or a sense of brokenness or void?

Don’t worry, I’m not going to throw you into the deep end and suggest that you address all the hard parts at once, especially if conscious self-care is not something you’re used to.

Nonetheless, and I quote this Black, lesbian warrior poet with all respect, Audre Lorde said, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

Especially for those of us who are marginalized due to various identities, and most of all, for those of us who are Black, Indigenous, or other People of Color Lorde’s quotation is super-important and a call to action on our own behalf. By “political warfare,” I believe she means first of all, that the culture will not take care of us, that the culture, in fact never meant us to survive (to paraphrase another poem of Lorde’s). Late-stage capitalism is not the habit of taking care of anyone but the most privileged. We need to care for one another and for ourselves, both.

Second of all, caring for ourselves is rooted in self-compassion. Self-compassion is the fine art of forgiving ourselves for being human. For messing up. For needing to apologize. For not being able to keep all the balls in the air. According to Dr. Kristin Neff, self-compassion is much more effective at building a positive self-image than are efforts to take “Self-esteem” head-on.

Self-compassion makes us more able to work for a just culture, a place where all of us, those who are privileged and those who are not, can work toward what the Rev. Dr. King called Beloved Community. Self-compassion helps us work for and care for that culture, to demand the revolution that will bring it about. Ultimately to live together in a way that “self-care” will not only be the province of the privileged.

Self-compassion gives us the power, energy, and vitality to do the things we most want to do, and one of the things I most want to do is make the world a more just and kind place for all people, including, and sometimes starting with those who are most oppressed in our society.

Self-compassion allows us the energy to foment revolution, if that’s our inclination, because it teaches us that we can learn from our mistakes, heal from our wounds, and try again.

As Parker Palmer says, caring for ourselves is not only caring for ourselves. It can mean caring for the world. If we don’t stop with ourselves, if we bring the same compassion we learn for ourselves into the rest of the world, we become agents of transformation.

Furthermore, the very acts of changing the culture mean that those of us with privilege will think less about whether we need a spa day and more time leaning into creating and maintaining just culture that takes care of everyone. Where we have child care, roads and bridges, education, safe housing, and health care because people who love one another, people who care for one another, people who build a culture together care that we all have these things.

The culture needs to change such that where we have privilege, as adrienne maree brown says, we will “dismantle any myths of privilege,” and where we struggle, we will “claim our own joy, dignity, and liberation.”

So all that said, I ask you again, where do you need some special care and compassion? Where will routine help you and keep you well? You think you can’t do routine; you think it’s boring or useless?

Well, first, I ask you this: forgive yourself. Forgive yourself for everything every day. Just start there.

And then, I challenge you. I challenge you to find some routine that is life-giving and that you can practice for some number of days. Maybe as few as 7 days:  A week of breakfast at the same time every day, a week of journaling first thing every morning, or a week of every day working in the coffee shop so you can be around people if that is nourishing to you. Or a week of carefully curating your social media, or even taking the week off from Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (I so need to do this, and it terrifies me!) Or a week of spending five minutes, sitting at the edge of your bed each morning, just breathing.

Something small with enough days that you can see how you feel after.

And then decide what you want to keep. What is nourishing? What made you say, “why have I not been doing this all my life?” Something tiny. Something the reminds you of the beauty of the world – and maybe that’s it, simply writing five things from the day past for which you are grateful.

Whatever it is, I’d love to hear about it. Simply reply to this email, or if you received this from a friend, write to magic@thewayoftheriver.com and I’d love to get back to you.

So much love. So much love,

~Catharine~

The post Self-Compassion and Revolution appeared first on The Way of the River.

Beloved friends— 
I know what it is like to NEED to throw the baby out with the bathwater.  

That is to say, I was living in a convent, and I couldn’t, just couldn’t do the juggling act anymore that was my attempt to reclaim and restore and reengage my relationship with the Roman Catholic church. Some things are too far gone for us, in whatever state we are in, in whatever moment we are in, for us to keep claiming them.  

Nowadays, my spirituality—that is to say, the personal practice that shapes my mornings and evenings—involves sitting at my altar, Casting a Circle, and singing. Or doing a version of the Sufi practice of Remembrance that I have learned from my teacher, Mark Silver. It involves writing. And reading. And sometimes morning prayer or ceremony with other people. Those are the pieces of my spirituality.  

My religions, on the other hand, are Unitarian Universalism and Stone Circle Wicca. They inform and give shape to my communal and personal practice, but they are not the same thing as my personal practice, my spirituality. 

So what is this all about? 

I’m thinking about how much ground we spiritual and religious progressives have ceded. And yes, I know I’m late to this particular party, but I mean it. What the hell? The ground we too often cede is the moral high ground. 

The right wing of religious life with its focus on purity, avoiding sin (especially ones related to sex), and keeping gender roles arbitrarily clear, claims the moral high ground all the time. It’s practically their favorite activity, as far as I can tell. (Yes, I am wound up this evening.) 

Meanwhile, families are detained and separated at the border.  

Meanwhile, 220-some residents of the US are wounded and 73 have been killed in less than two months. And those are just the ones I’ve read about. 

Meanwhile, transwomen are more likely to be murdered than ever.  

Meanwhile, reproductive justice becomes less and less evident across the country.  

Meanwhile, waterways become polluted with the fire retardants used in the wildfires of summer. 

Meanwhile, floods and land subsidence erode the landscape and entire islands are slowly being covered by water that is melting from the protective ice at the—not our—planet’s poles. 

Meanwhile, the vast majority of people with physical and developmental disabilities will be sexually assaulted in their lifetimes. 

Meanwhile, roughly 1 percent of people worldwide control nearly half of all the wealth in the world. 

These are moral issues, friends. These are moral issues.  

And they are moral issues that people can take firm positions on based on their religious obligations. 

For those of us who are Unitarian Universalists, the very foundation of the two traditions that flowed together to make us who we are is love. Love among members of congregations. Loving accountability among congregations. Love for neighbor. Belief in a God so loving that He (yeah, well…) would never leave anyone behind for the fires of perdition.  

Love is the basis of our faith. Take it or leave it, the basis is not logic or civil disagreement or hyperrationalism. Our history shows us clearly that the moral foundation of our tradition(s) as UU’s is love. 

And yet, if you look at our Seven Principles, we affirm and promote various good, ethical precepts; love is not among them.  

In our Six Sources, we give a passing mention to our Jewish and Christian heritage and its reminder to love our neighbor.  

But most people who attend Unitarian Universalist congregations have never even heard of the Six Sources. Most of them only know the First Principle, the worth and dignity of every person, and maybe the Seventh, pertaining to “respect for the interconnected web of existence.” Not love of or care for, but respect for. 

Love is the foundation, UU friends, and love is, in my book, the ultimate moral high ground. 

Let me tell you a secret about my other religion. In Stone Circle Wicca, we have four virtues, and each one corresponds to one of the Cardinal Directions. In my heart and in my life, there is only one virtue that can bind them all together and make them active, effective, real. It lives in the Cauldron at the Center of the Circle, and its name is love. “For my law is love until all beings,” as the Goddess says in her Charge. 

Love is the Center, Wiccan friends. And love is, in my book, the ultimate moral high ground. 

So take it! Take it, lay yourself upon on it and declare your right to share it, to be there, to be clear in a justice-seeking life that is based on love.  

I’m not saying lord it over other people. I’m not saying declare that those with whom you disagree are worth less as human beings than you or we are. I’m not saying any of that.  

But I am saying to stop being afraid of your religious, moral, and spiritual values. 

Rev. William Barber II, one of the founders of the Moral Mondays movement and the contemporary Poor People’s Campaign (originally founded by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.), reminds us consistently, from his Christian perspective, that the issues of this day are moral issues that religious progressives should feel obliged to address, based on their religious values. 

And those of us who do not espouse any particular religion, what are our obligations? What are our values? 

Whatever our religious affiliation, it is true that each of us is responsible for the discernment of our own hearts. And that’s true for those of us who do not adhere or practice any religion, just as it is for those who do. 

Still, friends, I urge you, as you have heard me quote before, to do as the Buddhist teacher, Joanna Macy urges us. She knows that we may be running ourselves into a new Stone Age with our disregard for the climate crisis. And yet she says, whatever is coming, whatever may happen, “We can love one another now.” 

Call it duty. Call it obligation. Call it humanism. Call it the right thing to do.  

I call it love. And in my world, love is not withheld from anyone. Love, as in the mercy Shylock asks to be shown in The Merchant of Venice, can pour out upon Earth, transforming everything it touches: 

“The quality of mercy is not strained. 
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven 
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest: 
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.” 

So just for today, let us try to be unfailingly merciful, honestly kind, wisely charitable, fiercely compassionate… let us love one another now. 

And while we’re at it, let us remember that love IS the moral high ground, and leaves no one behind to suffer. 

Love does not abandon children and families. 

Love does not abandon trans and non-binary and gender non-conforming folks.  

Love does not abandon polyamorous families.  

Love does not abandon single parents raising their children.  

Love does not abandon Earth and Her creatures, systems, and people.  

Love not only does not abandon anyone, but love stays, love rests with, love suffers with, love abides with. 

Love stays, friends, especially when things are at their hardest. Love never gives up. 

My position is this: If you have a tradition that calls upon love as the center of its values, then please live out of those values. If you have no tradition that you call your own, but you practice some kind of personal spirituality, ask yourself how love factors into that practice, and if you find it wanting, do something about that. And if you do not practice or believe or adhere or join, then I’m asking you, join me.  

Join me in love. 

As ever, 

~Catharine~ 

The post Join Me in Love appeared first on The Way of the River.

Beloved— 

This issue of Reflections gets an honest-to-goodness content warning. I have written some home truths about dieting, the dieting industry, and the nature of self-compassion. But there’s some hard stuff in here, and if you are someone who struggles with your weight, food, or your body, and you’re just not feeling like going there right now, slide on by, comrade, and with my blessing. 

One of our comrades at The Way of the River, Kerry, was speaking with me this week about commercial advertisements in late-stage capitalism. How much of an assault they are. How we both have to mute them (or, if they’re recorded, fly by), because listening to them is, as I said, an assault on the senses. 

I can’t watch much commercial television for precisely the reason that television advertising nauseates me. It’s too loud. Too fast. And too much of a lie, but it’s so easy to take it in, anyway. 

One of the things that Kerry pointed out in her conversation with me is that it all seems to stem from the fear of death, and the belief that if we just have the right things, live the right way, and consume the right products (and don’t consume others, ah ah AH!) we’ll be okay. And being okay means not dying. 

Fear of death has fueled many human preoccupations throughout history.  

One cannot help thinking of the Pharaohs, those mighty kings who—like other wealthy people around the planet—were buried with many of their household objects and other signs of their wealth and power. I think, too, of the Celtic woman we know was wealthy and free when she died because of the torc that was around her neck in her tomb. And I think of the baseball (softball? No, baseball, I think) that we buried with my grandfather because, as one of my aunts said, “He might like to play once he gets there.” 

But there is no “getting there.” Not in that sense. I just don’t believe there is. My grandfather is not somewhere playing baseball.  

Because I don’t believe that we can outrun death. 

And commercial advertising, much of it, is about trying to outrun death. Medicines for every conceivable ailment, skin regimens, cars that feel big and safe, and, of course, diets.  

The diet industry was worth 72 billion dollars at the start of 2019, according to an article in Business Wire, a Berkshire Hathaway online magazine. 

Let me say that again, in case the citation was lost on you:  The diet industry is worth 72 BILLION DOLLARS in 2019. (Note: if it worked, it wouldn’t be worth that much money, but onward…) 

Not only that, but according to a website supporting people who want to buy franchises in various industries, the weight-loss industry is, “…fraught with misinformation. False claims about potential results and benefits run rampant. In the last decade alone the Federal Trade Commission has brought more than 80 law enforcement actions against companies making deceptive weight-loss claims.” 

Most studies that claim to track, “long-term” weight loss success and that have the highest rates of “success”—success being described as keeping between 5 and 10% of their original body weight off—only study up to a year or two. That’s long term?!  

It’s not. An article in Slate by Harriet Brown, puts it like this: 

“You’ll likely lose weight in the short term, but your chance of keeping if off for five years or more is about the same as your chance of surviving metastatic lung cancer: 5 percent. And when you do gain back the weight, everyone will blame you. Including you.” 

“This isn’t breaking news; doctors know the holy trinity of obesity treatments—diet, exercise, and medication—don’t work. They know yo-yo dieting is linked to heart disease, insulin resistance, higher blood pressure, inflammation, and, ironically, long-term weight gain.” 

Let me zero in on a couple of things here. First, “They know yo-yo dieting is linked to [a bunch of awful stuff].” And we know that the likelihood for at least 40% of people is that they will gain back more than they originally lost each time they diet, which is how yo-yo dieting leads to weight gain.  

But what is more on my mind is this quotation: “And when you do gain back the weight, everyone will blame you. Including you.” 

A-fucking-men, my sisters and brothers. Amen.  

We blame ourselves. All current science shows that willpower alone does essentially nothing in the war against our bodies (poor bodies, with so many of us always at war against them…), and yet everyone, including us, blames us. 

The most famous, wealthy, powerful people among us blame ourselves. In her magazine O, Oprah describes sitting at the Emmy Awards ceremony and going so far as to pray to lose to her talk-show rival, Phil Donahue: “I wouldn’t have to embarrass myself by rolling my fat butt out of my seat and walking down the aisle to the stage.” 

What?! 

How does this make any sense?! 

How does such deep, abiding shame about taking up more space in the world, and maybe, maybe lowering one’s risk of certain disorders and diseases, come to be? There are all kinds of things floating around in here, right? Beauty myths and standards or attractiveness. Healthism—the belief that health is the highest and most important virtue. The belief that thinness equals health and that, “If you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything.” 

My. God.  

“If you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything.” Have you ever heard such a ridiculous statement at any other time in your entire life?! Your relationships. Your joy. Your skills. Your gifts. Your superpowers. Your capacity for love and the ability to change the world for the better. 

Nope. Nope. Nope. 

If you don’t have your health—and what do we mean by “health,” anyway?!—you don’t have anything. And if this elusive “health” is somehow marked on your body by obesity, then not only are you radically impoverished, it’s your own fault. You are both a medical and a moral failure. 

The diet industry tells us that we can outrun death. That obesity is the leading cause of the death in the United States. Furthermore, it sells us the idea that if we just… if we only… if we could… be other than we are, comrades, we would be thin. And because we were thin, we would be healthy. And because we would be healthy, we would be valuable. Worthy. Lovable. 

It’s a crock of shit, I’m here to tell you. 

I could talk about my actual weight (appalling, especially to me—I’m not immune to this shame game). I could talk about my “numbers” for thyroid and glucose and all that I got from my last blood draws (really good). My blood pressure (fine). My stamina or ability to walk more than half a block (shitty). I could talk about the effects of pulmonary emboli (horrific). I could talk about my healing from cellulitis (slow). I could share with you the charming story of how I became dangerously anemic (gross). I could paint a picture for you of how I came to be the size I am with the health strengths and vulnerabilities that I have. 

And you might draw a picture of me. Because of “my non-weight numbers,” as well as my commitment to aquatic physical therapy, you might think I’m what some people call a “good fattie.” “She’s doing what she can…” And that might make me a more moral person in your eyes, whether you’d like to admit it or not. It’s certainly true that I imagine some idealized version of myself in which I’m no longer fat and so I am therefore morally more upright. 

Or you might look at my lack of stamina and my actual size… You might see me scanning a waiting room to find a chair… You might look at my history of getting bigger, and trying to lose weight, and getting bigger still, and trying to lose weight, and getting bigger still… 

And you might draw other conclusions. But I want to practice not drawing any conclusions about people’s character—my own or anyone else’s—based on the size of their bellies, asses, thighs, or any other parts. Not whether they’re thin or fat, small or big, “normal” or “morbidly obese.” 

I want to practice love. Love that I offer myself and that I return to myself when I forget. And love for you, love to which I return when I forget. 

Friends, let us love one another. Let us love one another now, not in some imagined future in which we are all healthy and take up the “right” amount of space and can do the “right” number of laps across the pool.  

As Joanna Macy says, “We can be in love with one another now.” Whatever is going to happen in the future, thanks to cancer, traumatic brain injury, heart attack, stroke, or slow decline, none of us is getting out of here alive. None of us. 

It’s not impressive to me when friends of mine who can buy their clothes at Target are obsessing on their weight and spending their HUGE POWER and AMAZING ENERGY trying to get smaller, to take up less space, and to have disappointing effects on their lives. That is to say, sure, get stronger. Sure, dance. Sure, swim. Sure, do something really physically hard for you and realize you can do it and feel the beautiful power of muscles moving over bone and the delightful soreness that can come the day after some physical work. 

Or not.  

I love you anyway. You don’t owe me your health, beloved. You don’t owe it to anyone. We’re all going to die, and whether I have you for only this one day or whether I beat you to the grave, I love you.  

Always- 

~Catharine~ 

The post You Don’t Owe Me appeared first on The Way of the River.

Beloved—

First, you should know that as I finished proofing and editing this love letter, my hands shook, there were butterflies in my belly, my feet were squirming, and I had to remind myself to breathe. This is not bullshit, friends. What I am writing is real for me right now, and I hope it is real for you.

Second, I promise I’m not going to talk about the Roman Catholic church for this entire love letter. If you really can’t stand anything about any of all that, skip down to where it says, “So let’s go to someone else.” Seriously. Don’t worry about it. Just skip on down.

One of the most important maxims I have ever learned about discernment is one that I have had to translate into my own theology. The statement is attributed to the Spanish theologian, Ignatius of Loyola, also the founder of the Jesuit order:

“The will of God is written in the deepest desires of our hearts.” The will of God is written in the deepest desires of our hearts.”

The will of God, you say?

Okay, how about your own most profound truth, your own Highest Will, your own best self, your own true calling, how about one of those? Better?

Is written in my own desires?

Yes. That’s what I’m saying, and it is one of the founding principles of the Jesuits, the Sisters of St. Joseph, and many other religious orders.

Now, the Jesuit Pope Francis I (born Jorge Mario Bergoglio, from Argentina) may be doing a lot of things that one certainly wouldn’t have expected of, say, his predecessor. Nonetheless, if he said, “Consult the deepest desires of your heart to find the truth of what you’re meant to do,” I think a lot of people would be surprised. Most of us don’t generally think of Popes as encouraging us to attend to desire.

Nonetheless, our own most profound truth, what some of us magical types call our Highest Will, what we are most meant to be doing in this world, is findable.

You can know it. You can find it.  

So let’s go to someone else. Let’s see what another powerful leader, this one from the Black church tradition, has to say.

Let’s go to the theologian, Howard Thurman. In 1944, the Rev. Dr. Thurman founded the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples. People’s Church was super important (at its founding and today) because it was the first major, interdenominational, multiracial, multicultural church in the United States. In Rev. Dr. Thurman’s work, Jesus and the Disinherited, he outlines a theology of liberation for all people with those most on the margins centered as he believed they were for Jesus.

And the Rev. Dr. Thurman also famously said, “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

But again, we struggle with this maxim, this wise aphorism, because we have no idea what makes us come alive. Many of us feel such a lack of life, such apathy and despair in the face of the evils being done around us—even, and maybe, so sadly, especially those evils being done in our name—that we cannot name what brings us alive. We are, some of us, afraid to be alive.

Where life is concerned, or, if you will, vitality, the white dancer Martha Graham did not mince words:

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open.” (emphasis mine)

Please let our quickening, our action not be lost. The world needs it. The world needs YOU.

These writers and thinkers, all of them, as well as the Quaker teacher Parker Palmer, public servant Janet Reno, anonymous writer of the Gospel of Thomas, and ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle all agree with Ignatius and Francis, Howard, and Martha up there.

What we do matters. What we don’t do matters. What we allow matters.

Who we are and how we are matters.

You matter, my dear one. You matter.

I made a video early last week about these very issues. About how vitally important I think it is that we pay attention to what is given to us. What are our gifts? What are our strengths? Where do we need help, and how do we ask for it?

And yes, friends, I want my class, Making Hard Choices, or its sister class, Tarot for Discernment, to help you understand your heart, to help you hear your life speak, to bring forth what is within you. I want to help.

And why?

Because I believe that teaching and learning and listening and hoping and dreaming and attending are all part of the ministry I am called to do.

And also because discernment is a lifelong activity that calls us again and again to attend to the choices we’re making or permitting to be made for us.

And also of course because my ministry is part of the livelihood of my household.

And also because I can imagine a movement of people who are committed, whose previously comfortable hearts have been afflicted into speaking truth to those in power, who have claimed their dignity and liberation, who are dismantling myths of oppression (thank you, adrienne maree brown, for that formulation), and who are saving our habitat so that we stop killing one another and the other beings on this planet.

I can imagine that movement because I know what it’s like to find one’s comfortable heart afflicted, or as my Pentecostal and Baptist friends might say, “convicted.” I can imagine that movement because I know that when enough people know that they’ve got to do something, that something can be accomplished.

I know that when enough people know that something is worth not just dying for, but living for, appointing their lives for, that something will happen.

Friends, I want us to stop killing one another.

I want the concentration camps (“detention centers”) in the United States to be closed and the people currently in them taken care of as befit their human dignity.

I want not to see the animals and plants who share this beautiful, glorious home of ours, this Earth of Whom we are an expression, continue to be destroyed and utterly lost from Earth’s beautiful face.

I want barriers to the full inclusion of people with disabilities to come down and for us to learn how to honor and welcome each and every one of us.

I want people to use our bodies, our souls, and all the strength we can find for the highest, deepest good we can find. And we can find that strength through the open door of our hearts, as the Sufis say.

I want a movement to grow up with people like Greta Thurnberg (teenage environmentalist), Rev. William Barber (Protestant minister and founder of Moral Mondays), adrienne maree brown (writer and community organizer), Rev. Theresa Soto (Unitarian Universalist minister, intersectional activist, and poet), Mark Silver (Sufi teacher and business educator), and Rev. Eric Eldritch (Wiccan priest and interfaith activist).

These are people, while they are as fallible as the rest of us, who listen to their hearts. To their heads, to their studies, to their experience, to their bodies, yes, and to. their. hearts.

“The will of God is written in the deepest desires of our hearts.”

Friends, I’m not saying that I can give you all the answers to your questions, or even ANY of the answers. What I can give you is my experience of a powerful periscope that allowed me to see up out of the muck of my life and into a new life I love.

What I will say is that I have some tools that have helped me when I have used them. I will say that they are tools that have saved my life.

I will say that these tools are, I am reminded again and again, necessary for my well-being and the well-being of my ministry.

So perhaps, if you attend to your heart right now, or over the course of this week, you will decide to join our small band of comrades in the work of August’s course, Making Hard Choices. Or perhaps this is not the right time.

But what if it is the right time?

Making Hard Choices registration will be open through this Saturday (11:59 Pacific Daylight Time). If your heart longs for comrades in the journey, if you want to work hard to learn what is yours, if you want to know how to move forward, then consider joining us.

And if you already know what you are called to do, then please do it. Please, please, please move against the fear, and do it.

Please move one more inch toward your fear, and help us love one another now. Help us act together now. Help us save one another now.

I love you.

~Catharine~

PS – Not only is Making Hard Choices open, but so is its friend, Tarot for Discernment, and registration for that course will be open all month. Whatever you decide, know that I am always here, Beloved, waiting to hear from you, waiting to see you in The Way of the River Facebook Community Group, or at magic@thewayoftheriver.com, waiting to know more of who and how you are.

The post Come Be Frightened appeared first on The Way of the River.

Hello, Beloved –

Today, I share some words for you that have come to my mind, and one word in particular, that I wrote about at the beginning of 2018.

These words are about the importance of saying NO. Saying NO to overwhelm. Saying NO to beating ourselves up, yes.

But especially, right now, right here, in this place and time, to saying NO to how the United States government is behaving. How the “speed of the machine” is entirely too slow, and people are dying – from climate crisis, to deaths caused by police, and most on my mind these days, from the overcrowded and entirely inhumane conditions of refugees and undocumented migrant people at our southern border.

This seems like a perfect time to promote Making Hard Choices, doesn’t it? But that’s not why I’m including the message below. I’m including it because we are a little way over halfway through a year, and I need to be reminded of the compassionate NO. The compassion that says, This injustice must STOP. Overwhelming greed and pride and the “personhood” of destructive corporate consumption must stop.

I know that I am called to speak with, engage with, talk with those in my community who are in relationship with me, whom I trust and who trust me. And so I am writing to you, I have written to you, and I will continue to write to you. And write to me, please. Tell me what you’re doing, what you’re feeling called toward, what you need to do or have to do in order to do what you are most called to. And let us all get together to enact our callings—together, each doing our part, each coming together, ALL together, to make the United States a safer place to be for all of our residents and citizens.

Blessings, and may you enjoy the words below, the reminder that we need to say NO.

I love you

*****

I want to comment a bit on a spiritual practice of mine I have engaged for the upcoming year. I have allowed a word to surface, to emerge through discernment and waiting, to be a guide, an aspiration, or a reminder.

Last year’s word was “Juicy.” I spent some time explaining why I chose it and what it meant. What I don’t think I told you is that a little over half the year, the word “Radiance” also emerged. I heard myself called “radiant” by others, I wrote about it in my journal, and it became clear that it was part of my identity.

Not only part of my identity, but something I wanted to cultivate. Juiciness, yes—the richness of the ripened pomegranate pip; the slurpy, messy joy of a new summer peach; the slide and delight of lovemaking—these were important images.

Radiance, now, that was something else again. It wasn’t something I thought up. It was something that surfaced, that emerged and was reflected in the language and understanding of others.

So.

This year I thought I might choose, “vitality” for my word. Energy. Life. Mobility. All things I want to encourage in myself, yes. I did say, though, that I knew it was provisional. I knew I had “thought it up,” as I mentioned above. It’s a good word, “vitality,” and definitely does go with “radiance.”

But it’s not the word that’s been given.

The word that has been give to me for this year is “no.”

I am a yes-sayer.

I want to take on All the Things, even knowing, if I take even a moment’s reflection, that I cannot.

I want to make everyone happy, especially people whose judgment I fear.

I want to do everything perfectly, and berate myself when I fall short.

I know I am not alone in these matters, friends. I know that there are those of you who do similar things.

There’s an expression, “No is a complete sentence.” This phrase, this sentence, has always terrified, attracted, and repelled me. All at once. How can I say, “No” by itself? Or even just “No, thank you,” when someone asks me to do something extra, or when I get an idea myself to which I need to say no?

Here’s another one: “No means no.” It is most commonly used to refer to sexual assault and abuse. As a survivor of multiple rounds of assault and harassment, I learned that “no” did not always succeed in being what I meant. Whether I said it with words or said it with my terrified, rigid body, “no” didn’t always get me very far.

Finally, there’s the idea of compulsive niceness. I am a kind person. Compassion and kindness, real, radiant loving kindness are things I value about myself. But sometimes, as you’ve read here before, compassion must put up the hand that says “no.” Sometimes, kindness is teaching someone else about boundaries. Sometimes kindness to myself or even to others is setting a simple boundary: No, I cannot do that. No I’m not free for that meeting. No, my schedule is already full that day.

I share all of this with you not just to give myself accountability (though doubtless that is part of the picture), but also to encourage you in your New Year’s ponderings. What are your hopes, your aspirations? What is reflected to you in the language of those you love and whose opinion you value?

I know I’ve been hearing loud and clear that I don’t need to do everything that is offered to me. That my life runs much better, my relationships are closer and more fulfilling, that my mind is clearer when sometimes I say, “No.”

One last thing about this word, in case it’s not clear. I don’t WANT it to be my word for 2018. It’s making me very uncomfortable. I feel a bit like a toddler stomping around, even though underneath all the stomping and the griping there is an essential peace. A peaceful knowledge that this word, “no,” can help me, teach me, see me through.

What is leading you? Where do you feel at peace in your discernment? How does the Divine bloom in your heart this season, reflected to you in others’ words and the stirrings of your own deep, wise Self?

I’d love to hear. There’s a thread on The Way of the River Facebook Group on this very topic. Feel free to join, or to send me a note about your musings. And remember, of course, that nothing here is set in stone. The year moves on and so do we. We learn and grow, and our sense of ourselves and the things around us changes. Don’t be afraid to choose, just to let something gently emerge.

You don’t have to get it right.

There is no wrong answer.

I love you

~Catharine~

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Dear ones—

May your week be fruitful, and may we all bring all of ourselves to our being this week. Enjoy the video! See you ‘round the Facebook Group.

Love-
Catharine

The post What Are We Doing? appeared first on The Way of the River.

2000s. Raised slightly religious at a Unitarian Universalist church

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I was googling what people who train owls are called, and instead got traumatic flashbacks when OWL training results came up. OWL is the Unitarian Universalist/United Church of Christ sexuality education program. My dad was an OWL teacher and do you know

My dears, my heart is heavy today. In various ways, my Unitarian Universalist colleagues of color, trans and non-binary colleagues, colleagues with disabilities, and fat colleagues have spoken up today talk about bias, harm, and ongoing injury in our ministerial association. (UUMA)

There is so much harm done in ministerial circles….and these are allegedly circles of care, compassion, and ultimately of covenant.

So this note is just a reminder for all of us in The Way of the River, all of us comrades. I intend that The Way of the River be a place where Black live and the lives of other people of color and indigenous people matter. Trans/non-binary/gender non-conforming lives matter. Fat lives matter. Disabled lives matter. Women’s lives matter. Immigrants’ lives matter.

Many of us hold identities that are so complex we cannot hope to pull one thread from another. We are harmed and we have caused harm. Yes. That is true.

But what I mean to say here is that I want The Way of the River to be an anti-oppressive space. The personal is political, yes, but the spiritual is political. We cannot love one another if we are not loving one another, eh?

And loving one another MEANS loving across difference. And to love means to welcome.

To welcome is to create spaces that think of others and so to risk being wrong or missing people as we work toward inclusion, welcome, and celebration of one another’s liberation and dignity. To risk doing it wrong, and to try again to do better. And taking the risks and trying again both and always out of love.

That is why I have written about characteristics of the white supremacy culture from which I benefit and which I perpetuate and work to dismantle, all at once. And why I write and talk about the kyriarchy — the rule of “the lords” — writ large.

It is why I write about being fat and having mental illness and physical disability. It is why I write about being a survivor of sexual assault when men believed they had more right to my body than I did myself. And I believed them.

And all of this is why I’d like to hear from you, ESPECIALLY if you are part of a marginalized group, if you hold identities of struggle. My email is magic@thewayoftheriver.com.

I will read what you write, I promise.

I will try to get back to everyone who writes to me, though I know that that is a dangerous promise to make.

Especially if you think that there are things I need to talk about that I’m not talking about, please let me know. May we have a conversation about what you wish I’d say that I haven’t? Please email me, or send me a PM or ask for a Zoom call.

I love you.

There may or may not be Reflections this week. This note may be the only public writing I feel able to do; we shall see.

But know that I love you, and that I am especially sitting in solidarity and comradeship with all seeking liberation, dignity and joy, and all who work to dismantle any myths of supremacy. (Thank you, adrienne maree brown for those words.)

The post Oppression and The Way of the River appeared first on The Way of the River.

Our new Breeze database is Breeze and you should have received an invitation, logged in at https://www.breezechms.com/ (ID: FUUN) and made sure your profile is up to date.

Now you can also download the Breeze app (Breeze ChMS) and you will see the same functionality as the web-based version to quickly look up members within your database to access their contact information or email straight from the app. Members can even use the app to access their giving history.

Hello, dear friends –

Happy LGBTQ* Pride month! I should say, happy LGBTQQIPA Pride! That’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning, Queer, Intersex, Pansexual, Asexual Pride! Happy month for us!

I’m a Gen-Xer priestess and minister who came out when I was 17, during the AIDS Crisis. Please consider my words in light of that part of my identity.

The movement once described as “Gay Liberation,” has grown to include people who use words like non-binary/Enby; demisexual; gender nonconforming; cisgender; and aromantic. To some of us, all this new language can feel overflowing, overwhelming, even frustrating and flooding.

But queer culture has always been about finding out who we are and how to tell its stories, even if we can’t explain them. It’s always been about multiplicity in unity. There have always been people of Male, Female, Both, All, and No gender. There have always been people who were asexual (not just celibate), polyamorous, same-sex/same-gender-loving.

There has always been queerness.

For example, in ancient Greece, the priestxes of Cybele were ecstatic drag singers and dancers, the Galli. The Galli are, in many ways, the forebears of some of queer culture’s most daring, reviled, marginalized, and magical, sacred, people—transwomen and drag queens. These holy forebears, the Galli, danced through the streets generally making a ruckus, with painted faces and flowing gowns, jingling their sacred tambourines.

The Galli are the ones whose magical, sexy worship we invoke in Pride parades.

Pride parades are an opportunity for contemporary queer people to dance in the streets as our worship. To walk, roll, dance, chant, and watch as ecstatic celebration. As rejection of the toxic prison of the closet—a place so many of our queer kin still live.

While the parades are not for all of us—some of us prefer other kinds of events, or don’t really celebrate this month at all, and that is our prerogative—the Pride parade is still one of the quintessential expressions in the constellation of queerness.

Pride parades are chances to pull out all the stops and make room to be just as countercultural as some of us are, just as flamboyant, just as glittered, just as sexy, just as threatening to heteronormative hegemony as we are.

Queer people have been recognized for millennia as magical beings. Cultures with three to seven genders acknowledge that gender expression is complex, mysterious, and even touched by the Divine. We have been acknowledged as travelers between the upperworld and underworld. For example, in the Sumerian myth of Inanna, Queen of Heaven, it is two “genderless beings” who bring her the Water of Life and the Food of Life to save her after her invasion of the Underworld realm of Her sister-self, Ereshkigal.

And in 1978, queer, world-traveling magic would find a new expression:  Gilbert Baker designed the first rainbow flag. Baker included eight stripes, each one a different color. He assigned a meaning to each stripe, an expression or aspiration for the “gay” community. Bright pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sunlight, green for nature, turquoise for magic, dark blue for serenity, and violet for spirit.

The flags were an overnight sensation, and eventually groups like the 32 volunteers who dyed and sewed the first flag couldn’t keep up with demand.

Enter mass production.

Mass production that of course changed something that had been the work of a few, dedicated, invested human hands:

The first big change was that large lots of hot pink fabric were unavailable; the stripe signifying sex was lost.

The second change, made to accommodate hanging the flags in municipal areas, was to eliminate the turquoise; the stripe signifying magic was lost.

So now we have the six-colored flag we see all the time. And six qualities, no longer including sex or magic.

What I mean to get at, though, is that the loss of sex and magic—sexmagick—may have been the work of mass production, may seem benign, may look like happenstance…but as a priestess, I look at the symbol of those losses and know that losing the celebration of sexmagick as essential to queer identity contributes to marginalizing our own kin and impoverishing our own liberation.

I think of the dozens of transwomen murdered in the US each year, mostly women of color, often sex workers, usually killed by someone they know.

These vulnerable women are shapeshifting, magical, sexual people whose talismans have been lost in the rainbow flag. The fuchsia stripe celebrating sex and the turquoise stripe recognizing magick told a story of queer power that Pride celebrations have been losing for years.

These days, our extravagant Pride celebrations are most often supported by corporate sponsorships. And corporate sponsorship, like mass production, transforms something created by the work of devoted volunteers into something overseen by bigger and bigger money and more and more assimilation and respectability.

People fuss over whether the Dykes on Bikes (often the leaders of Pride parades) are too threatening, too dangerous, too obviously sexual to be the heralds of the parade. Queer leatherpeople are looked at askance, and their more assimilated queer kin ask each other, “Why do they have to be so out there?” A drag queen of my acquaintance was discouraged from wearing anything so revealing.

As if.

The whole point of Pride parades is to be revealing. They are our time to reveal being just as we are in our hearts of hearts. They are our time to celebrate, to dance in the streets with Galli ancestors.

Pride parades are our time to reveal that queerness can indeed be a threat to so-called “traditional family values,” by showing that it is the freaks among us who are family to one another. However we engage our sexuality, from asexual to polyamorous pansexual, how we are sexual is part of Pride, and part of queer family.

It is no coincidence that “family” has been a word used by queer people to identify one another. We have been family to one another when no one else has.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a nice, white married lady with two cats. I live in the suburbs with my wife, who looks like the Girl Next Door. Two kids would make us the ultimate lesbian-appearing family. (PS – kids love Pride parades. What’s not to love about a bunch of grown-ups in costumes?!)

But my household and my families by birth and marriage are not my only family. I’m family to the boi walking on a leash in the parade with their Dom. I’m family to my asexual kin whose relationship with sexuality is may be utterly different from that boi and his leash. I’m family to my kin who have visible and invisible disabilities that keep us from parades but who are nonetheless part of my Pride.

All part of my sex magickal family.

And it is that sex magick, the stripes taken from our original rainbow flag, that terrify those who would eradicate us from Earth’s face.

No matter how much or how many of us assimilate to a straight-looking image, there are still people disgusted by what they imagine we do sexually behind closed doors and therefore (?!) disgusted by our very existence. For example, just this week, an Alabama mayor wrote openly on social media about killing queer people. And queer women have been called out for being witches for-fucking-ever.

Sex magick, I’m telling you.

Pride is our time to be magically sexy and to reclaim what was lost from that first eight-striped flag.

It is time to fly—all together—the flags of the Radical Faerie families, of the pansexual leather families, of the nonbinary families, of the families of Girls Next Door, and most certainly, of the families of drag queens and transwomen of color who have been at the front of the fight for our inclusion from the beginning.

Remember that during the Stonewall Riots, the 50th anniversary of which we commemorate this year, it was people like Silvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, two transwomen of color, who took off their high heels and threw them at the police who raided the Stonewall Inn. This cisgender white woman owes my liberty and probably my life to transgender women of color.

I am proud to call the queens and dykes of the Stonewall Inn, and of all the other raided bars across the decades, my queer ancestors. And if you are queer, you can too. Let us give thanks and praise to our Ancestors who have fought the good fight, the fight for pride and inclusion. And let us give thanks and praise to our Descendants, may they live in liberation.

Blessed be your Pride month, my dears. Blessed be.

~Catharine~

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My dears –

Whilst it is indeed the case that every letter I write to you is a love letter, it is also the case that some of them are more obviously dear than others. This one is a reminder in two parts of something very dear to me, and something I believe with all my heart can help every one of us.

This letter is, shocking, I know, about discernment. But wait! There’s more!

It is also about something I know some of you find super fun, some of you disdain, and some of you simply have no experience with: Tarot.

What?!

Tarot, you say? Like, as in cards? Yes. Like, as in fortunetelling? Not as such, no.

Tarot, I say, as in the subject that many of my readers, friends, and colleagues have been asking me to write, teach, and think deeply about for the last few years. I’m just sorry it’s taken me this long.

Tarot is a powerful tool for discernment. So may any oracular device be, traditional or not—dice and playing cards can be as useful as ancient techniques like watching the flight of birds, interpreting the arrangement of entrails <<shudder>>, casting the Elder Futhark, or reading from the Ifa table.

But Tarot is the tool I know best. And it’s a great tool. It is full to BURSTING with visual, numerical, chromatographical, alphabetical, astrological, and angelic symbolism. It is associated with the Western Mystery Tradition’s obsession with Hebrew letters and the Tree of Life, as well as with the card game that lies at its roots.

It is precisely because Tarot is so full of symbolism both accessible and arcane that it is a great tool for discernment. You can read Tarot without ever studying it for a second. If you’ve never studied a single deck, you can read reliably by considering a question as simple as, “What am I missing that I need to know?” and drawing a single card. Then look at that card and pay attention. Just pay attention to what emerges for you. Pay attention to the colors, the person(s) or animal(s) on the card. Pay attention to the shape of the flowers and how many leaves they have. Pay attention to the way the clouds and the water look. Look at the left side of the card and then the right.

What emerges for you? Of what are you reminded? “Reminded” is the key word here because I believe Tarot never tells us anything we don’t already know deep inside.

Deep inside. Deep, written on the walls of our hearts where our dearest hopes, wildest fantasies, and most hidden terrors are inscribed.

If you’ve read my work before, or listened to me talk, taken one of my classes, allowed me to accompany you in any way on your spiritual journey, then you’ve heard me talk about discernment. And discernment is in part, at least according to Ignatius of Loyola, the discovery of what is written in the deepest desires of our hearts.

Tarot, a practice, play, study, and discipline, is something with which I have been close since I was twenty years old, twenty-six years now. Longer, even, than I’ve known I am a witch, and close to as long as I’ve known I have a calling to ministry. (When I was fifteen, I desperately wanted to be a Jesuit. Desperately, My best friend and I had a huge row about it, actually. I maintained that women would surely be allowed ordination by the time we were adults. More the fool me.)

And Tarot is the oracular discipline to which I’ve given money, study, time, energy, many charts and spreadsheets (I see you experienced practitioners smiling at me, knowing that charts and spreadsheets can have everything to do with Tarot.), and lots and lots of love.

So what?

So why am I writing this to you now?

I confess, I’m teasing you a bit. There’s something coming soon that will bring together these two loves of mine. (Now don’t you think for me a minute that I can’t have more than one or two loves. This is me, we’re talking about. Mr. Whitman knew what he was talking about when he said, “I am large! / I contain multitudes!”)

I love the practice, study, and discipline of discernment.

And I love the practice, study, and discipline of Tarot.

Furthermore, like many of you, I use the Tarot to help me discern next steps in my own life and to help others work with their own questions.

It’s a match made in heaven, no? At least, I think so.

So what shall we do about it, friends? What shall we do?

Well, I’ll say this much: Making Hard Choices: The Art of Discernment is coming up in August. Making Hard Choices is my semi-annual class in learning how to ask the right questions, how to put your ear close enough to the conch that you can interpret the rhythms of the waves of your heart, how to attend to your life as it speaks and has been speaking to you for years.

Making Hard Choices will be with us in August, and I know some of you have been waiting for the chance to dig in with some of the alumni of the course. I can’t wait to introduce you to some of those folks who have found that the practices I teach in Making Hard Choices bear the most fruit over time, with patience, and after letting them sink in a bit. I am so looking forward to working together so you can begin the process of deepening your practice of decision-making, learning to listen to yourself and your life, and sharpening your skills as a life mapmaker, as it were.

Making Hard Choices is in August, and I so hope you’ll join us there.

And what might come up in September? What might I have in my pockets for the month of the equinox, Precious? (Sorry, inappropriate Lord of the Rings references have no place here, I know, I know.)

But I’m going to have something FUN in September!

Will it be something for you Tarot aficionados who have been after me to share how Tarot and discernment meet and meld and come together? Something for those of you who have never laid eyes on an open deck of cards but have always wanted to? Something for those of you who unfairly call yourselves “dabblers” just because you’ve never had a teacher or because you just read the cards the way you see them without looking at the book? Something for you who don’t know the difference between the words, “Major Arcana” and “pips”?

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Making Hard Choices and all its juicy goodness is on its way, never fear. The course that is changing the way some of our comrades at The Way of the River view their most life-altering decisions is indeed happening in August. I’m so looking forward to it. To the pieces that have come into play again and again, as well as some new work along the way.

And then Something Else will be trotting along after…

All my love, truly— (And don’t you think for a minute I can’t give all my love to lots of different people. That’s how love works, silly!)

~Catharine~

PS – Oooh! I almost forgot! (I forget so many important things) There’s something fun for you to get your hands on Right Now!

There is a thing that we in the biz of online ministry call the Awesome Free Gift. Or, if you will, the AFG.

An AFG is the gesture, sometimes big, sometimes small, of thanks that I (like others) have made when you signed up to receive my love letters.

People can make a lot of mistakes with the AFG. Goddess knows, I have.

I’ve made them too small, certainly nothing to write home about! And I’ve made them too big—a whole book or an overwhelming pile of email, however well-meaning!

But my loves, I think maybe (you’ll have to tell me, because I won’t really know until that happens) that Goldilocks is among us. Because I’ve made an AFG that is indeed a gift—you need do nothing more to receive it than to go to the Facebook Community Group. I’ve made an AFG that is (of course) free of charge. And I’ve made an AFG that, well, I don’t mean to say it’s awesome, amazing, or astounding…but it’s authentic. I’ll say that for it. The new AFG: Authentic Free Gift.

This Authentic Free Gift will be what people receive when they sign up for Reflections. But if you’d like an early crack at it – just
go over to the Facebook Community Group, where you’ll find the link to a little bit of something fun, a little bit of something serious, and a little piece of me.

The post At Long Last! appeared first on The Way of the River.

Apparently I'm 100% Unitarian Universalist and 99% Liberal Quaker, but I consider myself a hardcore agnostic. https://twitter.com/Nicole_Cliffe/status/1134269363119243264 …

I got Unitarian Universalist.

Dear, dear beloved—

Thank you for “being here.” Thank you for being with me, some of you, for something like five years!

Some changes are coming to Reflections, and I look forward to hearing from you. Not only those of you who have been faithful readers (and responders!) for years, but also from those of you who are new to our community of comrades.

I bring up my deep and abiding gratitude for all of you because it is like fertilizer for the ground of my inspiration to write. Knowing you are there, knowing that some of you have a special folder into which you put Reflections so you can read it when the time is right, that some of you read them if you feel like it, and some of you just enjoy having a little moment—just the title, just the reminder that I am and you are here and in some way we are together. And some of you read every single week (so surprising to me every time!) and begin your Mondays with a bit of conversation with me. Thank you. No matter how you engage with Reflections, thank you.

Your presence is part of what inspires me every week. The suggestions you make. The ways that those of you in The Way of the River Facebook Group bring yourselves, some of you, again, every single week to Beloved Selfies…It’s astonishing to me. Maybe someday it won’t be a surprise, as our comrade Rev. Ruth Rinehart said together, but for some of you who read every single week (truly surprising to me every time!), for now, it is.

What else gets me to the word? What else supports my coming to the page close to every week of every year these last five years?

I will tell you, and I hope to remind not only myself, but also you, so that we may all find (even more of?) our own creative voices.

First, there are the Baseline Things. For me, these are regular food and water, coffee in the morning, and my meds.

Otherwise, the #1 thing I need for creative fruitfulness and abundance is sleep. I hadn’t realized it until recently, when one week it became stunningly obvious: I had one weekend of powerful rest, and then by Sunday night I was full of ideas, finding myself unable to keep from writing page after page in my journal. I wrote thoughts for Reflections, thoughts for upcoming classes, thoughts about my marriage. I couldn’t not write. I was hungry for writing as I get hungry for touch, for sex, for food. I needed writing as surely as I had needed the rest that preceded it.

Deep rest, I’m telling you. And, in my case, naps.

I know not all of us can take naps. I know I don’t have children who need me at inconvenient times. I know I am refreshed after naps, while others become bears when they awake. Nonetheless, I can and need to nap.

I nap every day. I began this practice because it helps my mood and evens out the bumps that anxiety and depression can throw in my way. I’ve kept napping because it supports my ministry, and particularly my ministry of writing.

Not only do I nap every day, but I try to spend some time each weekend deeply resting. I take my daily nap and I read something for an hour or two. And sometimes I take two naps. (Just writing that, I feel as though I’ve told you I ate ice cream for dinner or watched silly tv all afternoon. Deep rest is still a guilty pleasure. So silly, but true.)

There’s plenty of neuroscience that supports the value of sleep. Dr. Roxane Prichard, a scholar of neuroscience, sleep, and intersectional social justice, recently recommended the book Why We Sleep to me, and she said, “If you have any doubts about the necessity and benefits of sleep, read this book.” I haven’t read it yet, so I don’t know more about its contents, but Dr. Prichard’s recommendation was fervent, so I include it here.

So there’s science. But I know very little about that science.

What I do know is that when I have been getting bad sleep or too little sleep, I dread writing Reflections. I think of all of you with guilt and worry. “What will I write?” I wonder. “I have nothing of value to say!” I exclaim internally. “Anything I write will be self-involved and worthless!”

And then I sleep. And almost every time, the doubt melts away without my even noticing. I write in my journal, I come to the Reflections page ready to write, and the words flow out of my fingers.

Sleep is one thing I need to come to the page with joy and anticipation.

Beauty is another.

Anyone who reads Reflections, is in our Facebook Community Group, or knows me in some other context knows that I have recently moved.

I have moved to Rosewood House and I am surrounded by beauty. I am surrounded by old trees I have no hope of encircling with my embrace.

I am surrounded by the small birds popping around the garden, looking for worms, or settling in the branches of the dogwood, or nesting in the tree closest to Julie’s study downstairs.

And most of all, I am surrounded by gardens dug over twenty years ago, tended faithfully ever since, and which offer the Procession of Flowers. Grape hyacinth, heavenly bamboo, primrose, daffydowndilly, hyacinth… And then lilac revealing its classically lavender blooms and the pink dogwood while the peony buds began to swell. The unbelievably royal violet clematis creeping up the trellis against the brick.

And overnight one night, the appearance of those Grinch-head looking blossoms of rosebush after rosebush after rosebush. Flowers of the Mother of God, of Guadalupe, of Mary, mysterious, waiting, burgeoning in the sun.

And now they begin to unfurl, each of them, their five leaves, their pentagram of protection, and show us their colors. Colors that have been a mystery until this week. And colors that will just keep coming, as the bushes with the most sun appear first, and the ones that are more shaded have smaller buds (though still SO many!) and will follow along behind.

PS – I just. Could. Not. Resist. The above is the first blooming rose from the garden outside my window. The first of the roses to turn down its protective leaves and dare to start to unfurl in earnest. Perhaps some helpful metaphors there. Perhaps just beauty and the glory of Earth’s reckless gifts.

As I said last week, sometimes I just sit and gaze out my study window. Neil Gaiman says of his writing routine that he writes many hours a day in his space, and he may do three things besides write:  He may use the bathroom, make tea, or stare out the window.

It feels good to be connected to one of my heroes. I spend the time I spend writing with my fingers moving over the keys, or getting coffee, going to the bathroom, or staring out my study window.

Beauty. Sleep.

Beautysleep? Perhaps that is in fact one way of looking at it. My conscious mind taking in the beauty around me and my subconscious mind swimming in it, organizing it in Mystery, and offering me its gifts when I wake.

There are other things that support my writing, teaching, classes, presence, preaching. But these are two that have been asked to be shared with you today.

Where is beauty in your life? Are you missing it? Reading what I’ve written about Rosewood House, do you find yourself envious or longing?

How can you find or create beauty around you? When I lived on a busy urban street, I brought bouquets into my house (yes, flowers again. I sat on my porch in late spring and summer and watched people walk by. I drove through ancient forests and breathed in the tender gift of their breaths, back and forth. I went to the coast and admired the crash and retreat of waves against the Oregon cliffs.

These were my ways. What are yours? What could be yours? Don’t give up.

Where is rest in your life? Does it feel possible? Is there even one hour in the week you can carve out just to lie in bed? One hour?

If that hour feels like too much, I understand, at least on some level, because I have watched my beloved working parents struggle to find enough rest to manage, much less to be truly nourished.

So if sleep, if rest feels unattainable, then perhaps lean into beauty? Into the runes the sticks by the Metro make. The flocks of geese above coming home again. Even the vicarious delight you can take in seeing someone with a style, a sense of joy in the way they move through the world.

Baseline care. Community. Sleep. Beauty.

I am blessed, my friends, and you do a big chunk of that blessing. Never forget it.

You are beauty.

~Catharine~

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My Unitarian Universalist friend said Catholics are weird. I responded: “We’re not! By the way, the incorruptible heart of a dead Priest Saint from 100 years ago is touring the US, and will be nearby, wanna come with?” His face! (Don’t worry, I explained!)

Hello, dear ones, and (for me), good morning –

So there’s this thing I’ve been noodling on. In some ways, it’s not new at all, I’ve written about it here before, and the noodling is not even new. It’s something I return to again and again in my heart, words, and actions.

That something is perfectionism. But perfectionism from a slightly different angle than I’ve written before. And this edition of Reflections genuinely deserves a content warning, simply because it refers to some of the ugliest realities of life in the United States.

At any rate, I was preaching, and I paraphrased an important statement from our comrade, Rev. Theresa Soto: It is more important to interrupt harm than to be polite.

I also said, over the course of my sermon, “Friends, it is more important to try than to be right.”

These two affirmations are related. Why?

Because I am telling you now, perfectionism is – well, part of me wants to say, “A tool of the Devil.” But since I don’t believe in the Devil, and since even if I did, my theology would overrun him entirely, and since really what I mean is something else, I should say that something else.

Perfectionism is a tool of the status quo, and therefore of oppression, white supremacy, and evil.

The status quo is a condition in which Black people die and/or are murdered at astonishing rates. The status quo is a condition in which families are separated, parents from children, at the US southern border and where agents of humanitarian aid are arrested, shackled in courtrooms, and convicted of the crime of leaving water in the desert. The status quo is a condition where the rapists of teenage (and younger) girls are released based on time served, when that time has been all of a few weeks. The status quo is a condition where people with disabilities are wildly more likely to be sexually assaulted than any other members of the general population. The status quo is a condition where birth control and healthy sexual education are withheld from those who could get pregnant (and these are the aids which most help lower rates of abortion), while rights to safe, legal, and accessible abortion are under direct, coordinated, and terrifying attack.

The status quo is full of terror.

And when we give into perfectionism, we give in to the status quo.

What do I mean by that?

Well, far too often, and this is especially true for white people, and I daresay, for white women, we allow ourselves to be stopped in our tracks by perfectionism. We simply don’t move. We don’t dare. We don’t take our own will into our hands and use it. We are afraid of disturbing the peace when the peace has already been broken by someone else causing harm, whether by outright prejudice or violence, or by microaggression.

We are so afraid of being wrong that we don’t dare do anything at all.

One way of being “wrong” is what I mentioned above: “Breaking the peace.” “Causing a scene.” “Ruining” the dinner table conversation at a holiday.

But these things—”causing a scene,” “ruining the conversation,” and “breaking the peace”—are all ways in which we respond to oppression. They are all ways in which we can literally interrupt harm. Harm done by thoughts. Harm done by words. Harm done by votes. Harm done by all kinds of actions.

It is more important to interrupt harm than it is to be polite, Rev. Theresa has taught me.

And it is more important to try than to be right. And politeness, which should not be seen as a measure of rightness, but nonetheless is, is certainly less important than trying..

In an influential interview, Adrienne Maree Brown speaks to trying and failing, ‘Even when we make mistakes, harm each other, lose our way, we are worthy….Learn to apologize. A proper apology is rooted in this worthiness – “I was at my worst. Even at my worst, I am worthy, so I will grow.”’

Apology is what can follow on the heels of trying and not hitting the mark. Apology is what we offer when we genuinely believe in our own worthiness and that of others. Apology is our own commitment to ourselves, not only to those we have harmed, that we are worthy enough to be open to new ideas and therefore to grow, to change.

I have to apologize a lot. I am a recovering perfectionist.

Writing Reflections is one way that I recover. I can’t hit it out of the park every week; I just can’t. And I can’t write something that strikes a significant chord/cord (the musician in me can’t resist, and neither can the priestess) for everyone every week. Some weeks I don’t feel inspired at all, and I take two naps the day my writing is due, and pray that rest and renewal will wake up the genius (that little spirit person who helps artists to do their work) and allow me to face the blank page.

Accepting that I have various disabilities is another way that I recover. I can’t do everything I want to do, and when I try or when I believe that “any normal person could do this,” I suffer, and so do those closest to me. Asking for accommodation, being clear about what I need, and disappointing people if they won’t (or believe they can’t….hmph) make spaces accessible to me are spiritual practices.

Acknowledging that the last six years have taken a cumulative toll on my body and overall health is also a way in which I recover. Pulmonary emboli (life-threatening), followed by antibiotic-resistant deep skin infection (life-threatening), followed by severe anemia and surgery (life-threatening, in the sense that invasive surgical procedures always are), suicidal depression (obviously life-threatening), and then more than a year of hives (briefly believed to be life-threatening when I ended up in the ER, had 150 mg of Benadryl in my system and still was massively swollen up from face to feet)…accepting that all these things have been not just one assault after another, but a cumulative string of insults to my health is a way I recover from perfectionism. Understanding more and more deeply that it will take several, even many years for my body to gain the strength and stamina it once had—more insisting on my own worthiness, more recovery from perfectionism.

And trying to interrupt harm where I see it is of course another way of recovering from perfectionism. It puts me in the way of screwing up, saying the wrong thing, fracturing relationships, staying strong in the face of further harmful behavior. When I let go of perfectionism in the act of trying to interrupt hard, I find we must learn the art of apology because I’m rooted in knowing I’m worthy, I’m rooted in bravery, and I’m rooted in commitment.

Just typing, “I’m rooted in bravery, and I’m rooted in commitment” feels dangerous. It feels like hubris—the pride that the gods strike down. Or at least that get me angry emails.

But these things, bravery and commitment, are what I hope for. And because I am worthy, when I miss the mark, I can risk apology.

So today, dearest, I encourage you, if you struggle with perfectionism, to take a risk. Risk being wrong. Risk someone <<I gasp and shudder in fear>> getting angry with you. Risk someone you care about, someone you really love, disagreeing with you. Risk trying to interrupt harm and inadvertently causing more.

Risk, and in the risking, grow. Know that you will become more skillful. Know that you will become a presence that brings healing where it is most needed. Know that you will become a presence people on the margins will trust. Know that you will become a presence that creates a container where others know they can be brave and that you will respond to their vulnerability with respect and care.

Let us risk, beloveds. And let us support one another’s risking.

I love you.

~Catharine~

PS – I just. Could. Not. Resist. The above is the first blooming rose from the garden outside my window. The first of the roses to turn down its protective leaves and dare to start to unfurl in earnest. Perhaps some helpful metaphors there. Perhaps just beauty and the glory of Earth’s reckless gifts.

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If you ever get the chance, I think you'd get on really well with the Adelaide Unitarian Universalist Reverand Rob Macpherson @saunitarians

“We hold nothing, nothing is ours

Not even love so fierce it burns like baby stars.

But this poverty is our greatest gift;

The weightless of us as things around begin to shift.”

The Indigo Girls – Emily Saliers and Amy Ray

When we think of poverty, we tend to think mostly of material poverty, of hunger, of homelessness, of loneliness, and most of all, of suffering. If we are paying attention, we think of how to alleviate others’ suffering, how to feed and clothe them, house them, keep families together, offer child care and other parenting support. We may also think of how to change the systems that keep some people in poverty while others bask is wealth.

These are all good things to do, and good things on which to focus our collective efforts.

And yet there is another dimension of poverty that is part of all of us.

This poverty is what the Indigo Girls’ quotation points toward. It is the materially observable and spiritually significant reality that everything, everything we have has come from somewhere else. Everything we have comes to us in the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part, as our Seventh Principle reminds us.

There is no such thing as the “self-made man.” There is no such thing as someone who “did it on their own.”

These realizations can bring gratitude for all that we have, as well as a sober realization that much of what we have has come from the labor and oppression of others.

Spiritual poverty is a both/and situation.

The night of the 2000 Presidential election, I decided, rather than watch the returns, I would attend a panel lecture on happiness, being offered by some visiting Tibetan monks. (As it turned out, a very good choice, given the controversy of that night and the following weeks.)

The lama who spoke shared a concept that has stayed with me ever since, and which is intimately tied up with our Seventh Principle. He talked about the Beneficence of the Ten Thousand Things.

In this context, “ten thousand” means, basically, a whole lot, more than we can conceive of, the Limitless. The Beneficence of the Ten Thousand things is the idea that nothing we have is our own, but rather everything comes to us as part of the impossibly complex web of existence. Not from our own owning, or holding, or grasping. Not even from our own effort. Even our attempts, our persistence, our effort come from other places.

Our own effort moves through us as a gift from somewhere and becomes a gift to somewhere else. It is simply part of arising. And each gift, each movement, each arising becomes an invitation for gratitude.

Consider this morning.

I awoke. My heart, which had been beating all night through no conscious effort on my part, continued to do so. Thank you, heart.

My body, original gift of biology, changed over years and years of experience, nurture, neglect, love, and choice, stepped out of bed. Thank you, body.

And that body, along with my mind and head and spirit, moved about and did things. Thank you, however temporary, this ability to move creakily from my bed to the bathroom and about the house.

Thank you, clothing, woven and sewn by others—and probably by others who live lives much less luxurious than mine, and perhaps under conditions of suffering I know nothing about.

Thank you, water with which I washed myself, brought to my house by pipes I did not lay, coming from springs I did not build or create, but which the generosity of Earth provides.

You see where this goes.

Nothing is my own.

Nothing is our own, or at least, not solely our own. Not our talents and skills. Not the art we create. Not the money we receive. Not the land on which we live. Not the natural resources we use. Not the people we love.

Nothing is our own.

The hymn in our grey hymnal sings out, “We are not our own, Earth forms us, / human leaves on Nature’s growing vine.”. And it goes on to a wonderful realization that arises from this spiritual poverty we have, this utter lack of holding: “And if love’s encounters / lead us on a way uncertain, / all the prayers of saints surround us. / We are not alone.”

We are radically not alone. In fact, we are part of one another in ways that can spin our mind into beautiful new imaginative places.

We breathe the same air as one another. What is within you is within me.

We share the same molecules. What is within me is within you.

We drink water the hydrogen of which was present at the beginning of that condition we call time.

We were present at the beginning of time. Everything we are and all possibility was present at the beginning of time.

Everything that makes us ourselves and everything we encounter was present at the beginning of time.

We are children of Earth, yes, but also of Heaven, of those first beams of what we call stars.

We are literally eternal. As eternal as the universe, at least. Because we are at one with all that is. With all that ever has been. With all that ever will be. We span generations and aeons of time. While our consciousness may end with “this little life,” as Shakespeare calls it, we are nonetheless eternal.

“Existence is a team sport,” Commander Jonathan White says, “and it is a team sport.” We cannot escape it—we are part of one another. We are not our own. If we belong to anything, it is to one another.

And if we belong to one another, then we have a radical mandate to come to know one another, to think of one another, to include one another, to welcome one another into our circles of belonging. To exclude no one.

For Unitarian Universalists, the recognition of spiritual poverty is most easily found in the Seventh Principle of the “interconnectedness of existence of which we are all a part.” But spiritual poverty helps us live into all our Principles. “Justice and equity in human relations,” “world community,” respecting the “responsible search for truth and meaning,” and certainly recognizing the “worth and dignity” of every person.

So I invite you today, to consider the many ways our own spiritual poverty invites us into contemplation and gratitude. What will spiritual poverty help you be grateful for today? How can it help you live out your values? How does it change your ideas of welcome? How can we all become more generous, recognizing that nothing we have was our own to begin with?

So many blessings to you as we ride the waves of change together. We are not alone, friends, so let us love one another.

May the blessings of gratitude be with you –

~Catharine~

The post We Hold Nothing: Spiritual Poverty appeared first on The Way of the River.

You mean I’m not lazy, stupid, or crazy? — book by Kate Kelly, Peggy Ramundo, and Edward Hollowell

Beloved –

Last week, I began telling you my money story. So many of us carry so much shame around our money stories that I thought it might be helpful to just “put it out there.” That it might be worthwhile just to own it, to act with authenticity, integrity, and compassion for myself and for others, all in the service of wisdom—that elusive quality for which we strive.

So today, I want to write a little bit about the Why that lies behind a life of chaos, or can. I want to show you a little bit about the underlying causes and exacerbating factors that kept me locked in chaos for so long.

Chaos with money.

Chaos with physical objects.

Chaos with paper.

Chaos with time.

The line at the top—a book title that has stuck with me for years—is one about realizing that one had adult “Attention Deficit Disorder.”

I bring up ADD because, in addition to the salad of other mental health and learning issues I have, learning about ADD explained so much. So much about money, organization, and memory.

Ned Hallowell, one of the aurhors mentioned above, says something like this in his book, Driven to Distraction: Having ADD is like driving with no headlights in the middle of the night in a snowstorm with one windshield wiper working. And oh, with the radio on, full blast.

I remember the first time I heard that and I thought, yep, that’s so it.

It’s not that I have a deficit of attention. It’s that I’m attending to too many things at one time.

Too many things.

Too many relationships.

Too many projects.

Too many worries.

And too much left undone, half done, or never started, as a result.

ADD/ADHD is what is called an Executive Function disorder. It is like a learning disability, in that no matter how much energy or willpower you throw at it, for most of us, it returns again and again, roaring back, wrecking relationships, destroying our self-esteem.

Why?

Because we forget. We have now and not-now, as Hallowell also says.

We have every intention of cleaning up our dishes. But then the world presses in, and something else becomes imperative. Something else reminds us of something else left undone. Something else pokes at the side of our brain and we jump into a creative project.

When I wrote about the chaos of my twenties and early thirties, I was writing about a classic case of “now and not-now.”

The warning notices about my speeding tickets would come. I would look at them with fear and anxiety, put them aside, and within a remarkably short amount of time, they were simply gone from my consciousness.

The bills would arrive, I would know I couldn’t pay them then. I’d think I’d cover them next paycheck, but by the time of the next paycheck, I was busily planning my next trip to Four Quarters, writing a new project, and head-down in relationships, creativity, and work.

In addition to “lazy, stupid, and crazy,” people with ADD are often labeled, and often believe ourselves to be, assholes. People who don’t care about others, especially their partners.

But that’s not it. We do care. We do love you.

Remember how I said ADD is like a learning disability? How it’s an executive functioning disorder?

That means that we have to learn how to manage things that other people find to be second nature.

So nowadays, I s.me things that help/

One of the most important things I’ve learned about managing with ADD is “Time not task.” What does that mean?

Well, let me explain something about how chaos erupts in the lives of some people with ADD.

Organizing and tidying brings on horrific overwhelm in me. It makes me itchy, I’m so overwhelmed and anxious.

So it is with tidying the house or fixing up my study, or UNPACKING AFTER MOVING. (ahem.)

I don’t know where to start. There’s so much GOING ON. There’s so much that the objects in the complex visual field before my eyes seem to move around and swim in my vision. Remember the Hallowell idea from above, about how it’s like driving in a snowstorm. The snow come down in giant drifts and obscures my vision. I cannot find my way.

So there are two things that have helped to change my life. One I have written about before – Pick up one thing. Just one thing.

The other is what I mentioned above:  Time, not task.

I can do almost anything for fifteen minutes. And so, when it’s time to clean the house, that’s what we do. Fifteen minutes. And then we’re free to watch an episode of a show or play on facebook or take a phone call for 45 minutes. Yep, fifteen of working and forty-five of open time. Fifteen-forty-fives, we call them.

Getting past the shame of doing what seems like so little hasn’t even been that hard. Why? Because working in bursts is GREAT. Working in bursts GETS THINGS DONE. And I know the timer will go off—yes, use a timer!!!—in hardly any time at all.

It generally takes us 3 fifteens, and sometimes 2, to get the house tidy and neat. It’s amazing!

But before learning workarounds for what had for years, decades, even, stopped me in my tracks, I had to recognize that the shame I felt, the horrific weight of shame that I was a bad person, that I was “missing a chip,” that I’d never live up to what teachers and authority figures always insisted on calling “potential” (please don’t use that word with your children…), and that I was just broken.

I came to recognize that I was none of those things. I wasn’t lazy, stupid, or crazy (at least not in these ways). I wasn’t uncaring. I wasn’t an asshole. I didn’t need to be stuck in patterns of broken promises and tearful apologies.

What I needed were tools, education, practice, and patience. For one thing, there were things I had never been actively taught as a child—like how to clean my room, for example. I had just been expected to know how to do them.

Happily, I have been given many of those things over the course of the last ten years, and the lessons continue to evolve and change and help more and more.

Now I arrive early for appointments to compensate for my tendency to be late.

Now I use my phone to remind me to do things—and I try to pay attention when it goes off, lol!

Now I tidy in fifteen-forty-fives ad I don’t care if people think fifteen minutes is too short a time or it’s evidence that I’m lazy.

Lazy isn’t simply a descriptor of one’s behavior. It’s a judgment of one’s character, and it’s shaming. It will NEVER change behavior. NEVER.

If these things sound familiar to you (whether in you or in a loved one), I recommend to you two books. One is ADD-friendly Ways to Organize Your Life, and the other is Is It You, Me, or Adult ADHD?. Both of them have made a huge difference in my life, and maybe they can for you too.

All the love, all the peace, all the compassion—

~Catharine~

The post Testimony of Chaos Part II appeared first on The Way of the River.

“You either [move] inside your story and own it or you [stay] outside your story and hustle for your worthiness.”

― Brene Brown

Hello, beloved –

First, thank you so much for all the messages of support and love I have received over the last three weeks when I have begun the process of moving into this beautiful new-to-me sanctuary I can call my home. Your words have been most welcome, and they have been part of what has helped get me through the stress of the move into Rosewood House.

Second, I’ve been thinking about Reflections and the other writing I do at The Way of the River. The Beloved Selfie threads in which you so generously participate, bringing yourselves to the images, bringing your be-ing to the pixels on the “page.” I think about how we work gently to create a non-oppressive space. How much more of that anti-oppression, pro-love work I want to do.

And I think of why people have come to The Way of the River.

For many of us, even for me in the very beginnings of this ministry, we have come because we need a place we can tell our stories, be inside them, move inside them, learn the truth and the value of them. We need a place to affirm and confirm the values of our weird truths, our bananapants qualities (thank you, Morgan Davis, for that most excellent term), and the histories that make up what I learned in seminary to call “testimony.”

Now I didn’t learn about this word, “testimony,” from a teacher. I didn’t learn about it in a lecture or a presentation. I learned about it from my classmate, Asha, a Black, Pentecostal, exuberant, straight, cisgender woman. We were talking after a meeting we had for our pastoral care class. We had been drawn to one another from the first day of classes. She found my own exuberance refreshing, “even when we were singing those terrible white people hymns.” And I found her positively magnetic. We became friends almost instantly.

Did I mention she was Pentecostal? Yes, indeed, you might think that our theologies would separate us, but instead, because we were so drawn together in friendship, we came to one another in a spirit of curiosity and honestly. It was the beginning of some of the experiences that epitomized my time at Wesley Theological Seminary. Loving alike, not believing alike. Truly.

At any rate, Asha and I were talking about some of the deep topics we were working with in a pastoral care class we had together. And I spoke about some things in my past about which I felt ashamed.

And Asha say, “Girl, you stop right there! You just stop right there! You don’t have one reason to be ashamed. Every single thing you’ve just told me is part of your testimony, and part of how God has brought you to this moment, this school, and your ministry. It is your testimony.”

As I think of how Asha went on to speak about testimony—and she gave some wonderful examples from her own life—I realize that testimony is a lot of what The Way of the River has been, when it’s been at its best. When I’ve been my most generous and authentic self.

And I also think of the preaching admonition:  Preach from scars, not wounds. And it’s wise, to a point – you are not here to take care of me all the time. We are together in this work, this ministry, this magic. And yet sometimes it’s hard to tell what is truly healed to a scar and what has a ways to go.

That said, I’d like to leap into a piece of testimony I don’t think I’ve written about a lot with you:  money.

For years and years – from my late teens into my late twenties, I’d say of my relationship to money, “I am missing a chip. I just don’t understand how it works.” I didn’t even know how right I was.

So first, in this edition of Reflections, I am going to tell you some of the things, many of the things that happened to teach me that I had a “missing chip,” and furthermore, that I was characterologically inferior, immoral, irresponsible, and unreliable. Maybe some of you share these experiences and haven’t been able to speak about them.

And some of you will find them shocking. Shocking, even, in ways that learning I have bipolar type one or that I heard voices for years hasn’t been shocking.

Some of you will find them alien. You just won’t be able to imagine how I lived my life in such a way, and then arrived where I am now. But I will tell you the testimony. Not the whole story, the whole testimony, not today. But we can begin.

Let me show you some of what happened to me, relative to money, over the course of my late teens and well into my twenties:

I had a $500 credit line closed on me.

I lost a calligraph, a precious one, of my father’s that he had made just for me. I couldn’t pay my second payment to the frame shop that had it and was framing it as it deserved, and then then the shop closed and I lost it forever. (Ach, still such a loss, such grief.)

I bought things, jewelry mostly, impulsively, without any consideration of other bills, needs…without any concept of a larger context.

And then other things started to happen.

The heat got turned off.

The electricity got turned off.

My dearest friend moved out of our shared apartment because she couldn’t handle the chaos I was living in or was creating.

I defaulted on my student loans.

I was evicted.

There was a bench warrant for my arrest, and I was taken by the State College constable (who also happened to be one of my high school science teachers—how MORTIFYING IS THAT?!) to see the District Justice regarding my having bounced several checks. I didn’t even know that I was writing bad checks.

Later, when I was holding down a job that made what seemed like the vast sum of $34,000 a year, things were still hard. Better than when I was broke all the time, but better.

Except I got a speeding ticket. On the order of your classic bipolar disorder speeding ticket:  A 75-in-a-50 mph zone. I was in a county bordering on the county where I lived.

I forgot all about that one. Even when notices were put on my door, I just took them down, put them someplace, and forgot all about them.

Until uniformed police officers came to my workplace. Then I remembered the notices.

They came to my workplace where I was the branch manage for a total of some fifty people.

Uniformed police officers came and put me in the back of their vehicle and took me to the District Justice in Alexandria, near Huntingdon, where I was called to account for my unpaid speeding ticket. I did the only thing I could think to do and called my boss, a dear friend, who did indeed get me out of this jam, pay the ticket and the fees (I did manage to pay him back, thank goodness), and take me to my car.

Chaos. Chaos. Chaos.

Just writing all these words, recalling and recording all these events, I feel my stomach clench. Are these scars, or is there still woundedness there? Does it matter? Is it helpful for me to be authentic for you in this way? I have intimations that it does, and that is why I offer these words to you.

I was always on the edge of everything. Staying up until 4 in the morning. Drinking heavily six nights a week. Spending lots of money on said drinks. Sleeping with various friends in some awkward situations. (That piece is something I regret much less than you might think. It all worked out in the end.)

Why? Why was all this happening? Why was there so much chaos in my life, and particularly around money?

More to come in my next missive. More to come about learning my own backstory and beginning my own healing. More to come about learning testimony and how powerful it is in writing a new story.

Because there was a new story to write. A new story indeed.

With joyful anticipation and love—

~Catharine~

The post A Testimony of Chaos – Part 1 appeared first on The Way of the River.

Is there a Unitarian Universalist church near you? They're basically the church of secular social justice advocates with all the same benefits and more of typical religious institutions.

I found community, enlightenment, intelligent spiritual conversation, and a really good choir, at a Unitarian Universalist fellowship. It’s wonderful to be in community w/ ppl from many different faith traditions (Christian and atheist/non-spiritual alike).

I can't believe I'm saying this BUT....since I'm a practicing Unitarian Universalist Mindful Athiest who needs the support of that community of free thinkers (we have it all-if ONLY it were called a "society" instead of a church) ....Separation of Church & State would be enough

I'm a Unitarian Universalist. I still remember the shooting in Knoxville, in 2008. Not my congregation, not even my state, but it was terrifying. My heart goes out to you, Representative, and to all Muslims.