Well, friends, my decades-long obsession with revision has reached a new extreme. I’ve shamelessly messed with another author’s work. Is this even allowed? When my mother died, her study group was preparing to read Teilhard’s Divine Milieu. I picked up her beat-up paperback copy just as I began a two-year formation program in contemplative Christianity. One day my teachers …
When I turned fifty I did a ten-day silent retreat at the Benedictine monastery at Snowmass, Colorado, an immersion in a Christian form of meditation called Centering Prayer. The retreat was hard. At 5:15 a.m., under a black bowl of stars, I trekked a quarter mile up an icy hill banked by snow, huffing from …
In honor of International Women’s Day I dug back into Hannah, Delivered, my first attempt at long fiction. The plot’s shaggy, Hannah’s voice a tad cloying, her transformation predictable, and even so the pages radiate enough novice enthusiasm for the wild and wooly subculture of traditional midwifery that I keep turning pages. Hannah’s apprenticeship and …
For years I’ve practiced strange medicine, resting my ear on the body of whatever story I happen to be writing. Is it alive? If so, what does it want to become? Even though we play a part in generating them, stories have heartbeats all their own. Once the draft is out, I listen beyond my …
We are each a jewel in a mighty net. When we are unaware of this, disasters like the pandemic happen. When we are aware and bring whole, open hearts to our common plight, the net sparkles.
The crises of our times are overwhelming. And Covid has tied our hands; we can’t offer solutions the way we’d like to, the way we know is most effective—in person, together. My dream tells me to trust deeply in work we can do at home, alone and within our families.
Community does not necessarily mean living face-to-face with others; rather, it means never losing the awareness that we are connected to each other. It is not about the presence of other people—it is about being fully open to the reality of relationship, whether or not we are alone.” –Parker Palmer
So what can we do? We can accept these limits. We can release, again and again, our needs for security, affection, and control. We can embrace this moment as it is, fully welcoming the wisdom of the body, because in our fear and sadness and anger hides our immense love for this world, and that’s where divinity enters.
The interior life is a real life and it’s the life that continues. It’s powerful beyond imagining, especially if entered with love.
Delio dismissed the concept of institutionalized religion with a wave of her hand—it’s too small, inaccurate, misleading. Religion is a dynamic in evolution moving creation to ever greater diversity and unity.