Spirituality

May 27, 2015December 18, 2019

Anointing Ancestral Land

This was the first time I’d felt called to go on a spiritual pilgrimage. I needed to meet God on the land of my ancestors, trusting that this would help me step outside of my collapse with shame over the fact that they’d owned slaves.

Within the week, I’d confirmed that my friend Alease Bess, whose ancestors had been slaves in North Carolina, was excited joining me on this journey.

I wanted to take something we could offer to the land. My friend and earthmother, Candice Covington, recommended I take rosemary, cajeput and black pepper essential oils for anointing the soil.

“Oil from evergreen cajeput trees,” she explained, “purifies and purges old rot and decay of emotion, pain, loss and fear and creates a fertile place to plant new seeds. As you step onto your ancestral land, you need some of this heavy-duty purification of the old. Rosemary will help strengthen and center you with its healing of memories, and black pepper will strengthen and fortify your cleansing.”

Knowing that I wanted all of the spiritual and energetic support I could muster for this pilgrimage, I packed pocket-sized bottles of each of these oils, trusting I would know when and how to use them.

I gathered maps of North Carolina. I wrote down the few details I knew about the location of the home of the original Tipps immigrant, Lorenz, in Salisbury, and the Dogwood Plantation of his son Jacob near Morganton. Union General Sherman had torched the courthouses that had held the titles to the land, so I had to rely on the description of the general location Mom had found during her genealogical research.

A few weeks later, Alease and I headed west from her home in Durham toward Salisbury. First, we were looking for the homestead of immigrant Lorenz Tipps, Jacob’s father. Lack of exact locations on the map demanded a different sort of navigation, so we listened to the breezes and trusted that the Spirit would guide us.

Driving up and down country roads, Alease and I explored the area described in Mom’s account of Lorenz’s homesteading documents as “on Hagan Fork off Lyle Creek, tributary of the Catawba River.” In that general vicinity, something faint but clear in both Alease’s and my spirits indicated it was time to pull over, park the car and step out onto the land.

A few fences marked off the field, but no homes lined this stretch of the road. Wandering in silence, we honored the beauty of the land and vastness of the sky. This had been Cherokee land for thousands of years. A few hundred years ago, white settlers named it Rowan County, then Lincoln County and now Catawba County. Political lines drawn in the dirt may have changed, yet the land remained whole.

Alease and I brought what felt to me like meager gifts to atone for such a horrifying history—a few oils and prayer. I picked up a stick and scraped a cross in the hard, dry soil. Opening up the small bottles, I poured fragrant essential oils of tree, herb and flowering vine back into the earth. Their spicy scents rose like incense.

Over the anointed dirt, Alease and I extended our hands in blessing—hers pecan tan and mine a peachy tan. She sang of blood. I spoke of water.

Alease prayed, “Blood has saturated this land. History tried to shove these bloodstains under the grass. We know they are still here.”

She leaned her head back and began to sing, “Nothing can for sin atone; nothing but the blood of Jesus.”

As the last notes of the hymn faded away, she was silent for a few minutes. “Today a new blood is offered, poured freely into this blood-soaked land. This is birthing blood, cleansing blood flowing from Immanuel’s veins.”

I added my prayer: “Come living waters, come to this country soaked with generations of tears. Wash the land and satisfy our deepest thirst.”

When the anointing was complete and a rock left to mark the spot, we returned to the car and drove away. The reality of both of our ancestors’ experiences remained unchanged, yet we felt lighter.

We stopped in town to break bread together and share stories sparked by the morning. Then, we headed west to track down the land that once was Jacob and Margaret Tipps’s Dogwood Plantation.

After the Revolutionary War, Lorenz’s son Jacob moved westward a few miles to Burke and Caldwell Counties to make his fortune. He staked his claim, worked the land and received the title to six hundred and forty acres. Jacob and Margaret had fourteen children and “owned” thirteen African slaves.

“Near the Morganton-Lenoir airport” was as much as we knew. Alease and I drove up and down the roads near the airport. Old Amherst Road wound its way to a new subdivision. We turned around and drove halfway back down the road. Once again, we both agreed when it felt like we had arrived at the right place, and we stopped the car.

Stepping out, we walked through a break in the trees onto to the edge of a pasture. Ancient mountains had eons ago eroded into the blue hills that lined the far side of the field, while Jacob’s plantation home and slave shacks had long since disintegrated.

Sitting on the ground, I picked up a rock. Once again I scored the hard earth and poured out the anointing oils while Alease and I prayed.

As our prayers grew silent, I stood and walked over to lean on a white pine that might have shaded my family members when they lived here. Through her prickly bark, a warm tingling soothed my back, just behind my heart allowing my shame and anger at Jacob to lessen. The sins of racism and slave-owning remained, but compassion flowed freely in me and out into the tree.

Gazing at the Smoky Mountains, Alease stood at my side praying softly. A white pick-up truck whizzing down the road startled me. Through the dust I saw a white-skinned man at the wheel, gun on a rack behind his head. When he caught sight of us, he did a double take. I assumed he wondered what we were up to.

Actually, it wasn’t a bad question. What in the world were we up to?

We were there on a sacred pilgrimage, not to our spiritual holy land in Israel but to our ancestral land. Standing together, Alease and I felt the hallowed ground under our feet and prayed that healing would move forward and back through the generations.

The next day we headed for our respective homes. Through this shared pilgrimage, I had been given a way to honor my ancestors without forgetting that they also owned slaves. The land and our prayers wove the stories of Alease’s and my families, their joys and woes, into a single fabric.

Excerpted with a few adjustments for this shortened format from Big Topics At Midnight: A Texas Girl Wakes Up to Race, Class, Gender and Herself, my book published by Rosegate Press in 20012, pages 274-286.

May 4, 2015December 18, 2019

Inside and Outside

Working for justice in the world begins on the inside.

We live in a culture addicted to power, growth and control. While these elements affect each of us differently, depending on our race, class or gender (among other things), they ultimately influence us all. In order to step outside of injustice and into the Kingdom of God, we need to wake up to the full spectrum of reality around and within us.

For instance, it was easy for me to assume that my life experience and knowledge, alongside good intentions and spirit-led values, were enough to build a strong inner foundation for my work in the world. This was not true. I had to learn to recognize systemic abuses of money and power. Likewise, I needed to look deeply inside to notice my own assumptions and to clearly see when my behaviors (subtle or obvious) were not in alignment with my values.

Diverse, in-depth community was the context in which I was able to do this kind of waking up to and unhooking from the distress of our culture’s oppression. In that community, I discovered the truth that we are all part of a much greater fabric, one that includes the voices of our ancestors, the hopes of our descendants and the messy and miraculous humanity of our contemporaries around the globe.

Honestly sharing stories of our experiences, perspectives and assumptions across our differences has the power to break down the walls that divide us.

These are words I’d like to shout from the mountain tops, announcing the message I’d like to share and the path I’d like to walk. What would your message to the world sound like?

March 8, 2015December 18, 2019

Deep Diving

I come alive when diving right into the middle of topics my father told me to avoid—money, race, religion, gender and politics.

Not interested in locking horns or intellectual analysis, I want partners who seek root-level transformation—from personal to global. I am captivated by sharing and listening to a wide variety of personal stories and experiences within diverse groups as these conversations can shift assumptions and misinformation—the things that keep us separated—in order for us to move forward equitably, together.

Since I was a girl, I’ve turned to the written word as my favorite way to explore both the edges of life and my own experiences. During the seven years I wrote and rewrote Big Topics at Midnight: A Texas Girl Wakes Up to Race, Class, Gender and Herself I simultaneously honed my writing skills and dove into my own stories of sleep and waking up. It was a magical process.

I revel in the dance of writing and deep diving. The best way for me to begin a writing day is to wake before the sun rises with a brilliant first sentence, followed by a flood of ideas for a new writing. While noticing all that I hadn’t noticed growing up isn’t always fun, I savor the sight of expanded vistas that emerge as I begin to see my life as one part of a multigenerational, global human family in the midst of our diverse, earthly home. And then return to my desk to write about what I see.

In addition to writing and poking into the nooks and corners of my life, I also delight in hosting “big conversations” where groups of people share longings and experiences of living in ways that bring our faith and values right into the middle of our deeply divided world. One particularly juicy topic I enjoy exploring is how money flows in our lives, in the community and in the world and how to continue to bring our engagement with that financial flow into deeper alignment with our values.

Waking up to the paradoxes within and in the world around me is sometimes uncomfortable and often requires me to change my behavior. Yet this is the holy work of spiritual transformation, both personally and in our world. It is pure grace to bring my deep diving faith-in-action to this moment in history.

This is what makes me feel alive from my head to my toes. What makes you tingle with excitement for yourself and the world?

February 10, 2015December 18, 2019

Weaving in the Dark

I love the moon and the stars, but I am afraid to be out alone in the dark. My natural tendency is to be on alert for potential dangers, but that’s hard to manage when I can’t see anything.

I love my gift of clarity—catching a glimpse of the potential of how things might unfold in the days or years ahead. Sight, both internal and external, is my most trusted sense. But the sight I’ve been using is hindered in dark.

I am walking in spiritual darkness. I don’t feel lost or abandoned as happens in the dark night of the soul but I can’t see anything I recognize. I have a strong sense of the divine presence and a luscious dose of gratitude, but I can’t see where I am going. Even the next step feels overwhelming.

I’m very busy. Traveling often. Some say that my to-do list is too long and wide, and that I’d see more clearly if I dropped some things in order to open up more spaciousness. That doesn’t ring true to me.

Here is what I see—an image. That is all I have now.

I am sitting on the ground in front of a vertical loom. I’m weaving a rug that is two-thirds of the way complete. I can’t see the pattern on the rug. I don’t know what colors or types of skeins are being used in the weaving.

Behind the rug, hidden from my view, Spirit is very active with an unseen ritual. While I don’t know what is happening on the other side of my weaving, I am nonetheless personally involved in the prayer dance.

One of the skeins of thread in the weaving comes from this unseen dance between Spirit and me.

I am to keep weaving, trusting that what is emerging won’t be an ugly, tangled mess.

My mind is very unsatisfied with this image and this process. And yet here I stay, adding one row and then another.

November 30, 2014

Risk Being Different

I spent last week supporting my daughter as she filed papers to end her five-year marriage. We stood solidly, side-by-side, without any hint of I-told-you-so—because of support I sought and received very early in their courtship.

That support helped me to walk steady in our relationship despite the differences between what my daughter Laura wanted for her life and what I assumed was best for her.

While I needed to have a place with my friends to express my feelings, I had to learn to stop projecting my fears onto her. I came to learn that people—including my daughter—needed to make their own decisions. Once I had a bit of space from my concerns, I understood that she saw things I couldn’t see and that she had her own life path to walk. She was on an honorable journey that taught her many things.

Laura stood in line with her papers in hand a much stronger and clearer woman—more herself—than she’d ever been before.

Walking with Laura required that I acquire new skills. I learned to let my feeling flow freely, usually to friends, so that my actions didn’t flow from fear or assumptions. I explored ways both to take responsibility for myself and to honor Laura taking responsibility for her life. I explored drawing limits about my own actions and reactions that weren’t in line with my values. I desired to honor everyone involved, including myself, which sometimes included not acting with or participating in disrespect.

In addition, I needed to learn how to listen, really listen, without forming rebuttals or imagining a list of what-I-thought-made-the-most-sense while pretending to pay attention to her.

All that, while keeping my heart wide open.

Where our differences could have divided us, as they have in far too many families, our relationship strengthened over those years.

Odd as it may seem, these same tools that were so critical in the intimacy of our mother/daughter relationship were the same ones that helped and continue to help me walk through the Big Topics that fill my work.

Early in my life I assumed having a big heart, clear sight and good intentions, whether as a mother or as a global citizen, was enough.

I was wrong.

I needed tools I hadn’t learned in school to walk in the midst of the wide variety of our world.

I’d heard the admonition to practice “tolerance” and “honor diversity.” For me, tolerance (i.e. enduring) was an appallingly low goal. Honoring our differences, on the other hand, was much more complicated than it sounded—whether between family members or coworkers. Good intentions weren’t enough.

Building sustainable partnerships with people with who have very different life experiences and opinions is demanding. It means not getting my own way. It means having my worldview stretched, sometimes uncomfortably. It means being willing to see places where my actions don’t line up with my values or compassionate heart—and adapting my behavior as needed. It means keeping my heart open and staying in relationship with people who make me mad, even when I’d rather walk away.*

Whether as a mother, friend or Big Topic Revolutionary, I want to take steps toward authentic and sustainable partnerships. While I had many friends who have supported me in learning these new tools, the primary place of support and wisdom to walk steady right in the middle of difference came from Be Present, Inc.

This fall I’ve been in three Be Present circles, and I keep returning to their vision statement. It reads like the manifesto I want to follow:

“We are a diverse network of people willing to risk being different with one another, our families, communities, workplaces and organizations.

We are committed to a process that builds personal and community well-being on the strength of self-knowledge rather than on the distress of oppression.

Because we believe that enduring progressive change begins with and is sustained by persistent personal growth, we bring to people a model for personal and organizational effectiveness which replaces silence with information, assumptions with a diversity of insights, and powerlessness with a sense of personal responsibility.”

My daughter and I walked honorably through the middle of our differences. I have no doubt that she will walk into this next phase of her journey following her own inner guidance rather than my advice. As it should be. One person’s perspective—whether for my daughter or global social justice—is too limited.

The Be Present Empowerment Model taught me how to risk being different in all of my relationships. The learning curve has been steep and demanding, but it has shown me the way to be part of the change I so want to see in our world.

As you consider end-of-the-year giving, for yourself or as a gift in honor of someone you love, I hope you’ll join me in financially supporting this work so needed in our world, and families, today.

*There are times—for example in the face of persistent disrespect—when we need to end a relationship, at least for now. But walking away from people who piss us off means there is no chance for something new and transformative to happen. If we stay and continue to open the conversations, we will have a chance to see if new sight and doorways will appear.

October 1, 2014

Living in the Midst of it All

Each time the wind blows, a handful of leaves dance and spin as they fall. As the world turns around the big topics, sometimes it’s the small details that matter.

A cup of tea shared with Karyn after weeks on the road.

The orange pumpkin at my neighbor’s door.

Stepping into a steamy bath scented with red spikenard as I let the lists go for an hour on a busy afternoon.

Its good to notice the little things at moments like these. I’ve been to the first of two funerals this week. In addition, I am working on a blog that started with one small topic—radiation dangers of cell phones—and has exploded into something that touches so many of the problems in our world and fills me with shrapnel of fear. The blog, and my emotions around the topic, are too raw to post yet.

I am tempted to be silent and delete my current draft. After all, I’ve avoided this topic for several years, so why proceed now? I feel the pull of despair, something I know can stop me from taking action.

My wrestling brings me back to the central question of my life—how do I remain steady, walking forward with an open heart as things crumble around me?

I’ve been on this road for a long time.

I don’t know what I thought I was writing about when I began working on Big Topics at Midnight nine years ago. Every step of the way I uncovered information—some personal, some ancestral, some historical, some cultural—that shook the ground under my feet. Each time I had to stop writing and trying to figure it all out and instead tap into a far deeper way of knowing. I used all of my tools—prayer, journaling, collage, essential oils, vibrational essences, cards, leaning against trees, talking to friends … In addition, I stopped to notice the beauty all around me: falling leaves, pumpkins and shared cups of tea. Slowly but surely I found the ground under my feet and continued writing.

I know I can walk that journey from fear to clarity again. When the timing is right, I’ll be able to return to working on the blog I’m not yet ready to share.

Grace is found in the big topics and in the little details of life. Both are part of life. I am called to dance between the two and experience joy, as well as fear, and hope, as well as grief.

August 16, 2014

Let Your Heart Break #3: Joy

Right in the middle of a blog series about death, I am heading into a wedding. It feels as if I should complete my series before I turn in another direction. But life doesn’t work like that.

Death and birth. Crumbling and resurrection. Joy and sorrow. They weave in and out of each other on a daily basis. Life requires flexibility of the soul.

This isn’t just any wedding. This is the wedding of a child who was born into our family almost thirty-two years ago. Howard and I were twenty-eight years old when we brought him home for the first time, wondering, “What are we supposed to do now?”

Not sure we ever answered that question, but as the mother of both Paul and Laura, his sister born three years later, I learned about life and love, creativity and joy. On days when I struggled to get through a particularly exhausting parenting day, older friends would remind me to savor every moment, because childhood flies by.

It did.

And Paul is about to say, “I do.”

His fiancée, Lauren Holmgren, is an amazing woman. She has an inner light, clarity and strength rooted deep within her, and the two of them bring out the best in each other.

Of course, marriage is not all joy and delight. It is part of life, with all of its ups and downs, joys and sorrows. The daily-ness of marriage—or partnership for those still excluded from marriage—gives us the perfect place to work out all of our assumptions, rough edges and quirks. Some days are easier than others.

I am in the transition from spinning with all the details that need to be done toward savoring each moment. It’s sometimes hard to keep the bigger picture in mind—Paul and Lauren are getting Married!—when my calendar is full, my mind is trying to come to grips with Robin Williams’ suicide and my heart is aching with Michael Browns violent death in Ferguson, Missouri.

But that is Life.

And life is too precious not to take time to celebrate. I invite you to tip your glass in honor of Paul and Lauren, and all heart-filled, joyful events that are happening right now.

This blog is third in the series Let Your Heart Break…here about breaking open in joy.

Photograph of Paul and Lauren taken by Lisa Bogan.

July 4, 2014

The Wisdom to Stay Still

Moving slowly and listening deeply are common practices for a Sabbath day. Lately, however, I seem to be in seven-days-a-week period of deep listening and moving at about twenty percent of my normal, double or triple-tasking speed.

The nagging voices in my head are quick to point out how ridiculous it is that I am doing so little when I have a book to market, blogs to write, friends—some in very difficult situations—to visit and a hurting world all around me.

I know that voice: the good, responsible voice that fits right in with business as usual.

I don’t want business as usual. I seek to live into the new.

I am in the middle of several amazing conversations and partnerships across huge chasms of race, class and gender. It is the hardest work I’ve ever done. And it is the most transformative and joyful work I’ve ever done. I look forward to the time when I can write about the details of this work.

For today, here is what I know: the only way I can continue to walk this path is to honor my guidance to slow down, listen, ponder, spend a few minutes each morning tending to our garden before heading out on a walk, and wait for the next steps to emerge.

Slowing down in the face of urgent needs is part of my wisdom, not my laziness.

Something is brewing on the back burner of my life. I can’t yet see it. I catch a whiff of its scent now and again. I know it will have something to do with building sustainable partnerships across the chasms that too often divide us. I want to explore how to live our huge dreams right in the middle of our too often chaotic and unjust world.

That clarity is coming. Soon? Next year? That is not for me to know.

For now, I move through my days slowly. With profound gratitude. Connection. And lots of time for solitude.

If I am to take my place of leadership in our world, I must honor my wisdom to stay still and wait until the way forward is clear.

Originally published on the Divine Feminine blog page. Photograph by Judy Bork.

June 9, 2014

Strangers and Stories

I tentatively knocked on the driver’s window. The young man curled up behind the steering wheel didn’t move. The car’s motor was silent, but the radio blared. Military ID tags hung from the rearview mirror. A notebook page filled with writing was lying on the passenger seat.

I knocked again, harder this time. No response.

A few minutes before, I’d walked past the parked car on my morning walk and noticed a garden hose lying on a blackened cloth on the ground below the tailpipe and going to car’s front window. The young man inside looked asleep.

I walked a few feet further before what I’d just seen began to register. Heart racing, my thinking slowed.

Moments later another person passed on his morning walk. “Did you see that guy?” I asked with hesitation.

“Yes. Maybe he is homeless and just sleeping in his car,” he replied.

“But what about the hose?”

“That’s strange, but what can I do?” he answered before continuing on his walk.

I couldn’t walk away. Unable to rouse him, I hurried home to call the police.

Howard walked with me back to the car, arriving just as the ambulance pulled up beside the fire truck and police car. We saw emergency technicians roll an empty gurney from the truck, then put it away. There was more movement, but we couldn’t see clearly. The ambulance doors closed, but it didn’t go anywhere.

Was he in the ambulance? Was he dead?

I identified myself to the police as the one who had called. When they were finished with the empty car, one of the officers came over to talk to me.

The young man was alive and alert in the ambulance. He had told the officers that he’d been there since four that morning and had written an extensive suicide note. The policeman reassured me the young man was heading to the hospital where he would get the help he needed.

Help sounded good. Yet, I hoped that obtaining psychological help, and it’s cost, wouldn’t add to the burdens that had already made the young man feel like life was too much.

Last week was the tenth anniversary of the suicide of a friend’s daughter. And now another young adult who decided that life wasn’t worth living had touched my life.

I don’t know what brought this stranger to that brink. I do know that he was born into a world where too often the shadows of our global problems are as dark as midnight. It is easy to lose hope.

I know there are no easy answers or solutions to our global shadows for individuals or for the human family. I do believe that this is a moment in history where our most important spiritual task is to learn how to stand steady and awake with an open heart in the midst of the chaotic crumbling of so much around us. So little in most people’s experience prepares them with these skills.

I walked past the empty car on the way to church the following day. It was Pentecost. The One who was fully human and fully divine, the One who lived and died and then lived again had left a second time. It had looked as if all was lost. Again. Midnight indeed.

Two thousand years ago on a day we now call Pentecost, Jesus’ friends gathered together, hoping beyond hope that all was not lost. Suddenly a mighty wind blew, tongues of flame appeared and the Holy Spirit broke into their lives.

During the Sunday sermon, we were invited to share our experiences of being touched by the Holy Spirit. In this Episcopal congregation, people spoke up and shared story after story.

Young man. Share your stories—the ones of your grief and the ones of your dreams. Listen to others share theirs.

I have my own story about the morning I met you. Since I planned to walk to a class a few hours later, I had debated whether or not to go on my early morning walk. In the midst of my mental debate, I felt the Spirit nudge me to walk out the door, and I did.

I saw you and have been carrying you in my heart ever since.

I am eternally grateful that strangers are called to be present to one other, even in our darkest hour. It gives me hope.

March 24, 2014

Grief on the Way to Transformation: My Cell Phone and Violence #2

Why concern myself with human rights abuses in far away places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo? Why make connections between myself and the behavior of a long-ago king, the Belgium’s colonial policies or missionaries’ behavior when, although I personally am outraged by their behaviors, none of these people were my family members?

Why think too much about the fact that materials for my cell phone and wedding ring may have involved injustice and ill treatment of others half way around the globe? For me, my cell keeps me connected to people I care about and my wedding ring is a symbol of a life-long love.

I have no interest in collapsing in shame and despair. That is a dead-end street that feels lousy and helps no one.

Yet, I am no longer willing to keep global horrors at arms length, grateful that since I don’t approve I can wash my hands of any connection to things done by other humans, national and transnational corporations who produce the goods I buy, or “my people” (which includes people who share my Euro-American roots, white skin, Christianity or wealth).

Distancing myself from other’s behavior makes it too easy for me to forget the deep historical roots of today’s world events and the fact that I enjoy the benefits of things grown and produced under horrifying conditions.

Maintaining that distance requires that I go back to sleep. That isn’t an option for me anymore.

However I can’t, nor should I, shoulder the responsibility for all of these actions. Nevertheless, I can stop and grieve. Weep for violence and injustice—for both victims and perpetrators. Let my heart break open for those who suffered and continue to suffer far outside my neighborhood.

My personal grief and the world’s grief meet in my heart. That is where I experience the truth of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”1

No defensiveness is needed. Only seeing. Grieving. Not getting stuck there, but also not bypassing my need to wail about tragic aspects of human behavior.

Fear is fanned on every street corner and news show. Despair for the enormity of the environmental destruction and human inequity feels like it could easily undermine our capacity to cope with daily life.

The only path I know of that moves toward transformation, runs right through the middle of grief. “To let ourselves feel anguish and disorientation as we open our awareness to global suffering is part of our spiritual ripening. … Out of darkness, the new is born.”2

Against all logic, this path leads me to joy and gratitude. Standing solidly in the center of both grief and joy, I find clarity about my place in the global world. I am prompted to continue to ask myself, “What’s next? What is my next step to further align my behavior with my values?” Not from a place of despair, shame or over-responsibility but from a solid knowing of the interconnectedness of us all.

Paradox again. I always return here. The more I can learn to hold grief and joy, the greater my capacity to live life fully in ways that serve us all.

1. Martin Luther King, Jr. Letter from a Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963
2. Joanna Macy and Molly Young Brown. Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World (British Columbia: New Society Publishers, 1998) Pg 45