Sue Monk Kidd: Connections, Trips, and Soul Food
“Remember that little flame on the Easter candle. Cup your heart around it. Your darkness will become the light.”—Sue Monk Kidd, “A Journal Entry” in When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life’s Sacred Questions (HarperOne, 1992).
Blue Mosque
We take another visit with Sue Monk Kidd. I wish I could have Sue Monk Kidd’s book, When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life’s Sacred Questions, with me, and read it when meeting with other spiritual friends. I hope to remember her message about waiting. I see many people coming for direction, living the “night sea journey” in the biblical tradition of those waiting: Jonah in the belly of the whale, Christ in the tomb, or Joseph in the well where there is only darkness.
I hope to remember Kidd’s phrase when we have difficulty letting go: “Put on your courage suit” and cross the bridge of letting go.
I began this book on Maundy Thursday in the Chapel of Repose with the Reserved Sacrament. I ended it in Greece with my husband, my daughter, and her husband in the week of Easter four as we overlooked the Acropolis. I know Kidd’s later books are about her trips to Greece, especially with her daughter, where she becomes even more connected to the feminine part of herself and God. My daughter and I have published a book together, just as Kidd and her daughter did—so much serendipity.
Kidd ends her book by describing a drawing of a mother and child that came out of her true inner self, based on a sketch she made at Kanuga, the home of my spiritual direction class. Several years ago, on Mother’s Day, we dedicated a sculpture of a mother and child in the garden next to St. Luke’s chapel that my husband had purchased.
More connections.
Later, my husband and I began another pilgrimage to our oldest granddaughter’s college graduation, again with our daughter and her husband.
As you can see, Sue Monk Kidd gets my attention and speaks to me. So today, as I relive these journeys, I try to follow more of Kidd’s direction, stay in the moment, and feed my soul real food instead of junk food.
The real food I am looking for is silence, laughter, solitude, treasuring the moments with children, grandchildren, and friends, care of my body, exercise, deep encounters, prayer, writing, reading, Eucharist, gratitude, seeing serendipity, forgiveness, and forgiving, delight, compassion, living in the present, empathy (sharing pain), and reverence for the earth, especially as I remember past trips to ancient and nearer parts of the world we both visited with our daughters on land and on the sea.
Retake a virtual trip in your mind to a country you once visited with a loved one, perhaps carrying a book by a favorite author. Maybe you traveled to England, Italy, China, Spain, Germany, Greece, Norway, France, South Africa, Canada, Mexico, or Israel.
Give thanks for those you love who have traveled with you. Give thanks for writers who speak to your soul. Pray for that author, your family, and for people in that country to remain safe, especially the families of Ukraine and the Middle East.
tea time
Joanna joannaseibert.com. https://www.joannaseibert.com/