Connections, Trips, and Soul Food

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/

 

Sue Monk Kidd; Incubation in Darkness

Sue Monk Kidd: Incubation in Darkness

“Today (August 12) is my birthday. It makes me think of the new life I’m incubating and the Birth-day still to come. Today, I’ll talk to myself. I’ll say, ‘Accept life—the places it bleeds and the places it smiles. That’s your most holy and human task. Gather up the pain and the questions and hold them like a child on your lap. Have faith in God, in the movement of your soul. Accept what is. Accept the dark. It’s okay. Just be true.’”—Sue Monk Kidd, “A Journal Entry” in When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life’s Sacred Questions (HarperOne, 1992).

family zoom duringthe pandemic

Today, we continue to share stories from author Sue Monk Kidd. I found two copies of her book, When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life’s Sacred Questions, unread in my home library. So when I saw the book on the list for my spiritual direction studies at the Haden Institute, I took this as a sign to read it. I still remember the first time I met Sue Monk Kidd. She was on tour for her book The Dance of the Dissident Daughter. I took all my female partners in my medical group and my daughter to hear her. One of my partners cried the entire time and bought several books.

Kidd is as impressive a speaker as a writer. She reminds us of Marion Woodman’s writings about creative suffering in the dark. Creative suffering burns clean, unlike neurotic suffering, which creates more soot. Creative suffering “easters” us or transforms us, chooses a new way, owns our shadow, and heals our wounds—as opposed to neurotic or self-pitying suffering, which is un-transforming and leads to despair. Kidd continues to tell us that pain may not kill us, but running from it might.

At a retreat she led at Kanuga conference center, Kidd described a healing exercise where we placed on the altar cut-up scraps of colored paper representing wounds and pain from our lives. We then offered them up, turning them over instead of pushing them down or trying to escape from them.

She reminds us that the most significant events in Jesus’ life occurred in darkness: birth, arrest, death, and resurrection. Then, as tiny bits of light come out in our lives, we begin eastering—much like the lighting of the Paschal candle and bringing light into the dark world at the Easter Vigil. This is a great image for me, as the deacon often carries the Paschal candle, saying “the light of Christ” three times before singing the Exsultet, giving thanks for the light. The Paschal candle we use is a natural wax and, for some reason, is always challenging to extinguish!

Kidd describes how our addictions keep us unaware of what is going on inside of us, as well as outside of us. When I live in my addictions, I deny the harm to my body, soul, and heart that comes from wearing my many false selves. Thirty-two years ago, when I was introduced to a twelve-step program, I got my voice back, but the recovery of dealing with the tensions of all the false selves is still part of my recovery trying to live the steps. I experience more and more easterings or resurrections, but it is still hard work. When the true self emerges, there is light and delight in life. Gratitude is what living in the true self brings. God becomes our playmate, and we find our inner child.

Kidd writes about our accelerated, instant, quick “fast-food” society. I remember talking to a ten-year-old about playing chess, and her response was, “It takes too long.”

Kidd also reminds us of our desire for shortcut religion, looking for what Bonhoeffer called cheap grace, “Long on butterflies but short on cocoons.”

I go down to our den this afternoon and find my husband and our almost thirteen-year-old grandson quietly playing chess. I feel hope.

What great tragedies happened in this pandemic and our recent tornadoes in Arkansas, but we are also beginning to see easterings, neighbors and churches caring for each other, families checking on each other, more families getting vaccines, a realization of the value of community and staying healthy in community.

sue monl kidd

Kelsey: The Ballad of Judas Iscariot

Kelsey: The Ballad of Judas Iscariot

 “We forget that the real task is to bring the totality of our psychic being to God and not just to repress and split off those parts of ourselves that we cannot change.”—Morton T. Kelsey in The Other Side of Silence: A Guide to Christian Meditation (Paulist Press, 1976).

Theologian Morton Kelsey wrote a practical book more than fifty years ago called The Other Side of Silence: A Guide to Christian Meditation, which affirmed that meditation is not only for those in Eastern religions. His revised edition, published twenty years later, The Other Side of Silence: Meditation for the Twenty-First Century, contains more of his writings for an audience now familiar with Christian meditation.

 Kelsey believes that meditation is simply the way we set up the conditions to prepare for the God who seeks us and breaks through to us, particularly in silence.

“Doing meditation” involves using biblical stories, dream images, poems, and images from other sources. Kelsey’s book includes a moving poem, “The Ballad of Judas Iscariot,” by the Scottish poet Robert Buchanan, which I read and meditate on every Easter season. It reminds us that no one is lost, unforgiven, or unloved by God. The ballad must have been powerful when sung.

The story is of Judas wandering through regions of darkness until he spies a light from a lantern at a doorway. Jesus is holding up the light, and he beckons Judas to come in and join his fellow disciples who are getting ready to eat. Jesus tells Judas they were just waiting for him before pouring the wine.

http://www.robertbuchanan.co.uk/html/sel4.html

I also offer the poem to spiritual friends who feel they have done something unforgivable or that God no longer loves them. Then, of course, I meditate on it when that darkness of guilt, shame, or a poor self-image surrounds me. Judas is a reminder and icon of times when we cannot accept that we might be forgiven or loved, or are having trouble opening ourselves to God’s Grace, which is continuously offered through dark and light times.

 But, honestly, was Judas’s betrayal of Jesus worse than denying or abandoning him as the others did? Judas simply could not ask for or accept forgiveness, and had forgotten that the God of his understanding was loving and forgiving.

During the pandemic and our recent storms, we were called to do more than our usual forgiving and ask for a greater share of forgiveness from others.

Joanna. Joannaseibert.com https://www.joannaseibert.com/