Connections, Travel

Sue Monk Kidd: Connections, Travel Near and Far

“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).

joanna blue mosque

 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. Many friends coming for direction live in the biblical tradition of waiting called the “night sea journey”: 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 fourth week of Easter as we overlooked the Acropolis.

Kidd’s later books are about her trips to Greece, especially with her daughter, and becoming more connected to the feminine part of herself and God. My daughter and I wrote a book together 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 commissioned.

More connections.

As you can see, Sue Monk Kidd gets my attention and connects to me. So today, as I relive journeys, I try to follow more of Kidd’s direction, stay in the moment, and feed my soul real food instead of junk food.

I am remembering past trips to ancient and nearer parts of the world we both visited with our daughter and granddaughters on land and sea, where we learned, surrounded by those we love and away from our busy world, to let go into the moment.

Retake a virtual trip in your mind to a country you once visited with loved ones, 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.

I remember Buechner’s words in Wishful Thinking: “There are two ways of remembering. One is to make an excursion from the living present back into the dead past. The old sock remembers how things used to be when you and I were young, Maggie.

The other way is to summon the dead past back into the living present. The young widow remembers her husband, and he is there beside her. When Jesus said, ‘Do this in remembrance of me’ (1 Corinthians 11:24), he was not prescribing a periodic slug of nostalgia.”

            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.

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

Paths for Difficult Times

 Guest Writer: Jennifer Horne

Spiritual  Practices and Paths for Difficult Times

Walking a Pandemic Path

“What we are looking for on earth and in earth and in our lives is the process that can unlock for us the mystery of meaningfulness in our daily lives. … Truly the last place it would ever occur to most of us to find the sacred would be in the commonplace of our everyday lives and all about us in nature and simple things.”—Alice O. Howell in The Dove in the Stone: Finding the Sacred in the Commonplace.

In March, during the pandemic, we listened to the endless honking of Canadian geese on the lake we live by, the sounds reminding me, in my fear and helplessness, of slowed-down ululations of grief. Sometime in April, when I could no longer stand to watch the images of COVID victims on the nightly news, I began doing tai chi in my study between 5:30 and six while my husband watched CBS.

I’d been doing tai chi a couple of times a week for the last seventeen years, after taking a class from James Martin, a kind, elegant Vietnam veteran who had learned the practice to soften the demons he’d brought home with him from war. James died fifteen years ago, and as I followed the path of the twenty-four poses, beginning, going through the sequence, returning to where I started, I felt grateful for the legacy he left, how he taught us to “take a little journey,” breathe, and let our minds rest as our bodies moved. 

In fall, as darkness closed in and the days grew short and cold, I felt the need for some kind of outdoor movement, something brief but restorative, somewhere close by. Our house is nestled in woods, and I had been wanting to make a labyrinth but didn’t have the right spot for one. Instead, I made an oval meditation path in the woods off to the side of the house, finding, raking, and marking its circumference, then placing whimsical items along the way, all related to birds: an old birdhouse, in which I placed a bright orange plastic egg, a birdcage with no bottom, a piece of driftwood shaped like a heron’s head.

My favorite part is the approximately 2-x-2-foot nest of twigs I made at one turning in the path. As I walked, these things reminded me of how we were “nesting” at home but would be able to “fly farther afield” someday, and the shape of that simple path reminded me that life happens in cycles and circles as well as linear time.

Whenever my mind got too busy with pandemic thoughts, I loved going out and walking for as long as I needed to while I looked at branches, sky, and ground, so that my inner space came to resemble the outer calm and natural changes I was observing.

Staying home to stay safe from the virus, we weren’t going anywhere, and it felt constraining. Still, on my path, even though I walked in circles, it felt like I was going somewhere—somewhere deeper, more expansive, connected to a greater being, to an out-of-timeliness beyond the current fraught moment.

On the last day of March, I went out to the path after the rain stopped. The woods are greening at time-lapse speed, and the path is sprouting life: wild iris I’d never noticed before, and also the first shoots of the poison ivy that covers the woods in summer. Soon there will be ticks and chiggers and the occasional snake as well.

It’s time to leave the path until next fall, another cycle.

As I do my evening tai chi, repeating the phrase “this day, this light, this moment, this breath,” whenever I need to re-center myself, I move toward and then away from the window to the woods.

I can’t see the path now, but I know it’s there. I imagine, in times to come, it might remind me that even when I’m stuck, I still can find ways to move forward so that in walking my own small path, something good can happen.

Jennifer Horne

Poet Laureate of Alabama

Recent books:

 Dodie Walton Horne in Root & Plant & Bloom: Poems by Dodie Walton Horne, edited by Jennifer Horne and Mary Horne.

Since this writing in 2021, Jennifer published in 2024, Odyssey of a Wandering Mind: The Strange Tale of Sara Mayfield and

Letters to Little Rock about memories of her father.

Joanna Seibert joannaseibert.com

.

Grace

Grace

“Like the unexpected call of a friend just when you need it most, grace arrives unannounced. A door opens. A path becomes clear. An answer presents itself. Grace is what it feels like to be touched by God.”—Bishop Steven Charleston, Facebook Page.

I stand waiting to walk out and read the Gospel as we sing the hymn before the Gospel: “Dear Lord and Father of Mankind.” I glance at the last verse, and there, faintly written in pencil, just before the beginning of the last line, is the word “softer.” It is in my mother’s distinctive handwriting. I had forgotten that my mother sang in the choir at Grace Episcopal Church in Yorktown, Virginia. So, this must be a directive from the choir director.

My mother has been dead for twenty-five years. We did not always understand each other, but when she died, I wanted to honor her in some way. I decided to start using her personal hymnal/prayer book in church.

Her name has worn off the front cover; the gold cross will soon disappear. The red leather cover is now coming apart, particularly the backboard of the book’s spine. I have not repaired it because, for some unknown reason, what remains of this book, just as she used it, seems to be connecting me to her.

When I saw my mother’s writing, I gasped and sent up a small prayer of thanksgiving. We had some challenging times, but I have begun to feel healing over the years since her death. This morning, in this split second, I felt reconciled with my mother and grateful for her life and support.

Healing family relationships takes time and constant prayer for family members and ourselves. Today, I realize that prayer works. Attempting to connect to an estranged family member through something that the family member treasured over time works.

Valuing what we have in common, rather than remembering our differences, brings healing in life as well as after death. For example, my mother and I shared our love of the Episcopal Church and singing in particular. Today, I felt my mother beside me.

Through this realization, I experienced one more way: God’s Grace continues to heal and care for us over time if we only put ourselves in the position to receive.

 It is Grace that is helping us through difficult times. Our only job is to look for it and see it all around us.

The name of my mother’s Episcopal church in Yorktown also helped! Grace!

Bless you for supporting the ministry of our church and conference center, Camp Mitchell, on top of Petit Jean Mountain, by buying this book in the daily series of writings for the liturgical year, A Daily Spiritual Rx for Lent and Easter.

My mother never saw this book or the other two in the series, but she would have liked it. If you enjoyed this book, could you briefly write a recommendation on its page on Amazon? More thank-yous than I can say for helping support a special camp for Arkansas’s children, youth, and adults!!!

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