Actual encounters and stories offer you a narrative feel of some of the terrain that welcomes and divides us today, whether religious, political, or cultural. A refrain accompanies each section, which you are encouraged to ponder, digest, sense your way into, feel what rises. The final portion of each section then gives a more textual interpretation of the themes needed to keep my own balance in a journey of devotion in conscious love. I offer here some of the most psychologically and spiritually demanding material I know, which makes repetition and engagement from several angles absolutely necessary.
A Companionable Way therefore offers you a both/and of expertise and invitation. While I suspect the expertise acquired will only be minimally useful to you, I am well credentialed and established in both mainline and seeker/nonhierarchical communities. I have worked hard to get where I am, taking pleasure in it. Still, the outward work dims greatly in light of the inner work required to write here. The intention is to offer whatever of this journey will feed your own bodysoul and to encourage you to relinquish all else without thought, reliant upon your own embodied wisdom. I hear Walt Whitman smiling as he sings in our ears, “Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”2 Amen to that, which is the gift I had to learn to give myself in order to arrive here, sharing this invitation with you.
All rests within the image of a “circle of stones,” an ancient-new space of stones and the necessary spaces between them. I offer you hard-won words and the necessary silences out of which they emerged. You are welcome to the contributions of my journey, but for it to matter, you must learn to name your own experience, accountability, and yearnings as they arise in you—a process less and less traditioned in our fearfully bound schooling. The transfiguration of each of us, individuals immersed in community, whether we desire it or not, requires this both/and genre of prose made flesh. The more deeply listening, widely devoted, consciously loving and heart-seeing human beings there are in the world, the better and safer it will be for all of us.
1. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 100–102.
2. Whitman, preface to Leaves of Grass, 11.
Acknowledgments
So many hearts have shaped this work, which is now offered outwardly in hopes of honoring and protecting these hearts in the One who called us into companionship. Writing about the transfigurative force of spiritual companionship presents a fascinating conundrum. How do you proclaim the best news and abundance of sacred human belonging you have ever known while protecting the intimacies of soul and learning that were for you alone, both of you, each of you? How do you describe the pattern and power of companionship in an abundance that just cannot be contained while disguising enough detail so that the vulnerabilities risked and shared remain private, protected? These pages are my best attempt to do just that: to be faithful to what we were given, so to share what I learned from each of you, which is needed in our polarized and polarizing world today, overflowing with yearnings and habits of mind not as well met as they might be. What follows here is true to my experience AND where necessary, details have been changed to honor those who risked so much to help me learn, to see and hear me into what I now know.
One Thursday, September 11th of 2008, I began a teaching collaboration with a rabbinic companion willing to make the journeys to teach and learn together in a seminary classroom. His willingness to pursue wisdom across traditions and in unexpected venues transformed my life. My own awakening, my own focus, expanded and deepened in ways neither of us knew would happen. I found myself welcomed into webs of tradition and spiritual practices in far-flung corners of the United States, from my own home in the Midwest. These pages emerge from companionships with men and women in California, Nebraska, New York, Texas, Massachusetts, Florida, and various locations in between. This year, on this same significant date, I am surprised and smiling to complete the work that has nested and hibernated from so long ago until now. I bow with deep gratitude to all those at Wipf and Stock/Cascade Books, specifically Charlie Collier and Jacob Martin, for their commitment, publishing model, and faithful willingness to take risks on nontraditional publishing projects. You give authors courage and the world innovation. Thank you.
None of it would have found this form, but for Women Writing for (a) Change, a non-traditional writing school for women and men founded by Mary Pierce Brosmer twenty-five years ago in Cincinnati, Ohio. As a HearthKeeper (which means a graduate of the 2013 Conscious Feminine Leadership Academy) and a regular Wednesday Night writer, I came to voice in countless small groups, and large-group and public readarounds. Women holding space for women to come to words—nameless and unseen work, often, but fundamental to everything that follows here. I wish I could name you all by name and I want to honor the intimacy of our circles. Details about the community, now with affiliate sites across the country, may be found at www.womenwriting.org.
Spirit sent me two tenaciously faithful ones I need to thank by name, as the Trinitarian dance of the three of us has birthed this work. Lisa Dawn Michael Heckaman, close friend and companion in the sacred work that calls us both forward—the work of healing in womanheart-spaces held for both men and women—and Brian Daniel Maguire—husband and friend who has wrestled and grown alongside me as the life of deep feeling overtook us, a choiceless choice we both continue to honor in one another. The willingness and remarkable tenacity in each of you to companion me in this creative endeavor continue to bless me. Thank you. May all our efforts offer merit forward to any and all who yearn for what we have learned together in the One who calls us forth, day after day.
Lisa M. Hess
September 11, 2015
In Search of . . .
a peaceable way of awakening, becoming uniquely human across irreconcilable difference
sacred heart, abundant devotion, undying compassion, pure awareness
God, Goddess, Mother, Father, Son, Spirit, Divine, Holy, Wisdom, YHWH, and more names than can be counted—each distinct, all without division, separation, changeability, mixture
that which has no name at all
an expressive delight, able to companion suffering of self and others
Some time ago, many years into a future only envisioned, in many places on earth, a search took root in the hearts, minds, and bodies of creation. It came to words in human beings fearfully mired in learned hatreds . . . human beings unknowingly beckoned by a deeper way of healing, within and beyond themselves. The search was borne by all the world, seen and unseen. Drawn forward by that which was sought, a way of companionship began, inviting a return to the body, a path of devotion in conscious love across difference, a trusting in the quiet holy dark forgotten in fear. In that living, breathing center, many now await, listening, beginning to learn what will nourish and heal.
Introduction
I was running sacred, though I felt only scarred and scared.
A young doctoral student in theology and a budding religious leader within a local church in New Jersey, I faced challenges that overwhelmed and rising emotional energies that unnerved me. The retreat center close to where I lived offered a good running trail, complete with paved and beachfront trails. I was running more, and longer, almost as if I were afraid of something behind me, within me. Whatever it was, it was so close I could not seem to get away. The more deeply I felt it, the longer and faster I ran, not unlike a horse increasingly frightened by a driverless wagon hitched behind her. I entered a grotto near the end of a looped run, dappled by sun and shade. A Marian figurine towered above, whitened by the sun but for dark