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Somehow, it is already late June, and the program year has come to a close. This past Friday and Saturday, the cohort gathered for Dis-Orientation, our final program for the year. We shared our “River Stories” with one another -- a practice of reflecting on our experiences of the year, identifying five key moments, and assigning a song, poem, dialogue, description, or five evocative words to each, and then sharing these moments with one another.
“Are you in the ordination process?”
I had never been asked this question before becoming a Life Together Fellow. The first time someone asked me I responded immediately, “I can’t be. I’m Catholic.”
The idea had almost never crossed my mind. Sure, I’d read about women’s fight for ordination in a theology class in college, and I’d even heard women preach a few times. I’m a feminist, and an activist, and occasionally an optimist, but nothing has ever seemed so impossible to me as the idea of a woman being ordained in the church I was raised in.
Two years ago when I entered Life Together after graduating from Wellesley College, my body was already tense. Not because I didn’t know what to expect from the program, but because I knew all too well the mazes, pitfalls, and disappointments I would have to navigate in this, predominantly white, east coast, self proclaimed liberal space. After all, I had just spent the last four years both benefiting from, and being frustrated by a similar environment at my college.
As I write this letter, sunlight streams through my window, and I find myself wondering when I might take a break, walk my dog, and spend a few precious minutes soaking up the sun. It has been this way for the past week or so, now that spring has definitively arrived in Boston. On Friday, we held our staff meeting outside, and just yesterday, we gathered around that same table, on the porch of 40P, for our weekly staff lunch. We know these spring days, before the heat and humidity of summer arrive in full force, are not to be taken for granted.
I want to take you all back to a moment. The moment is late January of last year, and I’m in the meditation room of Life Together’s headquarters at 40 Prescott Street, nearing the end of my interview with Associate Director Lindsey Hepler and LT alum Yuris Martinez. It was like no other interview I’ve ever been in - warm, conversational, and deeply thought-provoking. The tremble in my hands that I had arrived with quickly dissipated, and I found myself feeling renewed, like a spark had been lit inside me.
As you may know, our hearts of full of gratitude for the safe arrival of Alex Bogdan and full of joy for the Bogdan family as they navigate their first few months as a family of four. This month's letter to the community comes from Development and Operations Manager Jerry Ellis as Kelsey will be out on maternity leave until late June. During this time Lindsey Hepler will be the Acting Director.
My time as a Life Together fellow, as many of you know, was not too long ago. I had the honor to live with the intentional community of 2 Garden St in Harvard Square from 2015-2016 (shout out 2G fam across the world!). But today, and for the past six weeks, I’ve been working as a LT staff member supporting the logistics of a number of projects while Kelsey is with her growing family.
I am a person who likes to move fast. I like to talk fast --so fast that people often have trouble understanding what I’m saying. I like to walk fast --so fast that anyone under 5’9” usually complains. I eat fast. I get through emails fast. You know what isn’t fast? Helping organizations creak and groan and bend towards enacting their values.
For better or worse, I’ve grown accustomed to spending life on the move; bouncing off emails on the subway between tightly-packed meetings, or squeezing in a last-minute phone call with a fellow in that hour I had planned to sit down and draft a proposal. If I’m being honest, I’m writing these very words on my phone, riding the Orange Line subway between Assembly and Sullivan Square stations!
A couple of months ago, my mom gifted me a book titled The Book of Hygge: The Danish Art of Contentment, Comfort, and Connection. Kind of obscure, yes? Danish culture is not something I am familiar with, nor is it part of my family background (though it is part of my husband’s). Even so, my mother found the concept of hygge (pronounced “hoo-gah”) fitting for my personality and many of the things I care about. According to the book’s author Louisa Thomsen Britts, hygge is a “a quality of presence and an experience of belonging and togetherness. It is a feeling of being warm, safe, comforted, and sheltered… it is an experience of selfhood and communion with people and places that anchors and affirms us, gives us courage and consolation.”
Lately, I have been thinking about how we write about things that have never really existed. As an English and Creative Writing major, a longtime poet and lover of stories, I know a little bit about language’s power to articulate that which we cannot see or touch. I often find my greatest solace in my ability to articulate that which brings me joy or annoyance or curiosity or despair. But can existent vocabulary ever sufficiently articulate an imagined future? And how can we make our writing, our articulations, accessible to everyone?
Last weekend a group of us Life Together staff and fellows went on a contemplative retreat to Emery House, enjoying the hospitality of our friends at the Society of St. John the Evangelist (SSJE). In some ways, winter is the best time to go on retreat; like the trees shorn of their leaves, preparing for spring, a winter retreat compels you to go inward and notice that which is harder to perceive during other seasons. I could admire the diverse array of birds flocking to the bare birch trees outside my bedroom window.
At the 2018 Mystic Soul Conference in Chicago, I was introduced to Moses the Black.
When I first saw the 6 or 7 foot portrait of this stunning being, I wondered why the leadership of the Mystic Soul Project chose him as one of the conference’s saints. I recognized names like Dolores Huerta and Sylvia Rivera, but had no idea who this man was. In general, iconography has never really interested me - and yet this man’s eyes drew me in.
I recently saw an exhibition called “(un)expected families” at the Museum of Fine Arts. There was one section displaying the photographs of “hidden mothers” – fascinating, sometimes unintentionally comical, Victorian-era photographs that show infants in the laps of mothers who are completely covered in and hidden under fabric.
The church loves to talk about welcome. From evangelical mega churches that put coffee shops in the foyer to progressive experiments with the format of ancient liturgies, people from a variety of contexts are thinking about how the Christian tradition might best embody welcome. If we’re being honest, though, sometimes self-preservation is at the heart of the effort. How can we preserve the community we love by drawing more people into it?
“Everyone has a home to go to, except me.” The patient whose hospital bed I’m sitting beside suddenly speaks without looking at me. She’s been silent for the past half hour of my chaplain visit, refusing to speak but also shaking her head each time I offer to leave. I take a deep breath and let myself feel the full weight of her words. I can’t help but be reminded of Jesus’ words from Matthew 8:20. But the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. “Tell me more,” I say, and we look into each other’s eyes.
Living with L’Arche this summer, and now living and working with a homeless community in Boston called MANNA, I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about the idea that ‘All are Welcome’. The Rev. Cristina Rathbone, head priest and founder of the MANNA community, explains what it means to be welcome in our community, and her words resonate with the welcome I experienced in L’Arche:
How often are you left waiting in your day-to-day life? If you’re like me, you might find yourself increasingly impatient when the doctor is running 15 minutes late or even when the Internet page is slow to load. Our interconnected, high-tech culture is one of instant gratification: knowledge on any subject is at our fingertips, people are immediately available to answer our questions, and any object we desire can be on our doorstep in two days. So when we have to wait, we question whether it is worth it, whether that person or thing will ever come at all.
My two years as a fellow with Life Together were an immersion in inquiry, reflection, and search for integrity. I learned for the first time about the practice of community organizing -- of strategies of public disruption of the status quo and of building power -- the practice of living in intentional community -- of trying in imperfect and temporary ways to share resources and to make collective decisions -- and the practice of contemplative prayer -- of knowing myself and God more deeply and intimately than I had known.
