A New Sanctuary — Inviting You to a Place to Quiet Your Soul and Find Peace !!

I am always grateful for Lent, no matter how haltingly I enter into it, and this year has been a decidedly one-step-forward-two-steps-back affair. A month ago my poetry collection, Mending Prayer Rugs, appeared in bookstores and in people’s mailboxes.

I have been beyond blessed by its reception. Readers – strangers and friends — have been generously affirming; they have taken the time to slow down and read, and have clearly “gotten” my attempts to bring to life the inner lives of women as we live out own very ordinary, extraordinary days.

Today as I shift into lower drive, towards what I know are the necessary spiritual conditions for the Lenten journey of taking stock, I am trying to open myself to what in my life needs to change, and listen for leadings into the new ways I am being called to give and be present.

As a writer, I know that any poem, any letter, or reflection worth reading must be conceived in silence, and nurtured with glacial patience. A poem builds phrase by phrase, sometimes over years. So do the beautiful hand-stitched quilts crafted by my dear friend, Peg Gignoux, whose Cortona Steps graces the cover of my book. So does raising a child, navigating the white-knuckled car wrecks and academic pivots and the general buffeting of a careless world. A proper garden, a marriage, a life. And effective response to crisis.

Silence and patience, the slow building of self-awareness that leads to intentional choices, are not qualities in vast supply these days.

I don’t need to detail the waves of trauma, or loops of helplessness and despair that assail our best efforts to put one foot ahead of the other these days. But I can pray about how my years of experience of prayer and writing and shared silence might offer new forms of sanctuary to you, my readers.

My writings here, free and available to anyone who wishes to read them and pass them around, have always been intended as gifts to a growing community of readers. I have cherished your comments and suggestions. Several online offerings have come from them.

Now in my quiet Lenten observations one of the leadings that I am paying attention to is a monthly online sanctuary, a space and time for to gather – in silent prayer, in guided reflection, with time to journal and to discuss our challenges, hope and wisdom in this uncertain time.

We advance in healing, in wholeness, and in conscious social change only by taking small, consistent stitches, performed away from the observing and evaluative eyes of our public persona. Healing and inner change need this space. And we need others to witness and affirm our process of “becoming.”

Trying to “do change” alone leads to closed loops, self-absorption, and soul fatigue. The company of others is the grace we need to see our solitude in a new light. When this happens, we are able to sustain the centering work of the true self, and re-enter the world from a rooted place. We become clearer about what constitutes “good work,” and significant speech and action, and are able to share these as gift, to rejoin the slip stream of community, and the life of the world in which we work and live and pray.

If this nudge of a notion would feed your needs at this time, I welcome your thoughts in the Comments here, as I discern the voice of the Spirit in this. Spiritual discipline, particularly for women, is helped enormously by the embrace of an empathic community. Community holds us; it empowers us to lean into the deep work of flow, assess our gifts and purposes with honesty, and discover the courage to use our voices in the name of the good, however large or small our realms.

I have always thought that this was what Jesus was about in the desert. Perhaps this is one of the lessons being offered us this Lent.

I look forward to hearing from you!

Blessings and peace,
Kathleen