Nashville, TN: After spending time with the women from Magdalene at Thistle Farms this morning, I purchased a copy of their new book, Find Your Way Home: Words From The Street, Wisdom From The Heart. It's a skinny little book, which I love, since I usually only have a bit of time (or energy) to read snippets on the road. However, I have a feeling that this little book is going to be packed full of big insight.
An added bonus to my new purchase is that one of it's authors, Becca Stevens (who, by the way, founded Magdalene and is a priest at St. Augustine's Episcopal Church and who almost made me wet my pants from laughing so hard at one of her tales) is holding a weekly discussion of the book at
St. A's. By the power of the internet, I am able to catch the lessons I miss, but after being present for the first week's gathering, I already feel that this is going to feed my soul greatly.
In an attempt to share some of the wisdom I gather each week, I'm going to try a bit of reflective blogging after I have a chance to re-listen to the podcast in my living room, on the bus or around a venue.
Becca talked about her beginnings of life as college chaplain, where the desire of creating a woman's sanctuary came from and how Magdalene forced her to deal with her own personal sexual abuse. The book was born from conversations between Becca and other folks in the St. A's congregation, about what it means to live in community together and the spiritual principals based around that.
Becca focused on a few highlights of the book. She said:
"The idea of the book... was about, literally, that this gospel that we proclaim was about freeing us from everything. From all of our pasts... about moving forward, without the false assumption that we're not going to mess up in the future... but that right now, where we are and what we're about is about telling the truth about what we know."
What freedom in knowing that even though we've made bad choices in the past and we are most definitely going to screw up again somehow in the future, in this very moment, we're simply doing the best we can!
Becca also brought up a subject that is such a personal, yet common (which is somehow comforting), struggle.
"We need to be able to unite our spirituality and our sexuality. We can't divorce those two things anymore. It's dangerous and it's not worth it to me and I don't want to spend any more time on it! Yes -- you get to be in your body and love God and find it to be a safe, compassionate space."
Who knew the two could coexist? And this is coming from a PRIEST, so my Catholic guilt doesn't stand a chance.
Finally, Becca said something that was HUGE for her, was the idea of people leaving... and how to do it gracefully.
She confesses:
"For me and what my fear had been about, I needed to learn how to say goodbye gracefully for people."
Amen, sister. Er, mother? Your holiness? I think she'd be ok if I just stick with Becca.
That should get you through the rest of the week, don't you think? Now back to my light heaving reading.
