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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 specks where it had been weathered. Two faded turquoise kneelers rested at the grotto’s base. Without anymore straightaways to run, I slowed to a canter, then to a trot, then to a walk. Exhausted, I lowered my body onto the faded pads of a kneeler. It felt strange to me, a running Protestant reined in close to a blessed Mother.

I looked up at her, of professed blessed status unknown to me. I heard myself ask what it was like for her: What was it like in your body of inconceivably sacred purpose? A question of sacred trajectory, when I thought about it later. Tradition has it Mary sang praises in response: My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my savior. She speaks to her soul enlargening, making visible, the Lord. Of course, other words come with such churched ears: This is my body, given for you. These words bring intimations of sacramental bread, wine or juice, a solemnity formalized in the hands of men (mostly), though some women now. Myself included there. Years later, I would learn the archaeological and archetypal significance of grottos for the Feminine. I would begin to see Marianist grottos are a Christianized integration of rituals and symbols centuries old in records of the Moon Goddess, represented in numerous civilizations both East and West.1 But back then, I was not ready to know that.

When I was running from something I knew not, I stopped finally in a Marianist grotto. I could not outrun what was rising from so deep within me, nor was I willing any longer to try. Unknowing, I was entering into an internal-external transfiguration that would be a return to the body as sacred word and an invitation into deep feeling that is redemptive, illuminating, integrative. I was finding my way into a path of devotion in conscious love known in ancient-new sacred belonging: spiritual companionships and circle-way wisdom. Ultimately, Marianist grottos became the places in my life that “could hold me” as a holy enfleshed woman awakening to deep feeling on a path of devotion in conscious love. A contemplative path unfolded, rooting itself deeply in the body and in multiple, spiritual friendships across irreconcilable difference.

This path of devotion has been more nourishing and challenging than any one community of practice in which I belong, largely because it overflowed the bounds of my sense of “community of practice,” beyond my understandings of congregation, faith, religion, and tradition. I found myself guided into a holy meander in spiritual friendships with practitioners of various traditions, or no identifiable tradition at all. Many of us relied heavily upon our root communities—congregations steeped in textual traditions or local sanghas of lineages of practice. Others challenged such “communities,” finding connection, intimacy, and transformation completely outside of them. This unexpectedly transformed the habits of mind I had had about my own tradition, what belonging means. Even as a clergywoman and a theology professor, I was pushed outside of thinking in these terms at all.

A glimpse of the stories to come, then. Shortly after my run at the New Jersey retreat center, a woman sitting with me on the bench there touched my hand in a commitment of spiritual friendship, which over time released decades of embroiled body-shame in a gentle, bounded, but visceral way. Years later, I as a professor and preacher’s wife was manhandled by an unthinking fellow during a congregational coffee hour. It took nearly five years for the theological reality of reconciliation to emerge, but when it did, I knew it deeply in my bones. Invited by a new friend, I found myself face to face with a large Buddha, welcomed over years to learn a felt sense of lovingkindness in (for me) a most unusual fashion. At another grotto close to my home, a rabbi blessed me with a Passover question, an invitation to release “some inner betrayal” that had captivated me. I knew not what he meant, but posted the intention to release it at an interfaith campus seder. Life opened a couple weeks later, healing the longstanding splinter that the manhandling was in my own body. Doors opened amidst my seminary teaching, then, to a visit in the Bronx where I both “stormed a shtiebel” after sitting with storage and found myself woven into spiritual friendship deeper than a really difficult encounter there. A couple years before that, my husband and I found ourselves at a Shabbat table with a Chabad rabbi and his wife, all of us filled to overflowing. Much later, on a completely inarticulate and intuitive impulse, I drove more than five hundred miles to leave a pomegranate on the gravestone of my great-grandmother. Shortly after that, a New Moon circle of wilding and wizened women gathered to listen deeply to their lives, to name intentions for the coming month. I as theology professor found myself reborn in an unexpected way. Only a few, there are so many others . . .

A Companionable Way shares these stories and the sense I make of them for living a life of deepening sacred purpose in a divisive world. It invites anyone willing into compassionate companionship toward an expressive delight in which all may hold the suffering of self and others. It addresses the deeply human yearning that draws us together and the divisive habits of mind that drive us apart—both movements necessary for inner and outer transformation. It invites you to practice trusting into new flows of befriending, to immerse yourself in the invited and long-held wisdom of others while you listen to your own embodied voices. To do so, this companionable way opens into a path of devotion—a deeply embodied, bounded, and driving force that both purifies and transforms us from the inside out. All this has led to and now requires a new-old “container”—a shape of human gathering—better able to receive and honor all that the world pours into us today: a circle. A companionable way is ultimately a circle way of living into the world. To think your way there, consider the yearnings and habits of mind in which we live today.

Yearning

Within each communal gathering where I am welcomed, whether it takes place within a certain tradition or no tradition, I sense how increasingly hungry each of us is for . . . something. This yearning drives each of us, albeit in different directions: some of us outward, others of us inward, even more of us into a numbness or distraction of some kind. For me, I name this a hunger to be seen, to be heard, simply to be enough just as I am—whether “I” be woman, man, child, elder. Call it a basic human need, right up there with food, shelter, and clothing. Or the relational “seed” so necessary to counterbalance an individualism that isolates. More and more of us are sensing these yearnings,2 naming them as variously as our stories lead.

So much in our world shapes us to evade and minimize them, however. The ways in which we are seen, heard, and expected to perform (conform?) today are increasingly fraught with fear, innuendo, and disconnection. Most collective gatherings can become unexpected minefields of presumption, prejudice, and ideology where we need to hide basic parts of ourselves. In very real ways, it is dangerous today to be deeply seen in our human frailty and giftedness. Public condemnation is quick and intense, if perhaps fleeting, before it lands on another unsuspecting and unfortunate soul in undesired trials. Presumption of guilt is fueled by whatever projected fears govern the moment. Think of the most recent scandal, the foibled politician, the immoral religious leader, the abusive athlete, the sexualized teenage celebrity being prepared for cultural consumption. How quickly we are moved to an unconscious fear or anxiety about what if. How quickly we move—or are moved—to judge and disassociate. Being deeply seen and heard today carries risks of misunderstanding, abuse, even accusation within a polarized public.

At elemental levels, therefore, we go unseen, unheard, yearning to connect while being saddled with a decreasing awareness in how. Without formation and practice, we know less and less about how to connect deeply with one another. Our previous ways of gathering—as well as the amount of time we remain in one place—do not allow consistent skill development or the emotional formation for how to connect with one another. Without heightening awareness of it, we are “taught” every day to disconnect and rarely how to connect. The yearning grows. The urgency is leading to violence in many of us.

Few institutions today are structured well to meet this yearning. The naysayers of our world point to the crumbling institutions, the horrific state of human relations across race, nationality, gender, orientation, political party, and more. Listening to the news, it’s hard not to be overwhelmed by hopelessness. Many historic religious traditions are declining in membership. Government is polarized and fraught. Marriage is changing, and families increasingly take diverse forms today. This grieves some of us terribly and welcomes all of us uncertainly. From the other direction, the visionaries, the idealist ones, paint pictures for us in their words and websites about the magic that is all around, the power of positive listening, the creative life that is at our fingertips if we just . . . (fill in the blank). Somewhere in the middle, each of us receives the perhaps undesired but unavoidable challenge of making a life in a complicated time rife with overwhelming choice. How then shall we live? ask the poet-authors Wayne Muller and Terry Tempest Williams. What do you want to do with your one wild and precious life? asks another, Mary Oliver.

These pages invite you into recent and tentative answers to such questions, facing yearnings well met and new habits of mind able to hold more than our current divisions. On this path of devotion in conscious love, I was awakened to see and be seen in a fashion beyond my own tradition, though deeply faithful within it. In circle-way communities, I have been heard more deeply than I ever knew possible. As a theology professor and Presbyterian clergywoman, I am a deeply traditioned woman, yet I was given myself anew—found myself reborn—when I became grounded in exile as a befriended outsider, when I sat at table with spirit-friends across irreconcilable difference, when I found myself a theist at home in non- or no-theisms, when I was welcomed in a circle of wilding women. As such, A Companionable Way is a record of my own spiritual adventure to companion anyone awakening to a nameless, potentially fearful yearning that was previously unknown, even a little unwelcome. That sneaking suspicion that life was meant to hold more than it seems to? Or this curiosity to trust God more than you ever knew possible, even when all the voices in your head tell you it is dangerous to do so? I welcome you to breathe into this “more” both within the institutions that hold your life and in a wondrous life unfolding “outside” of them. Perhaps these categories of “tradition or not” no longer serve us or name the search as well as they have before. Which means our habits of mind must also be redressed.

Habits of Mind

A young woman startles awake, finding herself driving an 18-wheeler. She watches herself driving safely, soundly, but cannot recall how she got there. She has no recollection of training to drive a semi, but this is precisely what she seems to be doing. Without much thought, she drives through tree-lined streets of rather bland, suburban, North American neighborhoods. On the passenger’s seat beside her lies a map that she has followed step by step. Finally, she turns right into a cobblestone driveway. After the long winding drive, she pulls up in front of an old colonial mansion, bright red brick, white trim. She observes with pleasure its spacious lawns, flowing down a steep decline off to the side of the truck. Behind her is the labyrinthine driveway, lined with ancient elm trees and dappled sunlight. In the distance beyond the lawn lies well-trimmed landscaping, bountiful beds of multicolored flowers. With the semi slowing into the driveway, the cab turns at a right angle to the trailer, grinding the goods to a halt. The engine stalls. With some alarm, she realizes she cannot move forward or backward. There is no way to drive a semi down the slope without great harm to her, the semi, and the goods in the trailer. She cannot move backward, with the trailer of such size and the angle of the cab and driveway. Anger and curiosity begin to arise in her as she wonders whether the map was misleading. “I have been betrayed,” she says, to no one in particular. She opens the door, jumps down from the cab, opens the back of the truck and starts unloading the boxes, one by one.

These reflections demonstrate one way to unload our conceptual boxes: boxes of our minds, whether steeped in a tradition or not, to look anew for what can speak peaceably today; boxes of how we live our lives, looking for old-new ways in which more of us may find deeper human being; and boxes of the ways we have been conditioned to think about who we are in community or how community needs to be. The dream above arrived several years ago, spurring me to ask much more radical (at the root) questions than my professional degrees, ecclesial ordination (Presbyterian Church USA), or successful establishment life would ever directly encourage. In what “communities” or “containers” do you spend your time—religious, civic, political, familial? Are you willing to reflect critically on this, perhaps see some things you’d rather not see? Most of us do our best to live within the streams of human belonging we’ve been given, afraid it will be “worse” on “the outside.” To become critically reflective about “our tribe” can threaten the ground on which we live our lives.

For instance, a dear friend found herself in a fundamentalist religious community close to home, yearning for the community while trying to quiet the dissonant voices. She disagreed with the cognitive norms of doctrinal exclusivity and internal conformity required to belong there, but she had also learned to hold her nose and tolerate it for the sake of belonging. As she found herself in a more egalitarian community that fed her spirit “on the outside,” she began to “unpack her own boxes.” She began to ask questions and gently open her heart to others in new ways. She then discovered herself perceived as a threat in her faith community. High exclusion, after all. Or consider politics. My uncle found his sense of belonging in grass-roots politics. Organizing campaigns guided him to deeper connection with others, at least until the campaign was over. Then his community would unravel and he would have to start all over again. Itinerant communities of temporal purpose. In these instances, and perhaps more of your own, communities of practice defined by religious tradition, political persuasion, or other named-identity groups are less and less able to cultivate the deeply embodied habits of mind needed to reconcile the tensions we face.

A Companionable Way therefore opens boxes and allows each of us to examine their contents in some surprising ways—steady, slow, curious. It suggests that the conceptual categories or “habits of mind” so prevalent today are simply no longer the best way to move the goods of heart into a world of wonder and need. Talking, deepening the discourse, argument and counterargument have had their time in the spotlight but now must bow to other ways of engagement. The ways we “see the obvious” need to open anew in different ways of being together that are rooted in invitation, not obligation, and that presume good will, even in the face of violence and betrayal. Our mental habits need to be held more loosely in a love that liberates (thank you, Maya Angelou), all while resisting the immediate critique and judgment of expert rationalists promising the certainty we crave. You don’t have to believe everything you think—a good bumper sticker I saw once. Sometimes allowing thoughts that discomfort you is the way toward a deeper love and life than your mind could ever hold. Contemplative practice, new flows of spiritual friendship, and strong “containers” able to hold deep feelings—from intense joy to righteous rage without social cost—will invite us into embodied, nondualistic habits of mind, sustained in a simple but spiritually demanding fashion beyond polarized-polarizing identities.

Having been invited for years on this journey, I am now inviting any with ears to hear: unload your own boxes; examine the contents of your life through the inner work of your mind-body-spirit. Learn to place only the necessary nourishment and simplest tools you find into a knapsack to carry on the road with those you will meet on the way. It will take some time to walk past the trucks of certainty, the sculpted gardens, and the colonial architecture of how we’ve crafted our worlds before. A different kind of journey into unshakable abundance and assurance beckons all of us who are willing.

What a Companionable Way Is Not

Perhaps a glimpse into what this book is not will help make it more comprehensible in the words we do have. This is not a book on interfaith dialogue or world religions. A Companionable Way, as intended here, offers stories, a rhythmic framework, and some commentary on practices suitable for deepening interpersonal encounters across differences of all kinds. It’s not “interfaith dialogue” as traditionally conceived, though those efforts have borne much fruit in what arises here. Dialogue, in the popular mind at least, prioritizes expertise and language, no matter how attentive we may try to be to relationships first, heart-connection first. Focusing on themes or issues may aid understanding, but those also may distract from sensing the incontrovertible sacred in an “other” you are trying to understand, at some distance from yourself. It almost presupposes that for fidelity’s sake, you will choose your “tradition” over another human being, over another life. The dialectics of discourse require either/or choices at almost every turn. A companionable way is more interested in the wordless, the implicit, the structural, the choiceless choices of the numinous become present, the claims on your life interconnected with others in the face of conceived and perceived traditions.

Also in some contrast, discourses on “world religions” presume an abstraction between doing and being, person and practice, which is a conceptual device useful for its purposes, as far as they go. The split is not useful here, however. Learning about a religion, even when facts and holidays and histories are intellectually conceived, keeps you at some distance from yourself, from an “other.” Companionship is not “learning about” but “learning with.” “World religions” feels a bit like the old-school museum, with dead things pinned to velvet cushions for voyeurs to gaze upon, in abstraction and isolation. At best, we come away with the presumption that “they” (Islam, say, as some “force out there”) or “we” know something, without ever having to encounter ourselves already in relation, which we are—energetically, spiritually, emotionally—whether we want to be awake to it or not.

A companionable way is a stumbling attempt to live first from interdependence amidst irreconcilable difference, to see with the heart first from connection and presumed good will. Stumbling may be the most important word there, because there is no way to “get this right” or encounter without “mistakes.” Beginning with interdependence requires difficult inner work to encounter our own deeply embodied traditions or habits of mind, laden in the subconscious and unconscious, shaping everything we perceive about something “out there.” This inner work is important because without it we may become inoculated against even a remote curiosity about centuries-long wisdom traditions from all over the globe—traditions that could contribute to global healing and relief of suffering, were they encountered in a more suitable fashion of exploration, humility, and discovery. At best, with the presumed good will and intention for inner work, living from interdependence becomes a practice, which may allow us to discover ourselves becoming more deeply devoted to others we’ve just met, strangers become companions.

Lastly, while I am a scholar within a particular academic discipline, the form of my reflections here will not be one of traditional, analytical argument within my discipline. Because primarily relational learning begins and ends in deep feeling, the traditional scholarly resources and genre of discourse available today are simply inadequate to my purpose. I think it’s fair to say most scholars do not appear to be the most emotionally savvy of us all. We can be the worst offenders of projection and transference. We may actually get socially penalized in our profession for overt emotional displays, except perhaps cognitive aggression. So we devote our lives to increasingly refined points of textual inquiry—what some have joked about as “learning more and more about less and less.” We may be driven by something deep within us, often incomprehensible to others, sometimes inaccessible even to us. Instead of delving within, we focus our work beyond—which can be useful, of course . . . until it’s not. Myself, I have found the rising awareness about—and in—deep feeling to be one of the most destabilizing learnings in my decades of scholarship. Better to pour that drive outside into rigorous scholarship than face it within, I thought. But then . . .

I was found and welcomed into an ancient-new, strong “container” in which to see and be seen, listen and be heard underneath and beyond all my words: a circle. Circle-way communities of practice, new configurations of power and speech, practices of psychological holding and being held while the deeper inner work of self-transfiguration happened . . . “Love” blossomed in ways and with companions it wasn’t expected or anticipated to be. “Church” happened within and then beyond traditional church walls, in communities of practice and holy intention. “Body” became a site of revelation, knowledge, and wisdom trumping all professions of gospel and law. “Knowledge” grew from seeds and in dimensions previously suspect and considered insignificant. “Family” expanded beyond bloodlines, with predictable backlash from blood-family. And “God” blew out of every box previously conceived or about to be conceived. And what was the ancient-new, strong container in each of these companionships, the holding spaces in which each attends to his/her own inner work and all co-create the sacred space within which to listen, lament, celebrate, and heal self and world? A circle space, womblike and holding, practiced and deepened by both women and men in holy intention. The final chapter of this text lands on precisely what this means and how the form holds all it does.

A Companionable Way Emerges . . .

This is an invitation arising from both the privilege of establishment and the painful gifts of exile. Its pathway to abundance and assurance within me emerged from a stable early family life, steeped in congregational Presbyterian Christianity. Hard work and good fortune have offered me a successful professional life, begun in the liberal arts before being drawn into “higher” theological education, and a blessed marriage to a handsome and tenaciously loyal man. Of course, he is now inevitably torn, perhaps even irretrievably, between his own sacred calling to “his church” and companioning the obstreperous, no less sacred calling of his wife whose “faith community” overflows our one, shared root-tradition. Dear souls . . . This unwieldy life continually disrupts certainties, which is understandably difficult.

Imagine our mutual surprise when the first year of his congregational calling ejected me into exile, a nameless space outside of our previously shared, sacred work. I landed again and again in spaces not immediately or obviously assured of sacred intention, at least as we had been trained to conceive of it. Over months, then years, I landed and grew to trust this Holy more and more deeply in a web of companionships of practice and observance, including Tibetan Buddhists, Jews of Conservative, Modern Orthodox, and Hasidic hue, practitioners of earth-centered spirituality (and those faithful to One they call Goddess), atheists, “nones,” and more. Without expectation or conscious intention for it, in these ways and spaces, persons and places, I discovered a depth of devotion to Jesus as Risen Lord as I traveled with and was nourished by those outside my tradition. The felt sense of this Jesus in the power of the Spirit still overwhelms me today. The felt sense and multiple-tradition receivings of it, however, mean mono-traditional language could never adequately describe it. Solely Christian-communal terms are simply insufficient. In an odd, counterintuitive conviction, I grew to trust Jesus so thoroughly to show up “on the other side” that I learned “He” was always there, the Christ-within Who needs no name within wordless devotion.

So what is a woman of faith to do when she senses the sacred, the Holy One, outside of her community’s “boxes,” more often outside her community of faith where she is Led than within its previous bounds or language? Leave church?3 Contrary to any expectation of leaving, all this led to unexpected leadership—elected roles in church and liturgical-curricular leadership in seminary and guild contexts of higher theological education. As each invitation to lead arrived, I discerned them with my multiply-traditional “community of faith,” which had fewer Christians in it by that time. All of us knew leadership was the path to share what I was learning from the peripheries, at the intersections, back into “the center” of my own Christian communion. I accepted the invitations, confirmed mostly by “outsiders.” Still, all along, a sense of dissonance grew—fears of disloyalty, even betrayal—right alongside incontrovertible fruit of Spirit and blessed assurance.

The Fidelity in Fear of Betrayal

Peter Rollins coined an important phrase for me in these years: the fidelity of betrayal.4 He delves into the complicated traditions swirling around Judas Iscariot, observing that salvation history within Christian traditions pivots upon Judas’s perceived-real betrayal of Jesus in the garden. This incontrovertible both/and would disconcert most Christians today, of course: Judas as necessary to salvation? Judas as faithful disciple with a difficult task? For so very many, faith can only mean an unshakable grasping of Jesus’s name, work, power, focused on certainties of light as previously conceived, named of old. Yet my own experience and the felt sense in my body convict me in a faith strengthened, deepened, broadened—so much so that I can now withstand in breathing compassion those who judge me falsely, condemn me without question, disregard me and my feelings in public and private ways. This blessed assurance and love from abundance has allowed me to move into the world with more risked compassion than I have ever known. Does my willingness to move into the fear of betrayal, even into a perceived betrayal “outside” of my own community’s norms, demonstrate less faith . . . or more?

Recently, I noticed that only one voice spoke in the dream above. “I have been betrayed,” it said. The map the dream-driver was given was somehow “misleading.” I began to look for when the word betrayal arose these last years. In the grotto, an important yet still inarticulate healing happened when I was invited to release an “inner betrayal” I knew not how to conceive. Leaning into that, even not knowing what it was, led to theological reconciliation and new insight, new connections in companionship. Whatever else this journey entailed, a theme of fidelity and betrayal appears to weave throughout it.

Betrayal is an ugly word, and certainly not one I thought I’d use early on in a book on devotion as the path of conscious love. I have avoided and softened the word for years now, so discomfited have I been with the possibility of betraying myself, my faith, my life in this pathway of relationship. What I have learned is that betrayal can be a doorway to deepened faith, when healed in the sacred gaze of devotion and held in old-new containers strong enough to honor both the light and holy dark of human lives. On its own, without conscious care, betrayal destroys, disassembles, and divides. With conscious care, deep-body listening, and willingness to risk, however, the perceived (or real) betrayals of my community of faith have led to deepened faith in me, multiple intimate spiritual companionships, greater self- and other-compassion in an intensely grounded life of assurance and devotion, able to hold the suffering of self and others. In Christian traditions, we call that fruit of Spirit.

Standing on this side of my life’s calling, knowing my own wholeness more than I ever knew possible, I can concur with the dream-driver’s statement: I have been betrayed . . . by centuries of yearnings unmet and habits of mind unwilling to expand to the More that awaits us all. Speaking as a woman of faith, I find it loyal to betray institutions that have undervalued and dehumanized women for centuries. My sense of loyalty-faith-passion demanded a betrayal, perceived or real. After all, when is growth beyond the bounds of what was a betrayal, and when is it necessary for healing, for wholeness? I’m beginning to sense that betrayal is inevitable in human life. Each of us will be betrayed—by another, by ourselves, by the customs and institutions we hold most dear. We will be exposed to danger by giving information to a (perceived) enemy. Knowledge will be offered, dispersed, that is treacherous to what we hold most dear—our planet, our relationships, ourselves. And sometimes, in the face of deep suffering and hunger, disloyalty is more virtuous than loyalty. Betrayal can be a pathway to deeper fidelity.

Yet it is also true that I have not been betrayed by anyone in particular. Not my family, nor my husband, nor my faith community, nor my colleagues. It has taken me decades to be able to name my own experience, especially as it threatens many of those I love—a gentle father and ever-present mother, an attentive husband, a remarkable extended family and faithful web of colleagues and friends. The dream above arrived several years ago, startling me as a Presbyterian, patristic, and practical Christian theologian. Unknowing but not unwilling, I was finding myself on this journey of awakening to a way of the heart, a path of devotion in conscious love by means of companionship across irreconcilable difference. Step by step, I knew I was going where it felt lively to go. In very real ways, the betrayal that I sense so deeply is completely impersonal. I can offer what I have learned because of the family, ecclesial, and academic life I know, have worked hard for, have been given. Yet we have also been betrayed by ages of refusal and fear, when we persist in not seeing our interconnection and the overwhelming violence against women and children. Our world is groaning under it.

Fruit of many years, then, A Companionable Way invites each of us into this way of the heart toward an expressive delight able to companion the suffering of self and others, a way that invites deepening of the journey in which you have been steeped, or been scarred, probably both. I’ve now unpacked a lot of boxes. Some I knew I was unpacking. Others fell off the truck and spilled open as I stayed at it. I have made a preliminary order of most of the pieces, picking up what has been fruitful and relinquishing that which seems too heavy to carry or impractical for the journey. I will show you what I am taking with me in my knapsack, and you are welcome to any of it that you desire.

A Bit on Terms: “Deep Feeling” and “Container”

A couple of observations about some words in the pages to come. Deep feeling as I use it here is a primarily relational, embodied, and intuitive force within each of us, including inarticulate and articulate awareness of emotions, sensations, intuitions, hunches and more. It is not solely or even necessarily a conscious force, though it can become so. This force labors—or we labor with it—in resistance and neglect, at the bounds of consciousness. It has great potential for self- and other-transfiguration for the common good. I awakened to it at about age six or seven in an embodied but necessarily hidden way, in my body-dissociated Pennsylvania Deutsch family. It was an awakening to the overwhelming sensation the human body is capable of, interconnected with the mind but also beyond it. The manner in which this occurred, and the isolation in which it occurred, insured that this holy capacity within me would remain in the dark, entangled in shame for decades. Maturing into an adult with it, within a Protestant religiosity that disdains the body—all bodies, especially women’s bodies—made it a burden for a long time. It’s been this journey—repression, maturation, regression, then regeneration in spirit5—that has returned me to deep feeling as gift, not burden; invitation, not danger.

The force of deep feeling, finally birthed into my conscious awareness and shared for nearly a decade now with spirit-friends, has been complicated and complicating, of course. By definition, it is exquisitely intimate in a world forgetting the nature of authentic intimacy rooted in shared vulnerability. It is excruciatingly personal, rooted in the mundane and concrete details of any one and all of our lives—the extraordinary within the cover of the ordinary. This also means it is unavoidably embodied, which is befuddling for increasingly disembodied, technological, consumer-driven human beings today, disconnected from the land, geography, earth. Even naming the body means we think it’s about sex, when it is not.

To make matters worse for receptivity in this world, coming into deep feeling that is intimate, contextual, and embodied requires a coming to consciousness of an unspoken, perhaps even unspeakable woundedness within each of us. Many traditions of religious hue jump on this reality as sin, sinfulness, even depravity deep within us as human beings. On the one hand, it’s hard to dispute the evidence—watch the evening news, or witness the vitriol overflowing in the blogosphere. Yet those words do not describe the woundedness I mean. Honoring its wordless character, I will not presume to name it. I can say this woundedness began at birth for each of us. Out of our sustained refusal or chosen unconsciousness of it, we use the evidence of the wound to deepen it more, to pretend and defend against it, its cleansing, its healing. No one wants to see, let alone know and feel deeply, this woundedness within. Without redress, we continue to cloak conceptual and physical violence with paternalistic, shaming, systemic attempts of avoidance, neglect. Sustaining ourselves this way while exploiting the world in avoidant fashion, we continue to hold onto impossible certainties and an elitist expertise for the few.

What is ultimately invited in a return to and healthy stewardship of deep feeling is an energy, form, and direction able to balance, hold, and nourish. When we are willing to return, to steward, to trust, we receive all the world pours into us in a way more and more necessary for any new life in community to root and blossom today. Stronger, grounded, and circle-way communities are the only containers I know able to hold the deep feeling of each of us in the co-created presence of the greater whole.

Container is another word used in a potentially unfamiliar way in these pages, though more and more folks I encounter are using it in the fashion I intend. Here, it describes the way we structure our communities, our shared time, even our words and our habits of mind, which are the “conceptual containers” in which we understand our world. Our public and private institutions today demonstrate a fairly common shape and energy, at least on the surface. Walk into most civic settings or churches or synagogues today, particularly traditional or (Christian) megachurches, and you’ll experience a container with a clear front, perhaps a stage, a body, and a back. It could be represented by a square, a rectangle, or even a lopsided pentagram, but there is a clear hierarchy or point of focus within such a container. Leadership speaks from up front, whether one or a few, and the rest of the gathered listen and act as they are led within social and liturgical customs (now breaking down). The leader can see the most faces, and those gathered can see just a few, unless they twist and turn to look. The cornered-container holds the words and visions of the few, within the silences of the many, at least until one of the larger community pays the cost to become set apart to lead within aging structures that can disempower the many.

On the other hand, smaller communities within or outside of these institutions often gather in a differently styled container, best represented by a circle. Emergent communities within religious traditions, for one. Or grass-roots communities in politics. This container brings a different archetypal, social energy to the fore when human beings gather together. Requiring smaller numbers, by virtue of its shape, the circle places those gathered such that each person can see the faces of all the others. There is a center in which no one stands, with which everyone can make a direct connection. There is no top or bottom, so equity arises more easily. Not assuredly, of course, as it takes intention and practice. There is a circle-holder/decision-maker, but the energy of the container is one of co-creation, transparency, accountability, responsibility for self and other. More than just an arrangement of chairs in a room, the circle is an ancient-new container inviting a new way—to us today, at least—to be with one another in a collective form, energy, purpose. Mary Pierce Brosmer, founder of Women Writing for (a) Change, defines “container” as the “organizational universe, encompassing all aspects of how a group lives: time, physical space, money, relational agreements, food, and ritual. . . . Anything that maintains the delicate balance between open spaces and boundaries and allows life to emerge.” She offers analogues too: “eco-system, home, womb.”6 She gives the story and practices undergirding this circle-way community, a community intent upon conscious care of its container—its light, its shadow, its integrity and rootedness in the world.

In sum, a school could be considered a container, as could a congregation. Most often, however, these are organizational universes unto themselves, unconscious of the smaller “containers” within them or the feared “containers” outside them that require skills, practices, and deep listening to truly hold the words, energies, and deep feeling of their participants. We are largely conditioned in cornered containers to look to the leader(s), to those outside ourselves who we think are responsible for the community life, who are paid or trained to offer us what we need. In these pages, I use the word container to refer to the co-created shapes and energies in which people gather to be in community, consciously practicing and deepening the skills and listening necessary to be healthy, more whole, more and more conscious, regardless of their received notions of leadership. An aim of this entire project is for more of us to become more conscious and intentional in the containers to which we accord authority, in which we participate, which hold what is most sacred to us. We need to ask: are these “containers” serving us, each and all of us, well?

Conclusion

Part memoir, part toolbox, A Companionable Way charts one woman’s journey of awakening to the deep feeling of devotion in conscious love, possible only with an integrative journey of both light and dark, healed and held by companions from all walks of life, sharing their own charisms as I offered my own. Here you receive stories of my running sacred and scared, of the 18-wheeler of higher-ed expertise I have been trained to drive in the consciousness with which I was shaped. Here you see traditional theological education “stall” in the driveway of a colonial estate, unable to move forward or backward. I am still the Chalcedonian-Christian practical theology professor and Presbyterian “teaching elder” I was. But now, I am also a woman of sacred flesh healed in the gaze of devotion, held in circle-way communities of practice strong enough to hold both light and dark, silence and word, joy and outrage. I am a deeply traditioned woman who was given herSelf—or found herself reborn—only when I was grounded in exile, a befriended outsider, a theist at home in non- or no-theisms, a woman reborn in a circle of wilding women. My “community of faith” lives and breathes outside of, underneath, and within the reigning habits of mind in the institutions I continue to serve. My deepest yearnings to be truly seen, heard, and received just as I am and as I continue to grow are met regularly with a love that liberates.

The genre of this kind of life requires your own willingness and intuition, your soul’s tenacity to hold onto yourself, allowing your world to unravel a little so it may be reknit, stronger than it ever was. Each “section” of the book offers a story of encounter with challenge to my own yearnings and habits of mind to hold them. A refrain invites you to pause, to ask yourself how the story landed in your body, what (if any) feeling arose in encounter with your own yearnings, habits of mind, received interpretations. Each section then concludes with a more interpretive chapter, offering the sense-making I have crafted for my own balance in this journey of devotion in conscious love.

In the end, you yourself will decide how you awaken to your own deep feeling (or not), how you see the containers in your life that hold you, and what sense you will make of your own yearnings and habits of mind. To return to the original image: a companionable way of being in the world takes jumping down from the truck and sustaining a bit of jarring awareness. All you need is a box-cutter, a knapsack, curiosity, and a willingness to enter into a journey where you take responsibility for your choiceless choices, you bring only what both nourishes and challenges you, with neither sacrificed for the other. You will find what your heart desires most deeply. You can learn to companion suffering within an abundance that cannot be shaken. No one need carry everything for themselves when a circle community holds a wholeness greater than its parts. Select and carry what you need. Be willing to share what you have in abundance. Your companions will find you.

1. Harding, Woman’s Mysteries, 128.

2. Kula and Loewenthal, Yearnings, 129–82.

3. Thankful nod to Barbara Brown Taylor, whose Leaving Church was an important text for me at that time.

4. Rollins, Fidelity of Betrayal, 13.

5. Washburn, Embodied Spirituality, 28–31.

6. Brosmer, Women Writing for (a) Change, 182.