Welcome to the Untangling

Pausing to Reflect and Reintroduce Myself

I am currently enjoying a digital sabbath in which I am offline not checking email, social media or anything related to Substack. This is one of a few posts that will appear while I’m relishing in sabbath time.

We knew we would be moving again this summer. The Army wouldn’t allow us to stay in Europe any longer. We would have to go home and this fact alone made me very reflective. Move always do this tome. What do I hope? What have I learned here? What do I dare to dream for the future? What does it even mean to go home? All of these big questions have inspired me to take a moment to reintroduce my self and my hopes for this space after nearly two years of being here together. If you are just arriving here, it is a joy to find you here. I hope you’ll stick around and wander through this untangling together.

When you signed up, you may have already read an introduction about me where you may have seen that really old photo of me. Here is a more recent photo of me enjoying my last few days in Germany at a biergarten. Prost! I thought it might be nice to tighten the knot a bit and reintroduce myself. So here goes.

🏡 We are moving from Germany to Alaska where my husband will be in one of his last few jobs before retiring from the United States Army. We’re proud of his service and overwhelmed by all of the changes that are to come in the next few years.

🕯️I’m a spiritual director and currently see all of my clients over the magic of Zoom. My hope in this work to help with the untangling because life is so full of snarls and we all need to find more holiness. More on that below.

💒 I started this sacred practice of listening as a pastor in the United Church of Christ where what I loved most was always those big conversations where I did more listening than talking. I asked more questions than I ever answered and had no idea that this would lead to spiritual direction.

💕I have two little girls, who are almost 6 and 7, who are beyond excited to be closer to family and be able to attend after school activities in their native language.

✍️Between school drop off and pick up for my girls, I’ve been writhing a book. I am realizing the dream of publishing with Tehom Center Publishing who have been amazingly supportive. (If you’re in ministry and have always dreamed of writing a book like me, check out this amazing opportunity.) I recently shared a shitty first draft and hope to offer a few more peeks into this writing project here on Substack.

🍳 I love to cook and follow food blogs a bit more avidly than I read scripture. The last fantastic thing that I made was this delicious white bean soup. It feels way too hot for that soup now. I’m eager to try this blueberry salad when I finally have a kitchen again that feels like a better idea for hot days.

📚I love to read and am always reading something for my spirit and a bit of fiction. My last directee before my digital sabbath confessed she didn’t want to share the title of what she was actually reading. I’m kinda in the same camp right now. In times like these, we all need one or two sources of joy.

Photo by Beth Macdonald on Unsplash

I am curious about what connects people like you and me with the holy. Wendell Berry quotes William Blake in one essay, cherishing this idea that "everything that lives is holy." It’s an immense possibility to hold when life feels snarled and knotted. Berry continues, asserting his faith that “we are holy creatures living among other holy creatures in a world that is holy. Some people know this, and some do not. Nobody, of course, knows it all the time.”

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.

The poet William Stafford pulls at this thread in his poem. I love poetry and come back to it again and again in my own quest for holiness. Poetry is one of my favorite teachers. We don’t always know where it will lead but we dare to follow it and even try to describe what is so hard to see. We try to get ahold of it and understand why it shimmers. It’s not always apparent but we lean into each other hoping to catch a glimpse of it.

It’s what I hope we have been doing here in Prayer Threads over the past two years and even more so into the future. I hope this is a place where we will continue to ask questions like:

• What does it even mean to pray and why bother?

• Where does curiosity lead?

• How do we navigate the unknown?

• Where do we find hope?

I hope that you’ll add to these questions, bringing your own tangled mess of life into this conversation and sharing your story. Together, as the poet suggests, we will follow the threads. We’ll wonder about what it means to find holiness in the everyday ordinary of life.

You’ll find that I often write about the things my directees share because they are wise and wonderful. There are hints of their struggles in the words that I share here and here as their questions and thoughts continue to live in me. As their spiritual director, I help them find that holiness again. It’s already there. My task is to help them remember by pulling at the knots in every story and hope.

I call it Holy Threads because I believe that every one of those threads is holy, however tangled and messy life might feel. We don't always see it. We might need help but everyone of those strands has some wonder shimmering within it.

I don't expect anyone and everyone that reads this newsletter to become one of my directees. That wasn’t my intention when I started it. Instead, I was curious to discover what this platform might yield. (I have some questions I didn’t have about the platform then now.) How else might we explore what’s holy together? What words help us and what practices might guide us?

I’ve written about journaling and singing and I’m eager to explore what else might connect anyone of us in this very uncertain time in history with the holy. I’m not talented with needle crafts. Threads twist and snarl around my fingers when I tried to teach my daughter and myself to crochet recently. It was a complete mess that left us both frustrated. And though I was able to unravel our so-called handiwork, it is the threads of stories that I am more eager to follow. Where does this story begin? What does it inspire in your future? How are you telling that story now? Do you even know that you are carrying that thread? Or is it something so holy you couldn’t quite see it?

I want to pull at those threads through spiritual practice and the tangled mess of trying to find meaning and purpose in this moment of time. It feels hard to do in a newsletter. It feels like it unfurls better in those gentle questions of conversation through deep listening and shared wonder. Two years after starting this Substack, I’m still trying to figure out how to do that.

I’m so glad you’re here so that we might share in the sheer delight and wonder of finding holiness in the strands of story entangled in our lives.