A Companionable Way. Lisa M. Hess
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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