A Companionable Way. Lisa M. Hess
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.
Grounding in Exile
A companionable way of being was seeded in my life when I, a theological professor and preacher’s wife, was manhandled at an after-church coffee hour. I marvel at this today, how significantly this brief, painful event instigated so much that I now cherish in my life. I have made a lot of lemonade with this lemon. Propelled away from the pain, I landed in a nonlinear, spiral path of awakening, self-discovery, and forgiveness. I came to know the gifts that find you in exile, if you learn how to look for them. Even when the pain of departure overwhelms everything you thought you knew, wondrous light, love, and levity can await you too.
The story can be told in a sentence and a poem. A longtime class clown and devout elder of my husband’s church, “Jim,” ass-slapped me twice at coffee hour.
“We have pound-cake to tempt you,”
he said to her in the Ann Taylor suit.
“Vanilla for this side,” slapping her ass.
“Chocolate for that one.” Ass-slapped again.
He looked around the church for others
to join the fun. Only a young girl across
the table stared back at him. She vanished
in place, there but not there. A hole where
a heart had been. The other shell of a woman?
She walked out alone. Her husband, the pastor,
was everywhere, so nowhere. Wounded too,
though absent. Pain for the journey had come.
These lines—three stanzas about two jarring slaps—arose years ago as poetic truth-telling for me, struggling to know how to respond gracefully, strategically, and faithfully to an embarrassing violation of my own bodyspace in the environment of my husband’s job, part of our economic livelihood and perceived