"a God for the daughters..."

"pose like a trophy
on a shelf;

dream for everyone,
but not yourself;

i've heard of God the Son
and God the Father;
I'm still looking for a God
for the daughters..."

Two weeks ago, one of our daughters sent me the link to Little Big Town's video for, "The Daughters." I watched it and wept. It had me at hello. And I know I couldn't write this post until I could watch it without putting my head in my arms and falling apart - again.

I'm still not able to watch it without tears burning, and my chest hurting, but that will come...

I don't know why this touches me so deeply. Perhaps it is because the daughter that sent it to me knows me so well. And perhaps it is because I feel, deeply, the pang of sadness for lives lived - including most of my own - within a false narrative of what it means to be a "good girl."

I remember posture lessons in high school. Walking  across the room with a book on my head, under the stern coaching of our home economics teacher. She seemed to believe that a woman with perfect posture was somehow going to make a better wife. Sitting with your knees pressed together and your ankles crossed would make you more desirable - not to a boy - but to his parents. Lipstick made you kissable. Hair that was tidy and free of split ends would actually "say" something about you -- what? I still don't know.

I was a good girl. I loved my family. I loved my school, my church, my friends. But it wasn't enough. I didn't have a perfect nose. My teeth weren't straight. I put on weight between my junior and senior years and learned to starve myself to take it off. I went further and did more than I wanted - to be wanted.

This didn't stop when I rediscovered a God who I was taught loved me as his daughter. I still ached to be "enough." I still took on rejection as "my fault." And turned myself upside-down and inside out to pretend it was all okay - just so no one would think that the not-good-enough girl, hadn't become the not-good-enough woman, wife, mother. Mostly wife.

So what changed? Because something must have changed - right? I can now watch this video and feel the pain as distant. I no longer feel it as an indictment, but now accept it as a reminder of a long ago chapter in my life. A chapter I would title, "not enough, never enough."

I am not proud of the years of bending over backwards to make people like, admire, and want me. I am sad about them. I am sad for the example of frustrated eagerness-to-please that I modeled for my daughters and their friends. And it wasn't really about pleasing a man. More often it was about giving the impression, to other women, that I really wasn't "not enough." That I would be a wise, evolved, fun friend. When in reality, I was sad, insecure, and self-deprecating.

So, what changed? I am not really sure. Other than to identify a momentary shift, a turn of the aperture, a widening of the limiting lens through which I saw myself as a self-identifying female in a very male-dominated world. A world in which women were not kind to one another - in an effort to jockey for attention, admiration, and achievement based on comparisons with one another.

I was sitting in a hotel conference room with about 50 amazing women. In my mind's eye, they had "arrived." I was there because - well, to be honest, at that moment I wasn't really sure. Was I there to support them? Was I there because I needed to hear the message in order to clarify it later for them? Was I there to take notes? It couldn't possibly be, because I deserved to be in the company of these other - more intelligent, enlightened, interesting - women. They must know something more of God's love than I did. Because I felt like a loser and was on the verge of tears.

It was a session on the history of the women's rights movement. The presenter was one of the most motherly, kind-eyed, gentle, fiercely loving women I had ever been in the presence of. I so wanted to ask her a million questions. Not about the historic thought-leader and reformers she was telling us about, but about herself. How was it that she was white-haired, soft, round, bespectacled, and brilliantly kind? And at the same time, she was smart, funny, compassionate, and wise.

The women I had been hanging out with were constantly encouraging one another to invest in the right suit, pumps, hair color/style, presentation. And I had been part of it. Coaching my colleagues on how to present themselves, as much as their message. But this lovely creature at the front of the room, was the opposite of what I had been asked to encourage in my colleagues. I was confused.

During the morning break, I stayed back in the conference room while everyone else went to grab a snack, powder their noses, or stretch their legs. I just couldn't. I knew if I joined them I would either burst into tears, or stand in a corner comparing myself to each of them. So I sat in the back, looking over my notes. Copious notes.

About five minutes later, the presenter came back into the room. She came right over and sat down next to me. She didn't say anything at first, she just put her soft, warm hand on my forearm and smiled a sad, knowing smile. I felt her sisterhood. In that moment, I knew that she had her own struggle with how to be a woman - among women. It was as clear to me as the tears streaming down my face, that I was not alone.

I don't remember what she said to me -- it wasn't a lot. But when the session resumed, her message was all about the historic struggle to understand the "God of the daughters." She shared insight into the lives of women like Mathilda Jocelyn Gage, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and Mary Baker Eddy. Women who knew that knowing, and claiming, God as equally female, was more important than the fight for suffrage or a place at the table of commerce or legislation.

In her kindness, I had found my own path towards "being enough." I would - from that day forward - strive to be more kind, more collaborative, more supportive of those around me. I would seek not hard-won achievements, but softness of soul. I would work every day to model a gentle-heart, a fierce love, a sisterhood where one woman doesn't stand out alone, but one in which no woman wins the floor, until all women are heard.

I discovered that there was, in deed, a God for the daughters.

offered with Love,

Kate

"we are each other…"

"we are the daughter,
we are the sisters
who carry the water.
we are the mothers
we are the other,
we are each other..."

I don't know where this post is headed -- really. I just know that when one of my daughters sent me this video of Lissie's, "Daughters," I had to show up in front of the keyboard -- and let it rip.

So, here goes. For me, this is all about having each other's back. Not just as sisters, daughters, best friends, and neighbors, but as fellow citizens on a very small planet. And yes, you are right. There is nothing new about this message. Maya Angelou, Mother Teresa, Eleanor Roosevelt, Betty Friedan - most great women - have encouraged this one thing in all the women they hope with forward their legacies: Be kind to one another. You will not achieve anything on your own.

And yet, I see this terrible pattern repeating itself throughout history. Women hurting women. It breaks me. More than most, this is the one thing can make me feel like crawling under the covers for a few days, and never come out. To hear that a woman has thrown another woman under the bus. To hear women encouraging each other to unload a pile of hurt on another woman - behind her back. To hear the drone of gossip -- and trust me, there is no other sound like it -- from another table at the local coffeehouse.

Do men do this? I can't tell you -- I am not a man in a relationship with other men. I don't know what they do or don't do. This is about us. Girls, women, sisters, mothers, friends. We must stop it.

We are each other. That's not just hyperbole. Think about it. To criticize another woman is to fill your own heart and mind with a lesser sense of  womanhood.  This lowered consciousness of any woman, effects the way you feel about all women -- yourself included.

What you hold in thought is projected upon the screen of your own body, face, family, interaction with the world. If I feel disdain for someone -- even when I think it is perfectly justified and reasonable -- everything I look at through that lens is going to be colored by speculation and doubt.

So, today I am holding myself accountable. And yes, I am taking it one day at a time. I can easily attain this better version of me, in a calm, clear hour of prayer -- but can I sustain it for weeks, months, years? I hope so.  I have written a symbol on my hand - with a Sharpie - to remind me that, "Love never loses sight of loveliness," as Mary Baker Eddy promises. Even if I have to rewrite it daily, it will remind me to stop and take stock. To examine my own heart through the lens of a simple axiom:

"When you point a finger at someone,
three more are pointing back at you." 

Whenever I think I am thinking something about someone else, it's not really about them. I am the only one actually harboring those thoughts. I am the one populating my inner landscape with those thoughts. It has nothing to do with the other person. They are just the screen I am projecting my own thinking on. The same with the words I speak, or the negative reactions I allow myself to indulge in -- based on what I think is someone else's behavior.

I love that Mary Baker Eddy gives us this great filter in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures:

"In a world of sin and sensuality
hastening to a greater development of power,
it is wise earnestly consider
whether it is the human mind
or the divine Mind
which is influencing one." 

The human mind loves to reason. It loves to find reasons. It loves to compare, criticize, and contrast. It loves to sort and compartmentalize -- to file people, places, and things into hierarchies. The human mind wants -- desperately -- to feel important. It's opinions are its greatest currency. 

 The divine Mind on the other hand simply knows. It just knows what is true. It doesn't need to convince, debate, discuss, and pat itself on the back. What is true, is true about everyone. What is a lie, is a lie about no one.

This morning, I read this passage from, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts by Gabor Maté, and it awakened a new place of compassion in me:

People will jeopardize their lives,
for the sake of making the moment livable.
Nothing sways them from the habit -- not illness,
not the sacrifice of love and relationship,
not the loss of all earthly goods,
not the crushing of their dignity,
not the fear of dying.

The drive is that relentless."
 

I am standing up to this drive. I am going to do everything - in my own life - to not be driven by a need to just "make a moment livable." I will not say something that is not kind, just because it might make me look or feel better -- in that moment. I will not capitulate to pressure, just to make an awkward moment end more quickly. I will try to never -- ever again -- let a harsh word slip, or sarcasm spill, just because it will break the tension. 

 And I will be more patient with you, because I now have a clearer sense of how demanding, and insidious the need to just "make the moment livable" can be.

We are each other. And what I want for my daughters, I want for your daughters. What I want for myself, I want for you. If I want my daughters to have clean water, I must do as much to achieve clean water for a young girl in Burkino Faso, as I would for my own sweet girls. If I want my sister to be treated with respect and dignity by her colleagues, I must treat every woman I interact with, with that same respect and dignity. If I want my dearest friend to be heard when she speaks, I must listen more deeply to my neighbor when she speaks.

There is no you and me, us and them. We are one. We are each other.

offered with Love,

Kate

"My night with Mary..."

"Be it unto me,
according to Thy will..."

Our study of Scripture this week included the story of Queen Esther, a courageous spiritual matriarch, who, like Mary Baker Eddy...the subject of the following post...turned to God in her darkest hour, and found divine guidance. I love these women...Ruth, Esther, Deborah, Elisabeth, Mary, Mary, Mary...I find courage, and encouragement, in their journeys of grace.

These are women of substance, women of character, women who faced darkness head on, women who accepted their spiritual calling - with some version of Mary's "be it unto me according to Thy will." They are daughters, mothers, sisters, girls, widows, wives, who leapt from the edge of their own personal abyss, and into the depths of their divine purpose...with eyes fixed on God's face, and His hand at their back, waiting for the "Breath of Heaven" to lift them above a crashing sea - the ebbing tides of "what if" and "not me Lord...please, not me."

Each of these women, in her own right, is a story of Christmas, the birth of the Christ in the heart of a woman. Each of them, my hero, my mentor, my mother, midwife, my friend in the dark of night. This, repost from last Christmas, is just one of those stories, about one of those remarkable Marys...19th century spiritual thought-leader, Mary Baker Eddy. In so many ways, I owe her...and her predecessors...my life.


"On a Night in December, 1910..."

"I can't stand to fly.
I'm not that naive.
I'm just out to find
the better part of me.

I'm more than a bird.
I'm more than a plane.
More than some pretty face,
beside a train.
It's not easy to be, me..."

I weep each time I hear Five for Fighting's song, "Superman."  It makes me think of spiritual luminaries like Jesus, Mother Teresa, Moses, and yes, Mary Baker Eddy.  These were men and women who were never trying to "fly."  I believe that they were only trying to find the better part of themselves, and that once they'd discovered some significant spiritual milestones along the way, felt compelled...by compassion...to share those insights with humanity. 

One hundred years ago, tonight, Mary Baker Eddy quietly passed away at her home in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, with her dearest friends close by.  Her last written words, in her own hand were, "God is my life."  I think she discovered, not only the better part of herself, but the best.  A sense of "self" that understood exactly why God identified Himself to Moses as "I AM."

This is my story about how that night, 100 years ago, had an impact on my life, 87 years later. 

It was early December of 1997.  My husband, daughters, and I were living in the carriage house, on the property of Mary Baker Eddy's Chestnut Hill home.  At the time, I was immersed in projects related to the life and contributions of this extraordinary thought leader.  To be surrounded by the contextual setting of her life was a remarkable gift of grace.

In exchange for our housing, our we made daily security check's on what our daughter called, "the big house," Mary Baker Eddy's former home.  It is a large stone mansion set on a hill in a nearby suburb of Boston. And at regular intervals during the day, we would walk through the house to make sure that pipes had not burst, doors were secure, and the proper lights were on/off. 

That December night I was feeling overwhelmed by our circumstances.  I was facing down some pretty aggressive demons and was feeling quite alone.  At midnight, I offered to make the walk up the long drive to the "big house" and do the security check myself. 

It was a bone chilling night.  The kind of cold that didn't slowly creep through layers of clothing, but penetrated immediately like a steely claw that wouldn't let go.  The night sky was a star-peppered navy velvet, and a full moon rose over the slate roof of the mansion like the face of a benevolent luminary.   But all I felt was the weight of our plight.  Health concerns, financial uncertainty, looming homelessness...seemed to have actual mass that night, as they sat heavily on my heart.

I walked into the house by way of the back door, large flaslight in hand, and made my way through the arches and hallways of the first floor, before ascending the flight of stairs leading to the landing just outside of Eddy's former bedroom.  

[It's important to note here, for readers who are not familiar with this property, that her home had been kept intact ...each room appointed and furnished exactly as it had been the night she passed...for 87 years.  It served as a museum of sorts.  Tours were offered on which visitors could see exactly as Eddy and her household had lived at the turn of the century.] 

As I stood on the landing, it was not lost on me (steeped as I had been in the history of her life) that it was close to the anniversary of her passing.  I thought about that night.  How her household workers had supported her, but how this must have been a very private part of her spiritual journey...a threshold that she alone could cross.

I felt that way myself that night.  I was facing my darkest fears.  Being without housing as a wife and mother...with no seeming resources at hand to secure a home for my family...was my worst nightmare.  And it was a dark corridor that loomed just beyond the dawning of the New Year.  With one child in grade school, and infant twins, I couldn't imagine how we would find our way out of the situation without divine intervention. 

My husband was doing everything he could, but options seemed non-existent, and our prospects for housing, bleak.  Besides that, we were in the middle of the early stages of adopting our twins and we needed to be in a home for the adoption agency to sign off on our compliance to state requirements and for the judge to finalize us as our daughters' permanent family.

Standing on the landing, just outside of Eddy's bedroom door.  I longed to have her tell me what to do...or at least how to pray about such a hopeless situation.  Then it occurred to me that she had faced many dark nights in that room.  I wanted to know what it felt like to be her.  What did she surround herself with? 

I stepped over the satin rope that kept visitors just outside the threshold of the room during tours, and sat on the floor right next to the head of her bed.  I turned off the flashlight,  closed my eyes for a few moments, and prayed to really see what she saw. 

When I opened my eyes, there were three things that immediately caught my attention. 

When Eddy first moved into that house she was disappointed with it size and opulence. So she'd had her quarters reconfigured so that she had a small bedroom and an adjoining office. She'd also had a skylight put in above the landing just outside her bedroom door, which let in natural light.  That night in the darkness of winter, the moonlight that poured through the skylight, and filtered into her bedroom through the open door, was as "soft as a moonbeam mantling the earth" and it fell on the other two images that had immediately caught my attention.

One was a portrait of Jesus.  Simply framed, a bit to the right, and just above eye-level on the wall directly in front of her as sat in her bed.  This made me cry.  To be reminded of the savior who as she herself said was, "waiting and watching in voiceless agony" during his night of "gloom and glory" in the garden of Gethsemane,  humbled me greatly.  I could see how his portrait served to galvanize her courage.

The other image was an already familiar etching of Daniel in the lions den.  In this depiction, Daniel has his back to the lions, his hand are gently folded behind him, and he has his face upturned towards the light that is pouring through a small barred window.  He is facing the light...not the lions.  He is peaceful, not defensive.  He is focused and calm, not distracted and distressed.  Its message was clear to me.

This piece was also simply framed and hung almost at eye-level on the same wall as Jesus' portrait, just opposite her headboard.  The moonlight fell on these two images with such gentleness that I felt as if they had been kept exactly as they had been, for all those years, just so I could sit with them that night and be comforted, encouraged, and healed.

I will never forget that night sitting on the floor next to her bed.  It was as if I'd been given a holy land tour of the garden of Gethsemane and nothing had changed.  It was almost as if, Jesus' tears had never dried that night, and still lay in salty pools on the rocks.  As if I could hear the song of the those first century nightingales, the cooing pair of doves that had nestled beside him as he prayed, and the scent of jasmine that perfumed the velvety air while his disciples slept. 

But my holy land was a worn carpet, a narrow bed, a moonbeam, the face of the Savior, the posture of a peacemaker...and the prayers of a woman.

It seems like such a small part of this story to say that during those next months of ceaseless prayer, we were shown...step-by-step...exactly what we needed to do to continue the work we loved, and find just the right home for our family. 

The larger story for me is about a woman...who was just that, a woman.  A woman who never sought to be great..only good.  Who never sought fame or fortune, but to understand, for herself, that the better part of "me" is, the "I AM." 

I believe, that when she wrote, "God is my life," two days before her passing, on December 1st, she did just that.

I don't remember the cold as I walked back from "the big house" to our cottage that night.  I only remember the moon, the stars, and the simple room where a woman prayed one December night in 1910.

Thank you for your courage, and your example...
Kate
Kate Robertson, CS

If you would like to read the comments on the original posting, click on this link, "One day in December, 1910," and scroll down to the bottom of the page.

"I can hear a distant singing..."

"I've been feeling kind of restless.
I"ve been feeling out of place.
I can hear a distant singing,
a song that I can't write,
And it echoes of what
I'm always trying to say...

There's a feeling I can't capture.
Its always just a prayer away...

And I cannot wait to be going home..."

Mmmm...Sara Groves' "Going Home" conveys the warmth of finding yourself snuggled into the sofa, wrapped in quilts, after Thanksgiving dinner.  You are watching Little Women...the Winona Ryder/Susan Sarandon version...while your mom strokes your hair, and you sink deeper and deeper into the comfort of her soft body.

I know this feeling.  It is the feeling of returning to your own "ground zero" for recalibration.  It's like plugging yourself into a giant cosmic wall socket for recharging.  It is a spiritual act, and it is deeply grounding.

And as much as it may seem like we are going backwards towards our childhood, in a time long past, it is really a deeper, fuller, more-alive-with-promise exploration of what is inherently changeless and true...our innocence. 

A reader recently wrote and asked me to write something about purity.  She had searched the index to this blog, and couldn't find a post that addressed this topic.  I was stunned.  Over 400 posts and not one had been tagged "purity." 

This is shocking to me, because "purity" is a spiritual concept that I work with almost hourly.  Purity is the allness of good, the fullness of innocence, the power of God asserting itself. 

Purity is not the absence of infection, violation, imposition, mistake, or bad choices.  Purity is not passive.  It is not something that can be lost, taken, or destroyed.  Purity is not vulnerable.  It is the self-assertion of grace, the insistence of hope, the radiance of divinity, the affluent coursing of Love's universal "I AM" springing from an inner core so deep, that it cannot be touched by darkness, doubt, or fear.

Another friend shared this quote from Woman, Food, and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Anything by Geneen Roth, the other day:

"…there is a natural inclination to want to keep exploring, keep discovering, keep touching the place that has never known suffering-which is, after all, the function of any spiritual practice."

This innate hunger to revisit the "place that has never known suffering," is the power of purity voicing itself to human consciousness.  It calls to us from a deep knowing, a persistent certainty that we are, and always have been,  good, pure, worthy, capable, untouched, and whole. 

This, for me, is the place of my Mother-God's soft lap.  It is the longing for this "place" that calls me...deeper and deeper towards its core.  It is this space of divine fullness and innocence that is inviolate and unsullied.  It is the purest light drawing us to itself like a leaf towards the sun.  It is home.

She wanders the
street...
looking nowhere
and yet
searching for
something,
her eyes
are lowered,
heart shattered,
wings broken,
hope unraveled...
where is
kindness,
is there a return
to innocence for
the child who
is no longer...a child?
Is there a
mother's lap to
fall asleep, and
rest her
head and
her dreams in...
without
fear?
Go deep,
go deep...
this longing to
be
a child again,
is
calling you
to Her
arms...
listen
it is
within
you...
singing.

Thank you for the prompting, Liz...with Love, 
Kate
Kate Robertson, CS

Here are two more, profoundly beautiful quotes, from Woman, Food, and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Anything by Geneen Roth, that were shared with me:

“The third journey—the Journey in God—is the same in both the Sufi tradition and the path-of-food version: In this journey, you end the search for more and better. You no longer live as if this life is a dress rehearsal for the next. Authenticity, not trying to be good, begins to infuse your actions. Through practices like the Eating Guidelines, meditation and inquiry, you slowly realize that you are already whole and that there is no test to pass, no race to finish; even pain becomes another doorway, another chance to recognize where love appears to be absent.” (200)

“…real holiness is not in what you achieve…if you are willing to refrain from dieting and needing an instant solution, and if you want to use your relationship with food as the unexpected path, you will discover that God has been here all along. In the sorrow of every ending, in the rapture of every beginning. In the noise and in the stillness, in the upheavals and in the rafts of peace. In each moment of kindness you lavish upon your breaking heart or the size of your thighs, with each breath you take—God has been here. She is you.” (201)