Selah

I feel, so often, that my self is kind of a strange dichotomy. I am in seminary, currently on a path toward Christian ordination. The rhythms of the liturgical year are etched deeply in my soul, and right now it's Advent, the Christian pre-Christmas season of darkness, preparation and waiting. Yet the rhythms of the earth & sky are embedded in me just as deeply, and the Winter Solstice means even more to me spiritually than Christmas does. I'm pretty sure both of these attachments and longings point toward a mystical core deep inside of me that's been papered over and stepped on and plastered and bricked up by the rationalistic-logical world of patriarchy. But layer by layer, I'm unearthing her. Through connections I've made in seminary and outside of it, in spiritually-oriented women's circles, I've begun to embrace a femme epistemology. Femme is a kind of queer femininity, and epistemology means a way of knowing and learning. It means I am turning to

Everything is about to change. And it already has. It will be. It was. It is. The dawn you eagerly await to end the long, cold darkness is already full sun far off in the east. Yet even after light’s return spring is months away. The promised land waits so far from the sea of liberation— and Thirty long years pass after His birth before their Messiah will come. Stones of justice have been tossed in the lake but their ripples have not yet arrived, have not resolved into the kin-dom already present among us. While we wait, let us seek —in the darkness of the Now and Not Yet— for the treasures God has hidden there, the riches of the secret places only found by night. This is what is promised us: the wheel of life turns ever on and darkness is a path to joy. (Originally published as “Secret Places” in the UUCF Good News Journal, Winter ‘17)