True Confessions of a Chaplain

“Thank you so much for what you do,” said the massage therapist as they worked a knot out of my shoulder. This was a surprise from the reaction I usually get from strangers—the person who cuts my hair, the Lyft driver, the congregant who’s just listened to my sermon. Often it’s a generic, “OOOoohh!” and a pregnant pause as they look expectantly for me to explain exactly what a hospital chaplain is. There’s the occasional, “That’s like a priest, right?” But the ten second pitch I give lying on someone’s table is different from the actual work that I do. If you’ve had spiritual care in a hospital, if someone you love has gotten a new organ, or been close to death, or has died, or has wanted a blessing, then maybe you know what this is, you know what I do, and you know what chaplaincy can do. Most of the time it’s a mystery. I’ve been wanting to demystify it for a while.

I’m not your pastor

While it’s true that a chaplain can also be and work as an ordained minister, a priest, a rabbi, imam, or a pastor, I’m not, and many of us don’t. So the expectations you’d have of a pastor, we aren’t necessarily interested in filling: we’re not going to tell you if you’re going to hell or not. (I never expected this from my pastor, and still don’t but it comes up more than you’d think. The theological diversity of the question of hell notwithstanding, it’s not our job to pass judgement, despite how much death we see.) We’re not going to rescue the soul of a dying person from whatever happens after you die. We’re able to do things like listen to you, ask you hard questions, and make insightful observations, but our job is not to posit that your theology match our own. Most of the time, we might be companioning outside our tradition, which leads me to

Not all of us are christian

Despite the word chaplain coming from the Christian tradition, not every chaplain you meet in every place (hospital or otherwise) is a Christian. Many of us are not. Many of us are also trained to provide care outside our tradition. We can create ritual and officiate sacrament with you that will offer you the opportunity to make meaning out of a profound threshold moment of your life. You can receive meaningful support as a Christian from a chaplain who is Muslim, and you can receive meaningful support as a Jewish person from a chaplain who is Unaffiliated. While we care about the box you check that identifies your religious tradition, it isn’t a measurement we use to discern what you need. We assess with you what you need; what’s important to us is what you’re going through, and how we can come alongside you in it. What’s important to us is your humanity and your spirituality, your suffering and your need, and how we can help you meet it.

I don’t care if you’re saved

This one is my favorite. Countless chaplain colleagues tell me they have fielded questions from retired pastors (usually men) asking, “How many people have you saved?” from their bed. The point of our presence and our work is not to “save” you from anyone or anything. As I wrote earlier, I’m only interested in what you believe about life and death, or about anything, insofar as it serves you. The moment that your own faith begins to create suffering for you, I get deeply curious about why and how, and what we can do to make senses of it. I am not going to use your loved one’s death as an excuse to inquire about your salvation, nor am I going to use a hospital wedding or baptism as an opportunity to advance an isolating, heteronormative view of personhood or relationship. Frankly, if you’d rather talk to me about who I’ve saved, than about how you feel lying in your hospital bed, then I’m likely to think that there’s something you’re not able to touch about your own illness, fear, or suffering. I know you’re suffering.

if you feel bad with me, it’s probably on the way to feeling better

I remember leaving a room wherein a patient was crying. A social worker, who was no fan of mine, said to no one, but loud enough for everyone to hear, “When I left her, she was fine.” This person didn’t know that I’d done my job because she couldn’t understand the value of a spiritual care provider. It’s true, that sometimes the work of a chaplain means that you have a person to be with you who is unafraid of exploring hard feelings: we’re not afraid of your tears, we don’t try to avoid your suffering, and so far as you’re not being abusive or offensive, we can even tolerate your anger. The job of the chaplain isn’t, always, to make you feel better, or at least, I don’t interpret my job that way. My job is to be with you in the reality of life on its own terms. You were driving under the influence and caused an accident that cost someone their life? Okay, I’m not going to judge you, and I’m not going to tell you it’s going to be okay. Instead, I’ll be with you, and I’ll let whatever you’re feeling about it come up, and we’ll hold it together. Your spouse is dying? That sucks, and if you’re not ready to talk about it, okay. But if your spouse wants to talk about it, I’m going to talk about it with her, and then I’m going to let you have your own process around it. Chaplains are people who hold disparate things at the same time a lot. We get good at staying present with feelings and circumstances that most others don’t want to feel. Anyone who has let themself feel painful feelings as a part of healing will tell you the only way out is through.

we are clinicians who train in spiritual and emotional care

It takes more than just slapping the name “chaplain” on the chest of a minister to make someone who’s capable and qualified for this work. Chaplains go through rigorous training, have advanced degrees in religious study and pastoral care, use assessment models, write and present research projects regarding ways in which spiritual care impacts health care across disciplines, we serve on boards and committees that enhance our community as medical professionals, and we are certified by any one of several professional bodies in the United States. We’re not (just) good-hearted folks who walk in off the street wanting to do good. We are members of clinical care teams, and our care benefits patients, staff, and families, not just those of whom are religious. We know because we’ve done the research to prove it.

We do more than just pray

I’ve been introduced before as “someone who has come to pray with you,” and while that’s not untrue on its face, it’s a fraction of the work I’m trained to do or able to do. I am trained to hold individual and community space for people who are grieving, celebrating, or contemplating; I am trained to assess someone’s spiritual suffering, which (I hope this is clear by now) is often larger than any one faith or wisdom tradition); I am trained to engage interventions that will allow them to touch and explore that suffering, and in so doing, to engage in metabolizing it, to discover and land in a new place, and to communicate that clearly to themselves or others when necessary; I am trained to use various models of development, personality, and group theory to understand why patients and families behave the way they do in extraordinary health care circumstances, and to help them ground in the midst of this; I am trained to run toward the suffering of others, and not try to fix it. I am trained to tolerate some of the most beautiful and most painful realities of the human experience, and not to look away. I’m happy to pray with you if that’s what you want, and it will bring you some peace. We can also talk about the playoffs. We don’t have to talk at all. If you want, you can tell me that thing you said to your sister that you wish you could take back now. I won’t tell you she deserved it, and I won’t tell you not to feel guilty. I’ll just be with you.

You can be yourself with me

Because I’m trained to provide spiritual care across traditions, and because I’m not interested in advancing any religious or theological outcome, you can be whoever you are. My job is to love you by being with you, listening to you, and reflecting as clearly back to you as I’m capable of. My job is not to want to make you be different than you are. Yes, this is easier some days than others: I don’t like it when men my father’s age make sexist jokes or when they pay me too much attention. (Pls don’t worry, if I ever felt unsafe, I would set a quick boundary.) But this isn’t really for those men; this is for the trans patient who’s braced against having their dead name used, or for the young adult with religious trauma who dares me to tell her anything even a little like what the church told her. I’m sorry about the places and the ways you’ve been harmed, and the people who hurt you. I’m sorry you feel so vulnerable and at the mercy of such a massive, impersonal system. I see you. I’m here with you.

I hope this will be an ongoing list. Maybe, as time goes, as the work goes, we’ll see what other truths I want to make sure get known. For now, I hope I don’t see you in my halls or on my consult list. But if I do, I promise to take good care of you, if you’ll let me.

workday

Yesterday I met a patient named Maribelle* who had to terminate her pregnancy; or rather, her pregnancy had ended. She miscarried, but she had to take a pill, mifepristone, I assume, to help her complete the miscarriage. She was the same age as me, which I only learned after the visit, and which stunned me, because her demeanor was that of a young woman. I was sure she was under 30, but no, she was well into middle age. She wore a bulky sweater, a puffy vest, and a hat and leggings. We did not speak the same language, and we used an interpreter to help us communicate. The interpreter was on the ball, she conveyed tone, and was witty and sensitive. I noticed Maribelle was wearing a necklace with a medallion of the Virgin Mary on it hanging below her sternum. She was talking about her faith, and I commented on the necklace. Is that the Virgin on your necklace?

“I’m not sure, I just put this on this morning because I thought it was cute,” she remarked, looking at the necklace, as if seeing it for the first time.

It is cute, I said, I just wondered if you felt like you needed Mary close to you today.

She made a face, and answered, “I only need God, I don’t worship Mary.”

I’ve heard this before. The first time was in my own family: Jesus is the son of God, and Mary is some pregnant teen who was nothing special. Catholics worship Mary, my mother whispered to me, judgment gathering in the corners of her mouth, but you just remember you worship Jesus. I’m skeptical about why so many Christians are so quick to dismiss Mary, to downplay her power, her capacity, her import. But I recognize it as a signal of various Protestant and Evangelical theologies.

I understand, I replied to Maribelle. I also think that Mary is a nice model, I said to her.

The interpreter repeated me in Yvonne’s language, and they two spoke to each other for a moment. Yvonne made another face, this one more open and curious than the last, as if she’d heard something that she hadn’t considered, but was going to. The interpreter spoke to me. “I said what you said, Mary is a nice model, and she said ‘what is Mary a model of?’ and I said, ‘she's the mother of Christ.’”

Exactly. It’s no accident to take the mother of Jesus with you into the hospital on the day that you learn your unborn baby is no longer alive. This mother knows better than anyone else about the death of a child.

These kinds of visits are never easy, and they’re never the same. Sometimes I expect that I know how someone is going to respond or feel when they learn their body has miscarried—which is a poor term to describe what really happens, which is that their body has realized that something is unhealthy, off, or unsafe with the pregnancy, and has ended it for the safety of everyone involved. It’s not a flaw or a failing; it’s a strategy our bodies have evolved to keep us alive. But language is often coarse when it comes to these kinds of things, so “miscarriage” is the best we have so far. I’ve met folx who are grateful that they miscarried, because they didn’t want to be pregnant, and folx who have spent tens of thousands trying to conceive and this is the second, or third, or fourth time that this has happened. I’ve met folx who are content to let it go down however it will, and folx who want to move heaven an earth if it means saving the almost-life growing inside them.

Maribelle was… surrendered? She kept saying that God would have his way, that this was God’s will. I’m not sure if I believe a statement like that on the face of it, that what God wants is for someone who is carrying a pregnancy and has chosen this, to lose it. I believe that God wants us to have lives that are sustainable and rich and full of love for ourselves and others, as reflections of God. I believe that God gives us the capacity to make choices that are in keeping with sustainability and community. I believe that is with us, loving us and accepting us, in all moments of our lives. But what I believe is of no consequence in this moment; in this moment, my work is to come alongside Maribelle, and if she believes this is God’s will, I try to hold that, and make space for any feelings she has to come up.

When we are done, I invite a nurse back into the room, and I walk slowly toward the elevators, breathing and thinking about where we are. Massachusetts. She lives here. No one on the L&D team is afraid to prescribe her mifepristone, to help her body do what it is already doing, that is, ending a pregnancy that would have developed into a child with illness and developmental defect. The baby’s heartbeat stopped because her body knew what was viable and what was not. The midwives and the nurses were all grateful to be collaborating on care with this woman. She lives here. She doesn’t have to wrestle with a prescriber from a different state who doesn’t speak her language. She doesn't have to manage her abortion at home without any family or friends to support her. The social worker, Miranda, is able to get her a ride back to the hospital for the rest of the procedure, and home again. She’s able to be monitored in a hospital with providers who aren’t afraid to touch her or care for her, for fear they’ll be prosecuted. Even as she is far away from home, sad, and scared, and trying to accept reality on its own terms, she is more resourced than many women in this country right now. 

There are various women that I call on when I walk the halls caring for birthing people, people experiencing fertility issues, people grieving loss. I call on Julian, who reminds me of Divine presence in loss and suffering. I call on Margaret , who would not allow her children to be taken back into slavery, and would still their heartbeat by her own hand before she would give them to the slow death of the master. I call on those who protect the women laboring, the women struggling to stay alive, the women who are scared to be themselves, the women who are scared to bring new life into this world. I call on Mary, who spoke prophecy over the incubating body of her child when she visited her friend.

The fire of my devotion to the Reproductive Justice movement still burns as brightly as it ever did. It might burn a bit less cleanly, based on how much harder it has become for reproducing people to have the privacy, access, and opportunity they need to make the good and right choices for themselves and their families. I get fewer opportunities than I might have hoped for to speak plainly with people about choosing to be a parent, choosing how and when and on what terms, and discerning how their faith supports them. But there are some days when I feel grateful for the facets of my ministry: the fact that I work in a state that has protected abortion as medical care; the fact that I work in a hospital that has resources for patients who don’t speak English; the fact that when I come alongside these patients, they are not being met by a faith leader who will judge them. They are only met by someone who will show them love, who will support them, and who will be present however they need.

*None of the names you read when I write about my work are real ones. Just FYI.

Litany of Remembrance

originally drafted by the author for the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit Service of Remembrance, Massachusetts General Hospital, Saturday, October 5, 2024. On the occasion of Perinatal and Infant Loss week.

For each life that was planned and whose conception was ordered,  

We remember.  

For each life that has come into this world a surprise,  

We remember.  

For each infant whose lungs were underdeveloped and who was unable to breathe,  

We remember.  

For each infant whose brain or heart could not help them live the life we dreamed about,  

We remember.  

For each mizuko, each water baby who was not yet fully grown before they died,  

We remember.   

For each birthing parent whose body ached with milk they could not give,  

We remember.  

For each secondary parent who felt utterly helpless to change things, 

We remember.  

For each parent held captive who could not get free from addiction to be with their infant,  

We remember.  

For each grandparent who saw their own child, beset on all sides by grief and confusion, helpless to fix or change,  

We remember. 

For each parent tangled in the razor-sharp web of injustice who could not be with you before you died,   

We remember.     

For each parent who lost their life trying to bring life into the world,  

We remember.  

For each doctor, nurse, and provider who worked tirelessly for healing and restoration, 

We remember. 

For each sibling who never got to share their kiddo the lessons they learned and the delights they discovered, 

We remember.  

For each Godparent, aunt, uncle, cousin, or loved one who cannot shower or spoil their little one, 

We remember. 

For each person whose partnership dissolved and buckled under the weight of the loss of their child,  

We remember.  

For each parent who chooses to put on a happy face and pretend they’re okay when they’re not okay,  

We remember.  

For each parent who allows their grief to surge and rage like a storm-tossed ocean,  

We remember.  

For each loved one and friend who came alongside us when we thought we were alone

 We remember.

For each person who made us feel a member of community in our grief,

 We remember.

For each salty tear that begins to water the seed of our gratitude and our love,  

We remember.  

 Parent of every heart and every loss, we remember our losses today. We remember every sob, tear, and sigh. We remember the providers who did everything they could, even though it couldn’t give us back our child. We remember those who cried with us as we said goodbye. Be present with us in our reflection and our grief. May we be accompanied in love by the memories of our Beloved Babes. May we feel comforted by our connection to one another.  Amen 

one step at a time

I’m preparing for a major event in my ministry called an ecclesiastical council. My denomination holds these for people they’ve been accompanying as we discern ordained ministry. It is one of the final steps before someone is able to be an ordained minister in the denomination. The truth is, I’ve been preparing for this for years. The first EC I attended was in my second year of div school. I was feeling hopeful about ordination as a part of my path, and many of the advisors in my life were suggesting I attend one. It meant so much to me that my first EC was for a Black woman, Rev. Karlene Griffiths Sekou. She was so poised and thoughtful and insightful and creative, and her intellect blew me away. While I was so encouraged to see a Black woman in my denomination absolutely rocking it, I was also intimidated by her wisdom. Was there any way I could learn as much as she knows? Could I speak with such rootedness and determination about my faith? Could I lead with such passion and vision? Who I must become to succeed as a minister of Christ?

Karlene’s amazingness notwithstanding, the question of who I have to be in order to serve as an ordained minister of the Church has been a loaded question for me. I carry around a fair amount of baggage that for years I was sure would inhibit my ability to be present or speak meaningfully with others. I have struggled with feeling like I’m not enough: The disappointments and pain of my family has created a tender spot that often causes me to doubt if my faith is genuine. Most of the things I was taught were indicative of a meaningful life as a follower of Christ, I no longer believe in. Was my embedded theology the gatekeeper that I believed it to be for so long, or was it just a holdover from people who were doing their best, that I can shed and leave behind?

If, during an EC, the community votes to approve you, then you are able to seek a call to ministry, and upon receiving one, you are ordained in a ritual service full of joy and seriousness and Spirit. There’s something to be said for the idea that ordination is a bigger party than a “board” meeting where you share your theology, ethics, and ministry experience with your community, and then a bunch of delegates vote as to whether they can affirm your call to ordained ministry. Ordination has all the ritual, all the pomp, all the sacredness and Presence, and it has gifts! But somehow, this feels like the moment with the higher stakes for me.

I’m thinking about all the councils I witnessed. All of them have been online, because COVID, but all of them have also been exciting and enlightening and inspiring. I was at Rev. Noah Brewer-Wallin’s I remember standing at the card in my kitchen and trying to make tea while we cheered them on. I was at Rev. Lexi Boudreaux’s delighting in her joy. Just recently I was sitting at my dining table squealing and cheering at Rev. Jasmine Buchanan’s. It has consistently been a beautiful and energizing experience for me to witness the way in which these people have claimed their faith so beautifully. The love of Christ has been a liberator, not a rule-maker, and it has inspired them to use their gifts in service and pursuit of love, community, and justice.The process of discerning ordination in my denomination has invited me to wrestle with what I think ministry is writ-large, and what my ministry looks like in this world. These are words I would never have used to describe my work ten years ago, and they still make me a little itchy in some places. Discernment has also been an invitation to listen to Spirit and to be attentive to Her nudges, silences, and sensations. I’m grateful for the path that I’ve been on, and though I’ve often been impatient and frustrated, there’s also a part of me that’s grateful that it’s taken the time that it has. It’s hard for me to imagine being the version of myself that I am right now any sooner than this. I know the reality is that Spirit is going to continue to work in me, that this council is a major moment, and it’s also a new beginning, a threshold crossing for me. 

I also know that I’ll still have to pay rent, and watch my sugar intake, and try not to roll my eyes at my partner. I know that my life doesn’t suddenly become larger, more magical, or easier than it is today. Racism will still exist; Roe was still overturned; police will still kill Black folks for existing; and the earth will continue to groan under the weight of corporate toxicity.

More than an expansion into, this threshold feels like I am laying something down, or laying myself down somehow. Something in me is prostrating or surrendering, like my desires and hopes and goals are important and meaningful to me, but maybe if I’m lucky, I might be holding them a little less tightly. I was hoping to achieve for so long, to cross finish lines and earn accolades and succeed. Even now, I don’t deny that there is privilege in these things: there are doors that unlock or open, tables that grow an extra seat, for achievement and success. But I’m grateful that I’m thinking less about what looks good on paper and more about what allows me to meet the work I’ve been put here to do. There is a way of being and living and serving that I am invited to live into, that I want to spread into, like water or warm oil: soft and spacious, not rigid or “upright.” Right now I’m feeling loosed of the expectation to be a thing. Right now, I don’t have to perform a version of myself in order to qualify, be of service, be of use to God. The fear I felt of who I must be in order to serve is melting. It is such a relief.

My deep hope is that the community I’m sharing my journey and ministry with agree with me, and with God, that my call is genuine and true, and that they can affirm me as an ambassador and servant of our denomination. Nothing about this is accidental or circumstantial, I feel in alignment, and I hope that my community agrees. But whatever the outcome, I feel hopeful about the work of Spirit in my life.

An Open Letter to my Niece on the Anniversary of Dobbs v. Jackson

When I began this letter, you were about to turn six, I think, and will be entering the first grade soon. It’s astonishing to think that you, an exuberant, delightful, opinionated, and joyous little person will be old enough to fall in love, to feel arousal, to desire intimacy with other people. Maybe these things are true about you know—it’s a story that grownups tell ourselves that feelings like this only come with adulthood. It helps us make sense of being human, which is a strange, marvelous, difficult experience. It’s not fair that it minimizes your experience, but you’ll find as you grow that grownups are seldom interested in what is fair, despite what we say.

I try to imagine you as a teenager: I am hoping that you don’t feel an overwhelming sense of pressure to perform, to be the best, to do and live in ways that make your parents happy. I know your Uncle grew up this way and I think your father did too, under the burden of our parents’ hopes, fears, and demands. I did too, and it was hard on all of us. So my hope for you is that you have parents who love everything about you, even as who you are is different than who they are, and different than who they wanted you to be; I hope your folks are brave enough to let you live free, and that they teach you the useful lessons you need, instead of hiding in their fear. I hope you are clever and thoughtful, and unafraid to tell the truth, and than you are brave enough to be yourself and not too worried about fitting in, though this is a big deal when you’re a teenager (and also a big deal when you’re an adult). It’s a story that grown-ups tell ourselves, that we have this life thing figured out. It keeps the fear and anxiety at bay. It’s a lie. The better we get—the better you get, darling girl—at riding the waves and the shifting sands of living, the more we don’t have to know, or have to have figured out. We can watch, and consider and feel, and then respond. It is a deep fear that requires us to exercise control, to attempt to exercise control over others. I’m sad and sorry to tell you that adults try to control others a lot: we might couch it in ideas that sound nice, but at the end of it, it’s all about power.

Most of us have not learned the lesson that the only thing we can control is how we respond to circumstances. We cannot make people believe what we believe, we cannot make them act the way we want to act (and often don’t act), and we cannot make them feel what we feel. We’re better off for all of that, but many of us think the world would be better if everyone else just did and thought and said what we do, what we wanted.

Another lie.

Niece, I am deeply, deeply sorry. I am so sorry that the laws in this country have made you less free. I come from a family that experienced poverty on both sides. Poverty is far away from you, I think, unless many things have changed. Your father has a good job that is valued by our society, and capitalism has rewarded him, so you likely don’t know what it’s like not to have enough to eat for dinner, or to watch your parent choose to feed you and to forgo eating themselves. Both my parents came from large families. My grandmother had her first child at fourteen. Can you imagine that? Waves of nausea and vomiting during homeroom and first period, gaining so much weight you can’t safely participate in gym class (do you even have gym any more?) or soccer or gymnastics or kung fu? Struggling to carry your books and violin over your baby bump? And now you have this whole other person for whom you’re responsible, you have to feed and keep alive and care for. What you want doesn’t matter anymore, because all of your energy and desire lives at the feet of this other life.

My grandmothers didn’t go to high school; they had kid after kid after kid. They were Black women who came up during the Great Depression and World War II, have you learned about those yet? They lived during Jim Crow, and they had few, if any choices. The part of me that loves living—loves strawberry ice cream and the feeling after a good run, and loves my friends and your Uncle and delights in skin against skin—is grateful that they were able to have families, despite all the trauma and the struggle that were part of that. The part of me that exists outside time, that can see my grandmothers as women, wishes desperately that they’d lived in a world that valued and honored and legitimized their bodies, their existence, their desires and choices. Niece, I’m sorry because you do not live in that world. You live in a world that tells you that your body is only valid if it looks this way, if it loves this way, if it talks or sounds or works or thinks this way. Now you live in a world that wants to force you to breed this way; it is actively taking steps to steal from you your capacity to make choices about how you govern your reproductive health. I’m sorry. I’m sorry that this issue is not one that was dealt with once and for all, and has resurged as a frontier of control. I’m sorry that you and so many other young people have to think about this, that instead of abortion being as accessible and affordable and as destigmatized as dental care or eating your veggies, it is against the law in some parts of our country. I’m sorry.

If you are living now as you have been living as a girl, you live in a state where the government seeks to protect your right to choose, access, and hopefully afford an abortion, should you need one. But this might change—one thing that seems true is that white people will not dissolve American apartheid without a fight, and while I hope that your state won’t go the way of others in our country, I am no longer surprised by the atrocities that white people will commit against themselves in pursuit of committing atrocities against people of color and culture; I know what white people will do to protect and uphold white power supremacy.

Because you are related to me, you are related to other young women and folx who seek to live and love and learn and be happy, just like you do. Because we all live in this country, their journey to freedom is obstructed by similar stones and potholes to your own journey, though they are not identical. I pray that you will cultivate solidarity in your heart for these people, your kin, who do not live in states that wants to protect their reproductive autonomy. They live in states that want to arm teachers instead of banning assault weapons, and who want to force parenting on people who might choose otherwise. I pray that you might know them, that you might care about them, and should you be given the chance to care for them, that you would relish it deeply.

When I was a teenager, my mother said to me, if you get pregnant, that’s it, you’re out. This house wasn’t meant to hold three generations. It taught me that pregnancy is a negative consequence of unsafe sex. There are many consequences of unsafe sex, and there are some consequences of safer sex; some of them are negative, some of them are positive, and some of them change over the course of your life, seeming positive and then becoming negative as time goes by. Some consequences change with treatment, and some of them never change. I wish my mother had taught me this, that pregnant was not something I had to be if I didn’t want to be. I wish that she had taught me that abortion was not something I had to be scared to talk about, scared to want, scared to have, and I wish that she had taught me that abortion is not sinful.

Are, these words, sinful, sin, even words you know, niece? Are there people in your life who tell you that God loves you less if… and then fill in the sentence with whatever they think is right? Is someone using the marvel and mystery of Divinity to try to regulate your behavior? Are you treating yourself this way?

I don’t know today. But if, at any point you want to talk with me about this, I am here for it. I am a woman of faith who believes at my center that That Which Is Divine has given you, and me, and all of us the capacity to make good, wise, righteous choices. I believe that nothing separates us from relationship with Divine. And I would be deeply grateful to hold space for you as you discover what you believe about being a person, about being in relationship, about your self-determination. I love you, and I am here for you.

forever,

Shen-shen