I feel the seasons everywhere
And I feel blessings in the air
Those seasons you have sown
You're gonna come into your own.
Seasons, walk into your season.
This is a song that we sang on the Marble Women’s Ministry Retreat by Donald Lawrence. Though the retreat concluded almost two weeks ago, I still find myself “feeling seasons everywhere.” The theme was Dancing with God through the Seasons of Life. Though right now I should have my head and heart completely in preparations in Holy Week, part of me is still engaging that theme.
I think that there is a special and unique idea called women’s spirituality. Do you think so? For me, women’s spirituality takes seriously the whole person—spirit, mind and body. It is a relational experience of faith that desires a relationship with God and right and loving relationships with other human beings. My idea of women’s spirituality is that it is inherently creative, artistic and aware of the aesthetic. We can see ourselves as daughters of an infinitely creative Creator. Think of Alice Walker’s beautifully titled book In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. Also I think that women’s spirituality—particularly Christian women’s spirituality—is incarnational. It never completely absents itself from the body because women don’t really have the choice of leaving the body. Every twenty-eight days the body asserts itself. This is the blessing of Jesus’ life: he offers us an embodied, human model to follow.
The theme of the women’s retreat reflects this sense of women’s spirituality. We may find ourselves in multiple seasons simultaneously. Not just the natural, climactic seasons of winter, spring, summer and fall but agricultural seasons of planting, nurturing, harvesting, or fallowness. We even acknowledge that we have our personal experiences of the liturgical calendar : Ordinary Time, Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Resurrection and Pentecost that have nothing to do with the church calendar and everything to do with our living experience.
In what season(s) of life do you do you find yourself? How is God speaking to you and dancing with you in this season? |