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The Elder of Vicksburg's avatar

Love the First Things essay, and you're absolutely right about "Wild Christianity." The lives of those old British saints - see Sabine Baring-Gould's eight volumes of hagiography -- are a great place to start, ditto the old Anglo-Saxon and early English prayers and religious poetry as collected in various anthologies and the "Orthodox England" site. Deeper links with the natural world and created order may smack to some of paganism, but it doesn't have to be, at all. See also "The Northern Thebiad," the lives of saints in the great forests of Northern Russia, and those legends about various saints befriending bears and wolves. Anyways, great essays/thoughts.

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Anne-Marie Mouwen's avatar

Thank you Paul for your work. The journey you are on feels familiar. But, being a homeschooling mother of three, I just do not have enough 'desert time' to let the deeper layers of existence, or the whispers of Christianity although strong in their undercurrent, reach me. I can hear them call in the distance, but my attention is needed now, in this household, with these immediate needs of children, food, chickens, cleaning, daily life really.

I guess I could cut out some 'me-time' or get up extra early to connect to the transcendent. Being needed by others, foregoing myself and giving seems underrated too in our culture. Could I let husband and children alone to find reconnection with the transcendent? Somehow it feels off, my wholeness is relational in nature. Might there be a different road possible: being fully connected to Mother Earth, exactly by being a feeding, caring and present mother myself? Could it be women and men connect with different layers of the transcendent, and we compliment each other?

Cutting myself loose from my relational bonds to my family to focus on my relation to the transcendent does not feel like the right way. I need to be embodied for my family and I'm sure the transcendent is wise enough to reach women right where they are, in the middle of real life, growing crops and attending tot the needs of their children. Your words reach only part of me, and I agree, intellectually, with most of what you bring to a fore. Yet, I am on a path to value an embodied, female route and connection to the transcendent. I think I already know where it is, and how to live it. Maybe both routes -spirit and body- together make for a wholesome, living and enduring reconnection to our roots.

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