glorious mysteries

Walking Without Shame

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

This is the post I wrote for my rosary group today, part 2 of 3:

Crown of Thorns Novena
Day 36 , Thursday, 29 January 2026
Glorious Mysteries:
Walking the Pathway of the Resurrection

On this pathway, we walk through the Garden of Resurrection, the Ascension (Enlightenment), the Coming of the Spirit, the Mother’s Assumption (Dormition), and the Coronation of the Queen of Heaven.

I love the word Somatic. It basically just means “of or relating to the body.” I extend it to mean embodiment. My heart’s desire prayers in recent novenas has been focused on embodiment issues, exploring how I live my feelings in my body, how I move and inhabit my body as I age into this next stage of menopause, how I build my strength, how I experience the world through my senses, how I learn to love and really treasure this body I am in. I am almost 60, about to start my Third Act, and I want to cooperate with and listen to my body as I step onto this stage. I want to keep her healthy as long as I can, and to (as Mary Oliver puts it), “Let the soft animal of my body love what it loves.”

Speaking of stages, I haven’t actually been on dramatic stages much at all since I was the rose seller in Oliver, and sister Berthe in The Sound of Music at Lancaster, PA’s Fulton Theater in my early twenties. But I remember some of the things that bloomed in me when we did warm-up exercises in theater classes. Walk like a giant. Walk like a cow. Walk like a toddler discovering the world. And suddenly, as I walked like a giant, in my five-foot human body, I was a giant, then a cow, then a toddler. For today’s “lesson,” we walk like someone completely unashamed.

After yesterday’s discussion of Shame in the Sorrowful Mysteries, I wonder if we could resurrect some of the certainty and belonging and confidence and courage that inhabits a body unencumbered by shame, simply by walking or standing (or sitting or lying) as someone without shame. What does it feel like in your body to stand without shame? To walk with confidence? To hold your head and shoulders as if what you are saying deserves to be heard?

Sometimes it helps to have an image to work with. I picture Eleanor Roosevelt’s calmly confident face, Harriet Tubman’s fierce belonging, Greta Thunberg’s truth-telling. I picture the Sun card from one of my tarot decks: a person standing, feet shoulder width apart, face and heart lifted to the sun, arms out to the sides in a receiving gesture.

Practice:
Try this Somatic/Embodiment Exercise. 

Stand with your feet shoulder width apart. (Or, if standing is not an option, you can do this to the best of your ability from a sitting or lying position. It’s about what you feel in your body, after all.)
Settle. Breathe. Rest in the Mother’s Arms.
Breathing, straighten your spine.  Roll or shake your shoulders and let them drop slightly.
Breathing, feel your feet on the earth (or the floor or the bed). Send roots down into the earth.
Breathing, tilt your face toward the sun (even if it is a cloudy day and you have no windows).
Breathing, lift your heart toward the sun.
Breathing, open your arms wide, receiving the sun into your body.
Feel comfort and courage and confidence fill you. Let belongingness fill you.

Breathe it in.

If you feel any of those shame-messages whispering in your head, turn each one into a raindrop, and let it drip from your fingers into the earth.
How does confidence and courage and shamelessness feel within your body? What color is it? Does it have a shape or temperature? A voice? A name? Where in your body do you feel it most strongly? Now move—walk or shrug or dance or just feel it in your face—with shameless ease.
You are worthy. You deserve to be here, to take up space, to speak your mind. 

Liminal

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today it was my turn to write the reflection for the Novena Page at The Way of the Rose Facebook Group. Our theme for this Novena is Liminal Space, and today’s part of the three-day cycle is the Glorious Mysteries. I began with a poem, so that will double as my poem for the day. Here is what I wrote:

The Liminal Space
Glorious Mysteries, Day 21

Standing here in this moment
between the past and the future
this liminal space
this threshold
this doorway
between what was and what will be
between what we bring and what we take
between the breath of a moment ago
and the breath of a moment to come
we PAUSE.

Open this window in time
and rest here.
Feel its elasticity,
let it spread out,
breathe into the bubble of now.

Mindfulness practices are, I think, about the liminal space of this moment, when we are always standing on the doorstep, feeling the memory that tugs us from behind, and the awareness of a future that draws us forward, and then releasing those insistent calls in order to stand: Right here. Right now.

Past and future are not irrelevant, but they fade. We know we must tend to them both, but not now. Not just right at this moment. And this liminal consciousness is not procrastination, not avoidance of the Real Work of remembering and doing and making and creating and healing. It’s a gathering, a building up, like the gathering of a wave, like the potent silence between orchestral movements, like the hush before the first bird sings into the dawn.

Every day of a novena is a liminal moment, a standing on a threshold between two points in our journey. Today is the Glorious Mysteries, a space of becoming in between yesterday’s sorrows and tomorrow’s joys. Yesterday, we stood between joy and glory, contemplating the weight of the challenge in the place of Sorrows. Tomorrow, we hold the birthing and growing self, knowing we’ve passed through a rich stage of becoming, that the coming day will hold sorrows aplenty. And each day, we set aside the mysteries of past and future for just a moment as we enter the labyrinth of the day’s mysteries.

Some exercises for holding the space of the moment:
Take three deep breaths. After each in-breath, hold the breath inside you for a couple beats. After each out-breath, wait a couple beats before taking a new, full breath. Feel what it feels like to be filled with (in-spired) with the breath of life. Feel what it feels like to be an empty vessel, empty of air.

Stand in a doorway, or find a portal in a woods, a space between two trees or where a branch leans down around you, or a shining shaft of sunlight on a trail. Stand in that space, perfectly still. Feel the past behind you tugging at your memory. Feel the future ahead of you, pulling you forward. Then let those feelings fall around you like a carpet of autumn leaves and stand in the moment. Do a sensory check. What do you smell? What do you hear? What colors and textures do you see? What is the taste on your tongue? What do you feel on your skin?

Do a three-card tarot reading, and keep all three cards face down. The one to your left is the past and memory. The one to your right is the future. Turn over the one in the center. Without looking at a booklet to tell you the meaning, just sit with the image before you. Ask: “Who am I, right now?” Not “What do I bring?” or “What will I take with me from this moment?” Just “Who am I, in this exact moment?” When you’re done, put all three cards back in the deck without looking at the other two.

Gratitude List:
1. This moment
2. and this one
3. and this one
4. now this one
5. and this one, too.
May we walk in Beauty!

“The ability to sit with mystery and explore the dark but fertile realms of infinite possibility is crucial to the work of inhabiting a meaningful life. We have to learn to stay rooted in the midst of chaotic obscurity, in the shadow-haunted wild places of the psyche. We need these rootings more than ever during the bone-deep metamorphosis that is menopause.” —Sharon Blackie

“To see where you are going, look behind you. The clues are there. Mistakes you have made, patterns you have followed, breakthroughs you have had, ideas that did not turn out as planned: your experience is your guide. It tells you what you may expect on the road ahead. The key is in how much you have learned from the past and how those learnings shape your decisions for the future. Look before you leap: look back to see what may come.” —Steven Charleston

“Revolution means reinventing culture.” —Grace Lee Boggs

“May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.”
—Nelson Mandela

For a day, just for one day,
Talk about that which disturbs no one
And bring some peace into your beautiful eyes.
—Hafiz

“Open your mouth only if what you are going to say is more beautiful than silence.” —proverb

“All religions, all this singing, one song. The differences are just illusion and vanity. The sun’s light looks a little different on this wall than it does on that wall, and a lot different on this other one, but it’s still one light.” —Rumi

The magic of autumn has seized the countryside;
now that the sun isn’t ripening anything
it shines for the sake of the golden age;
for the sake of Eden;
to please the moon for all I know.
—Elizabeth Coatsworth

“Revolution means reinventing culture.” –Grace Lee Boggs

The Glorious Mysteries

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today is the last day of National Poetry Month. It has been another marvelous month. I have felt like the Muse was active more days this month than not, for which I am grateful. I never know when I begin these things whether I am going to hit a wall by day ten and have to slog through to the end. I’m grateful that there was so much to find and follow this month.

I have four more weeks of school, and then I’ll hopefully have time to do some editing. I really want to commit to going through my work and pulling together another book. But I have said that several times in the past few years, so I need to find the Key in order to make it happen.

The rosary prayers go in a cycle of three sets: The Joyful Mysteries, the Sorrowful Mysteries, and the Glorious Mysteries. There is a fourth set that was added by Pope John Paul II, but I haven’t studied those. As I have been praying the rosary since August, I have been meditating on the mysteries as a Path of Initiation to Enlightenment. I believe we are repeating this cycle over and over again in our lives, and the three-day cycle of repetition in the rosary cycle offers a way to meditate on one’s current cycle of transformation.

The Joyful Mysteries are about hearing and accepting the call to transformation:
1. The Annunciation: Hearing the call, meeting the beloved angel being, saying Yes, consenting to the process
2. The Visit with Elizabeth: Mentoring, wise confidante, comfort and counsel
3. The Birth: Stepping onto the path, hatching, the seed bursts forth, the initiation
4. The Elder Blessing: Blessing and commissioning by the priest/priestess, they say: “I have waited my whole life for this!”
5. The Finding in the Temple: Finding the purpose, defining the vision of the initiation story

The Sorrowful Mysteries are about meeting the challenges of the enlightenment journey:
1. The Agony in the Garden: Facing betrayal and abandonment, anxiety about what is to come
2. The Flogging in the Temple: Pain, the reality of betrayal, enduring the torture
3. The Crown of Thorns: Being shamed and mocked, standing shameless in the face of taunting
4. The Bearing of the Cross: Picking up the work that must happen even in the midst of trauma and anguish
5. Death: Death, loss, symbolic death, end of old life and way of being

The Glorious Mysteries are about stepping into the truth of the new way:
1. Resurrection: Symbolic rebirth, restoration, revivifying, re-energizing, re-awakening
2. Ascension into Heaven: Stepping back onto the path with Enlightenment in sight
3. The Descent of the Holy Spirit: Tongues of fire, new language, deep connection to Spirit, recollection of “This is my Beloved Child in whom I am well pleased.”
4. The Assumption of the Virgin: Taking up the priestessing role, putting on the mantle
5. The Coronation of the Virgin: The Summoning to the coronation of the Queen, living in the glory of the Mystery

This past summer, when I felt caught in cycles of unrelenting Sorrowful Mysteries, it was a comfort to meditate every three days on the process of meeting the challenges and then to remind myself that the Glorious Mysteries follow. And of course, while this is a linear telling, there’s also a layering quality, a sense in which we live all the stages at once.

Gratitude List:
1. Denise Levertov’s poetry
2. Writing practice. I long to have a writer’s life, but in the meantime, I can carve out time for a consistent writing practice
3. Circles of beloved community
4. The quiet misty green of the grove in the morning
5. Always new things to learn
May we walk in Beauty!

“Things aren’t so tangible and sayable as people would have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are world of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.” —Rainer Maria Rilke

“We don’t think ourselves into a new way of living. We live ourselves into a new way of thinking.” —Richard Rohr

“To create one’s world in any of the arts takes courage.” —Georgia O’Keeffe

“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal… To hope is to give yourself to the future – and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.” ―Rebecca Solnit

“The child’s hand
Folding these wings
Wins no wars and ends them all. “
―Thomas Merton

“I never sanction violence. Never. But I wonder how we got to the point when destruction of property deserves greater coverage and a greater portion of our attention than the destruction of human life. Since when do shattered windows matter more than shattered spines, shattered voice boxes, and shattered dreams? When did we become a people who mourn the destruction of things over the destruction of lives?” —Omid Safi