This is the post (3/3) that I wrote for my rosary group this morning:
Crown of Thorns Novena Day 37 , Friday, 30 January 2026 Joyful Mysteries: You Are Shameless!
Today, we walk through the Garden of Yes, to the House of my Beloved, to the Village of Birth, to the Blessing of the Elders, to the Finding of Myself in the Temple.
It is possible I have written of this here before. Several years ago, I wrote a poem about my grandfathers, the ways in which the patriarchy of my Mennonite ancestors affected the women. I can no longer find the poem, but I remember part of the end of it:
Oh, Shameless! To be without shame. Could you know, Sister-Ancestors, that they blessed in their cursing. We’ll find our own valley, called Shameless. Called Brazen. Oh, carry that name. I’ll wear it, too.
In many religious traditions, and particularly in some streams of the Mennonite tradition of my own ancestors, it was considered shameful just to be a woman, especially if you did not redeem your femaleness by being feminine, by keeping immaculate house, by serving, by listening instead of talking, but submitting to the will of God (which meant the will of the men in your family and church). Women have borne the burden of keeping the family’s honor, of doing the emotional labor, of passing on the culture. If she stepped out of line, she was labeled shameless.
My own parents did everything they could, fiercely and with great intention, to break those assumptions about gender and to give their children a different pathway to follow. And in many ways we did, and in other ways, we—like our peers—absorbed many of the messages that church and culture told us about women and men and about staying within the lines, about behaving ourselves, about not being shameful. And I, who am so many things that are not that womanly ideal, could never measure up.
No matter your gender, can you hear those elders and gatekeepers of the past scolding you for not being all you were told you should be? “Shameless! Have you no shame?”
Why, no. Thank you very much. No, actually, here on this pathway of the Joyful Mysteries today, no, I have no shame. I am shameless.
Practice: Settle. Breathe. Rest in the Mother’s Arms. It helps if you can look in a mirror while you do this. Take the curse and twist it into a blessing, for blessing it is. Say it: “I am shameless.” “I have no shame.” Say it again. Again. Grin at yourself. You ARE shameless, you know. So worthy. So Beloved.
Here is my post for The Way of the Rose Novena today:
Crown of Thorns Novena Day 35 , Wednesday, 28 January 2026 Sorrowful Mysteries: You Do Not Have to Take the Shame They Hand You
Today we walk the rooms of the Sorrowful Mysteries: Agony of Anticipated Trauma, Pain of Scourging, Shameful Crown of Thorns, Carrying the Burden, and Death.
After the agony, after the pain, comes the public shaming, mocking, and humiliation of the Crown of Thorns, the shadowy reversals, the gaslighting. The propaganda. The victim-blaming. The outright lies.
Stripped naked, beaten, and put on trial, forced to listen to the Authorities build their narrative against you: This is who you said you were, but we know better. You thought you were so great. He said he was the King. They’re not protestors and protectors; they’re domestic terrorists and violent extremists. She tried to run him over. He brandished a gun. They deserved to be shot. She’s a witch: Burn her! He’s a heretic: Execute him! What was she wearing? He had it coming. You deserved it. You’re too fat, too thin. Too driven, too lazy. Not worthy.
It’s nothing new, this tendency of Empire and authority and patriarchy to twist its evils into shame poured on the victims. You can’t believe the evidence of your senses. Order is more important than empathy. How dare you question the established order of things?
Shaming is meant to make you feel small. Powerless. Helpless. Unable and unworthy to stand up to power. Shaming makes you question your truth at the deepest levels. Makes you doubt yourself.
The truth is, if I accept the shame they offer me, then I have handed the narrative to others to take power over me. I’ve given away my agency, abdicated my responsibility for my own life. I’ll spend my days cringing, worrying that someone will see my true shameful self, instead of living into my own blossoming, into my power to create goodness in the world around me.
Practice:
Settle. Breathe. Rest in the Mother’s arms.
Can you bear to list (in your head or on paper) the messages you have been told (by the culture, by others, by yourself) about why you should feel shame? If you can, write them or remember them in your quiet space in the presence of the Mother.
[Here are some of mine, for full disclosure, and probably over-sharing. Note that not all of them are true, or shameful. They’re just what I’ve been handed. I’m messy, chaotic, lazy, a hoarder. I’m too fat, too distractable, too loud, too emotional. I make decisions too fast, and I work too slow. I have hurt people’s feelings, ignored people who needed my attention, and made a fool of myself trying to be the center of attention. More and more and more. . .]
Stop.
Feel her tender gaze upon you. At some of these items on your list, can you see her shake her head, hear her tell you how very worthy you are? At others, you can hear her chuckle: “Darling One, you try so very hard. Rest now.” Or, “This is not you at all, only what others try to make you believe about yourself.” And maybe after one or two: “Let’s work on that one together, you and I.” Remind yourself that she loves you no matter what, that she will always love you, that you do not have to DO anything or perform anything to be worthy of her love. If you wrote a list of things you have been told to be ashamed of: burn it, or flush it, or put it under a rock.
(Note: I would like to say also that I don’t think shaming is always inappropriate. For instance, right now I want to say, “Shame on the leaders who are authorizing and encouraging kidnapping, terror, and death. Shame on the ones who hurt our children! Shame on the ones who execute people in the street, on the ones who break into people’s houses, on the ones who kidnap children and use them as bait, on the ones who refuse to see all people as our neighbors.”)
Sometimes it takes a lot of reworking and re-arranging, and cutting up phrases to fit to other phrases. This one was almost too easy. I like how it fell together, so I am not going to tug and pull at it for a few more days. I think it’s done. Great Gratitude to all the Facebook Friends who submitted phrases!
Funny, Isn’t It? a Facebook Crowd-sourced Poem by Beth Weaver-Kreider
We had been in camp for three months. In the very middle of the front row, his bony hands clasped in front of him: “That’s why everyone hates each other nowadays— I guess poor guys dont get kissed on the lips.” My stomach drops at the muffled sound of glass breaking. Since when do men care about such things? This is a dangerous time for you.
We have to confront each of our shadow aspects. I was in the habit of considering that etheric little bone defying the course of the waters, but the crucial bit of magic was to keep your focus on every angle of a question. I had decided to build and not destroy, start with the strongest sensation. I didn’t expect it to look so wild.
Learn from those far away and long ago. In many spiritual traditions, sin does not exist. A nation where you can’t ask questions is one that is going downhill. Atonement is unnecessary, since dreams bring guidance from the well of Being. Firebrands ask questions, and I would say she is everything. Her job took on a new shimmering significance. Funny, isn’t it? How it all comes around.
Sources: Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Dream Count. Alexie, Sherman. The Absolutely True Diary of A Part-time Indian. Barbery. Muriel. The Elegance of the Hedgehog Callahan, Patti. Once Upon a Wardrobe. Genet, Katherine . The Gathering. Haig, Matt. The Life Impossible. Haig, Matt. The Midnight Library. Harpman, Jaqueline . I Who Have Never Known Men. Helminski, Camille Hamilton Adams. The Way of Mary. King, Karen L. The Gospel of Mary of Magdala. Kinney, Wallis. A Dark and Secret Magic. Klein, Gerda Weissman. All but My Life. Lee, Min Jin. Pachinko. Menakem, Resmaa. My Grandmother’s Hands. Myss, Caroline. Sacred Contracts. Patchett, Ann. Tom Lake. Quinn, Kate. The Briar Club Reichel, Hanna. For Such a Time As This: An Emergency Devotional Rowling, JK. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Shaw, Martin. Scatterlings. Winspear, Jacqueline. The Comfort of Ghosts.
Gratitude List: 1. Playing with words 2. Being on Break! 3. How hard the guitarists and singer worked this morning to prepare for their performance at Grandfriends’ Day 4. Getting things done (this is a recurring gratitude for me–I think it’s about my tendency to procrastinate, so it feels especially soul-cleansing to have a list of things I have accomplished.) 5. Anticipating time with Beloveds May we walk in Beauty!
I know this now: It was a dangerous choice to go there in the first place. I was in danger of losing so much, constricting myself into the tiny little boxes required of those who existed in that place.
I went in with my eyes open, knowing of the claustrophobic boxes, how the language pulled toward dogma and creed. I went in with my own language, my own protective wards, kept secret in my pockets. I went, tethered to those who stood outside, who could watch for me, who could pull me back if I got stuck in the tiny places, injured by the sharp corners, the barbed words, and the lack of fresh air to breathe.
I can view my time in that place as a setback, a wrong choice, a misstep. Or I can look at how it changed me and transformed me, how it prepared me for this moment, gave me courage, made me fierce. Although it left me with wounds, it did not take my essential Self from me: I am always new, always a dragon shedding her skin to become fresh and reborn again, but always the same essential me, growing and changing and developing.
I don’t want to give those eight years power by saying I should not have taken that journey, that the breach of Self was too destructive. Because although my ego took its hits, I didn’t lose my Self. And there were gifts in this journey too. The young people who were there with me taught me so much, so much that I bring with me now that I’m out in the outer world again. Those eight years were a necessary phase of my development. They changed me forever in good and powerful ways. They too were initiation, difficult initiation. Not a break in my line of learning, not a backward step–or if a backwards step, only part of the dance.
Anytime we willingly submit to the claustrophobia of a religious institution, we put ourselves in danger of either taking on the rules for ourselves, or of losing some essential confidence and courage and forcefulness as we make ourselves smaller in order to fit inside the boxes. Me, I’m so grateful now for the ones who tethered me while I was in the land of boxes, those who held the lamps for me to see my way out when I reached the point of banishment.
I called myself an exile when I left that place. As though it had ever been my true home. I can laugh now looking back, and see how even though the lines that draw my past (for a couple generations) ran straight through that place, it was never my home. I have always been my home.
And I look back today with gratitude for the expansiveness of the escape, for the fact that I can breathe, and run and explore, and call myself by my real name, and not have to look over my shoulder.
So many sacred journeys happen in three days. My sojourn was eight years. And now three years more have passed and finally I feel the new wings stretching out behind me. I am ready to fly again. Blessed be!
Today was my day to write for the Way of the Rose Annunciation Novena: THE ANNUNCIATION NOVENA Day 5, Sorrowful Mysteries
There’s something so inexorable about living. One thing happens, and then the next, chain reaction following chain reaction, and one domino topples, so the whole damn line just cascades, one thing after another, until it’s all a pile of rubble on the floor.
You hear the rumble of thunder, lightning strikes the tower, and before you can think what to do, it’s all just tumbling down around you, crumbling to dust and ashes. Sometimes it just feels as if all life does is happen TO you, you know?
And yet, sometimes right there in the pile of debris, among the wreck and the ruins, in the quiet moment when the dust is settling through shafts of light falling all around you, or sometimes it happens in the dew-bright garden when every possibility seems to be in bud, or in the roar of traffic when you are on your way from hither to yon, just trying to keep up: sometimes you can hear the Angel’s voice, asking
“Will you carry the light? Will you carry and share the mystery of seed and egg and birthing star? Will you be the hands and feet of something beyond your current kenning? Will you use your heart, your strength, your cunning, help to make the new thing within you, in the service of Love?”
I keep forgetting that I get to choose, that even between the crazy race and the cascade, even in the dawn garden, even in the rubble, I can choose when and how I participate, how I collaborate with life to co-create a destiny beyond my imagining. No longer is it simply that I am made for this moment, but I make myself for this moment, and for the next, and for the next.
“When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.” —Mary Oliver
“Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.” —Barry Lopez
“With every action, comment, conversation, we have the choice to invite Heaven or Hell to Earth.” —Rob Bell
“Do not grow old, no matter how long you live. Never cease to stand like curious children before the Great Mystery into which we were born.” ―Albert Einstein
“Love will find you, wherever you are. It will seek you out in the most hidden places of your heart. It will search the crowded cities and walk the empty hours after midnight. It will overcome any obstacle placed before it, even those you create for yourself, to find you and to bring you its gift. No matter how far from love you feel you have drifted, it will never give up on you. Love is the Spirit, watchful and persistent, enduring and forgiving, the steady presence of a reassurance that will keep you safe whatever chance may bring you. If you are a believer, then believe this: love will always find you.” —Steven Charleston
“I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons, knocking on a door. It opens. I’ve been knocking from the inside.” ―Rumi
“How monotonous our speaking becomes when we speak only to ourselves! And how insulting to the other beings – to foraging black bears and twisted old cypresses – that no longer sense us talking to them, but only about them, as though they were not present in our world.
Small wonder that rivers and forests no longer compel our focus or our fierce devotion. For we talk about such entities only behind their backs, as though they were not participant in our lives. Yet if we no longer call out to the moon slipping between the clouds, or whisper to the spider setting the silken struts of her web, well, then the numerous powers of this world will no longer address us – and if they still try, we will not likely hear them.” ―David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology
In the Sufi way of seeing it, longing is a divine inclination, drawing us towards the Beloved. Just as lover and beloved long to be in each other’s arms, so too is it between us and the life which is meant for us. Like a plant growing towards the sun, longing is nature inclining us towards the light we need in order to be fruitful. But also, as Rumi writes, “that which you seek is seeking you.” So longing is not only the quality of seeking reunion, but the sound of something in search of us: the calling homeward.” —Toko-pa Turner
“Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky.” —Kahlil Gibran
“I believe dignity emerges in the way you finally carry your own story. Through your painstaking reframes to write yourself as the heroine of your own life, your losses cease to consume you. They are not forgotten or made invisible, but rather aggrandised in your telling, eventually passed down through the line of mothers and daughters as the mythical ‘obstacles to flight’ that they were. But dignity also lives in one’s willingness to step wholly into a new life of love, even as its first strands are being woven together to create a shape that will warm you.” ―Toko-pa Turner
Sunday Morning Prayer
hope like a seed buried deep within the earth; hidden covered by layers, disappointment, struggle, pain; buried yet stretching, growing and becoming. hope like a seed becoming new life.
The prompt for today is to write a For _______ poem. I decided to ask my family to help. The first one was all I needed.
What are you grateful for today, I ask, and he says, “For life,” and that is the end of the poem.
Gratitude List:
This family
Good listening and honest talking
The hammer game
Wise people
Making music with my beloveds
Thanksgiving Thoughts: “You pray for the hungry. Then you feed them. That is how prayer works.” —Pope Francis ***** “Allow dark times to season you.” —Hafiz ***** The Thing Is Ellen Bass
to love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it and everything you’ve held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands, your throat filled with the silt of it. When grief sits with you, its tropical heat thickening the air, heavy as water more fit for gills than lungs; when grief weights you like your own flesh only more of it, an obesity of grief, you think, How can a body withstand this? Then you hold life like a face between your palms, a plain face, no charming smile, no violet eyes, and you say, yes, I will take you I will love you, again. ***** My November Guest by Robert Frost
My Sorrow, when she’s here with me, Thinks these dark days of autumn rain Are beautiful as days can be; She loves the bare, the withered tree; She walks the sodden pasture lane. Her pleasure will not let me stay. She talks and I am fain to list: She’s glad the birds are gone away, She’s glad her simple worsted gray Is silver now with clinging mist. The desolate, deserted trees, The faded earth, the heavy sky, The beauties she so truly sees, She thinks I have no eye for these, And vexes me for reason why. Not yesterday I learned to know The love of bare November days Before the coming of the snow, But it were vain to tell her so, And they are better for her praise.
Today’s Prompt is to write a “What I Meant to Say” poem.
I said I was tired,
but what I meant to say was that I had intended to be bolder.
I said you were right,
but what I meant to say was that my own opinion counted, too.
I said it didn’t really matter,
but what I meant to say was that it was a matter of life and death.
I told you everything was fine,
but what I meant to say was that my soul had just caught fire.
I told you I could live with it,
but what I meant to say was that something in me was withering away.
I told you it could be fixed,
but what I meant to say was how furious I was that you broke it.
I said, “Excuse me,”
but what I meant to say was, “I need you to get out of my way.”
I said I was sorry,
but what I meant to say was, “That’s my business.”
I said, “Please,”
but what I meant to say was, “It’s my turn now.”
”When we see the Beloved in each person,
it’s like walking through a garden,
watching flowers bloom all around us.” ―Ram Dass
***
“The present moment is the intersection of eternity with time.” ―Beatrice Bruteau
***
“Only the present moment contains life.”
―Thích Nhất Hạnh
***
“It is the paradoxical nature of grief to lead us to love. There is a seed planted in loss, an evolution made in breaking, a genius found in separation that is rarely apparent in the heart of crisis. But often what looks like deviation is really proliferation, like satellite initiatives born from a group’s dissolution. Intimacy is forged in the hearts of those who know exclusion. To them is given the gift of tenderness which can mentor another through their own isolation.” ―Dreamwork with Toko-pa
***
“I believe the world is incomprehensibly beautiful – an endless prospect of magic and wonder.”
―Ansel Adams
***
“You can pray until you faint, but unless you get up and try to do something, God is not going to put it in your lap.” ―Fannie Lou Hamer
***
“Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the Earth seeking the successive autumns.” ―George Eliot
***
“I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me.”
―Hermann Hesse, Demian
***
“I went inside my heart
to see how it was.
Something there makes me hear
the whole world weeping.”
― Jalaluddin Mevlana Rumi
***
“Did you ever hear a tree pushing out of the ground or the snow falling? Great things happen in silence.” ―Mother Angelica
***
“Everything belongs, even the “bad” and dark parts of yourself. Nothing need be rejected or denied. No one need be hated. No one need be excommunicated, shunned, or eliminated. You don’t have time for that anymore. You’ve entered into the soul of the serene disciple where, because the Holy One has become one in you, you are able to see that oneness everywhere else. Almost like magic!” ―Richard Rohr
***
“Our work is to show we have been breathed upon – to show it, give it out, sing it out, to live it out in the topside world what we have received through our sudden knowledge, from body, from dreams, and journeys of all sorts.” ―Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes
***
“We found ourselves in a realm
where dreams are formed,
destiny is chosen
and magic is as real
as a handprint in the snow.”
―Libba Bray
Gratitude List: 1. The River of Cats. We have a new route to school these days to pick up L at her new house. We go on a dirt road past a farm where a dozen cats or so stream across the road as we approach. Needless to say, we drive very slowly. In the morning dusk, their eyes are a dozen sets of tiny headlights as in our car’s lights.
2. Handsome Duck. There’s a silver-feathered handsome duck on the same road.
3. Lancaster. Almost two hours to go in the day of the Extraordinary Give, and we’ve already broken the record we set last year–over $7.5 million dollars. We don’t have a lot to give right now, so we chose one to give to, and it seems so small. But being one little drop in this ocean of giving helps to keep the cynicism at bay.
4. Saying what I mean
5. Sleep
In the beginning, she hovered there,
above the waters, molding the land,
holding the world in her hands,
crafting a world of fire, earth, water, air.
In the beginning, she brooded,
her face obscured by shadows,
her thoughts filling the hollows,
her watchful eyes hooded.
She sent her dreaming forth,
streaming through the cosmos,
building like song to a crescendo,
filling newborn skies with morning.
In the beginning, she listened
for colors that flew in the wind,
singing that blew through her mind,
waves of color and sound risen
from deep within her breast.
Her thoughts became matter, feeling
mattered, materialized into being,
unbeing fled as her moon rose in the west.
And today we un-matter her being,
un-materialize the thoughts she formed,
de-stabilize the dances she performed
to set it all in motion. We’ve set it reeling,
ripping the fabric she wove.
It cannot be too late to change our ways,
to seek again the rhythm of her days,
to turn to her again and call her Love.
“At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can.”
–Frida Kahlo
***
A little story by Amrita Nadi:
At the end of a talk someone from the audience asked the Dalai Lama, “Why didn’t you fight back against the Chinese?”
The Dalai Lama looked down, swung his feet just a bit, then looked back up at us and said with a gentle smile, “Well, war is obsolete, you know.”
Then, after a few moments, his face grave, he added, “Of course the mind can rationalize fighting back. . .but the heart, the heart would never understand. Then you would be divided in yourself, the heart and the mind, and the war would be inside you.”
***
“There are moments when I feel like giving up or giving in, but I soon rally again and do my duty as I see it: to keep the spark of life inside me ablaze.”
–Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life
***
“Always there is something worth saying
about glory, about gratitude.”
–Mary Oliver, What Do We Know
***
*Do your little bit of good where you are;
its those little bits of good put together,
that overwhelm the world.
–Desmond Tutu
****
“You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.” –Jeannette Rankin
Gratitude List: 1. Strings of geese like beads across the sky. Fly well, Bright Ones!
2. This microwaveable bag of lavender and beans. It makes me warm and it eases the residual aches.
3. Wise friends
4. Tenderness. Basic kindness.
5. Stories of miracles and wonder.
Following your bliss, as Joseph Campbell put it, doesn’t mean knowing where it might lead. Bliss beckons us every single day. At first, it may come in a small voice, out from under a great heap of rubbish, but it definitely knows your name. It starts with a dream that you may not even remember, and it grows into a déjà -vu, a surge of emotion, an inexplicable familiarity in a stranger’s face. Rather than getting caught up in finding “your purpose,” take the risk to talk to that stranger, follow your feeling and trust your dreams, and before you know it, as Rumi says, “your living pieces will form a harmony.” —Dreamwork with Toko-pa
*
“Wear gratitude like a cloak and it will feed every corner of your life.” —Rumi
*
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
—Annie Dillard
*
“Rabbit’s clever,” said Pooh thoughtfully.
“Yes,” said Piglet. “Rabbit’s clever.”
“And he has Brain.”
“Yes,” said Piglet. “Rabbit has Brain.”
There was a long silence.
“I suppose,” said Pooh, “that that’s why he never understands anything.” —AA Milne
*
“The aspen trees were shaking the sweetest music
out of their leaves.”
—Mary Oliver
*
“Why struggle to open a door between us when the whole wall is an illusion?”
—Rumi
*
“Life is a blank canvas, and you need to throw all the paint on it you can.”
—Danny Kaye
*
“I’m convinced of this: Good done anywhere is good done everywhere. For a change, start by speaking to people rather than walking by them like they’re stones that don’t matter. As long as you’re breathing, it’s never too late to do some good.”
—Maya Angelou
*
“Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.”
—John Muir
*
“I started going for long lone country walks among the spendthrift gold and glory of the year-end, giving myself up to the earth-scents and the sky-winds and all the magic of the countryside which is ordained for the healing of the soul.”
—L.M. Montgomery
Gratitude List: 1. The Holy Moment of telling story, of powerful vulnerability, of the hush of listening, of voices found and reclaimed, of grit and resilience. How our stories bless each other.
2. Blessing the babies. I love the way my church blesses the babies. I think that part of my pastors’ job must be the best job in the world.
3. Spicy Korean noodles for lunch
4. Now we go from golden to orange and red
5. The Water Protectors. Lancaster Against Pipelines. People who stand up, speak up, put themselves on the line.
Mockingbird Chronicles 