a glimpse into what this book is not will help make it more comprehensible in the words we do have. This is not a book on interfaith dialogue or world religions. A Companionable Way, as intended here, offers stories, a rhythmic framework, and some commentary on practices suitable for deepening interpersonal encounters across differences of all kinds. It’s not “interfaith dialogue” as traditionally conceived, though those efforts have borne much fruit in what arises here. Dialogue, in the popular mind at least, prioritizes expertise and language, no matter how attentive we may try to be to relationships first, heart-connection first. Focusing on themes or issues may aid understanding, but those also may distract from sensing the incontrovertible sacred in an “other” you are trying to understand, at some distance from yourself. It almost presupposes that for fidelity’s sake, you will choose your “tradition” over another human being, over another life. The dialectics of discourse require either/or choices at almost every turn. A companionable way is more interested in the wordless, the implicit, the structural, the choiceless choices of the numinous become present, the claims on your life interconnected with others in the face of conceived and perceived traditions.
Also in some contrast, discourses on “world religions” presume an abstraction between doing and being, person and practice, which is a conceptual device useful for its purposes, as far as they go. The split is not useful here, however. Learning about a religion, even when facts and holidays and histories are intellectually conceived, keeps you at some distance from yourself, from an “other.” Companionship is not “learning about” but “learning with.” “World religions” feels a bit like the old-school museum, with dead things pinned to velvet cushions for voyeurs to gaze upon, in abstraction and isolation. At best, we come away with the presumption that “they” (Islam, say, as some “force out there”) or “we” know something, without ever having to encounter ourselves already in relation, which we are—energetically, spiritually, emotionally—whether we want to be awake to it or not.
A companionable way is a stumbling attempt to live first from interdependence amidst irreconcilable difference, to see with the heart first from connection and presumed good will. Stumbling may be the most important word there, because there is no way to “get this right” or encounter without “mistakes.” Beginning with interdependence requires difficult inner work to encounter our own deeply embodied traditions or habits of mind, laden in the subconscious and unconscious, shaping everything we perceive about something “out there.” This inner work is important because without it we may become inoculated against even a remote curiosity about centuries-long wisdom traditions from all over the globe—traditions that could contribute to global healing and relief of suffering, were they encountered in a more suitable fashion of exploration, humility, and discovery. At best, with the presumed good will and intention for inner work, living from interdependence becomes a practice, which may allow us to discover ourselves becoming more deeply devoted to others we’ve just met, strangers become companions.
Lastly, while I am a scholar within a particular academic discipline, the form of my reflections here will not be one of traditional, analytical argument within my discipline. Because primarily relational learning begins and ends in deep feeling, the traditional scholarly resources and genre of discourse available today are simply inadequate to my purpose. I think it’s fair to say most scholars do not appear to be the most emotionally savvy of us all. We can be the worst offenders of projection and transference. We may actually get socially penalized in our profession for overt emotional displays, except perhaps cognitive aggression. So we devote our lives to increasingly refined points of textual inquiry—what some have joked about as “learning more and more about less and less.” We may be driven by something deep within us, often incomprehensible to others, sometimes inaccessible even to us. Instead of delving within, we focus our work beyond—which can be useful, of course . . . until it’s not. Myself, I have found the rising awareness about—and in—deep feeling to be one of the most destabilizing learnings in my decades of scholarship. Better to pour that drive outside into rigorous scholarship than face it within, I thought. But then . . .
I was found and welcomed into an ancient-new, strong “container” in which to see and be seen, listen and be heard underneath and beyond all my words: a circle. Circle-way communities of practice, new configurations of power and speech, practices of psychological holding and being held while the deeper inner work of self-transfiguration happened . . . “Love” blossomed in ways and with companions it wasn’t expected or anticipated to be. “Church” happened within and then beyond traditional church walls, in communities of practice and holy intention. “Body” became a site of revelation, knowledge, and wisdom trumping all professions of gospel and law. “Knowledge” grew from seeds and in dimensions previously suspect and considered insignificant. “Family” expanded beyond bloodlines, with predictable backlash from blood-family. And “God” blew out of every box previously conceived or about to be conceived. And what was the ancient-new, strong container in each of these companionships, the holding spaces in which each attends to his/her own inner work and all co-create the sacred space within which to listen, lament, celebrate, and heal self and world? A circle space, womblike and holding, practiced and deepened by both women and men in holy intention. The final chapter of this text lands on precisely what this means and how the form holds all it does.
A Companionable Way Emerges . . .
This is an invitation arising from both the privilege of establishment and the painful gifts of exile. Its pathway to abundance and assurance within me emerged from a stable early family life, steeped in congregational Presbyterian Christianity. Hard work and good fortune have offered me a successful professional life, begun in the liberal arts before being drawn into “higher” theological education, and a blessed marriage to a handsome and tenaciously loyal man. Of course, he is now inevitably torn, perhaps even irretrievably, between his own sacred calling to “his church” and companioning the obstreperous, no less sacred calling of his wife whose “faith community” overflows our one, shared root-tradition. Dear souls . . . This unwieldy life continually disrupts certainties, which is understandably difficult.
Imagine our mutual surprise when the first year of his congregational calling ejected me into exile, a nameless space outside of our previously shared, sacred work. I landed again and again in spaces not immediately or obviously assured of sacred intention, at least as we had been trained to conceive of it. Over months, then years, I landed and grew to trust this Holy more and more deeply in a web of companionships of practice and observance, including Tibetan Buddhists, Jews of Conservative, Modern Orthodox, and Hasidic hue, practitioners of earth-centered spirituality (and those faithful to One they call Goddess), atheists, “nones,” and more. Without expectation or conscious intention for it, in these ways and spaces, persons and places, I discovered a depth of devotion to Jesus as Risen Lord as I traveled with and was nourished by those outside my tradition. The felt sense of this Jesus in the power of the Spirit still overwhelms me today. The felt sense and multiple-tradition receivings of it, however, mean mono-traditional language could never adequately describe it. Solely Christian-communal terms are simply insufficient. In an odd, counterintuitive conviction, I grew to trust Jesus so thoroughly to show up “on the other side” that I learned “He” was always there, the Christ-within Who needs no name within wordless devotion.
So what is a woman of faith to do when she senses the sacred, the Holy One, outside of her community’s “boxes,” more often outside her community of faith where she is Led than within its previous bounds or language? Leave church?3 Contrary to any expectation of leaving, all this led to unexpected leadership—elected roles in church and liturgical-curricular leadership in seminary and guild contexts of higher theological education. As each invitation to lead arrived, I discerned them with my multiply-traditional “community of faith,” which had fewer Christians in it by that time. All of us knew leadership was the path to share what I was learning from the peripheries, at the intersections, back into “the center” of my own Christian communion. I accepted the invitations, confirmed mostly by “outsiders.” Still, all along, a sense of dissonance grew—fears of disloyalty,
