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A Companionable Way
Path of Devotion in Conscious Love
Lisa M. Hess
A COMPANIONABLE WAY
Path of Devotion in Conscious Love
Copyright © 2016 Lisa M. Hess. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Cascade Books
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
www.wipfandstock.com
paperback isbn: 978-1-4982-3736-9
hardcover isbn: 978-1-4982-3738-3
ebook isbn: 978-1-4982-3737-6
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Hess, Lisa M.
A companionable way : path of devotion in conscious love / Lisa M. Hess.
Description: Eugene, OR : Cascade Books, 2016 | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: isbn 978-1-4982-3736-9 (paperback) | isbn 978-1-4982-3738-3 (hardcover) | isbn 978-1-4982-3737-6 (ebook)
Subjects: LSCH: Religions—Relations. | Christianity and other religions. | Dialogue—Religious aspects. | Theology of religions (Christian theology).
Classification: BR127 .H48 2016 (paperback) | BR127 .H48 (ebook)
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
Dedicated to
the motherline I can name,
seven generations are we:
Martha Engle, Elizabeth Brenner,
Catherine Newcomer, Elizabeth N. Musser,
Ruth Berger, Carol Virginia—
and
Mary Pierce Brosmer,
whose vision, passion, and willing woundedness
have restored so many of us.
Preface (How to Read this Book)
This is a book for conscious loving in divisive times, which means it cannot be read from start to finish, nor should it be read quickly. It invites you into a spiraling journey of holy desire and sacred work, therefore in the nonlinear, episodic fashion you determine. This is an adventure only you can choose, then choose to stay with when its demands confront you. You may uncover your deepest Self, your own deepest wisdom within the Wisdom of ages crafted specifically within you. I found the way here when I became responsible for developing a master’s level course on “interreligious and intercultural encounter,” which ultimately offered fruit I had neither anticipated nor sought. From here emerges good work worth doing in a world hungry for it. Healthy relationships seed and blossom here with others whose lives also open to unexpected invitation. I have Christian language for this, as that is my home tradition, but these pages emerge from significant encounters with strangers and spirit-friends in other historic traditions and no tradition at all. Conscious loving in divisive times requires a disruptive, potentially peaceable awakening in each of us toward the blessed assurance that comes when living into rigorous abundance able to hold the suffering of self and others.
A Companionable Way resisted straightforward prose for nearly four years before becoming this collection of stories and reflections, experienced with spirit-friends across differences of many kinds. As a theological scholar, I had attempted to place this unfolding journey of devotion into the academic learning/teaching genre. There I would state the problem and survey the field, honoring the resources received to address the problem and even solve it. I would have woven the voices together in a tight, analytical argument to persuade your mind and heart of the significance of the problem and the innovation of the solution. I became full professor in a freestanding Christian seminary by doing just that kind of work. Then I read Judith Duerk’s Circle of Stones, an invitational, interactive, and intuitive book exploring inner/outer transformation in a nonlinear, even spiraling journey fashion. As obvious as it may be to some of us, my theology-professor heart finally got it, at least for this work. Inviting an interactive, intuitive journey into devotion in conscious love requires invitational, intuitive, and interactive language, be it poetry, prose, or somewhere in between. My years-long struggle was with genre more than content, how to share with integrity what I have received more than what the words might be.
True to our divisive times, you have a decision to make in how you proceed. If you identify within a historic wisdom tradition, particularly an institutionally mainline and/or more hierarchical or intellectually expressed Western/European one (those strands of Protestant or Catholic Christianity, Mormon, secularist, etc.), then I invite you to read slowly, but as traditional custom dictates: from the front to the back, linear order. An introduction outlines the conceptual intentions of the work, and you can begin to listen to your own voice and experience amidst the “yearnings” and “habits of minds” that drive and divide our world into many worlds, often at odds with one another. You can decide whether you want to focus on the more interpretive chapters or whether you have the patience to enter into various stories of encounter for what might arise in you in more inarticulate or intuitive response, underneath or before the interpretive language offered.
If you are more a seeker, by which I mean you find your center and energies grounded in a more fluid, nonlinear, secular feel of equanimity, then I invite you to begin with the last chapter, “Circle.” With that as foundation, you may then receive the encounter stories, refrains, and interpretive writings in a fashion well suited to your own proclivities and habits of mind. Your gift has already been finding grounding “out there,” bringing it to the wholes in your life from the ground “up.” You might read the sections in reverse order, from “Circle” back toward the table of contents, or choose whatever order attracts you. In either case, the text offers you choice in how to best receive what is offered in good will, with open-hearted intention. A nonlinear journey needs to be open from multiple vantage points, so this text lives into that reality.
What I am attempting to share beckons from opposite directions, after all—establishment and “out there,” tradition and no tradition at all—as well as the numerous places “in between.” No matter how you self-identify, we may all meet metaphorically and energetically in the central teaching of the book, which is devotion. Devotion is the word that found me for the embodied receiving/awakening to the Holy that unifies without power, loves without attachment, opens without expectation of return. At least as much as each of us can withstand the Holy, its river of devotion, and the invitation to practice this in body. Devotion is the single-point flow out of which unity and interdependence can actually be sensed and seen. Devotion lives within an embodied heart more than intellect as conceived today. From this place, all discourse about encounter, about interreligious-intercultural learning, begins in earnest toward peaceable awakening and an
