Sue Monk Kidd: Incubation in Darkness to Easterlngs

Sue Monk Kidd: Incubation in Darkness

Family Zoom

“Today (August 12) is my birthday. It makes me think of the new life I’m incubating and the Birth-day still to come. Today, I’ll talk to myself. I’ll say, ‘Accept life—the places it bleeds and the places it smiles. That’s your most holy and human task. Gather up the pain and the questions and hold them like a child on your lap. Have faith in God, in the movement of your soul. Accept what is. Accept the dark. It’s okay. Just be true.’”—Sue Monk Kidd, “A Journal Entry” in When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life’s Sacred Questions (HarperOne, 1992).

Today, we continue sharing stories from author Sue Monk Kidd. I found two unread copies of her book, When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life’s Sacred Questions, in my home library. When I saw it on the list for my spiritual direction studies at the Haden Institute, I took it as a sign to read it. I still remember the first time I met Sue Monk Kidd. She was on tour for her book The Dance of the Dissident Daughter. I took all my female partners in my medical group and my daughter to hear her. One of my partners cried the entire time and bought several books.

Kidd is as impressive a speaker as she is a writer. She reminds us of Marion Woodman’s writings on creative suffering in the dark. Creative suffering burns clean, unlike neurotic suffering, which produces more soot. Creative suffering “easters” us or transforms us, chooses a new way, owns our shadow, and heals our wounds—as opposed to neurotic or self-pitying suffering, which is untransforming and leads to despair. Kidd continues to tell us that pain may not kill us, but running from it might. 

At a retreat she led at the Kanuga Conference Center, Kidd described a healing exercise in which we placed cut-up scraps of colored paper on the altar, representing wounds and pain from our lives. We then offered them up, turning them over rather than pushing them down or trying to escape them. 

She reminds us that the most significant events in Jesus’ life occurred in darkness: birth, arrest, death, and resurrection. As tiny bits of light emerge in our lives, we begin eastering—much like the lighting of the Paschal candle and the bringing of light into the dark world at the Easter Vigil. This is a powerful image for me, as the deacon often carries the Paschal candle, saying “the light of Christ” three times before singing the Exsultet, giving thanks for the light. The Paschal candle we use is made of natural wax and, for some reason, is always challenging to extinguish! 

Kidd describes how our addictions keep us unaware of what is going on inside and outside us. When I live in my addictions, I deny the harm to my body, soul, and heart that comes from wearing many false selves. Thirty-six years ago, when I was introduced to a twelve-step program, I got my voice back, but dealing with the tensions of all the false selves remains part of my recovery as I try to live the steps. I experience more and more easterings, or resurrections, but it is still hard work. When the true self emerges, there is light and delight in life. Gratitude is what living in the true self brings. God becomes our playmate, and we find our inner child.

Kidd writes about our accelerated, instant, quick “fast-food” society. I remember talking to a ten-year-old about playing chess, and her response was, “It takes too long.”

Kidd also reminds us of our desire for shortcut religion, seeking what Bonhoeffer called cheap grace, “Long on butterflies but short on cocoons.”

I go down to our den this afternoon and find my husband and our almost thirteen-year-old grandson quietly playing chess. I feel hope.

What great tragedies occurred during the pandemic and in our recent tornadoes in Arkansas, but we are also beginning to see Easterings, with neighbors and churches caring for each other, families checking on each other, families getting vaccinated, and a growing recognition of the value of community and of staying healthy together.

Joanna. joannaseibet@me.com 

https://www.joannaseibert.com/

Spiritual Practices and Paths for Difficult Times

 Guest Writer: Jennifer Horne

Spiritual Practices and Paths for Difficult Times

Walking a Pandemic Labyrinth in the Woods

“What we are looking for on earth and in earth and in our lives is the process that can unlock for us the mystery of meaningfulness in our daily lives. … Truly the last place it would ever occur to most of us to find the sacred would be in the commonplace of our everyday lives, and all about us in nature and simple things.”—Alice O. Howell in The Dove in the Stone: Finding the Sacred in the Commonplace.

In March, during the pandemic, we listened to the endless honking of Canadian geese on the lake by our home, the sounds reminding me, in my fear and helplessness, of slowed-down ululations of grief. Sometime in April, when I could no longer stand to watch images of COVID victims on the nightly news, I began doing tai chi in my study between 5:30 and six while my husband watched CBS. 

I’d been practicing tai chi a couple of times a week for the past seventeen years, after taking a class from James Martin, a kind, elegant Vietnam veteran who had learned the practice to soften the demons he’d brought home from the war. James died fifteen years ago, and as I followed the path of the twenty-four poses, beginning, moving through the sequence, and returning to where I started, I felt grateful for the legacy he left, for how he taught us to “take a little journey,” breathe, and let our minds rest as our bodies moved. 

In fall, as darkness closed in and the days grew short and cold, I felt the need for some kind of outdoor movement, something brief but restorative, close by. Our house is nestled in the woods, and I had been wanting to make a labyrinth but didn’t have the right spot. Instead, I made an oval meditation path in the woods off to the side of the house, finding, raking, and marking its circumference, then placing whimsical items along the way, all related to birds: an old birdhouse with a bright orange plastic egg inside, a birdcage with no bottom, and a piece of driftwood shaped like a heron’s head. 

My favorite part is the approximately 2-by-2-foot nest of twigs I made at a bend in the path. As I walked, these things reminded me of how we were “nesting” at home but would be able to “fly farther afield” someday, and the shape of that simple path reminded me that life happens in cycles and circles as well as in linear time. 

Whenever my mind got too busy with pandemic thoughts, I loved going out and walking for as long as I needed to, looking at branches, sky, and ground, so that my inner space came to resemble the outer calm and natural changes I was observing.

Staying home to stay safe from the virus, we weren’t going anywhere, and it felt constraining. Still, on my path, even though I walked in circles, it felt like I was going somewhere—somewhere deeper, more expansive, connected to a greater being, to an out-of-time beyond the current fraught moment.

On the last day of March, I went out to the path after the rain stopped. The woods are greening at time-lapse speed, and the path is sprouting life: wild iris I’d never noticed before, and also the first shoots of the poison ivy that covers the woods in summer. Soon there will be ticks and chiggers and the occasional snake as well.

It’s time to leave the path until next fall, another cycle.

As I do my evening tai chi, repeating the phrase “this day, this light, this moment, this breath” whenever I need to recenter myself, I move toward the woods and then away from the window. I can’t see the path now, but I know it’s there. I imagine that, in times to come, it might remind me that even when I’m stuck, I can still find ways to move forward so that, in walking my own small path, something good can happen.

Jennifer Horne

Recent Poet Laureate of Alabama

Recent books:

 Dodie Walton Horne in Root & Plant & Bloom: Poems by Dodie Walton Horne, edited by Jennifer Horne and Mary Horne, 2020. Jennifer published in 2024, Odyssey of a Wandering Mind: The Strange Tale of Sara Mayfield

and Letters to Little Rock, memories of her father.

Joanna Seibert joannaseibert.com

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The Sacred Labyrinth

The Sacred Labyrinth

Guest Writer Patty Kohler

Praying

“It doesn’t have to be

the blue iris, it could be

weeds in a vacant lot, or a few

small stones; just

pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try

to make them elaborate, this isn’t

a contest, but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which

another voice may speak.”—Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver’s simple poetry resonates with my soul for its very simplicity. This verse recalls the circuits of a labyrinth, often made of a few small stones, evoking silence. It beckons the walker through a liminal doorway into another world composed of gratitude and thanksgiving, surrounded by the sweet music of silence. In this in-between state, my monkey mind chatter falls away; each thought drops from my consciousness, landing softly in the earth’s receptive arms.

The labyrinth pathway is designed to offer a place to pause at its entrance and begin a slow release of everything that competes for our full attention. Stepping in, we let go of what happened earlier in the day, what is running through our heads, and even what might be coming up in the next few hours. For now, we will begin the slow walk, leading only to the center. 

The path may veer toward the middle or loop toward the labyrinth's outskirts. Still, it gently leads us to the middle, allowing us to set aside, at least temporarily, all those ideas, worries, and concerns that plague our minds. With a quiet mind and shuffling feet, we walk the circuitous route around and around, turning at unexpected places into the waiting center. 

Thus emptied, when we reach the center, we stand, sit, or gaze around at the path that has led us here. In this spot, we open ourselves to receive whatever Spirit has to offer. We soak it in, gratefully gather Love, Peace, and Life, and receive with gratitude. Here, we remain as long as we are led, soaking it in and filling us up silently. 

As we prepare to leave the labyrinth’s center, we retrace our steps and gradually unwind our way back to the entrance. We reflect, sometimes with awe and wonder, on what we have received. We return in silence, knowing that somehow this brief pilgrimage has changed us in a subtle way. 

Again, as we contemplate and return, we may walk nearer the center or the edge. The labyrinth, an ancient symbol of unity and wholeness, has fed us, and we are ready to step out and return to our lives and the world. 

Excerpt from In Circles

“Everywhere and ancient the circle

is repeated, shaping us to its original wisdom.

Give us each day our daily hunger,

to be more than we are now,

to be less solitary selves doubting our place,

to be more a circle of connection and acceptance,

spherical harmony of the heavens.

Each one a single voice, a sacred story,

but always in the larger circle of meaning and mystery.”—Gary Boelhower

labyrinth. Heber Springs St. Francis Episcopal Church

World Labyrinth Day this year is on May 2, 2026. It is always the first Saturday in May. It is still not too late to honor others around the world who will be walking the labyrinth with you. To find a labyrinth near you, go to https://labyrinthlocator.com/

Patty Kohler, Ed.D.

Advanced Labyrinth Facilitator

“Now, if I hear the sound of the genuine in me, and if you hear the sound of the genuine in you, it is possible for me to go down in me and come up in you. So that when I look at myself through your eyes, having made that pilgrimage, I see in me what you see in me, and the wall that separates and divides will disappear, and we will become one because the sound of the genuine makes the same music.”   Howard Thurman

Joanna Seibert joannaseibert.com