Life be Lifing...Love Anyway

Greetings lovely one,

I was debating on whether I’d take a Q4 hiatus from all digital media, but decided on at least showing up here if I had the capacity — and it does, as I finally have a real day off. But more than that, I had the emotional capacity. This month has been a “when it rains it pours” kind of month. I started it with a hospitalization … by day four I was discharged. This month we celebrated my grandmother who, as some of you know, passed on from this life around Thanksgiving last year, so it’s not been a year yet, and I’m still missing her like crazy … and a whole flurry of not-so-great news for those of us in gov’t grant-funded positions (like yours truly). And that’s only the tip of the iceberg. It’s been rough, ya’ll.

And yet still … in small gestures of kindness, in smiling faces, in doctors and nurses who are overworked, but still caring, in funny meme texts, in vegan chocolate mousse desserts with friends, in someone holding the door open to say “I see you” … I feel the Lord’s loving Presence even as I wonder where the heck is the Lord in all this mess.

In the middle of October, I hosted my second annual Transformative Love Retreat. Just like last year, I pivoted the retreat so that I could make it work given the circumstances. I find I have an ideal in my head that’s pounced upon when reality comes in like a lion. It’s a mighty force of change and, sometimes, it turns out for the better and sometimes much worse … for a time.

The reality of the state of affairs was something I could not separate from a retreat about a love that transforms. And so the retreat focused on only one learnscape, “Love is as Love does,” which comes from M. Scott Peck’s description of love:

“Love is the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth … love is not effortless. To the contrary, love is effortful … love is as love does. Love is an act of will — namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.”

From there we engaged in forms of poetry therapy and expressive arts getting tangled in our web of connections to ourselves, to one another, and to our Holy One.

We started with the poem “The Guest House” by Rumi and worked our way to the poem “Child of the Americas” by Aurora Levins Morales. As we all happened to be Christian women religious we sat with and contemplated Bible verses like: Zechariah 7:9-10, Matthew 25:35, and Romans 13:10 to name a few. We wrestled with what “love does” meant in times like these. What choosing love meant to our work, our ministries, our daily interactions in life and on the socials that seem to be more and more saturated with AI and “us versus them.”

It is something I believe we have to continue to wrestle with, and live while contemplating the questions that emerge from it. A love that heals, a love that does justice is a love that is very effortful. It requires work. And I have found myself quite exhausted and full of grief this year — this is why I never skip out on the quiet moments to rest and refuel.

But there is definitely still an emphasis on self-love present in Luke 10:27. How can you love neighbor as self if you don’t love self? If you hate yourself … if you’re miserable, entitled, bitter about yourself, how can you love? How can you be loving of God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind … if you are greedy, vengeful; believe your life doesn’t feel great if other lives aren’t suffering and afflicted with pain; if you feel everything is a competition; that righting wrongs must be an act of war; that happiness and joy comes only by fantasizing the humiliation and life loss of fellow humans; by pretending that we are not fellow humans; by convincing yourself that we are not all created by the one God claimed to be believed in by 83% of U.S. adults.

“Love is an act of will … both an intention and an action. … We choose to love.”

I’ve been choosing to nurture the self-care branch of my self-love tree. A hospital stay and bills I cannot afford made self-care hard to ignore. Even in the hospital, and in pain … I chose to advocate for myself, I chose to be vulnerable and ask my housemates for help, I chose to be kind and empathetic to the care team assigned to me, I chose not to hide my faith and trust and love of God.

Honestly, the way this year has been — rough tides of change and a couple of wipe outs — I wanted to be a participant at my own retreat! So, I’m grateful that I learned/am still learning and have striven to model a co-leadership/co-teacher style of leadership, because I believe in shared wisdom, that love can spread and heal and transform, because we all are our own medicine so we each bring that to the table of collaboration, because there is that of Divine Light in each of us … it’s up to us to let that Light shine, today, tomorrow, and always.

Peace, Love, and Wellness,

Your Sister Friend Lynette

(More formally, Sister Lynette Davis, SFCC, but feel free to call me Lyn)

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JOIN US: Join me and Quaker Public Minister, Windy Cooler for an evening of story, reflection, and hope. Come as you are—whether your grief feels close at hand or long carried, there is space for you here.

AVAILABLE NOW: I’m a contributing writer to the latest edition of “Illuminate” — the only Bible study curriculum written by Friends (Quakers). Faith groups and communities all over the U.S. and some in other countries will be using this study guide in September, October, and November. So can you! Purchase a print or digital copy of Illuminate here.

AVAILABLE NOW: A while back, I was deeply honored to be invited to include my essay “All In” in an anthology of writings from the Quaker journal What Canst Thou Say. The book, titled “God’s Grace: Comforting, Guiding Supporting,” is a collection of essays about mysticism and mystical experiences, and I’m sure you’ll find many wonderful pieces to enjoy. Grab your copy today.

COMMUNITY MEMBER KUDOS:

Listen to Love Agent, Dr. Jessica’s new podcast for a shadowy tour through the nonprofit underworld as she conjures short stories from the haunted halls of community work – where good intentions go to get gaslit and overworked. Each episode unearths a deliciously dramatic short story inspired by the real-life absurdities of doing good in a broken system.

Do you have something coming up that you’d like me to share next month (a new creative work, a new service or program, looking to hire for a new position, etc.)? Email me so I can give you Kudos. First come, first featured. (This opportunity is for email and irl community members only.)

I’m not sure if I ever told you that I had a hard time calling myself a writer. It was in fact a Twitter influencer in the nonprofit world who encouraged me to claim the title…so I resonate with Jacinta’s Substack letter: What if I told you I’m not “a writer”?

Unlike Emily, I do not like horror films and don’t watch ‘em, but I have heard that scary movies reveal and reflect the cultural fears we collectively grapple with. Well, money is a common source of anxiety (especially as many of us grapple with financial and food insecurity) so she shares how some of the scariest specters in spooky movies represent our financial worries.

I’ve also been doing my best to listen for God and find some hope in a time of “heaviness”, so I appreciated this list of reading suggestions that affirmed the prayer life and nurtured the hope of theologian, Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes

ok, so this was actually my muse last month, but I never finished that draft and incorporated some of what I had written into this post —enjoy!

My take? I loved this movie as a kid because this was my favorite game to play back then. (Btw, I haven’t gamed since high school, unless you count a very brief run of The Sims in college.) It was soooo bad that it was good! Haha! But I thought Raul Julia did a fantastic job playing Bison! What say you?