Soul friend. Mystic. Minister.

I wholeheartedly devote my life to the teachings of Jesus Christ and the Anglican faith, but have never believed that God stays only in the sanctuary. For many years, I have walked as a spiritual mentor and care provider, tending body, spirit, and community as one. Along the way, I have come to trust what the mystics and the desert mothers and the myrrh-bearing women already knew: that the sacred hides in ordinary matter, waiting for someone to notice.

I haven't always fit in, and I am often reminded of it. To some I am too religious, to others too spiritual.  I like to refer to myself as neuro-mystical. I am deeply imperfect, painfully empathic, and sensitive, and for a long time I tried to contort myself into the shapes others expected that I fit. I have stopped! I have come to know that the places where we don't fit are often where we are being asked to see more.

God's word has always spoken to women through unexpected messengers. An angel meets an unexpected woman and tells her that she will carry a son. The first witnesses to the resurrection were faithful women whom no one expected to believe: Mary Magdalene, called Equal to the Apostles; Phoebe, named deacon in Romans 16; Junia, also described in the book of Romans, as an apostle in her own right. God has never been shy about entrusting sacred truth to unlikely people, in unlikely places.

So I did not think it strange, only fitting, since God speaks to me in many unexpected ways, when I found a necklace in a thrift store bin: (seen in the picture above) , beads of hawk's eye, a stone said to sharpen sight and clarity. At its centre, a magnificent fossilized stone that I was told is a mammoth tooth, a fragment of deep time carried across millennia to arrive, of all places, in my hands. When I place it around my neck, I feel myself as the soul in the middle, not belonging, only being. Just as we all are, held between the ancient and the ethereal, earth and heaven, the enough and not enough, what is rooted and what is rising—the middle space, the contemplative place, the place where I long to be. Nothing is merely material, nothing merely accidental. A five-dollar thrift store find can definitely be a thin place.

This is the spirit of Anamchara: soul friend, an old Celtic word for one who sees you without pretense. My work holds together what others insist on separating: the mystical and the biblical, the earth and the altar, the ancient and the immediate. My friends, you don't have to fit in boxes,  or be tidy or certain of anything. It is enough, you are enough, to come as you are. I have stopped needing permission to hold it all as one, and I would be glad to walk beside you as you do the same.