You are the ceremony

What it means to be a living sacrifice

Me sitting at my dining room table. Captured by Mary Claire Photo.

When we slow down enough, we remember who we are.

We are able to piece together the quiet threads of our longing and wonder.

We are able to tend to aches and disappointments.

We are able to ask better questions and listen for deeper answers.

We’re able to practice stillness.

There is the slowness we choose through rhythm and ritual. There is the slowness that chooses us by way of discomfort, pain, or the changes of life.

The invitation, always, is to pay attention.

To let the still, small voices speak and shape your life.

A More Beautiful Way is an orientation. It’s a posture towards the world, towards your enemies, towards your neighbors, towards yourself—centered on healing, rooted and established in reverential acts of stewardship and love.

I’ve been writing about these themes on A More Beautiful Way for almost one year. When I set out to start this project, the weekly writing commitment was mostly about me, in that I wanted to prove to myself that I could show up to my writing consistently, every week, for one year. To say I’m proud of myself is understatement. I’m proud. I’m hopeful. I’m becoming.

Recently, I heard one of my favorite teachers, a healer named Ki Meishon, say, “I am the ceremony.” Everything in me said yes.

We study our scriptures and say our prayers. We light our candles and pour libations for our ancestors. Some of us pull our cards and others of us dance under the moon. We honor the Sacred arts of parenting, of gardening, of laboring for justice. We move out about in the world. We shape our places as they shape us. We dwell in mutuality, even if the forces that be insist on our forgetting just how much we truly belong to one another.

We are the ceremony. You and me. Our lives are the altar. This isn’t meant to apply pressure. It’s meant to serve as a reminder of how significant you are. Your choices have meaning. Your words have power. Your stewardship of resources, relationships, and responsibilities is holy work. This is an invitation to not take yourself for granted.

One of my favorite passages from my tradition’s sacred text is written in Paul’s letter to the Romans, where he writes, “…I urge you, dear siblings, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, set apart and pleasing to the Holy One—this is your true and wholehearted worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what the Spirit’s will is—her good, pleasing and perfect will.”

Becoming a “living sacrifice” may sound like a harsh and challenging request. And I suppose, in some ways, it is. I am learning this in real time as I grow through an initiation and consecration of my own in preparation for the sacred work of spiritual direction and breathwork facilitation. However, it’s important to know that “sacrifice”, etymologically, comes from the latin roots of sacer, meaning “sacred” and facere, meaning “to make, to do.”

Sacrifice can be said to mean, “…a making sacred.”

To be a “living sacrifice” could be said to mean: make your life sacred.

Become the ceremony. Be a dwelling place for the Divine.

This type of soul care and spiritual vitality is just as important as ever. The technological advancements of modern life tend to make us think that the solutions we need are also technological in nature. We think that if we can understand a problem, then we can surely fix it. This is post-enlightenment malarky in my opinion. I couldn’t disagree more. We need soul care as we move through depression and anxiety. We need emotional health and maturity to grapple with the political divisiveness of our time. We need spiritual grit and discernment to unlearn our tendency to dehumanize the people we believe to be our enemies.

Sometimes when I step back to process the news or to think more deeply about the racial and political landscape, I am overcome with despair. In so many ways, it’s like we’re our own worst enemy, collectively hellbent on destruction and wholly unwilling to bend, to compromise, to soften towards possibilities of a shared future. I lament this. I feel powerless in the face of it. I try to ignore it from time-to-time, sticking my head in the sand and stewarding my little home place as best I can. But you can only hide from reality for so long. You can only pretend for so long.

Where do we find hope? In the practice of a more beautiful way—even as violence is celebrated and the world burns—reminded that this practice is centered on healing, and is rooted and established in reverential acts of stewardship and love.

Next week marks one full year of A More Beautiful Way, the blog and podcast. I’m looking forward to announcing a new structure, pointing back to some of my favorite and most popular posts, and to inviting you into a new phase of our work.

Until then, be well and stay soft.

Much love,

Bethaney

PS-Thank you and welcome to all of the new and newly paying subscribers to this publication. I can’t believe that hundreds of people have opted-in to this body of work, and that many of you believe enough in me and this project to pay for it each month. Thank you from the tip of of my fountain pen and the bottom of my heart.