A Companionable Way: Path of Devotion in Conscious Love

by Lisa M. Hess

Overview

In today's polarized publics, we are rarely prepared to encounter one another peaceably and deeply across irreconcilable difference. A Companionable Way invites inquisitive minds, body-souls, and spiritual hearts into the delightful but demanding inner work required for peaceable encounters with integrity across interreligious and intercultural difference. Unmet yearnings and the unconscious refusal of deep feeling in so many of our cultures need redress, not only within scholarly-analytical habits of mind but also in aging communal "containers" not adept at holding deep feeling without harm. Ancient but 'new' containers today--webs of spiritual friendship and circle-way communities of practice--offer hope for new learning and formative encounters with difference toward an expressive delight able to companion the suffering of self and others. Part memoir of a deep-feeling academic, part toolbox for the curiously contemplative, A Companionable Way witnesses to the deeply rooted Sacred available to each of us in a return to the body, devotion in conscious love, and new ways of being human together across irreconcilable difference, held gently in a patient and living wisdom particular to each but needed by all.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781498237376
Publisher:	Wipf & Stock Publishers
Publication date:	09/16/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	156
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Lisa M. Hess is Professor of Practical Theology at United Seminary (Ohio) and a graduate of the 2013 Conscious Feminine Leadership Academy with Women Writing for (a) Change. Author of Artisanal Theology and Learning in a Musical Key, she is a companion, contemplative, scholar, poet, and teaching-elder (PCUSA) who serves the common good as an active leader in traditional and nontraditional communities of practice.
Lisa M. Hess is Professor of Practical Theology at United Seminary (Ohio) and a graduate of the 2013 Conscious Feminine Leadership Academy with Women Writing for (a) Change. Author of Artisanal Theology and Learning in a Musical Key, she is a companion, contemplative, scholar, poet, and teaching-elder (PCUSA) who serves the common good as an active leader in traditional and nontraditional communities of practice.

Table of Contents

Preface (How to Read this Book) ix

Acknowledgments xiii

In Search of… 1

Introduction 2

Grounding in Exile 20

Desire 25

Deep Roots in Difference 33

Liturgical Hospitality 38

Belief amidst Nontheism and Other 46

Path of Conscious Love 51

Fidelity in the Pear of Betrayal 65

Devotion 70

Befriending Outsiders 78

Seeing With the Heart 83

Rebirthing 93

Awakening 97

Deepening-Into the Dark of Initiation 103

A New-Old Sacred 107

Circle 115

Conclusion 133

Bibliography 139