Category Archives: Fran’s reflections

Definitions

  •  Spiritual Direction
    “Our work calls people to their own holiness”.  (Spiritual Directors InternationaI statement)

           I do Spiritual Guidance in following contexts and cultures:

Young Adults/Youth

Couples/families

Divorced/Widowed

Gay/Lesbian/Bi/Trans/Queer/Questioning

Retiring from work/career

Elderly/Mature Adults

Grieving/Dying/Sick

  • Spiritual Guide

    A spiritual guide is not a judge.  A spiritual guide is a companion, a man or woman who sees our potential, and holds a gaze of shelter and belonging.  At times it a  fierce gaze, in other moments, we see tenderness, compassion, humility.  Our story is valuable, and speaking your truth gives voice to angst and ability.  Please risk trusting your spiritual director, trust your own gut and intuition, and remember, we only move as swiftly as the slowest part of ourselves.   Thus whether it takes months or years to fully share and integrate our story, life invitations and experience, all is well in the fullness of time.  Transparency, risk and seeking to create your authenticity.    –Spiritual Directors International

  • Ministry is
    a quality of relationship between and among
    human beings
    that beckons forth hidden possibilities;
    inviting people into deeper, more constant
    more reverent relationship with the world
    and with one another;
    carrying forward a long heritage of hope and
    liberation that has dignified and informed
    the human venture over many centuries;
    being present with, to, and for others
    in their terrors and torments
    in their grief, misery and pain;
    knowing that those feelings
    are our feelings, too;
    celebrating the triumphs of the human spirit,
    the miracles of birth and life,
    the wonders of devotion and sacrifice;
    witnessing to life-enhancing values;
    speaking truth to power; 
    speaking for human dignity and equity,
    for compassion and aspiration;
    believing in life in the presence of death;
    struggling for human responsibility
    against principalities and structures
    that ignore humaneness and become instruments of death.It is all these and much, much more than all of them,
    present in
    the wordless,
    the unspoken,
    the ineffable.It is speaking and living the highest we know
    and living with the knowledge that it is
    never as deep, or as wide or a high as we wish.

    Whenever there is a meeting that summons us to our better selves, wherever our lostness is found,
    our fragments are united,
    our wounds begin healing,
    our spines stiffen and
    our muscles grow strong for the task,
    there is ministry.
                 – Rev. Gordon McKeeman, Unitarian Unversalist Minister

Love After Love

The time will come

when, with elation,

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror,

and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

 and say, sit here.  Eat.

You will love again

the stranger who was yourself.

Give wine.  Give bread. Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all of your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

 Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit.  Feast on your life.

-Derek Walcott

A Year to Remember: mental and physical health

“Sustaining an exercise routine for a fulll year can strengthen your body and your mind, according to new research.  The study has implications for reducing the risk of dementia.

A team of researchers from several U.S. universities have found that moderate physical exercise can increase the size of the brain’s hippocampus in older adults .  (The hippocampus is involved in all facets of memory formation.)  The scientists recruited 120 sedentary adults with no signs of dementia and placed them in two groups of equal size.  One group began walking for 40 minutes a day, three times a week.  The second group limited its exercise to a stretching and ongoing routine.  The walking group showed improved memory function, which was associated with an increase in the size of the hippocampus, a region of the brain that generally shrinks as we age.

Measurement of the left and right hippocampus showed increases of about 2 percent in the walking group.  The stretching group saw a small reduction in the size of the hippocampus.”

– source:  “Exercise Training Increases Size of Hippocampus and Improves Memory” by K. I Erickson, et. al.  PNAS. 1/31/11

 

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My mother died of Multi-infract Dementia at age 83 having been slowly incapacitated for the previous 10 years.  She neither exercised at all nor consistently took her high blood pressure medicine.  My father died at 89 1/2 years old from complications of Diabetes.