Homily: Off-Script

Off-Script: Living the Stages You Choose
Homily for October 4

Jaques has it all worked out. "All the world's a stage," he says, "and all the men and women merely players." Then come the seven ages: infant mewling, whining schoolboy, sighing lover, quarrelsome soldier, well-fed justice, the lean and slippered pantaloon, and at last "second childishness and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything."

It's a tidy speech. It's also a script. And notice who's talking: Jaques, the melancholy one, who finds a sermon in everything and joy in almost nothing. He watches life from the edge of the stage and mistakes the watching for wisdom. He has decided how your play goes before you've spoken a line.

Most of us were handed a script like his before we could read it. Crawl, walk, talk, right on schedule. School, then more school. A career by this age, a partner by that one, children in the window between, a house, a peak, a retirement, and then the long slippered decline Jaques promises. We call these "milestones," as though they were carved in stone by the road, and not painted there, recently, by someone with an interest in where we're headed.

Whose clock?

Sociologists have a name for the thing pressing on you when you feel behind: the social clock. Bernice Neugarten described it sixty years ago: the shared, mostly invisible sense of what we ought to have done by now, and the low hum of anxiety when our own life runs early or late. Erik Erikson gave us eight tidy stages, each with a task to master before we're allowed up to the next. These aren't lies. They describe something real about how many lives unfold. But they were written in a particular time and place, by a culture that pictures a life as a staircase, always climbing, and old age as the top step before the fall.

That ladder is one culture's drawing of a life. It is not the only one, and it is not the truth. Other ways of perceiving hold time as a circle, a spiral, a web of relationships rather than a stairway of achievements. And the moment you notice the ladder is a drawing, something loosens. You can step off the stairs.

The unruly ones

We love our unruly elders. The raging granny with a protest sign. The woman in the red hat that doesn't suit her, delighted that it doesn't. The reclaimed crone. The curmudgeon who has run clean out of patience for nonsense. The elder who cries at anything tender. We love them because they've stopped performing. They say the true thing, wear the loud thing, rest when they're tired, love how they love, and ask no one's permission.

Here's what's easy to miss: almost none of them arrived there by accident. Jenny Joseph's famous poem, the one that gave the Red Hat Society its purple and red, isn't really about being old. Its line, at the very end, is that perhaps she'd better practice being outrageous now, so the people who know her aren't too shocked when she's suddenly old and does it for real. The unruly elder is a rehearsed role. Freedom is a muscle. It is built early, it is built now.

Off-script is not no script

Let me level with you, because this real talk, not a pep talk. Going off-script is neither free nor simple. Some of us cannot just dance off the ladder. Bodies, money, the care of children or parents, real obligations, real danger for those whose very existence is already treated as "out of order." "Just live authentically" is easy to say from a comfortable seat.

So I'm not asking you to burn the script. I'm asking a gentler thing: to notice that you are holding one, to notice whose handwriting it's in, and to take up the pen where you can. Off-script doesn't mean chaos. It means authorship: the difference between a life that merely happens to you on someone else's timeline and one you are, even a little, consenting to. You are the sacred steward of your own experience. That is as true of your calendar as of your prayers.

What are you rehearsing?

So this is not, in the end, a homily about honoring old people, though we should. It isn't only for those with grey in their hair. Every one of us here, at whatever age, is aging right now, rehearsing (on purpose or by accident) the person we are becoming. The twenty-year-old and the eighty-year-old are in the same play. The only question is whether you stick to the script.

So I leave you with the question the unruly elder answers with their whole body: what freedom are you practicing today? What small "no," what postponed delight, what unruliness or tenderness will you try on now, not when you're finally old enough, not before you're too old, but today, off-script, on no one's clock but your own?

Jaques was wrong about the most important thing. We are not merely players. We can pick up the pen. Not all of us can rewrite the whole page, and some of us are carrying more than any one person should have to hold. But wherever your hand is free, even a little, the pen is yours. Pick it up where you can.

Grounding: Going Off Script

Grounding

Prepared for “OffScript” spiritual feast on 10/04/26
For the reader: Speak slowly and warmly. Let the pauses be longer than feels comfortable. Trust the silence. Roughly 6 minutes.

Everything here is an invitation. Take up only what serves you, and let the rest go by. You are the sacred steward of your own experience.

So, let's arrive. Just as you are. At whatever age you are today, in whatever mood came with you. Nothing to reach for. Nowhere further along to be.

[pause]

Let yourself be held. By the chair, the floor, the air, this moment. If it's easy, let your eyes close. If it isn't, let them rest soft on something near.

[pause]

Somewhere in you, breath is moving. It has never once asked whether you were on time.

And underneath it, a heartbeat, steady through every deadline you've ever been handed, every milestone you met early, or late, or not at all. It kept its own time the whole way.

If it feels welcome, you might bring a hand to rest over your heart, and simply let that steady timekeeper be met.

[longer pause]

There is a part of you like that. Older than any schedule. It was there before you were told to hurry and grow up. There's a part of you like that. Younger than any schedule. It will be there long after someone decides you're too old for this or that. You don't have to find it. Just let it be near.

[pause]

And if there's a timeline you've been carrying... a story about... "by now I should have", the story that... "it's too late", the story... "I'm too old"... you don't have to argue with it right now. You might just set the timeline down for a moment. Right here on the floor beside you. Let one slow breath out, and set the timeline down on the exhale. It'll keep. You can pick it back up later, if you still want it.

[longer pause]

Rest in what's left when you put it down.

[pause]

And if anything grows heavy, come back to the simple things: the breath, the weight of you right where you are, the ground that's holding all of it. You are held.

[pause]

Somewhere ahead of you there's a version of you who has stopped apologizing. Who says the true thing, wears the bright thing, rests when tired, loves how they love. You don't have to become them today. You might just let them wave to you from up ahead.

[pause]

And just for a moment, you might let a little of their freedom be yours. Not someday. Now. A small loosening somewhere. The shoulders dropping an inch. A quiet yes, or a quieter no. One true thing, tried on in the body, the way you try a key you half expect to fit.

[longer pause]

However that landed, or didn't, is alright. You tried on a garment on and you can try it on again, or leave it where it is. You tasted this flavor of nourishment. Nothing more is asked of you.

[pause]

When you're ready, no hurry, come gently back. To your body, your breath, this room. To the others gathered here, each of us aging, right now, toward a self we haven't yet met.

Welcome. You're here. That's enough.

Held in a Community of Accountability: Sacred Tending and Supervision

Held in a Community of Accountability: Supervision, Consultation, and Peer Support

 "Perhaps the secret of living well is not in having all the answers but in pursuing unanswerable questions in good company."

– Rachel Naomi Remen 

The word "supervision" can mean many things. In casual use it can name almost anything, from a rigorous reflective relationship with a trained supervisor to a warm monthly check-in among former classmates. When we are loose with the term, two harms follow. A companion can believe they have accountability they do not in fact have, and a seeker can assume a level of oversight that is not present. This chapter draws clear lines between the forms of support and accountability available to you, considers when you might choose one form or a blend of several, sets our vocation beside kindred professions, and names something most of us have lost: the dense web of communal accountability that once surrounded practitioners of sacred care.

Learning Goals

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:

- Distinguish individual supervision, facilitated group supervision, peer support and consultation, and specialist consultation, and name what each does and does not provide.

- Weigh your own caseload, season of practice, and the complexity of your work when you choose an accountability structure.

- Situate spiritual companionship beside parallel helping professions and their differing standards.

- Name what professional bodies ask of their members regarding supervision.

- Reflect on the communal accountability that surrounded traditional sacred carers, and on what its absence asks of us now.

The Layers of Support and Accountability

It helps to picture these forms as layers rather than as competitors. Each attends to something the others cannot.

**Self-reflection** is the base layer. Verbatim reports, Focus Question Forms, and journaling train you to notice your own responses and growth edges. This layer is necessary. It is also not sufficient, for a plain reason: your omissions are, by definition, the things you cannot perceive in yourself. No amount of honest journaling reveals what you do not know to look for.

**Your own spiritual companionship** tends your interior life. Receiving companionship yourself is a form of grounding and formation, and most professional covenants name it as a good. It is distinct from supervision. Your own companion tends your soul; a supervisor tends your practice. Both matter, and one does not substitute for the other.

Beyond these two personal layers sit the four accountability structures this chapter aims to disambiguate. While we know that all people are equal in value, we are not equal in experience, skill, knowledge, and ability. This matters.

1. Individual supervision (with a trained supervisor)

A sustained reflective relationship with a person trained in the supervision of spiritual companions. The supervisor carries a measure of responsibility to attend to what you cannot perceive in yourself: your reactions, your assumptions, the movement of power in the room, the seeker whose story is entangling you. This relationship is not one of equals. The supervisor's role includes challenge, not comfort alone. When something felt off in a session and you cannot name why, this is where you bring it.

2. Facilitated group supervision (led by a trained supervisor)

A trained supervisor guides a small group of companions. You gain the trained, more-experienced eye of the supervisor and, at the same time, the many angles of perception that colleagues offer. Cost per person is lower, which widens access. The form asks for trust and firm confidentiality among members, and for a group small enough that each person's work receives real attention.

3. Peer support (among equals)

A circle of colleagues in which no one holds the supervisory role.  *Peer support* offers mutual sustenance, normalization, and the relief of not being alone in the work. This support is genuinely good but has a limit. Peers share your level of experience, and may share your social location and life experience as well. A circle of equals can, without anyone intending it, validate one another's boundary crossings, because no one in the room holds the vantage point to perceive the shadow that all of them share. Peer work is a support and a comfort. It is not, on its own, oversight.

4. Peer consultation/supervision (among equals)

*Peer consultation* (sometimes called peer supervision) is more focused than peer support: colleagues bring cases and questions for one another's reflection. Facilitation may rotate around the group. There may or may not be a trained supervisor or elder(s) among the group. However, peers share your level of experience, and so may share your shadow, missing skills, or lack of experience. While, if there are skilled supervisors or elders within this group, it may be sufficient for supervision, participants need to be vigilant and to commit to bringing anything significant or unfinished that comes up in a peer group to a trained supervisor/supervised group.

5. Specialist or augmenting consultation

Time-limited and bound to a topic. You bring a specific question to a person with expertise you lack: a trauma specialist, an elder in a tradition a seeker practices, a supervisor with a particular competence. Consultation augments your ongoing plan rather than replacing it. If a seeker's situation moves past the edge of your training, consultation is often the first faithful response, whether or not you also hold ongoing supervision.

Choosing Your Structure, or Your Combination

No single arrangement fits every companion, and most companions blend several. Rather than a rigid schedule keyed to years of practice, consider a set of honest questions.

**How many seekers do you tend, and how often?** A fuller practice asks for more frequent and more formal accountability. A very small practice may be held well by less frequent formal supervision paired with a monthly peer circle.

**What is the complexity and risk of the work?** Companioning around trauma, crisis, or recovery from a high-control group asks for more, and often asks for specialist consultation alongside your ongoing supervision.

**What season are you in?** Newer practice asks for close, frequent supervision. A seasoned practice may shift toward peer consultation among trusted equals, with consultation sought as particular needs arise. Notice, though, that this is a matter of the depth and complexity of your practice, not merely of years elapsed. More experience does not mean less accountability. It means a different shape of it. A companion who reads growing seniority as permission to withdraw from oversight has misread the direction of the arc.

**How isolated is your practice?** The more you work as a sole practitioner, the more deliberate your structures must be, because nothing about your working life will supply accountability by default.

**What can you access and afford?** Group supervision, peer circles that share the cost of a periodic supervisor, and sliding-scale or trade arrangements all lower the barrier. Cost is real, and it should not be the thing that decides whether you are held. If finances are the obstacle, that is a problem to solve, not a reason to practice unheld.

Some communities and bodies set a floor rather than leaving the question open. It is common, for example, for a body to expect monthly individual supervision of anyone in active practice, with a reduced cadence permitted for a very small caseload when it is paired with a peer group. Knowing your own community's covenant is part of practicing with integrity.

The Web We No Longer Have

A contemporary spiritual companion often practices as a sole practitioner: an independent professional, accountable to a voluntary membership body and to whatever supervision they arrange for themselves. Measured against most of human history, this is unusual.

In many traditional systems of spiritual care, a person did not set up as an independent practitioner at all. Authority to accompany others was conferred within a community and remained answerable to it. A practitioner was known over years by elders who had formed them, held within networks of kin, bound by the reciprocal obligations of the tradition, and visible to a community that could perceive and name their failings. Formation could be long, and recognition came from the community rather than from a certificate on a wall.

These systems differ a great deal from one another, and we should be wary both of flattening many distinct traditions into a single romantic picture and of retrofitting them into our own categories of "supervision" and "peer support." What we can say is structural rather than particular: traditional sacred carers were embedded in dense, ongoing, relational accountability, and most of us are not.

This reframes a misunderstanding worth naming. It can be tempting to hear a phrase like "decolonize supervision" as if it meant "loosen accountability," as though rigor itself were a colonial imposition to be shed. The opposite is often nearer the truth. Many traditional systems carried more relational oversight than our professional arrangements do, not less. Our layered structures of supervision, peer consultation, and specialist consultation are, in part, an attempt to reassemble by deliberate design a fraction of what embeddedness once provided as a matter of course. Naming that keeps us humble about how partial our reassembly is, and it guards us against mistaking our solitude for freedom.

Beside Our Kindred Professions

Placing our vocation next to neighboring professions is clarifying, and it dissolves a tempting but false idea: that there exists one universal standard for supervision that we might simply adopt.

**Clinical counseling and social work in the United States** front-load supervision. To reach independent licensure, a licensed professional counselor or licensed clinical social worker completes on the order of three thousand hours of supervised experience after the degree. Within those hours, the actual face-to-face supervision is the order of one hundred to one hundred fifty hours, often figured as roughly one hour of supervision per twenty to forty hours of work. After independent licensure, ongoing clinical supervision is, in many states, no longer required. A licensing board continues to hold the practitioner through continuing education and through its power to investigate and to revoke a license.

**Counseling and psychotherapy in the United Kingdom** treat the matter otherwise. Bodies such as the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy expect practicing members to maintain supervision across the whole of their careers, on the order of one and a half hours per calendar month for those in active practice, with more when the caseload is heavier or higher in risk. Supervision, in this model, is not a stage one graduates from. It is a permanent feature of being a practitioner.

**Chaplaincy and clinical pastoral education** form practitioners through supervised units of training under certified educators, with board certification as a further threshold.

**Ministry and coaching** vary, though the direction of travel is toward more structure. A growing number of faith bodies now require pastoral supervision of clergy, and pastoral supervision has become a recognized discipline with its own training and accreditation.

The teaching point is not that one model is correct. It is that the range is real. The United States "licensed and released" pattern is one choice among several, and arguably among the thinnest. When we design accountability for spiritual companionship, we are choosing which lineage of practice to align ourselves with, and we should choose with awareness.

What the Professional Covenants Say

- **Spiritual Directors International (SDI)** offers *Guidelines for Ethical Conduct* that are aspirational rather than prescriptive. The Guidelines name supervision and continued formation as values, and they invite each individual, program, and community to define what supervision means in its own setting. SDI does not set a required cadence. Any claim that SDI mandates a particular frequency would misstate the document.

- **The Association for Pastoral Supervision and Education (APSE)**, in the United Kingdom, treats pastoral supervision as a discipline in its own right. It accredits pastoral supervisors across traditions and reviews an accredited supervisor's conduct at five-year intervals.

- **The British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP)** requires ongoing supervision of members in practice, as noted above.

- **The Association for Clinical Pastoral Education (ACPE)** sets standards for supervised pastoral education and for the educators who provide it.

A pattern emerges. The more a body understands its purpose as the protection of the vulnerable public, the more concrete its supervision expectations become. Aspirational language and firm requirements are not opposites so much as points on a single line, and where a community places itself on that line is a statement about how it holds the trust seekers place in it.

Try This

Set aside twenty minutes and take an honest inventory of how you are held. If you have access, do with with a peer.

- Name each form of support and accountability now present in your practice, and who provides it. 

- For each form of support, ask: is this person or group my equal, or do they hold a trained, more-experienced vantage point? (Both have value. The point is to know which is which.)

- Where in your practice do you feel most alone with what you carry?

- What is one form of accountability you have been assuming you have that, on honest reflection, you do not?

- What is one change that would strengthen how you are held this season?

There is no failing grade on this inventory. It is a way to perceive your own structure clearly, so that any gap is one you have chosen to address rather than one you did not know was there.

Cross-References (To Heart of Sacred Tending series)

- **Book 1**, *Accountability Is a Form of Love*: the ethical foundation this chapter builds on.

- **Book 2**, *Creating Your Ethical Framework*, and the appendix material on finding a supervisor, forming peer groups, and preparing with the verbatim and the Focus Question Form.

- **Book 3**: the mechanics of supervision, and the material on countertransference and the supervisory relationship.

- **Book 4**, *Communities of Accountability and Support*: supervision as a lifeline across a long vocation.

For Further Exploration

- **Spiritual Directors International, *Guidelines for Ethical Conduct*.** Short and aspirational. A good text for perceiving how a global, multi-faith body frames supervision as a value to be defined within each community rather than as a fixed rule.

- **The Association for Pastoral Supervision and Education (APSE)**, pastoralsupervision.org.uk. Definitions, ethos, and accreditation standards for pastoral supervision across traditions and contexts.

- **British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP), Good Practice in Action resources on supervision.** Useful for perceiving a model in which lifelong supervision is a baseline expectation.

- **Michael Paterson, *Pastoral Supervision: A Handbook*.** {Verify author(s), editor(s), and edition before print. Paterson is a founding figure in APSE; confirm exact title and co-authorship. ] A practical introduction to pastoral supervision.

- **Maureen Conroy, *Looking into the Well: Supervision of Spiritual Directors*.** {Verify title, author, and publication details before print. ] A field-specific treatment of supervision within spiritual direction.  

Homily: By Relationship, Not by Right

By Relationship, Not by Right

On delight, theft, and the long work of spiritual belonging

(Homily prepared for Spiritual Feast on Ethical Relationship with Deities)

Welcome, friends.

The first time I heard the Goddess Chant, something in my chest broke open like my heart had expanded a thousand times.

Isis. Astarte. Diana. Hecate. Demeter. Kali. Inanna.

I had been raised under a single God. An old judge in the sky who watched and weighed and, I felt, mostly found me wanting. In Bible school the holy had one face, one voice, one verdict. And here, suddenly, were seven names in a single breath, and behind them a hundred more. The divine was not a courtroom after all. It was an ocean. I wept the first time I sang those names, and I want to honor that weeping, because it was true. The expansiveness was real. The freedom was real. Something in me that had been starving finally was nourished.

I tell you the joy first, because what comes next could tempt me to be ashamed of it, and I will not be. The hunger was holy. The door was real.

But some of the hands that opened it were not clean.

I met the plastic shamans. The workshop leaders and weekend teachers, most of them white like me, who sold me practices they had no right to sell. Sweat lodges for a fee. Sacred pipes as merchandise. "Ancient wisdom," lifted from living peoples and repackaged for my spiritual consumption, with the price tag still on. I thought I was being initiated. I was being marketed to.

In 1993, five hundred representatives of the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota nations gathered and passed a Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality. They named the New Age movement. They named the shamanism workshops. And they named neo-paganism, my own new home, among those who had desecrated what was never offered. I did not get to be the innocent seeker in that story. I was, however unknowingly, among the named.

So I did what seekers do. I went looking for what was mine.

And oh, the romance of it. I have Scottish ancestry, and I fell in love with the standing stones and the sea cliffs, the old gods of the Gaels, the idea that somewhere in my blood a door was waiting that no one could accuse me of forcing. I even changed my name (though I had the sense to spell it like my French ancestors would have.)

Surely this was mine. Surely DNA was a key. 

Then some wise and generous Scottish and Irish voices told me, kindly and firmly, that it was not. That a genetic test is not a relationship. That their gods and their practices belong to a living culture I did not live inside, a language I did not speak, a land I did not tend. Blood, they said, is not the same as belonging.

I felt orphaned. I had fled the sky-God's narrow house, was cheated by the marketplace, and now told that even my own ancestry would not hand me a tradition on demand. I grieved. I am still, in some seasons, grieving.

It was an elder named Ama Lee, Haudenosaunee, in upstate New York, who first loosened the knot, though it took me years to feel it give. She taught me that the Corn and the Beans and the Squash still need people to tend them. That the land I live on is in relationship with me whether I notice or not, and that I owe it my attention. Later I found her teaching echoed in Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, in a Potawatomi understanding of land as gift and as responsibility, a reciprocity that asks something of us in return for what it gives.

But here was my knot. I am an inheritor of colonization. I live on the privileged side of a theft that is still happening. How do I answer the land's invitation to relationship without taking, one more time, what has not been offered? How do I receive a gift from people my people have robbed?

The answer, when it came, did not arrive as a new practice to acquire. It arrived as three words. Relationship. Consent. Sovereignty.

And the strange grace of it, the thing I did not expect, is that these were not fences built around my spirituality from the outside. They were my spirituality, deep in the heart of my spirituality.

I am a womanist in my theology, and womanist thought, in a thinker like Monica Coleman, holds God and the ancestors and the living community in one symbiotic web, where salvation is relational or it is nothing. I am a process theologian, and process thought knows the divine works by invitation and never by force, a lure that must be offered and freely received. I am a panentheist, and if the sacred truly indwells all things, then it indwells this people's living love for this god, and to override that is not to reach past the holy but to trample one of its dwelling places. And I keep a little Jung in my pocket, enough to remember that I never touch the archetype in its totality anyway. I only ever meet the image, and the image is a particular culture's accumulated devotion. It was never generic. It was never free.

So the boundary I had felt as exile turned out to be the truest expression of what I already believed. Not a limit on my faith. Its fruit.

Here is where I have come to rest, and I will not pretend it is comfortable.

I can delight in the gods of my neighbors on this earth. I can celebrate them. I can learn from the people who love them, when those people welcome me. But I cannot unilaterally take a deity into relationship without a relationship with the people, the tradition, the consent, and the sovereignty that god lives inside. Not by conquest, the way the sky-God's church took the world. Not by purchase, the way the plastic shamans sold it back to me. Not by blood, the way my Scottish romance promised. But by relationship. Offered, and received.

Even in the traditions that are closest to me. I do have a living thread to my Slovak kin. I know family, food, and ritual. There is some real relationship there, and I can tend it. But even that is not mine by right. It is mine by relationship, and relationship is a practice, not a possession. The Celtic romance, the one that never had roots beneath it, I have had to set down. That setting down is a small grief I carry on purpose, because carrying it honestly is more faithful than pretending it away.

Now I live in Portugal. A new land, where I have neither ancestry nor, yet, relationship. So I begin where the only honest beginning is. As a guest. Learning the land, its people, its history, the living and the long dead. Asking, slowly, whether I might be received. Hoping for something better than extraction. Hoping for mutual flourishing, which is the only kind worth having.

I am at the threshold still. I expect to be here a while.

May you find the door that is truly yours to enter.

May you love the gods of your neighbors without needing to own them.

May you know the difference between a gift and a taking.

May you grieve, honestly, whatever you must set down.

And may you be received, in time, by the land and the people and the holy, into a belonging that no one had to lose for you to have.

Blessed be.

GROUNDING: https://abeltaine.blogspot.com/2026/08/grounding-for-approaching-pantheons.html

This Spiritual Feast series is ©2026 Amy Beltaine, all rights reserved. You may freely reprint any blog post, website, or print resource. Simply include the following attribution, and if you print online, make the link at the end live:

Article ©2026 Amy Beltaine, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission. This article and hundreds of others, along with other free resources are available at http://www.AmyBeltaine.com

Grounding: Approaching Pantheons with Respect

Grounding Meditation: At the Threshold

For the Spiritual Feast of August 23, 2026 — "Approaching the Pantheons with Respect"

---

For the reader: Speak slowly, with gentle warmth. Pause fully between sections. Let the silences do some of the work. Approximately 5–6 minutes.

---

[Arriving]

Everything in this grounding is an invitation. Take what serves you and leave the rest. You are the keeper of your own experience, and you may open your eyes, shift, or return to your own quiet at any moment.

Let's begin by arriving. Settle into whatever is holding you right now. Your chair, the floor, the surface beneath you. Let your weight be received.

If it feels right, let your eyes soften or close. If closing your eyes doesn't feel right today, let your gaze rest somewhere gentle and unfocused.

Notice your breath, without changing it. Let it move at its own pace.

(pause)

[Who is already here]

Before we go anywhere, let's notice who is already here.

Across your life, presences have come and gone. Some you invited. Some arrived unbidden. Some were handed to you by family, by childhood, by the places you have lived. Powers. Images of the sacred. Names for the holy, or for the fearful.

Without reaching for them, let any that wish to be noticed come gently into awareness. Some may feel warm, like an old companion. Some may feel heavy, or unfinished, or unwelcome. You do not have to summon anyone. You are only noticing who is already in the room with you.

(pause)

You might quietly acknowledge each one. Not agreeing to anything. Simply saying, in whatever way feels true: I see that you are here.

(pause)

[The threshold]

Now, in your imagination, let a threshold appear before you. A doorway. An opening. The edge of a clearing. However it wants to look.

Beyond it, there is presence. You may sense many, or one, or only a quality of aliveness. You do not need to see clearly. You only need to notice that you are at an edge, and that something is on the other side.

Here is the heart of it: you do not have to enter. And nothing on the other side is required to meet you.

Let yourself simply be at the threshold. Notice what it is like to arrive somewhere without entitlement. To be a guest who has not yet been invited in.

(pause)

[Offering and consent]

If it feels right, you might offer something toward the threshold. Not a demand. A gift. Your attention. A question you carry. Your honest presence. Whatever you have available to give today.

And then, the part we so rarely practice: wait. Wait to see if you are received.

Notice what arrives. A sense of welcome. Or a paus. Or silence. Or a quiet no.

(pause)

Let a no be as holy as a yes. A boundary is not a verdict on your worth. Some relationships are not yours to have, and honoring that is its own kind of reverence.

If you sense welcome, you might notice what is offered to you in return. You do not have to accept it. You may receive it, decline it, or ask to know more. Consent moves in both directions here.

(pause)

[Staying or releasing]

Now let your awareness return to any presence you noticed earlier. The ones already in the room with you.

With each, you might ask yourself: is this a relationship I want to keep carrying? You are allowed to say yes. You are allowed to say not just now. You are allowed to set something down gently, with thanks or without, and let it go on its way.

(pause)

Nothing is decided forever. You are only noticing, today, what feels alive and consented to, and what is ready to be released.

(pause)

[Return]

When you are ready, let the threshold soften and fade. Let any presence recede with your gratitude, or your simple goodbye.

Come back to your breath. To the surface holding you. To this gathering, and the others here with you.

Notice a sound. The quality of light in your space. The fact of your own return.

You are here. You are your own. And you get to choose who you welcome, and who you release.

HOMILY: https://abeltaine.blogspot.com/2026/08/homily-by-relationship-not-by-right.html

This Spiritual Feast series is ©2026 Amy Beltaine, all rights reserved. You may freely reprint any blog post, website, or print resource. Simply include the following attribution, and if you print online, make the link at the end live:

Article ©2026 Amy Beltaine, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission. This article and hundreds of others, along with other free resources are available at http://www.AmyBeltaine.com

Judaism: Story and Questioning in Spiritual Direction

Judaism: Sacred Questions, Sacred Stories, Sacred Repair

A People Shaped by Story

Judaism is fundamentally a story-based tradition. From Genesis through the prophets, from the Talmud to contemporary Jewish life, stories define identity, transmit values, and shape faith.

These are not stories to be believed from a distance, they are stories to enter, wrestle with, and retell. A few of the foundational narratives include:

• Creation: Adam and Eve, the Garden, humanity's first choices
• Covenant: Noah and the rainbow, God's promise
• Liberation: The Exodus from Egypt, Passover, the journey from slavery to freedom
• Revelation: Mount Sinai, the Ten Commandments, the giving of Torah
• Wandering and Arriving: The wilderness, the Promised Land
• Resistance and Survival: Esther and Purim, Hanukkah and the Maccabees

Each generation retells these stories, finding new meanings. At the Passover Seder, families are instructed: "In every generation, each person must see themselves as if they personally left Egypt." The stories are not just history, they are lived experience.

Stained Glass from a Synagogue CC0

Poetry as Prayer

Judaism sings. The Hebrew scriptures pulse with poetry, language that doesn't just inform but transforms:

• The Psalms: "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want..." (Psalm 23). Ancient prayers still prayed today.
• Song of Solomon: Erotic, mystical, embodied, the love between the divine and humanity.
• Lamentations: Grief given full voice, mourning made sacred.
• The Prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Micah, not fortune-tellers but activists, calling people back to justice and covenant.

The prophets deserve special attention for spiritual companions. They weren't predicting the future, they were challenging the present. "What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God?" (Micah 6:8). The prophetic voice is the voice of social transformation grounded in spiritual conviction.

Jewish Spiritual Direction: Hashpa'ah and the Mashpia

Jewish spiritual direction has its own name: hashpa'ah (literally "influence" or "overflow"). The spiritual director is called a mashpia (one who provides spiritual influence). This practice draws from Hasidic traditions of one-on-one soul work between a rebbe and their followers.

From the ALEPH Ordination Program:

"The AOP Hashpa'ah Program embraces a rich multi-dimensional approach. Just as the various rebbes had different styles of counseling, so too The AOP Hashpa'ah Program faculty model varying styles and approaches. Our training draws both from the uniquely Jewish tradition of fostering a direct soul-work relationship with a rebbe or mashpia, and from the many helpful practices and lessons we have learned from other religious traditions."

The Hasidic rebbe served as spiritual guide, often known for healing through storytelling, prayer, and love. The Ba'al Shem Tov (1698-1760), founder of Hasidism, emphasized joy, simple faith, and mystical devotion over rigid legalism. Stories abound of his healing powers and his ability to heal souls through the mystical power of love.

Chevruta: Partnership in Learning

Another Jewish model for spiritual companionship is chevruta, paired Torah study. Two people wrestle with text together, asking questions, debating interpretations, deepening understanding through dialogue. The Talmud teaches: "Two are better than one." In chevruta, both partners learn; both teach. This egalitarian approach mirrors the heart of spiritual companionship.

Rabbi Jacob Staub on Jewish Spiritual Direction:

"The object of spiritual direction is to cultivate one's ability to discern God's presence in one's life—to notice and appreciate moments of holiness, to maintain an awareness of the interconnectedness of all things, to explore ways to be open to the Blessed Holy One in challenging and difficult moments as well as in joyful ones. The director serves as a companion and witness, someone who helps you to discern the divine where you might have missed it and to integrate that awareness into your daily life, your tefillah, your tikkun olam work, your study, your ritual practice."

See resources below for training programs and contemporary practice.

Midrash: Many Layers of Meaning

Midrash is the Jewish practice of creative interpretation, filling in gaps in Torah narratives, exploring multiple meanings, letting ancient stories speak to contemporary lives.

The sages taught that every word of Torah can be understood on multiple levels, represented by the acronym PRDS (pardes, meaning "orchard"):

• Pshat: the literal meaning
• Remez: the symbolic or hinted meaning
• Drash: deeper analysis through language and association
• Sod: the secret, mystical meaning

In Hasidic thought, the characters of Torah exist within each of us. When we study biblical stories, we come to know ourselves. Midrash invites us to interpret the sacred text of our own lives—what's the literal story? What's being hinted at? What deeper meaning emerges? What mystery remains?

Spiritual companions can use midrashic thinking to invite seekers into a layered exploration of their own experiences.

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The Sacred Art of Asking Questions

Judaism doesn't just permit questions, it requires them. The Passover Seder is built around the Four Questions asked by the youngest child: "Why is this night different from all other nights?" Children are taught to question, to probe, to wonder.

The Talmud is a record of rabbinic debate, multiple interpretations held side by side, questions upon questions. "These and these are both the words of the living God." Wrestling is sacred. The name "Israel" means "one who wrestles with God."

When Jacob wrestled with the angel, he said, "I will not let you go unless you bless me." The blessing came through the struggle. Doubt is not failure, it's engagement.

For spiritual companions, this tradition offers permission to hold questions without rushing to answers, to honor wrestling as intimacy with the divine.

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Tikkun Olam: Repairing the World

Tikkun olam means "repair of the world." In Kabbalistic tradition, divine vessels shattered at creation, scattering sparks of holy light. Humanity's sacred work is to gather those sparks—through ethical action, justice work, compassionate living.

This is not separate from spiritual practice. It IS spiritual practice. The prophets made this clear: "Learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed" (Isaiah). "Let justice roll down like waters" (Amos).

Rabbi Staub emphasizes that Jewish spiritual direction integrates daily life, prayer (tefillah), tikkun olam work, study, and ritual practice. Inner transformation serves outer healing. Personal growth leads to communal repair.

Spiritual companions working with Jewish seekers (or drawing from Jewish wisdom) can ask: Where is this inner work leading you toward action? How does your healing contribute to the healing of the world?

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Gifts for Spiritual Companions

Judaism offers rich gifts to spiritual direction practice:

1. Embrace Questions: Create space for wrestling, doubt, and holy uncertainty.
2. Mine the Depths: Invite multiple layers of meaning (pshat, remez, drash, sod).
3. Honor Study as Sacred: Learning itself is spiritual practice.
4. Connect Inner and Outer: Personal transformation serves communal healing.
5. Value Partnership: Two are better than one (chevruta model).
6. Seek Justice: Spirituality leads to tikkun olam, repairing the world.
7. Tell Stories: Return to the stories that shape us. Find ourselves in them.
8. Celebrate Poetry: Let prayer sing.

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Try It: Practices for Companions

Midrashic Listening When a seeker shares a story, ask: "What's the pshat (what happened)? What's the remez (what does it point to)? What's the drash (what does it mean)? What's the sod (what mystery does it hold)?"

The Four Questions Like the Passover Seder, invite your seeker to bring questions to each session. Practice holding questions without answering them.

Tikkun Olam Check-In Explore: "How does your inner work connect to healing in the world? Where are you being called to gather the holy sparks?"

Study Partnership Find a chevruta partner for your own growth. Explore sacred texts together, Torah, psalms, poetry, the stones and rivers and trees, or your own lived experience.

Story Retelling Invite your seeker to retell a story from their life from different angles. What myth or story mirrors your experience?

A Note

This chapter offers a brief introduction to Jewish spiritual guidance traditions, focusing on elements that support spiritual companions in two ways: (1) developing minimal cultural competency when working with Jewish seekers, and (2) exploring gifts from Jewish wisdom that enrich sacred companionship across traditions.

Judaism is an ancient, complex, and living tradition with extraordinary diversity, from Orthodox to Reform, from Ashkenazi to Sephardic to Mizrahi, from mystical to rationalist. This chapter cherry-picks a few themes relevant to spiritual direction work; it cannot, and does not attempt to, represent the fullness of Jewish thought, practice, or spiritual life.

If you are not already familiar with the rich tradition of scholarship, debate, storytelling, and commitment to justice in Judaism, we encourage you to read widely and, more importantly, to build genuine cross-cultural friendships and relationships. Books can introduce; relationships transform.

For deeper exploration, we recommend the writings of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and following contemporary voices like Rabbi Abby Stein, among many others.

Beloved, you are whole, holy, and worthy.

Rev. Amy

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See Also These Posts

• Sacred Storytelling, Healing, and Liberation 
• Listening for Story
• Myth and the Power of Story 
• Spiritual Autobiography
• Via Transformativa (as a part of the Apophatic/Cataphatic topic)

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For Further Exploration

Books:

• Estelle Frankel, Sacred Therapy: Jewish Spiritual Practices for Healing the Soul
• Marc Gellman, Does God Have a Big Toe? Stories About Stories in the Bible
• Martin Buber, I and Thou
• Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath and God in Search of Man
• Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference and other works
• Yitzhak Buxbaum, Jewish Spiritual Practices
• Howard Addison, Show Me Your Way: The Complete Guide to Exploring Interfaith Spiritual Direction
• Elliot N. Dorff, Tikkun Olam: Judaism, Ethical Practice, and Repairing the World
• Rabbi Dayle Friedman, Jewish Wisdom for Growing Older: Finding Your Grit and Grace Beyond Midlife

Minimal Cultural Competency:

• Why we no longer say "old testement": https://epistemicexplorations.wordpress.com/2025/11/09/why-the-term-old-testament-is-inaccurate-when-referring-to-judaism/

• Why we no longer say "Judeo-Christian": https://www.theloverabbi.com/post/op-ed-why-i-no-longer-say-judeo-christian

Organizations and Resources:

• Rabbi Abby Stein (Supporting people coming out of orthodox/ultra-conservative movements. See Footsteps.)
• ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal – Hashpa'ah training: https://aop.aleph.org/hashpaah-training-program-for-jewish-spiritual-directors/
• The Velveteen Rabbi's personal reflection: https://velveteenrabbi.com/?s=hashpaah (and other posts)
• Rabbi Jacob Staub on Spiritual Direction: https://evolve.reconstructingjudaism.org/spiritual-direction/
• Institute for Jewish Spirituality: https://www.jewishspirituality.org
• Hazon (Jewish environmental and social justice): https://hazon.org
• The Temple of the Stranger is a Goddexx-centered, mystical, and embodied community rooted in Jewish ancestral wisdom.
• www.myjewishlearning.com  comprehensive website containing information about Jewish prayer, rituals, and practices.
• Judaism Unbound excellent podcast that explores creative interventions and ideas in the Jewish cultural landscape, aiming to serve those disenchanted with institutional and mainstream Judaism.
• Rabbi Shefa Gold, leader in the Renewal movement, is a renowned singer and prayer leader who offers ecstatic + mystical classes and has several apps for Hebrew chants, available to all.
• Wilderness Torah offers earth-based celebrations and teachings for intergenerational learners. 
• The Torah Studio hosts classes on Jewish text and prayer.
• Beit Kohenet feminist, earth-based, Goddess-centered Jewish movement.

Traditional Texts:

• Torah (Five Books of Moses)
• Psalms (Tehillim)
• Prophets (Nevi'im) - especially Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Micah
• Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers)
• Midrash Rabbah (selected midrashim)
• Stories of the Hasidic masters

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This Heart of Sacred Tending series is ©2025 Amy Beltaine, all rights reserved. You may freely reprint any blog post, website, or print resource. Simply include the following attribution, and if you print online, make the link at the end live:

Article ©2025 Amy Beltaine, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission. This article and hundreds of others, along with other free resources are available at http://www.AmyBeltaine.info

Homily: What and Who Do We Belong To?

What and Who Do We Belong To?

July 5, 2026 | Prepared for the Spiritual Feast

[Grounding Meditation: https://abeltaine.blogspot.com/2026/07/grounding-meditation-body-remembers.html]

I grew up putting my hand over my heart every morning before school started. I did it before I had any idea what the words meant, before I knew what a republic was, or what indivisible meant, or why we were pledging to a piece of cloth. The gesture came first. My hand on my chest. My body committed before my mind caught up.

I've been thinking about that lately. About how allegiance works. About what it means to belong, and to what, and to whom, and whether those things are chosen or inherited or simply assumed.

The word allegiance comes from the Old French liege, the sworn bond between a lord and a vassal. Feudal. Hierarchical. Not chosen so much as assigned by birth and enforced by power. You belonged to your lord the way a field belongs to its owner. The pledge was less a spiritual act than a legal one, a claim made on your body and your labor.

We have dressed it up considerably since then. But what is underneath still hurts. In 1982, I read the book "The Ugly American," and then my family spent a couple of weeks traveling in Europe, where we sometimes claimed we were Canadian because we were ashamed to admit we were American. I noticed that complicated feeling again in recent months here in Portugal, where I now also belong. My passport says what it says, and... there's more.

But here is what I notice: the hand still goes to the heart. Even when the words are compelled, the gesture reaches toward something that feels like it should be sacred. Like the body knows that belonging is serious business. Like we are always, underneath the patriotism and the performance, reaching for something real, some actual web of obligation and love that holds us.

So today I want to ask what we are actually pledging when we do that.

---

Vern Barnet, a UU minister and interfaith teacher, wrote a different pledge. Not to a flag, not to a nation, but to the earth and all life — the fields and streams, the mountains and seas, the forests and deserts. One world, one creation, one home, indivisible. Endangered, he says, by greedy consumption. Degraded by faithlessness.

Faithlessness.

Not ignorance. Not carelessness. Faithlessness. As if the ecological crisis is, at its root, a failure of fidelity. A breaking of covenant with the living world that holds us. We were claimed by this earth, by soil and water and the long, patient work of evolution, and we have not held up our end.

That's a theological claim, not just an environmental one. It says: you belong to something. You always did. The question is whether you have been faithful to it.

---

And then there is Valarie Kaur, Sikh activist, lawyer, daughter of California farmers, who's declaration of Revolutionary Love is not a pledge to a nation or a landscape, but to people. She vows to treat them as siblings. To fight for a world where all can flourish. She answers Mr. Roger's question "Who is my neighbor?" with "you all are, especially the oppressed and downtrodden and overlooked."

She vows to love even opponents, not to agree with them, not to excuse harm, but to refuse to let hatred reshape the one who resists it.

And she vows to love herself. To protect her capacity for joy. To honor her ancestors whose bodies, breath, and blood call her to courage.

We choose to perceive this darkness not as the darkness of the tomb, but of the womb.

Kaur is not saying it will all be fine. She is saying: I am bound to this. I have made a covenant. I will push.

---

Barnet and Kaur are doing the same thing, on different scales. They are naming what they belong to, past the nation, past the performance, past the coerced pledge, and they are making it explicit. Saying it out loud. Putting a hand on the heart and meaning it.

That act, the naming, the vowing, the this is mine and I am its, is what faith looks like in practice. Not belief in an outcome. Not confidence that it will work. Commitment in the face of not knowing. Allegiance as a spiritual practice.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Potawatomi botanist and writer, describes a grammar of animacy, the idea that the land is not an it but a thou. That belonging to a place means being in relationship with it, accountable to it, changed by it. You don't own the land. You are in covenant with it. That is a different kind of pledge entirely.

And if that's true of land, it's true of people too. The ones you belong to are the ones you are accountable to. The ones who can call you on your faithlessness. The ones whose flourishing is bound up with yours.

---

Today is July 5th. Yesterday the USA celebrated itself, its founding, its flag, its story. And there are things worth celebrating in that story, and things that story has buried, and most of us know both of those things are true at once.

But today, one day later, I want to ask the harder question. Not are you proud to be an American, but what are you actually pledged to? When you put your hand on your heart, right now, if you like, just as a gesture, just to feel where it lands:

What rises up?

Is it a flag? A nation? A particular vision of freedom that includes some people and not others?

Or is it the earth: the ground beneath you, the water you drink, the air that moves through you?

Or is it faces: specific people, communities, the ones whose names Kaur speaks aloud, the ones most likely to be abandoned by the pledges we make to abstractions?

Or is it something older and harder to name:  belonging that runs back through your ancestors and forward through those who you love, a thread of obligation that was never about borders at all?

---

The hand on the heart is an old gesture. Older than any nation. It says: I am here. This matters. I am not neutral.

May you know what you are pledged to.

May your allegiance be worthy of the lives it touches.

May faithfulness, not hope, but faithfulness to what matters, be the ground you thrive on.

May you belong to something real.

Grounding Meditation: Body Remembers Belonging

Grounding Meditation: Belonging

Prepared for the July 5, 2026 Spiritual Feast | What and Who Do We Belong To?

Approximately 4-5 minutes.

---

Let's begin by fully arriving. Take a moment to settle into whatever supports you right now: your chair, the floor, the particular quality of light in your space.

Everything offered here is an invitation. Engage in whatever way feels right for you today.

---

When you're ready, bring one or both hands to rest on your belly. Near your navel, or wherever feels natural.

No need to press. Let your hands rest there.

Notice what you feel. Warmth, perhaps. The rise and fall of breath. The simple fact of your own aliveness.

I invite you to let yourself remember, if anything comes: a time you held your own belly. In laughter. In hunger. In grief. In anticipation of something you couldn't yet name.

Your hands have been here before. Your body remembers.

[Pause]

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When you're ready, let your hands travel up to rest over your heart. One hand, or both, however feels right.

Feel the warmth there. The weight of your own hand. If you can sense your heartbeat, let yourself notice it, steady and patient beneath your palm.

And let yourself remember: other times this hand, or another hand, or your own intention has moved to this place. In a moment of love. Of loss. Of something that mattered enough to mark.

This gesture is old. Your body has made it before, and will make it again. Your body remembers

[Pause]

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When you're ready, bring your fingers to rest on your upper lip, or throat. Lightly. No pressure.

Notice the movement of breath here. The subtle rise and fall. The place where what is inside becomes what goes out into the world, where breath becomes speech, becomes song, becomes the words we use to say what we mean and who we are and what we are pledged to.

And let yourself remember, if anything surfaces: a time you were about to speak something true and felt it here first. A time you swallowed something. A time a voice came out that surprised you with what it knew.

[Pause]

---

For a moment, hold awareness of all three places at once. B]elly. Heart. Throat.

The places where we know things before we have words for them. The places where commitment lives in the body. The places where belonging is not an idea but a felt sense, a warmth, a weight, a breath.

If other parts of your body are asking for your attention, allow yourselfe to attend to them now. Your whole body remembers.

You carry your allegiances here. You carry your faithfulness to what matters, here. In these places. Whether you have named them or not.

[Pause]

---

When you're ready, let your hands rest wherever feels comfortable, and begin to return to this space. To the sound of my voice. To the people gathered here with you.

Take a breath. And another.

We are here. Together. With all of what we carry.

Homily: Drive out Hope, Wecome the May Queen

Driving Out the Hag

A Beltane Homily prepared for the Spiritual Feast May 3, 2026

There is a Scottish custom at Beltane. When Rowan described it to me I felt the good kind of chills. 

In the ritual, before the May Queen arrives, before the maypole dancing begins — first, you drive out the hag of winter. The Cailleach. The one who has held the cold in place. You drive her out with noise and fire and sheer communal insistence. Not gently. Not apologetically. You make it clear: your season is over. Something else is trying to get through this door.

I love this ritual because it is honest about something we often skip in our spiritual lives. It names that arrival and departure are not the same moment. Something has to leave before something can enter. The threshold is real. And sometimes, the work of the threshold is not children and laughter.

Sometimes the work is driving something out.

I spent my childhood with people who changed reality. Some might say my mom was a really good author of fiction, writing books for publication, but she also rewrote our experiences. I learned to hoard truth, defend it, and constantly question others' statements. I have spent my life undoing that habit and while the work is never done. I now can relax and allow people to be wrong or right. to have their persepctive and disagree with me, without my safety feeling threatened. I can trust that it will be OK. eventually. I had to exhale that hypervigilant, anxious habit in order to inhale love and trust and freedom to be fully myself.

Today I want to suggest that one of the things we might drive out this Beltane — or at least examine carefully at the threshold — is a word.

The word is hope.

Now — before you panic, or before you relax too quickly — let me be precise.

I am not saying hope is worthless. I am saying hope has been weaponized. And I am saying that for some of us, the word itself has become a kind of hag — something that sits in the doorway and prevents us from doing the actual work of spring.

Miguel de la Torre, in Embracing Hopelessness, puts it starkly. Hope, he argues, can function as a Ponzi scheme — a way of trusting the future to resolve what we refuse to address in the present. We hope. We wait. We trust that it will work out. And in the meantime, the structures that are grinding people up keep grinding.

Frank Wilderson’s Afropessimism makes a related argument: that hope, for those whose bodies the system was designed to consume, is not a spiritual resource. It is a demand made by those with more cushion — just hold on, just keep hoping, the arc is long. And researchers have actually confirmed this. A 2019 study found that for people in disadvantaged social positions, hope — specifically the harmony-focused kind, the it’ll work out kind — actually suppressed motivation for collective action. Hope, in those conditions, made people less likely to fight.

The hag has many faces. One of them looks like optimism. One of them looks like trust. One of them looks like hope.

But I want to slow down and stay honest. Because this is a room of many people, and we do not all have the same relationship to this word.

The K-pop demonhunter Movie has a character — Jinu — who announces plainly that he is hopeless. And the main character says to him: that’s the thing about hope. Nobody gets to tell you if you feel it or not.

Nobody gets to tell you if you feel it or not.

The main character in that movie, Rumi, also is experiencing her own kind of hopelessness because she's holding onto a story that does no serve her. The song Golden is her moment of releasing, breathing out that story and then she breathes in friendship, commitment, faith in her purpose, and this amazing song comes out. 

Some of us need the word hope. It is a lifeline. It is what gets us up. It is cellular and real and we are not performing it. That is true, and it is not naive, and I will not drive it out of you.

Some of us need to redefine the word before we can claim it — need to strip it of its pastel coating and find something fiercer underneath. Need to know that hope is allowed to be angry, uncertain, unresolved, a sewer rat.

And some of us need a different word altogether. Not because we have given up, but because the old container doesn’t hold what we carry.

There is even a name now, from researchers in Turkey, for the state between hope and hopelessness: hope fatigue. Not despair. Not optimism. The exhausted middle, where you still believe something good might happen, but you are tired of waiting for it to show up on its own. You are not hopeless. You are tired of hoping. And you need to know that is a real place, with a real name, and it is not a failure.

Different places. All of them legitimate. None of them requiring your performance.

For me, there came a day, I think it was shortly after November, when I'd say "I Hope... blah blah blah." and I realized I didn't believe it. It had no meaning for me. I was bereft, and so many sentences didn't make sense any more. I'd lost it. But wasn't sure what came next.

So what comes through the door, once we’ve been honest about all of this?

Cornel West — and I’m paraphrasing from memory, so stay with the spirit of it — drew a distinction between optimism and hope that I have never forgotten. Optimism, he said, looks at a bad situation and says: everything will be fine. Hope looks at the same situation and says: this is bad — and then goes about working to change it.

That second thing? That’s not passive. That is not a feeling you sit with until it grows. That is a practice. A commitment. A refusal.

Rebecca Solnit said it differently, just recently: if the word hope doesn’t work for you, try ‘never fucking surrender.’ And then she clarified what she means at the heart of it: we make the future in the present, if we show up.

The future is unwritten. This is not comfort. This is responsibility. Optimism says the future will be good. Pessimism says the future will be bad. Hope — real hope, or whatever you call it when it lives in your bones — says: the future is not yet written, and therefore I will show up to write it, with no guarantee that it works.

Viktor Orbán’s party just lost in Hungary. A single local election. A small crack. The kind of thing that could be nothing, or could be the first green shoot that comes after a long winter. We don’t know yet. And we act anyway.

We remain faithful, Charlie Murphy sings, to the work that must be done.

Not faithful because we know it will work. Faithful because the work is ours. Faithful because the alternative is to let the hag stay.

And this is where I want to hand you a phrase that I think does something important.

Trust and believe.

In the passive sense, trust is something you extend to the future and then wait. You hope. You trust. You see what happens. That version of trust is the hag.

But trust and believe, the way it lives in Black vernacular, the way it lives in our song today — that is not passive. That is: I am going to make this happen. Watch me. Trust and believe. It is not a surrender to outcomes. It is a fierce declaration of intention.

This is the May Queen arriving. Not as a feeling. Not as a guarantee. But as a commitment, a fire you light with your own hands, a dance you do on cold ground because you refuse to let winter be permanent.

Friends, the hag is real. The winter has been long. And some of what has kept us waiting — some of what has told us to be patient, to trust the arc, to keep hoping — some of that is worth driving out.

Not because we have given up. But because something truer is trying to get through the door.

Not optimism. But faithfulness.

Not passive trust. But trust and believe.

Not the promise of spring. But the fire we light to call it.

May you know which relationship to hope is yours, and be free to claim it without apology.

May you drive out what has overstayed its welcome — gently or with noise, whatever the season requires.

May you find the word, or the wordless thing, that actually gets you out of bed and back to the work.

And may you remain faithful — to the work that must be done, to the people you love, to the future that is not yet written but is waiting for you.

Welcome, May. We have made room.

This Spiritual Feast series is ©2026 Amy Beltaine, all rights reserved. You may freely reprint any blog post, website, or print resource. Simply include the following attribution, and if you print online, make the link at the end live:

Article ©2026 Amy Beltaine, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission. This article and hundreds of others, along with other free resources are available at http://www.AmyBeltaine.com