On Mysteries and Mentors

My grandmother believes in angels. In many ways, she has much more of a metaphysical kind of faith than I do. I grew up learning about stars and science from my dad.  He taught me to uncover the mysteries of the universe through the slow churning creation of of galaxies, from the power and precision of the Big Bang, and through him I learned the art of speculation, the scientific method, and a healthy dose of skepticism. So angels and miracles, prophetic dreams and visions that I read in the Hebrew scriptures and that I heard from my grandmother seemed far away from me for many years.

I meandered my way into spirituality--love for meditation, for transformation, for truth-telling---through important people who entered my life at right places. One thing that has never been lost on me is the presence of important mentors who have appeared in my life at a critical crossroads. Someone who could stand with me and see me as I am, a person who would allow me to be wherever I was in my life and take those experiences seriously.

I wrote a letter of gratitude to one of those women this past week. The letter was itself a sort of spiritual practice. It allowed me time to reflect on where I had come and who had helped me get to where I am now. Mentors have taken on many forms for me--this person in particular, she and a group of women, in fact, were with me as I was being birthed into adulthood.  I was reaching moments of awareness about the world around me and injustice, I was coming into a truer sense of myself as a feminist and a person of faith, and I was trying to figure out how to love and be who I was. And like birthing does, sometimes I screamed and fought and grieved and pushed and hurt my way through. The women in this group that I was a part of saw me clearly, and loved me unconditionally, and challenged me greatly. Most importantly, as a young adult, they took me seriously. Not "for my age". Not with any "in my day" caveats. Period. The ways they modeled womanhood and adulthood gave me permission to be imperfect, gave me space to speak (even if in hindsight the things I said were not particularly revelatory or meaningful), and held me accountable to those things that I had said I valued.

When God came to Sarah and Abraham in the desert to tell Sarah that she was pregnant, she giggled to herself in her tent while she was baking. "Apparently God don't know I'm old," she laughed. I don't know that I believe in angels the way my grandmother does, but I do believe that God sends surprising people into our lives when we're ready to give birth to something new, even if we don't believe that new things are coming. So for all of the angels who have been there with me in the screaming and the fighting and the grieving and the pushing and the hurting and the insurmountable love, I thank God.