about joanne

From life's inevitable passages of pain and suffering, the life-force of Spirit can birth awareness and transformation – if we choose to open to it.   In 2018, in the midst of one of those passages, I did choose to open and was utterly surprised at the age of 68 to  to begin expressing through mandalas* the experiences of fragmentation to an awakening to Love that was-always-and-already-present – as it is in each of us.  As Fr Richard Rohr succinctly stated: "...love is not something we do.  It is something that is done to us, and that we participate in.  It's something we fall into."  It is saying "Yes" to a life of participation and co-creation in the continual goodness and unfolding of God's creation.  For me, it has been learning to “live loved."

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My experience of living loved deeply resonates with what the Sufi Kabir Helminski states in his book about an awakening to the essential Self: “… This essential Self is not some vague entity whose existence is a matter of speculation, but our fundamental “I” which has been covered up by social conditioning and the superficiality of our rational mind.”  This, to me, is the belovedness that I was told one night IS at the core of my existence. 

When late, alone, and reading in my room one night in 2012, with a life-long, unconscious longing for an authenticity that I had, in childhood and in the majority of my adult years, not known in my hierarchically conservative, evangelical background, my eyes read these words from Brennan Manning’s book, Abba’s Child, The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging:  “Being the beloved is our identity, the core of our existence” and my spiritual ears, my heart, and my mind heard for the first time ever: "Joanne, you are beloved at the core of your existence."  No fireworks, no emotional high.  Just warmth and a deep assuredness from that night on that I was known and loved from before my parents were born, from before “time”, and that I was never and will never be separate from Love.  Maybe these mandalas sprang from an unknown awareness inside me that ALL things, including me, are from God, through, God and to God – an infinite circle.  Romans 11:36

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Life’s circumstances, and myself, did not change immediately, of course, after this experience.  But for all the unknown pain, difficulties, and also joy ahead, I knew that, for me, a for-the-rest-of-my-life journey had started – a journey of becoming a fully alive, beloved human being, a journey that is "brutiful" and wondrous at the same time.   As Logion 2 in the Gospel of Thomas states:

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Yeshua says:

If you are searching, you must not stop until you find.

When you find, however, you will become troubled.

Your confusion will give way to wonder.

In wonder you will reign over all things.

Your sovereignty will be your rest.

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I long to become the fully alive human being that I, and each of us, were made to be!   Helminski presents an ‘education’ of the soul, but the practice of Centering Prayer became Divine therapy for me, as well as human therapy with a beloved therapist as I recognized, faced, and worked to let go of deep codependent patterns that were blocking healthy, whole relationships.   I also resonate to the Franciscan theologian Bonaventure (c. 1217–1274) [who] ended his classic text The Soul’s Journey into God with this instruction:  "If you wish to know how these things come about, ask [for] grace, not instruction, desire not understanding, the groaning of prayer not diligent reading, the Spouse not the teacher, God not man, darkness not clarity, not light but the fire that totally inflames and carries us into God."    Ameyn.

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