Greene and Greene, Gamble House, Tiffany Stained Glass, https://www.pinterest.com/pin/97601516897263721/
Moments Gently Float Up
Tori Owens
Moments gently float up…snapshots in time:
…falling in love with Julian of Norwich’s writings, listening to an ice cream of a lecture by Dr. Paul Bassett, reading Dr. Wil Gafney’s marvelous Womanist Midrash, soaking up Catherine Keller’s exquisite Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming.
…periodically pulling out my old algebra and calculus textbooks from my college days – working calculus problems for the fun of it, for the clarity and order it brings my brain when it gets too muddled, and, sometimes, just for the beauty on the page.
…images of stained-glass I’ve admired: Louis Comfort Tiffany’s windows I’ve hunted down in Atlanta or New York City, Greene & Greene pieces in Pasadena, Frank Lloyd Wright’s in Chicago. I think, too, of a few I’ve created and built for churches and homes.
…listening to Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight” and feeling the dappled and momentarily blinding sunlight in my eyes and on my skin even in the depths of depression. Sitting with Chris on the rock ledge of the Gorge, butt and back a little achy, and hearing “Rows and flows of angel hair and ice cream castles in the air…” a bit deeper and raspier as Joni Mitchell started singing. Living the violins within, my blood dancing, and certain I can SEE the fresh neon green grass blades and newbie tree leaves popping during Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi, The Four Seasons: Spring 1.
…sitting in therapy with empathic and empathetic listening. Listening to the words, but listening far, far more to the tone, the body-language, the space in between the words, the emotions, the energy. Reading the hurts, the history, the trauma and shame far too difficult to be spoken aloud. Allowing a heart-to-heart energy connection that…just is uncontained.
…practicing the Eight Silk Brocade of Qi Gong, teaching a client one of the movements, feeling my hands fire up and tingle, dipping my hands into Qi that is everywhere and within me and you and connecting all things, in all ways, all the time.
…walking the dogs when it’s a bit cooler for all three of us. Noting the changes in the colors of the sky, the bugs, the birds, the grass, the smells, and feeling cared for and healed and embraced by the trees. I wonder if these friends have names.
…putting every bit of love I can in everything I bake or cook or prepare for others, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – shelter, food, water, healthcare – are what Jesus focused on the most. The practics. The basics. The everyday needs.
I softly smile again.
I feel (far more than I think) knowing is impossible to separate from needing to be known….
So, knowing - and being known - feels like it’s expanded into the whole world, the very cosmos – no beginning, no end, no limits, no boundaries. Limitless.
- Tori Owens
Tori Owens is a full-time therapist, a part-time doctoral student in Open and Relational Theology, most definitely an everyday mystic, just trying to blend it all in such a way that it might be a little healing. Her website is called Spiritual Peregrinations: click here.
…falling in love with Julian of Norwich’s writings, listening to an ice cream of a lecture by Dr. Paul Bassett, reading Dr. Wil Gafney’s marvelous Womanist Midrash, soaking up Catherine Keller’s exquisite Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming.
…periodically pulling out my old algebra and calculus textbooks from my college days – working calculus problems for the fun of it, for the clarity and order it brings my brain when it gets too muddled, and, sometimes, just for the beauty on the page.
…images of stained-glass I’ve admired: Louis Comfort Tiffany’s windows I’ve hunted down in Atlanta or New York City, Greene & Greene pieces in Pasadena, Frank Lloyd Wright’s in Chicago. I think, too, of a few I’ve created and built for churches and homes.
…listening to Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight” and feeling the dappled and momentarily blinding sunlight in my eyes and on my skin even in the depths of depression. Sitting with Chris on the rock ledge of the Gorge, butt and back a little achy, and hearing “Rows and flows of angel hair and ice cream castles in the air…” a bit deeper and raspier as Joni Mitchell started singing. Living the violins within, my blood dancing, and certain I can SEE the fresh neon green grass blades and newbie tree leaves popping during Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi, The Four Seasons: Spring 1.
…sitting in therapy with empathic and empathetic listening. Listening to the words, but listening far, far more to the tone, the body-language, the space in between the words, the emotions, the energy. Reading the hurts, the history, the trauma and shame far too difficult to be spoken aloud. Allowing a heart-to-heart energy connection that…just is uncontained.
…practicing the Eight Silk Brocade of Qi Gong, teaching a client one of the movements, feeling my hands fire up and tingle, dipping my hands into Qi that is everywhere and within me and you and connecting all things, in all ways, all the time.
…walking the dogs when it’s a bit cooler for all three of us. Noting the changes in the colors of the sky, the bugs, the birds, the grass, the smells, and feeling cared for and healed and embraced by the trees. I wonder if these friends have names.
…putting every bit of love I can in everything I bake or cook or prepare for others, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – shelter, food, water, healthcare – are what Jesus focused on the most. The practics. The basics. The everyday needs.
I softly smile again.
I feel (far more than I think) knowing is impossible to separate from needing to be known….
So, knowing - and being known - feels like it’s expanded into the whole world, the very cosmos – no beginning, no end, no limits, no boundaries. Limitless.
- Tori Owens
Tori Owens is a full-time therapist, a part-time doctoral student in Open and Relational Theology, most definitely an everyday mystic, just trying to blend it all in such a way that it might be a little healing. Her website is called Spiritual Peregrinations: click here.
Moment Theology
As I read Tori Owens' words above - I call it a prose poem - I am reminded of William Wordsworth's Recollections of Early Childhood, commonly known as Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Early Childhood. Wordsworth's poem explores themes of memory, the passage of time, and the sense of wonder experienced in moments of childhood. Tori is reflecting on moments in her adult life, but the aim is the same.
Each of Owens' vignettes evokes, for me, an intimation of immortality: that is, a sense of wonder, or perhaps more accurately, a sense of poignancy and beauty in the concreteness of everyday life. Each represents a moment in time—a snapshot in memory.
In such snapshots the horizontal sacred and the vertical sacred intersect. By the horizontal sacred I mean our relationships with the world, including other people, the more-than-human world, and the world of ideas. And by the vertical sacred I mean our relationship with the living whole of the universe, with God. Tori Owens offers a theology of the moment and for the moment: the moment as remembered and, by implication, the moment as lived.
She writes like so many of us think in everyday life. We don't think in well-argued statements with thesis claims and linear conclusions. We don't define our terms before using them; we use them and then, if challenged, define them. We think in fragments, in pieces, in shreds. And we know God in fragments—often without naming it "God." In fleeting moments of beauty, pain, love, and uncertainty, we catch glimpses of the living whole of the universe, even if we don’t recognize it as divine.
Tori is a stained glass artist as well as a therapist. The fragments are like pieces of unevenly cut glass in a mosaic or stained-glass window, each with its own integrity, yet contributing to a greater, living whole—or like snapshots in a scrapbook not yet finished—or like threads and fibers in a tapestry still being woven.
I like the fact that she doesn't create a "big" theology out of her snapshots, even as she is a doctoral student in Open and Relational Theology. There is something honest about staying with the snapshots and not pretending we know the whole. Call it paying attention to the particular, or, if you prefer, being mindful in the present moment. not just the moments as isolated units, but as moments of connection, of feeling. Each moment is a place coming together of the many into one and, I believe, a place where God is found. The whole is in the parts!
I also like the fact that her prose-poem feels fragmentary in a way. There is something right, indeed beautiful, about not trying to say that it all makes sense. That's a kind of mysticism, too. An intuitive recognition that it doesn’t make sense, at least in a linear or logical way, reveals a deeper, unspoken truth: that it does make sense in its own mysterious way. After all, God isn’t simply the stained-glass window—God is the light that shines through each pane of glass. And this light can never be grasped except through the finite pieces of glass in the window, or the threads and fibers of the tapestry. Through the snapshots, which gently float up in recollection.
This fragmented knowing is resonant with both mystical and process-relational understandings of God and the universe, where reality is interconnected yet apprehended through its distinct moments. This fragmented knowing, this snapshot knowing, is a theology of moments.
- Jay McDaniel
Each of Owens' vignettes evokes, for me, an intimation of immortality: that is, a sense of wonder, or perhaps more accurately, a sense of poignancy and beauty in the concreteness of everyday life. Each represents a moment in time—a snapshot in memory.
In such snapshots the horizontal sacred and the vertical sacred intersect. By the horizontal sacred I mean our relationships with the world, including other people, the more-than-human world, and the world of ideas. And by the vertical sacred I mean our relationship with the living whole of the universe, with God. Tori Owens offers a theology of the moment and for the moment: the moment as remembered and, by implication, the moment as lived.
She writes like so many of us think in everyday life. We don't think in well-argued statements with thesis claims and linear conclusions. We don't define our terms before using them; we use them and then, if challenged, define them. We think in fragments, in pieces, in shreds. And we know God in fragments—often without naming it "God." In fleeting moments of beauty, pain, love, and uncertainty, we catch glimpses of the living whole of the universe, even if we don’t recognize it as divine.
Tori is a stained glass artist as well as a therapist. The fragments are like pieces of unevenly cut glass in a mosaic or stained-glass window, each with its own integrity, yet contributing to a greater, living whole—or like snapshots in a scrapbook not yet finished—or like threads and fibers in a tapestry still being woven.
I like the fact that she doesn't create a "big" theology out of her snapshots, even as she is a doctoral student in Open and Relational Theology. There is something honest about staying with the snapshots and not pretending we know the whole. Call it paying attention to the particular, or, if you prefer, being mindful in the present moment. not just the moments as isolated units, but as moments of connection, of feeling. Each moment is a place coming together of the many into one and, I believe, a place where God is found. The whole is in the parts!
I also like the fact that her prose-poem feels fragmentary in a way. There is something right, indeed beautiful, about not trying to say that it all makes sense. That's a kind of mysticism, too. An intuitive recognition that it doesn’t make sense, at least in a linear or logical way, reveals a deeper, unspoken truth: that it does make sense in its own mysterious way. After all, God isn’t simply the stained-glass window—God is the light that shines through each pane of glass. And this light can never be grasped except through the finite pieces of glass in the window, or the threads and fibers of the tapestry. Through the snapshots, which gently float up in recollection.
This fragmented knowing is resonant with both mystical and process-relational understandings of God and the universe, where reality is interconnected yet apprehended through its distinct moments. This fragmented knowing, this snapshot knowing, is a theology of moments.
- Jay McDaniel