I WAS ABOUT 20 YEARS INTO my born-again Christian career when I dropped the dogma briefcase. I couldn’t carry it anymore, even if I wanted to. It was too heavy and the contents were all tangled and shredded. Or to use another metaphor: The theology I’d been trying to wear for decades didn’t fit. The waist was too tight and the pants too short and there was a lot of extra fabric in the arms.
It was terrifying, though, to step out of my long-practiced faith tradition and find myself—where? I didn’t know. I had become a Christian as a teenager, under the kind eye of Mrs. Marks, who led me to the Lord one spring evening my junior year in high school. In college I was part of an evangelical student group that went in for open-air preaching and dorm Bible studies. I married my husband just after graduation and together we spent our 20s and 30s involved in high-commitment, high-discipleship Christian communities. Faith was a transaction between me and Big Sky Daddy: If I did The Stuff(church, incessant prayer, good deeds) he would love me in return. It was my way of tamping down the almost constant panic I felt about whether I was worth anything.
This story is from the March/April 2022 edition of Spirituality & Health.
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This story is from the March/April 2022 edition of Spirituality & Health.
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ONE WORD TO BEAT WINTER BLUES: BIOMIMICRY
CREATURELY REFLECTIONS
THINKING ABOUT RESTITUTION
THE HEART OF HAPPINESS
WAITING IN LINE
OUR WALK IN THE WORLD
ENTER THE SAUNA
Journalist Emily O’Kelly shares some uplifting research on the benefits of sweat bathing, a global healing practice not just limited to Northern climes.
the trail of ATONEMENT
One Ashkenazi Jewish family escaped pogroms in Russia and then flourished in South Dakota, but the “free land” of their new homestead had been unfairly taken from the Lakota by the United States. Generations later, a celebrated investigative journalist set out to tell the truth of the Lakota and her family, calculate The Cost of Free Land—and pay it back.
STALKING YOUR Mind
Stalking the Mind is part of an ancient Indigenous American Medicine Way to tame your guilt, fears, and shame. What we’re “stalking” are our thought patterns and beliefs that seem to create the opposite of happiness and wellbeing. It’s a powerful psychotherapeutic journey of healing without the diagnosis or labels.
LEAVING MESA VERDE
After 21 years of service at Mesa Verde National Park, RANGER DAVID FRANKS recently guided his last tour of the pueblos and cliff dwellings. He says he was fortunate to assist the archeologists with a variety of work and never lost his amazement with their ability to figure out how and when things happened. The question he still wrestles with is much deeper: Why they left?
BECOMING YOUR OWN LEAD RESEARCHER IN HEALTHCARE
PEGGY LA CERRA, PHD, downloaded a health app to aggregate her medical records and was stunned to see the phrase \"aortic atherosclerosis.\" What she did next is a helpful model for all of us.
ARCHETYPAL ASTROLOGY
\"Is astrology true?\" is the wrong question, writes RABBI RAMI SHAPIRO. He suggests that the truth is out there, but out there is really in here.
WELLNESS IN THE WILD
Spa aficionado MARY BEMIS takes the [cold] plunge at Mohonk Mountain House.
