Hello to here: A Community Conversation

An invitation to name your season within community

Hi friends,

Back in the salad days of this newsletter, I used to post questions or discussion prompts and folks would hit that Comment button and respond. I quietly phased that out more than a year ago because I mistakenly assumed that it wasn’t a favourite of yours. Well, the survey results told me I was wrong (no big surprise there…) and here we are: back again!

I confess I’m selfishly glad for this because I genuinely love getting to know you all better, reading your answers, and creating a little spot of connection or community together. It is a tangible reminder that we are all real people behind these screens. We’ve somehow managed to have the nicest comment section on Beyoncé’s Internet and it seems a shame to not hang out there more often together.

Here’s how it works

So for those of you who are new-ish, this is the plan: I’ll post a discussion prompt or question every few weeks and send it out to all of our paid subscribers as an invitation. You’ll usually see a button that says “Leave A Comment” in the mix:

Click on that button and you’ll be taken to the Comments section here at Field Notes where you can read the responses of others and chime in yourself.¹

The best part of this always lies in not simply answering the prompt yourself, as wise and wonderful as you all are. Nope, the magic happens when you “like” and respond to other commenters. Over the weeks, you’ll get to know each other a bit. Feel free to affirm, to question, to clarify, to encourage. That’s the community conversation part, after all!

Want to submit a question or conversation starter?

Sometimes - like today! - the prompt is just my own curiosity; other times I pull questions from you all in a repository I called Wisdom From The Field. So if you have you ever wondered how other people are responding to questions of faith, church, family, politics, justice, and evolving spiritual journeys, that’s your chance to ask. For example, maybe you're wondering: how did you know if and when it was time to leave a faith community? how do you thrive in a relationship if your religious beliefs change? Or perhaps there is another question you have that you want us all to answer about books or theology or even regular life stuff but you want to ask a real community of people who are actually living it out in their lives.

Wisdom From The Field is for those of us who want to discuss things within community of pretty good people who are able to come alongside of you and offer thoughtful perspectives on your questions.

If you want to submit a possible question/discussion prompt for us to discuss, just click here and submit it. I’ll keep track of those and every once in a while, I’ll pull one from there that I think would be a good conversation amongst us all. Our next community conversation will absolutely be pulled from your suggestions/questions there.

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Our Community Conversation

Now let’s get to it!

This month’s community conversation was inspired by a paragraph that I recently re-read in Pádraig Ó Tuama’s beautiful book, In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World. He writes:

“What I do know is that it can help to find the words to tell the truth of where you are now. If you can find the courage to name “here”—especially in the place where you do not wish to be—it can help you be there. Instead of resenting another’s words of gladness or pain, it may be possible to hear it as simply another location. They are there and I am here. At another point, we will be in different locations, and everybody will pass by many locations in their life. The pain is only deepened when the location is resented or, even worse, unnamed. Hello to here.”

Hello to here.

His words reminded me of that famous passage from Ecclesiastes 3:

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:

a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to throw away;
a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace.

We often need to name our season well in order to live within it.

It is when we are fighting against our season - or, in Padraig’s words our “here” - that we often feel misplaced or misunderstood or miscast. Allowing ourselves to be in our “here” - without judgement, without shame, without striving, without wishful thinking - and naming it does exactly what he says: it helps us to be here.

So let’s collectively say hello to wherever you are, whatever season you’re in, however unexpected, however joyful, however terrible, however true.

So here is today’s Community Conversation: say hello to your “here.”

What season are you in (please don’t feel restricted to that list from Ecclesiastes!)? What courage will it require for you to name your current “here” even while you know that you will pass through it and into a new “here” eventually?

You can be literal or metaphorical, you can be spiritual or practical (most things are a bit of both anyway), you can be serious or silly. Whatever first rises up in you when you read that prompt is probably your best answer.

What is the “here” you want/need to say hello to?

See you in the comment section,

S.

Website | My Books | Field Notes | On Instagram | On Facebook

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1. Comments in Community Conversations, like most posts, are reserved for paid subscribers. But it’s our joy to give away paid subscriptions to literally everyone who asks. If you can’t swing a subscription, please just let us know by emailing assistant@sarahbessey.com and we’ll get you sorted out before too long. Promise. Subscriptions aren’t meant to be a barrier, just a way to create that quieter corner on the Internet for deeper conversations and comments, as well as to support this kind of work. You don’t need to justify or explain, just put your hand up through that email and we’ve got you.