I trained as an occupational therapist specialising in mental health. Since 2015, I have lived and worked in the community of Holy Rood House, Centre for Health and Pastoral Care, Thirsk, North Yorkshire, with my husband, Nick, who’s the business manager. We hadn’t worked in the same place before, or lived in community, and this is still a flourishing place for us.
I came here through writing my fourth book, The Life-Giving Path, about a virtual retreat, exploring ways to find a more fulfilled and meaningful life. I wanted to find a place with similar ideals. Having suffered a chronic illness for over seven years, I was ready to return to employment, and, at the same time, Nick was offered voluntary redundancy from his job.
My background in health, psychology, counselling, creativity, and well-being — alongside all the learning through a chronic illness, which gave me more knowing than any of my qualifications — meant I had gifts that fitted well here.
I now see guests one to one, and run creative groups and retreats. I offer prayerful spaces, bringing in things from the natural world to the chapel or the art room or the garden, and using language that helps people to connect more deeply. I take services, offer well-being practices, and I’m part of our ecology of health group.
Through the pandemic, I transferred many of the retreats to Zoom, and still offer online resources, and do our Facebook page.
Hospitality is integral for all staff in the charity, because it’s in hospitality that the community flourishes and finds the way of wisdom.
I’m currently writing a book about wisdom, with a working title of Wisdom Calls: Reclaiming a way of transformation through self, community and the earth. In the early happenings of the pandemic, the online retreats I ran exploring wisdom were among the most popular.
Through these difficult times of pandemics, wars, climate crisis, and national mourning for the Queen, there’s a hunger for a way of being that is wise, enlightened, discerning.
We welcome all people — often people who feel on the edge themselves — for short-stay, day-retreat, and individual therapy. It’s from this edge-space that we listen for Wisdom’s voice, emerging in a myriad of ways — assisted through stories, from the art room’s creativity, and our prayerfulness.
Wisdom is elusive, humble, coming in the ordinary, everyday moment, or surprising us with an epiphanic screech that draws us to follow her voice. Her call resounds within us, connecting us to our deepest longings and desires. Wisdom draws us from darkness, to ways of healing, love, and care for ourselves and the earth. Her relational ways connect us to our deepest selves, bringing unity and belonging.
Wisdom is most apparent when we’re adventuring on different trails from the normal; when getting lost and experiencing suffering. Here, she shows us her jewels. These jewels become treasures shared in community as her stories inspire others.
Wisdom has many aspects, including psychological and a deep body knowing. In embodiment we connect to Wisdom — Hokhmah in the Hebrew, Sophia in the Greek — this poetic movement evolving through energy within our bodies as flow and breath, bringing health and a way through our difficult paths. This flow connects us to all creatures, earth, and cosmos. “Genesis” in Greek, the biblical story of the unfolding of the universe, means “coming into being” or “becoming”. Process is a movement of emerging and new beginnings. We transform, alongside the earth.
As we bring our awareness to our sensations and senses, we can get in touch with holy Wisdom. At Holy Rood House, our chapel looks out into the garden, and our embodied prayers connect to the seasons, our senses, and the earth. I hold regular well-being sessions encouraging noticing and connecting to this breath of awareness.
My own spiritual life opened to Wisdom through noticing, which was transformative for me during my chronic illness. As I observed my own body, what it was telling me, and noticed what attracted me, I got to know how I functioned, and my uniqueness. In exploring my energy, what lifted and what depressed it, I noticed the flow of Wisdom, going deeper into a spaciousness within that opened me to divine movement, with a sense of depth and unity.
Hokhmah is personified as divine feminine, an aspect that has been hidden for many years. She’s an important voice today, especially in our patriarchal churches. Wisdom’s nurturing, compassionate voice is so important to bring into our own lives and communities. Many hear only critical voices. Wisdom’s nurture connects us to all the blossoming ways of love.
I read ancient theologians, who have so much to say in our present day: Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, and Meister Eckhart: and contemporary theologians such as Margaret Barker, Cynthia Bourgeault, June Boyce-Tillman, Celia Deane-Drummond, Elizabeth A. Johnson, and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza. I especially appreciate Neil Douglas-Klotz’s book Desert Wisdom: A nomad’s guide to life’s big questions from the heart of the native Middle East.
Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love poems to God, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy, would be the book I’d take to my desert island, but there are many other poets I draw from: Kathleen Raine, Nicola Slee, Mary Oliver, Susan Griffin, William Stafford, Carol Bialock — and guests here who share their poems.
Our community explores the concept “In God, we live and move and have our being.” We’re already in movement and don’t have try to get to God, or feel sorrow that we’ve moved away from God. I wrote a poem about this, ending:
And the world is held
within this deep love connection
stretching around us
as the flesh of the womb
All of us, animal, plant, galaxy
held by Love
that guides us through to our emerging.
The word “God” can be a stumbling block to many, and we use various terms for “more-than-ourselves” that we experience. I believe that this life-energy is the source of our life. Hokhmah’s life-spark is there at our conception. We’re beings in relation right from the start, through the joining of egg and sperm. We often quote Rowan Williams’s phrase: “I am a place where God is happening.”
Early mornings are my best time for connecting to Wisdom with a variety of disciplines, including reflection, walking, journaling, yoga, and chanting — not all done at once! I try and have some quiet reflection in the day, especially in the liminal times of getting dark. Having creative times, often with two friends where we share and create, helps me to explore.
The regular morning and evening prayer times in our community are an important part of my day, some of which I have prepared, giving me further thoughts.
I’m a Quaker, and their weekly worship is a vital part of my week. Being held in the community of silent worship and listening is very sustaining. I can face difficult issues within this sacred space, and find depth and connection I cannot feel on my own. Within this profound time, reflections can merge into a larger clarity, helping me see the bigger picture.
I grew up in a church-loving family, with a father who passed on his love of walking in beautiful countryside, and a mother who passed on her creativity. My toughest years of chronic illness, beginning when my children were six and nine, has taught me most about life, creativity and suffering.
I’m often incensed at the many injustices we hear about, especially the unbalanced distribution of money. Alongside the pressure put on many people during Covid lockdowns, there’s now the additional pressures of hardship. There are enough resources to sustain us all, if we share what we have, live simpler lives in the rhythm of the earth.
I’m happiest when I’m in flow, connecting to ideas, working with my hands, walking in beautiful countryside. My three-year-old granddaughter is a bundle of fun, and loves rhyming words; so we share a lot of laughter together.
We have a great dawn chorus here that I’ve recorded — an amazing experience.
I have great hope in the knowing that we all carry — a knowing that enlarges who we are, and connects us to each other and the earth.
I’d most like to meet Etty Hillesum, a Dutch Jew, who was a great journaler during the suffering in the Second World War, writing about the spaciousness within, where she found what was deepest and best in her, which she named God.
Helen Warwick was talking to Terence Handley MacMath.
holyroodhouse.org.uk