God’s grace
is like a great dam
held back
within us, and God,
a longing mother,
waiting to break open
and immerse us
in her waters.
~Edwina Gateley, “Dam,” from Growing into God
This passage is just one among several of Edwina
Gateley’s poems -- which often feature God as She -- that I have
savored. There is an elegant simplicity and unadorned candor in her prayer-poetry
that invites, engages, and refreshes. Edwina’s poems are like letters from an insightful
friend who gently and persistently reminds you that God “loves us passionately
right here, right now, amidst the wonders and messiness of life.” In early September 2013, dozens of retreatants got to
experience Edwina Gateley’s divinely earthy wisdom during a Contemplative Outreach-sponsored
weekend gathering at St. Bart’s Episcopal Church in Poway, California. Through verse, music, visuals,
and personal storytelling, Edwina invited us to reconnect with and reflect on
our own souls' journey with God through the stages of life.
Edwina (yes, she is a first-name-basis kind of sistah) referred to the “three stages of imaging God” to
focus and steer her animated—and frequently playful-- presentation. The first
stage occurs during childhood, when one (if raised in a religious home) tends to have an innocent, magical, or
mythical image of God. As a child, Edwina saw God as a light-hearted playmate,
and her hometown cathedral – full of beautiful statues of angels and saints,
was her “divine playhouse.” She found delight in the rituals, the Bible
stories, and the liturgical seasons of the church year. Her family’s Catholic
tradition was a source of solace, security, and joy for her.
The second stage of imaging God emerges through the
responsibility and discipleship that come with adulthood. As we grow and
change, explains Edwina, so do our notions of God. The questions of obedience,
sin, guilt, and judgment may come to the forefront in one’s spiritual journey (as it did for her) –
but one still feels the urge “to continue the journey -- like idiots for Christ.” At
this stage of her life, Edwina felt called to become a missionary and teacher
in Africa. But because she took with her a God who was “white, Catholic, and
British,” she was in for some surprises that would soon challenge and transform
her perception of divinity. As she wrote in her memoir In God’s Womb, “In Africa my understanding of God changed because
of the hospitality, openness, and generosity of the African people. Their
notion of God seemed to be much bigger than what I had learned from my Church
at home. I came to understand that we walk in God and God gets bigger to the
degree that we are open and expectant.” After three years in Africa, Edwina
returned to England and founded the Volunteer Missionary Movement, which
offered a way for lay people to become more engaged with Christianity’s social
justice tradition. Her experience in Africa had awakened her more fully to
Jesus’ gospel call: “we [are] to share our gifts and talents with the poor. But
not only that—we [are] to share the Spirit of Christ: the Spirit of love,
charity, and friendship.”
The growth and expansion of the Volunteer Missionary Movement was deeply fulfilling for Edwina, but eventually she began to feel a
pull in another direction – an invitation to spend more time in silence with
God. Thus she undertook a solitary three-month sojourn in the desert of
Algerian North Africa. Here, she sunk into “the consciousness of the Divine”
and experienced a deeper sense of belonging to and being loved by God. One of
Edwina’s compelling Sahara stories involved a moment when she recognized her
water storage tank was leaking and she would soon run out of water. She headed
out into the desert on her own to search for water – fearful, yet placing her
deeper trust in God. To her surprise, a Bedouin Tuareg woman appeared “against
a thousand miles of sand.” The woman did not speak English, but she invited
Edwina into her home built out of rocks and goatskins. As an exhausted Edwina
sat down to rest, the woman exited into a nearby rocky cleft for a time, and
returned with sweet hot tea to share. There was a spring in that rocky crevice!
The gift of that Bedouin woman’s hospitality and that hidden spring gave Edwina
a new perspective on the “water from the rock” that God made available to Moses
and the Israelites in Exodus 17.
Edwina’s time in the desert was a deepening of her
discipleship and relationship with the divine that characterizes a more mature
level of the second stage of imaging God. Restored and renewed, she came to the
United States to earn a degree in theology, after which she accepted another
call from God to embrace the neglected and the marginalized. She founded
Genesis House, a program serving women recovering from prostitution. After two
decades of this ministry, conflicts within the organization culminated in her
having to leave Genesis House – “perhaps the most painful and heartbreaking
time of my life,” says Edwina. And yet even this upsetting change in her plans
opened up for her a new and fruitful phase in her journey: of motherhood, of
leading retreats and conferences, of openhearted sharing of her journey with
others and of inviting people to embrace Meister Eckhart’s assertion that “we
are all called to give birth to God” – to allow divine love to take root within us
and freely flow out into the world.
This later phase – stage three of imaging God – is the
expansive call to wisdom and to divine union. God is Lover and we are Beloved. As our former, more limited images of God fall away, we become more
conscious of the divine presence in all people, all places, all moments.
Religious rituals may not hold the same kind of significance as they did in
earlier stages, since, as Edwina says, “we have a new Cathedral: in the
streets, in the forest, in the universe, in every place … we deeply know that
we are not alone and that God is bigger than our reality.” Here is where one
most fully realizes the call to be a mystic: to be conscious and to carry the mystery of God into daily life. A mystic
deepens in wisdom, intuition, authenticity and integrity, knowing that
ultimately all is connected, all is in God, and, as Julian of Norwich proclaimed, “all will be well.”
Throughout this two-day retreat, Edwina included musical
interludes and visuals as well as moments of silence and small-group sharing
that allowed participants to reflect on their own soul-journeys and turning
points with God. This interweaving of Edwina’s reflections with moments of
silence and personal sharing invited us to recognize how our own ways of
relating to the great Mystery have changed over the course of our lives and how, as Edwina
says, “God grows with us.”
Edwina’s life – her early missionary work, her time in
the desert, her further call to solidarity with marginalized women, and her
writing and story-sharing and retreat-leading -- stands as a wonderful example
of “modern-day mysticism,” that is, contemplation
and action. While we are invited into a deepening relationship with the divine in
a variety of ways, times of contemplative silence and solitude allow us to sink
into God, to rest and to be restored – so that we can return to ordinary life
with open, Christ-lit hearts and with the spiritual resources to walk through the
challenges and adversities that inevitably come our way.
Here are a few final tasty quotes from Edwina:
“God, the Eternal Seducer, is insatiable and is always
urging us further. If you follow God, God will take advantage of you!”
“A mystic is that which you are already invited to
become.”
“No matter how much our society represses it, there is a
deep hunger for the spiritual – it is an essential part of our humanity.”
“In the Book of Wisdom, the Holy Spirit is free and
wanders the marketplace [i.e., this world] looking for open hearts in which to
make her home.”
Thank you, Edwina, for answering and living the
heart-opening call.
