The Deep, Healing Waters of Discernment

[Editors’ note: Sarah Holst is a 2017 awardee of the Lucile Murray Durkin Scholarship for Women Discerning Priestly Ordination. This is the first of three in a series of reflections from our 2017 awardees on how the scholarship impacted their journey over the academic year.]

There is a story in Revelations about a portent of a woman who is in the throes of labor, when another portent appears in the sky, this time of a dragon.  “And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to bear a child, that he might devour her child when she brought it forth” (Revelations 12:4).  Hope, it is said, is giving birth in the face of the dragon… It is that impulse of hope that called on me to bear and bring forth a child despite the difficulties.  Even in the harshest of poverty, the devastations of war, the threat of environmental annihilation, we continue to give birth, and each birth is an act of hope.”- Beth Bartlett, Journey of the Heart

Collage by Sarah Holst with words by Adrienne Maree Brown from her book Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds.

Ritual is play. When we embrace the abundance that we have been given, when we celebrate and grieve and hold one another in community, when we dare to imagine and practice a world of interdependence, justice, and love without oppression, borders, and systemic violence, we take the Holy Spirit up on her invitation to co-create with and within her. The Lucile Murray Durkin scholarship gave me a boost to continue my journey of engaging with the Spirit in this most serious form of play: discerning how I am called to spiritual leadership and priestly service on the colonized land on which I live, in the community I move, love, and struggle within, and in the long story of the Catholic Church in which my own story is engraved. I am grateful for this scholarship and the strength, spirit, and stories of the women behind it because it has made the counter-cultural path I walk a little more possible.

I am a year’s worth of classes away from graduating with a Masters of Divinity degree with a concentration of Theology and the Arts and an emphasis on Social Transformation. I am a radical Catholic, standing on the shoulders of the like of Ivone Gebara, Elizabeth Johnson, Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, Liz McAlister, and Rose Berger, drawing on the depth and strength of creativity and action that these giants of our tradition offer willingly with open hands. My spirit is willing as I continue to ask the questions of how to take up the mantle of theological reflection, sacramental calling, and healing of communities and the earth. Yet, this path continues to be a complicated one: How will I support myself in this work? How will I offer support to my family? (I am due to have a baby any day now!) Will I be able to embody all that the Spirit is calling me to be within Catholic priesthood? Is Catholicism (in the way that its story has played out in the world) a big enough tent for all that I am dreaming? Will this work be centered in how I spend my days or will it have to be relegated to the cracks and corners?

“Messy Hope”, painting by Sarah Holst depicting a winged Mother God protecting the possibility of new, liberating life within the beautifully complicated
mess of creation.

“Soil and Sacrament”, drawing by Sarah Holst.

This last fall, I took a class called Interpretation as Resistance: Womanist, Feminist and Queer Approaches to the Bible taught by Drs. Alika Galloway and Carolyn Pressler. One book in particular opened my ancestral imagination to how far back feminist and ecofeminist stories have populated (and carried!) God’s long Kin-dom project of liberation. Wilda C. Gafney’s book “Womanist Midrash: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne” is a must-read for anyone seeking to ground in the line of midwives in the time of Pharaoh: smuggling hope into the world directly under the nose of violent systems. I was inspired and heartened by Gafney’s telling of the stories of Jochebed and Miriam and the line of midwives from which they came, including an exploration that a ritual parent of Baptism was likely traditionally performed by these women and their ancestors.

Where I live in Duluth, Minnesota on stolen Anishinaabe land, there is a long tradition that women are the protectors of the water, the protectors of life. I see and feel parallels from my inherited spiritual ancestors and the Anishinaabe women from the place where I live. I was recently at an event where Anishinaabe Water Walker Sharon Day said, “In times like these, we need to care for one another and the earth.” I am grateful to be grounding my exploration of the priesthood in the local community among folks of diverse genders asking what is needed for healing.

The way I see it, this priestly work must intentionally push upstream from the culture of isolation (which extraction capitalism and white supremacy depends on) and root into the values of community and interdependence, investing in deep relationship with water, place, animals, plants, and people. Within the often muddy (cloudy yet nutrient-filled) waters of discernment, the Spirit keeps leading me to opportunities to live out this community call: serving as the Internship Coordinator with EcoFaith Recovery, creating and leading ecofeminist taize services with a local, elder, mentor, and friend Beth Bartlett, and co-leading the most recent Call to Action retreat with young adults in the new mentorship program. I am grateful to be surrounded by the wisdom of folks who have been asking these questions for generations as I prepare to bring new life into the world this summer and continue to follow the Spirit where She calls me on this amazing path to priesthood.

“Sacred Life” drawing by Sarah Holst.

[For more of Sarah Holst’s artwork, check out her website here. Please also consider making an earmarked donation to the Lucile Murray Durkin Scholarship.]