Being the Beloved:
stories of ongoing transformation in daily life
By Gwen Shipley
Two Australian shepherds live in my home. They lie on the kitchen floor like random throw rugs scattered underfoot when we are cooking. For everyone’s good, we are training them to stay in their “place” when instructed. They are reluctant but content once they surrender. I am being likewise trained.
By age fifteen, my family and I had lived in as many homes. I have always thought I was made for hotels and airports. So, it was an adjustment when my young husband, who travelled weekly for work before marriage, said, “I like to be home!” I had little understanding of “place.”
Fast forward to the future. Home for me is the house my parents [finally] moved the family into, never left, and that my own family has now occupied for almost 30 years.
From here I have celebrated graduations, weddings, achievements, job changes, relationships, grandchildren, and a little travel.
From here I have grieved the loss of family members, myriad friends, and dozens of dreams. When the cumulative effect exceeded my holding capacity, I parked at the end of the lane and, like a heavy rain cloud, cried, “Please! I can’t drive in there one more time.
From here I followed the path of formation leading to CFDM. Though determined God was already and always at work, I still was not surrendered to “place.” Then the pandemic.
Now grounded, I scaled my gardening. Rooms filled with seedlings and potting soil as I engaged this gift of “place” in a new way. Dirty fingernails, disheveled hair, and a sore back (then a long, hot bath…) testify to a contemplative vision that finds God present in all things. Faithful, patient, generous, forgiving, relational… all expressed in this embodied experience.
The author of Contemplative Gardening (1) recalls the encouragement she received when struggling to appreciate her new pastoral location:
“…start small. Look at lichen on a rock, or the texture of bark on a nearby tree. When looked at with enough loving attention…every place contains beauty… ‘The shift to the location where the mind can be receptive to an encounter with God begins in the inner reality of the seeker.’ In other words, if you can’t live in a place you love, learn to love the place where you live. Shift your interior landscape.”
Opening to God’s character revealed in the power of a bean seed and the abundance of a dahlia shifted mine. It brought the sense that “place” is being at home in God in every moment. More and more, I “place” when I go and when I stay. In fact, after a decade of life-giving trips west in service of the soul’s care, I mostly want to stay and play in the Sunset Garden, or The Pines, or The Borders.
Last month my spiritual director said, paraphrasing, “I hear contentment,” (which is no small thing for my ennea-type!). We shared a laugh and thanked God together via phone, she from her place and me from mine. Over the weekend, Claude and I rested our tools to lie in the grass and watch two hawks chase a flock of swallows silhouetted against a soft blue sky.
1. Dolan, Pamela. Contemplative Gardening. Morehouse, 2022. p. 73.
Eph 4:10 (NLT) …the same one who descended is the one who ascended higher than all the heavens, so that he might fill the entire universe with himself.
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