Wild Goose Fest

Thursday morning, I will be on a plane headed to North Carolina to take part of the Wild Goose Festival. It’s the first time I’ve had a chance to be there since 2019. I was set to take part in 2020 (alongside my friend Becky Grisell who was also set to present a workshop) but Covid robbed us of that experience. One of many losses that year and beyond.

On Thursday, I’ll be helping set up the healing arts tent and putting the finishing touches on a lamentation wall. Read about why and participate digitally here.

Here’s how the wall will work: Paper and writing utensils will be provided for people to write, draw, and post their grief throughout the festival. This will be a holy place for people to articulate their sadness, their anger, their confusion, their unanswered questions. It will be a place to lay some of that heaviness down on the page and to know they are not alone in their grief. At the end of the festival, I will gather all the posts and take them home with me. I’ll pray over each one and then burn the pages and bury the ashes in honor under an oak tree on the banks of the Colorado River.

From Friday morning until Saturday evening, the wall will be there for people to post their laments. Lament happens best in community, where compassionate others bear witness to one another’s grief. As Barbara Holmes knows, “The call for lament is not an invitation to moping or sadness. It is a call for ritual reorientation. With or without tears, lament is a communal act of cosmological engagement.”

And since grief is a threshold, a story with a before loss and its aftermath, a generous North Carolina pastor is crafting a wall with a doorway in it to serve as the space to hold these stories of grief and loss.

It is telling that my installation is not the only one devoted to making room for sorrow. Another will invite participants to recognize the nonlinear nature of grief, walking a winding path and placing a flag in honor of their loss, and a third will offer a way to process the ways we have borne witness to war from our smartphones.

Friday afternoon, I’ll be guiding people to engage lament. I’ll be helping them discover lament as telling the truth about loss and love and letting grief move through us, to be metabolized instead of staying stuck. I’ll be reminding them that we need lament just as much as we need hope and trust and love. I’ll share how I learned to lament the hard way, about why it matters and why it can be strangely hopeful. I’ll describe some historical ways to engage it and then provide some possibilities for participants to engage lament for themselves.

And after the workshop, I’m thrilled to have the chance to do a book signing at the Festival bookstore! I’ll be able to share watercolor bookmarks for anyone who’d like one and will also have a few duelo boxes with tools for engaging lament and hope on hand as well.

On Saturday, I’ll be hosting people for mini spiritual direction sessions or to continue the conversation about lament. I can’t wait to have some chances to connect with people one one-on-one.

I welcome your prayers for my trip and those I’ll have a chance to guide into holy, hard, and healing lament.

with care,
terra

What I’ve been up to:

I wrote about my five favorite books on grieving without getting overwhelmed by despair. Find out why I chose them here.

Coming up:

I’m looking forward to joining the Eremos community for a workshop exploring lament as a missing piece for many. Central Texas friends, I hope to see you there!

I look forward to speaking at the Church Mental Health Summit alongside Aundi Kolber, Caroline Leaf, Makoto Fujimura, and Latasha Morrison in October. The event is sponsored by Spiritual First Aid and Hope Made Strong and will happen on World Mental Health Day.

What I’m watching

Sweet Tooth isn’t new but I’m giving it a go. It’s a mostly happy and redemptive apocalyptic drama (through there is definitely some death, destruction, and a villain aptly named Abbott). It’s got a great cast and a fantastic narrator. I’m almost done with the first season.

And I’m very excited for the next and final season of the Umbrella Academy which is apparently (finally) focusing on Ben and features Nick Offerman with an awesomely bad southern accent and David Cross who I'll always remember fondly as the blue man from Arrested Development.

What I’m listening to

I have a playlist in heavy rotation for joy and for my new writing project but I’m going to wait a little longer to share it because it shares a name with said project. But I can tell you this song is on it.

In memorial of a fellow Austin spiritual director and kind soul Jane Crockett Lowrimore: I hope something like this might be said about me when I am gone:

“Perhaps Jane’s greatest gift was her ability to make people feel accepted and cherished for exactly who they were and where they were in their journey. Jane was genuinely curious about the people who came into her life. She asked many questions and actively listened -- taking time to respond thoughtfully, never interrupting with her own opinion, always reserving space for you.

And when your time together was finished -- she knew how to end a conversation -- she would look at you squarely, lovingly, and bless you (that’s what it was a blessing), saying, “Take care of you.””

The call for lament is not an invitation to moping or sadness.

It is a call for ritual reorientation. With or without tears,

lament is a communal act of cosmological engagement.

-Barbara Holmes