Dear Kaleid Ladies,
Good morning! Blessings to you today.
As you know, we are offering two opportunities to “do Kaleid” together this summer, both prompted by the pain of racial tension. We desire to be women of courage and compassion in this season, and so we are praying together on Wednesday mornings and learning about whiteness together on Wednesday evenings.
You may be wondering, “Why these two things? And what if I can’t participate in either of them?”
In response to the first question, at Kaleid, we believe God made human beings as integrated beings. Our bodies, our minds, our spirits and our external worlds impact each other and are shaped in tandem. And so, as we think about Kaleid offerings, we always ask how we can incorporate the “contemplative” and the “embodied.”
In the contemplative, through silence, stillness and solitude, we quiet our minds, bodies and hearts. And we can become aware of God. We can be absorbed and amazed. We become grounded in our identity, remembering our human frailty and our human goodness. Contemplation draws us out of ourselves, away from our false narratives into our true identity as God’s daughters, made in love, by love, and for love. We need regular rhythms of prayer to remind us who we are. In a season of global upheaval and systemic pain we need the contemplative to remind us of what is fundamentally good and true.
In the embodied, through asking ourselves, “What does it look like to act out spiritual reality in my physical world?”, we act as the living temples of the Holy Spirit in our neighborhoods, our cities, and our families. Without people of God living in faithful ways, there is no reliable witness to the kingdom of God “on earth as it is in heaven.” In this season of racial pain, we are recognizing that our ways of being--of living our lives in the world--may be rooted in ideas or systems or blind spots that propagate rather than alleviate injustice. And so, in our whiteness series, we seek to humbly understand our own racial reality in order to inform how we live faithfully in the world.
As for what to do if you’re not able to participate, we’ve got you covered! As we move through our contemplative series and our whiteness series, we’ll offer you parts of the experiences here in the Kaleid communications, so that you can go with us as we go. We’ll miss you, but we are excited to get to share some of our experiences with you, so that you can ground yourself in God’s presence and offer your life as a faithful witness to the love of Christ in the world.
We are so thankful for this community of Kaleid women who are women of courage, willing to live into the silence spaces of the contemplative when everything else is screaming for our attention and willing to live into the active spaces of re-framing and repenting when old narratives cannot hold God’s work of love and justice.
“For the experience of Presence is the experience of peace, and the experience of peace is the experience not of inaction but of power, and the experience of power is the experience of a pursuing Love that loves its way untiringly to victory.”
- Thomas Kelley, Testament of Devotion, p.102
Gratefully,
The Kaleid Team
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