A Companionable Way: Path of Devotion in Conscious Love

In today's polarized publics, we are rarely prepared to encounter one another peaceably and deeply across irreconcilable difference. A Companionable Way invites inquisitive minds, body-souls, and spiritual hearts into the delightful but demanding inner work required for peaceable encounters with integrity across interreligious and intercultural difference. Unmet yearnings and the unconscious refusal of deep feeling in so many of our cultures need redress, not only within scholarly-analytical habits of mind but also in aging communal "containers" not adept at holding deep feeling without harm. Ancient but 'new' containers today--webs of spiritual friendship and circle-way communities of practice--offer hope for new learning and formative encounters with difference toward an expressive delight able to companion the suffering of self and others. Part memoir of a deep-feeling academic, part toolbox for the curiously contemplative, A Companionable Way witnesses to the deeply rooted Sacred available to each of us in a return to the body, devotion in conscious love, and new ways of being human together across irreconcilable difference, held gently in a patient and living wisdom particular to each but needed by all.

Lisa M. Hess is Professor of Practical Theology at United Seminary (Ohio) and a graduate of the 2013 Conscious Feminine Leadership Academy with Women Writing for (a) Change. Author of Artisanal Theology and Learning in a Musical Key, she is a companion, contemplative, scholar, poet, and teaching-elder (PCUSA) who serves the common good as an active leader in traditional and nontraditional communities of practice.