Ministry Call
Resumé
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Creative Pilgrimage
Read for free on Bible Gateway
Revelations of Divine Love
by Julian of Norwich
Read for free on Project Gutenberg
Devotion: Why I Write
by Patti Smith
Purchase from Yale University Press
Framing Text: The Book of Ruth
This first movement in my creative pilgrimage begins with Ruth. Her journey is not a spiritual vision or a cultural tour; it is a walk of loyalty. She goes not to seek greatness but to accompany grief. Her vow to Naomi, “Where you go, I will go,” is a declaration of surrender and alignment. She does not name herself prophet or artist, yet through her quiet fidelity she becomes the matriarch of a line that shapes history.
Ruth’s story has often been queered, especially in contexts of chosen family and covenantal love between women. I’ve heard her words in same-sex wedding vows and seen her invoked in ceremonies of solidarity. Though the text is not explicitly queer, it resonates deeply with queer values: faithfulness beyond bloodlines, bonds formed in exile, and the power of shared survival. Her presence in scripture invites a radical reimagining of kinship and belonging, one that reaches beyond her companionship with Naomi. Ruth redefines family not through bloodlines or law but through chosen loyalty, mutual care, and steadfast presence in a world governed by patriarchal norms.
Julian of Norwich: Devotion as Offering
If Ruth gives us pilgrimage as embodied loyalty, Julian of Norwich gives us pilgrimage as interior vision. She anchors herself—literally—to voyage more fully into the divine. Her stillness is not passive; it is profoundly active. Julian receives visions for the comfort of her “even-Christians,” not for her own glory. She learns to write not to mythologize herself but to make revelation accessible. Hers is a devotion of offering.
Julian speaks of reverent dread and the sadness that punctuates joy. She reminds us that to expect only contentment is to misunderstand the fullness of creation. Her visions do not promise clarity but participation. For Julian, seeking is not failure; it is communion—an act of grace in itself, even without resolution.
Her writing dazzles when she holds a small object, the size of a hazelnut, in her palm and perceives, in that fragile thing, the entire cosmos sustained by love. That image suggests the edge of quantum entanglement: the mysterious truth that things once joined remain connected across space and time. It evokes both abstract thought and sacred imagination, a vision of stunning compression, intimate yet vast.
Julian’s holiness welcomes rather than sorts. Her radical trust in love’s containment of all creation was dangerous in her day. Still she recorded it clearly and humbly, with confidence in its grace. Her hospitality of spirit parallels the chosen kinship Ruth enacts—the kind of fierce loyalty and mutual care that marginalized communities have always used to survive.
Patti Smith: Devotion as Persona
And then there is Patti Smith. Her book Devotion sets out to explore why she writes, but the answer it offers is simply: because she is Patti Smith. The pages lean on name-dropping, self-reference, and curated suffering. She stacks evidence of her cool like kids once collected trading cards—moody photos of cemeteries, stiffly framed gardens, reverent mentions of literary greats. The fictional tale she includes drips with Western tropes: lone genius as divine right, cruelty excused by exceptionality, sex as transcendence, death as performance. These gestures don’t open meaning; they posture toward it.
My reaction wasn’t just critical, it was personal. I knew this charisma. I chased it through art school: the cultivated distance, the cloaked vulnerability, the worship of genius. I recoiled not because I didn’t understand it, but because I did. I had built altars to this same aesthetic.
Smith writes like someone who believes her own myth. She doesn’t speak the language of the place she romanticizes. She remains the mythmaker abroad, untouched and deaf to input. Her fictional character, Eugenia, echoes Ruth’s pilgrimage without fidelity and Julian’s solitude without vision. She doesn’t transform; she performs. Her solitude is a stage, not a sanctuary.
You could say she moves, but she never journeys. She gestures toward transcendence without seeking communion. Ruth’s faithfulness makes family. Julian’s stillness births vision. Eugenia remains closed. Her story invites no one in. It reveals the difference between spectacle and offering.
Smith ends Devotion claiming she wants to write something profound, not clever. Yet the book reads as performance, not offering. It is a mirror polished for display, not a gift laid down with humility.
I chose Devotion hoping to encounter the divine. This was a voice my peers and I once revered. After walking with Ruth and Julian, I responded with judgment—not superiority, but defense. I recognized myself in the performance. Maybe I still do. That discomfort is part of the pilgrimage too.
Toward a Creative Ethic
This first pilgrimage brings me to a threshold. I have walked with Ruth, anchored with Julian, and wandered with Patti. What I have learned is simple: true creative devotion is not self-mythology, cleverness, or aestheticized despair. It is offering.
My work going forward must be rooted in that ethic—not to impress or self-justify, but to give something that matters. A methodology of offering might begin with questions: Who is this for? What are they carrying? What do they need? What will linger after the text, image, or service ends? It also calls for habits of attentiveness—reading with humility, walking without purpose, listening without the urge to reply.
I want to make work with hospitality as its compass: usefulness over novelty, dignity over cleverness, resonance over polish. I’m not interested in creating artifacts that shut doors behind them, but in crafting invitations that set tables before them. I want to make work that remembers people’s names. Travel should be solidarity, not display. Stillness should make room for listening, not serve as retreat. I want to make work that helps others see clearly and kindly, together.
This vision of holiness is not about visibility alone. Coming from an LGBTQIA+ perspective isn’t incidental for me; it’s the lens through which I’ve come to see God anew. The outsider status I once held close now becomes a fulcrum, lifting others into connection and shared belonging.
Holiness begins when we see our path not as detour but as doorway—a way to encounter the divine beyond what we inherited. It isn’t performance; it is fidelity. Not the kind tethered to purity or piety, but the grounded courage to return to one another again and again. To claim and be claimed. To show up in love when no one applauds. Holiness is presence. It is grace. It takes form when we choose one another—in exile, in silence, in the quiet corners—because we see one another as lovable, redeemable, and worthy. In that seeing, we catch a glimpse of God.
This is not abstract righteousness but covenant made tangible. We realize holiness through how we treat each other, not through doctrine. Holy texts are not the property of those who use them to wound; they are doorways to belonging, to sacred mutuality, to the divine possibility of being known and still loved.
That is the devotion I seek. As I continue toward priesthood, I hold that devotion in tension with tradition. Reverence does not mean erasing the self; it means bringing the full, honest self before God and community, allowing that presence to be shaped by scripture, by service, by story. My task is not to perform sanctity but to live truthfully into it—to show how faith can be both ancient and alive. If I am to be a priest, let me be a porch light in the dark: something steady, quietly offered, welcoming the traveler.
These essays are not declarations. They are invitations, part of a longer creative pilgrimage. I hope you’ll walk with me into what’s next: July’s reflections on growth, with Barbara Brown Taylor and adrienne maree brown as guides into rootedness, change, and the sacred practice of staying present. This first offering was written to loosen the grip of gatekeeping and make more room around the fire. The path continues, and I’d be glad for your company.
Next Month:
JULY | Season After Pentecost: Ongoing Growth
- Book of Acts
- An Altar in the World
by Barbara Brown Taylor
Available at HarperCollins
- Emergent Strategy
by adrienne maree brown
Available at AK Press