The Chalice Well

On most Thursday evenings now-adays, you'll find me at Grace Group, or maybe The Well. For the next few weeks, it's Grace Group. Grace Group at St. Timothy's is affiliated with Open Hearts Ministry; some groups are called Journey Groups, but at St. Tim's, it's Grace Group. I appreciate the name difference. We all have journeys to make in our lives, but to survive them and grow in them, we must encounter "grace" along the way. Grace to me is "total acceptance by the Other", whether it be God, or the women who sit across from me on Thursday evenings.

Those Thursday night meetings usually open doors that I'm invited to walk through during the next week. Such was my experience this past Thursday. We were invited to write letters, and I was invited to ponder my response to someone else's story. That was my "work" yesterday morning. Love woke me at 3:45, with an invitation to write, ponder, and work out my feelings through the image-making process we call "art".

As I wrote my letter and pondered my response the night before, as often happens, tears flowed; tears of shame, embarrassment, anger, hurt--and even the question, "where was God in all this". After a couple of hours of writing in my journal, the thought came to me, "Now, go work a mandala."

And this was the result. A friend recently sent me a photo of a "chalice well necklace," and I read on-line about the Chalice Well in England. I already have personal symbols of chalices and wells, and I knew Spirit was inviting me to draw my own Chalice Well mandala. And as I worked this one, remembering one stormy day in 1963, I felt as if Love spoke to me--"I was there in your shame and in your embarrassment. I was there in your fears of being abandoned, not enough, and unworthiness. I saw what happened to you, and My tears fell like the rain that fell that day, as I waited with you in the storm. I was there for you then, and I am still here for you now."