Circling Up

The 39th Annual Good Friday
Stations of the Cross March
Through Detroit

Intimacy is mutually honest, warm, caring, safe relationships, where everyone can be who they are and where everyone is valued.
Melodie Beattie

We are deeply grateful for the beautiful tapestry of conversation partners in our lives. As we listen, a diversity of voices is yearning for intimacy, justice and community. Actually, life is pretty simple. We all want jobs that pay a living wage and don’t physically and emotionally exhaust us. We need access to healthcare, housing, water, nutritious food, reliable transportation and a good education for our children.

We also desperately need other people in our lives! We want to spend time with people who know and care for us, and who we can also know and care for. We want to be able to let down with friends and family. We long for spaces where we find nurture and support as we change, mature and grow. Real intimacy and support can be hard to find. A key aspect of the work Kardia Kaiomenē has been commissioned for is partnering with others to facilitate circles that foster intimacy, community and justice. It’s a ministry of mutuality—we yearn for these three things just as much as everyone else. Here are some of the circles we are currently facilitating or participating in, all part and parcel to our work:


lectio divina (every Wednesday at 8pm in Detroit): For more than 1500 years, monastics and contemplatives have been practicing lectio divina as a way of rehearsing the biblical script while tapping into the Inner Teacher of every single member of the community. The goal is to read a short passage from the bible out loud, and multiple times, so that participants listen deeply “with the ears of our hearts,” as old St. Benedict described it in the sixth century. When we read the Script and connect it with our own trials and tribulations, we hear the Spirit speak. We learn how to be vulnerable, to share out of our own hope, pain, experience and joy. We access the divine “in here,” not just “out there.”

Faith & Resistance Gatherings (the first Saturday of every month in Detroit): this is an intergenerational spiritual community of faith and community organizing leaders we have had the opportunity to help vision around & organize over the course of the past several months. We are pastors, professors, parents, engineers, beekeepers, urban farmers, activists, law school students, therapists and teachers. We share vulnerably out of the context of our personal lives and “name the moment” of social, economic and political crises that we grieve and commit to resist and rise above. We are currently working through the Ethnoautobiography workbook, a curriculum one of our mentors (Lily Mendoza, pictured right, far left corner) draws upon and works through with her majority white undergraduate students. It is a beautiful, life-giving model, one who's approach aims to help participants “recover an indigenous sense of self."  Together, we focus on:

the past (ancestry/history) place (land/nature) memory and imagination (dreams/instinct/ unconscious parts of self) mythic origins (collective storytelling) rites of passage/ceremony (embodied communal celebrations) simply, a sense of awe, wonder, and mystery

The People’s Water Board Coalition (the second Tuesday of each month): leaders from a dozen (+) social justice organizations meet to share and strategize around the movement to resist city-wide water shutoffs and to implement a water affordability program so that every resident will have access to clean and affordable water.

Al-Anon (once/week meetings): based on the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, these groups are designed for all those who live or have lived in environments affected by addiction. The meetings are an hour or less and time is given for everyone to share out of their struggles, hope, pain and joy. Everything spoken is anonymous. These in-the-flesh weekly meetings, where Al-Anon is spoken, help to bolster, prod and sustain us in our respective journeys of recovery.

MarriageStrong Groups/Retreats (one to three per year): Five years ago, we had the opportunity to get trained in the MarriageStrong curriculum of Sharon Hargrave, LMFT/executive director of the Boone Center for the Family at Pepperdine University. Since then, we have consistently facilitated groups and retreats for married couples, or those seriously considering taking the plunge. This consists of 6-8 ninety minute sessions that serve to equip couples with tools to identify and heal from stuck patterns of conflict, and to help one another pursue lives of mutual transformation, integrity, and sincerity.

One of the geniuses of the “Restoration Family Systems” model, developed by Sharon and her husband Terry, PhD/LMFT, is that it calls us, over and over again, to begin sessions by opening up and modeling out of our own pain and struggle. We aren’t the experts—just fellow pilgrims on the journey. We have been graced with some powerful tools that, when utilized and practiced, offer the opportunity and skill set to transform conflict in our most intimate relationships into the very gateway we need to heal and transform—to become persons capable of embodying our deepest values and mutually pursuing our individual and couple goals and dreams.

Manna Meal Soup Kitchen (every pre-dawn Monday morning): at the beginning of each week, there's time and space to be confronted by Reality. Our society has rendered too many jobless, houseless, abused and addicted. For too many, a meal and a hot beverage is never a guarantee. Howard Thurman called this work “the gospel of creative love for the abandoned." There is a depth of soul that only comes from the well of grief. The pure in heart and the poor in spirit, the meek and the merciful—these are the “blessed” ones whom Jesus lifted up as the gospel people (Matthew 5:1-8). Their way-of-being evangelizes us. We become rearranged in the process.

Skype Couple’s Check-Ins and One-on-Ones (two to three per week): these conversations are an invaluable piece to the work we do. Some of these calls are focused on patterns and pain in relationships. Others home in on grief work, vocational discernment and/or general spiritual growth. Again, the focus is on mutuality and vulnerability. We work to listen, learn, ask questions, humbly offer feedback, and share out of the context of our own hard times and highlights, trusting that Spirit is prodding all our "inner teachers" in this process.

This is a sample of the core pastoral and accompaniment work we are grateful to do. As we continue to get this nonprofit up and running, we hope for more opportunities to facilitate circles that weave biblical scholarship with 12-step recovery principles, the “restoration” therapeutic model, social and political analysis and the real-world circumstances of our lives. We believe deeply in this work, and continue to experience these kinds of spaces as powerful catalysts in the process of unlodging grief, cultivating confession and letting transformation flow.

Kardia Kaiomenē means “burning hearts.” We hope that it will always be an organization that responds to the human yearning for intimacy, community and justice. And when we experience these, we boldly name this burning sensation for what it is: Something bigger than ourselves reminding us once again that we are not alone.