Rev. Catharine Is Currently
On Medical Leave

Don’t Always Go Forward

I am not fully healed. I am not fully wise. I am still on my way. What matters is that I am still moving forward. –Yung Pueblo   Dear ones – I am definitely not fully healed. I am definitely not fully wise. I am indeed on my way. And I am not at all […]

Darling, I Care about This Suffering

As longtime blog readers, friends, comrades in The Way of the River Facebook Community, and readers of my Monday love letter know, I am extremely attached to the three days as some of the holiest in the calendar. And this year, while the Wheel is turning, I find that I am at least as concerned […]

Samhain’s Ancient Grandmother

One Samhain That Samhain we sat in the third floor Aerie. That Samhain we sat on the floor in the dark. That Samhain we sat with a row of candles and lanterns marking a pathway. That Samhain we sat smelling the sweet incense. Between those lights, we sat on the floor in the dark and […]

Prayers for the Dead: All Souls

Blending in with the spirits, monsters, and long-legged beasties that go bump in the night. Carving turnips and later, pumpkins, into Jack O’Lanterns. Honoring the dead who move through the Veil between the worlds. Calling the names of the saints. Praying to our own Dead. There is a lot going on over the next few […]

Are We Grieving? (thoughts on some poetry)

There are two poems for fall that I love best. One, “Ode to the West Wind,” I’ve written about in Reflections. The other is by Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of my all-time favorite poems. (Check out “Pied Beauty” for sheer glory of words.) The Hopkins is called “Spring and Fall,” and has the dedication, “to […]

Why Care for the Ancestors?

Why should we care about who came before us, those we knew, those we didn’t, and those who are lost to memory? Why do we care for our ancestors? It isn’t so we can save them. It isn’t so we can absolve them of their complexities, their transgressions against us and oppression of others. It […]

Ancestors: Who Made Us?

My family is full of stories of those who have gone before us, those from whose lives I come, those who—as someone in a Facebook group of mine said—made me. Those who made me. It’s an uncomfortable feeling, thinking of ourselves as being more than OUR OWN selves. Yet there are so many ways in […]

The Making of a Priestess Part One

1991 We ran through the streets on Samhain (an ancestor-veneration holiday celebrated the same night as Hallowe’en). My dear friend Robert and I had painted our faces with black and white greasepaint and prayed to our ancestors to be with us. I immediately felt a sense of my great-grandmother. The one who was the first […]

I Speak Their Names

Any list of ancestors is incomplete. We are all one another’s ancestors. We are all creating the world they created and the world they left us. It is also we ourselves whom they have created left to this life and so we are among their greatest gifts. They continue, as we will continue, forever and […]

Lux Perpetua Luceat Eis

The dead are not dead; they are not under the earth… Moferere moferere eggun eggun… Lux perpetua luceat eis… The text above, in English, Yoruba and Latin, is the body of a three-part song that was written for Samhain, the Celtic—and now Pagan—celebration of the Mighty Dead, the ancestors. It was written by a largely […]