Back then to one of my favourite questions, echoing St Francis; ” who are you oh Lord, and who am I?” A soul searching question, an examin asked every day, a reality check with his deepest self, a question we perhaps all shy away from, and need to walk towards through. A movement towards love, self-love, and God love, the God who loves us more than we can imagine….

Who am I, does God love me? Am I loved, am I loveable…

Who am I, and how do I love?

” We love because God loved us first”, and through that love we connect to the deepest love, spiritually, and physically, calling us to be whole and holy, love we are told is love that sets us free.

I have longed to be set free, and judged myself from childhood, too fat, too tall, too opinionated, too open, too much….

The list has gone on…

My morning prayers this morning invite me to accept myself….

They tell me I am a crone, I embrace that, I am, at 57, I am a crone, a woman of substance, experience, and sensuous reality, a reality I have hidden from because for so long I have been encouraged as a woman not to take up too much space, encouraged to be less than I am.

A crone is an older woman who has lived and loved, who loved and is scared and scared, who bears wisdom and wounds in equal measure. Whose belly may be soft from child bearing, or taught from childlessness but celebrates the wisdom that comes from either wound, and each celebrates the other.

I am a woman who in the words of my daily prayers “The Celtic wheel of the year” by Tess Ward, celebrates her moist, juicy-ness, her creative and recreative potential, her healing possibilities, her wholeness, her true holiness, for she is fearfully and wonderfully made, to be moist and juicy means to be ripe, ready to give, daring to receive. That is who I am, who I am called to be.

For me this has meant celebrating my sexuality and finding healing within it, to say out loud that I find my wholeness in the body of another woman not a man, as is conventionally prescribed. In finding the flesh on flesh contact of curve against curve to be liberating and whole making, and to shake with the reality of the healing to be found there for me. We are fearfully and wonderfully made, to be whole and holy…

I have given birth to 6 children, 5 of whom survive me, one who doesn’t, I still have her rose, I have 2 granddaughters and am awaiting the arrival of a grandson…. I celebrate them all…

I have been married to one man, but am no longer, and while in retrospect the past may have looked different, it isn’t because the choices I made are what they are. Watching RuPaul’s Drag Race today and listening to the conversations around acceptance of sexuality both awoke and allowed me to accept that my choices were of their age, if I have caused wounds by my woundedness I am deeply sorry. I knew this of course, but sometimes we just need to hear it said.

Even in the sorrow I find and offer healing, for at last I can say I am who I am ( there may be a song in that 🙂 ).

But there is also deep joy, a joy that left me shaking with knowledge that who I am is okay, and deeply, deeply of God for in it I find no evil, simply a connection with the depth of myself that I was not aware of, triggered by a physical reality that I have hidden from.

Who are you Oh God, and who am I?

Somehow we are one, becoming one, for now I live between the now, and the not quite yet….

I am who I am….

” O holy mid-wife

who holds and guides me as I birth the story of my life…

with your sacred with-craft

I confess before you my sorrow

at the scandalous violence of putting to death of the wise woman,

the voiceless crone, the witches burnt,

the priest denied, the priestess hidden from sight,

I offer to you women’s knowing in the dark and on the margins,

and the fear of it that remains this day…

Forgive us holy God, genderful and strong,

for without your gift of woman no healing can be complete.