Celebrating Green Bough

Watercolor by Margaret Matthews

I just returned home from Adrian, GA, celebrating the 35th anniversary of Green Bough House of Prayer. And oh my, can I just say that I felt like I’d died and gone to heaven? There were all kinds of people. Singing hymns, laughing, offering prayers, feasting, shedding tears of joy and gratitude, dancing, telling stories about how much love, healing, grace, and transformation has happened on that holy patch of land, loved by the saints that abide there. It was truly a foretaste.

The celebration prompted me to search for and dig out an old journal, stacked in a Tupperware bin in my garage, still bearing ash from my fire in 2006, and cat litter, from trying to remove the stench. I turned the smelly, brown-edged pages to my entries from September 2002, when I went on my first retreat at Green Bough.

I had never been on a silent, directed retreat, didn’t really know what one was honestly. But lots of people I knew and loved had told me about Green Bough. Said I just had to go and see. There was no website or email, just a paper brochure with a land line phone (remember those?). So I called, got a live human named Steve, who literally wrote my name onto a large paper calendar to come be on retreat.

When the time came and I made my way from busy Atlanta down into south Georgia in the middle of cotton fields, I nearly missed it. There was no sign, and just a couple of regular looking, simple houses, across the road from a cinder block house with a large Confederate flag, barking dogs, and was that a goat I heard? This couldn’t be the place. I kept driving, checked the address again.

I ended up turning around and coming back. You’ll see a dove on the mailbox, he’d said. And sure enough, there was a wooden dove. I pulled in, parked my car, walked across the yard, and timidly opened the old screen door. Hello?

I stepped into a glorious little bookstore, chock full of titles and writers and little gifts that called to me. Pretty soon, a man of thin stature and deep eyes, emerged from a back room and greeted me with open arms, We’re so glad you’ve come. Let me show you around.

Later that afternoon, I met with Fay for spiritual direction. I had been seeing a spiritual director in Atlanta, so was accustomed to talking about my life and having her offer her wisdom and care in conversational response. Fay’s style was a bit different. She listened to me patiently and generously, with that same deep, knowing look I noticed in Steve. But she didn’t say much initially, leaving me to wonder if, in her advanced spiritual maturity, she found me to be so adolescent (I was, of course, spiritually speaking, but I didn’t want to be seen that way!)

In my insecurity and anxiety, I kept talking. She listened and listened. Then, she reached down and grabbed one of the most well-loved Bibles I’ve ever seen. It was swollen from how many times all those pages had been turned, full of bookmarks, loose papers, and post it notes. She silently put it in her lap. I watched in awe as she carefully turned the pages, hearing her fingers slide the thin pages until she found just the text she wanted to share with me.

Kimberly, I want you to pray with Psalm 139. It was a familiar psalm, one of my favorites in fact. But as she began reading it to me slowly, she would look into my hungry eyes and say verses as if they were meant just for me. When she came to the end of the verses she had in mind, she said, “And Kimberly, I want you to pray for the grace to know you are God’s beloved.” With that she looked at me so intensely, it was as if she was peering into my very soul.

My eyes brimmed with tears. Here I was a pastor in a church. I thought after a lifetime in the church and having gone to theology school for three years, I knew some things about God. I preached and taught and told my congregants about God’s love for them. I believed it in my head. But my tears signaled that somewhere deep down, I wasn’t so sure. Does God really know me and love me in the way the psalm suggests?

In that moment, I knew I didn’t know I was God’s beloved. But oh, how I hungered for that deep knowing!

So I kept coming back. Retreat after retreat. Season after season. Year after year. Green Bough became my spiritual home, this place where I could see and hear myself more clearly, where I could pray and reflect, and just rest and be still and know, where my deep, gnawing spiritual hunger was fed, my spirit refreshed, and my way illuminated.

Several years later, I remember driving down there, thinking about what I would share with Fay in spiritual direction. I was feeling self-satisfied, maybe even a bit righteous, about my spiritual growth and progress. I was confident that she would see and hear this in me, and give me a new spiritual "assignment."

She listened intently. She reached for her Bible. She gave me a new text. Here was the moment; I leaned in. And she said, “Kimberly, I want you to pray for the grace to know you are God’s beloved.”

Part of me was completely crestfallen and humbled. The tears came again.

And I was simultaneously relieved. I realized, it might take decades, or even a whole lifetime to really believe this foundational truth. And perhaps this is the one and only lesson. As I would hear Fay say, over and over and over again through twenty years, it is all about love. Knowing we are loved, and growing in that love toward everything and everyone, until it is all and all.

In this way, we never get to check it off our list, never arrive at spiritual perfection. There is always more to learn, more love to receive and to give. I think of this quote from Elizabeth O’Connor:

That is what Christianity is all about—becoming lovers.

The mission of the church is just loving people.

And our confession? What is our confession?

It is that we do not know how to love.

So I keep on going back, praying for the grace to know that I am God’s Beloved, the grace to love everyone else with such tender mercy.

Grateful beyond telling for the little slice of heaven on earth known as Green Bough, celebrating their 35 years of loving, my 20 years of being so well-loved,

Kimberly