Monday Meditation: Formation as Repair
Dear Becoming Ones,
Today I am thinking about formation—not as discipline in the punitive sense, not as the slow tightening of the self into something rigid, but as a widening. A loosening. A soft bloom. Formation as the gentle shaping of a life by what we love, what we attend to, what we return to with devotion and curiosity and care.
Classical thinkers and mystics have always told us that we are formed by what we contemplate. Augustine said our hearts lean toward what we love. The early Christian tradition described this as theosis—God became human so that humans might become like God. In the Methodist tradition, this became the language of journeying “onward toward perfection.” Womanists and Black feminists remind us that this becoming is always embodied, communal, and entangled with the liberation of others—there is no formation that is not collective. And the Anabaptist tradition teaches us that formation is a practice, a way of life lived in community, not a statement of belief.
But here is what I’m learning:
To narrate the impossible, we must be shaped by the impossible.
We must be formed by that which exceeds us, invites us, unsettles us, and pulls us deeper into our own aliveness. We must be shaped by wonder, by awe, by grief, by the tiniest flicker of curiosity. We must be shaped by each other.
We become what we pay attention to.
There is so much noise right now—so much collapse, so much violence, so much grief that lives in the body. The world is loud with urgency and certainty and spectacle. And yet, even here, perhaps especially here, we are capable of being formed by gentleness, by patience, by the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and who we are becoming.
I don’t know if I’ll ever step back onto a stage in the way I used to.
The targeted harassment, the anxiety—it changed me.
But being forced off the stage brought me back to my Sources.
Gloria Anzaldúa taught me to write from the wound that heals.
Nancy Bedford taught me that theology is always embodied hope.
My partner taught me that repair is slow and relational.
And my dear comrade Elyse Ambrose taught me that the word is a landscape.
Language can build worlds that do not yet exist.
(I hope to bring Elyse on for a Sunday Conversation soon, because their work on formation and Black queer sexuality is helping us imagine what sacred becoming looks like.)
So now, I write.
I create with words.
I am a word artist shaping a world I hope we might inhabit someday.
The question becomes:
What is shaping you today?
What are you allowing to form you?
Who do you want to become through your attention?
What if formation were a care practice?
What if formation were an act of repair?
What if the smallest act of noticing—the way the ants reorganize the earth, the way the cold air settles on your forearms, the way sunlight moves across the cat’s sleeping body—was already reshaping us into more attuned beings?
This morning, I am listening to a playlist of slow jazz, devotional chants, and quiet instrumentals. A former student sent me this playlist last week, and I listen to it each morning as I wake up and drink my coffee and watch the cats have the zoomies! I invite you to put on something that softens you, too. Allow sound to shape you. Allow breath to shape you. Allow being to lead you toward becoming.
Because when we attune to the One and the Many, to the ground and the sky, to the stranger and the beloved, we are practicing the world that is yet to come.
Be gentle with your unfolding today.
Paz,
RCE+
Field Guide to Formation as Repair
Pause for 60 seconds and notice your breath without changing it. Let your body remember itself.
Name one thing shaping you today (a feeling, a memory, a sound, a conversation).
Choose one thing to shape you gently (a cup of tea, a tree you walk by, a poem, silence).
Let that thing be your teacher for the next hour.
A Prayer for Being Shaped
Form me gently,
the way water shapes stone—
over time, without violence.
Let my becoming be slow enough
to notice the ant crossing the sidewalk,
the breath rising in my chest,
the way grief softens when held with warmth.
Teach me to love what is small,
what is unfinished,
what is still on its way.
Make of my life a vessel of tenderness,
a sanctuary for wonder,
a table where all may rest.
May I be shaped
by what heals,
by what opens,
by what draws us
toward one another
and toward the world that is arriving.
Amen, and let it be so.