Mary Lea Crawley
Mary Lea Crawley
One of my father’s favorite expressions was “Oh, yes!”. “Oh yes,” he’d say, when he made a particularly good point at our crowded dinner table. “Oh yes,” he’d beam when he unwrapped a box at Christmas – from the magical LL Bean.
I have come to know the Oh Yeses of my own heart. “Oh yes!” sounds loudly when I sit down in a meditation circle and everything is about to begin. Oh yes rings out each time I take that first sip of a Starbucks Cold Brew, with oat milk. Before I came to Beacon, I’d been an Epsicopal church lady for many years. I even served as the director of all things family-related – when my children were young. My husband Rob had, staunchly, been a non-church goer. Whenever anyone asked where he was hiding, I would just shrug and say, he’s a Unitarian. (It covered so much.)
After our kids flew our nest and the pandemic took my mom, I knew I had to grow up a bit and stop hushing the voice inside my heart. “The heart wants what it wants,” Emily Dickinson wrote in a letter to a friend. “The heart wants what it wants, or else it does not care.”
In September of 2021, my heart wanted acres of silence and reflection and direct speech about violence and injustice and all the inequities bound up in the –isms. That fall, as I was wrestling my voice, the word “Beacon” kept bumping around my world – it seemed to be in the ether. We have to check out Beacon, I remember telling Rob.
We came to Beacon, first, via Zoom from our kitchen table. Nicole Jacobson preached – so beautifully – about her life and trying to be open and Tuli led a silent meditation. Oh yes!. The following Sunday we got out our best masks and came to Beacon – and it was even better in person. Oh Yes! Robin preached and there was more silence, and I felt like I was being challenged to think outside the small tight circle of my way of being. Daniel got up and read something, and I realized that the words of Mary Oliver and Toni Morrison belong, mostly, in a sanctuary. My heart grew about 5 times that morning – my whole body said, “oh yes!”
Why do we keep coming to Beacon? Because some Sundays I walk in with little hope in my pockets and time pressure at my throat and then everything flies into the rafters, and I remember what matters. We have found the things – the very things – we did not know we needed. Rob found his way into the Dementia Support Group, where he can unload the heaviness of caring for his parents. I have found the best community group on the planet (I am being quite serious). And every Wednesday evening I get to sit down in a circle of meditators and as the lights dim, I feel a large “oh yes!” sound off inside me. The heart wants what it wants.