What is Soulwork, and what is a contemplative educator, writer, and artist?

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Dear friends,

Those are intentionally rich and ambiguous words that I use to describe myself and my work, and part of what I hope to do here in this blog for the next while is to introduce you to these ideas.

Many of you know that in my young adult life my religious heritage, Roman Catholic Christian, was very important to me.  My degree is in theology, and I came to Canada in the first place to continue studying theology on the graduate level, with the eventual hope of becoming a professor.

Well, that didn’t work out — to make a long story short, my increased knowledge about the history of the church plus current events across the world had me wondering how a good God could just let all this unmerited suffering go on.  After all, if I were God I wouldn’t let innocent people suffer so much!  Anyway, that all led to a crisis of faith, and I left my studies and I left my religious upbringing.

Yet, even though I abandoned most of my beliefs about “God”, I never left the search for something that was more than myself, I always searched for beauty, meaning, love, goodness.  And I realized that however people around the world and throughout time put words to their understanding of this something “Greater”, however I felt like the words and teachings I had known about this “God” didn’t seem to make any sense, that this search for meaning, for goodness, for depth in life, was not a waste of time.

And that’s what I mean by “Soulwork” — I don’t spend my time searching for or defining beliefs, but I do talk about how we can live in certain ways in which depth, meaning, goodness, love, and community are the center of our lives.

Notes on “Contemplative” will be in my next blog post.

With much love and many blessings,

Cat