Sistering!

If you want to be having your socks knocked off about the crazy/hilarious/ poignancy of being a woman then you ought to be listening to Glennon Doyle Melton. She's talking to anyone who will listen and hugging you too!  A recovering alcoholic and bulimic she's found her voice in the world of recovery and spirituality through her acid, self deprecating humor and simultaneous compassion.

Sacred Threads hosted Melton on July 1, 2015.  Two hundred and fifty plus women packed into St Julia Parish Hall in Weston, Massachusetts to meet this diminutive spiritual leader. "We should have rented the Garden", said Marie Labollita, co-founder of Sacred Threads.  "The tickets sold out in two hours".

This is generally the case when Melton comes to town. Founder of the online community at Momastery.com and author of Carry on Warrior; The Power of Embracing Your Messy Beautiful Life, Melton is reaching out and impacting the lives of women juggling young children and the spiritual questions that confront them. 

Melton's sobriety is based on her ability to tell the truth. "I miss booze like people miss people who beat them up and leave them for dead", she says. Her story is not easy to hear and nor is her ongoing battle for sobriety. Over a decade ago, hung over and holding a positive pregnancy test, she heard God calling her back to life. She married the father of her first child Chase and had two more kids. Now what?  She decided she needed a place like a monastery where she could find community and some peace; " an intentional community with better rules".  

Forming Momastery.com she says her rules are:

 "write like shame was something I never heard of;

treat everyone with respect;

and maintain an online posture of arms completely wide open".  

She refers to her "bathroom floor moments" and the clarity she has gained about God: that in God's acceptance of her " there's nothing that could make God love her more or less".  This is a powerful message to women struggling with their identity. Smart women who have or had high expectations of themselves.  Women, who, after producing two or three "little ones" may be wondering what the heck their lives are about as they change diapers, obsess over whether they'll ever get back into their size 8 slacks and crave a conversation with a sympathetic woman. 

Asked by Sacred Threads moderator, Maria DiLorenzo, " What do you want women to know about each other"? Melton replied, "We are lonely because all the surface stuff in our lives looks different.  But twelve layers deep we're all the same."  Describing the carpentry practice of supporting load bearing walls with other walls, she asks gleefully, "guess what it's called?  Sistering!!"

"We all need each other".

Fiona Lovell Horning