Message given by Tess Hartford at Durham Friends Meeting, June 1, 2025

Good Morning, Beloved Friends,

This morning I would like to submit that this message will ultimately only scratch the surface. While praying over, studying, reflecting and listening over the last several weeks, what comes forward is a need that I have — a need to express something that has persisted with me for many, many years.

So, I am taking a leap of faith in order to bare my soul before you, to allow you to see and hear a glimmer of what is a continual movement towards a hopeful new awareness.

I have spoken in your company over the years about my spiritual formation, the path I have walked for as long as I can remember. This journeying, my journey, has taken many and varied turns and forks in the road. I have shared with you my love and gratitude for being born and raised the the Catholic tradition. I have spoken from this place about how it has been for me growing from girlhood to maidenhood to motherhood, and some of the hurdles, challenges and blessings I have experienced.

Before I move on from there, I want to acknowledge the deep gratitude I hold for all of you and the fact that you would even sit here this morning and graciously listen as I share about my spiritual walk. Aho! I bless you.

As I have chosen to embody as woman in this lifetime, I have been keenly aware of and sensitive to many of the way in which femaleness is regarded and treated in this physical world. I am not going to go down the treacherous way of naming the abuse, the neglect, the shaming or the atrocities that women down through the ages have suffered and continue to suffer at the hands of of the systems of domination and contempt that have been in power for far too long. We all know them. As well, we all know that everyone, boys and girls, women and men, all suffer because of these worldly power structures — structures that are not truly grounded in the Divine, even though there may be claims that these atrocities are divinely ordained. 

At the tender age of 70, I am keenly aware of the lies and deceptions on so many fronts that promote a culture of death and degradation of all life on our beautiful Mother Gaia! Every direction in which I turn and look, I see and witness the wreckage and deception that have led us all to the precipice on which we now find ourselves.

As I prefaced my message earlier, I am only scratching the surface. Sharing some thoughts:

In the book Active Hope, by Joanne Macy and Chris Johnstone, there are ideas, exercises and group processes introducing the idea of our innate potential for resilience and positive actions to take towards healing — the healing of our individual wounds, and our collective wounds. As one small community alone, we are an amazing forcefield of goodness and justice and compassion**. So I want to bring this message around to what I first desired to bring. Over the many weeks I have been listening and searching for the words, the meaning, some glimmer of the heart of the Divine, beating among us.

• First, there is new life springing forth amidst the collapse all around us. Look for it! 
• Second, each of us is responsible for birthing a new consciousness, for examining the beliefs that we embody that are contrary to the divine inheritance for which we have been fashioned. Think on it. 
• And thirdly, when we do honor, truly honor the Creator’s life within each of our hearts, we will know peace. The peace that Jesus named when in his human expression of earthly life — he called it the peace that surpasses all understanding.

Friends, I thank you again for your respect and your giving of your attention to the thoughts that I have been wanting to share. 

Finally, I wish to share a blessing that I received just last week — a blessing that came through a young indigenous woman through Instagram, of all places. It came through a video of her in several beautiful natural settings. It begins with her narrating while squatting along a stream bed, her hand dipping into the flowing water with these words: 

My devotion knows no church, but it moves through everything I touch.

I don’t follow a path because I am the path, walked moment by moment through blood and breath and bone.

I’ve never lacked faith. What I lack is tolerance for cages built in God’s name, for the need to call it God at all, because the moment we name it, we make it Other.

And from that split, the first lie is born.

Status … salvation sold like product. I’ve seen it.

When mystery is made into a brand; when individualism wears a robe and calls itself spiritual.

So, I do not bow to those who weaponize devotion.

I do not serve Gods built on shame or dogmas that fear the wildness of my naked body.

I do not believe peace is real if it cannot look injustice in the eye.

How do you speak of oneness while turning from the wounds of the world?

I want no place in such a temple.

I do chant. I breathe. I offer. I bow. But not to be saved, but to be pure.

I do it because I am already holy. I am already whole, already here.

This body is my consort, his breath is my prayer, this life is the feast I share with the beloved.

I came to incarnate, to feel it all, to kiss the ground with every step,

to love what bleeds and breaks and so becomes.

I’m not here to follow a path.

I am here to offer myself entirely to the path of life itself 
again and again.

I return to the spiral, unlearning the roles, burning the names and continuously rebirthing myself.

My devotion knows no church, but it moves through everything I touch.