All the feels

Feeling what we feel The first step in the practice of ‘reckoning’

Last May, the Rev. Cate Anthony, one of St. Stephen’s associate priests, was named an Episcopal Church Foundation Fellow. The ECF fellowship supports Cate in imagining and implementing a ministry project within the context of St. Stephen’s and the broader church. Cate’s project focuses on reckoning: the Christian discipline of truth-telling and reconciliation.

When I first wrote my application for the Episcopal Church Foundation fellowship, I imagined that through the months of the project our community would grow together in the work of reckoning, or the work of remaining with one another even as we disagree, even as By Cate Anthony we experience conflict, even as we cause each other pain. My hope was that we would learn to name the elephant in the room, as it were—to face the twists of this life and the inevitable conflicts of shared community, and to seek reconciliation through them. What I’ve learned in the months since I began creating and implementing my project in earnest is that I missed a foundational first step, and that we cannot begin to reckon, quite yet. Instead, first, we need to do something even harder: we need to feel our feelings. Imagine the last time you had tell someone you love that they’d hurt your feelings. It doesn’t need to be a big incident—maybe they simply said a passing remark that was more pointed than you expected, and it poked your heart just a bit too sharply. What did that feel like? Did you know immediately you were hurt? Did it take longer to realize that you had pain? Did your anger or surprise come out sideways before you were able to recognize them? When you did name your feelings out loud to your loved one, how did you feel just before you spoke? Was your heart pounding? Were your hands steady?

The ability to notice our emotions, name them, and own them is the foundational first step in reckoning. It is reckoning with ourselves so that we can be fully alive to this life, in the moment entirely, able to move and dance and flow with the journey of these days. When we feel our feelings, we become more flexible, more agile in our responses to the changes and chances of this life, and we become more practiced at creating vulnerable and deep relationships with friends and family. This is the place we have to start, if we want to become reckoning and resilient Christian humans.

And so my fellowship project is shifting just a little bit, to focus more on cultivating practices of noticing emotions both intellectually and in our bodies, and to learning how to name those feelings to one another with confidence. We will begin by looking to the stories of our ancestors, studying the emotional experiences narrated in the Bible in our Thursday Bible Study during Lent. I will also curate a daily digital worship and feeling experience for Holy Week (more details to come). These are first steps, and I hope that they will help us begin to feel fully, and together.