From the Mercy Chair

By Mary Feagan

This is spiritual poetry like you've never read or heard it before: funny, heartwarming, and honest.

Inspired by the teaching known as A Course in Miracles, Mary writes about blowing her mind, watching TV with Grandmama God, whining, opening a pub, cavorting with her inner moose, and much, much more.

Many of the 50 poems in this digital volume are highlighted with Mary's original illustrations, and seven of them are linked to YouTube videos of Mary giving readings you'll never forget.

• Language: English
• Publisher: D. Patrick Miller
• Release date: Feb 8, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301281282

Mary Feagan

A nun for eleven years, I began saying goodbye to Old Judge God as I considered leaving the convent. An intimidating concept of God had dominated my life for too long. I left in 1968 when I was 29 years old; then for many years I wandered half-consciously among both old and new concepts of God, not ready to sort out my personal theology. When I was about 50, after two divorces and many confusing relationships, one more ruined romance brought me to my knees and to my unfinished business with God. I found I mostly needed a Mother God, and in gently mothering myself, I felt the presence of an inner self I named Grandmama God. I had just taken a Voice Dialogue workshop with Hal and Sidra Stone, where I had practiced meeting and speaking from my various selves. So I practiced hearing my critic, negotiating with my pusher, calming my pleaser, loving my child, and talking things over with Grandmama God. In these conversations, and with a new sense of Granddaddy God as well, I found in my quiet creative times the love I had been longing for. And my poems. I lived in Atlanta most of my adult life. Now I live in St. Louis, my hometown, near my amazing and wonderful family. I sit for two or three hours most mornings in my mercy chair, reading, writing and belly-breathing. Once a week I enjoy a fantastic group studying A Course in Miracles. I teach "Right-brain Drawing" in an adult learning series. I swim and work on weight machines twice a week. Other days I walk, often with a poem I'm memorizing. I say poems at open mikes at least once a week. My women’s group is so supportive, and I am always making new men and women friends at churches and coffee houses. I practice living from my heart, my true Self. My life is a sweet miracle.

Book preview

Introduction

I love the process of writing a poem. For me, a poem usually begins in the morning as I sit in my bedroom’s corner chair, the Mercy Chair, with a mug of hot tea. Often a surprising experience, I write thoughts, memories, questions and prayers that bother, stretch and heal me. Sometimes these become poems. Sometimes the last clear line of a poem comes days after the poem was first begun. I edit, erase, rewrite and later transfer the poem to my computer. If it seems like an audience-friendly poem, I may carry a large-print copy of it on evening walks and memorize it. Saying it aloud, I make more changes.

The next part of the process is sharing it, saying it to people while looking into their eyes, saying it on the phone to a friend, performing it in a cafe open mike night, or sending it in an email. The final step is someone in the cafe or reader receiving it and responding, Ahh, laughing or smiling or touching my arm or asking me to say it again or calling or emailing me, Thanks.

The whole unfolding awes me, delights and entertains me, makes me feel alive and useful. My poems connect me with others in ways beyond my expectations and control. I am grateful to do what I feel I was created to do. As A Course in Miracles says, Child of God, you were created to create the good, the beautiful and the holy. Do not forget this. The Love of God, for a little while, must still be expressed through one body to another, because vision is still so dim. (Ch1.VII.2) I talk about my experience of writing a poem in Mercy Chair.

Mercy Chair

I am sitting in my mercy chair again this morning.

It’s an oversized old maple rocker with a stationary base

so it won’t roll on my cat’s tail. It has a matching footstool.

Both have soft cushions covered in magenta velvet.

I sewed them myself on a sewing machine I learned on

as a child. It had been my grandmother’s, then my mother’s.

Here I sit with my journal and pen, books and a mug of hot tea.

Mercy meets me in this chair, holds me in its roomy arms,

receives me as I think and write my current dreads, delights and dreams.

All are forgiven, blessed, found true or false and kept or swept away.

Some become poems. As my mind quiets, I feel deep gratitude.

Then Mercy rolls me into stillness and rocks me