I grew up in the heart of California and California will always have my heart. Recently, I have returned home to the San Joaquin Valley and now live near the place where my mother’s grandparents first arrived from Arkansas and Oklahoma during the Great Depression. Yet, I acknowledge these lands as the ancestral home of the Tachi-Yokut peoples and I am slowly learning what it means to be in right relationship to “home” as a white, 4th-generation descendant of Dust Bowl refugees to California with a long memory of family violence, trauma, and poverty.
For nearly 20 years I have worked as a chaplain with most of that time spent in hospice settings. Spiritual care, to me, is about accompanying people as they navigate their own relationship with Life in good faith that we all hold our own inner compass, even when forgotten or unused within ourselves or invalidated by society without.
In my own spiritual life, I identify as “spiritual, not religious” but this feels like administrative shorthand for my own decades-long journey of apocalyptic religious de-construction, a personal path of searching, and opening to mysteries I do not have the answers for.
The work I continue to do to both understand and be accountable for my identities as a white, straight/cis-gendered, able-bodied woman who is actively working to manage and heal legacies of religious harm and trauma in her own life hopefully makes space for others to feel safe to explore their own sacred truths. However, I am very much a work-in-progress still and learning to embrace this part of being human, too.
In this space, I inconsistently write about the things I think consistently about: spirituality, death and dying, grief, apocalypse, religious de-construction, and healing.
You can learn more about my work as a Chaplain and Palliative Care Consultant with Mettle Health through the webinars included below.
Heather Isaacs 