Judith Favor

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Book Review: “Living Fellowship Needs Fresh Forms”
by Daphne Clement

October 12, 2022 By Judith Favor

During the pandemic, Daphne Clement, retired hospice chaplain and coordinator of spiritual care, began each day in worship on Zoom. For 19 months, waiting worship transformed COVID-19 lockdown into a life-sustaining spiritual retreat for Friends who gathered in collective connectedness.

“We are witness to the formation of an amazing technological society that has risen to meet the need for communion among Friends during the past year and a half of the pandemic,” Clement writes. “And we morning worshipers are so grateful for the innovation.”

She wonders about the future, inviting Friends to reflect on their own circumstances: “So, will our everyday Zoom worship endure?” Clement asks. “Is digital worship the new way of life?”

Living Fellowship Needs Fresh Forms

Filed Under: Book Reviews, News, Quakers Tagged With: Friends Journal, published, Spirituality & Practice, testimonial

Friending Rosie: Page Publishing

October 21, 2021 By Judith Favor

Bookcover Image for Friending Rosie: Respect on Death Row by Judith Favor

In alternating voices, Judith Wright Favor and Rosie Alfaro take the reader on a frank, frustrating, and unforgettable journey. Friending Rosie: Respect on Death Row bridges the chasm between souls consigned to life behind bars, and souls enjoying the privileges of freedom.
Rosie’s letters from Central California Women’s Facility, interwoven with Judith’s reflections and questions, highlight perspectives from authors of different races, religions, and languages. Marginalized people stifle their stories when there is no one to hear, but mutual listening brings forth accounts of regret, doubt, humiliation, and grace. Some stories describe difficult encounters in prison. Family members with intimate knowledge of Rosie tell their stories. Other tales illustrate surprising parallels in the inner lives of both authors.
Judith follows the friendly path of Quakers who began in the 1650s to value women’s leadership and befriend prisoners. Rosie grew up Catholic, in a faith tradition that shaped her art and values. Both write stories interwoven with social challenges and spiritual practices intended to support readers in reaching out to persons behind bars.
8-12-20: “It’s yours, mine, and God’s book. I’ve been lettin people know about our book and about you. People are very interested in our story, and I know this is a start of a great journey. I’m very proud of us, friend… I wanted to tell you that to me this means nothing, but to lots of people who like crime stuff, me being the youngest and the first Latina to get the d. penalty in Calif. is a big deal. I’m personally ashamed of it, but there’s people who think it’s cool. I love you and you stay safe. Tu Amiga, Rosie”
Incarcerating our way to safety does not work. Friendships do work. These stories, rooted in caring and respect, offer a warmly satisfying testimony to the power of friending.

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Page Publishing’s Devoted Page

Filed Under: Announcements, Books, Contemplative Memoir, Excerpt, Quakers Tagged With: biography, Friending Rosie, Page Publishing, published, Quakers, Spirituality & Practice

52 Weeks of Love & Money: The Companion Journal for Sabbath Economics — PUBLISHED!

September 25, 2021 By Judith Favor

 

52 Weeks of Love & Money: The Companion Journal for Sabbath Economics

Got enough money? Enough love?
Facing an uncertain future?
Sabbath Economics is the spiritual guide for you.

Loving and being loved makes everyone happier. Looking at money matters from a spiritual perspective makes everything better.
Author Judith Favor helps each of us explore how much is enough as we move forward, individually and collectively, into an uncertain future. Inland Empire member and author Judith Favor will be the…


Guest Speaker
for the High Desert Branch’s
Act 2 Zoom Meeting

to be aired on

Tuesday, October 19th at 6 pm

The public is invited to attend this free presentation.

Invitation and link may be found
by visiting www.hdcwc.com


Judith Wright Favor loves conversing with people who are interested in finding sacred possibilities in the very human tangle of personal finances and relational challenges.
She just published The Companion Journal: 52 Weeks with Love and Money for Sabbath Economics. This book is loaded with insightful questions for every day of the year, plus lively quotes to get you thinking about money and love in fresh ways. Each page has space to record your own desires, curiosities and imaginative ideas.
The Companion Journal will be there for you day and night, but money troubles can be hard to talk about. Because we are social beings and spiritual beings, it is better to explore the complexities of money and love in the company of a few good people. Who else do you want in this conversation?
Don’t miss this provocative and unusual presentation.
Judith Favor, Author

Judith Favor, Author

Contact Judith to arrange discounts so everyone in your book group, church group, or family circle can have a copy.
Buy at Powells, Barnes & Noble, Amazon or Readers Magnet.
Judith Wright Favor is the author of six nonfiction books and one novel:

Spirit Awakening (1988, out of print)
The Edgefielders:
Poor Farm Tales of a Great-Grandmother
(2013)
Silent Voices (2014)
The Beacons of Larkin Street (2017)
First in a trilogy honoring female church leaders
in 1970s San Francisco.
Sabbath Economics:
A Spiritual Guide to Linking Love with Money
 (2020)
52 Weeks with Love and Money, A Companion Journal (2021)
Friending Rosie: Respect on Death Row (2021)

Judith likes to quote poet Mary Oliver, who wrote:

Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell someone.

 

 

Judith is a member of the
High Desert CWC’s
“On Topic Speakers for You”
presentation project

 

 

Filed Under: Announcements, Books, Workshops Tagged With: Author Event, Counseling, published, Sabbath Economics, workshops, writing

A Mother’s Heartlines

December 9, 2019 By Judith Favor

Early-morning pages, written before my responsible self comes on duty,
take me into deep, dark places and a few bright, clear ones.
My fifty-four-year-old son is dying of cancer,
complicated by meth addiction.
Mary’s question to the angel echoes within me: How can this be?
The answer, according to the Beatles:
Mother Mary said to me, Let it be. Let it be.

“What are you seeing?”
Ray’s last words were raspy,
yet powered by the curiosity that propelled his entire life.

“I see you filled with light,” I said, “and surrounded by light.
I see you loved and loving, forgiven and forgiving.”

With that, he slipped into stillness. No sign of pain.
No sign he knew I was there, yet I knew it was the
absolutely right place to be. I just knew.
How long can a mother gaze upon her comatose son,
seeing that of God in his wasted body and paralyzed limbs?
One can live infinitely into a single moment, says Philip C.
When my oldest son phoned to take me to lunch,
I said, “No thanks. I’m right where I need to be.”
I declined Michael’s invitation to dinner, too, because I was beginning
to feel something so unexpected, so far off the deathbed emotional charts,
that I could barely name it to myself,
let alone speak it aloud. It felt strangely like joy.

Joy? How could this be? I was losing my youngest son
to cancer after decades of shared adventures, epic struggles
and occasional unitive experiences in nature. Why joy?
Later it came to me: Holy obedience. Surrender to Love.
All through Ray’s final day, I sat where Christ guided me to
sit. Kept silent until prompted. Spoke what Spirit directed
me to say. Personal needs, even hunger, evaporated into
the mystery of grace.

How can a son’s tragedy become a mother’s grace?
How could Ray’s passing engender a joy huge enough to encompass
all of his pain, all of my pain, and perhaps your pain, too?
Holding a loving, prayerful vigil with my dying boy lifted
me through sorrow and beyond it to an astonishing fullness
of joy. But even robust joy is fragile and fleeting.
Ten days later, grief yanked me down, pulled me deep
beneath the strong dam of capability I had constructed to
care for my husband as he weakens with Parkinson’s Disease.
Triple sorrows smashed my carefully constructed dam.
Loss of son. Loss of Partnering Pete. Loss of mobility and freedom.
The combination brought me to my knees.
I cried and cried and cried and cried.
How is it even possible to sob for so many hours?
Pete, helpless to comfort me, called the grief midwives.
Friends Connie and Charleen came and knelt beside me on the floor.
Time collapsed beneath floods of tears.
Losing a child is unspeakably difficult.
I can manage only silence.
Lifting Heart Lines from my messy morning pages buoys
me through the grief-bursts.
I swim infinity loops in the community pool,
and dive deeper into stillness.

Sometimes I find a Heart Line in another’s words.
Sacred Veil lyricist Tony Silvestri: “Giving myself permission to write
these texts allowed me to revisit my grief in a very powerful way.
I understood I hadn’t fully grieved, because I hadn’t processed it in art.”
Eric Whitacre’s music and Los Angeles Master Chorale lyrics convey Silvestri’s
intimate expression of his young wife’s death.
Primagravida. Retroperitoneal cystic. Adenocarcinoma. Adnexal cysts…

How do they manage to sing complex medical terms so tenderly,
without choking up?

I sat at the threshold with my son, at the open door of Mystery,
until Ray was ready to pass through it.
He crossed a horizon as wondrous as the one we crossed together
when I gave birth to him 54 years earlier in this same hospital.
In his end is my beginning.

Those words came in meditation. I wonder what they mean…
I travel to Quaker Center to renew body and spirit in the redwoods,
to commune with Friends and place rocks of personal heartbreak
in a communal griefbowl of clear water.
I seek a weekend of contemplation for strength to tend Pete
as his health and memory fail.

I awaken at 1:40am to a delicious melting-chocolate sensation,
as if I had melted into God. If I had stayed in bed to savor it,
I’d still be ambulatory today…
but I rose to go to the bathroom. Fainted. Fell.
Heard my rifle-shot tibia fracture,
saw ragged bone protruding through flesh and foot twisted at right angles.

“Uh-oh, compound,” said the first EMT.
“Not prepared for that,” said the
second.

In Trauma ICU,
a nurse drew red balloons and wrote Happy Birthday on the whiteboard.
My decidedly unhappy 79th birthday was brightened by my daughter’s visit
followed by assurance from two female orthopedic surgeons
that their repair efforts were successful.

Filed Under: Essays, Quakers Tagged With: Heartlines, published, What Canst Thou Say, writing

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    Recent Posts

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    • 52 Weeks of Love & Money: The Companion Journal for Sabbath Economics — PUBLISHED! September 25, 2021
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    • First Stack of Author Proofs! December 2, 2020
    • Sabbath Economics published on November 11, 2020 November 10, 2020
    • WRITING FOR CHANGE IN CHALLENGING TIMES September 3, 2020
    • Big-Hearted Democracy August 25, 2020
    • A Mother’s Heartlines December 9, 2019
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