Suggested Blessing

Why this title, and what to expect from this space

Hi friends & amazing strangers & everyone in-between,

Like many writers whose main social media presence is Twitter (@megmcdermott92), as chaos has enveloped the app, I’ve been wondering if I need to make a leap to some other internet spaces to continue having a place to connect and share words & friendship! I’ve decided today is finally the day to have my own Substack.

My hopes for this Substack is that it will both be a place where I can share all the typical writerly things (here’s my newly published poem, here’s a new book, etc.) along with some thoughts on poetry, faith, and spirituality, and the intersection of all those things.

As many of you know, that intersection is a very treasured one in my life! I’ve been ordained as an Episcopal priest since 2019 and serve a congregation in Western Massachusetts.

Me as a newly ordained deacon in 2018 on-campus at Susquehanna University, which I attended with the intention to focus solely on Creative Writing + ended up adding a religion major and discovering the seed of a calling to the preisthood

As part of my congregational work, I often try to incorporate the arts, primarily through hosting different series of visual art and poetry meditations over Zoom and over this past school year collaborating with an ecumenical colleague on hosting spiritual-themed open mic nights; poets sometimes get shout-outs in my preaching as well!

From a few years ago…I made my clergy colleagues do an exercise where we inserted ourselves into artwork of the “peaceable kingdom” passage from Isaiah!

My work on my own writing feels like a vocation, or feels spiritual, as well. Writing was my first love and an aim in my life way before I ever considered the possibility that I could be a priest. (As a little Roman Catholic girl, this was understandably not on my radar!) My first published book Jesus Merch: A Catalog in Poems & my two published chapbooks, Woman as Communion and Prayer Book for Contemporary Dating, all have something to say about faith, the Divine, and how those relate to our REAL (not performatively sanitized) lives; they also often speak about the struggles of pursuing the Divine in a context that may be patriarchal, or at the least be carrying some severely patriarchal baggage. One of my greatest hopes for my poetry is that it will be permission-giving, especially for women readers, to name truths about themselves, their faith, their doubts, and their relationships that they may have been encouraged to repress within churches, or other spaces in their lives.

As I was trying to think up a title for this Substack, I decided to look back at my chapbook Woman as Communion, published by Game Over Books in 2022, since so many of those poems (the earliest of which was drafted my junior year of college, and which span up through about age 27/28 or so), hold a special place in my heart. I landed on the poem below which I initially wrote during a Clinical Pastoral Education internship (a hospital chaplaincy summer internship program many pastors-and-ministers-to-be undergo as part of their training) when we were asked to bring in something that reflected our understanding of blessing.

While the perspective of this newsletter is certainly informed by the various things I name as blessing in this poem, the pairing of “Suggested” and “Blessing” is what resonated with me when I started thinking of what this Substack might offer. So much of my approach to church, faith, spirituality, etc. — and perhaps to poetry also? — is about offering possibility rather than speaking in mandates (though I also think there’s room for more confident declaration + proclamation too!); about engaging in language like “I wonder…,” “Perhaps…,” “Maybe,” or “What if?” (specifically the hopeful “What if?”…I think we all are well-skilled in the anxious “What if?” on our own). So I hope that whatever this newsletter becomes, it’s a place that carries forward that spirit of possibility and suggestion.

So on one hand, the “Suggested” aspect of this “Suggested Blessing” newsletter returns to me — my suggestions of where we might encounter blessing, or beauty, or even God. But I also leave the title open-ended. The “Suggested Blessing” may be the blessing that is being suggested by someone or something else — lurking in a poem I’ve read and loved and want to share; suggested by a movie or an artist; suggested by something in creation; suggested again perhaps by God Herself.

I hope you will stick around and explore the possibilities with me. <3