This concept of unfolding revelation is a topic I cover with my aunt Tam, my guest on this first episode, as we discuss the mothering and comforting heart of Father God.

My aunt played a pivotal role in helping me grow in a deeper relationship with Father as I wrestled through questions about my faith several years ago, especially where it came to seeing God as an angry God, one who just shook His head at me. Now I am excited for her to share her wealth of wisdom with you, and hopefully, this will help turn your heart to see a different face of God as well.

Enjoy the episode!

It was unseasonably cold for a late March morning, but my two-year old’s bright orange fox hat with matching mittens was perfect for his first Knee-high Naturalists program. My son, Aiden, loves being outside, the wilder the terrain, the better. He is not one to stick to rules or structure, at least not for very long, and his free-spirited approach to life was on full display at the nature center that morning.

At the beginning of our walk, Aiden insisted on holding the program leader’s hand, but almost took her down in the creek with him every time he made a sudden lunge for the water. Instead of admiring the trees and looking for birds’ nests in the branches with the other children on the path, he wanted to walk through fallen limbs and thorny vines. And when our program leader pointed out the hole in the ground that might have belonged to a cozy mouse, my son walked right up to it and plunged his hand down inside.

It was ironic when later that same day a friend, knowing full well my struggles in wrangling Aiden, recommended the documentary The Alpinist— a film about late Canadian solo climber Marc-André LeClerc, who from a very young age was drawn to nature and the mountains, a passion that was encouraged by his mother, Michelle Kuipers.

When Marc-André was growing up, Michelle packed bookcases with adventure stories and created a home school routine of in-home study in the morning and outdoor exploration in the afternoon. But when his love of the mountains led him to technical climbing, Michelle let him climb, trusting his sense of direction and self-confidence.

“If you’re never given free rein to have your little adventures as a kid you never really learn who you are,” Michelle says in the documentary. “You don’t learn what your strengths and weaknesses are, and you never learn that you’re capable.”

As scenes of Marc-André hanging from jagged and icy rock faces rolled across my screen, I asked myself if I could ever let Aiden do the same. If his present love of dirt, trees, and thrills led him to scale mountains would I have the courage to release him to the wild?

That morning the program leader had asked me, “You knew this would be difficult, didn’t you?” I chuckled and nodded.

A stranger saw and touched on my deep, interior struggle. Something deeper than creeks and thorns.

Before Aiden was born, I had visions of us sitting at library story time and attending all the typical mommy and me events. Instead, he screamed and fought me through his first (and only) gymnastics class, not wanting to follow the predetermined course for the day. I had paid for four classes, but we never went back for the others.

So, yes, I knew that day in the woods would be difficult, but the true root of that difficulty stemmed from my questions on the nature of God and what He believed about me.

Do I have the courage to release myself to the wild?

Does God want me to be in the wild?

Do I have the courage to walk without fences?

Does God want me to walk without fences?

I knew the words about God’s grace and love being sufficient, but I didn’t really believe it. They said grace was a gift, but I was still trying to earn it. I continued grasping predetermined laws and rituals and put fences around my life because I couldn’t be trusted.

But He could be trusted.

In her book The Forgotten Feminine, Denise Jordan writes:

“The law empowers sin but grace and love remove its power. A friend of mine described it beautifully like this. She told me that in many of the large cattle ranches in Australia there are no fences – the land is so vast that it would be impossible to fence it. It is also very dry. But there are pockets of water here and there and the cattle never stray far away from the water. They don’t need a fence because they will die of thirst if they stray away from the water. You see, there is no need for the law when our thirst is quenched in the pool of grace, in the river of love. There is freedom but it doesn’t go beyond where this love will allow you to go. Love imposes its own limits out of consideration for the object of its affection. If we stray from the love of God, we get thirsty and then we are drawn back to drink deeply from that love again.”

“The law empowers sin but grace and love remove its power.”

The same lesson Jesus tried to teach the woman at the well.

Jesus is tired from a long journey and chooses to rest at Jacob’s Well in Samaria. A woman comes out to the well to “draw water” and he asks her for a drink. But the woman is surprised at the request because not only is she a Samaritan, and Jews didn’t associate with Samaritans, but she was a woman and had a lower social status than men of that time.

“You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?”

Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.

“Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?”

Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

“Sir,” I can see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”

“Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.” (NIV)

Jesus was offering to place himself, the Living Water, inside her so she could become a well without fences to no longer draw water, to no longer draw the love and grace of God from a physical location, but directly from the source itself, Him, who dwells inside His people in the New Covenant.

The Samaritan woman struggled to understand these deep spiritual truths then just like I struggle to understand them now in the 21^st century. Our fences are different now, and yet they remain.

Toward the end of The Alpinist, Marc-André’s mother says, “I am thankful that at least God granted me the grace to understand this about my son, to not stand in the way of his passion for the mountains.”

Aiden’s five now and still very much the same and yet time has allowed the great wisdom behind Michelle’s words to seep down to the roots of my darkest fears about dishonoring God and incurring His wrath if I was to step outside the fence.

I’ve come to believe something very different now. In fact, I think God’s parenting style is similar to Michelle’s.

“You know who you are in me.”

“You’re capable.”

“Why do you doubt?”

“Love imposes its own limits out of consideration for the object of its affection.”

I’ll never stray far, because the well of Living Water is inside me.

When I was a teenager, I studied theology at my small Catholic school in a chapel with stained glass windows and wooden pews lined with red cushioned seats. It was my favorite class.

In this chapel, we discussed the history and experiences of the people from that faith tradition as they lived out their devotion to God through the centuries. While the class would inevitably have to come to an end each school day, I loved knowing there would always be a new perspective or dynamic about God yet to be uncovered.

Theology, “The Study of God,” was in fact never reaching the end of the study of God.

Until the day I felt I had.

I looked to the spiritual writers and teachers I had grown to admire for deeper revelations of God only to find the discussions were becoming redundant. Books I read back in my stained-glass chapel era were the same concepts I was pointed to more than a decade later. My faith up until that point had been built on knowing how to argue apologetics and rattle off definitions and interpretations, but it’s easy to speak of being right while remaining inside your own echo chamber. While these words had become my blueprint for a relationship with God, they had only, as a friend wisely put it, gotten me “to the door”.

I wanted to understand what Jesus meant when he said: “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear it’s sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So, it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”

I wanted to follow the wind and discover God in the wild. I wanted to find a community of believers who declare a revelation that doesn’t end at the chapel walls, one that isn’t reserved for eternity. A people stepping out of uncomfortable places and pouring over words of new and ancient writers that point to an unfolding revelation happening in this moment, where the new kingdom meets ancient soil.

A people that didn’t have God figured out.

Because if you have God figured out, it’s not God.

So, you know what they say when you can’t find what you’re looking for… you must create it yourself. This is the community I’m building at Glass Chapel.

When I first started this newsletter three years ago, I knew what the mission was but expressing it proved to be a challenge. I was in a fog of doubts and questions about the faith tradition I had grown up in. Compounding this Dark Night of the Soul was the fact that I was in the throes of new motherhood and with that change came depression and having to accept that my expression of motherhood might look different from the women who raised me.

That my life might look different from the people that raised me.

My earliest articles reflected this inner turmoil of grappling with my role as a mother, which was ultimately tied to a desire to understand who God was and how He viewed me. Because at the root of it all I didn’t know my identity.

I didn’t know who I was when I could no longer be a conformer.

For so long I attempted to understand God and my relationship with Him through titles, religion, and job duties. I tried to live up to other people’s beliefs and expectations and discovered that just as I can’t be labeled, what others have to say about God doesn’t define God.

Who does God say God is?

Christian writer Denise Jordan says, “Historical Christianity and indeed many of the great theologians that have shaped our belief system (whether we are aware of it or not) have seen God from a fallen perspective.”

While I’ve received glimpses of God through teachers and scripture, I remind myself I see through a mirror dimly. I will not stop searching just because seemingly wiser individuals separated by time and space studied these topics before me.I’ve learned nothing from the story of Galileo if I settle for the idea that knowledge of God, like science, is not also unfolding.

If it’s true, the truth will stand.

And this is the mission of Glass Chapel I’ve been carrying in my heart all along, for this to be the place where people can find themselves in the longing and the seeking, as they’re carried by the wild, reckless wind. The people who want to ask the questions echoing in their hearts and find answers in the place both ancient and new.

Before walls, rituals, and sacrifices there was Eden in the Book of Beginnings.

Endless Wonder

Holy God

Sphere of Light

and Eternal Dawn

broke through twilight

and stars’ winter

piercing darkness

with Eden’s song.

Endless Echo

Restless Storm

Promise from Light

in human form

touched the veil

and left it torn

to enter sanctuaries

behind closed doors.

📷 Jessie DiCicco

Last night I prayed again to God: How do I know when it’s you speaking and not the “father of lies”? I know the enemy is cunning and yet I’ve still walked down paths I thought were from my Savior, but in the end didn’t lead to Father’s sanctuary.

“Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.” 1 Kings 19: 11-13

One must quiet their soul enough to hear, because God is in the quiet connections.

Something remembered and then found.

A silent prayer answered.

The right words at the right time.

Tension to peace.

I’m going to go into my inner room more often and pray quiet prayers to God.

I want to hear His whispers.

📷 Anthony DiCicco

I want to worship in a glass chapel in the woods,

and look at God through fragile panes and tree branches.

I want to stand between earth and sky.

Where the new kingdom meets ancient soil.

📷 Anthony DiCicco

It is 8:30 AM on Christmas Day, and while the rest of the world is waking up and unwrapping presents, Tony and I are walking amongst frost-covered fields and bare branches. It brings a quote by Sheldon Vanauken to mind: “Bare branches against the stars”. A phrase he used to define a moment of beauty, and a moment of beauty is indeed what I find myself in.

Yes, it’s quite cold and besides the sound of Tony’s shutter on his Nikon, there is just the shrieks of endless flocks of geese overhead. But, if you listen closely there you will hear the faint hum of growing things.

I wish I could wrap moments like this into a box and present them to others on this December morning, but would they understand it? Would they prefer their mobile phones, and Snap Chat, and flat screen TV’s over the faint hum of growing things?

The brittle blades of grass crunch beneath my riding boots as we walk toward the woods. The sun pierces through the atmosphere strong and bright; gold against the morning blue. The sphere blinds and thaws the world around us; penetrating the chilled bark as steam rises off the trees. The sign of life pulsating beneath the layers.

The last time I woke up in Pennsylvania on Christmas morning was fifteen years ago. I left because of a man and I have returned because of a man. Back then my priorities were much different; I was one of those tearing through paper until God removed the layers of bark to reveal a deeper life. The bark has grown back over the years and yet His warmth penetrates, reminding me that I too am thawing.

When I was growing up, the kitchen was my least favorite place. It was the area of the house I ran through to get to my final destination—the backyard, the bus stop, a friend’s car— and not the room I lingered too long in outside of mealtimes. But my mother was often found here, stirring a large pot of homemade chicken noodle soup, or laying steaming lasagna noodles into rows on wax paper. I dreaded the moments when she would rope me into food prep. Nothing was more agonizing than slicing sweet corn off the cob.

When I got married, I managed this domestic expectation with quick sheet pan dinners, the crockpot, and (my personal favorite), the instant pot. But after having my son, it wasn’t just mealtimes that I dreaded, it was the domestic life. Home felt like a prison.

After family leave, my husband returned to his career and “real” accomplishments, while for me there was no shortcut out of the life I found to be lacking in purpose and importance. I thought the only answer to relieve my pain was to go back to work myself.

It was around this time that my aunt recommended the book The Forgotten Feminine by Denise Jordan. Denise and her husband are the founders of Fatherheart Ministries. They’ve made it their mission to help others discover “a Father that loves us with a love that reaches beyond all human expression of what love is… a love that surpasses knowledge.” But in her book, Denise argues “The deficit of mothering love and comfort needs to be addressed before the fathering can come in.”

The idea of seeing God with motherly qualities was foreign to me. Perhaps it came from being raised in a legalistic form of Christianity, being abandoned by my father in adolescence, or a combination of the two. God was a far-off tyrannical figure with an overabundance of masculine traits looking down on me with condemnation. And “when His love for us is just a masculine and dominant kind of love as has often been presented to us,” Denise says, “it is virtually impossible to open your heart to be loved by a lawgiver and judge.”

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This was true in my case. While I had the outward signs of a life devoted to God, I did not have the inward reality. I constantly lived in a place of shame, grasping for a God that just shook His head at me. This smothered any kind of genuine love for Him from growing in my heart and it certainly prevented me from falling into His comforting and motherly embrace.

Through Denise’s words, I learned God is not more masculine than feminine—he is equally both. Man and female are made in His image. A perfect balance of masculinity and femininity.

“Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” Genesis 1:26-28

“The Hebrew word ‘man’ here in verse 26 is a generic term adam meaning ‘mankind’ and is inclusive of both man and woman,” states Denise.

God is neither male nor female; He is spirit. But we do use human descriptions to relate to Him and to preach to others about Him. We call God Abba, Father because it is the name He instructed us to use and it is how His own Son spoke of Him and prayed to Him, but throughout scripture, Father has encouraged us to rely on Him as a mother too. Denise says, “God revealed Himself (Gen 17:1) as El Shaddai, the Many Breasted One,” and in Psalm 131 King David says:

“My heart is not proud, O Lord, my eyes are not haughty; I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me. But I have stilled and quieted my soul; like a weaned child with its mother, like a weaned child is my soul within me.”

“He speaks here of himself as a child at the breast of its mother,” says Denise, “Israel’s greatest king sees himself in this way.”

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When I was reading these powerful revelations, I was reminded of a movie I watched a few years ago called “The Shack” which was met with some criticism by members of the Christian community due to the writer’s “blasphemous” depiction of God the Father. The film is based on the novel of the same title by William Paul Young and tells the story of Mack, a husband, and father going through the motions of his Christian faith while concealing childhood trauma and resentment toward God. Then his youngest daughter Missy is abducted and killed, and Mack finds himself in a full-fledged dark night of the soul. A few months after the tragedy, he receives a letter signed by “Papa” (the name his devout wife has given to God) and in it, Mack is invited to return to the shack where his daughter’s life was taken:

“Mackenzie,

It’s been a while. I’ve missed you. I’ll be at the shack next weekend if you want to get together.”

Mack arrives at the snowy, mountainous location which has been transformed into a lakeside paradise and it’s against this backdrop that he encounters the triune God. The Holy Spirit is a gardener named Sarayu (which means “breath of wind”). Jesus is a young woodworker (no surprise there), but God the Father is not in the form you might expect. He appears to Mack as a middle-aged woman who cooks and bakes in the kitchen.

“I always pictured you with a white beard,” says Mack.

Papa replies, “After what you’ve been through, I didn’t think you could handle a father right now.”

When I finished Denise’s book I rewatched The Shack. One of my favorite scenes from the movie is when God is showing Mack how to press dough in the kitchen. Papa rubs flour into His hands and speaks of never abandoning His children. He holds out His arm and shows Mack the scar from the nail mark that pierced His own wrist when Jesus was staked to the cross. “Don’t you ever think that what my son chose to do didn’t cost us both dearly.”

I don’t look at domestic life the same way anymore, because now I know God is the one putting bread in the oven and washing the servants’ feet. I see men’s and women’s roles as different, but also equal, and interchangeable, like when it comes to women working outside the home. God isn’t identifying me by a singular feminine trait that others have expected me to live out a certain way. “Remember also that all of us as individuals have a unique mix of masculinity and femininity within us, so many of us will recognize traits of both masculinity and femininity in our behaviour and way of relating,” Denise points out. God knows this. He created my unique imprint of feminine and masculine qualities and is aware of the degree to which they need to be lived out for me to feel fulfilled and for His will to be accomplished. Because I know this now, I am at peace with staying home with my son for this season.

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God has shown me how to secure a sense of accomplishment throughout the day with little “jobs” and making time in my schedule for writing. If He ever calls me to live my traits in a more public way, I won’t be measuring it against the expressions and wishes of others, but instead looking to the mother heart of my God who knows me intimately and speaks words of comfort to me and not condemnation.

He's El Shaddai, the one who meets me in the kitchen.

Denise Jordan’s book The Forgotten Feminine is available on Amazon. To learn more about James and Denise Jordan and their ministry, please visit www.fatherheart.net.

How often have I been like Mary going to dead tombs?

Performing rituals before a God who never desired inscriptions in stone.

Anointing the head that holds the creation of the cosmos.

Anointing eyes that saw Satan fall like lightning.

“My ways are not your ways,” he taught her. “My thoughts are not your thoughts.”

Still, she tried to understand, clinging to the tradition of elders.

Clinging to spices in her hand.

First, the veil had been torn in the temple and now the stone had been rolled back too.

She wept.

She couldn’t meet her savior, offering him spices with trembling hands.

“Why are you crying?”

“Why are you crying?”

“Who is it you are looking for?”

She would bring back her Lord to anoint his scarred body.

She would wrap him in a cloth and roll the stone over his grave.

It’s what they had told her to do.

“Mary.”

Mary. The one who saw the risen Lord before Peter.

Mary. No longer the one with bitter spices.

Forever the one with words from the Teacher to preach to men.

Dear Friends,

In February, Simon Cowell’s golden buzzer, Jane Marczewski (Nightbirde), passed away after a long battle with cancer. For those of you who haven’t heard her sing, here’s Jane’s performance on America’s Got Talent last year.

Nightbirde is one of the most powerful voices I have ever heard, and I’m not just referring to when her words are put to music.

A few months after her golden buzzer, I discovered a blog post she had written three months before her AGT performance aired, it’s titled “God is on the Bathroom Floor.”

“I don’t remember most of Autumn, because I lost my mind late in the summer and for a long time after that, I wasn’t in my body. I was a lightbulb buzzing somewhere far…”

Her words came to me when I was in a darker place than I am now. It was a time I still desired notebooks and paper and to jot down ideas in an app on my phone. Surprisingly, it wasn’t during those days that I considered deleting this newsletter, in fact I hadn’t even created it yet. A few weeks ago, when my mind was the most calm it had been in years, my motivation to write was nonexistent. I would write down thoughts on lined paper and in the notes on my phone, but the words felt hollow. Someone had pulled the plug on my creativity without me realizing it and even if I knew I could find it again underneath the floorboards I probably wouldn’t have bothered to retrieve it.

Then I snapped out of it. Call it grace or the cumulative outcome of thirteen months of counseling or call it both. After a couple of months of dryness, my cup was being filled again.

One of the things I’ve been struggling with for a while now is how to best identify with my art. Perhaps you’ve noticed (it coincides with the number of times I’ve modified the name of my Facebook page).

Am I a writer? And if so, what kind of writer am I? An essayist? A journalist? Or a children’s book author?

But then again I do enjoy artwork and dabbling in the occasional craft. Am I an artist?

Perhaps I am both: Writer and Artist.

After my bout with writer’s block, I realized that if I’m going to focus on labels the most fitting one would be “teacher,” but I don’t need it to take up space on social media anymore. It’s a knowing I carry with me.

A teacher is knowledgeable in a variety of subjects and is passionate about sharing what she’s learned with others which for me could be an interesting conversation, a book, a movie, an observation that I attempt to capture with words and hurl out into the world as black text against a white backdrop. Maybe it’s a handmade “new baby'“ card, or a clean desk.

I remember another creative telling me once that whenever she gets up in the morning she asks the Holy Spirit what He wants her to work on that day. That little gem of advice has stayed with me through the years and even though I’ve done a very poor job of executing it, I have reached into my pocket to remind myself it’s there and I think now I’ve finally discovered the value in it.

It’s not in my nature to limit myself to one creative pursuit and box myself in a cardboard box covered in labels, instead I want to be like the wind:

“The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit”. John 3:8

So, no, I will not be deleting this newsletter because like the gems I’ve turned over in my pocket for years, I think this one should be added to the collection.

I plan to resume my third Thursday deadline this month and next week I have a little something special for Holy Week because as Jane once said "You can't wait until life isn't hard anymore before you decide to be happy,” and now is the time to be fully alive.

See you next week.

-Jessie

“Call me cursed, call me lost, call me scorned. But that’s not all. Call me chosen, blessed, sought-after. Call me the one who God whispers his secrets to…”

To read Nightbirde’s full blog post “God is on the Bathroom Floor” click here.

When I was pregnant with my son, there was no question of how I planned to feed him after his birth. If my body couldn’t provide sufficient nourishment, then luckily we lived in an area where access to formula was as easy as choosing between powder, concentrate, and ready-to-use. 

As it turned out, I didn’t even make it to the end of a full week of breastfeeding before cracking open one of the emergency ready-to-use bottles stashed away in the pantry. The snap of plastic was a healing balm to my fried nerves after the constant worry my son wasn’t receiving enough food. But even with the stress of breastfeeding alleviated, I still could not shake the fear of his belly being less than full in the months that followed. 

When my son began transitioning to solids, I exchanged formula for a packed-out lunch box for every outing. A cornucopia of veggie straws, applesauce pouches, dried cherries, and Nutri-grain bars was within reach at the earliest stages of fussiness. Now when my picky toddler pushes his food away at mealtimes, I glance at his lean body and try to shove a few last forkfuls in his mouth. 

The desire to feed and nourish my child is a primal instinct shared by many mothers. A nurturing spirit transcends socioeconomic and geographic boundaries. And yet, in certain countries, those same boundaries can determine whether that shared motherly instinct is fulfilled or not.

It may be challenging for those of us who have not experienced true food scarcity to comprehend a scenario where a system of government denies certain classes of mothers (and fathers) the freedom to provide basic nourishment to their children; yet in North Korea, a mother’s fear of her children going without food can be a daily manifestation. These mothers do not have the option to pack bulging lunch boxes or encourage their children to fill their little bellies at mealtime; instead, they are compelled to ration what they have to ensure there is sufficient food for their entire family at the next meal.

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Yeonmi Park, a North Korean defector who escaped the country at 13 with her mother, has been speaking out the last few years about the suppression of her people in the socialist state where millions have starved to death. In her memoir, In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom, Park details one of the country’s worst famines in the 1990s known as “The Arduous March” when her family relied on her father’s trading business in the legal and illegal markets.

“It seemed normal to me that there were times when we had food to eat, and other times when there was only one meal a day and we went hungry. While they worked to keep us from catastrophe, my parents often had to leave my sister and me alone. If she couldn’t find someone to look after us, my mother would have to bolt a metal bar across the door to keep us safe in the house.” 

 Many North Korean families like Park’s who were not members of the higher class and had a lower “songbun” (social status ranking), resorted to smuggling goods over the border from China or made items to sell in the unofficial markets called “jangmadangs” just to have money to buy food. Sometimes Park and her sister foraged for insects and plants in the woods. She says her mother “carries guilt to this day that she was not better able to enjoy my childhood; she was too busy worrying about getting us enough food to eat.” 

On August 3, 2021, during a conversation on The Joe Rogan Experience, Joe Rogan asks Park about another dynamic of North Korean life when she states, “There’s no word for love in North Korea.” 

“So, your mother never told you she loved you? You never told your father you love him?” Rogan replies.

“In North Korea, there’s even no word for “I” so they don’t want people to be individualistic…”. 

Park explains that whenever a North Korean makes a statement that should be spoken with the word “I”, such as “I like water,” they will replace “I” with “we”.  

She discusses the concept further in her book:

“North and South Koreans have the same ethnic backgrounds, and we speak the same language–except in the North there are no words for things like “shopping malls,” “liberty,” or even “love,” at least as the rest of the world knows it. The only true “love” we can express is worship for the Kims, a dynasty of dictators who have ruled North Korea for three generations.”

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Later in the conversation with Rogan, Park comments on how death and malnutrition were an everyday occurrence in North Korea to the point where she would walk by dead or suffering individuals on the street and not feel anything. She associates her lack of compassion to human nature’s adaptability, which allows one to conform to evil if it’s the only experience one has ever known. 

“When do you think you started to feel things?” Rogan asks. 

Park replies, “With my son.” 

Through his birth, she learned how to feel compassion and unconditional love for the first time toward another.

“All I felt was love, and zero, zero fear.”

I’ve attributed plenty of things to freedom throughout my lifetime, food, clean water, and prosperity to name a few, but I’d never considered the act of telling my son “I love you” to be one of them. I thought that right belonged to every parent who’s ever raised a child. Instead, on the other side of the world, mothers like Park’s are speaking very different words to their children to help ensure their survival under a communist regime. “Remember, Yeonmi-ya… even when you think you’re alone, the birds and mice can hear you whisper.” 

A few days after learning Yeonmi Park’s story, I was preparing to leave my house for a late evening Walmart pick-up order when I received a notification on my phone that my son’s favorite juice was not available. Frustration grew as it was the item I needed most for the following morning. Then, I remembered the people of North Korea and Yeonmi Park. 

I was grateful I was able to feed my son. 

Welcome to Glass Chapel.

When I was a teenager, I studied theology at my small Catholic school in a chapel with stained glass windows and wooden pews lined with red cushioned seats. It was my favorite class.

In that chapel, we discussed the history, tradition, and cultures of the people of this particular faith as they lived out their devotion to God through the centuries. What I loved most about theology was knowing I would never be able to reach the end of the study of God.

Of course, when the class would eventually have to come to an end, my unsatiated curiosity and wonder didn’t want the discussion to stop.

This chapel helped set a foundation for me, but in the 13 years since leaving its walls, I’ve come to believe God is in the sanctuary, yes, but He’s also in the wild, and in each of us. He desires to reside within us in a way we may never fully understand—on this side of eternity at least. But I want to try to understand it.

Now my chapel has transparent walls as I’ve looked beyond the structure of my youth and tried to discover what it is I believe and why do I believe it. One thing I definitely believe is that the Body of Christ is deeper than we can ever understand.

But I want to try to understand it.

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This is what you can expect at Glass Chapel.

If you’re seeking the open door and desiring an authentic perspective on culture and spirituality that leaves you thinking “you too?”, you’ve come to the right place. At Glass Chapel, I want to share compelling stories by looking beyond the chapel walls and featuring words by spiritual writers who don’t believe in an end to the study of God.

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-Jessica Ferraro DiCicco

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