The following is an excerpt from our Substack, Notes From The Labyrinth. Read the full story here.
“Come to the beach. Rest your body, gaze at the water, listen to the wind. This retreat for women offers time to play, renew the creative self, and feel the presence of the sacred through the practice of meditation.”
So reads the first paragraph of a bright yellow flyer from the 2003 ‘Creativity and Spirituality’ retreat with RCWMS.
Introduction
Welcome to the second installment of Notes from the Labyrinth, where we reflect on past and present RCWMS legacy topics, interview staff and former contributors, and ultimately work toward a 50th anniversary book for the Resource Center for Women and Ministry in the South, a feminist nonprofit in Durham, NC.
The 50th anniversary committee spends a lot of time reflecting on the “secret sauce” of the Resource Center’s unusual ability to persevere, stay relevant, and uphold the mission that founder and executive director Jeanette Stokes imagined years ago: “Weaving feminism and spirituality into a vision of justice for the world.”
If you’re new to the Resource Center or need a refresher, RCWMS hosts a variety of programs with a feminist approach to creativity, spirituality, and social justice. This programming has included publishing books, producing CDs and documentaries about feminist artists, hosting conferences on topics ranging from quilting to preaching to economic justice, and a wide range of other impressive feats for a small, predominantly grassroots-funded organization.
As the founder and former editor of a magazine, I’m often drawn to the tangible products of RCWMS, such as our books or documentaries, as I know firsthand how challenging and all-encompassing these creative births can be. But, equally important and perhaps more foundational to the Resource Center is the creation of spaces where women, elders, queer folks, and spiritual people from all faiths can convene and find community.
The Resource Center started hosting retreats as early as 1983, geared primarily at (you guessed it) women in ministry. The locations for these events shifted among various camps and conference centers across North Carolina before finding a home at Trinity Center, an Episcopal conference center on the NC coast. The Resource Center first brought retreats to the beach in about 1993, and over thirty years later, we’re still hosting regular retreats there.
For this essay, I’m interested in exploring the relationship between RCWMS and the beach, why Jeanette Stokes felt so called to keep bringing women here, and the impact of these retreats on participants, myself included.
Part One: Jeanette.
A love of water was instilled in RCWMS founder Jeanette Stokes at an early age by her father, E. Malcolm Stokes, a former collegiate swimmer and diver. He made sure that water was a regular part of his family’s life, even in the landlocked state of Oklahoma, where Jeanette was raised. In our interview on the topic, she told me that even now, 50 years after his death, he’ll still sometimes appear to her when she’s in the ocean.
As an adult, she’s held the practice of sojourning to the beach near and dear. The beach helped her realize that one of her favorite things in life is to have unstructured time with no demands on her. Sometimes this means having the beach be the place where she can physically remove time from her body. She recalled this story from the 1990s:
“My then-husband John and I went to Ocracoke for two weeks. And I took off my watch. And I never put it on again. Of course, there are clocks everywhere, so I’m never away from time. But I took time off of my body. I liked my watch, but I took it off to be at Ocracoke. And I was completely ‘Ocracoked’ with a D on the end. And it just made a huge difference.”
Continue reading the full post on our Substack here.
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