Walk Worthy Press: Showing Mary by Renita J. Weems

Author Testimony

"Writing is a form of prayer to me. Like prayer, writing demands that I pay attention, focus, and peep closer in on something I'm otherwise inclined to overlook. I must pay attention to what's going on around me, inside me, beyond me. Of course, there's the part of writing and prayer that's a conversation, a conversation with God, with yourself, with spirits that visit you. But it's more than a conversation. Or perhaps I should say, it's a different kind of conversation. It's like the kind of conversation that happens with a cherished friend. The point of the conversation is the conversation, not answers. The point of prayer is prayer. The point of writing is writing. I don't get better at it; I just get more deeply into it. There's a moment that arrives in the writing of a book, as in the praying of a prayer, when you can't remember for the life of you what made you put off so long eking out those first words.

Writing my last book, Showing Mary: How Women Can Share Prayers, Wisdom, and the Blessings of God, acquainted me with some of the prayers I've been unknowingly praying for more than five years now. I've been feeling myself as a woman on the verge of a new beginning for quite a while now. But I didn't know how to talk about the new me, other parts of me, that longed for expression. With three books on spirituality and women under my belt and a full blown career as a writer, ordained minister, and public speaker I didn't know how to admit to myself and others that I wasn't fully satisfied with my work. I was blessed more than most by just the fact that I have been able for years to move back and forth between several professions with ease and reward. But I knew the truth.

What I didn't know was how to talk about what was going on inside me. I needed a role model. I set out to find a woman who knew what it was to be and to become, to reinvent yourself before your very eyes, to not allow herself to be satisfied with the role others foisted on her. I turned to the bible for such a role model. I knew I could trust the word of God to shine some light on the situation. I never tire of the women in the bible as scant and slanted as their stories may appear on the surface. Theirs was the first stories I looked to years ago when in my first book Just A Sister Away I sought to find my voice as a thinking woman of faith. Despite some ambivalence in the beginning about Mary the Mother of Jesus, I soon found myself eager to peel back the layers of myth and legend surrounding the woman who has come down through history as the Virgin Mother, the Blessed Virgin, the Mother of God. Mary's story is every woman‚s story, I soon realized. Hers is the ideal story for women seeking out other women as role models and companions along the spiritual journey. Mary teaches women a lot about prayers, inner wisdom, and the blessings of God."

Renita J. Weems

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