Community of Joy: Pamela Johnson

Written by Rachel Young Binter (she/her), Director of the Center for Clergy Renewal (CCR).

When I met with Pamela at her home in West Madison I came with three questions: How did you find Holy Wisdom Monastery?; what has Holy Wisdom given you?; and what are your hopes for Holy Wisdom in the future? Here is what she told me.

Fifteen years ago Holy Wisdom came to Pamela as a direct invitation in a dream during the Friday night before Palm Sunday. She woke in the middle of the night having heard a gentle voice asking: “Why are you not going to Holy Wisdom Monastery?” When she woke up in the morning, she called her longtime friend, Tom Zanzig, and said, “I am going to go up to Holy Wisdom Monastery to worship tomorrow. Do you want to come?” So together they entered the Sunday Assembly space and found themselves bathed in the richness of the music, liturgy and inspiring homily. When they joined hands with the community for the Prayer of Jesus, and the bread came down the row to enter them and join them to the mystical body of Christ, they looked at each other and said, “I’m home.”

As Pamela began to live into the community of communities at Holy Wisdom Monastery, what became clear to her was that even though she had felt like she didn’t know anything about Holy Wisdom when the quiet invitation came to her in the night, the truth is, her heart did know Holy Wisdom and was simply being awakened.

Her life, she told me, had been a series of what she calls spiritual breadcrumbs, dropped on her path just as she needed them. In her early years in a Lutheran church in Edina, Minnesota, she was nurtured by beautiful liturgy, music, prophetic preaching and the encouragement to share her gifts in a congregation composed by receiving the gifts of the people.

When she and her husband moved to Winona, Minnesota to create a flower farm, she learned to sit down on their land, which was profoundly quiet. Her home there was built by Trappist monks who came from Iowa in the 1970s to form a community. The monks built a limestone deck that looked out across three valleys. This was a gift. She spent four years listening, resting in beauty and inviting others into the stillness. She was also given the gifts of hospitality, stability, humility and the kind of welcome that looks like the heart of Christ through praying with and volunteering in the ministry of two Catholic Worker houses in Winona.

When her granddaughter was born in Madison, she and her husband moved to Brooklyn, 20 miles south of Madison. There, once again, they created a flower farm, Still Point Farm. All these breadcrumb experiences led to cultivating a place where flowers were gathered, tables set and people – young and old – were invited to come without cost, for community, spiritual renewal, retreats and shared spiritual and theological exploration. On each farm she was given bread for the journey, making the bread placed into her waiting palm at Holy Wisdom Monastery on that Palm Sunday feel like a homecoming.

At Holy Wisdom, Pamela found a place where the call to prayer, hospitality, justice and care for the earth (markers of her own emerging spirituality) were deeply embedded in a communal way of life. The monastic rhythms, contemplative practices and trust in silence as Spirit’s first language shaped the sisters and this community of communities. Her formation as an oblate deepened her commitment to this place and the Benedictine shared way of life.

When the Lilly Endowment offered the possibility of writing a grant to support clergy renewal, she saw the gifts that the restored land and contemplative rhythms of Holy Wisdom could bring to weary pastors. Along with co-facilitating a grant-writing team, she helped successfully dream into being a Contemplative Renewal program that has now brought over 100 pastors to Holy Wisdom to be immersed in the monastic, contemplative rhythms of Holy Wisdom for eight days in the summer and six days in the winter. She and the immersion Beauty Team set a table of beauty in the middle of the meeting room and a table of nourishing snacks at the edge of the room. The Beauty Team lays a poem of welcome on the each pastor’s pillow before they arrive and they greet the pastors by name at the door as they enter. They create a contemplative space in the Retreat & Guest House sunroom for the pastors to reflect, write and make art. She and her husband Larry come early each morning of the immersion, bearing homemade baked goods. This quickly becomes an anticipated joy!

Pamela continues to nurture the life of the Center for Clergy Renewal (CCR) by co-chairing a monthly Reflection Circle that holds the spirits, questions and wonderings of the CCR staff so the program can continue to flourish. She serves on the Discernment Team that reads clergy applications to determine each year’s cohort and invites the Reflection Circle to pray for each pastor by name as they get ready to travel to us. She has supported the pastors by offering her wisdom on topics such as writing a Rule, the Enneagram and the gifts of every pastor having a Reflection Circle. Some pastors have also sought her out for her other special gift – preparing a cup of tea and listening with the ear of her heart, because those who are awakened in the night by the voice of the Spirit have gifts to attune us to Spirit’s stirring in all its forms. We are grateful for how she welcomes, listens and finds the breadcrumbs of Christ’s presence to place in our hands. We are grateful that in this place of many doors, she helped open yet another door, giving clergy in need of a reminder of God’s love, a place to join her in saying, “I’m home.”

Pamela said she is grateful every day that Spirit led her to Holy Wisdom’s radical welcome, deep listening and all embracing Eucharistic table. She sees that since its founding Holy Wisdom has always evolved by responding to the quiet voice of the Spirit. She sees a long, blessed future for Holy Wisdom by simply continuing to be itself – a monastery: a justice seeking community of communities rooted in prayer, work, study, rest, Benedictine values, this land and the renewal of planet earth and all its creatures. Thank you, Pamela, for adding to our community of joy!

If you would like to join Pamela in supporting the work of the Center for Clergy Renewal, please consider attending “We Shall Overcome,” a lunchtime program and fundraiser featuring a conversation with Pastor Joe Ellwanger, as he shares a lifetime of meeting the challenges of history with the hope of the Gospel, beginning with his days as a young pastor organizing alongside Martin Luther King Jr. in Alabama.