🎧 Power of Place Episode #35 | Power of HaMakom - Mary Lane Potter

Power of Place - Stories of the Pacific Northwest

Join us in this episode for a conversation with a wise friend about the deepest matters of the heart. Our guest is theologian, novelist, and mystic Mary Lane Potter. Mary’s quest for a closer relationship with the divine stretches from her childhood in an immigrant community steeped in the traditions of Christian Reform evangelism; to her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago Divinity School, then a life of service as a lay preacher and tenured academic; followed by a conversion to Judaism and a literary career. Mary has authored the novels Strangers and Sojourners: Stories from the Lowcountry and A Woman of Salt, as well as a spiritual autobiography Seeking God and Losing the Way: A Story of Love and Conversions. Her upcoming novel is based on the biblical character Miriam. An avid essayist, her work is published to diverse audiences, including Tablet, an online magazine of Jewish news and culture. Mary’s stories will whisk you off to Sri Lanka to step over moonstones, into the Sinai Peninsula on camelback, before returning to the oceanic Pacific Northwest just in time for the Jewish festival of Sukkot. We conclude with an open invitation for you to participate in building what Mary calls “a pop-up sacred space.” Mary’s storytelling—intimate yet prophetic—will illuminate the liminal spaces between the sacred and the profane in your daily life. "What I knew as a child...and I’ve been spending my whole life trying to understand and articulate, is that we can experience the divine or the sacred; and we can experience something that is more-than; that something that is greater-than; something that is beyond us, and not know it." ~Mary Lane Potter