Gail Seavey
Gail Seavey has been on a 50-year intentional spiritual journey as a Rhode Island School of Design trained artist, community organizer, and Harvard Divinity School educated parish minister. I invite you to join me in co-creating culture by bravely facing trauma, celebrating joy, dismantling white patriarchal supremacy, healing, and empowering one another to transform who we are together. Join the conversation as we explore our inner lives in relationship to our changing culture.
Rising Tide Clay Basket
The Path of the Goddess of the Eye
Gail in in the caves at Cappadocia
Published Work
Varied expressions of one spiritual journey, shown as sculpture 1975 - 1983, written as sermon and liturgy 1997-2019.
Presentations
& Media Links
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Berry Street Essay & Lecture
The Berry St. Essay, first given 200 years ago, is the annual ‘state of the body’ address by a Unitarian Universalist (UU) minister to their collected colleagues. Gail was asked to do the 2016 address because of her ministry to survivors of clergy sexual abuse. Her Essay: “If Our Secrets Define Us,” caused a controversy that ultimately helped motivate faithful ministers in the UU Minister’s Association to transform their systems to better hold ministers accountable and justly respond to victims. Since a person named in the essay threatened to sue, the UU Association’s published version was redacted. The unredacted essay is required reading in several ministry schools’ classes, so I have included it in both written and video form. Because the essay speaks about traumatic situations, some have been triggered by it.
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Media Interviews
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The Arts of Religion
Large room, Goreme cavern dwellings, Turkey, 2009
Gail's Blog Posts
“Flesh Becomes Word”
– Alicia Suskin Ostriker
It started with a dream. I was in a cave, much like one in Turkey with layers ever deeper in the earth of little rooms and cubbies that were used as secret safe cities in times of great power shifts above. A few years before I entered the dream, I had climbed wide awake down into the first layer of this very real cave where, to my surprise, I was not overwhelmed by claustrophobia. Standing there inside the earth, I understood that my body had been healed, literally changed, no longer suffering from 40 years of the hypervigilance hard-wired by Post-Traumatic injuries. Later, in the dream I was in one of those tiny stone cubbies speaking into a pipe that was connected to many other cubbies each with another person speaking into their pipe. This dream came to me while I was still speaking publicly in front of many actual human beings at least weekly as part of a sacred and ongoing conversation with them. After 30 years of speaking in public I am now exploring that dream, speaking to you while you are in your cubby and I am in mine, starting a different kind of sacred conversation.
