The Spiritual Scientist Podcast · Mick Young

Healing Stories in the Bible & The Renewed Sacraments of the Christian Community

·1 hr 1 min·4 clips

Laurie says her first real Christ experience happened in a toilet after an argument with her landlady.

Laurie Widmer Hess joins the show as a writer, editor, caregiver, longtime student of anthroposophy, and newly trained spiritual director. The conversation begins with her book When Fragments Make a Hole, a personal journey through healing stories in the New Testament. Each chapter pairs a poem she wrote with personal stories. The book stays rooted in ordinary life, with even dirty toilets alongside the gospel scenes. Laurie says the poems began in a hard season in her life, which gives the project its emotional weight. The conversation keeps returning to how the pieces fit together. From there, the talk moves into her religious background. She describes the Episcopal or Anglican church in America as a liturgical tradition with sacraments and ritual, but without the authority system of the pope. She was not searching for another religion. Still, she found something true in the tradition she grew up in, even when it seemed to remain behind a veil. Choir was formative for her. That early attachment to ritual never really left. The sacraments of the Christian community changed how she could meet that ritual. They felt like the same reality translated into a language she could finally understand, though she is careful to say the language remains mysterious and deep. The interview closes by circling back to anthroposophy, Steiner's work, and the people carrying those ideas into life.

As heard by us

Healing stories, dirty toilets, and sacraments shape a patient search for spiritual language.

Laurie Widmer Hess brings a book of Bible healing stories into a conversation that stays close to poetry and ordinary life. When Fragments Make a Hole is presented as a work that joins poems with personal stories, and the structure gets some of its force from that mix, including…

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Why you'd press play

Bible healing stories, poems, sacraments, and one very down-to-earth toilet detail, all in one measured listen.

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