”Freedom & Liberation” | Melissa L. Bennett | June 23, 2024

"Our country is complicit in so much violence." Sermon by guest preacher Melissa L. Bennett, recorded live at the 10:00am service on Sunday, June 23, 2024.

 

Melissa Bennett (she/her) comes from Umatilla, Nimiipuu, Sac & Fox, Anishinaabe, Nordic, and Celtic ancestors - all of whom have a plethora of stories to tell. She is a transracial adoptee who grew up on an Oregon onion farm in a region that was once traditional hunting and gathering grounds for the Kalapuya people. She is as connected to the stories of the farms that raised her as she is to the stories of her own people.

 

Melissa grew up on the storytelling of her great-aunt Annabelle, a librarian named Mrs. Borsberry, and the local creeks, woods, and kittens. She started telling her own stories in the first grade and was writing them by the fifth. For over 25 years Melissa has turned her love of storytelling and storylistening into a spiritual practice. She serves her community as a spiritual care provider and spiritual mentor bearing witness to the stories people share in order to help them see where meaning, belonging, curiosity, and possibility exist in their lives. She shares oral tradition, contemporary literature, spiritual texts, ancestral connection, the archetypal language of tarot, film, music, guided meditation, dreaming, altar building, ceremony, writing, and art as ways to support the healing of her clients through story, world building, and myth making.

 

Melissa has been cultivating a relationship with the unseen world since she was a small child and decided to make her lifelong spiritual work “official” when she earned a Master of Divinity degree, a graduate certificate in spiritual counseling, and a graduate certificate in theological studies from (what was once) Marylhurst University. Following her education she completed a clinical spiritual care residency in forensic mental health and has since utilized her skills working primarily with underrepresented people in higher education across the Pacific Northwest and beyond.

 

Melissa’s identity as an Indigenous woman, a transracial adoptee, a person with chronic illness, lifelong anxiety and depression, and neurodivergence has shaped her work through a healing justice lens. She is committed to utilizing story as medicine for healing the past, addressing systems of oppression in the present, and imagining equitable futures where all people are safe, free, and thriving. For the past decade Melissa has presented, preached, taught, and facilitated on the intersections of story, spirituality, and social justice.