A Woman You Should Know: The Wisdom of Service – An Interview with Selena Kilmoyer
By: Lisa M. Hayes – Confluence Daily is your daily news source for women in the know.
Selena Kilmoyer is a dichotomy. She is both an artist hermitess and a very recognizable person in public places in Olympia, Washington. Everyone knows who she is, and one way or another almost everyone in Olympia has been touched by her work. Selena is the face of homeless advocacy work for a region in Washington that, like every other region almost everywhere, has a homelessness problem.
When I first met Selena, I knew her as Sister Selena. She was a nun. She came to Olympia in 2001 to work for a local homeless advocacy organization. I was working with a different organization whose mission was closely aligned with theirs.
It was 102 degrees on a Tuesday afternoon. I’d decided a watermelon feed for the houseless folks in our community was in order. It seemed like the right thing to do. In hindsight, it was a very “let them eat cake moment” in homeless advocacy. However, it was the day I met Selena Kilmoyer, and that was an important day in my life.
Selena Kilmoyer is a complicated woman. She’s exceptionally tender and uncommonly tough. Selena is a change maker and a very good friend. Selena sweetly refers to herself as a crone, and I couldn’t think of a better description of her. Now in her 70’s she embodies the wisdom and experience of the crone years completely. She’s just as much of a force of nature as she was when I first met her. She recently, once again staffed an overnight cold weather shelter many nights in a row in the most challenging circumstances. Selena is older, but she doesn’t seem to age.
I got the opportunity to interview her.
Lisa: Choosing to be a nun is an uncommon decision. You are the only nun I’ve ever known. Although you’re not a nun anymore, at the time, you were nothing like I’d imagined a nun would be. You seemed like an unlikely Sister. Why did you choose that path?
Selena: I did spend several years as a member of a contemplative community, totally immersed it is beautiful ritualistic daily practices of silence and liturgical tempo augmented by sharing life with a gaggle of women, most of who had lived together for more than six decades. I was not “a late vocation” – someone entering religious life later or as a second or third career. Rather, I sought the deep silence offered in such an appropriate cocoon in a conscious effort to allow God to heal generations of my Orange Protestant Irish family’s conditioned hatred of all Catholics. I was born into a family who proclaimed the love of God, His Son and hatred of all Catholics. That was the profound dichotomy with which I lived my childhood well into adulthood. I did not hate and yet was taught from womb-hood to do just that.
This personal experience enables me to genuinely understand why and how people —that whole groups of people can so blatantly HATE others! And, in 2018, allows me a truly deep empathy for children of those who do so hate without any reasons!
It is also living with this profound insecurity of total identity confusion that led me into ‘advocacy.’ Actually, at eight, a neighbor invited me to help out at a local Lighthouse for the Blind, helping smaller blind kids with their recreational activities on Saturdays. It was pure heaven for me, a poor kid with few toys and fewer opportunities to play. From that into Special Education and being one of the early advocates and practitioners of the federally funded Special Education Mandate which holds strong these many decades later.
Then, prison volunteering which opened my eyes to the direct correlation between poverty and incarceration. In the mid-80s, in response to the under-funded federal mandate to deinstitutionalize state mental hospitals, Legal Aid in Vermont, organized a cadre of volunteer guardian ad litems. Our job was to defend long-term mental patients rights to remain hospitalized rather than be community released into virtual homelessness.
Lisa: How did you end up in Olympia, Washington doing homeless advocacy?
Selena: As I felt called into the silence of a contemplative community and its healing, likewise, somewhat reluctantly, I felt called out again, and that is how I found myself a live-in volunteer at Olympia’s Bread & Roses in summer 2001. One of my first and fondest memories was the watermelon feed at Sylvester Park and hanging out with you & adorable little son!!
Literally sharing life with poor and marginalized, 24/7, has lent itself profoundly and in myriad unknown ways to furthering my deep inner healing —- learning to truly experience unconditional love in its zillion of expressions by those who find themselves ostracized and often despised without any reason at all…
Unless of course, we bother to include FEAR of other the primary reason for all our separations as a species in general.
Although Bread & Roses did many other ‘ministries,’ it too is the old Devoe Shelter I most fondly recall. It is with sadness in part, as most recently at a weeklong overnight Cold Weather Shelter, that I encountered several of the guys, graduates of Devoe, who are still these many years later “living rough” as the Brits say. [I mention too, Rick, who had been housed and clean & sober until a certain Mr. Trump became head of our county — Rick is in his active addiction and struggling to survive one-more-day ~~~~].
Lisa: Back in the day, you and I were both involved in an unlikely purchase of a property for the Devoe Shelter. We ran Olympia’s first shelter there under the most extreme conditions. Everything was wrong with that space, up to and including the septic had collapsed and we had to use Honey Buckets.
The biggest challenge there though was not the facilities. It was the fact that none of us knew what we were doing. Things got unruly up in there really quick until you decided to staff the overnight shift – alone.
By yourself, you saved that shelter, and that program which has since that time saved thousands of lives. What gave you the courage to walk in there alone, and take that over?
Selena: Oh, the Devoe Shelter: I love mentioning a time when I spent every night with half-hundred- guys. It makes me smile and chuckle… Grace steered me clear of any fear of the situation, and yet, I was also given perception sufficient to call on Olympia and Lacey cops to help whenever, literally whenever a call came from Devoe. And they indeed could be counted on. I was also given the strength and stamina to keep going until the Drexel permanent project replaced our ‘home.’
The guys and I without planning committees or task forces grew a loving community in that black-molded, non-sanitary over-crowded environment. We could count on each other; share with each other; generally get along, and they would always defer to the old bitch and her bossiness. In the intimacy of over-nights men learned to trust and shared at very deep levels openly and I learned to become a heart-depth listener.
Lisa: In all of your years of work in the homeless advocacy arena, what have you learned about the politics of homelessness?
Selena: When I first came to Olympia and sat on committees we talked ad nauseam about the homeless; then houselessness; then needing housing with support services; then Housing First, then housing for the vulnerable who cannot navigate their lives say nothing of the social services system. In the past year, my thinking has evolved to this: WE ALL NEED TO BE SACREDLY COCOONED. Those who are street dependent and woods dwellers lack virtually all aspects of living sacredly cocooned.
Among those, our neighbors who find themselves, primarily because of ridiculous policy discrimination, unable to access appropriate medical and nursing care facilities, are now an ever-growing number, most vulnerable in my opinion. And among those, are an increasing number of elders. We also find ourselves dealing with an ever-growing new nomadic youth population — some of whom I have experienced for years — new drugs and other self-medicating are ‘crusting the souls of these young people’ causing them to be more unpredictable and potentially dangerous. Then there are those in the throes of addictions and attendant mental impairment; and those who are dealing only with mental illness. The majority of these folks’ needs for sacred cocooning are not being met.
And of course, the acutely homeless be they family or individual who can with a bit of help, rocket back into the insanity of life in USA 2018.
My spiritual and experiential truth is this: WE HAVE THE CAPABILITY AS A COMMUNITY TO READILY UNCOVER THE APPROPRIATE COCOONING NEEDS FOR ALL OF THESE TOO-MANY INDIVIDUALS (AND THOSE WHO FIND THEMSELVES IN FAMILIES AS WELL); MEET THE NEEDS AND CREATIVELY MOVE INTO INNOVATIVE AND CONCRETE WAYS OF BEING COMMUNITY DIFFERENTLY, SO AS TO END ALL THESE INJUSTICES. SACRED COCOONING IS OUR COLLECTIVE SACRED RESPONSIBILITY. So let it be done and soon, damn it.
Lisa: What have you learned about yourself along this journey?
Selena: For too many years, I did not feel worthy of being loved; feeling a profound sense of separation from the Divinity Within (even though I consciously and conscientiously was a spiritual practitioner for decades — the old, fake it until you make it — in tandem with a precious zeal for union with the Divine). I did not take care of myself and have finally learned – that until I do that well, I am not really effectively helping others. I do not regret anything – to – date. Healing happens!
Lisa: What advice would you offer other women who are considering volunteering or getting involved in community service?
Selena: I humbly offer my experience to other women:
Allow yourself access to healing modalities that ‘call to you.’
Allow yourself the guidance of professionals and other healthy women.
Believe that we actually can be healed and then begin to live whole and full lives (regardless of our chronological age).
Allow yourself to naturally and graciously evolve.
Learn to trust yourself.
Be in gratitude.
And remember the wisdom of Dorothy Day, founder of The Catholic Worker: “ the greatest challenge of the day is how to bring about a revolution of the heart.” And we women and our millenniums and our children are engaging in this full-time and into the fullest of myriad ways. YES! YES! YES!
And lastly dear Lisa, Since November 2017, I am engaged in an on-line yearlong Intensive with Barbara Marx Hubbard, Awakening the New Species In You. I am learning with my global classmates how to become a Homo Amore Universalist — a loving universal human being. I am in the noviciate class beyond homo sapiens!!!! And, I love the possibilities I am learning about, which in turn, offer us new ways to practice sacredly cocooning all; especially those who struggle to simply survive each day…
In conclusion-
Selena: I deviate from the questions provided. I am culminating a yearlong ‘sabbatical-way-of-being’, having been gifted with a ‘severance’ when Bread & Roses dissolved last March 2017. It has been an inner exploration of ME — all of me (as the old song refrain goes) So, I offer my answers from this perspective — that of Selena, Joyful Crone. I claim my crone-ness most humbly yet proudly. I am joyful for joy is, I believe, the manifestation of that peace that passes all understanding. It is received by pure grace and her sister wisdom.
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