Edwina Gateley to present 2016 Aquinas Lecture

Friday, Jan. 22, 2016

SALT LAKE CITY — Author and poet, devoted layperson, retreat leader and single mother, Edwina Gateley ran a girl’s school in Africa and served the poor in the streets of Chicago in response to God’s call, all without ever having taken religious vows or working as a diocesan employee.

“I’m 72 now, and I’ve spent my life trying to follow my calling as a woman of God and as a mom and as a writer,” said Gateley, author of 15 books, each of which deal with some aspect of faith. 

Gateley will be in Salt Lake City Jan. 23-24 to offer a retreat on Saturday and give the 2016 Aquinas Lecture on Sunday. She believes that “we’re all little walking Gospels, or we should be; we should be personifications of the Good News,” she said. “We don’t just stay with what’s been written in the past – the Gospel is our foundation, but it’s got to be lived today, in the present, in our contemporary world.” 

Gateley’s message is universal, said Mary Lowe, a member of the Aquinas Lecture committee at St. Catherine of Siena Newman Center who recommended that Gateley be this year’s speaker at the event. 

Lowe has heard Gateley speak before and also has read several of her books, including “Songs of a Laywoman,” which she uses for meditation, both for herself and with those for whom she is a spiritual director. 

“It speaks to me of God and wonder and the Holy Spirit working,” she said.

Gateley’s devotion is an inspiration, Lowe said. “She really believed that God called her to work with the street people in Chicago, with the women in prostitution, and the poor and the homeless, and had no idea what she was doing, and she went.” 

Although Gateley isn’t a member of a religious order, “she is following God and helping God’s people, and I think she inspires the rest of us to do the same,” Lowe said. 

Describing herself as a storyteller and poet, Gateley said she plans the day of reflection to be “about how we can believe in the possibilities when we live in such a screwed-up world.”

Although people of faith know there is a God, “what we do, I think, is that we shove God to the sidelines for Sunday” instead of experiencing his presence in everyday life, she said.

“Common, ordinary people should have access to the mystery of God in their lives,” she said, but popular perception is that only special people like saints have access to God, and with this way of thinking, “I think we cheat God of a relationship. … We don’t bring God into our lives because God’s already there. It’s a matter of sight, of vision. I’m not convinced that we really believe deeply how much God is present because we don’t experience it; we don’t allow ourselves to experience it.”

The retreat will be geared toward women but she welcomes men as well, she said, although she focuses on a feminine spirituality. “I’ll be talking about, giving birth to God in our world today,” she said.

God has planted a seed within each person, she said, and “the seed never goes away. It may never grow, it may never gestate, because that requires our cooperation.”

Those who attend the retreat will “laugh, they’ll listen to stories, they’ll be challenged and stretched, and that’s the whole childbirth thing – you won’t give birth to anything new unless there’s a stretching experience. And that day will be a stretching experience for all of us,” she said.

By contrast, during the Aquinas lecture she will share her own faith story; she hopes that will encourage people to reflect on their own path and “how God has led them and increasingly might lead them deeper into discipleship and peace,” she said. “Loving one another is what the Gospel is all about. And that means we have to do stuff that demonstrates that we care for our sisters and brothers and in that process we are changed. We always think we’re going to change everybody else, but in actual fact what God does is change us.”

The annual Aquinas Lecture at St. Catherine of Siena Newman Center is intended to offer notable speakers who “can talk about spiritual and religious issues that might be current to people,” Lowe said, adding that in Utah, “it’s hard to find spiritual nourishment that’s at hand, that’s easy to take part in.”

 

WHAT: 2016 Aquinas Lecture

PRESENTER: Edwina Gateley

WHEN: Sunday, Jan. 24, 12:30 p.m.. 

WHERE: St. Catherine of Siena Newman Center

                     170 University St., SLC 

Free and open to the public.

 

 

WHAT: Women’s Day of Reflection

PRESENTER: Edwina Gateley

WHEN: Saturday, Jan. 23, 9 a.m.-4 p.m. 

WHERE: Episcopal Church Center

                    75 South 200 East, SLC

Cost: $35; includes lunch. Scholarships available. For information, contact Mary Lowe, 801-201-1450 or ewolmary@comcast.net.