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Rev. Lori Anne Bowen: The Right Approach at the Right Time

 October 14, 2024

Not every pastor who practices mindfulness does so regularly, but there are certain periods when devoting time to inner reflection and affirmation is an important way to navigate and mitigate outside forces. 


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Pastor Lori Anne baptizes a young child.

Support Through Severe Trauma  

Pastor Lori Anne Bowen was employed at the VA Medical Center in Salisbury, North Carolina for seventeen years as a kinesiotherapist before heeding the call to ordained ministry. After graduating from Duke Divinity School in 2006, she began her ministerial career. Everything was relatively smooth until she was hit head-on by a drunk driver in 2019.  

“My right knee was cut in three places to the bone. My left kneecap was crushed. My left hip was crushed. My left femur was broken and had pins and screws. My collar bone was broken as well,” she recalls.  

Her recovery took a full year of medical leave, after which she was reappointed. However, the church where she was assigned was only five miles from the accident site, dredging up constant reminders of the trauma she had experienced.  

“I had extreme anxiety and PTSD, so I asked for a move,” she says. But during that same time, Pastor Lori Anne also discovered a new approach to dealing with anxiety: Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) through the Selah Stress Management trial offered by Duke’s Clergy Health Initiative.    


DISCOVERING LOVING KINDNESS

Pastor Lori Anne had not done much with mindfulness before joining the Selah program – just a brief introduction during a leadership program and some of her own reading. “I knew just enough to think this would be an interesting program and something that would help me,” she says.  

The Selah MBSR curriculum included guided trainings on awareness of breath, walking meditation, yoga, body scans, and Loving Kindness Meditation. With the rest of her online cohort, Pastor Lori Anne tried all of the approaches and found benefit in many.  

“The breath awareness was interesting, because as I was learning that I also was diagnosed with sleep apnea. Some of that came from cardiac issues associated with my car accident. So breath awareness is something I continue to do every night, but also at other times to calm me down.” 

The Loving Kindness Meditation took a little more getting used to and required Pastor Lori Anne to engage in deeper reflection. At its core, Loving Kindness Meditation is like a prayer, directed first inwardly and then outward: May I be happy. May I be healthy. May I be safe. May I have peace.  

“I remember thinking, ‘okay, this is different, this is a little odd,’ at first,” she says. “The meditation talks about offering loving kindness to myself. That's kind of hard in some ways, because I offer love to others easier than I do for myself. Loving kindness, done well, forces me to truly offer myself the same things that I'm offering someone else. 

She continues, “Loving Kindness Meditation made me feel better about myself, helped me to accept who I was, in the midst of all of those physical things going on after the accident. I saw the benefit of how I could reframe how I thought about myself, as well as other people. Jesus's commandment is not just to love God, but to love your neighbor as yourself. If I don't love myself, it can make a huge difference in how I love my neighbor.” 

 

Jesus's commandment is not just to love God, but to love your neighbor as yourself. If I don't love myself, it can make a huge difference in how I love my neighbor.

Even though mindfulness and meditation are rooted in Buddhism, Pastor Lori Anne sees a strong connection to Christianity. “It wasn't hard for me to integrate the two,” she says. “It doesn't matter who may have invented this or taught it; if we bring ourselves to it, and Christ is present in our lives, then it is a Christian practice.” 

Best of all, Loving Kindness Meditation and the other MBSR practices of Selah helped Pastor Lori Anne deal with both physical and mental challenges during her recovery. “Through all of that, when I would get frustrated or stressed, the physical pain was worse. Just mentally dealing with the fact that I had a car accident and all that I went through seemed to make my pain worse or my limping worse. When I was able to reset and calm my mind through the Loving Kindness Meditation, the physical things lessened as well.” 

The Selah program ended in 2020, and like many of her colleagues, Pastor Lori Anne’s practices diminished from every other day, to once a week, to rarely as the work and noise of life got in the way. But, like many other pastors, her stress levels have increased in recent months in the wake of church disaffiliation and a looming election.   


Dealing with Daily Stressors 

Although much of the trauma of her accident and recovery are in the past, Pastor Lori Anne, now in her fourth year as Senior Pastor at First United Methodist Church in Mocksville, is facing challenges to her role as a faith leader to a sometimes tense and uneasy congregation.   

Make no mistake, her calling is as strong as ever. “I still feel that God wants me to be in ministry, and at this moment, I feel like Mocksville is where God's calling me to be. I love walking alongside people in joys and sorrows. It's a holy moment, being with people when they're at their most vulnerable. It's a feeling of having that Christ-like relationship with them,” she says. But like any relationships, dealing with members of a congregation isn’t always easy.  

“One of the most stressful challenges is folks who look at pastors as people who come to serve them, not to serve alongside them,” she says, noting that members of her congregation have requested programs or services without offering any support or engagement themselves. “When they expect more of me as a pastor than is realistic, that's the hard part. That, and seeing people who are not open to what the spirit may be asking them to do in their lives.” 

Part of the challenge is being a woman in a leadership position traditionally held by men. “I'm the first female senior pastor here at this church, and there's no way they would’ve asked of the former pastor some of the things they’ve asked of me,” she observes. “I doubt they would expect that pastor to have done any of the things I've already done. We're different people with different gifts, but I don't think it would be the same.”  

Politically, Mocksville UMC is purple, or a mix of Republican (red) and Democrat (blue) voters. In an election year, political battles outside of the church, such as proposed library book bans, are causing tensions that spill into the building. There’s also ongoing debate over the Conference’s decision to allow same-sex marriages and the church’s option to perform them.  

“We have folks on both sides of the issues. You can feel the underlying tension, and it makes a difference in decisions that are made,” says Pastor Lori Anne. “I don't want to be a fence-sitter, but I know that to proclaim the Gospel, you have to have people that are willing to listen. If they're already closed off because they don't agree with me, then I've lost them.” 


Recommitting to Loving Kindness  

Just this past summer, the messages of Loving Kindness Meditation returned to Pastor Lori Anne in an unexpected way.  

In planning vacation Bible school, her associate pastor chose a program called “Compassion Camp” with a focus on “changing the world with loving kindness.” The curriculum included helping rising kindergarten-through-sixth graders recognize and develop compassion for the hurt of others and use loving kindness as a response. Pastor Lori Anne talked with campers about Bible stories that demonstrated loving kindness and how loving kindness crossed lines of diversity and division. The campers even learned a loving kindness song that uses the words of the meditation. 

“That brought me back to thinking about loving kindness,” says Pastor Lori Anne. “During camp we had a bully in the church. And practicing loving kindness with his face, in his name, made a difference in our relationship. It didn't keep him from being a bully, it did help me to be more calm and rational in dealing with him. So that's an experience I can truly say made a difference. 

“My hope is that it helped to build a foundational understanding that loving kindness is something that we can offer to anyone and everyone, even at their young age. I'm hoping that that foundation is helping them to learn about God's love for them and how that love is shared with other people in so many different ways.” 

 

There’s a lot of folks out there who have opinions different than me, that I have trouble looking at with loving kindness. And with the election coming up, I really need to get back to truly practicing, because I know it works.

Since that Bible school, Pastor Lori Anne has chosen to use Loving Kindness Meditation again – particularly to help address those with whom she experiences difficulty. “There’s a lot of folks out there who have opinions different than me, that I have trouble looking at with loving kindness,” she says. “And with the election coming up, I really need to get back to truly practicing, because I know it works. 


This is the second of four stories from pastors using Loving Kindness Meditation to love their neighbors. Learn more about Loving Kindness Meditation and other evidence-based tools for ministry well-being on our Resources page.