Celebrating Helen Keller's Spiritual Birthday.

Making time to mark occasions of transformation. What might your Spiritual Birthday be?

I and others (and maybe you!) are getting ready to share in a celebration of Helen Keller’s Spiritual Birthday the first week of March. We are going to throw a party, a celebration, a virtual event series to consider Helen Keller’s remarkable life, her deep spiritual vision, and her message of love for the world. I’m stoked, I’m excited, and I’m curious….if each of us were to throw a Spiritual Birthday party for ourselves…..when would they be and what occasions might they celebrate?

Helen Keller always celebrated March 3rd as her Spiritual Birthday as it was the day that she met Annie Sullivan, the woman who would become her teacher and life long friend and companion. Annie would bring language to Helen and the ability to communicate and connect with the larger world. In this way their meeting was a Spiritual Birthday, an occasion that would transform Helen’s entire life and personhood.

The most important day I remember in all my life is the one on which my teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, came to me. I am filled with wonder when I consider the immeasurable contrasts between the two lives which it connects. It was the third of March, 1887, three months before I was seven years old.

Helen Keller, The Story of My Life 1902

While we are all used to celebrating the day we are physically born it is powerful to consider the occasions, people, experiences along the course of our lives that cause us to be reborn or remade, that make possible the expansion of who we are and what is possible for us.

For myself I think my Spiritual Birthday could mark the occasion of the first Swedenborgian Church Youth League retreat that I attended over Memorial Day Weekend in 1991. I was 13 years old and bounded off to be with a group of teenagers none of whom I had ever met before. Somehow over the course of that weekend, in the company of this strange band of diverse humans, under the care and leadership of loving adults, something shifted in me.

After returning from the retreat I went back to school somehow different. I decided to try and bring some of the loving energy I had experienced at the retreat back to my public school classroom. I began to tell my friends and fellow classmates that I ‘loved them,’ and managed to create for a time a culture of hugging each other before going home for the day. I remember my parents telling me that my teacher had called to make sure everything was okay at home, so taken aback by this shift in my behavior.

Somehow that retreat, those connections, that new space where I was welcomed and loved, as I was, opened up something in me. It made me see the possibility of loving myself and others more fully and set the course of my entire life. My early efforts to shift the energy of my 7th grade classroom to be more loving aren’t so different from all that I am seeking to bring now.

What occasions, people, places, moments, experiences have helped shape who you are in the world? And how might you wish to celebrate them?

I hope you’ll join us in March to celebrate Helen Keller’ Spiritual Birthday and invite others to join! I also hope you’ll consider what Spiritual Birthdays you might wish to celebrate in your own life or better yet which ones you’ve helped make possible for others. We are all in this together friends, here to grow and change and evolve. And there is much to celebrate.