The Abbesses
Co-Abbess
Rev. Mo. Alaina Alexander
Rev. Mo. Alaina Alexander has spent her life in a complex dance with the divine. God haunted from an early age, her journey inside the numinous world of poetry and mysticism has shaped every facet of how she lives.
Raised soul deep within the ecstatic tradition of fundamentalist pentecostalism she first encountered God on the warm summer nights of camp meetings and tent revivals, in the sweat of bodies pressing towards altars and the cold comfort of carpet over concrete. It was there, amidst an ocean of tears and reckless passion, that she met a God that eclipsed her religion and shattered her understanding. A God that demanded something much more difficult and revolutionary than the rigid mandates of her inheritance. A God that demanded an abundant beautiful life, one led in love and not fear. A God that would eventually draw her religion from her as salve draws a wound.
It was this relationship that redefined her relationship with herself.
It was this implacable love which broke the systems of ecclesial control that had until then strangled her life.
And it was this knowledge, unshakable and irreducible, that drove her into a new way of being.
Entwined thus with faith, Alaina began to serve. After seeking and receiving ordination with The Progressive Christian Alliance, an organization that affirmed her meandering path of faith, Alaina answered her first call and became the minister and then director of Mercy Junction: Justice and Peace Center in Chattanooga TN.
Mercy Junction gave her the support she needed to pursue the more concrete acts of liberation that love calls us too: feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, freeing the captive, and opposing evil in all its myriad forms.
Through her time with Mercy Junction and into her years co-pastoring at Harriet Tubman House in Nashville, Alaina led marches, coordinated demonstrations, and spoke out across Tennessee and in the press. She learned how to cherish the grace that exists between those targeted by the state, how to use the slow burn of holy indignation that comes with a violent arrest, and the way a sanctuary can become a sanctuary.
Resistance however is not only found in direct action but in building the world we long for. After years of fighting alongside her wife and co-pastor Jeannie Alexander, they began to dream of something new. A place to build that world and to continue the work in a different way. A house of refuge for those fleeing harm and seeking rest, a church for those whose understanding of God is expansive and inclusive, a return to a way of life that sheltered the mystics and misunderstood through centuries before. They dreamed of an Abbey.
Co-Abbess
Rev. Jeannie
Alexander
Rev. Jeannie Alexander grew up just down a winding country road from a Trappist monastery, a fact that profoundly shaped her understanding of God and faith in ways that would not become clear to her until years later. As an abbess, she engages in the Benedictine praxis of ora et labora through shepherding and growing food for the Abbey community, and the broader community. Prior to co-founding the Abbey, she lived out her pastoral vocation in very creative and dynamic ways. Ordained on Pentecost in 2007, she spent years as a street chaplain and pastor serving homeless communities in Atlanta and Nashville. Her peregrine journey led her to death row, where she was then called to serve as the head chaplain of a men’s maximum-security prison. During her time as a prison chaplain, she and insiders co-created a wide variety of educational, faith, and gardening programs. She learned along with insiders how to live out a theology of liberation, human dignity, and justice. Her experiences in prison led her to found an abolitionist organization that worked through a faith/legal/and educational framework to create alternatives to mass incarceration, with a focus on dismantling private prisons. Her pastoral calling to fight for human dignity and against evil, has led to years of collaborations as a community organizer, and numerous arrests. She is the author of the 2022 amendment to the Tennessee Constitution, which eliminated all exceptions to the abolition of slavery. She holds a law degree from Cornell University and a Masters in Religious Studies with a focus on Ethics and Mysticism, and has been a professor of philosophy, ethics, and religion. She is a shepherdess, river walker, and lover of all things wild. She writes, preaches, and teaches on the topics of a theology of holistic liberation, a consistent life ethic, spiritual rewilding, and an eschatology of beauty in apocalypse.
Abba Lot visited Abba Joseph and said to him, “Abba, to the best of my ability I do a little fasting, praying, and meditating. I maintain stillness and purge my thoughts to the best of my ability. What else should I be doing?”
Standing up, the elder stretched out his hands to heaven, and his fingers became like ten lamps of fire; and he said
to him, “If you are willing, become utterly changed into fire."
Saint Joseph of Panephō