Rev. Dr. Marisa Egerstrom
Rev. Dr. Marisa Egerstrom is the pastor of Florence Congregational Church. She is also a trained spiritual director through Still Harbor, based in Boston, and created the Protest Chaplains during the Occupy movement, sparking the now-widespread “movement chaplaincy” approach to interfaith spiritual care in protest.
After earning her seminary degree at Harvard Divinity School, she was ordained as an Episcopal priest in 2017 and completed her PhD in American Studies in 2021. Part of her academic work on the history of American torture practices examined religious abuses in Guantanamo Bay, underscoring for her the importance of deeply rooted spiritual practice in confronting injustice and oppression. Her passion is to make connecting with the sacred possible and practical for people who don’t identify as religious.
"Tend the fire of your own heart," said the inaudible but clear voice, somewhere in Marisa's chest, as she stirred coals to keep warm on the last night of a four day wilderness fast. Tender Fire became her trail name when she hiked the Long Trail, and a reminder of a larger, healthier way of being that included parts of herself she had lost touch with along the way.
One of those parts was art. Marisa has been making art since she was a child. Some of her materials stash dates from teenage projects, and she has carried those now-vintage supplies with her from Minnesota to California to Massachusetts. As her spiritual life has developed and ripened, she realized my art was the expression of a naturally arising spirituality, perhaps what some of her Buddhist teachers call "natural compassion" or "natural goodness." It is a way to pray without the interference of piety, which in modern Western peoples is loaded with a soul-numbing self-consciousness, if not outright moral narcissism. When she is working a piece of wood to highlight the awesome (literally awe-inducing) patterns and fractals of the grain, the praise of What Is burns in her chest, her hands find right action in the long hours of sanding and shaping, and she forgets to think about stupid things like whether she is a Good Person or how special she is or how terrible the media spectacle of the day is.
