Season 3: Episode 15 | No tap Dancing required: A theology of Being Beloved with Kieawnie Clar

What if experiencing God has less to do with the right prayers and more to do with who you’re willing to sit with?

That’s the question at the heart of this conversation with Kieawnie Clar, a minister, spiritual director, Executive Director of her local Street Chaplaincy, and founder of the Bethany Project. Kieawnie is also a personal friend and seminary colleague, and the person who invited me back into community when I was done with church. So this one is personal.

Kieawnie grew up Catholic in a predominantly white county, formed by liturgy and repetitive prayer in ways she didn’t fully understand until years later. As a young adult she moved through evangelical spaces that prized outward expression, raised hands, loud intercession, visible demonstration of faith. And she kept trying to be that person. It didn’t fit.

What changed everything wasn’t a dramatic conversion moment. It was centering prayer.

Developed by Trappist monk Thomas Keating and practiced through the organization Contemplative Outreach, centering prayer is deceptively simple. You sit. You choose a word, Kieawnie’s was love, and when your thoughts wander, you return to it. No performance required. No right way to feel. Just presence. Just consent.

For someone who had spent years trying to experience God through the right expressions, the freedom of doing nothing was revolutionary. And out of that stillness, something shifted. A love developed in her, not manufactured, not performed, that she describes simply as a gift. A love that drew her toward people in despair. Toward the unhoused. Toward the ones the church has historically walked past.

That love is the foundation of everything Kieawnie does now.

Through the Bethany Project, she provides what case management and food cards and behavioral health services cannot: spiritual care. Attention to the internal life. A sense of purpose and belonging. She doesn’t show up with an agenda or a salvation script. She shows up and sits. She learns names. She creates safety. And over time, trust follows, and community follows trust.

In our conversation, she said something that always makes me think: “As Christians, we answer questions that have never been asked.” We assume people need what we’ve decided they need. We walk in as conquerors. We skip repair and jump straight to reconciliation because reconciliation makes us feel better. Kieawnie does none of that. She asks what people need. She stays. She lets love do what love does.

We also talk about spiritual direction, the contemplative practice of accompanying someone as they explore where God is or isn’t moving in their life. It’s not therapy. It’s not counseling. It’s companionship in the deepest sense. And Kieawnie offers it to people who have rarely been invited to say the honest things out loud: I don’t believe anymore. I’m mad at God. I’ve been outside for twenty years and nothing has shifted.

She can sit with all of it. Because she’s sat with her own.

Perhaps the most disruptive thing Kieawnie says in this episode is also the simplest: that we cannot love others well if we haven’t first let God love us. For those of us raised on the JOY acronym, Jesus first, Others second, Yourself last, that lands like a holy disruption. But she’s right. Love that skips self isn’t love. It’s performance. And people in genuine need will know the difference every time.

This episode is for the person who has all the right words and wonders why nothing is changing. It’s for the one who is exhausted by performing faith and hungry for something real. It’s for the re-imagining.

How to reach Kieawnie:

Email: info@thebethanyprojectmarin.org

The Street Chaplaincy

The Bethany Project
Bethany Project Donation Link