Meet Rev. Nicole Lamarche

We recently connected with Rev. Nicole Lamarche and have shared our conversation below.

Rev. Nicole, thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?

I used to think of resilience as something that a person just has, like some of us are wired to be tougher or better able to endure hard things and others of us aren’t. But now I think of resilience more in the sense of our willingness to keep going, to keep trying, to keep showing up, to keep finding joy and hope, even when we haven’t fully recovered from life’s lows or we don’t feel strong. The people in my life who are the happiest and best able to adapt when hard things happen are the ones who refused to give up, who keep showing up for life. There’s a spiritual stubbornness needed. I see this in my mom and her mom and maybe other women in my lineage. And I think resilience is something we can tend to with practices that allow us to hold a perspective beyond this particular moment. Perhaps resilience requires some level of depth with one’s inner life.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

It is both a challenging and an exciting time to be a Christian clergyperson. I have been an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ for 19 years and I have seen a lot of changes. Increasing numbers of Americans want little to do with institutionalized religion. Among my friends and peers (ones that aren’t clergy), few are connected to spiritual communities, and few have sought to raise their children with any religion at all. The Christian Church especially, has become associated with child abuse and hypocrisy, judgment, and exclusion of LGBTQ people, a white male version of God and more. Those are all good reasons to disassociate. I see this great departure as part of the end of the patriarchal paradigm, in the world more broadly and in the Church.. The paradigm that relies on separation, domination, and exploitation has run its course. Religious communities built on shame, fear and hate should close. In our hearts we know that it’s time for another way of living and loving on this planet together wherever we are. In a spiritual sense, I view this as a time to heal the world from the wounds of the patriarchal paradigm by bringing the feminine and masculine back together in every parts of our lives. If the relationship, religion, organization, family or any system requires control to exist, it is coming to an end. It’s time for relationality and reciprocity. I am grateful to be alive for this awakening, this time of healing, reintegrating and more. Some are calling this the Sophia Century. Lynn Twist defines this “as a time when women will step into their rightful role in co-equal partnership with men to bring the world into a new era of balance, peace and prosperity…When the power of love replaces the love of power, the world will become a different place.” I am grateful to be alive for the Sophia Century!

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

My advice to those who are early in life’s journey is to believe in yourself, to trust your inner sense of who you are and what you are here to do. It is far more comfortable in the short term to go with the flow of what is around us, to do what others put upon us or think about us or to slip into what is easiest, but if we aren’t careful, this can mean we end up becoming something we really aren’t or we find that we are living someone else’s life. I believe with my whole heart that we are each human expressions of the Life Force/God/the Divine and that our combination of cells won’t happen again like this, which means what is needed is just each of us, bringing ourselves fully to each day. This gets to the second thing that I think is needed especially early in the journey and that is bravery. There is a certain kind of boldness and bravery needed to live the kind of life that you want. It takes a willingness to keep going, to keep showing up, to keep being and doing authentically and in love, knowing not everyone will see you fully, even some family and dear friends. Keep going. I have had to let myself let go of some of the relationships in my life that I realized later were basically a transaction, love and support were only offered if I did what they wanted. That’s not love. It’s okay to love yourself enough to live your life fully. Others who are living like this will find you! The third quality I would highlight is a willingness to fail and fall and get up. Winston Churchill once said that “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm” and I think there really is something to that. I have learned so much from the things that didn’t work or didn’t turn out as planned and if I had stopped then, I wouldn’t have been able to integrate what was good, what did work and what might be needed to try again. Stumbling with enthusiasm is still showing up and I think often it really is the way to get where we need to go.
In high school during my awkward years, the time with braces and weird hair, I tried to earn some scholarship money through a local program made famous by Diane Sawyer, called America’s Junior Miss. I didn’t really look the part and I didn’t have a fancy dress. I wore a borrowed black and white bride’s maid dress from a friend of my mom. She altered it slightly for me to use during the evening gown portion. But I sang my heart out. The most popular girl in school was doing it too. She didn’t have a talent so I told her a monologue she could do. But she had the most beautiful perfect pink dress with a bow in the front. She won and I was First Runner up. If I had accepted that as the final thing, I would have missed so much. Later in college, when I was once again looking for scholarships, I found the Miss America Organization. It was similar to what I had experienced a few years earlier so I figured I would give it a try and during the winter of my junior year in college, I walked across the stage in an unflattering navy-blue one-piece swimsuit in bare feet, for my first pageant, Miss Tucson. I didn’t place, but I fell in love with the people I met. I competed quite a few times before I won and that year at Miss Arizona, I didn’t make the finals. The following year I tried again and that summer I was First Runner Up. I graduated and moved to California for seminary and with the encouragement of some new friends and with lots of hard work and stumbling, I tried again. That summer I was First Runner Up. There’s a lot to say about what went into all of this, but a big part of it is believing in yourself regardless of what is happening around you. And being brave and being willing to fail and get up. It wasn’t until my final year in the summer of 2003 when I stood on the stage in Fresno and wondered if once again, I would be called the First Runner Up, but not that time. That night the little white card had my name: Miss California 2003, Nicole Lamarche. I failed myself all the way to Atlantic City!

All the wisdom you’ve shared today is sincerely appreciated. Before we go, can you tell us about the main challenge you are currently facing?

Right now, most human beings on planet Earth are in one sense more connected than we have ever been at any time in our history, sharing tons of information about our lives, details about who and what we love, while at the same time, at least in this country, we are lonelier than we have ever been, so much so that last year the Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy released a new Surgeon General Advisory calling attention to the public health crisis of loneliness, isolation, and lack of connection in our country. This disconnection I believe is in part driven by the fact that America’s particularly brutal form of unbridled capitalism grinds people down. There is little left to give to ourselves or to showing up for others outside of our primary responsibilities. In this country, for most of us, living comfortably requires two incomes and there is no common commitment to ensure that each of us have healthcare or parental leave or support getting an education for the next generation. And many of us feel an underlying sadness called “eco-grief” as we live with the knowledge that our earth’s systems are breaking down because humans have prioritized profit and power over flourishing in most every part of our lives. If you are awake, we are in a hard place. Our disconnection makes it hard to feel our worth and our power. This is an obstacle I feel individually and collectively.
Most days I get up and am grateful to be alive. I give thanks for my heartbeat, for the gift of my breath, for the chance to be here with others on my journey. I try to ensure there is space for my contemplative practice each day and it’s where I remember all of this. It’s a miracle I am here. Life is beautiful. I am grateful. Beginning the day from this place allows me to be more expansive in my thinking and living and it also allows me to evade cynicism. One of my favorite parts of my vocation is having a regular opportunity to inspire all of us to see our connection to others, to the trees and the birds and to other human beings. I believe that we are supported by the Divine in the good things that we do in our lives; we are accompanied by a Greater Love in ways we don’t even understand. I have seen how knowing our worth and feeling our connectedness can help each of us overcome despair and find our way to connect our gifts to making the world kinder and more just, more sustainable and rooted. And I know I am biased, but I believe a healthy good old fashioned faith community that is devoted to being inclusive and creating a space of belonging and sharing life together and showing up for each other and the world we want can change everything. It really can be a platform for us to overcome challenges, the little ones and the big ones.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://nicolelamarche.com
• Instagram: @Nicole.lamarche
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nicole.lamarche
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/revlamarche/
• Twitter: NA after it was taken over and ruined

Image Credits

Phillip Bradbury took some of the church shots. I paid for the professional shot, but I could look up the photographer. The reset are just pics from our family, etc.