A place to encourage and honour your longing
Are you looking for ways to go slower and deeper on your spiritual journey?
Or are you a leader seeking creative resources for your community?
Hem of the Light offers reflections, prayers, and practices to help you pause, rest, and reimagine.
Meet Catherine
Catherine Smith is a retired minister with the United Church of Canada. She is a writer, and spiritual companion whose work weaves together prayer, poetry, and practice.
Throughout her life, Catherine has walked alongside others as they rediscover wonder and find language for what the heart already knows. Along the way, she has come to understand that longing is not a weakness but a sacred urgency - God’s own longing meeting ours.
Catherine has always carried a deep love for writing, prayer, and the quiet practices that ground us. She writes to help people pause in the midst of life’s complexity, to give shape to what feels unspoken, and to offer prayers and practices that meet people where they are. Her writing is often drawn from the edges of things, those threshold moments where grief and joy mingle, and where the divine gathers its light.
Her ministry is shaped by what Walter Brueggemann calls “the task of prophetic imagination - to bring to public expression those very hopes and yearnings that have been denied so long and suppressed so deeply that we no longer know they are there.”
Rooted in the Christian story yet open to the vastness of Spirit that moves through all of life, Catherine believes that spirituality transcends boundaries and that all people, from any faith tradition or none at all, can find here a space of resonance and refreshment. Her voice has been described as “simple yet profound, poetic yet practical.”
Come as you are, come as you long to be.
Hem of the Light was born out of a desire to nurture longing for stillness, imagination, and renewal.
“The task of prophetic imagination and ministry is to bring to public expression those very hopes and yearnings that have been denied so long and suppressed so deeply that we no longer know they are there.”
~ Walter Brueggemann
These words shape much of what happens here. When numbness sets in, prophetic imagination reawakens longing, making room again for wonder, courage, and love.
Why Hem of the Light?
The name Hem of the Light was born from a moment of wonder.
Late one afternoon, Catherine saw sunlight lying against the snow, its brightness trailing like the hem of a long skirt, leaving space for both thoughtfulness and shadow. That image became a metaphor for her ministry and this space: a gathering place where light meets darkness and something sacred shimmers at the edges.
Hem of the Light is a place to honour and nourish longing - not a desire for more, but a holy longing that awakens us to God’s presence and our deepest humanity. In a world that often numbs and overwhelms, this longing calls us back to life.
It is a space of hospitality and welcome, where you can come just as you are - weary or hopeful, questioning or searching. A place to rest in both radiance and quiet, to discover that even at the edge of light there is beauty, hope, and belonging.
Here, prayers, reflections, and practices become companions for the journey - helping you give voice to what stirs within, and nurturing faith communities through both ache and celebration.
Hem of the Light is not about quick answers.
It is about presence. Hospitality. Wonder. Longing.
May you find resources here that steady and inspire you, and an invitation to reimagine your life and community in light of the Spirit’s love.
“May you come to accept your longing as divine urgency. May you know the urgency with which God longs for you.”
~ John O’Donohue