In a private session for a woman minister uncertain whether to remain in the church she served, Bartholomew set aside the language of service and pressed a harder question: whether a soul open to the Vastness like hers was being forced into a structure too small for it — and taught that the way through was not to enlarge the shoe but, if it truly pinched, to take the foot out and trust herself.

Context: Recorded on April 10, 1980, in Taos, NM, this was a private session given a few days after the Easter gathering, in answer to a woman minister who felt a growing distance between herself and the reverend who led her church, and was unsure whether her own spiritual development was still served by staying. Though addressed to one person, the counsel Bartholomew gave — on outgrowing a spiritual container, on the difference between true service and mere belonging, and on the courage to stand alone — reaches well beyond her particular situation, which is why it is offered here alongside the public tapes.

The Deputy and the Governor: Bartholomew began by recalling the exceptional spiritual capacity he had recognized in the questioner before, and warned that the vast self within her was unlikely to stay content in a limited vehicle of service. If she chose to remain in the organization, he said, then as a participating member she was genuinely obligated to follow, uphold and expedite the ideas and beliefs of the man who led it, for "the job of a deputy is to serve the governor." But with all due respect to that man, Bartholomew's own observation was the reverse: it was she who ought to be the governor and he the deputy — something the reverend himself would never perceive that way. That gap, he indicated, was the real matter she had to face, and no talk of duty could paper over it.

The Shoe That Pinches: Rather than tell her what to do — "I do not tell people what to do... I do care about how you are addressing this problem" — Bartholomew handed her a single image to work with. Something was pinching, he said; there was a shoe pinching her soul, and the only question worth asking was whether the sole was too vast or the shoe too small. She was trying to fit a vast understanding into a very limited structure, and the mere fact of belonging had set boundaries around her that her larger self kept colliding with — each collision throwing up the same anxious quandary about whether a given thought or impulse ran counter to the reverend's beliefs or might somehow constrict his work. If the shoe truly pinched, his counsel was not to keep stretching it but to take the foot out.

True Service, Not Mere Belonging: He cautioned her against being misled by the vocabulary of service — whether she could "best serve in this capacity," and so forth — because the soul simply serves where it is needed, and there was little more to be said about it. To find her own answer he prescribed not more thinking but deep, silent immersion: to sit in her meditative state, place the reverend's form before her, and without a single word simply feel whether there was a true compatibility of understanding between them, or whether she had outgrown it and was now only casting about for a way to remedy the situation. If she addressed the question that deeply, he promised, she would know within her own being what to do — whether to leave, to stay, or to hold some modified place in between.

Trust Yourself: On the fear of losing her means of service, Bartholomew was reassuring: the divine power never takes up an instrument that is ready and then leaves it lying fallow. Were she to leave and sit quietly in her own home, having done the inner work to free her own boundaries, in time people would come to her of their own accord, or she would be drawn into something freer and more alive than what she had. He likened her situation to two trees grown so close together that they must be separated into different pots, so that each may have equal access to the air, the sun and the breezes that move between them. Whatever she chose, he closed, the reverend's understanding — limited and conditional — paled beside her own; what he saw holding her back was not any lack of capacity but a lack of belief in herself and in her own intuitive knowing. She stood, he said, on the very brink of the Vastness, needing only to break through the thin, filmy barrier she herself maintained with borrowed ideas and constructs. He urged her to use the very shoe that pinched as the mechanism of her freeing, and ended by sending his unending belief in her goodness and in a heart that blazed to serve, assuring her she was very close to the one God.