Lee Cheek

Lee Cheek, B.M., M.M., was licensed in 2011 as a Lay Preacher in her congregation Grace Episcopal of So. Berkshires (formerly St. James, Gt. Barrington, MA).  In 2014 she was a founding member of the Social Justice Commission of the Diocese of Western MA, and now serves as a co-chair of The Beloved Community Commission which supports Episcopalians in Western Massachusetts in the living out of our Baptismal Covenant in the context of becoming Beloved Community.  While co-mentoring Education for Ministry, she began reading James Alison in 2007, and since then has been an avid student of mimetic theory. This inspired Lee to confront the truth of her early socialization that allowed her to ignore the impact on black Americans of the southern Jim Crow culture of Mississippi County, Arkansas where she grew up in a law-enforcement family in the 1950s & ‘60s. An interest in how the human body records the impact of traumatic experience led to a certification as a Rosen Method Bodywork practitioner in 1995. She works in Egremont, MA, where she lives with her husband, operatic bass-baritone John Cheek. Her favorite Girard quote is from Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World:  “I always cherished the hope that life and meaning were one.”