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Sketching Prayer
Last Friday I took a quiet day from my full schedule and spent the day at Holy Cross Monastery, where there are quiet spaces, comfortable chairs, good lunches, and wonderful river views, all wrapped up in an atmosphere of prayer and contemplation. Last year I took one day at the monastery each week of Advent, and I’m hoping to do likewise this year. When I am there my phone is on airplane mode and I spend my day in silence, reading Scripture, praying, musing, and sketching. I consider all of these sketches from last week to be a form of “sketching as prayer,” whether or not I have Scripture or…
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Advent Longing, Hope, & Waiting
The Advent themes of longing, hope, and waiting have been running through my mind all week. I’m thinking about my deeper longings and how properly placed hope can help me wait confidently and with expectation for those longings to be fulfilled. We’re surrounded by upbeat Christmas music, lights, and glitter, but if we stop to get in touch with the longings that often stay hidden beneath all our activity and also the longings of much of the world, we know that all is not truly upbeat for us or for the world. What are some of my longings? I long for broken hearts to be healed, broken relationships to be…
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Advent Retreat: Waiting, Longing, & Hope
“Advent is a season of expectant waiting, tapping into the sense we have that all is not well, the longing for the world to be made right again… By helping us to hope intensely for restoration, to feel our own need to be saved, Advent prepares us for genuine Christmas joy and faith in the One who saves us from our sin, Jesus.” (Reinders, Philip. Seeking God’s Face: Praying with the Bible Through the Year. Faith Alive Christian Resources & Baker Book House. 2005) Advent RetreatDecember 2, 9:45 AM to 3:00 PMImmanuel ChurchWappingers Falls, NY You’re invited to an Advent Retreat at Immanuel Church on Saturday, December 2nd from 9:45am to 3pm. Join us for a…
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Lenten Retreat
I want to know Christ and experience the mighty power that raised him from the dead. I want to suffer with him, sharing in his death, so that one way or another I will experience the resurrection from the dead! Philippians 3: 10-11 Who wants to suffer? It’s not something we typically choose, nor should we without good reason. But Jesus did choose to suffer, because of his tremendous love for us. He chose to enter into our suffering here on earth, in order to give us life. Lent is a season during which we choose to identify with Jesus, sharing in his sufferings, not for some morbid fascination with suffering,…
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New Year’s Day of Reflection (Sketching as Prayer)
2023 is just beyond the turning of the calendar. A New Year full of hopes and potential and… unknowns. The turning of the calendar provides a context for looking back to reflect on the year we’re just closing out and looking forward as we give thought to our path for the coming year. We all have hopes and perhaps dreams for the next 12 months, but much is unknown to us and beyond our control. We can have the certainty of knowing we are in God’s loving care, and that all our days are known to him, but with health concerns, a challenging economy, and general societal turmoil it can…
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Personal Advent Retreat
I spent a wonderful 24 hours at Holy Cross Monastery this week. While I didn’t have a particularly Advent-themed plan for my retreat, I had wanted to take time for silence and reflection at the start of Advent, which is also the start of the Church Year. The monastery was in complete silence for their Advent Contemplative Days, and the whole time there was richly quiet. I went with the idea of pondering a Rule of Life for this season of my life and as a new liturgical year begins (a Rule of Life is a way of intentionally planning for the pattern and practices of one’s life, in particular…
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Sketching as Prayer Retreat
As summer passes into autumn and a new season begins, this is a good time to stop and reflect on the past few months and look ahead with intention to the coming season. The hot days of summer can be slow and restful, but sometimes they can also seem more hectic with family visits and extra activities, so it’s helpful to pause to catch our breath and reorient ourselves. Join me for a day of retreat, rest, and renewal as we open our sketchbooks or journals, eyes, and hearts to God’s presence in his creation and look to discover his fingerprints all around us. This is an opportunity to slow down…
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Spiritual Direction
Do you wish for someone to listen to you and to listen with you to God? Someone who will help you discern God’s presence and his invitation to you in the midst of your questions, struggles, or doubts? Spiritual direction is a ministry of listening to and accompanying another person as they seek to be attentive to God. It’s a time and place to explore questions, doubts, desires, dreams, and struggles in the context of listening for God’s invitation. Christian spiritual direction is biblically grounded and is Trinitarian in focus– recognizing that we are invited into loving relationship with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It can be…
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Listening and Hearing
I’m at our daughter’s home meeting our newest granddaughter, Sylvia, and helping out with her and two-year-old William this week, which means not much downtime, but lots of laughter with a toddler and sweet snuggles with a newborn. Our wonderful son-in-law, Howard, wanted to be sure I got some of the alone time I need, so he hung a hammock chair in the woodland garden he has been making in their woods, and I spent some time sketching there this afternoon. As I sketched a couple of trees, I enjoyed the sound of many birds ringing through the dense woods. Mostly what I heard were the nearly continuous, loud singing…
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Holy Week Musings in Words and Pictures
I’ve been pondering the events of the final week before Jesus was crucified, what we call Holy Week, mulling over the words from the four gospels and sketching some of the scenes. The book He Was One of Us, by Rien Poortvliet, a Dutch artist whose work I find inspiring, is a beautiful and poignant presentation in Poortvliet’s words and sketches of the humanity of Jesus throughout his life on earth. I find that Poortvliet’s sketches help me realize more deeply the truth that Jesus was fully man as well as fully God, and therefore felt emotional and physical pain as we do. And that leads me to ponder how…