Calling all Members, Partner Groups and Friends!
St. Patrick loved to wield a rake, saw or garden hoe and we do too! Join us on Saturday, March 17, 2012, for a joyful day of working together on the land. We plan wood cutting, gardening and trail work.
Coffee and muffins at 9:30; work begins at 10. Lunch and supper provided. After supper join us for a campfire, Irish folk tales and more, music and games.
The Retreat House is open and available for overnight stays (no charge) on both Friday and Saturday. Bring your own food for meals other than Saturday lunch and supper. Hours worked count toward membership and partner group volunteer commitments.
Sisters of Mercy foundress Catherine McAuley once said: "We have one solid source of happiness in all our journeying - we can keep our hearts fixed on God."
"It's like jumping or being thrown into a life-changing stew where you simmer for five days in the transformational mix of silence, wilderness and ritual."
This retreat is designed to help refill the reserves of people suffering from burn-out that results from compassion fatigue, overwork, or (as is often the case) a confluence of the two. We will explore gratefulness as a way of life with specific practices that restore our sense of sufficiency and wonder in the present moment - the only moment fully given to us - thus easing our anxiety about whether we have enough money, friendship, and other resources to get by. Through guided meditation, journaling, dialogue, life review, music, quiet space to breathe, and other tools, we will reconnect with what most inspires us. This is a non-judgmental retreat in which it is okay to be ungrateful, which is sometimes a necessary step in peeling off layers to a fundamental gratitude that springs from simply being alive.
How do we live with our daily experiences, the good and the bad? The proverbial wheat and tares co-mingled populate the landscape of human experiences. Indicators of flourishing beauty jostle with reminders of diverse disheartening evil, near and far away, often conveyed by a media intent on informing us daily.
The weekend will draw on elements from Belden's work with Richard Rohr's Men as Learners and Elders and with the Mankind Project (including their call to accountability, a man's openness to his feelings, the true and the false self, and the importance of dying before you die). More particularly, we will explore the spirituality of the Desert Fathers, focusing on their realization that the wound and the gift are one. The desert place of breakdown in our lives is invariably the place where we're invited to a new wholeness. As Leonard Cohen puts it, "the cracks are where the light comes in." From a Christian perspective, this is the core of the paschal mystery.