Monday, February 8, 2016

LENT! Four online retreats, two short and two long -- Thurman, Soelle, Merton, desert journey, daily bread

Lent in the Western churches begins early this year.


Ash Wednesday is February 10.


We've got four online retreats for you to choose from this Lent. Click on the name of each retreat below for further information and registration:

FEBRUARY 10- MARCH 27 (Lent and Holy Week):

Two options:
Desert Journey and Daily Bread: New Lenten Perspectives on Food and Fasting
Peace in the Struggle: Lent with Thomas Merton

In case you're still in shock at the early beginning of Lent, or if you prefer a short and more intense experience to an all-Lent-long one:

FEBRUARY 22-MARCH 1:
Howard Thurman: Nine Days in Lent
MARCH 7-15:
Dorothee Soelle: Nine Days in Lent






All of these online retreats call us to simplicity, mindfulness, and holiness. Like the season of Lenten itself, they invite us to repentance and conversion, but also to joy.

Peace be with you. Please join us on the journey of Lent.


* * * * * * *
Lent is the Church's annual long retreat.

We go on this retreat --not necessarily to a different place, but a zone of mindfulness and practice that simplifies our life and peels away its non-essentials-- in order to reconnect, deeply, with God, with Christ, with the Spirit at the heart of God's life, our life, and the life of the world.

So we clear space, or let God help us clear space, and time, to make room for the God of comfort and surprises and to make room for what is deepest and truest in our lives.

And because we not only live in our bodies but are our bodies, our practices are not only states of mind but bodily actions and attitudes.

"Spirituality" does not mean "outside the body" or "other than the body."

Quite the contrary.

"Holiness," though it may include sacrifice or restraint, is not a forgetting of the body but really "wholeness," a way of not living a life in pieces. "Integrity" may be another way of thinking of it. In Lent we seek to be whole again, or whole in a new way.

In the wilderness, in a life that is even just a little simpler, a little slower, and little more mindful, we can discover or rediscover the integrity to which the Holy One calls us.


(c) Jane Redmont

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