Cultivating personal, cultural and planetary stories for a new era
Dear faith community friends,
Do you ever feel discouraged as we struggle against injustice, violence, and all that is unraveling in our culture and in the Earth?
I recall Gordon Cosby in the early 1990's looking back at our mission work in the city over the preceding 20 years. Despite all our efforts, he found that in every area we were working – health care, housing, education, employment, racial reconciliation – statistics overall were worse than when we began. Now, discouragement, even despair, and fear for the future of our city, our nation, and our planet gnaw at us daily in this wintertime of quiet desperation.
At the same time, a new spring is beginning to break forth. Something is stirring underground, something deeper than appears on the evening newscast, something popping up at the edge of our awareness. We call this the new story, even as we recognize it has roots in ancient wisdom.
For several years now, some of us have been paying attention to this new story. Where is it coming from? How can we tend it, help it to grow in us and us in it, help it to grow in the world of culture and nature around us?
What we have found is that this new story is very much one of reconnection and of humility. For too long we have been caught in stories of separation – human from nature, body from mind, spirit from matter – and stories of human superiority and domination. From within us, and within the Earth around us, a deep longing is giving rise to another story, a story of connection and of taking our small but important place in God's creation.
This April at the Wellspring Conference Center at Dayspring we want to share what we've been learning about new story in a weekend program called, “Breaking Through: cultivating personal, cultural and planetary stories for a new era.” In this new season for Wellspring, begun less than a year ago, this program will be the first to come out of our long life together as a faith community in the tradition of the Church of the Saviour.
Come and join us in April at Wellspring as we immerse ourselves again in the body and spirit of this sacred part of God's Creation, as we reconnect with our bodies through the practice of gentle yoga, as we explore the inner world of dream, and as we gather to share stories, for ceremony, and for delicious vegetarian home-cooked meals. A new story is indeed breaking through!
Register soon as spaces are filling up. Go to wellspringconference.org/events/2
Jim Hall
Dayspring Earth Ministry