Halloween is more than a month away, and already the stores are cluttering our minds with Christmas merchandise. Dread of the imminent Holiday muzak is starting to make us sweat. But…what if Christmas 2018 was different? What if this year you reimagined the spiritual essence of the season?
What if……every time you saw a nativity scene, you visualized the baby as a metaphor for the mysterious, beautiful Spirit that is constantly birthing itself into the world?
…every time you heard a song with lyrics such as ‘O Come Let Us Adore Him’ you remembered to honor the Spirit that is already alive within you and within everyone you meet?
…every time you encountered any version of the Christmas story, you allowed it to serve as a reminder that although the Spirit is “forever being born in the human soul,” we must constantly make room in our awareness for it – emptying our minds of the clutter, opening to the reality of the present – because otherwise “there is no room in the inn for such a mystery?”
Spiritual Imagination & the Nativity Retreat at Loyola Spirituality Center in St Paul
Join me on December 1, 2018 at Loyola Spirituality Center for this afternoon retreat.
Using art, music, storytelling and guided visualization, we will:
reconsider the Nativity story – angels singing in the sky, refugee woman giving birth in stranger’s shed, lowly field men approaching in awe – as a metaphor for the moment when suddenly the Universe stops and loudly announces “The Spirit of love is here! Alive in the world! Incarnate!”
and
reflect on ways we can be like the wise men who followed their intuition and outsmarted evil so the Spirit could flourish.
What if the point of the Christmas story has always been that:
1) this mysterious, beautiful Spirit is already present “hidden inside of everything”
2) yet we’re still always waiting (longing!) to see it revealed in the world because we’re so clouded from the reality that Spirit is everywhere and already birthed inside of us?
Follow this link to register by November 1.
(All quotes come from Richard Rohr’s Advent Message video which can be found here.)
Artwork credit: Cosmic Birth/Sacred Moment in Time ©Mary Southard marysouthardart.org Courtesy of MinistryOfTheArts.org All rights reserved