Last weekend I was down in Oregon for the last weekend of a training program I participated in all last year on the Art of Supervision of Spiritual Directors.  It was a great program and supervision is one of my professional growing places, something I believe deeply in, not just for spiritual directors, but for all those in forms of pastoral ministry.  The word “supervision” doesn’t really do justice to the process — which is a way of deepening self-awareness and growth in response to encounters in work and ministry.  It is a place to set down our roles and

So have you missed the Abbey this week?  I have been on an amazing journey for five days with even more amazing women.  We close our time together this morning and then I will head back home to rest and renew and will return to blogging Monday.  In the meantime, visit my article on Art and Spiritual Practice at Patheos, a new site offering resources to explore the gifts of different religious traditions.

A week and a half ago I participated in a Blog Meme Interview and I asked if readers had any other questions for me.  kigen asked me:  “Is it, and if so, what makes the doing of photography a sacred or religious practice for you?” The answer is, of course, an unqualified YES! :-) Mythologist and storyteller Michael Meade says the word “moment” comes from the Latin root momentus, which means to move.  We are moved when we touch the eternal and timeless.  There is a sense of spaciousness in moments.  Art and spiritual practice are how we find this moment

Sunset Slowly the west reaches for clothes of new colours which it passes to a row of ancient trees. You look, and soon these two worlds both leave you, one part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth, leaving you, not really belonging to either, not so helplessly dark as that house that is silent, not so unswervingly given to the eternal as that thing that turns to a star each night and climbs – leaving you (it is impossible to untangle the threads) your own life, timid and standing high and growing, so that, sometimes blocked in, sometimes reaching

“Music arouses the sluggish soul to watchfulness. It has power to soften even hard hearts, and by rendering hearts moist it ushers in the Holy Spirit. Through the power of hearing, God opens to human beings all the glorious sounds of the hidden mysteries and of the choirs of angels by whom God is praised over and over again.” -Hildegard of Bingen 1098-1179 “I am not satisfied with him who despises music, as all fanatics do; for music is an endowment and a gift of God, not a gift of men . . . I place music next to theology