To Be is a Blessing: An Online Retreat for Advent

God bless you and keep you, God smile on you and gift you.

—Numbers 6:24-26 (Translation from The Message)

Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy.

—Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

This Advent, join us for a retreat in which we cultivate a spirituality of blessing. Together we will nurture gratitude, joy, hope, and delight in the beauty of our lives in the midst of a hurting world. We won’t be denying or bypassing that woundedness but resourcing ourselves with a sense of abundance at the heart of things. We will resist a culture that strives to wear us down and leave us feeling hopeless.

Blessings can be like warm bread for the hungry, a cold drink for those who thirst.

Blessings offer hope and encouragement, steep us in gratitude, nurture our courage.

They bring us present to the grace of each moment. The word comes from the Latin, benedicere, which means to speak well of. Blessings help to remind us of the love and beauty of the Holy One in our lives and assist us to take nothing for granted. They act as maps to navigate our human experience, orienting us back to gratefulness and praise.

They sustain us in bringing reverence to all of life from the most ordinary of tasks to the great thresholds of our lives. They immerse us in the holy rhythms of the sacred which are not of our making. In a world obsessed with the scarcity of time, blessings help us to expand each moment like a flower opening her petals on a sunny day. They invite us to breathe more deeply, enlarge our vision, and give honor to our experiences. Blessings help us to touch eternity here and now.

A blessing is an acknowledgment of the gifts and graces already present. All of the mundane activities of the day became opportunities to witness grace at work. They become meditations and remembrances.

When my calendar and to do lists become misplaced holy grails in my life, speaking a blessing is a way to put things back into perspective. When my heart aches and grieves over loss, a blessing is a sanctuary space within which I am held and met by the divine.

St. Benedict wrote in the Prologue to his Rule, “Let us then at last arouse ourselves, even as Scripture incites us in the words, ‘Now is the hour for us to rise from sleep.’ Let us then, open our eyes to the divine light, and hear with our ears the divine voice as it cries out to us daily. ‘Today if you hear God’s voice, do not harden your hearts,’ and again, ‘He who has ears to hear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the Churches.’”(RB Pro:8-11).

The image of awakening calls us to shake off the slumber which creates a veil between reality and our perception. The act of blessing helps us to awaken and see more clearly. When we remember to bless, we consecrate life whether we are in the kitchen, the office, in church, or standing in a forest.

In both Jewish and Celtic traditions, a central practice is to bless the unfolding of the day, each activity, each turning point. Everything becomes worthy of blessing. The Talmud calls for 100 blessings each day and through this practice we can shape ourselves into beings who pay close attention and who remember from whom all of life flows.

Our retreat begins with a two-hour live online retreat to embark on our journey together. Christine Valters Paintner will lead us into Advent and offer some wisdom about a spirituality of blessing. She is joined by Sybil MacBeth who will lead her practice of Praying in Color, a simple and accessible creative practice using a black pen and colored markers or pencils. It invites the whole body into an active, meditative, and playful way to pray. A piece of paper becomes a prayer closet in which an ebb and flow between silence and words makes possible a connection with the Divine.

Then each day of Advent that follows until Christmas Eve there will be either an audio with Christine offering more teaching and meditation or a video from one of our wondrous Wisdom Council members leading a practice to cultivate a spirituality of blessing. (These audios and videos are about 8-12 minutes each). Once a week John Valters Paintner will be offering a scripture reflection on a biblical story of blessing.

We will be considering ways to offer blessings, receive blessings, and to be a blessing in the world.

A lovingly facilitated forum is also included in this live version of the retreat. Feel free to share what you are discovering with a community of kindred souls.

We will turn on closed captioning during the live Zoom session (which you are able to turn off in your settings if you find distracting) as well as provide a video recording with closed captioning available and a text transcript of the session.

The gathering  will be recorded for those who pre-register but are unable to attend at the scheduled time or who want to view again. You will be sent a notification when this is ready to view.

You have lifetime access to all online programs.