Advent reflections and Sabbath poetry from Wendell Berry.

By Elizabeth Majoros, student in our Ordination Preparation group

As we sang “People Look East, the time is near” in closing, I recalled how Sara taught me that song when she was my 28 year old’s kindergarten teacher. Being a Waldorf mom opened me up to a world that changed my life and led me into a path that has guided me to this moment. We looked into each other’s faces and into the trees and gardens of her backyard, and (in the absence of a Christian Community congregation) I felt this was the perfect place to be on the first Sunday of Advent….

By Lesley Waite, student in our Ordination Preparation group.

I was born in Dunedin, New Zealand, a city established in the late 1840s by Scottish immigrants. They brought Presbyterianism and with gold found in Central Otago from 1861, built the first university in New Zealand that opened in 1869. I grew up with and developed a strong relationship to words and books, art and nature – then, as an adult found Colin McCahon, who brought all these together in his paintings….

By Mimi Coleman, student in our Ordination Preparation group.

Poetry has been a lifelong companion, sometimes other people’s poems, sometimes my own, as a way to voice something that is blooming inside my soul: Words, The Good Word, The Logos. I search for the right word, sometimes I find it. …

By Jeana Lee, student in our Ordination Preparation group

This week, guest author and ordination preparation student, Jeana Lee, brings us five poems by Mary Oliver. Her piece is really a spoken word piece; a beautiful reflection on each poem and how it has helped, comforted and guided her soul through life – and how these poems can do the same for us.

Memories of Childhood Contemplations

By Victoria Capon, student in our Ordination Preparation group

Standing in my grandmother’s dining room, studying her original crewel embroidery artwork hanging on the wall, I remember wondering why the flowers in the bottom third of the image were so indistinct and undefined. My grandmother had beautiful flower gardens outside her front door that met the woodland just beyond gracefully – the tiny bluets growing in the delicate native grass naturally blended the cultivated areas with the wild…

By guest author, Luis Gonzales

Some paintings can have an effect similar to a soothing balm for the soul. I think this painting of Karine Léger (Montreal 1977) is a subtle and potent medicine for the moment that we are living….

We offer you a poem this week that was shared by a friend to his congregation in Nashville, Tennessee in his weekly emails.

Today we share with our readers a piece by Bill Hutchins, a friend and patron of the seminary and a long time architect and artist, that explores the artistic path he has been taking to learn to know – and love – a forest.

Right at the time of Autumn, when our consciousness and our ability to think clearly intensify here in the Northern Hemisphere, we celebrate the festival of the archangel, Micha-el.

With an essay by guest writer, Laurie Clark

Every year or so, I get the urge to send some of my Christian friends the final track of Sufjan Stevens’ 2004 album Seven Swans…

By Friedrich Rittelmeyer - 1933

By guest author, Mary Graham.

“…a poem [is] a door into a temple that allows us, when we walk in, to feel less just ourselves [alone], more part of everything.” - David Whyte

“And the tree broke at once into blossom…”