How I have come to use this methodology? What might it offer to you? "The Consent of Advent," a virtual Advent retreat, will begin on Sunday December 1 and continue through Christmas Day December 25, 2019. This is an innovative Wisdom approach to the movement through Advent and our preparation for Christmas. Participation in this retreat can be done on one’s own schedule and in one’s own home. While it will provide a certain structure to the duration of Advent…there is enough variation and flexibility that it shouldn’t preclude anyone’s involvement.  I was always one who said that I was only interested in working with people and groups in person. Then, when a fairly recent move to the seacoast area of New Hampshire took me away from the circles of people with whom I connected and dearly loved, I was forced to find another medium in which to work. I very reluctantly tried my hand at virtual work. Wow, have I been amazed! I am now so appreciative of the opportunities that the Internet, and specifically, the Zoom platform offers. I feel fortunate to be living in this day and age when we have this technology. I currently meet with

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Last November, nearly a year ago now, a large number of us gathered at the Garrison Institute in Garrison, NY to participate in Cynthia Bourgeault's retreat on Centering Prayer and Nondual Consciousness, "From Narrative Self to Witnessing Self: Crossing the Threshold."  It happened to fall the same weekend that Fr. Thomas Keating's memorial service was live-streamed, and several of us gathered that Saturday afternoon to watch and join in the energy of that event.  Out of that gathering was born the seed of the idea that became the interspiritual celebration of Thomas' life this past July.  At the same time, Laura Ruth and I left the Garrison weekend feeling that Cynthia—or the weekend itself—had commissioned us to step up our game in engaging the fourth point of Northeast Wisdom's Mission Statement: ENGAGE with the other great sacred Wisdom traditions of humankind through interSpiritual dialogue, shared practice, and worship, always cognizant of our deep rootedness in the Christian tradition. How might we serve NEW in witnessing more fully to the interspiritual edge of our mission?  Over the past year, I had been working to integrate my own commitment to Sufism into my public ministry, while my inner life was also astir

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Cynthia Comes to Glastonbury Abbey for a Day of Reflection… Set on a gentle hill, a long winding driveway approaches a seasoned stone and wood monastery building with the Abbey Church of Our Lady of Glastonbury perched at the end. Beyond, the road narrows and heads down to the chicken and goat barn. The monks pray and chant the psalms in the Benedictine rhythm five times daily, in a chapel that breathes both with the tall pines surrounding it and with its simple, elegant interior. It is adorned with the stations of the cross, a two-sided crucifix, and icon of Benedict all created by artist Tomie dePalo. A feeling of peace and stillness, a sense of quiet fullness, pervades. Nightly, the monks gather around a stunning round icon of Our Lady of Glastonbury to sing before sleep. The grounds include an herb garden and woodland labyrinth, a stone fountain with Mary offering blessing, and a gazebo as well as outdoor stations of the cross and beautiful places to walk, stop and sit. Glastonbury Abbey in Hingham Massachusetts sits just two miles south and three miles west of the Massachusetts Bay of the Atlantic Ocean, just south of Boston. It was

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With extraordinary joy and gratitude I offer these words of welcome to the wonderful feast now laid before you: the complete video archive of our groundbreaking Thomas Keating interspiritual celebration, which took place at the Aspen Chapel last July 13 and 14 — and of which, I am proud to say, Northeast Wisdom was one of the principal sponsors. You may view the eight videos of the event through the link at the end of this blog post. The purpose of the gathering was to honor Thomas Keating’s remarkable interspiritual legacy and to inquire more deeply together how to move forward in its light into the challenging and uncertain times now facing our planet. In both of these goals, the gathering far exceeded our expectations. In fact, it blew us all away. Fr. Thomas Keating–Trappist monk, principal architect of Centering Prayer, and interspiritual pioneer–died on October 25, 2018, leaving behind not only a living treasury of his own final teachings about the emergence into unity consciousness from a Christian perspective, but more significantly, the fruit of that emergence: his continued robust energetic presence among us as an ongoing teacher and guide. I became aware of that presence very powerfully toward

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What follows is an article on the Desert Fathers and Mothers retreat that Cynthia Bourgeault led in Tucson Arizona in the winter of 2018. Beautifully crafted by Jo Taylor for the Northeast Wisdom website, with experiential notes from Heather Ruce's retreat journal and Quaker Chantmaster Paulette Meier's reflections, their three voices come together to share the song of those ancient Wisdom teachers and their sayings as they come alive in us today.   Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything. ~ Abba Moses   First Evening: I Enter the Desert I arrive and immediately I am activated. I am aware of the old narratives creeping in and I feel somewhat small. How am I going to do this? I begin to see so many familiar faces of love and I settle down. I belong here, these are my people. After our first meeting I reflect. My insecurities are emerging, my beasts if you will. I know these beasts, they are not unfamiliar, they are old friends. They are full of doubt. They tell me I am behind, that I still have so much work to do, that I am too much, I’m being dramatic, people

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