Articles on Contemplation in Action
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Nurturing Spiritual Directors as Contemplative Leaders
On November 11, 2022, the Shalem Board approved Vision 2025: Our Ongoing Hope. The Vision offers six guiding principles for attending wholly to one’s spiritual practice while traveling through what might seem like the barren wilderness of ordinary life. As Director of Shalem’s Nurturing the Call: Spiritual Guidance Program, I find that the fifth guiding…
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Solitude’s Gift of Grace
Too often these days, I am overwhelmed with sadness and anger and a sense of not being enough. I think many of us struggle with this. It’s easy to feel this when we live in a world where so much is broken. Suffering and injustice surround us, and we feel powerless to change it. Communication…
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Sacred Abundance
“Those of us who were part of the Vision Coalition and worked on Vision 2025: Our Ongoing Hope have been asked to write reflections on the Guiding Principles of Vision 2025. The Guiding Principles are statements that remind us of who we are and who we are becoming — a place where both the present and…
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Befriending Good Friday Darkness
While staying alone at a friend’s woodland cabin one Good Friday night, I turned off the lights and stepped outside for a walk. My eyes needed a few minutes to adjust until silhouettes of bushes, trees, and clumps of weeds emerged from the blackness. Darkness changes even the familiar, and while I knew where the…
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We Are Healing Ground: A Contemplative Circle of Collective Care
Shalem’s Vision 2025 sparked the Spirit in us to share about Healing Ground, a contemplative circle of collective care that echoes the values expressed in Vision 2025, especially the need to uplift historically silenced voices and to challenge injustice and systems of inequity. At Healing Ground we are transforming ourselves and the community in a…