Companion’s Mission Statement: Companions on the Inner Way offers a safe communal place to explore our deep longings for the Holy. Grounded in the Christian tradition, our contemplative retreats incorporate body, mind, and soul through presentations, dialogue, spiritual practices, art, music, movement, and worship with Eucharist. We strive to create an environment that is theologically curious, radically welcoming, and liturgically vibrant.
Summer 2019 — Retreat Information
“Ancestors of our Faith: Poetry & Women’s Power in Cross-cultural Perspective”
register at www.cotiway.org
Special Guests: Drs. Rachel Harding & Wendy Farley
August 4-9, 2019
How can we draw resilience and encouragement from the lives of our female ancestors – even when their lives were traumatic or impacted by structures of violence and inequality? How do the poetic orientations of women mystics, activists and writers help us cultivate a more hopeful vision for ourselves and our world? How do women who sustained their own humanity under great duress, help us learn to sustain our own and recognize the most profound humanity in one another? Together, we will explore these questions.
In this retreat, Dr. Wendy Farley and Dr. Rachel Elizabeth Harding lead us in a series of conversations and reflections about poetry – and a vital, poetic orientation to life – in the spiritual traditions, creativity and wisdom of women.
Combining their scholarly and creative interests, Drs. Farley and Harding help us make connections between the writings of women mystics in Europe and the lived spirituality of Black women in the contemporary Afro-Atlantic diaspora. Farley’s research on women’s medieval contemplative practices, and Harding’s work on women’s mysticism and activism in Afro-Brazilian Candomblé and African American Christianity, are both informed by the professors’ shared love of poetry as a mode of human being in the world.
So, they will share work from Natasha Trethewey, Lucille Clifton, Mary Oliver and Naomi Shihab Nye; and they will tell us about Mechtilde of Magdeburg and Mãe Stella de Oxôssi; Marguerite Porete and Harriet Tubman, all of whom used their powerful intimate connection with spirit to create new possibilities for the people around them.
Format: Each day includes lecture and dialogue with Drs. Harding and Farley; small group community around spiritual reading; corporate and individual times of silence and contemplation; worship with Eucharist; and communing with God through movement, art, and nature.
Location: Zephyr Point Presbyterian Conference Center, Lake Tahoe
Visit www.zephyrpoint.org for more information.
Visit www.cotiway.org for complete event and registration information.
Contact Information:
Carolyn Foster, Director
[email protected]
510.484.3078
Mailing Address:
1329 Seventh Avenue
San Francisco CA 94122-2507
