Past Events

Dear Children of the Earth
At Rolling Ridge Study Retreat Community

May 6-7, 2011

Annual retreat for children ages 6-12 and their parents,
grandparents or mentors

In our grasshopper and salamander days, who among us didn't ask why the grasshopper could jump so far -- or why the salamander had black dots on its orange body.  We lived by wonder, for by wondering we were able to multiply a growing consciousness of being alive.

-- Richard Lewis, Living by Wonder

As young and middle-aged people of faith we embarked on an inner and outer journey to live intentionally, listening to the Spirit within and connecting with the world around us.  We sought to do good work, to live honestly and passionately with partners and community, to raise children with love and understanding.  Now we find ourselves in the wilderness time between adulthood and eldership: our children are adults, the ground of our work is shifting, and we are simultaneously overjoyed and overwhelmed by new roles within the family.

We invite you to a conversation about this wilderness time amid an actual wilderness space. In a safe and sacred place apart, surrounded by the winter woodlands of Rolling Ridge which are themselves a metaphor of beauty in the slowing phase of life’s cycle, we are enabled to explore the challenges and the possibilities opening before us.  Helped by resources such as Creative Aging by Marjory Bankson and Looking Back and Giving Forward: Finding Common Ground for Positive Aging, a workbook published by Lumunos, we can ask wide-ranging questions such as how we can balance the allure of new options with the necessity of letting go; how can we come to terms with physical limits; can we envision alternatives to the way aging is typically seen by contemporary society; can we grow old together?

Our conversation will be facilitated by a member of the Rolling Ridge Study Retreat Community and will include time for individual reflection, silence, and rest as well as sharing, discussion and gathered prayer. Lindsay McLaughlin is an educator, writer and newly minted grandmother; a dancer all her life, she is motivated by a desire to find the gift of maturity in a field built on the fire of youth and to gather friends to harvest the wisdom of years gone by and uncover hope for the years to come.

We will be offering this retreat from dinner on the evening of Friday, February 4, 2011 through lunch on Sunday, February 6.  The cost is $125 and covers all sessions, meals and lodging (mostly dorm-style).  Space is limited.  To register send $50 deposit made out to RRSR to Rolling Ridge Study Retreat, 120 Jubilee Lane, Harpers Ferry, WV 25425. Include your name and contact information.  Feel free to call 304-724-1069 or email community@rollingridge.net.

The two great hungers in our world today are the hunger for spirituality and the hunger for social justice. The connection between the two is the one the world, and especially a new generation, is waiting for. We need schools of contemplation and action to help us connect our own inner faith journey to how we live our daily lives in a broken world.

These new wisdom schools have two purposes -- the first is to study and learn the rich contemplative wisdom within our own Christian tradition, knowing that this tradition is open-hearted and eager to learn from other faith traditions as well.

The wider tradition is unanimous, however, in its assertion that the deeper Christianity cannot be known by the mind alone; it requires a transformation of the entire being. That is the second, and in fact, primary purpose of the school. From time immemorial there have been wisdom schools to raise human consciousness and transform society, and to work with the core practices that sustain the transformation of consciousness: meditation, contemplative prayer, lectio divina, sacred song, the language of sacred gesture, simple work in community, and the daily practices of mindfulness, inner observation and surrender.

The schools are conducted in the 1500 year old Benedictine spirit of a balanced daily rhythm of prayer, work, silence and study. Wisdom schools practice the core components of this path: contemplative prayer, lectio divina, chanting the psalms, simple work in community, shared meals, silence, inner practice, and study.

We are honored to have The Rev. Dr. Cynthia Bourgeault as the first teacher for the Wisdom School at Rolling Ridge. I have been following Cynthia Bourgeault's work for a number of years, and have found her to be my best teacher for centering prayer and inner practice. I stumbled upon her work while exploring the connection between the Christian contemplative tradition and the Fourth Way inner work inspired by Gurdjieff.

Cynthia Bourgeault is the principal Teacher and Advisor to the Contemplative Society, an ecumenical, not-for-profit association that encourages a deepening of contemplative prayer based in the Christian tradition, and an adjunct faculty member at the Vancouver School of Theology. She is a retreat and conference leader, teacher of prayer, writer on the spiritual life, Episcopal priest, and part-time hermit, spending half of each year in solitude on Eagle Island in Maine.

Cynthia is passionately committed to the recovery of the Christian contemplative path and has worked closely with Fr. Thomas Keating and others as a teacher of centering prayer, as well as in Sufism and the Christian inner traditions. She is the author of Chanting the Psalms, Mystical Hope, The Wisdom Way of Knowing, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, Love is Stronger Than Death, and The Wisdom Jesus, and many articles and audio tapes on the contemplative life. She is a past Fellow of the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural research at St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, MN, and an oblate of New Camaldoli Monastery in Big Sur, California.

In 2001 she was invited to become a charter participant in the "Deepening the American Dream Project," sponsored by the Fetzer Institute, joining a select group of other American spiritual writers including Kathleen Norris, Jacob Needleman, Elaine Pagels, Huston Smith, and Parker Palmer. The Wisdom Way of Knowing: Reclaiming an Ancient Tradition to Awaken the Heart is a revision and expansion of the essay originally written for this project. The Wisdom School at Rolling Ridge will study this text during our week together. It is required reading before coming to the school.

To register for the event, send a $100 deposit to Rolling Ridge. The cost of the school is $465, and includes lodging and meals at the Claymont Society near the Rolling Ridge Community in Harpers Ferry. The school is limited to 40 participants. Cynthia's retreats have a reputation for filling up quickly. If you think you may want to come, sign up soon. The deposit is refundable up to 30 days before the event.

NOTE: This school is currently FILLED. If you would like to be put on the waiting list or be notified of future Wisdom Schools by Cynthia Bourgeault in our area, e-mail Bob Sabath at bsabath@rollingridge.net or phone him at 202-531-7572.

Walter Brueggemann is acclaimed as currently being the "world's leading interpreter of the Old Testament". He enables us to access the memories of Judeo-Christian ancestors, through their poetry and stories concerning enduring themes in human faith journey. Those themes, in broad stroke, continue to be recognized in our contemporary western culture. Thus, we discover that drawing on memories of the ancestors, joined with personal memories and contemporary experiences, we in effect are provided an itinerary for an imaginative life journey.

So, in this retreat we turn to the medium in which the ancestors engaged their world -- poetry and story. The creativity and hope to be discovered through such speech is articulated by Walter in an earlier book -- Finally Comes the Poet.

"The entertainment of a 'fiction' drives us beyond known truth. From the great narratives of Israel to the prophetic poems to the testimony of early Christians, the singers and storytellers spoke dangerously about dangerous matters, about new possibilities. The settled, entrenched, and certain heard only fiction, but it was a 'fiction' more powerful than facts".

"After the engineers, inventors, scientists, 'finally comes the poet' -- 'shattering evocative speech that breaks fixed conclusions and presses us always toward new, dangerous, imaginative possibilities".

Preparation for this retreat is to read Brueggemann's current book -- Journey to the Common Good, 2010, 122 pages through which we each will discover rich insights to be shared with one another in retreat. HOW we find our way to the common good in our contemporary communities of faith or other ventures of 'doing good' is so central to whether those life ventures will be experienced as blessing.

The structure of this retreat is a simple one as follows:-

• October 22, 7:00pm-- dinner and sharing current life journey notes.
• Following dinner, around the fire we meditate on samples of poetry read aloud from ancestors in their quest for the common good.
• We close with music and bedtime prayers.
• October 23, 8:00am-- breakfast.
• Following breakfast at 9:00 for sharing our respective learnings from reading of Journey to the Common Good.
• At 10:30 -- time of reflection and journaling while walking on Rolling Ridge trails in the Blue Ridge.
• Lunch at 12:30.
• Second time of sharing insights at 1:30.
• Dinner of celebration and thanksgiving at 5:00pm
• Depart for home at 6:00pm.

Our study source, Journey to the Common Good, is an easy accessible read, 122 pages, and packed with rich insight from an outstanding scholar. Obtain it from your bookstore or favorite on-line bookseller.

To register for retreat call us at 304-725-2312 or e-mail Vvatrr@juno.com. Bring your own wash towels and comfortable walking shoes. Retreat fee is $30 covering meals, and lodging to be paid upon arrival. Those who prefer to do so may arrive for retreat by 9:00am on October 23, for which retreat fee is $20.

If you need directions to Deer Spring House at Rolling Ridge Study Retreat Community can consult our website: www Rolling Ridge.net or call us at 304-725-2312.