Daily practices will include worship, Eucharist, communal living, and work with homeless people, including one twenty-four hour period on the streets of Atlanta. Readings will be drawn from the works of Dorothy Day, as well as from other related materials. The practice of spiritual discernment offers significant potential for transforming congregational life. This course is generally held at a monastery, convent or retreat house. Joining with a contemplative community for a week, participants seek to understand the monastic life.
Attention is given to silence, centering prayer, lectio divina, work and rest.
In a consumerist culture that denies pain and replaces it with things, the book of Lamentations is a counter-cultural witness. This course examines the artful book of Lamentations in its anger, comfortlessness, and yearnings for God as a metaphor for spiritual struggles. The course finds in the dialogue between the two books a form of witness needed for pastoral care, global mission, and spiritual flourishing. Our learning will be grounded in a prayerful process in which each participant will engage in a fourfold discernment on a decision actually facing him or her, through personal prayer, journaling and small group sharing. As this process unfolds, we will examine its roots in the Christian tradition, focusing primarily in Scripture, Ignatius of Loyola and Jonathan Edwards.