2025 ESDA Annual Gathering
Embrace:
Visual Art as Spiritual Director
Franciscan Renewal Center | Phoenix, AZ
January 24 - January 27, 2025
We Invite You to Join Us!
Topic: Embrace: Cultivating Your Practice of Attention Through the Visual Arts
“Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in an unlimited variety of ways. Yet it is never viewed with indifference: beauty demands to be noticed; it speaks to us directly like the voice of an intimate friend. If there are people who are indifferent to beauty, then it is surely because they do not perceive it.”
-Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction, 2011
For our member gathering this year, we have chosen a theme of “Embrace” to invite us to encounter ourselves and our ministry through the beauty of the arts. The attentive process of beholding beauty awakens us to the desire of God, grounds us in the gratuitous generosity of God and recovers our essential human being which is more often more fractured and fragmented than we even recognize. In this space, Spirit and soul enter into the potentiality of reconciliation, recovery, and the tender embrace of love.
We are those who, by vocation, “hold” – “attend to” – “embrace” others in their journey with God. In our 2025 Gathering, we will engage the visual arts through the modality of film to facilitate our practice of attention. The visual arts may be considered a type of spiritual director or a transformational apparatus for re-thinking, re-viewing, and re-imagining life. We will encounter questions like:
What do I embrace? What embraces me?
What am I holding? What am I beholding?
What (and who) am I being invited to embrace?
These and other questions prompt us as a spiritual direction community to attend to our own inner lives. We will provide embodied interactive experiences to help us engage our own selves in the context of prayerful communion.
Come allow the Holy Spirit and this sacred community to embrace you at the ESDA Gathering this January 2025.
Come enjoy a spacious place for communal conversation and reflection through the visual arts. We will explore how visual imagery through film can provide a bridge between the conscious and unconscious mind, revealing underlying emotions, desires, and spiritual longings that may not be immediately accessible through rational thought. Art provides a non-verbal outlet for emotions that might be difficult to express through words. This can lead to profound spiritual growth and self-awareness as deeper insights and expression of your spiritual experience emerge. The use of the visual arts can be particularly helpful in spiritual direction, where emotions, desires, and spiritual longings play a crucial role in the person’s journey. We hope you join us for this communal conversation!
Join us for an offering of visual arts and facilitated conversations in a retreat environment as we gather together to discover and craft embodied practices to attend to the movements of God’s Spirit in ourselves, others, and the world.
Retreat Facilitator: Rev. Elizabeth Khorey
Spiritual Director
Ordained Anglican Priest & Pastor
Teacher and Creative
Curator of Sacred Experiences & Environments
Eucharistic Minister and Liturgist
Elizabeth Khorey curates evocative experiences to precipitate intimacy with God, others and the self. She is a creative, Anglican priest, teacher, and spiritual director who seeks to discover ways people flourish, as God intends, within all spheres of ordinary life. Through the practice of attention, prayer, and compassionate care, she watches for where God’s Spirit is at play in order to participate with God’s restorative activity in the human soul and in the world.
Accommodations
*Fee includes accommodations, meals, and all materials.
Single Occupancy: Private room - $690
Double Occupancy: Double room shared with another spiritual director - $540 (Roommate preferences will be considered.)
Commuter: Locals and guests making alternative lodging arrangements - $395 Fee includes meals and materials only.
Waitlist: Hold your spot for the first available double-room onsite accommodation. We will contact waitlist recipients in the order the deposit is received. A full refund will be applied if no space becomes available.
50% Deposit required upon registration.
2025 Gathering Refund Policy - Full refunds offered for cancellations 60 days prior to the event. 30-59 days prior to the event, a cancellation fee of $200 will be applied. After January 1st no refunds are possible.
Registration:
2025 Gathering
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