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. 

Teaching elements – to offer instruction about what we behold, how we see, where we find ourselves, and how we come to discover a deeper sense of knowing

Evocative prompts – to assist with listening to the inner voice, the interiority of emotions, attunement to movements and intimations of the Holy Spirit through the visual modality of art

Invitational conversations – to help us dialogue and express what and how we feel, sense, and think

Silent engagement – with the art to listen, pray, encounter God

Movement – to engage the body with experience of crafting, movement through the senses, in order to release the more rigid forms and assumptions of cerebral knowledge that dominate Christian practice and prayer

These movements will flow through 5 sessions:

Session 1: Embrace Spaciousness

Session 2: Embrace Diversity

Session 3: Embrace New Creation Transformation

Session 4: Embrace Communal Prayer

Session 5: Embrace Integration

Come allow the Holy Spirit and this sacred community to embrace you at the ESDA Gathering this January 2025.