Just in time for your summer reading program, Rev. Gail Tapscott will share some highlights of her lifelong love affair with reading. She will look back to childhood and young adult books that shaped her journey as well pointing to a some later influences that helped her craft her long ministry.
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To close our theme on Creativity, members of the Congregation will have an opportunity to share, in small groups, their own connections between spirituality and creativity. In this Coffee house-style service, Luanne Buchannan and Elaine Gelbard will facilitate conversations that will enhance and expand our understanding of creativity as it refers to our own spiritual path. Jillian Mattern will join us for music. Please bring a drink to share, or a finger snack that requires no utensils.
The creative "flow state" is a state of complete absorption in what one is doing, which sometimes results in losing one's grasp of space and time.
Writers in a flow state can produce words at a high rate of speed-and not just "good words" but those impossible-to-find "right words" which will survive the editor. Musicians with a difficult piece of music can find themselves being carried along by the act of playing it, a functional meditative state that seems to exist beneath conscious thought. Whether the person is creating new art, or performing much-practiced movements, "flow" is that state of full immersion where both mind and body seem to be working independently of the person. William Blake (1757-1827) observed, "I myself do nothing. The Holy Spirit accomplishes all through me." Blake is one of many to notice the similarities between creativity and spiritual transport. In Christian tradition, the soul enters a child with the first drawing of breath, the "inspiration" - which is also our word for that exalted mental place where imagination, insight, and excitement meet. Kate, Walter, Reynaldo, and Quinoa work in creative fields. This Sunday they will present a service about how they see creativity and spirituality connecting, how the two might feed off each other... and perhaps how the creative and the divine are one and the same. Rev. Gail Tapscott and Alison Doyle will help us look at the merging of two denominations into one and the art of mothering and how the essence of creativity is found everywhere.
Thinking Like a Caterpillar Does Not Work for Butterflies - Rev. Jamila Tharp - Sunday, May 6, 20185/4/2018 We all have the absolute right to reach out, without holding back, toward what we care about more than anything. Whether we describe the recipient as God, or a profound sense of indestructible love, or the dream of a kinder world, it is in the act of offering our hearts, sharing our life’s stories in faith with one another that something in us transforms, we move beyond our limited thinking and we learn to spread our wings and fly.
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