Celebrating Our Sacred Universe (*Program Only - lunch/snack sold out)

This day retreat, with lunch, is generously sponsored by the Remi De Roo Institute. The idea for it was sparked in the mind and heart of Remi’s friend and colleague, Pearl Gervais, who recognised his lifelong reverence for the land, and who was awakened by cosmologists and scholars to a living cosmology and to Earth and cosmos as sacred.

Sunsets and sunrises, the unfolding of life in all its forms, the majesty of mountains and oceans – all have taken on a mystical quality for me.

– Remi De Roo

On this spring day, we will experience glimpses into four remarkable teachers who also revered this numinous quality in earth and cosmos: Hildegard of Bingen and Teilhard de Chardin in the morning session, and Thomas Berry and Joanna Macy in the afternoon session. Through their mystical encounters and soulful communion with the whole, each offers vignettes in their writings, insights gleaned, and guidance to live knowingly and lovingly within a sacred story, a universe revealing itself through ever-evolving faces.

We will also glean a sense of Bishop Remi’s inner stirrings to the universe-as-sacred and the wonderful gift this was for him. And, as we contemplate what’s emerging for each of us, we will take time for conversation of this awakening self-understanding as integral members, within an intimately related communion of subjects, within the living body of Earth and cosmos, all imbued with the numinous.

Leah will join us in the afternoon with her gift of chant, song, and instrumental selections throughout – all within Bethlehem’s beautiful chapel with its grand piano and with nature’s awesome presence with us as ‘Westwood Lake and Pacific Rainforest.’

Time to relax, retreat, slow down, take time to connect with others, with nature, with the universe … and to celebrate everything!

The flow:

• morning and afternoon reflections to engage heart and mind
• conversations to listen to what’s emerging
• music and song to bless our hearts and engage our voices
• gentle, simple, expressive movement
• lunch followed by contemplative time in nature before the afternoon session
• a refreshment break in the afternoon