by Drew Masterson | Feb 19, 2020 | Contemplative Life, Liturgical Seasons
For more of my life than I would like to admit, the season of Lent primarily signified the time of year when I would give up sodas as a last ditch effort to get in shape for baseball season. In fact, I would tend to forget about Lent until I spotted my Catholic...
by Bill Haley | Feb 14, 2020 | Contemplative Life
It feels a crazy time. For me at the moment, it’s all too easy to be often distracted, perhaps even a bit disoriented. There are always the challenges of work and family, and yet right now there is the particularly disappointing and even depressing state of our...
by Karla Petty | Feb 5, 2020 | Contemplative Life
2020 is now well under way. Whether you made resolutions or not, the language of starting over and afresh surrounds us immediately following Christmas and well into the first months of the new year. Come January 1, we are bombarded with messages about becoming new...
by Bill Haley | Jan 17, 2020 | Contemplative Life, Justice and Mercy
This coming Sunday is “Sanctity of Human Life Sunday”, or “Pro-Life Sunday”, kicking off a week of events, rallies, and protests (and counter-protests) for Christians and churches around the country and particularly in Washington, DC. I’m grateful for these...
by Wade Ballou | Jan 14, 2020 | Contemplative Life, Liturgical Seasons
We’re still close to the beginning of a new year and decade, and as always, beginnings are invitations. So it is with the Christian year. Advent leads to Christmas which in turn becomes Epiphany. Later in the year we enter into Lent, Easter, and Pentecost. We conclude...
by Drew Masterson | Jan 7, 2020 | Contemplative Life
At Coracle, we aim “to inspire and enable people to be the presence of God in the brokenness of the world through Spiritual Formation for Kingdom Action.” With that mission clearly stated, it is fair to wonder why we would choose to gather once a month to discuss a...
by Coracle | Jan 6, 2020 | Church Unity, Contemplative Life, For the World, Justice and Mercy, Liturgical Seasons, Pilgrimage
A Christmas Letter from Nate Bacon of InnerCHANGE, our partner ministry in Guatemala. Dear Family and Friends, Christmas as a time of giving is a beautiful thing! Sadly, our consumerist society has warped that wonderful ideal, into a bit of a buying frenzy which can...
by Coracle | Jan 3, 2020 | Contemplative Life
by Kate Harris | Dec 20, 2019 | Contemplative Life, Liturgical Seasons
“While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son.” Luke 2:6 (NIV) In an unknown town, a week’s distance from the womanly wisdom of mother, sisters, aunts, it began. Plodding heavily beside...
by Rick Mastroianni | Dec 16, 2019 | Contemplative Life, Liturgical Seasons
She insisted on seeing me face-to-face, unveiled, defying all custom for the betrothed to remain apart until the wedding feast. I watched her eyes rain when she saw doubt and pain in mine. They said it was a good match: me from David’s royal line, she connected to...
by Drew Masterson | Dec 10, 2019 | Contemplative Life, Liturgical Seasons
Advent, when we allow it, transports us back in time to a relatively small and unheralded province of the Roman Empire where a people waited. This people had enjoyed millennia of imperfect but close communion with their God; He had walked with them, spoken to them,...
by Coracle | Dec 6, 2019 | Contemplative Life, Vocation
Poem and Reflection by Julie Harrison Eastwood Coracle Fellow, Class of 2019 Eucharist Song Prepare the fields lay them open and ready to receive graft and seed to be baptized with rain with tears as we wait in the hospitable silence Sing with the fields greening in...
by Bill Haley | Oct 18, 2019 | Church Unity, Contemplative Life
For a long time my life has been formed and fed by the monastic tradition. It began by reading Henri Nouwen’s Genesee Diary in college, and it was that book that introduced me to monasteries, the Trappists, and spiritual direction. Since that time and over time God...
by Rick Mastroianni | Oct 1, 2019 | Contemplative Life
I’m among many who have benefitted from experimenting with the practices found in Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. Friends from various Christian traditions practice the Prayer of Examen, a contemplative review of the day in which we reflect on moments of...
by Drew Masterson | Sep 24, 2019 | Contemplative Life, Creation
Robert Frost once defined poetry as a “way of remembering what it would impoverish us to forget.” Poetry emerged as the first form of literary writing in human history way back in the 3rd Millennium BCE, and indeed the vast majority of ancient literature comes down to...
by Coracle | Sep 24, 2019 | Contemplative Life, Creation
A poem by Julie Harrison Eastwood Written during the first Coracle Fellowship retreat in January, on a grassy little island just big enough to sit on, beside the water. Forgiveness is Love, said the winter-swollen creek. Impatience is the brush-tinder for every bad...
by Coracle | Sep 23, 2019 | Contemplative Life
In mid-May of this year, 2019 Coracle Fellow and accomplished painter, Carolyn Marshall Wright, sustained a serious concussion. The injury, from which she is still recovering, left her largely confined to her home for the next four months, where she alternated between...
by Bill Haley | Sep 17, 2019 | Contemplative Life
I imagine that many of you, like me, did not come from a sacramental tradition. Perhaps you find yourself in one now and still have questions when it comes time on Sunday for “Communion,” “The Lord’s Supper,” “The...
by Kelly Gould | Sep 10, 2019 | Contemplative Life
As we approach the halfway point of a year of gathering together, I reflect on what I thought this year would be and what its reality has been. When I discovered the Fellows program, by accident really, I immediately heard God whisper my name, “Kelly, this is what we...
by Abigail Whitehouse | Aug 27, 2019 | Contemplative Life
My husband and I live on an Air Force base, and a few weeks ago, I went for an afternoon walk along the trail that circles the runway. I had just purchased a jogging stroller from my sister’s neighbor and wanted to give it a try, but the timing was terrible and the...
