by Bill Haley | Jun 3, 2025 | Contemplative Life, Creation
I hope that the weather where you live has been as interesting as here in the Washington area–unpredictable, unseasonable, and gorgeous. In recent months, nature has been speaking more deeply to me of God (for example, in the breathing trees). I’m grateful to be...
by Kristy Wallace Grant | Jul 16, 2024 | Contemplative Life, Creation
In this “Space for God: Beauty” devotional, Kristy Wallace Grant (Coracle Ministry Center Coordinator) guides us into a time to wrestle with the tension between our perception of the world and God’s reality. Starting with the bleakness of...
by Drew Masterson | Jul 14, 2024 | Contemplative Life, Creation
In this “Space for God: Beauty,” Drew Masterson (UVA Center for Christian Study) guides us into a reflection on a children’s book offering a creative reimagining of St. Francis’ famous prayer, “The Canticle of the Creatures.” Both...
by Bill Haley | Apr 30, 2024 | Contemplative Life, Creation
In this “Space for God: Beauty” devotional, Rev. Bill Haley (Coracle Executive Director) guides us into an uplifting meditation on the beauty of the spring season. He weaves together music, footage of creation, and scripture to help us behold and magnify...
by Coracle | Jan 26, 2024 | Contemplative Life, Creation
In this “Space for God: BIBLE” devotional, Kathy Bruce helps us move out of the Zoom room into the cathedral of creation. She guides us to quotes and scriptures that powerfully worship God by attending closely to the beauty, majesty, and scale of...
by Coracle | Oct 19, 2023 | Contemplative Life, Creation
In this “Space for God” devotional, Ann Bodling (Coracle Spiritual Director) helps us to pray with Celtic Christians of centuries gone by. These followers of Jesus lived in a world saturated with God’s presence, which enabled them to extend a prayerful posture...
by Mary Gardner | Apr 14, 2023 | Contemplative Life, Creation
In this “Space for God: Beauty,” Rev. Mary Gardner (Coracle Spiritual Director) guides us into a meditation on the splendor of flowers—their vibrancy, their diversity, and their fragrance all pointing to the gratuitous love of God in creation. We hope you...
by Coracle | Feb 27, 2023 | Contemplative Life, Creation
Carly Smith, a participant in our 2022 Coracle Fellowship cohort, shares a poetic response to her time in the program and what she learns about the truth of God from watching nature around her. Chrysalis WhispersI gaze on you young one. You fill your life with green....
by Jeff Lindeman | Jan 18, 2023 | Contemplative Life, Creation
In this “Space for God: Beauty,” Jeff Lindeman guides us on a tour of creation, helping us to encounter its colorful diversity, complex symmetries, and staggering beauty as a gallery of God’s artwork. By spending time reflecting on the art, Jeff...
by Danny Nasry | Aug 14, 2022 | Contemplative Life, Creation
In this “Space for God” reflection, Danny Nasry (Coracle Community Minister) brings us into contact with the glorious over-abundance of God’s creation. Through water and daisies and even romanesco, Danny helps us slow down and let ourselves be awed...
by Ken Wettig | Jun 3, 2022 | Creation, For the World
What is a more important Kingdom Action priority, gun violence prevention, creation care, or racial justice? What often gets our attention is whatever is trending on the news cycle. I am no exception. Two trips to Canada within the last year highlight this tension....
by Laura Mastroianni | Apr 13, 2022 | Creation
At the end of February, I attended the Coracle Fellowship in Baltimore retreat on the Eucharist. During our time of Silence and Solitude, I felt compelled to go outside for a walk. I really tried to ignore that feeling. I’m not familiar with the area, and I didn’t...
by Danny Nasry | Jul 6, 2021 | Contemplative Life, Creation
I hope your summer thus far has been a gift, and full of the promise of more gifts just around the corner. Perhaps you have a little getaway coming up, or you just returned from a 4th of July celebration. Or maybe you’re enjoying simpler gifts, like the powerful...
by Danny Nasry | Apr 27, 2021 | Creation
“No matter how urban our life, our bodies live by farming; we come from the earth and return to it, and so we live in agriculture as we live in flesh.” – Wendell Berry (The Art of the Commonplace) One of the most important questions a professor asked me in...
by Karla Petty | Apr 21, 2021 | Contemplative Life, Creation
86. From Aurora LeighBy Elizabeth Barrett Browning TRUTH, so far, in my book;—the truth which drawsThrough all things upwards,—that a twofold worldMust go to a perfect cosmos. Natural thingsAnd spiritual,—who separates those twoIn art, in morals, or the social...
by Bill Haley | Oct 22, 2020 | Contemplative Life, Creation
I sojourned to south-central Montana in mid-September. The break came at the end of an unexpectedly intense seven weeks, and before a seven-week stretch that I knew would be intense, and unexpectedly became much more so. I needed this time to rest, to immerse myself...
by Tara Haley | May 27, 2020 | Creation, Justice and Mercy
“The name of our proper connection to the earth is ‘good work,’ for good work involves much giving of honor. It honors the source of its materials; it honors the place where it is done; it honors the art by which it is done; it honors the thing that...
by Bill Haley | May 21, 2020 | Church Unity, Contemplative Life, Creation
This was originally delivered as a sermon at Washington Community Fellowship in the fall of 2010. In the season of autumn, we are often treated with stunning, breath-taking days of beauty. I cannot help but be reminded of the poem “God’s...
by Coracle | Apr 15, 2020 | Contemplative Life, Creation
by Ann Bodling, Coracle Spiritual Director In this strange, disorienting, sometimes-hopeful sometimes-fearful, sometimes-sad time, I can forget. The gifts are here, as always. The Presence of God is here, as always. To recognize them I need to notice, as always. And...
by Sarah Kohrs | Mar 23, 2020 | Creation, Justice and Mercy
I love puddles. On my way to volunteer with the local food pantry recently, every road into town had a puddle here or there. Plump robins and similar spring-happy birds were ruffling in the water, droplets careening off their feathers into splashes that mimicked the...
