At the Contemplative Heart of Creativity: A year-long cohort
“I believe the creative spirit is nothing less than love made manifest.”
– June Jordan
This program is not currently active. If you are interested in this offering, please email houseprayer@csbsju.edu so we can notify you when this will be offered again.
Program Overview
Do you long to explore your sacred experiences of art-making with colleagues? Are you looking to deepen your path of transformation through your creative practice? The Episcopal House of Prayer and the Eye of the Heart Center for Creative Contemplation invite you to apply to a year-long cohort of 8-12 artists and contemplatives. This program is designed for dedicated artists of all experience levels and disciplines who consider art-making to be their spiritual practice or regularly engage in some form of contemplation, who want to grow in their capacity to heed inspiration’s movement in their art and life.
Over two retreats and six small group sessions, participants cultivate our ability to listen—to the stirrings of our hearts, to what’s coming alive in our art, to one another, and to the needs around us. Others magnify our ability to recognize, nurture, and share inspiration, that inward breath of spirit. Artistic practice, embraced with a full heart, contains all the invitations of a spiritual practice. Contemplative creatives make love manifest. We experience creative process as a means of becoming.
“I loved, loved, loved getting away to EHOP… I loved seeing people again in real time, during their real lives, in between. The relationships were the best part—that they weren’t created for a weekend, only to vanish. The way we created our final retreat was powerful; I felt as if we were tapping into something big as a group. This a group of artists from different disciplines and different contemplative backgrounds (meditation, prayer, mindfulness, etc.) who lay groundwork by learning deep listening skills, then further develop and use those skills as we share our art, and talk about our artistic processes, with each other.” – Katrina Vandenberg, author of The Alphabet Not Unlike the World, and Atlas.
Program details
Initial Retreat: Aliveness in Artist and Art
This weekend introduces participants to one another, their art, and a process for listening to the spirit’s emergence.
Six Gatherings: Artists’ Listening Circle
The most significant creation born of art-making is who the artist becomes in the process. With intention, a community can tend both the artistic creation and what’s coming alive inside the creators. In facilitated contemplative dialogue, the circle will expand our receptivity to inspiration’s movement in our lives and work through communal listening.
Final Retreat: Artful Listening Retreat
Over eight months we’ve listened for what is coming alive within each of us and in our art. This weekend we instead listen to the spirit’s movement within us as we engage another’s art, opening our hearts as an audience or as participants in art-making. We’ll receive one another’s gifts as an intimate, relational manner of listening.
About the Teacher
Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew is a wisdom teacher and writing coach dedicated to facilitating creative emergence.
As a writer she elicits the spirit’s movement within stories; as a teacher she supports transformation within writers and on the page. She received her MFA in creative nonfiction from Hamline University, her spiritual direction training from the Center for Spiritual Guidance, and her contemplative formation from the Center for Action and Contemplation’s Living School. She is the author of the spiritual memoir Swinging on the Garden Gate, now in its second edition; the chapbook, A Map to Mercy; the novel Hannah, Delivered; a collection of personal essays, On the Threshold: Home, Hardwood, and Holiness; and three books on writing: Living Revision: A Writer’s Craft as Spiritual Practice, winner of the silver Nautilus Award; Writing the Sacred Journey: The Art and Practice of Spiritual Memoir; and The Release: Finding Creativity and Freedom After the Writing is Done. You can connect with Elizabeth at www.spiritualmemoir.com and www.elizabethjarrettandrew.com.
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