PLEASE NOTE THAT VERY SADLY WE HAVE HAD TO CANCEL THIS EVENT

CONTEMPLATIVE REFLECTIONS

God is Your Centre

Led by Martin Laird OSA 

Saturday 14 July

10.30 - 4.00 pm

Cost £30 Concessions £20

Please bring a packed lunch.  Coffee and tea provided

St. John of the Cross says it simply: "God is your centre."  Howard Thurman, the famous preacher and mentor to Dr Martin Luther King Jr, realized the very same truth: "There is in each of us an uncreated element." Neither is saying anything original. Each is part of the great cloud of witnesses that has seen through the illusion of separation from God.

This illusion is sustained by the cunningly egoic need to strategize, possess, and control.  Typically we transfer these same egoic strategies onto a spiritual discipline so that we might possess and control our feelings about what spiritual people like ourselves should be feeling at any given moment.  By means of self-forgetful release into the practice of contemplation, the illusion of separation from God falls away. We become so silent before God that the "before" drops away. 

Through times spent together in silent prayer, conferences, and discussion, we shall consider the subtle difficulties we meet in something so simple as stillness and consider why the sense of being separate from God is so convincing.

Martin Laird OSA is Professor of Early Christian Studies at Villanova University.  Among his published works are: Into the Silent Land; A Sunlit Absence; and the forthcoming, An Ocean of Light (all from Oxford University Press).