By Jeana Lee, student in our Ordination Preparation group

This week, guest author and ordination preparation student, Jeana Lee, brings us five poems by Mary Oliver. Her piece is really a spoken word piece; a beautiful reflection on each poem and how it has helped, comforted and guided her soul through life – and how these poems can do the same for us.

Memories of Childhood Contemplations

By Victoria Capon, student in our Ordination Preparation group

Standing in my grandmother’s dining room, studying her original crewel embroidery artwork hanging on the wall, I remember wondering why the flowers in the bottom third of the image were so indistinct and undefined. My grandmother had beautiful flower gardens outside her front door that met the woodland just beyond gracefully – the tiny bluets growing in the delicate native grass naturally blended the cultivated areas with the wild…

By guest author, Luis Gonzales

Some paintings can have an effect similar to a soothing balm for the soul. I think this painting of Karine Léger (Montreal 1977) is a subtle and potent medicine for the moment that we are living….

We offer you a poem this week that was shared by a friend to his congregation in Nashville, Tennessee in his weekly emails.

Today we share with our readers a piece by Bill Hutchins, a friend and patron of the seminary and a long time architect and artist, that explores the artistic path he has been taking to learn to know – and love – a forest.

Right at the time of Autumn, when our consciousness and our ability to think clearly intensify here in the Northern Hemisphere, we celebrate the festival of the archangel, Micha-el.

With an essay by guest writer, Laurie Clark

Every year or so, I get the urge to send some of my Christian friends the final track of Sufjan Stevens’ 2004 album Seven Swans…

By Friedrich Rittelmeyer - 1933

By guest author, Mary Graham.

“…a poem [is] a door into a temple that allows us, when we walk in, to feel less just ourselves [alone], more part of everything.” - David Whyte

“And the tree broke at once into blossom…”