The Voices We’ve Heard: New SCL Vision and Programing.
If you’ve been talking with me—or have checked in on The School’s website of late—you’ll know I’ve been on ‘walkabout’ with The School: “walking with all senses attuned to the new dream being dreamed among us.”
Though it may be a bit highfalutin to compare my process to the great mysticisms put forth in the Gospel of Thomas, logion 19 perhaps explains my interest in attending fully to the right new beginning for SCL:
The disciples said to Jesus, “Tell us how our end will be.”
Jesus said, “have you discovered, then, the beginning, that you look for the end?
For where the beginning is, there will the end be.”
I’m glad to say many voices spoke out to me in this search for the true beginning: spoke their values, concerns, spiritual longings and needs.
And a dream has come—with the comfort and beauty of a shawl, woven of your voices, a wholeness, something The School can wrap itself in, be known by.
Committees and the Board are close to having langue for this dream, and I’ll soon be sharing the new Mission and Vision Statement that’s sprung from our work.
There will be much to look forward to, to follow—new Fall and Winter Programing, including both in person and online retreats, and guest teachers.
Just now I want to share one insight that you’ll see included in the organizational language coming soon. It is a particular quality, or configuration present already in The School as I found it. And there is a certain uniqueness to it within the broader contemplative ecosystem. I think there is also a tremendous potential and potency to be had when explored consciously—as I hope we’ll do!
I’ve come to calling this SCL quality ‘a contemplative braid,’ where the three strands of group contemplative practice, personal practice, and how each of us (and the school) engages with daily life and the world is brought into wholeness and dynamic interplay.
It reminds me of the Ecclesiastes quote: “a cord of three strands is not quickly broken.”
Or as our own most gifted, most inspired Shane Steinkamp wrote during our Visioning Committee work: “contemplation becomes durable when it is communal, personal, and active in the world.”
For those of you who, like myself, have followed Cynthia Bourgault into the Fourthway Work, the Three Lines of the Work from that system also support the recognition of a unity to be had among these three strands:
Work on oneself
Work in relation to others
Work for the Work and the Ray of Creation itself.
I appreciate your patience and trust during this process, and look forward to all we’ll soon set into motion together!
Yours in the vision of this ‘contemplative braid,’ this ‘dream prayer shawl,’ this ‘School’—
David
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