November 30, 2022

Dear friends,

Many of you may have noticed how often the word imagination comes up in our work. From the ecological imagination underpinning our Research Collaborative project to the theme of this year's Convocation — "Imagination and Collective Liberation for a Climate-Changed World" — and even expressed in the opening phrase of our mission statement, "to catalyze spiritual imagination," we are finding that imagination is essential in the work of spiritual transformation to which we are committed.

Part of our imaginative posture as a team means that we aim to pay particular attention to the ways in which we do our work. Though we are deeply focused on matters of faith and spiritual leadership and ecology, we can still spend our days swept up in emails and expanding to-do lists. Yet we also strive to understand ourselves and our work in the context of ecological rhythms.

This December, in the hope of deepening imagination, we are undertaking an experiment that we are calling our December Pause. Though we will still be deeply engaged in The BTS Center's work, we are stepping back from most public programming in order to gather as a staff team around some of the big questions and conversations which we long to have, and which often get postponed because of lack of time: questions around identity and purpose, and conversations focused on synthesizing and integrating our observations and learnings from the past two or three years. We look forward to a more measured pace, one in which new ideas will have space to emerge.

Though you will hear from us less often over the coming month, we look forward to sharing what new perspectives and openings we may find in this intentional time. And we hope you will join us for one of many exciting offerings in the new year, including our annual Committed to Listen gathering on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and an event with Debra Rienstra, author of Refugia Faith, coming up in February.

We hope that you will find moments of pause in this often busy season — moments for rest, respite, and reflection in whatever way the Spirit is leading you.

With best wishes for a beautiful December,

Join us for these Upcoming Programs

• Lament with Earth
• Thursday, December 1 • 7.30 - 8.30pm (Eastern) • Online

• Chaplaincy and the Environment: A Webinar from the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab
• Thursday, December 1 • 2pm (Eastern) • Online
• Co-sponsored by The BTS Center and featuring Rev. Alison Cornish, Program Consultant at The BTS Center



And Save the Date for these events in the new year

• Committed to Listen: Martin Luther King, Jr. Day 2023
• Monday, January 16, 2023 • Online
• Details coming soon

• Refugia Faith: An Evening with author Debra Rienstra
• Thursday, February 16, 2023 • 7.00 - 8.30pm (Eastern) • Online
• Details coming soon

Advent: a new beginning

The early Fathers of the Christian church read the ebbing of light and heat and vegetable life each year as a foreshadowing of the time when life as we know it will end completely. That it will end is the rock-bottom truth we sense deep in our primal bones every December, and it rightly terrifies us. To their and our abiding fear of a dark ending, the church spoke of an adventus: a coming. Faith proclaimed, When life as we know it goes, this year and at the end of all years, One comes, and comes bringing a new beginning.

Advent, to the Church Fathers, was the right naming of the season when light and life are fading. They urged the faithful to set aside four weeks to fast, give, and pray — all ways to strip down, to let the bared soul recall what it knows beneath its fear of the dark, to know what Jesus called “the one thing necessary”: that there is One who is the source of all life, One who comes to be with us and in us, even, especially, in darkness and death. One who brings a new beginning.

This is Christian tradition at its best, moving in step with creation. 

— Gayle Boss, from All Creation Waits: The Advent Mystery of New Beginnings

The BTS Center | 207.774.5212 | info@thebtscenter.org | www.thebtscenter.org

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