No matter what happens this election year in the United States, there is going to be further polarization, hateful rhetoric, and very likely, violence.

Looking for a spiritual retreat to tide you over in quiet contemplation during the holy days leading up to Hanukkah, Winter Solstice, Christmas, Kwanzaa, New Year's Day, and Epiphany? Here are many choices — some Christian and inclusive, others multifaith — from which you can find a perfect match for your needs.

The great Christian monk Thomas Merton once compared the spiritual life to the search for a path in a field of untrodden snow: "Walk across the snow and there is your path."

With great pleasure, Spirituality & Practice invites you to become part of the inaugural group for two training programs based on the recognition that all of life is a spiritual practice. These programs are for individual seekers, spiritual leaders and companions, caregivers and service providers, and activists in change-making organizations.

Sermon with Rev. Dr. Caleb J. Lines

This presentation is a celebration of the cosmos and its processes. Why? We are living in a time not only of the meltdown of glaciers but also of ideological systems.

Each day you will receive a different email message from this enlightened hot mind. Every day the one who is eternally alive will throw a ray of his light into the depths of your life. Every day a different facet of the comprehensive revelation I have described will flash its brilliance into your soul.

An index of resources posted each day on the Spirituality & Practice homepage — practices, readings, films, quotes, and more to help you navigate these times.

I fully support regular church attendance but not to worship. I go to give thanks to my ancient ancestors who strove so hard against violence and kept humanity progressing. I've written a sample service for updating Christianity to today's reality.

Wise and successful people tell us we learn through making mistakes and trying again. Entrepreneurs, musicians, social workers, philanthropists, artists all gave it a go and, after years of trial and error and disasters, with lots of luck, they succeeded.

Black Lives Matter. It’s a vibrant, grassroots movement in the United States that grew out of the unspeakable killings of black men, women, children, genderqueer folk, by state and government sanctioned police officers. Black people—and people of colour—gathering to say, “Enough! Don’t kill us. We matter too.”

We knit our hearts and intentions together in this solemn moment to resolve individually and as family, friends, and community to honor and support these two in the vows they now make.

This special 4-week Advent Study offers an exploration of the season using rich visual art and music. Many congregations choose to mark these Sundays with the lighting of candles in the Advent wreath, balancing the dark days of winter with the promise of a coming spring.

By way of this self-paced course, one can improve one’s capacity to: Define dialogue, and apply it to one’s daily life. Use critical thinking about an issue of importance. Demonstrate increased knowledge of one’s own worldview and that of another person. Recognize the difference between a stereotype and a generalization and learn to deconstruct a stereotype to defuse prejudice and construct useful, respectful generalizations. Act with creativity and compassion.

Want a richer spiritual practice? Need some help getting more gratitude in your life? Would you trade 20 minutes to get spiritually fit?

The Christian writer G. K. Chesterton had the right idea when he said we need to get in the habit of "taking things with gratitude and not taking things for granted." Gratitude puts everything in a fresh perspective; it enables us to see the many blessings all around us. And the more ways we find to give thanks, the more things we find to be grateful for.

tation, salute it and say: "I salute all those Americans who risked their lives for my right to vote!" Ask your friends and family members, or in a ritual in worship, asking parishioners: "With which hand will you be voting on November 8?" Take that hand and hold it with yours, and say: "May love (or the love that is God) guide your hand to vote for the common good!"

Against or Through? With or For? But or And? Skits for worship

Resurrecting the Magdalene is a six-lesson, self-paced, e-course created by Lauri Ann Lumby, transpersonal educator, author, spiritual director and ordained interfaith minister. The purpose of this course is to reveal and share in the deeper and hidden truths about the Magdalene and her time with Jesus; including her roles as student, initiate, co-equal partner, wife, facilitator and witness to the resurrection, and the one sent to continue Jesus’ mission of being love in the world. Participants are empowered through the course to reclaim their own Divine Feminine and are activated to be a vessel of Divine Love in the world.

This service is appropriate for a small congregation of 20-60 people. The service is conducted in two settings:

Behind the words the actions, behind the actions the mystery. The Eucharist is a prism through which we can view the painful and joyful realities of life.

Celebrant: God, you are with us. People: You are always with us. Celebrant: May we open our hearts. People: May we know your presence. Celebrant: In thanksgiving, People: And in deepest honor.

Before we start, we all will exit outside to the labyrinth and begin our silence. Walk the labyrinth to the center and back out while meditating on quieting and listening to the Divine within.

Pastor: Following the tradition of Jesus, who welcomed children into his community, we celebrate the presence of children within this community of faith and offer them the sacrament of baptism.

Lover Spirit, intuition in the center of our souls, In your love we find relation. All connected, we are whole. Timeless mystery, quiet conscience, deepest values, voice inside. With the drum and with the cauldron, this we ask you: be our guide.

The care and nurture of a child is a task too great for one or two parents. In reality, a child is always in need of many adults to protect, teach, love, and shepherd into adulthood. Godparents represent all of us who are not the birth parents of a child but who covenant to also love, sacrifice for, be attentive to the needs of, and to care for a child.

The events of Holy Week reveal the complexity of human nature - of how loyalty and treachery, callousness and tenderness can live side by side in people's hearts.

THEME The Connecting Solitude THOUGHTS FOR REFLECTION The spiritual desert is not a foe to be conquered but an emptiness to be affirmed: for when we are full, we perceive nothing, but when we are empty we can receive everything.

How do you account for / explain the different versions of the same event? To what extent does it matter in your understanding and experience of Jesus that the details that describe such a fundamental event in his life are not an agreed Gospel record across Mark, Matthew and Luke? Why did John ignore all the details of the baptism of Jesus?

The butterfly lives in a seamless realm, a matrix, poetically in the palm of God/dess’s hand, not alien or estranged. Is it possible for us to find that kind of confidence, or trust in the nature of the Universe itself? Let’s take a moment or two to think about Wisdom, and our place in the Universe. What kind of liturgy, or worship experience, would celebrate the kind of inclusive, nurturing community the butterfly knows without thinking about it?