Newsletter

New Year 2025 blessings, contemplative companions. A February 2025 online retreat with Justin Coutts is offered by TCS in this newsletter. “The Gate of Heaven is Everywhere” ~ Thomas Merton by Barbara Cecil (Dedicated to the young people who are inheriting the world we have created.) I was touched by how Heather Ruce opened the daily Pause of meditation and Centering Prayer earlier this month. She spoke of a great wave surrounding us, permeating us, which is itself the flow of God. The name...

Advent, with dragons by Paula Pryce "A most cruel and horrible dragon issued forth . . . of various colours, with a beard and hair that seemed of gold, and teeth that seemed of iron, eyes sharp and brilliant as kindled flame." – The Legend of St. Margaret of Antioch Dragons curling, twisting, encroaching. Many have said that this Advent feels different. The soft hopefulness diminished, the growing light muted. Instead a cavern of tangled serpents seems to be at our feet. A roiling world...

Holdfast. As a kid, I used to love finding seaweed on the beach after a big storm. We would wield short strands of kelp like clubs in mock fights, twirl the long ones above our heads so they’d whistle in the wind, and pop the little air-and-slime-filled bladders. Once in a while we’d even find a root-like holdfast. Holdfasts. Such a lovely name; such an unglamorous appearance. By the time a holdfast shows up on the beach, it is dead: brittle and broken, a woody knot no longer holding fast to...

Autumn greetings, contemplatives. Here I am, as I am. We came, physically, from across western Canada. We came, virtually, from Texas and North Carolina and Quebec and North Carolina and Ontario and Washington and Illinois and Maryland and New York and Ohio and Alberta. We showed up with rescue dogs and gardening tools; we showed up from kitchens and studies and the top of a windy Alberta park, wearing a warm toque. In this world, as it is. We came with grief over deaths and the environmental...