CHICAGO
May 7-9, 2024
Can These Dry Bones Live? Holy space to bring the dry bones of our hearts, churches, and world to the God who is making all things new. We will rest and worship together, connect with others, and learn practices of re-membering and reimagination.
LOCATION: BELLARMINE JESUIT RETREAT HOUSE GUIDES: sarah bessey, FR MICHAEL SPAROUGH, Drew jackson, Jonathan Merritt, rev lisha epperson, AARON NIEQUIST
Retreat Schedule
tuesday
1:00pm Registration
2:00pm Gathering & Invitation 5:30pm Dinner Together 6:30pm Stories of the Wilderness 8:00pm Embodied Compline
wednesday
9:00am Guided Mini-Retreat—Can These Dry Bones Live?/Practices for the Wilderness 12:30pm Lunch/Solitude 4:30pm Eucharist Service 5:30pm Dinner Together
6:30pm Practicing Delight 8:30pm Communal Campfire
thursday
9:00am Morning Prayer and Worship
10:00am Circle Conversations 12:00pm Lunch
1:00pm Sending Session
2:00pm Retreat Ends
Gathering & Invitation / Personal Retreat / Tangible Next Steps
On Tuesday, we will arrive from all over the country and begin a shared journey. We’ll meet each other, worship together, orient ourselves to the retreat, and begin to exhale and slow down. Our retreat guides will help us explore the question “Can These Bones Live?” through poetry, teaching, reflection, and embodiment. We’ll end with Night Prayer and the opportunity for a great night of sleep.
Wednesday morning, Fr Michael Sparough, SJ, and the team will lead a 3-hour, guided personal retreat. Through spiritual practices, simple liturgies, and embodied prayer, we will be led into holy space in which God can do what only God can do. This will propel us into an afternoon of solitude on the Bellarmine Retreat House grounds, and then back together for an ecumenical, practice-based Eucharist service. After dinner, we will dive into the practice of delight and celebration.
Finally, Thursday morning will focus on heading back into our actual home communities. How can we translate the practices and rhythms of the retreat into our real lives and churches? What are tools and resources that can support this good work? How can we become menders of the church cracked open? We’ll end the whole retreat with a time of prayer and sending.
Or said more simply: the three movements of the retreat are (1) Opening to the rhythms of Grace, (2) Swimming deep in the rhythms of Grace, and (3) Learning tools to invite others into the rhythms of Grace.
“God will often take you where no one dares, so that God can do what no one can.”
Our Retreat Guides
UNDER THE GROUND by Drew Jackson
Luke 24:1-12
In the beginning there is darkness. It is the womb out of which we are born. . . .In this state of trusting refuge, the light of divine revelation, which pierces but does not castigate the darkness, may finally be seen. This is a mothering darkness that nurses its offspring.
-DR. BARBARA HOLMES, RACE AND THE COSMOS
Life is always happening
underground—
the place light has forsaken.
Finite minds cannot take in
that the belly of mother Earth
is, indeed, a womb.
Entombed in the soil is the pip
of a new Eden.
Only the seed that has fallen into the pit
can burst through into the morning dew
to announce to weeping eyes
that a new day has risen—
a day in which the voices and stories of women
are believed, their word received
as good news,
and the men have no problem
following them and
learning how to believe again.
What I mean is this:
the world has been flipped
on its head.
Heaven has invaded hell,
the spell of death is broken,
and the doorway opened to a new way of being.
It all begins with seeing
that the darkness of our world is luminous,
and in the humus of life is where we become
fully human.