Sunday, May 19, 2024
The Land Between: Navigating Life’s Difficult Transitions
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Lead Teacher: Brad Ruggles has just been selected as C3’s new Lead Teacher. He is a former pastor that deconstructed and later left the faith he was raised in after 18 years in ministry. He and his wife Lisa enjoy adventuring and traveling with their two adult daughters. His interests are diverse and include backpacking, meditation, breath work, yoga, sport kiting, and photography.
Musician: Hannah Laine, vocalist and musician from Grand Rapids, is perhaps best known for her work with Future-Soul band Earth Radio. She began singing and songwriting at a very young age. Skilled in piano, vocal improvisation, beat-making, layering effects, and looping, her abilities to create a soundscape or groovy bop are limitless.
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Music: Hannah Laine
Gathering Host: Mark Smith
Music:Hannah Laine
Meditation: Leslie Newman
Moment of Silence
Reading/Teaching: Brad Ruggles
Liminal space is a unique spiritual position where human beings hate to be … It is when you have left the “tried and true” but have not yet been able to replace it with anything else. It is when you are in between your old comfort zone and any possible new answer. You will want to
run. …Anything to flee from this terrible “cloud of unknowing.”
– Richard Rohr
Into this liminal realm, between the known and the unknown, we are invited to enter if we are to learn more of the way forward in our lives as individuals, as communities, and nations. This is why, in so much Celtic storytelling and legends, lovers meet and worlds conjoin in the twilight. It is the coming together of masculine and the feminine. This is also why, in so much Eastern spiritual practice [as well as many in monastic communities], the early hours of dawn are viewed as the time of meditation, when night and day are commingling in ways that more readily allow us to move from the known to the unknown and from the nameable to the ineffable.
– John Philip Newell
I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is really only one logical conclusion. I need darkness as much as I need light.
– Barbara Brown Taylor
Music: Hannah Laine
Gathering Host: Mark Smith
Music: Hannah Laine
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