You are invited to join us for a special retreat in New Harmony, Indiana in which the wisdom teachings of John Philip Newell and the spiritual practices of Cami Twilling call us to be aware of the sacredness of Earth and every human being as key to the way of transformation and healing in our lives and world. The retreat focuses on the main themes of John Philip’s award-winning book Sacred Earth Sacred Soul: Celtic Wisdom for Reawakening to What Our Souls Know and Healing the World.
John Philip Newell is a ‘wandering teacher’ from Scotland in the ancient Celtic Christian tradition, drawing on both the poetic and the intellectual, and addressing the head as well as the heart. Cami Twilling is the director of Earth & Soul, a Celtic initiative of study, spiritual practice, and compassionate action based in Colorado. Their much-loved combination of teaching and spiritual practice offers great hope for healing and transformation in our lives, both individually and together.
A note from John Philip about this special retreat:
I’m so delighted that we’ll be offering an Earth & Soul retreat in New Harmony this year. There it sits in Indiana at the heart of the nation with one of America’s most sacred but little-known sites, the Roofless Church. Yes, truly, a church without a roof, intentionally designed to remind us that encounters with the divine are not confined to the four walls of religion. We meet God in what the Celts have always called ‘the Cathedral of Earth, Sea, and Sky’. This is key to the way forward for humanity and religion today. If we do not come back into faithful relationship with the sacredness of nature and the sacredness of every human being, the very future of humanity is in doubt. And so in New Harmony our retreat will focus on the themes of Sacred Earth Sacred Soul.
The other reason I’m so delighted to be returning to New Harmony is that it was the home of one of the wisest women I have known, Jane Blaffer Owen, the visionary behind the building of the Roofless Church. One of the things Jane used to say about the people who had most influenced her, like the great German-American theologian Paul Tillich who is buried in New Harmony and George MacLeod the founder of the Iona Community who is honoured in New Harmony, is that they did even more for her on the other side of the veil of death than they had done on this side. That has been true of Jane Owen’s influence in my life. As much as she blessed me when she was alive, she blesses me again and again with her sacred feminine wisdom from the other side.
I hope you’ll join us in New Harmony to imagine the way forward in our lives and world and to experience a place of vision and the memory of great figures who continue to bless us through the veil. As George MacLeod said of that veil, ‘It is thin as gossamer’.
-John Philip Newell