Thursday webinars welcome outstanding speakers

Thursday webinars welcome diverse speakers

This fall, St. Stephen’s will offer a new Thursday educational series open to all. The webinars will be presented live, allowing for participant to engage with the speakers, and they will be recorded for on-demand viewing.

This series will address: • our deepest spiritual needs and longings as human beings; • our r elationships with God, each other, and our own souls; • the rich r esources of Christian tradition, literature, and depth psychology; and • the peculiar str esses and opportunities of our time, with healing insights and practices

With this series:

Our role as a Village Green takes on new significance: This year, as we welcome speakers from around the United States and the world, our Zoom webinar format also allows us to welcome those who are “weary and carrying heavy burdens” (Matthew 11:28), people from across the country who consider St. Stephen’s Church to be their spiritual home. This is a sacred Village Green where everyone belongs, where we affirm the dignity and sanctity of every human being.

Our role as a New Abbey becomes even more evident: In the midst of anxiety and crumbling institutions, we delve deeply into abiding witnesses of Scripture and Tradition. Drawing on insights and practices, both ancient and new (from psychology, theology, Christian practice, literature, and the arts), we are welcoming modern spiritual pilgrims who seek nourishment for their souls, guidance for their daily lives, and enduring wisdom and truth to accompany them on their journey.

Our role as a Healing Community finds fresh expression: As the world makes its way through a withering pandemic, and as we struggle with severe loss, deep grief, uncertainty, and anxiety, this educational series is designed to tend what is wounded and help mend what has been torn in our social fabric. World-renowned teachers have been enlisted to promote the kind of personal healing that leads to wholeness and thriving in our families, our communities, our country, and our world.

Each of these four compelling speakers and their topics are described on these pages. Visit ststephensRVA.org/thursdays to register for any of them—or all of them! The webinars are free and open to all (not just parishioners). But space is limited, so do register as soon as possible. The Summons of the Soul

September 10-October 8 | 7-8 p.m.

BY JAMES HOLLIS

The unexamined life is not worth living. SOCRATES

A consequence of the necessary adaptations we make to the demands of family, the world around us, and the imbedded messages we all carry, causes each of us to get separated from our own truth, our personal authority. Initially accountable to the world around us, we adapt, repress, leave behind some of our best parts. Living a mature life is an ongoing summons of accountability to the soul, and the potential we are asked to bring into this world.

The current pandemic has forced us out of longstanding routines and presented many people with the opportunity to re-examine patterns and assumptions about our lives. In this five-part series, I will identify some of the issues, and the tasks they raise for us, in living a mature, examined life.

September 10: Growing Up: the Recovery of Personal Authority September 17: Stepping Out from Under the Parental Shade September 24: Getting Unstuck: Exorcising the Ghosts October 1: Freeing Your Children (from you) October 8: Mature Spirituality: Meaning vs. Happiness

James Hollis, Ph.D., is a renowned Jungian analyst living in Washington, D.C. Dr. Hollis, who teaches and lectures widely, is the author of 16 books, the latest being Living an Examined Life: Wisdom for the Second Half of the Journey and Living Between Worlds: Finding Personal Resilience in Changing Times. ✤

James Hollis is the most lucid thinker I know about the complexities and complexes that interfere with living a full life. His broad background in literature, philosophy, and Jungian psychology is everywhere present in this important book, which, as it strips away illusions, posits the soul-work that’s necessary for the difficult task of making our lives meaningful. He’s one of our great teachers and healers.

STEPHEN DUNN, PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING POET

Thursday webinars

The Way of the Hermit October 15-29 | 7-8 p.m. BY KAYLEEN ASBO

Throughout human history during times of upheaval and social collapse, there has been a surge of contemplatives drawn to following a path of the heart where they discovered a life of inner awakening, beauty and balance, despite outer confinement and austerity.

In “The Way of the Hermit: A Spiritual Survival Guide for Our Times,” I’ll point out the commonalities of the “hermetic path” of wisdom traditions across the centuries that can help inspire and empower us in the days and months—a pattern that can transform the experience of “lockdown” to “breakthrough.”

October 15: The Archetype of the Hermit: From Pythagoras and Parsifal to the Jedi Knights October 22: From Egypt to France and Ireland: Mary Magdalene and the Cave of La Baume, The Desert Fathers of Mothers of Egypt, Skellig Michael and Early Christian Celtic Monasticism October 29: Hermit Time as a Source of Renewal and Inspiration: St. Francis, John Muir

Kayleen Asbo, Ph.D has been praised as “a brilliant teacher who integrates the head and heart, combining brilliant scholarship with blazing passion—her classes are life-changing experiences of inspiration and revelation.” She’s been called a “master weaver of art, music, spirituality, psychological insight and history. Beyond that she does what is the rarest thing of all these days: she gives you reason to hope.”

She visited St. Stephen’s in 2019 to lead a tour de force, pre-Holy Week retreat on Dante’s Divine Comedy. We are thrilled she has agreed to “return” for this webinar series.

Kayleen holds a Ph.D in Mythological Studies with an emphasis in Depth Salomon Koninck’s ‘The Hermit’ Psychology. A leader of international Public domain pilgrimages and retreats to the sacred sites of Europe, she is a faculty member for Pacifica Graduate Institute, Dominican University, Ubiquity University and the cultural historian for the Santa Rosa Symphony. ✤ Hope in a Time of Uncertainty

November 5 & 12 | 7-8 p.m.

BY PICO IYER

How can we find light at a time when we don’t know what tomorrow will bring? What, if anything, can we gain from the extended Lenten season of the coronavirus, now stretching into autumn? How can closeness to death move us to live with more purpose and even joy?

At a time when most of the world is living every day with uncertainty, I’d love to consider what we might learn during this shared experience, and what doors are being opened even as so many are being closed.

On two consecutive Thursdays this autumn, I’m looking forward to sharing thoughts about the seasons of our lives, as they play out across the sea, in my longtime home in Japan, and for all of us at this strange moment that has upended the regular cycle of seasons we know.

Last year I brought out a book, Autumn Light, about the autumns in every year and life: blazing blue, very often, and sharp, even as it speaks for days growing shorter, afternoons getting colder, leaves falling from the trees. In my home of 28 years now, near the 8th century Japanese capital city of Nara, I see how the seasons are a lesson in humility, in community and in bowing before those

forces much larger than we are. And as I play ping-pong every day, often with my very elderly neighbors, and watch my Japanese parents-in-law grow older, I think of the cycles we all pass through as elders age, hair turns grey and children scatter.

In my second talk, I’d like to think about this season we’re all passing through together, and the fresh habits, the new inwardness and the greater depth and intimacy it may bring us in the midst of so much loss. My visit to St. Stephen’s last year was one of the highlights of recent years for me; as I get to see you all again in November—though only virtually this time—I’d love to address what hope may sit within reality and how the fact that all things must pass may move us to cherish everything a little more.

Pico Iyer is known for his travel writing and novels, but he has also gained attention writing and speaking about quiet and stillness. All of these things have something in common: Iyer’s astute observations of human nature. Born in Oxford, England to parents from India, Pico Iyer was educated at Eton, Oxford, and Harvard. His books include The Joy of Quiet, The Art of Stillness, and the novel The Lady and the Monk, to name just a few.

For years, Iyer has split his time between California and Nara, Japan, where he and his Japanese wife, Hiroko, have a small home. But when his father-in-law died suddenly, calling him back to Japan earlier than expected, Iyer began to grapple with the question we all have to live with: how to hold on to the things we love, even though we know that we and they are dying. ✤

A Promise Fulfilled December 3-17 | 7-8 p.m. BY GARDNER CAMPBELL

No War, or Battle’s sound Was heard the World around…. But peaceful was the night Wherein the Prince of light His reign of peace upon the earth began….

So the English poet John Milton imagines the birth of our Savior, in one of the most beautiful poems ever written: On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity—a poem Milton composed when he was just 21 years old.

This three-part Advent series explores Milton’s great “Nativity Ode” in all its splendor, drawing on the questions, conflicts, and assurances the Ode encompasses. We’ll think together about art, theology, cosmology, and the shape of time itself.

Our pandemic days bring with them uncertainty, fear, and doubt. Growing up in a large city periodically ravaged by plague, the young John Milton William Blake’s watercolor of the knew these sorrows too. Yet Nativity. Public domain he kept the faith, and in this poem, shares that faith with all of us so that we, too, can lift our eyes to the promise of deliverance—a promise fulfilled in a humble birth in a stable.

Links to the text and a reading of the poem are available on our Web site at ststephensRVA.org/thursdays.

I look forward to experiencing this extraordinary poem with you, as together we await the coming of Emmanuel.

Gardner Campbell is associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University and a popular speaker at St. Stephen’s. His topics have ranged from John Milton’s Paradise Lost to the parables of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone. He has presented online forums on C.S. Lewis’ Narnia Chronicles, and led discussions of classic films during our summer film series. ✤