| “The Sound of the Genuine” |
| All forms of contemplation share the same goal: to help us see through the deceptions of self and world in order to get in touch with what Howard Thurman called “the sound of the genuine” within us and around us. Contemplation does not need to be defined in terms of particular practices, such as meditation, yoga, tai chi, or lectio divina. Instead, it can be defined by its function: contemplation is any way one has of penetrating illusion and touching reality. —Parker Palmer Happenings |
| Contemplative Drumming Circle June 13th: Join us for our drumming circle on second Thursdays at 6:30 pm. Bring your drum and join right in. We are all beginners so no expereince necessary. Some small drums will be available to borrow during our time together.read more >> Sacred Saturday June 22nd: Monthly Sacred Saturdays starting June 22. A half day contemplative retreat of silence, formation, and creativity. Theme: DARKNESS & TRANSFORMATION using the tools of centering prayer, bio-spiritual spirituality, and writing.read more >> Contemplative Conversations: Sacred Stories Begins June 26th: Join us for this 4 week series to explore the spiritual practice of narrative as a gateway to revelation. Our time will consist of sharing, listening, learning, and silence. We will be speaking our stories to each other using Diane Millis PhD model for narrative circles.read more >> |
| Schedule Monthly Compassion Circle – 2nd Mondays 6:30 pm Be Still: Contemplative Worship Service – Tuesdays 6:00 pm Noon-hour Silent Prayer – Weekdays 12:15pm Contemplative Conversations – Wednesdays 1:30pm Contemplative Movement – Fridays 5:30pm Worship Music – Sundays 3:30 pm House Church: Integral Worship – Sundays 4pm Taizé Worship Service – Sunday June 16th 6pm |
| Howard Thurman (American Mystic. 1899 -1981)The Sound of the GenuineThere is something in every one of you that waits, listens, for the sound of the genuine in yourself and if you cannot hear it, you will never find whatever it is for which you are searching and if you hear it and then do not follow it, it was better that you had never been born…You are the only you that has ever lived; your idiom is the only idiom of its kind in all the existence and if you cannot hear the sound of the genuine in you, you will all yourself spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls…There is in you something that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself and sometimes there is some much traffic going on in your minds, so many different kinds of signals, so many vast impulses floating through your organism that go back thousands of generations, long before you were even a though in the mind of creation, and you are buffeted by these, and in the midst of all of this you have got to find out what your name is. Who are you? How does the sound of the genuine come through you…The sound of the genuine is flowing through you. Don’t be deceived and thrown off by all the noises that are part even of your dreams, your ambitions, so that you don’t hear the sound of the genuine in you, because that is the only true guide that you will ever have, and if you don’t have that you don’t have a thing.You may be famous. You may be whatever the other ideals are which are a part of this generation, but you know you don’t have the foggiest notion of who you are, where you are going, what you want. Cultivate the discipline of listening to the sound of the genuine in yourself.Now there is something in everybody that waits and listen for the sound of the genuinein other people… I must wait and listen for the sound of the genuine in you. I must wait. For if I cannot hear it, then in my scheme of things, you are not even present. And everybody wants to feel that everybody else knows that she is there.I want to feel that I am thoroughly and completely understood so that now and then I can take my guard down and look out around me and not feel that I will be destroyed with my defenses down. I want to feel completely vulnerable, completely naked, completely exposed and absolutely secure… that I can run the risk of radical exposure and know that the eye that beholds my vulnerability will not step on me. That I can feel secure in my awareness of the active presence of my own idiom in me.So as I live my life then, this is what I am trying to fulfill. It doesn’t matter whether I become a doctor, a lawyer, housewife. I’m secure because I hear the sound of the genuine in myself and having learned to listen to that I can become quiet enough, still enough to hear the sound of the genuine in you.Now if I hear the sound of the genuine in me, and if you hear the sound of the genuine in you, it is possible for me to go down in me and come up in you. So that when I look at myself through your eyes having made that pilgrimage, I see in me what you see in me and the wall that separates and divides will disappear, and we will become one because the sound of the genuine makes the music |
