I’m sitting here in Bonnevaux, our International Center in France and I am inviting you to come to join us here in September for the John Main Seminar or to join us online.
The John Main Seminar is maybe the major annual event of our worldwide community and it brings teachers together who share from a contemplative perspective and a contemplative wisdom a message for our time.
The theme this year is new wine, new skins from the Parable of Jesus. We need to put new wine into new skins. Before every seminar, we have a short three day silent retreat and that will be from the 11th to the 14th of September.
The seminar itself starts on the afternoon of the 14th and will go through until the Sunday afternoon. The speakers this year are three: Cynthia Bourgeault very well known and much loved teacher of contemplative wisdom based in the States, but with a voice that extends around the world, speaking from the Christian tradition, but in a very universal Christian way. Andrew Harvey, who is a speaker of tremendous energy and tremendous vision, depth, intellectual but also with a truly spiritual passion and myself.
The theme is generated by our common concern in many conversations we've had over the years, for the dark night, for the crisis that our world is going through.
Not only our religious world, but every aspect of the world, today: our society, our politics, our finances. We're living in an age where there is a breakdown, there is a melting down of what was once solid and institutional and secure.
Laurence Freeman
We can either panic and despair or we can open the eye of the heart and see with wisdom that what we are being led through is a rebirth and the discovery of new potential within our human dignity.
One of the tragic and dangers of this crisis is that we devalue the human and we want to replace it with technology or with bioengineering and remake ourselves.
What I think we need to do is to develop this contemplative wisdom that restores our faith and wonder in the gift of human consciousness, the human body, human life, human love of beauty.
Laurence Freeman
So this is why the three of us are together because we’re going to bring different perspectives. There will be a presentations, there’ll be workshops, there’ll be meditation together.
And so I want to invite you to be part of this very enlivening, I think and very energizing and hopeful time together where we can find not only hope but also vision for the future.
