One-Day Retreat with Douglas E. Christie

The Desert Within
at St. Andrew’s United Church.

Cost:$60
To register: contact Susan Cowan at tmsc@telus.net or 604-988-8835
What does it mean to enter the desert? To seek “the desert within”, that vast open space the Christian mystics experienced at the very ground of the soul where the human person encounters the divine? This retreat will draw upon the image of the desert (long important to both Jewish and Christian religious identities and central to the Christian mystical tradition) to consider what it might mean for us to incorporate silence, stillness, and solitude into our own spiritual practices. And to ask how such practices can help us recover a sense of hope and meaning in a world that too often feels devoid of both.

Douglas E. Christie, Ph.D., is Professor of Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. A long-time Merton scholar, Doug’s most recent book, The Insurmountable Darkness of Love: Mysticism, Loss and the Common Life (Oxford) was published in 2022. Doug is founding editor of the journal Spiritus.