Dear fellow pilgrim,

A tender rain has fallen over night, feeding the dried out gardens.

All summer Chuck and I have been quietly preparing what is coming to The Cloister this fall—something I have been genuinely excited to share with you before we leave to Germany:

The Cloister Path, which will hold the life of The Cloister together in the coming year, and the return of the Little School of Spiritual Formation, opening this fall with a small cohort.

And yet each time I sat down to write this letter, something in me hesitated.

Just as the air felt heavy, almost too hot to bear, one question kept lingering:

Can we really invite people onto an interior path while the world is burning, literally and metaphorically?

Isn’t turning inward a kind of spiritual shortcut—a way of stepping out of the fire instead of helping to extinguish it?

But deep inside, a small voice was holding firm:

The interior path is not an escape route, it whispered gently. It is the journey to the deeper self—from which wisdom, courage, and moral clarity spring.

Still, the exterior noise is so quick to outrun our interior concern.

We feel urged to leap into action before we even could ask for direction from the deep well of discernment.

In my hesitation, I took a little book off my shelf: ’s Let Your Life Speak.

And right there, Parker was bridging my longing and my hesitation, reminding us of what the wise teachers of every generation have known all along:

When we travel far enough on the inner journey—past the ego and toward the true self—we do not end up lost in ourselves. Instead, we keep “returning to the world, bearing more gracefully the responsibilities that come with being human.” (Let Your Life Speak, p. 73)

So here we have it, dear friend.

We start by walking inside ourselves—only to return to the world better equipped to answer its call.

We go in, in order to love out.

And so let me finally tell you what Chuck and I have been quietly preparing.

The Cloister Path 2026-27: Exploring Inner Rooms

If you have ever wondered what kind of “Cloister” our Cloister Notes refer to: we are not a religious institution. We chose the word because we have always been drawn to monastic places:

Places to retreat from the noisy world, to find hospitality and belonging for our spiritual pilgrimage, and to nurture both our intellectual and spiritual longing.

Honestly, I did not quite know what I was doing when I began writing Cloister Notes regularly almost three years ago, other than writing from one weary pilgrim’s heart to another.

But this year, Chuck and I sat down and asked whether there might be a path spacious enough to hold what we are already doing here—and what we would still love to bring to this Cloister.

And thus, The Cloister Path was born.

The Cloister Path invites you onto an interior journey. It gathers what already lives here—our Midweek Blessings, seasonal contemplations, retreats, conversations, and Moral Monday live calls—into one deeper movement.

And each annual cycle, the Cloister Path illuminates the inner journey through a different theme.

A few years ago, we bought a small book by the German Benedictine abbot Johannes Eckert called Wohne bei dir selbst—Dwell with Yourself.

Here, the author suggests what the monastery offers us: an outer architecture for our inner landscape.

Thus, the monastery’s floor plan becomes a way of moving through the many rooms in which a life is formed.

A cell for solitude.

A chapel for prayer.

A refectory for nourishment and community.

A library for study and wisdom.

An infirmary for suffering and healing.

A kitchen for work and hospitality.

A garden for tending what grows.

And a cloister walk connecting one room to another, returning us again and again to the center.

All summer, Chuck and I have been preparing something that has slowly sprung up, almost of its own will, out of this old monastic blueprint. Something that feels like a long-awaited homecoming.

And we hope you will feel the same, too.

So dear friend, here is our invitation:

Join us on the Cloister Path beginning this fall: Walk with us through the rooms of the monastery and experience how it helps us illuminate your interior path.

From the gate through the heart of the house and out again: one room each month, each an invitation to walk further into ourselves and return with more to give.

Perhaps there are rooms within us we know very well.

Perhaps there are others we have not entered for years.

And perhaps there are even rooms whose existence we do not yet know.

This is the path we hope to walk with you come fall.

Not one more program added to an already crowded life.

Not more material to consume.

But a way of exploring the landscape of our own souls—and, from there, returning more fully to the lives we have been given.

Ways of entering in

There is a place on this path at whatever depth your soul is asking for. These are not separate paths, but the same path walked further in.

• All subscribers: At the beginning of each month, our Exploring Inner Rooms essay will go out to the whole Cloister community: an invitation to ponder what the Gate, the Cell, the Chapel, the Garden might mean within our own interior landscape and within the changing rhythm of the seasons.

• Paid subscribers: Our sustaining companions are invited to enter further into each essay, e.g. into the spiritual and archetypal meaning of each room, as well as into our seasonal journeys over the year, and our monthly Moral Monday series, where we turn again toward the aching world.

• Little School cohort: For those longing for a sustained year of deeper soul work, transformation, and guidance, the Little School of Spiritual Formation invites you into a small, committed circle—no more than twelve people. Companioned and facilitated by Chuck and me, we will accompany each other into translating the wisdom of the monastery into our own inner architecture.
  

How to become part of the journey

As subscribers to our Cloister Notes you are automatically receiving the introduction to each monastic rooms and thus become part of the Cloister Path.

As a paid subscribers you are invited to enter each room more deeply receiving the whole monthly essay.

For all who long for deeper transformation and personal accompaniment The Little School of Spiritual Formation invites you into a guided experience of formation, transformation, and connection.

Below our sustaining subscribers will find the early invitation to join the first circle. General Enrollment starts Aug 15 depending on availability.

Early Access: Reserve your spot for The Little School

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Dear one,

Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish poet and spiritual writer, struggled all his life with his earthly father. Much of his writings are inspired by his attempt to cope with the tragedy he inherited. Some scholars think that diminishes his work. I have always thought his long struggle gives it its heart.

Here is some one who shares his vulnerability, and who turns it into poetry and existential insight.

As a therapist, I know few people who have not struggled with their earthly father. I think it is part and parcel of our human journey. Having grown up with a perfect father might not be much easier. Too big the shoes to step into. Too big the loss to go on alone.

Then there are absent fathers, cold fathers, overwhelmed fathers, and unfortunately, also willingly abusive fathers.

They have shaped family journeys, individual biographies and history.

If you want to know about a leader, you might look how he is as a father and how he deals with his own father.

As Kierkegaard reminds us, its is not so much the objective situation which shapes our experience but how we come to relate to it.

Thus there are children who go on imitating their fathers, in good and in bad, and those, who have come to a decision to do differently and to find their own way.

This individual relationship to our psychological inheritance is at the heart of Kierkegaard’s existential philosophy. It is also at the heart of his Gospel of Suffering, a book that inspired the Jewish psychiatrist and holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl: We do not need to endure our sufferings for ever — instead we can look at it with new eyes and begin to retell our story in new ways.

Constructing a redeeming story is often the work of a life time. They do not come easy and they require us to revisit the past in order to redeem our future.

But as Kierkegaard’s philosophical and psychological work stands witness: It is possible. We can turn our father wound into fertile ground for the growth of our deeper self.

I have always found it difficult to call God a father.

The “heavenly father” had lost its child like innocence for me at some point. And I see my clients wrestle courageously with it.

Of course, exploring the sacred feminine and reminding ourselves of the many motherly God images like those we find in Hildegard of Bingen’s writings, can be very healing.

But at some point our father wound calls us back.

Kierkegaard found a way to redeem both the theological image of our Divine father and his traumatic experience with his own father.

Because what makes the difficulty for many is that the “Heavenly Father” (and an overly paternal church) trigger their own father experiences and if they are heavy and painful, we project the same qualities onto our God image.

Which might explain the cruel and power hungry, judgmental, punishing and abusive God images so many people come to hold.

Kierkegaard invites us to turn it around: We arrive at the Divine father when we no longer project our own father onto God but, instead, see our own father as a faint and fleeting projection of the heavenly father. In his own words:

And dear friend, here is the good news: Even when your father wound is too deep and too violent to revisit, it must not break the sacred father image for you.

What Kierkegaard describes here in almost archetypal terms is that every one, you and me, we each have an idea of the original father, of the divine origin of what a father is supposed to be. And because of that image we carry, we suffer the discrepancy with our own fathers, or our own attempts to be a “good” father.

So the good news remains: we all have that holy image deep within us.

And because of it, we can see clearly where our own fathers failed us, unintentionally or intentionally.

The sacred father image is the remedy for our father wound: We no longer need to let our injuries blacken the sacred experience. We can redeem our pain in the eternal love of a Divine “fatherliness,” which transcends our injuries and also our gender stereotypes.

For Hildegard of Bingen (as for CG Jung) the Divine always holds both the sacred masculine and the sacred feminine.

Thus, Divine fatherhood incorporates motherly embrace, and Divine motherhood offers fatherly care.

Therefore, dear friend, take courage. You are not alone. The deepest thinkers and composers have let their father wound inspire them to reconnect to Divine mercy and take refuge in the “heavenly father” and her motherly embrace, not because but despite their stories.

And if you miss your father, because you dearly loved him, or because you remember him as a loving parent, or because you never met him, or because he was not there, or because he was never a father in what the word truly means, hold all of this tenderly in your heart. It is the place where the deepening happens.

Peace and Blessings to you, Almut

PS: Do let me know what you think in the comments.

Leave a comment

And if you are looking for some 1:1 spiritual companionship on your journey because these lines stirred something deep in you just respond to this email and let’s talk.

If you want to read more deeply about Kierkegaardian thinking and the existential psychology he inspired — and if you do not mind some more philosophical essays by me in your inbox — join me at the Existential Seminar, opening its doors this summer.

Existential Seminar

Existential Teachings and contemplations. Coming soon.

By Almut Furchert, Weary Pilgrim

Thank you for reading, sharing, and supporting Cloister Notes, an independent letter for dancing monks and weary pilgrims, a place to deepen your path and listen for the wisdom within.

If these words sustain you, please consider sustaining this writer in turn.

Paid subscribers support this space and keep it open to all, and are part of the inner cloister, with access to the archive, live gatherings, and seasonal contemplations.

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You can share this letter by simply forwarding this email, by sharing it on your social networks, or if you are a substacker, by restacking it. Thank you, thank you.

More Readings from The Cloister

🌿 From our Gardening as Spiritual Practice Series in the archives:

• Gardening as Monastic Practice

• Gardening as “Sacred Rebellion”

• Hildegard of Bingen on Viriditas and the Greening of the Soul

Coming up at The Cloister

This Fall we open our Cloister Path — a way of walking our inner rooms as we would the rooms of a monastery, season by season, room by room. Alongside it, seminars and quiet intensives are gathering: hours to sit with a single thinker, a single practice, a single question, and let it do its slow work in us.

I am excited to share more in the coming weeks :-) And to hear what you think.

Please register for the last Moral Monday Circle of the season, on June 1, 2026 at 6:30 PM, CT, zoom. 

This time we will be inspired by a short essay by our own on the Republican politician Liz Cheney and the “delicate dance of truth and virtue” to think how moral courage and humility are connected in our world today. (Feel free to read the short article up front or just come and see.)

Chuck has taught Moral Psychology at Saint Olaf College for decades. Our book on Moral Formation has been praised in the Notre Dame Philosophical Review as “Unparalleled in its range of topics covered, in its mastery of a vast empirical literature, and in its interdisciplinary engagement with philosophy, theology, history, education, and other fields.” Philosopher John Davenport has called the book “A masterpiece, one of the most important works in moral psychology in two decades.”

Here is how Chuck introduces our conversation this Monday:

Truth has become a tool rather than a benchmark.  Liz Cheney’s dedication to telling the truth show us how closely truth and virtue are connected.  When pride and power shut down critique, then we lose truth.  But we also lose virtue, because we cannot become better persons or societies without learning from critique.   

Questions for our conversation (below in the comments and in our zoom conversation) can be:

• In what way is Cheney courageous in her search for the truth? In what way is she humble?

• Can you think of a time when you have needed courage to be open to hearing the truth?

• Who in your life can tell you the truth about yourself? What makes you trust them?

• If virtue requires learning from critique, who or what is helping you become more truthful right now?

You can take part in our conversation in person by registering for our live circle below, or by sharing your thoughts in the comments. Or both :-) You can also share your prayer request so we can light a candle for you. 🕯️

How to register

Register for our live circle and receive your zoom link asap. We usually meet for a good hour.

Moral Mondays are a gift to our paid Cloister community. This allows our conversation here and in the live gatherings to take part in a private and protected atmosphere not accessible to the broader www.

If you are not yet a member and wish to join us in person or spirit, this is your invitation to upgrade your subscription :-)

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