12 Days Archive: Epiphany Day: Retreating, resting, sharing, good bye-ing
In our last post to you this Christmas season we invite you to a day of retreating or sharing or both, we look back and we look forward and we offer you our gratitude and farewell blessing.
This is the last post (!!) of our 12 Days of Christmas Series 2023/24, a Contemplative Journey towards the heart of Christmas. You can find all previous posts here. To subscribe or to upgrade your subscription to receive our weekly Cloister notes click here. To share your thoughts with us, respond to this email, comment below or use our private chat room.
The 12 Days of Christmas Contemplations are a donation based online retreat.
Your gift will help us pay this gift forward, to sustain this labor of love and keep it accessible to all.
Thank you, thank you.
PS: For all who could not find yesterday’s post (or was it behind a paywall?!) here it is sound and free:
Dear fellow pilgrim,
On this Epiphany Day we want to send you off into what the church year calls “ordinary times” with a farewell and blessing.
As a gift for all who have ventured with us through these 12 Days we offer three things:
A sanctuary to share your gifts with us: this is a private chat for all our subscribers of the 12 Days (both free or paid). A protected space for all who wish to say Hello to our fellow travelers and share a poem, photo, drawing, song, link to what ever has been on your heart or moved you during our journey. (Scroll to the bottom of this email for a how to …)
An Epiphany retreat, self paced. For all who came new to this journey (welcome!!) or who wish to deepen parts of it, you can find all the posts of our journey beautifully listed here and also a tender guidance below.
A Farewell and Blessing, because indeed this is our last post of the 12 Days!!! Just read on.
Looking back on the travel
Whoever has been traveling with us through the 12 Days of Christmas has probably experienced it. The Christmas story is a story of travel. And as daily travel tires you out, and makes your feet hurt and your mind wander, so too does journeying into the Christmas story. Still, we are on the way seeking the Divine. And already, each day of doing so, there were some hints of it: Practicing the presence of God, pondering Mary’s gaze, pausing and reflecting at the threshold to the new year with our beloved Bonhoeffer hymn, cradling the Divine within us, tending to our heart and sorrows; and you can also add to it what you have come across on the way.
Some women point out rightly that if it had been three wise women, they would have brought different gifts to the holy child, perhaps a blanket and some food, and they might have watched the baby so Mary could sleep. But bringing frankincense and myrrh might, after all, be not so bad an idea either. Not only do these gifts hold cleansing and healing properties but they also mark the most precious gifts the pilgrims could on after their long journey.
And here is how Hildegard of Bingen has it:
Touched by this Divine encounter, the wise travelers open their treasure chests to offer what they have. And behold, their treasures have been transformed, too, just as their hearts. So they bring their gold, which is their openness to getting to know God, their frankincense, which is the humble realization of our shortcomings and failings, and myrrh, our compelling desire to give our entire self to the Divine.
And what precious gifts do you desire to bring?
And how might this giving transform you as you head into the “ordinary time” with all its cares, calculations, and surprising generosity?
Do write us to let us know. And bring your gift to our Epiphany sanctuary.
Last but not least: Giving Thanks
Friends, I am grateful you have been with us this season. I am humbled you would read my contemplations born out of daily inspiration with a dash of pilgrim’s despair. I am particularly grateful to hear from you and your experiences during this time. Your comments and notes provide sustenance for me and help me to tune my writings to your journey.
We are thankful to those of you who sustain us, both with life-giving words, by sharing and recommending and as paying subscribers. We have found our first three founding members (“sustainers”) who will receive a signed copy of our latest book and also an invitation to our dinner table! Thank you, thank you! (I will notify you shortly!) And yes, there are still 2 more spots to go to have a first handful of founding members for this journey who will receive our book and dinner invitation :-).
Oh, and I also fixed the founding member tier. You can now actually choose how much you wish to give! Learning every day new things here :-)
And if you have been on the brink to become a paying subscriber to our Cloister Note and our upcoming 12 Days of Christmas Contemplations next season you can still do so here or choose a little extra help below:
Your support will help us sustain (and improve) the infrastructure for this project and keep it accessible to all. But most importantly; keep me writing! Thank you, thank you.
Bidding Farewell. A poetic blessing
We are looking forward to our upcoming Passion Week Consolations, for seminars on Hildegard & Kierkegaard, and to some new projects I will introduce to you here in the next weeks.
For now and for going forward we offer you our humble translation of this poem from Hermann Hesse on sustaining ourselves through life’s transitions.
Stair Steps
Like every flower withers and every youth
Fades to age, so blooms every step of life.
Every wisdom and also every virtue
Blossoms in its time and may not last forever.The heart, it must at every stage of life
Be ready to bid farewell and start anew,
And with fortitude but without grief
Give itself away, again, to other bonds,For in each new beginning dwells a mystery
Protecting us and helping us to live.We should then cheerfully pass from space to space
And not depend on any one like home.
The Spirit will not shackle us, nor close us in,
From stair to stair he wants to elevate and broaden us.We are hardly at home in any stage of life
And when comfortably settled in, weariness threatens.
Only the one ready for departure and the journey
May escape the crippling habit.Perhaps the hour of our death itself
Might send us in youthfulness to newer places.
Life's call to us will never cease.
Be whole, my heart, bid farewell and heal!Hermann Hesse
(transl. by Huff/Furchert 2014)
We bid you farewell! Be whole, and heal.
And may Christmas find you where you are, still. *
Almut with Chuck with little one
Join our Epiphany Day of Retreating and Sharing: Bring your gifts
Retreating
Do you know about Women’s Christmas on Jan 6? That is when the (wo)men finally get some rest after busy feast days where they did the hosting. So on this Epiphany we invite you for such a day of rest, retreat, and if you wish sharing. For all who hadn’t much time to journey yet, you can take some time to journey then, reading some or all of the daily letters to yourself at once.
Sharing
And if you wish, you can share what has been on your heart, the insights you have born, the difficulties you faced on this journey. I so much would love to hear from you!
For this just come over to our Epiphany sanctuary, a private room of sharing (like an open house) so you can be sure your comments will only be seen by your fellow travelers.
No zoom call, no group pressure. Just an open house you can show up to when ever you can this Epiphany Day, a space of giving and receiving and hopefully of homecoming :-)
At this private online chat you can leave your gifts (reflections, poems, drawings, doodlings, insights, questions, photos, sorrows or gratitude) in the morning (or anytime) and come back during the day (or anytime) to see what others have brought to the journey. You can walk in and out how ever your day permits. Chuck and I will check in regularly to welcome each of you and to cradle what you bring :-)
You can visit the chat on the website or by downloading the Substack app, now available for both iOS and Android. Chats are sent via the app, not email, so turn on push notifications so you don’t miss conversation as it happens.
Or, for a more contemplative version, just check in when you can using the link above.
How to get started using the app
Download the app by clicking this link or the button below. Substack Chat is now available on both iOS and Android.
Open the app and tap the Chat icon. It looks like two bubbles in the bottom bar, and you’ll see a row for my chat inside.
That’s it! Jump into my thread to say hi, and if you have any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.
Thanks for this journey. It made the Christmas season special. Blessings for the new year.
Thank you so much for this 12 Days retreat. It really comforted me through a difficult time.