In the Garden: February 2024

Upcoming offerings in The Garden Contemplative Community

Hello Dear Friends,

This month’s offerings in The Garden feature a Saturday morning group spiritual direction time and a Tuesday evening spiritual care workshop. We’ll also continue journeying through the gospel of John on Friday mornings with a lectio divina prayer time. Keep reading to learn more and I hope to see you this month!

Monthly Offerings

2/17 - Group Spiritual Direction

Date: Saturday, February 17th
Time: 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM EST

Group spiritual direction is a time of spacious holy listening in the context of community. Following personal reflection time, each person will be invited to share what’s stirring within them. We will then go around the virtual circle and share how we are each hearing and noticing the holy in what each individual shares. As a note, sharing is not forced or required; you can always pass. This is great opportunity to slow down, reflect and to weave spiritual community with others who are finding their way.

2/27 - Spiritual Care Workshop: Centering Black Contemplative Wisdom featuring Therese Taylor-Stinson

Date: Tuesday, February 27th
Time: 7:00 PM - 8:30 PM EST

In celebration of Black History Month, we will be joined by spiritual director Therese Taylor-Stinson to explore the rich legacy of Black contemplative wisdom in spiritual and religious life. She will also lead us in a practice of centering prayer. Read more about Therese below. This will be an educational and dynamic session. You don’t want to miss it!

Therese Taylor-Stinson, a native of Washington DC, is an ordained deacon and ruling elder in the Presbyterian Church (USA), a certified lay pastoral caregiver, a spiritual director, and the founding managing member of the Spiritual Directors of Color Network, Ltd., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. 

A graduate of the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation, she has served on the board of directors, is a member of the Shalem Society for Contemplative Leadership, and was commissioned associate faculty to offer Shalem’s Personal Spiritual Deepening Program in her local community. In her private spiritual direction practice, she companions people from various walks of life, and all over the U.S. and beyond, who seek a closer relationship with the Divine, clarity about their life callings, and healing from life’s traumas. She served on the Coordinating Council of Spiritual Directors International (SDI) and is currently a member of SDI’s Editorial Review Panel for Presence: An International Journal of Spiritual Direction. 

Her articles “Black Spirituality and the Art of Spiritual Direction” (December 2009), “Spiritual Direction as Sacred Activism” (March 2014), and “Cross-Cultural Considerations with Interpathy in Spiritual Direction and Antiracism” (June 2023) are published in Presence. Therese is also an editor, contributor, and award-winner for three books from members of the Spiritual Directors of Color Network: Embodied Spirits: Stories of Spiritual Directors of Color; Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Stories of Contemplation and Justice, for which she was solo editor and won an Indie Author Legacy Award for social awareness; and Kaleidoscope: Broadening the Palette in the Art of Spiritual Direction, a book that took a few years to develop, was edited by former Board Member Ineda Adesanya with the help of family and other authors, a Foreword written by Taylor-Stinson, and chapter 8 “Internal Liberation,” a wonderfully collaborative effort between Taylor-Stinson and current Board Member Paula Owens Parker. Hopefully, another collaboration will come with continued diversity among the various ethnicities, hues, shapes, and ways of being among people of color and of the land. 

Therese’s first solo authorship Walking the Way of Harriet Tubman: Public Mystic and Freedom Fighter, published on Valentine’s Day 2023, is a love letter to Black, Indigenous, and people of different hues and ways of being everywhere. She is married to Bernard Stinson for almost 45 years. They live in the DMV, and they have a daughter and two granddaughters who currently live further south.

Weekly Offerings

Fridays - Lectio Divina with the Gospel of John

Day & Time: Fridays at 10 AM EST

If you would like a brief orientation to the practice of Lectio Divina, read this post.

Zoom Links for all of the above are forthcoming and will be accessible here for members: