BECAUSE: Finding Thin Places: Music, Community, and Spiritual Renewal at the New Harmony Retreat
Philip Amerson [00:00:01]:
Greetings everyone. Philip Amerson, here again with a short because episode where we focus on the importance of community, the importance of interdependence. I promised earlier that I would tell you about a retreat that we had with 16 pastors from mainline denominations in New Harmony, Indiana. It was the middle of April, so most of them had their taxes finished. Maybe not all, but we met in the conference center at New Harmony and I saw again the great power of music and community to heal and restore. One of the assumptions for these retreats is that it gets to be very lonely work, especially post Covid and especially with all of the divisions and brokenness and families in our society. And. And that's what we found.
Philip Amerson [00:00:58]:
Pastors were ready just to rest and renew. And we were fortunate to have a remarkable musician, Ken Medema, who came and after each person shared some sacred object or some sacred story in their life, Ken would on the spot, improvise a song for them. Often when the song ended, there would be a little applause. More often there was laughter. There was even a line dance that was formed at one point. And the thing that struck me was there were a couple of occasions when Ken finished after hearing the story and there was a sustained silence. We knew we had come to a place of holiness, a thin place, a space where the eternal presence, the divine had touched each one in the room no one wanted to move. It seemed to last forever.
Philip Amerson [00:02:00]:
I'm sure it was three or four minutes. Music and community gave us space to catch our spiritual breath. And so I've been writing some about this retreat and it's called Canticles for parish ministry. Psalm 1 is coming up. You'll hear it in the future. If you'd like to know more about this, I can send you a copy. Just write me at phil p h I l@belongingexchange.org philongingexchange.org and I'll share more of these stories. God bless.
Philip Amerson [00:02:41]:
I hope you find some thin places, some places where the eternal and the everyday sort of meet. Bye bye.
