Make Jesus the Center of Your Family’s Year The time-honored traditions of the liturgical calendar guide Christians through a year-long meditation on the life of Christ. Beyond just Christmas and Easter, each season of the church year offers special opportunities to remember and celebrate the work of God. In Sacred Seasons, Danielle Hitchen helps you incorporate the rhythms and rituals of this ancient Christian discipline into your everyday family life. Part theology, part church history, and part practical spirituality, Sacred Seasons provides an easy-to-use guide to observing the liturgical year complete with fun activities, delicious recipes, and meaningful liturgies. Grow your family’s faith in tangible ways as you experience the meaning and joy of each sacred season together.
Nurture your best self throughout the year with this enchanted guide to living in alignment with nature's cycles from a Sunday Times bestselling author. Before clocks, seasons were the original calendar that cultures would use to survive and thrive! The essential magic of the natural world is available to us all, if we are open to living back in alignment with nature's flow. And experiencing this meaningful shift doesn’t require a huge life overhaul—simple little daily changes and rituals honoring the turn of the seasons will make a huge difference in how we lead our lives. In Sacred Seasons bestselling author and moon mentor Kirsty Gallagher teaches us to embrace these moments of pause and ritual with nature. From solstices and equinoxes to festivals (Litha, Samhain, Imbolc) and the signature energies of each season, readers will learn to tap into the rhythms of the world to unlock the best within themselves. Organized by season (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter), the chapters in this beautiful book offer opportunities for us to check in, catch up with ourselves, review our lives, make any necessary nature-inspired changes, and move forward into a new season with renewed clarity, direction, inspiration, purpose, and motivation. Living in alignment with nature in this way ensures that we are constantly evolving, renewing, releasing and growing, just like nature does.
Seasons of the Sacred weaves together poems, images, and stories of Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter, reconnecting us to our roots in the cycles of nature and our own soul. As our world appears more and more out of balance, our destruction of the natural world increasing, there is a vital need to remember what is essential, simple, and sacred. Likening Spring to falling in love, Summer with abundance and spiritual awakening, and Autumn with fruition and wisdom, this book continuously reflects the profound resonance of humanity within nature. Never more relevant than now, the chapter on Winter helps the reader remember what is most essential, showing how there is meaning and even peace amidst the most devastating losses, and how all life belongs to these deeper patterns of change. The book draws from such a variety of sources, such as Rumi, Hafiz, Lao Tzu, Rabia, Julian of Norwich, T.S. Eliot, and others. Each chapter opens with a unique woodcut or engraving image, further illustrating the beauty of our seasons. Vaughan-Lee adeptly connects the reader to the deepest envisioning of contemporary challenges. Climate catastrophe, refugees, cultural degradation, and political divisiveness are all contextualized within natural cycles of birth, loss, and transition, and the reader is guided to listen through the fear and anxiety of our age to the deeper ground of belonging that calls from even the most destitute inner and outer landscapes. Seasons of the Sacred is Llewellyn Vaughn-Lee’s fifth contribution to his spiritual ecology series, which places the human story within the story of the Earth and compels the examination of attitudes, beliefs, and habits in relation to the ongoing desecration, ecological devastation—and potential restoration—of our common home. “Vaughan-Lee encourages reconnecting with the Earth in this heartfelt compilation of essays, poems, and illustrations…. Suitable for readers of all spiritual persuasions, Vaughan-Lee’s soothing observations will inspire a more mindful contemplation of Earth’s rhythms.” —Publishers Weekly “Seasons of the Sacred is a beckoning down into the simple rhythms of nature. With his guiding eloquence, Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee moves us into conversation with the sacred, calling our awareness to the concealed gifts of each season. Drawing on the ancient poetry of Rumi, Hafiz, Julian of Norwich, Wordsworth, and others, we can’t help but fall into step with the numinous found in ordinary life.” —Toko-pa Turner, author of Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home
"Kazuko Shiraishi's poems are outcries, meditations, exclamations of fierce energy and playfulness. It is a joy to hear from a Japanese sister of such breadth and bravery." --Anne Waldman
No one goes to the desert for forty days without expecting to find someone or something there. Christians, by their very nature, are seekers. We look for direction, we look for fulfillment, and we look for others who want to walk the road with us. We knock on the doors of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, seeking shelter and wisdom. Embracing the Sacred Season is a guide in this search, at the center of which we hope to find God. What happens when the door is opened, and we know that we are in the presence of God? These unique reflections for the entire seasons of both Lent and Easter, based on Scripture readings, are direct, and help us take an honest look at our relationship with God. Each is followed up by reflection questions and a prayer. Let Janis Yaekel take you on a spiritual dance with God, as you embrace the sacred season.
The nineteen Teaching Sessions presented in this book also explain the specific steps involved in conducting many ancient ceremonies that, collectively, can create a personal lifestyle that produces peace, harmony, and balance within the Sacred Circle of Life. The words to the songs associated with those ceremonies are printed in the Appendix.
"A Regeneration of the Pre-Christian Spiritual Worldviews and Religious Practices of the Holy Isles." This book is very different from anything Robin Artisson has written so far, for a very special reason: it is written in the tone of a father to his children. This book is a gift for his children, full of things he would want them to know and things he would want to tell them, to help them through their lives. The book is closer, more intimate, and warmer than most of his work. But it includes massive amounts of material regarding native British Isles (Britain and Ireland) traditional Paganism and spiritual ecology, and native Gods and Goddesses. Tons of scholarly backing and personal inspiration, as well as a wide and complete selection of traditional Pagan philosophical "points of guidance" are offered, as a father would want to offer his most beloved offspring. A full working reconstruction of the pre-Christian polytheistic religious perspectives and practices of Pagan Britain and Ireland is "taught" in its pages, like a guidebook and a long letter/narrative being sent from father to children. There is a long occult tradition of such exchanges. All are invited to listen in on a man telling the most important things he can tell his children, and hoping that they remember these things when he is gone and they have children of their own. A very personal project, but one he has wanted to create and write for years, and it deals with years worth of material he has collected.
