Meeting the Sacred in Creation
An Interfaith Retreat at Lake Logan Retreat Center, Canton, NC
October 8-11, 2007 GreenFaith, an interfaith environmental coalition, is pleased to announce a contemplative retreat for people from diverse religious and spiritual backgrounds to explore one of the most neglected aspects of modern spiritual life – the relationship between the human soul and the natural world. The retreat will be held at Lake Logan Retreat Center in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, and will be led by the Rev. Dr. Gordon Peerman of Vanderbilt Divinity School and the Nashville Mindfulness Meditation Group, Kurt Hoelting of Inside Passages and Rabbi Lawrence Troster of GreenFaith. The cost of the retreat is $400, including all meals and lodging. Gordon Peerman is a psychotherapist in Nashville, Tennessee. With degrees from the University of Virginia, Yale, and Vanderbilt and as a member of the American Association of Pastoral Counselors, he founded the Stress Reduction Program at Saint Thomas Health Services in Nashville in 1997. He later coordinated the dissemination of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction to fourteen other hospitals in the United States. An Episcopal priest who teaches at Vanderbilt Divinity School, he has been engaged in contemplative practices, including centering prayer and mindfulness meditation, since 1975. Kurt Hoelting is a clergyman (United Church of Christ), meditation teacher and wilderness guide with twenty five years of experience in Zen meditation practice. A graduate of Harvard Divinity School, Kurt founded Inside Passages (www.insidepassages.com) in 1994 and has guided many sea kayaking retreats in Alaska, including trips co-led by Gary Snyder, David Abram, Jon Kabat-Zinn and Rabbis Rachel Cowan and Sheila Weinberg. He works with rabbis and Christian clergy to explore applying Eastern meditative discipline to Western contemplative practice, and to deepen our understanding of what it means to care for Creation. Rabbi Larry Troster is Director of GreenFaith’s Fellowship Program and a nationally recognized religious-environmental leader. He has worked as the Rabbinic Fellow of the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life (COEJL) and he has published and lectured widely on theology, environmentalism, liturgy, bioethics, modern cosmology and Judaism. A graduate of the Jewish Theological Seminary and the University of Toronto, he has served congregations in Toronto and New Jersey Lake Logan Retreat Center in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains will serve as the host for the retreat. Located on a 300 acre property near the Blue Ridge Parkway in Canton, North Carolina, Lake Logan offers a spectacular setting for reflection, meditation and healing. Hiking and kayaking will be part of the retreat, with participants taking part as they wish. “I’ve done a good deal of “inside” work as a therapist and meditation teacher,” says Peerman. “It has been good, intimate work. Another energy has been pulling me ‘outside’ into the wilderness for a dozen years, into a different intimacy. Pastoral counselor Gerald May calls the Presence that drew him into intimacy with the wilderness ‘the Power of the Slowing.’ This Power has been Big Medicine for me, especially in the company of those who know their need for slowing.” “In an era of global ecological crisis,” says Hoelting, “caring for Creation has emerged as a moral obligation for all people of faith. Yet we will not work to save that which we do not love. Connecting our faith directly with the natural world has become an essential part of our spiritual journeys. Our very survival may depend now on our ability to make this connection real for ourselves, and the communities we serve.” “The environmental crisis has not arisen solely because of technology, economics or politics,” says Troster. “It is fundamentally a spiritual crisis, which requires a spiritual solution that cannot be confined to a single tradition. We need wisdom gained from the world’s great religions and through relationship with the sacred in nature to guide us. ‘Meeting the Sacred in Creation’ offers the space to connect with that wisdom.” Founded in 1992, GreenFaith (www.greenfaith.org) is an interfaith coalition for the environment which mobilizes people of diverse spiritual backgrounds to deepen their relationship with nature and to take action for the earth. “Humanity’s religious traditions call us to be good stewards of the earth,” said the Rev. Fletcher Harper, GreenFaith’ Executive Director. “Care for the environment can bring people of diverse faiths together to create a future where the earth and all life flourish.” Inside Passages (www.insidepassages.com) is a wilderness-based contemplative retreat program for religious and environmental leaders, offering retreats in Alaska and the Lower '48 that invite the natural world back to the center of our conversation about human purpose and destiny in the 21st Century. By linking direct experience of the wild with Buddhist and Judeo-Christian contemplative practice, Inside Passages restores ancient bonds of kinship with nature that are fundamental to the cultivation of spiritual health and wise action in the world. To register for the retreat or for further information, e-mail Rabbi Lawrence Troster at ltroster@greenfaith.org or call GreenFaith at 732-565-7740 | 
