A Creative Companion This Advent Season
‘An Artful Journey into Advent’ Retreat Guide
• Four weekly Advent themes with reflections
• Daily prompts for the whole season, and ideas about how you might prepare and engage
• Art and found poetry throughout
• Invitations to spiritual (and sometimes creative!) practices, such as Lectio/Visio Divina, Ignatian contemplation/imaginative prayer, Examen, etc.
• Space for you to write, draw, reflect, and add your own layers of creativity to it!
I am delighted to tell you that I am offering an Advent resource this year that is different from anything I’ve done in the past! It is a standalone resource, one that you can print out yourself, or keep in digital format to scroll through during the season; or if you want it all printed out and ready to go, I will ship one to you! This is part retreat guide, part journal, with art and poetry and words to reflect on, and a bunch of artful space for you to add your own words and creativity!
There are a few ways you could approach this resource.
- As a retreat guide. At some point in the course of Advent, you may have space to take some solitude and explore and wonder with God about things. This will offer reflections and spiritual and creative practices that can hold you in that space. It will also offer room for journaling through your retreat
- As a weekly devotional. There will be a particular theme each week, and several ways of engaging that theme, so you may want to choose one day each week of Advent as a time to engage more deeply with these practices and prayers and longings along the way.
- As daily prompts and space to invite you further up and further in, right in the midst of your every day. There will be art and poetry and lectio divina and imaginative prayer and invitations to creative response, that could be spread across all the days of the week as you go. There are some one-word prompts included in your guide, enough for a new one each day, so you may want to just take one word each morning and hold it, respond to it throughout your day, let it inform you Advent experience and prayer.
- Or anything in between! Let it accompany you with your morning coffee, or make space for you to process difficult emotions that are coming up in the course of the season. Let it be a container for your Advent longings, for the hopes and fears of all the years, for the tidings of comfort and joy, for little glimpses of light while it is still dark. Read the poems and write your to-do lists—whatever your soul needs space for this Advent!
I am also offering some spiritual direction sessions and groups bookending the season.
So if you are wanting to discern some of what you may be invited into this season, and then at the end make space for a wrapping up of the gifts of Advent, you are welcome to book an individual session here, or sign up for both at once at this link (coming soon - email me at jamie@anamcara.com for now if you would like this option!).
And if one of the things you find you are longing for this Advent is community, you are invited to join a group spiritual direction session, focusing specifically on these themes and invitations of Advent.
Preparing our souls for Advent – November 29, 4-6pm PST
Wrapping up the gifts of Advent – December 21, 4-6pm PST
Or you can get both the retreat guide AND direction together:
(Or single individual sessions can be scheduled here, at a time that will work for you!)