Being in the Ocean of Love

Tomorrow: Online Examen Event. Dwelling in Love, Love incarnate dwelling in us.

Upcoming 2025 Events: Yearly Examen

Join others tomorrow in an online zoom retreat, for a chance to slow down, reflect on the past, and prepare for the new year. Participants will be led in contemplative personal reflection through body-based reflection, lectio divina, & Ignatian Examen.

• January 14th 10-11am PST

• January 24th 10-11am PST (DV/SA advocates, therapists, etc only)

From Wounds to Wisdom: February 18th-April 22nd

I’m excited to announce that I’m going to be offering this closed group for Lent again this year! It will be my third time leading a small group of people, who will be placed in spiritual direction triads for the entire 9 weeks. Closed doesn’t mean you aren’t invited, it means once the group is formed it won’t be open to drop-in attendees.

Click below for more information and feel free to contact me with questions.

“Seven weeks later I woke up in Ocean, and my attic full of crap was just gone. And I didn't get rid of it. I just woke up in an Ocean that does everything. An Ocean I feel all day and night and love like crazy. If you love somebody, you don't let people thank you for the things they did…

You're the soul inside your body, and soul is an emptiness so vast that shoreless Ocean fits inside it perfectly.” ~ Jervis, in Sun House, by David James Duncan

In David James Duncan’s newest novel, Sun House, this character of characters, Jervis has a profound ongoing experience with what he names Ocean, Love, God’s love. I won’t go into the details of how he got there, in case you read this mystical novel. Yet his naming of God’s Love Ocean, has stuck with me, and flowed through me these past months.

In past newsletters I’ve been exploring the mystery that God dwells within us, and we dwell within God.

"There is in the soul a something in which God dwells, and there is in the soul a something in which the soul dwells in God," ~ medieval mystic Meister Eckhart

The Incarnation—God became flesh—came to live in us, through us, turn over tables and open up the temple. And we mysteriously live in God. We are invited to abide in God, be connected to the vine, the metaphors in scripture abound.

Our thinking brain understandably doesn’t capture this, which is why embodied spiritual practices that engage the senses, movement, art, music, nature, are so helpful in living into this in an embodied way. Helps us to ‘land on God’s oceanic shore’, as Father Greg beautifully puts it below:

Not sure how else we breathe in the God of unfathomable compassion if not by our own spiritual practice and silent solitude. This allows us to land on God's oceanic shore and it organizes things for us. ~ Greg Boyle, Whole Language: The Power of Extravagant Tenderness