Wandering Home 2016 registration is open!

The Retreat will take place March 9-13, 2016
at St. Mary’s in Sewanee, Tennessee.
Limited space available. Register early for a discounted rate!

About the Retreat

Coming home to a place where we are nourished, where we are understood, known, and accepted is a gift all of us need to experience and yearn to feel. Our “One-ing” with Divinity/Christ/Spirit is the promised sensation of such a homecoming. And yet we live everyday in the midst of estrangement, misunderstanding, hunger, and harm. Sometimes we are left wanting, wounded, and excluded from the very places and spaces that profess to be a place of welcome. Wandering Home is a place to bring your hunger, your vision, your practice, your whole self to encounter and reclaim, indeed to indigenize Christian community and practice in life-giving, home-coming, transforming ways.

Wandering Home is a practice oriented retreat, engaging the many layers of embodied life–our thoughts, beliefs, habits, dispositions, imagination, and community in order to explore depths of spiritual awareness and creativity.

We offer group and individual practices to stretch into less exercised parts of ourselves to discover what spiritual longing or wounding might need attention, healing, or deepening. We offer opportunities for the group to engage in meditation, embodied exercises, discussion, and community formation. We also offer opportunities for intentional wandering, lectio divina, art, writing, resting, prayer, singing, and worship.

Wandering Home also clears space for silence, as well as periods of group sharing, and spiritual companionship. Prepare to open your heart to connection, tears, empathy, deeper wisdom, natural beauty, laughter, worship, and dance.

Whether you are on the borderlands of Christian institutions or in exile or defecting in place Wandering Home is a place for you to come and be fed, to reclaim community and practice.

When?

Wandering Home 2016 will take place Wednesday, March 9 through Sunday, March 13

Where?

Wandering Home 2016 will take place at St. Mary’s in Sewanee, Tennessee.

Retreat Leaders

Wendy Farley is interested in the margins of Christianity, where people may feel both wounded by the church and attracted to the beauty of a tradition that sees the ultimate reality as love. She engages ways in which secular spirituality and inter-religious dialogue can enrich our understanding of contemplative practice. She has been professor of religion and theology at Emory University for almost thirty years; her most recent books is The Thirst of God: Meditating on Divine Love with Three Women Mystics. Wendy has studied Christian forms of meditation, Buddhist and yogic meditation techniques and is an associate of Green Bough House of Prayer. The path of transformation involves the whole person and Wendy seeks practices that integrate body, energy, mind, imagination, art, silence, nature, and community.

Maggie Kulyk uses her more than ten years of experience in financial services and her background in religious studies to help people explore their relationship with money and how it intersects with their emotional and spiritual lives. After working for six years in the business world, Maggie pursued her interest in religion at Emory University. She received an MDiv from Candler School of Theology at Emory in 1996, then finished ABD from the Graduate School of Religion at Emory. Since 2002, she’s worked closely with individuals and families helping them put their money in the service of their dreams and values. In 2013 she became a Certified Money Coach through the Money Coaching Institute. Maggie is interested in the deeper story of money in human culture and how it operates symbolically in our lives. She is part of a growing conversation about what it means to give and receive, and she is exploring ideas about how the sharing of our personal and collective resources can lead to a transformed world.

Marcia Mount Shoop is a theologian, author, consultant, and fourth generation Presbyterian minister. Peace-ing Together is her work these days: a freelance ministry of consulting, teaching, healing, and cultural competency that she started almost ten years ago. Her book, Let the Bones Dance: Embodiment and the Body of Christ (WJKP, 2010), in-forms her work on embodiment, healing, spiritual practice, and theological reflection. She is also the author of Touchdowns for Jesus and Other Signs of Apocalypse: Lifting the Veil on Big-Time Sports (Cascade Books, 2014) and the co-author with theologian and ethicist, Mary McClintock Fulkerson, of A Body Broken, A Body Betrayed: Race, Memory, and Eucharist in White-Dominant Churches (Cascade Books, Fall 2015). She also has chapters in numerous anthologies around women’s spiritual experience, motherhood, and trauma. Marcia’s work focuses on healing and embodied dialogue around difficult issues like race, sexual violence, abuse of power, and religious differences in academic, church, and community contexts.

Schedule

Actual schedule to be announced.
It will be similar to the schedule we had at Wandering Home 2014:

Costs

Register by October 1:
Double (shared) room: $550
Single (private) room: $625

Register after October 1:
Double (shared) room: $600
Single (private) room: $675

Cancellation Policy: If you cancel before February 9, 2016, we’ll refund everything except for a $50 administrative charge. If you cancel after February 9, 2016, we will refund 50% of the retreat fee paid.

We don’t want financial constraints to prevent anyone from attending.
Inquire about a scholarship.

Frequently Asked Questions

What if I am not a practicing Christian; is this gathering for me?

Yes. This retreat is for people who seek religious practice beyond the edges of familiar Christianity. We welcome people who are comfortable with Christian language and practice, those who are unfamiliar with it, and anyone in between.

Is this a women-only gathering?

Wandering Home is a woman-centered space and open to those who do not define themselves by gender binaries.

What are the accommodations like?

Simple, but not rustic. Comfortable, but not fancy.

What special diets can be accommodated?

St. Mary’s can accommodate various diets if they have sufficient notice. People should indicate their needs upon registration. St. Mary’s cannot guarantee an allergen-free environment.

Can I reserve a private room?

Yes, especially if you register early! However, all bathrooms are shared.

What if I need financial assistance?

Inquire about a scholarship

What about differently-abled bodies — can we participate?

Yes. This is an improvisational and adaptive circle that forms around who is there. Every Body that comes will help to shape what we do and how we do it.

How can I get to St. Mary’s in Sewanee, Tennessee?

The closest commercial airports are in Chattanooga (CHA) and Nashville (BNA). Please see this page on the St. Mary’s website for driving directions and information on a shuttle service.