The Cenacle’s 2024 online Advent Retreat is on Saturday December 7, 2024.
Advent isn’t only about wonder-filled annunciations, saying yes, miracle pregnancies, and receiving visions in dreams. The people in the Advent stories faced real challenges similar to ones the poor, the displaced, the homeless, and the marginalized still face in our society today. Who were the women mentors in Mary’s life? What did it really mean that there was no shelter for Jesus’ family at the time of his birth? What are the metaphors in the stories and what is real? Why are those metaphors important to what the gospel writers were trying to communicate? Why is Matthew’s version of events different from Luke’s, and what were both trying to tell us? In the end, the stories of the people we meet in the Advent scriptures can change how we understand these important events in the life of Christ and what they mean for the struggles we face in our lives today.
9:30 AM – 12:30 PM Central.
Co-Facilitated by Judith Valente & Pat Pickett
About Judith:
She began her work in journalism at the age of 21 as a staff reporter for The Washington Post. She later joined the staff of The Wall Street Journal, reporting from that paper’s Chicago and London bureaus. She was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, first in the public service category as part of a team of reporters at The Dallas Times Herald investigating airline safety. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer in the feature writing category for her front page article in The Wall Street Journal chronicling the story of a religiously conservative father caring for his son dying of AIDS. Ms. Valente was a regular contributor to the national PBS-TV news program Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly. She won numerous broadcast awards for her work on the show. Her work also appeared on The PBS News Hour. She previously covered religion, interviewed poets and authors, and served as a guest essayist on National Public Radio and Chicago Public Radio, and was a senior correspondent at WGLT radio, an NPR afiliate in central Illinois.
About Pat:
HIDE and SEEK. God and I have been playing hide and seek since I was a child. Glimpses of God came in unexpected places. It was not in church, school, or any other institution where God welcomed me as God has through loving relationships and even failed ones. All the letters after my name might have been a help but where God is most real to me is in tears, laughter, vulnerability of those who trust enough to share their story. These people are my children, teachers, students, friends, those whose friendship I have lost. Most striking was finding God in persons who could not speak at all. Those are the persons I was privileged to serve at Clover Bottom Developmental Center as chaplain, a state institution for persons with intellectual disability. Through art and music we learned to communicate. Through hugs, tantrums, loss and abundance we learned to trust one another.
At Memphis Theological Seminary, I am able to share not only academic learning as an instructor but wisdom from years of practical experience as a pastor, wife, mother and life on a kibbutz in Israel. Yes, I have degrees and awards for work well done. I have loss where I have failed. Some of those degrees include D.Min.(six years Hebrew), M.Div. (Colgate Rochester Divinity School) M.R.E. (University of San Diego), C.P.E (University of Rochester). Degrees in art gave me entrée to God-speak in theology and awards for Communication from Mayor Bill Purcell (Nashville) and the Trost Memorial Prize for excellence in Ministry (Colgate) and art prizes collected by the National Archives in D.C.
I am still a learner and seeker as a Benedictine Oblate. With COVID God and I played hide and seek, once again. I used art and scripture hoping to share the breaking of bread in our lives. My retreats, gatherings of children with neuro-disability, regular folks, and those incarcerated are experiential. As a Special Needs Resource person at a high school this year I worked with teens to discover the beauty in The Canterbury Tales and The Tempest. They became characters on a trip and used magic to tell both stories. We wove vines through one classroom and asked the students to wrap themselves in green crepe paper to become trees to learn about DNA. We worked on a film and were paid pennies to show how important unions were to the movie industry in the beginning. This is my approach to prayer. Words are not always necessary…BUT WE ARE! We need to invest in living and being and doing. Prayer can happen anywhere we ARE – truly ARE!
