About the Course
A Tapestry of Sacred Stories: Yours, Mine, God’s
A Retreat with Faith Nostbakken, PhD, DMin
Thursday, October 16, 1:00 - 4:30 p.m. MDT
12:00 PDT / 1:00 MDT (includes SK) / 2:00 CDT / 3:00 EDT / 4:00 ADT
Friday, October 17, 10:00 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. MDT
9:00 PDT / 10:00 MDT (includes SK) / 11:00 CDT / 12:00 EDT / 1:00 ADT
Storytelling is at the heart of who we are as human beings. We might say that this is because we are created in the image of a storytelling God, for our Scriptures are predominantly a collection of stories narrating God’s relationship to God’s people. This retreat will engage us in story-sharing, a process by which we not only discover or name significant patterns of meaning and purpose in our own lives but also foster community and relationship as we tell our stories to one another. Weaving together biblical themes of call, blessing, spiritual encounters, personal relationships, and challenges or “eclipses,” we will begin metaphorically weaving tapestries with the “threads” of our own lives, as we see connections with biblical stories and honor how we hear the “threads” expressed by others. A culminating exercise will be to create a collage or other visual expression that draws together our own stories so that we can “show and tell” our tapestries together. From wherever we are as we join this retreat, we will gather on holy ground, for stories are sacred: yours, mine, and God’s.
Access to this recording (for review) will be sent only to those who are able to participate in this retreat when it is being offered.
Photo credit: Photo by Aditya Wardhana on Unsplash
Your Instructor
Faith Nostbakken, PhD, DMin
Faith has been a spiritual director for over two decades and is part of the leadership team for the “Becoming Presence” faith formation and spiritual direction program through the Providence Renewal Centre (PRC, Edmonton, AB). She also co-leads the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises and offers other retreats and workshops through PRC and in other venues. Faith is an ordained deacon in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada (ELCIC), playing a role in various ecumenical endeavours locally, provincially, and nationally. The author of books on Shakespeare with a PhD in English Literature and a love of writing poetry, she currently teaches creative writing at King’s University and courses on writing, rhetoric, and literature at Newman Theological College (Edmonton). She has an MTS (Newman Theological College) and a DMin (Lutheran Theological Seminary, Saskatoon). Living most of her adult life with chronic illness—its own “school of learning”—she has deep empathy for the challenges others face and a deep passion for attending to the meaning that can emerge around or through those challenges. You can learn more about Faith at https://faithnostbakken.ca/