About the Course
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 two-part workshop will engage us in story-sharing, a process by which we not only discover or name both the everyday and significant patterns of meaning and purpose in our own lives but also foster connections as we tell our stories to one another. Fear not – you don’t have to be a literary or gifted orator! Rather, weaving together biblical themes of call, blessing, spiritual encounters, and challenges or “eclipses,” we will begin metaphorically weaving tapestries with the “threads” of our own lives, as we see overlay biblical stories with our own and honor how we hear the “threads” expressed by others. This is an opportunity to recognize that we are on holy ground together, reminding ourselves that the details of our lives—the ordinary and mundane, as well as the unexpected or striking—all contribute to sacred stories: yours, mine, and God’s.
Photo by Aditya Wardhana on Unsplash
Your Instructor
Faith Nostbakken, PhD, DMin
Faith Nostbakken 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/