Dear Kaleid Ladies,
Good morning! How are you?
We are good. We are so grateful for this community…for you. Our gratitude is especially big because of the beautiful time we shared at last week’s retreat. We enjoyed listening to God, laughing, sharing our hearts, and making space for what surfaced as we studied the Shema together. It was sweet.
Over the coming days at Kaleid, we will be clarifying and advertising some summer opportunities like volunteering at a summer camp in Clarkston and our next contemplative circle, which will begin on May 11th. Sign-ups for those things will be open soon, so be on the lookout!
Easter is a season of life, where we practice feasting as an exercise of defiant hope.
Jesus was resurrected into his physical, earthly body, made new. The activities of our physical lives can be harbingers of the ultimate, eternal life that will be ours through Christ. Christian hope is not a hope of escaping that which God created (including our bodies); rather, it is the hope of a resurrected and renewed creation. This Easter season, we want to be a people who notice our physical lives pointing toward the Reality that most real.
Our quirky bodies. Our wholehearted hugs. Our regular gatherings. Our time outdoors. Our silent tears. Our belly laughs. Our begrudging exercise. Our relieved rest. Our simple meals. These are the varied expressions of life that foreshadow Life. They are human ways of living that will be taken up into Life, made whole and new, because of Jesus. This is why we pay attention to our actual, physical life, here, during Eastertide. This is why we practice defiant hope as we feast in small ways, with human gestures.
It could be said that art is an expression of this type of gratuitous abundance. Like the garnish on a plate that helps you stop and notice the meal you’re about to eat with greater presence and appreciation, art highlights life in a way that helps us to be more present to our world—the messy parts and the beautiful ones.
Our Art in Order to See Circle meets this Saturday afternoon at the Carlos Museum at Emory and for a debrief of the experience on the evening of May 4 over zoom. The exhibit we are visiting (And I Must Scream) is anything but a celebration of the bright side of life, but we believe that engaging art that highlights disorder in the world is a way for us to follow Jesus into that pain in a more tangible way and to strengthen the edges of our defiant hope for all things to be made new. This Circle is also, then, an invitation to be Easter people, together. Whether you’re an “art person” or not, we’d love for you to join us! Register here.
Thanks again, friends, for being you.
We appreciate you and hope you have a wonderful Wednesday.
Gratefully,
The Kaleid Team