Interfaith Companions in Blessing
welcomes your self-organizing, self-supervising participation
Our community is a WOOF! (Web Of Overlapping Friendships)
Our purpose is to create a supportive environment in which a person can reflect on and deepen their communion with what one might call “The Heart of All Life,” or, in Quaker language, “That of God in Everyone (and in every Creature, also) . Our vision is to meet in small self-organizing meditation-prayer-affirmation-study-action teams-of-two and study circles.
Given how interwoven we are with the entire Web-of-Life-and-People, and how deeply the Web-of-Life-and-People needs our help, we invite you to see yourself as a Chaplain-to-the-Web-of-Life, a Chaplain-to-the-Whole-Wide-World, and expand the circle of care in your life and community. We hope this vision of everyone-an-Earth-chaplain will allow people to see themselves in a new light, stay engaged with mending the Earth, and nurture one another over long (and probably difficult) periods of time.
In support of this calling to become, ever more fully, a Chaplain-to-the-Whole-Wide-World, we invite you to explore the Five Wings of the Heart mandalas of meditation, prayer and affirmation. In our development of these prayer mandalas, we have poured as much inspiration and understanding as possible into the mandalas themselves (as DNA in seeds) so that our emphasis is on exploration, practice, companionship, co-learning, and mutual support, rather than on certifying teachers. Our models for this kind of decentralized organization are Quaker communities, 12-Step meetings and Catholic Worker communities.
Decentralized, power-in-the-branches, organizing has already changed the world in major ways, as explored and explained in the recent book, The Starfish and the Spider (used copies appx $2). Click here for an 11-page summary of the book.
Inspired and energized by the above, we invite you to participate in the following ways…
1. >>> We invite you to download and study our Five Wings of the Heart book of meditation/affirmation/prayer mandalas and explore the deepening of your spiritual life through the Five Wings practices. (All our study materials are free.) Please consider the Five Wings approach as a resource, not a requirement. In addition to encouraging the exploration of the Five Wings approach, we bless each person to explore practices of blessing, prayer and eco-spirituality until they find (or invent) one that expresses their deepest love of life.
2. >>> Please download and study our Teams-of-Two User Guide
The Teams of Two approach recognizes that having an ally can help us stay focused in challenging and chaotic circumstances (such as the world in the middle of the climate crisis).
3. >>> We suggest that you start a cooperative study and practice group in your area, with one or more friends interested in Earth-care-spirituality, personal resilience and loving/serving all people and all creatures as our extended web of kin.
4. >>> Start (or continue, or join) a mend-the-Earth, widen-the-circle-of-care, action project in your area. (I choosing where to put my effort, I have been deeply inspired by Saint Teresa of Avila’s advise on this question: take up the cause that stirs in you the deepest love.
5. >>> Have regular mutual-support/prayer/meditation/affirmation gatherings (online or in person) of “two or more”.
6. >>> Contribute your project-learning-experiences, creative product, or progress report to the world and the wider Earth Prayer community via the web as a free PDF, MP3, Facebook post, or video.
The basic ideas in the Five Wings of the Heart and Teams-of-Two guides are all already in the public domain, the creative commons, and/or widely expressed in the books of writers such as Thomas Berry, Joanna Macy, John Muir, John Seed and Vandana Shiva (among others). So you are welcome and blessed to use/adopt/adapt these ideas to carry forward your own already existing mend-the-Earth projects.
Although they may help people feel better about themselves, our prayers, meditations and affirmations fall under the heading spiritual teaching rather than psychotherapy, and are not intended for the treatment of mental illness or extreme emotional distress. In a similar way, recommending that a person take a walk every day and eat apples, while it might improve a person’s health, does not, in our view, constitute the practice of medicine. If you are experiencing extremely stressful emotions, please seek professional help.
May your explorations of blessing and Earth-prayer help you to grow in awareness, gratitude, kindness and compassion.
Dennis Rivers, MA, Editor and Librarian