Hello –
In one year it will be the first Tuesday in November of 2024, a Presidential election year. We can expect a very noisy year, filled with anger, fear and contempt before we have the opportunity to vote. How can we be better than all that?
My best response is to offer a seminar after the first of the year to help you and your friends and neighbors learn to be beacons of light and love. Here’s the first of six blog posts I’ll be offering between now and Saturday, January 6th, when the seminar begins, in hopes of having you join me. These blog posts will be on our website. I’ll also be sharing postcards and posters, in hopes of attracting new people:
Transcending Contempt in 2024
A Six Session Seminar with Powerful Words, Useful Exercises and Six Unlikely Companions
Session One: The Gifts of Wonder, Attention and Gratitude, calling on the works of Plato, Simone Weil, and Aquinas
On Saturday, January 6th I begin teaching a six-session seminar on Transcending Contempt. As we enter yet another fraught election year, how can we become beacons of non-anxious light and love in a fractured and fearful culture?
The origin of Transcending Contempt was my response to the 2016 Presidential Campaign of Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump. I’m proud of the fact that St. Paul’s has Republicans, Democrats, and Independents in our congregation, and we love each other. For the penitential season of Lent in 2017 I invited the whole congregation to fast from contempt for Lent, noting that different places on the political spectrum had different flavors of contempt such as bombast, superiority and snark. The response was overwhelmingly positive.
This coming election year I invite us to be proactive and tap into the deepest wisdom possible to be sure we don’t get snared by the ever-present temptation to be contemptuous of others. In the first session I’ll do most of the talking. I’ll introduce our way of proceeding and then invite us all to three practices that we’ll be returning to again and again throughout the upcoming sessions.
Each session, including the first one, ends with my inviting you to try out a practice through the course of the coming week. The subsequent session begins with a check-in. How did your practice go? What did you learn? What worked for you? What didn’t work of you? I’ll then offer twenty minutes of teaching. At each session, I’ll provide a hand-out with the teaching outline, a description of the next practice, and a few pages from or about one or more of our great thinkers. These thinkers are Plato, Simone Weil, Aquinas, Kierkegaard, Dante, and James Baldwin. This is not a study course, but if you wish to go deeper in any of these writers, I’m happy to help.
The first session will conclude with an invitation to the WAG practices. This means learning to Wonder like Plato, to pay Attention like Simone Weil and to be Grateful like Thomas Aquinas. These three practices will pop up repeatedly throughout our six sessions and are essential for our effort to live lives where we have released contempt and filled ourselves instead with love.
I invite you to keep reading these intermittent Blog posts, which preview the six weekly sessions, to learn whether you are called to Transcend Contempt with me beginning in person only on January 6th. The class is in Duncan Hall at St. Paul’s on 1123 Court Street. Hospitality begins at 8:30am and the sessions are from 9am to 10am.
Get more information or sign up at the links.
Blessings, Christopher
p: (415) 456-4842