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Where Is Your Hope? Spirituality and Seekers

CONFERENCE RECORDINGS
Where Is Your Hope? Spirituality and Seekers
with Rev. Roger D. Haight, SJ, PhD, and Ms. Katie Gordon, MTS

The Margaret Brennan Institute hosted the Oct. 12, 2019, “Where Is Your Hope? Spirituality and Seekers: A Day of Exploration and Conversation” at Marian High School in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. The day featured two keynote presentations, conversation sessions and contemplative space, all within an atmosphere of seeking God together in community.

We welcomed presenters Rev. Roger D. Haight, SJ, PhD, and Ms. Katie Gordon, MTS.

The three session recordings from the conference are as follows:

Session 1 | “Spirituality, Religion and Seeking: On Being Spiritual within the Church” with Rev. Roger D. Haight, SJ, PhD
1. Some basic concepts
2. The cultural context of spirituality
3. Finding and explaining a Christian spirituality
4. A personal comment on being spiritual and religious
5. Ecclesial spirituality: grounds for hope in the Catholic Church today

Session 2 | A Response to “Spirituality, Religion and Seeking: On Being Spiritual within the Church” with Ms. Katie Gordon, MTS
1. Personal
2. Millennials / nones
3. Organization of spiritual life
4. Nuns & Nones
5. This is where I find my hope

Session 3 | A Conversation facilitated by Dr. Mary Ann Hinsdale, IHM, PhD
Dr. Hinsdale guides a conversation between Haight and Gordon and includes conference attendees’ questions and comments.

Rev. Haight is the author of Spiritual and Religious: Explorations for Seekers, a collection of essays in which he asserts that at the heart of religion and Church is the life-giving presence of spirit. “Spirituality consists in the way we live,” he writes, “and it constitutes our identity” in relationship to “a transcendent value or ultimate reality.” Seekers are those who are “not squarely at home in any established religious faith … they are looking for meaning in their own lives and a wider framework that would supply a broader context for such a meaning.”

Ms. Gordon is a national leader in working among religiously unaffiliated millennials to explore questions of spirituality, community, and justice. She is part of the core team of “Nuns & Nones,” an alliance of spiritually diverse millennials, women religious and key partners working to create a more just, equitable and loving world. She is currently at Harvard Divinity School in the MTS program in religion, politics and ethics.

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Prayer for me, then, has been an entering into my own heart and experience and finding its meaning in the experience of Jesus and of his Mother who is the perfect Christian and faith-filled believer.

Margaret Brennan, IHM, in New Catholic World (Jan/Feb 1977, p. 21)

Prayer is … the challenge to find Jesus, to respond to him, to rejoice in his goodness, and mercy, and tender love … in the encounters of every day and in the challenging, often ambiguous signs of our times.

Margaret Brennan, IHM, in New Catholic World (Jan/Feb 1977, p. 21)

To resist evil and violence both within and outside us is to acknowledge ourselves as purposeful agents of salvation, and of responsibility, to ourselves and others, capable of moral discernment, courage, creativity and solidarity.

Margaret Brennan, IHM, in What Was There For Me Once: A Memoir (2009, p. 79)

I grew into a great love of the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ and of the liturgy, through which the life of the Church is most deeply expressed.

Margaret Brennan, IHM, in What Was There For Me Once: A Memoir (2009, p. 45)

You never come to the bottom, do you? How do you come to the bottom of coming to know God? God is so big that you just come to know different things about God all the time. As you learn more about the world you learn more about God.

Margaret Brennan, IHM, in a voice recording on September 15, 2015

Spirituality is what our faith looks like in everyday life. Spirituality is about getting to the bottom of our restlessness. It is here that God comes. It is here where God is.

Margaret Brennan, IHM (Presentation at the Summer Pastoral Theological Institute at St. John Center for Youth and Family in Plymouth, Mich., on Aug. 12, 1999)

Spirituality is the capacity to live deeply in the concrete, creative order of things even as we stretch through and beyond them.

Margaret Brennan, IHM, in Compass: A Jesuit Journal (Sept/Oct 1994, p. 19)

The experience of God and ways of knowing the holy are the same as our mode of knowing all other things. And that mode is sensuality.

Margaret Brennan, IHM, in Compass: A Jesuit Journal (Sept/Oct 1994, p. 18)

When both our light and our darkness are integrated then our inner and outer lives are integrated. Losing ourselves and then finding ourselves again is the pattern of our journey through life.

Margaret Brennan, IHM, at St. Paul’s Retreat Center (May 11, 2009)

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