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December 21, 2021, Adrian, Michigan – Sister Esther Kennedy, OP, a Dominican Sister of Adrian, invites you to join her mindfulness community to deepen your understanding and commitment to a daily meditation practice. Monthly Days of Mindfulness are held on Saturdays from 10:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
The schedule for the first four months of 2022 is as follows:
January 8, 2022 – Come and See. Take a Fresh Look. In this Zoom presentation, come to the New Year with fresh enthusiasm to embrace the truth of who you are and who you are becoming.
February 12, 2022 – Amp Up your Happiness. This Zoom presentation begins an exploration of the Buddha’s eightfold path of cultivating skillfulness in understanding, thoughts, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration. This session helps us to cultivate skill in the first three areas: understanding, thoughts, and speech.
March 12, 2022 – Life Itself Orients Toward Happiness. In this Zoom presentation, we practice skillful action; skillful livelihood in ethical work, practiced with honesty and integrity; and skillful effort, aware of our negative attitudes and cultivating wholesome thoughts and more open-hearted behaviors.
April 9, 2022 – If Only… I’d Be Happy. This in-person presentation teaches the steps on the path to happiness: cultivating a skillful mind that is uncluttered, precise, sees through negative thought patterns, and guides us to inner wisdom and kindness and skillful concentration that is free of worry, restlessness, boredom, and dullness.
The cost is $25 per session. Registration is required for both the virtual and the in-person sessions and is available at www.webercenter.org; click on “programs.” Registrations may also be made by calling 517-266-4000 or emailing [email protected]. Limited scholarships are available.
All guests at in-person presentations will be screened for COVID-19 and required to wear a mask. Weber Center is on the campus of the Adrian Dominican Sisters’ Motherhouse, Adrian. For information, call the Weber Center at 517-266-4000.
December 7, 2021, Adrian, Michigan – In their November 2021 Spirituality live stream presentation, Now and at the Hour of our Death, Associate Nancy Mason Bordley and Sister Mary Ann Dixon, OP, explored different ways that people of faith can come to terms with loss, grief, and death through the paschal mystery. The monthly spirituality presentations are coordinated through the Adrian Dominican Sisters’ Spirituality Committee.
Nancy described five components of the paschal mystery: Jesus’ death on Good Friday; his resurrection on Easter Sunday; the 40 days after Easter, which was a “time of adjustment” to Jesus’ new life and grieving of the loss of his former life; Jesus’ Ascension into Heaven, a time for the early disciples to let go of Jesus as they knew him; and Pentecost, “the reception of new spirit for the new life we are already living.” Focusing on the period of adjustment between the Resurrection and the Ascension, Nancy spoke of grief and the sense of loss that all human beings experience. “We can paper over the loss with pious platitudes,” Nancy said. “We can numb the pain of suffering and loss. But we need to grieve, and we need to grieve well.” She added, “Like Jesus, we, too will die and because of him we’re able to pray that our life will be transformed” after death. But Nancy emphasized that loss does not only refer to the death of a loved one but to the diminishment of our own physical powers as we grow older, the loss of a job, or the end of a dream. “Good grieving allows me to experience the sorrow of my losses but also the joy in what I have,” she said.
Sister Mary Ann reiterated the importance of grieving well and the notion that death is only one of many losses we suffer. “We have rehearsals for death – illness, loss of a ministry or job, prestige, independence, and control,” she said. These experiences invite us to let go of security and our need to control, she said. Sister Mary Ann also pointed to the benefits of experiencing loss in our lives. “When we enter into a loss, we can expect to unearth a surprising new life,” she said. “We can emerge … with new insights, new revelations of God’s faithfulness, new revelations that we might not be able to discover in any other way.” Watch the entire video below.