© 2015 Line St Pierre
© 2015 International Urantia Association (IUA)
| Jesus’ Birthday in His Homeland | Tidings — December 2015 — Index | Parliament of World’s Religions Report |
¶ Toward Weaving the Tapestry of the Supreme
In an upper room at 533 Diversey Parkway (Urantia Foundation), ten women met to share themselves and their spiritual journeys. The facilitators of the retreat, The Daughters of God, led by Line St-Pierre, created and tested a new model for group sharing that worked very well and can be used with other groups.
This handful of women spoke of their inner lives and their relationship to the Urantia Revelation, and its meaning and calling for women. We explored how to help other women value themselves as Daughters of God, to be equally loved and equally endowed as men, and how to embody, nourish, and spread this eternal dance with God through service opportunities as women.
Following are comments from participants of the Daughters of God Retreat September 2015:
“We danced, enfolded and emboldened by our spiritual beliefs, we moved to the rhythm of a new dance. We learned to be aware of our frame with just the right amount of tension instead of resistance from the cocoon of pain, tears, abuse and confusion. A luminous thread is spun and we survive to thrive, embracing audacity of authenticity, choosing attunement over atonement. Divine Mother-Son – Holy Mother Spirit, you are the Cosmic Blue-Print. Daughters of God, we are the warp upon which the tapestry of the Supreme can be woven.”
“I did not know what to expect as I signed up for this retreat and the outcome is beyond anything I ever could have imagined. It is the first step in finishing the task of my life’s path. The feelings of the spiritual awakening in my mind and body are overwhelming and almost indescribable. I more fully understand what it means to be a Daughter of God. I have been searching a life-time for this spirituality and need it for my personal commitment to the family of God. I feel I have the connection through witnessing the love, passion, spirituality and knowledge of this group of women. I did not expect that – I have been learning through osmosis and it’s really only the beginning of everything.”
“This memory of a safe and secure place helps me to continue to be safe in my soul all the way through the bones. By sharing our experiences of pain, fear, joy and revelation we learn, grow, appreciate and love. Thank you for sharing your ways of how you care, inspire and how you reach out and are enfolded by your spiritual beings. This too will go a long way as I walk my path in life.”
“Explorers guided by our heart-lights, hand in hand we helped each other through tunnels and places damp with tears, over boulders, around hairpin turns, over precipices. Opening into caverns dazzling with reflected God-light we danced around the warmth and brightness of the spirit burning within us.”
“Everything about this place, 533, is perfect. I feel the perfection of our being together, such gratitude. I am amazed at the cascade of events that brought us together. Such sisterly love, trust and sharing of our sorrows, secrets and dreams. I am greatly enriched. I believe in my heart that the strength of our voices, individually and together are changing the world. Using our voices to speak the Truth, to walk in Beauty and to embrace Goodness is in service to our Universal Father and our Mother Spirit.
If you truly desire to find God, you cannot help having born in your minds the consciousness of the Supreme. As God is your divine Father, so is the Supreme your divine Mother, in whom you are nurtured throughout your lives as universe creatures. “How universal is the Supreme — he is on all sides! The limitless things of creation depend on his presence for life, and none are refused.” [The Urantia Book, UB 117:6.2]
“Thank you for being so intimately with me and for allowing me to be so intimately with you. I will never forget this experience.”
“What I have seen and heard this weekend is the beauty in each one of you, the talents, the ability, the knowledge, the skills and the joy and I heard your voices – as a single voice can be beautiful – but when we sing together how much more beautiful a song becomes. Together we have become a chorus of voices and yet I could hear every individual voice – all the beauty, wisdom and love each one of us carries forth and that empowered me. I feel empowered not to give up and to share what I know. This is what I saw and experienced this weekend.”
“The theme of a new dance, at this stage in my life to learn a new dance, oh yes this is great news. In learning salsa steps, the true gift was in the awareness of needing a frame in this new dance for the next stage in my life. I have a sense of what that new dance will be and I got my frame. I could not have found that frame anywhere else: the strengthening of my trust in God, my faith and my hope for the future especially passing the torch to the future generations who will continue to contribute to the development of the Supreme on our planet.”
“Often in life I have felt moved to action by an inevitable and powerful force impossible to know exactly where it comes from. It is not from mind, it is deeper than intuition; it may be closer to gut feeling. Anyhow, it makes it possible for me to be in a particular place with a certain group of people. This is how I ended attending the retreats of the Daughters of God. Why is this retreat so important? The questions we reflected upon were: What does God need/want from us women? What is our role within the Divine plan for our planet? At a very elemental level, for a start we are life givers, we bring human beings into this world. All men born have been delivered by a fellow human being of the opposite sex. However, over the millennia women lost their equal status to men and we still struggle to this day with all sorts of abuses from the evident to the most subtle via modern society practices that go against the very essence of being a woman. So, we Urantia women readers, what can we do? What did Jesus entrust his female disciples with? Why did he know they would not fail him? Shall we 21st Century women pick up the torch of service and healing that was entrusted to women by our beloved Master over 2000 years ago? YES!!! What came very clear to me this weekend after working with my sisters is that God our Father is inviting us to Dance with him, and guess what? We all accepted it!!! We all have inside ourselves the leading and safe protection of our Father, we inherited the Grace of our Mother Spirit and Jesus provided the music of healing and service for us. We women help other women daily and bring up boys who will love and honor their female partners according to this Divine dance that we are all invited to. Brothers and Sisters out there, would you accept to dance with God and make your unique contribution to our eternal and joyful path God-wards?”
“Threads and yarns of various fibers, colors, thickness, length.
We toss them in together, pulling them out of
Pockets, unwrapping them from the private places where we’ve spirited them away.
Some we are eager to proffer,
And others, hesitantly, reluctantly,
Guiltily perhaps,
We pull out from hidden caches,
Rumpled and stained with sweat and tears,
Blood and the soot of many places.
As the pile grows, we take each strand and
Weave it into the warp already on the loom,
The fiber framework provided long ago, long waiting for us,
Calling us to weave and sing,
_To speak and dance together.”
The Daughters of God group would love to share this model with other groups to help them encourage more women to appreciate their value and calling. If you would like to experience this retreat, we would be happy to travel to your retreat site to meet with your group. If you plan a date, gather 6 to 8 women, and reserve a venue, we will commit to meeting with your group. We look forward to empowering more women to follow their spiritual longings for sisterhood and outreach. Please contact Line St- Pierre for more information at line.stpierre@gmail.com
¶ References
| Jesus’ Birthday in His Homeland | Tidings — December 2015 — Index | Parliament of World’s Religions Report |