A 2-hour Mini-Retreat – online workshop
Presented by: Janet Strickler
January 11th, 2025 – 1 PM Eastern
Get your New Year off to an inspiring start with this mini-retreat on Zoom. Most of us have heard that a practice of gratitude is supposed to be good for our health and happiness, and even the Bible encourages us to “give thanks in all circumstances,” (I Thess 5:18) but many of us have tried that and run out of steam after a few days. Get a fresh start with this fun retreat, in which we’ll explore gratitude beyond the usual things we think of being grateful for, and incorporate elements of play, art, poetry, and song.
Janet Strickler is an artist and a Franciscan, and has lived in Colorado for nearly all of her life. For over 20 years she has made gratitude an important part of her daily spiritual practice, eventually spending several summers studying with Brother David Steindl-Rast, the founder of gratefulness.org.
Janet is author of The Little Handbook of Spiritual Practices, and Grateful Every Day; a set of 60 inspiration cards for gratefulness. She was Artist in Residence at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Longmont CO for many years, and often has a booth selling her art at General Convention and other church conferences.
This workshop will be video recorded
Zoom meeting link will be sent to those who register.
Workshop is limited to the first 100 persons who join the Zoom meeting the day of the event.
Supplies Needed
Please have something to write on and something to write with.
A notebook, journal, or scratch paper are all fine, and if you have favorite pens or even colored pencils, have them handy. Since this is a mini-retreat time, you might also want to choose something to create a little sacred space, like a candle or icon, and clear your space of extra distractions.
For Additional Information
Contact Ginny Guzman-Walsh, Chair
NECW ZOOM WORSHOPS SERIES
ginnygw@icloud.com
More Resources From the Retreat Presenter
Janet Strickler
Thanks, everyone, for joining me to start the new year off with some practices of gratitude! I hope you will continue to make it part of your spiritual life.
Here are some links to things I mentioned during the retreat, and further resources you might be interested in:
www.grateful.org is the website begun nearly 20 years ago by Brother David Steindl-Rast, who is also the author of Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer. On the website, you will especially want to delve into the Explore tab, where there are hundreds of articles, stories, poems, and videos.
www.artoftheordinary.net is my own website. If you’d like to see some of the artwork I made over the years as Artist in Residence for my church, (something new for each liturgical season each year,) check out the Liturgical Art tab.
If you’d like to see the piece of art I eventually made that includes (completely hidden when the piece was finished,) over 350 of the blessing prayers I wrote, it is called The Heavens and the Earth.
Grateful Every Day is a set of 60 inspiration cards I designed a few years ago, to help inspire a gratitude practice. Each one has on the front something to be grateful for, and on the back, some questions and prompts to help you think about that topic. A set of cards is $20, and the link above will take you to them on my Etsy shop.
Little Handbook of Gratitude Practices is a small hand-drawn booklet I created a few years ago, which is fun and inexpensive, fits into a greeting card envelope if you want to send them to friends, and the three practices we did today all came from this book. Those are $3.50 each, but if you want more than 10 copies, to give as gifts or use with a group, the price goes down dramatically, so email me for information about that, which isn’t on Etsy. My personal email address is janartist@gmail.com, if you’d like to order anything directly from me, or ask a question, or anything else.
Another thing I will be offering during Lent this year is a Daily Gratitude Practice via email. It is based on the Grateful Every Day cards, and each day during Lent, participants will receive an email with a topic for the day, questions and prompts to help you think about that, and some other related bonus; a poem, video, article, or song. This is by donation, with the amount up to the participant. If you’d like to be notified when registration is open for that, you can sign up for my mailing list via my website: https://www.artoftheordinary.net/mailing-list/
And lastly, (thanks to those of you who read this far!) here are links to the two videos we saw this morning, and to TSSF, my Franciscan Order, if you’d like to know more about that:
A Good Day, with Brother David
Grateful: A Love Song to the World with Nimo Patel
TSSF: the Third Order of the Society of St. Francis
Thank you all, Janet