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What: Course
Who: Bill Dols, MDiv, Ph.D
When: Five Tuesdays
Fees: $125:00, members; $150.00, nonmembers; $100.00, full-time students and seniors over 65
Theodore Roethke writes that in the dark we perceive what goes unseen in the light. When tempted to avoid the darkness, Thomas Moore counsels, "if you are looking for meaning, character, and personal substance, you may discover that a dark night has important gifts for you." Meeting during Advent, when church people hear promises of how "the sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light," we will wonder about the child waiting to be born within again at the darkest hour of the longest night. We will explore the mythic interior darkness below the waters described by biblical Jonah as well as fanciful Pinocchio. The five evenings are an invitation to consider the darkness around, between, and within, of which Rilke writes "I love the dark hours of my being . . . [when] the knowledge comes to me that I have space within me for a second, timeless, larger life." Reading between the lines of our lives, as well as of ancient and modern texts from Bible and Washington Post, the invitation is to enjoy poetry and story, exploring how the shadows of our political, social, and psychological landscape offer us, as it did Rilke, "faith in the night."
William Dols, retired Episcopal priest and former director of The Education Center (home of Centerpoint), is a long-time seminar leader for The Guild for Psychological Studies, which brings together material from comparative mythology, religions, the arts, and Jungian psychology to provide a framework within which individuals are aided in their search for their own deepest values and awareness. Bill resides in Alexandria, is a Fellow of the College of Preachers at the National Cathedral, and contributes to The Bible Workbench, which he created at The Education Center in 1989 and edited for nearly twenty years
For this program, we plan to offer CEUs for Social Workers.
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