It has been a rather long time getting here, but I’d like now formally to acknowledge the opening of The Living Room and to invite you to come and visit me there. The provision of this new place and its ongoing management is a gift from the contemplative Carmelite Order that many of you will already know from Clarendon Street Church.

The Living Room is a beautiful and silent space for rest, reading and reflection and is most conveniently located in the city centre.

The route there is indicated on the map below. Click on the image for larger view.

The Living Room is open from 9am until 3.30pm every weekday.

It is, however, closed on alternate Wednesdays. (That is, for October and November, it is open on Wednesday 21 October, on Wednesday 14 November, and on Wednesay 18 November.)

For more details, please bookmark on The Living Room website which will be in full swing very soon.

Just a quick note to let you know that the fourth film in our HOPE series is going to be shown on Tuesday 3rd Feb as opposed to Monday 2nd of next week. As usual, kickoff is at 7pm in Clarendon St. Spirituality Centre (which is just opposite the Brown Thomas Car-park in Clarendon St).

To refresh your memories I include a short description of the film ‘Sisters in Law’ which continues the season.

*SISTERS IN LAW: STORIES FROM A CAMAROON COURT*
Cameroon/UK Kim Longinotto, Florence Ayisi. 2005

Sisters in Law is a feature-length documentary film portraying aspects
of women’s lives and work in the judicial system in Cameroon, West
Africa. The film follows the saga of lawyer Vera Ngassa and judge
Beatrice Ntuba as they prosecute crimes against women and girls — crimes
long ignored by Cameroon’s patriarchal society. This
fascinating, often hilarious doc follows the work of State Prosecutor
Vera Ngassa and Court President Beatrice Ntuba as they help women fight
often-difficult cases of abuse, despite pressures from family and their
community to remain silent. With fierce compassion, the two feisty and
progressive-minded women dispense wisdom, wisecracks and justice in fair
measure, handing down stiff sentences to those convicted. A cross
between Judge Judy and The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency,
SISTERS IN LAW has audiences cheering when justice is served!

* As a new initiative the Contemplative Cinema Club would like to invite people to offer donations at the door. These donations will be transfered to a project working against human trafficking and slavery. I am currently researching Cambodian projects working to free women and children from enslaved prostitution, and hope to have further information for the next season at the Contemplative Cinema Club. This season will begin on Tuesday 10th February at 7pm, in Clarendon Street, and continue the theme of Hope.

Wishing you a very bright St. Briget’s day, and hoping you jump up and join in on the celebrations!

Christine

It may have lost a little of its sparkle by now, but I’d like to wish one and all a blessed new year.

Given the huge possibilities of  “turning a new leaf” (god, I wish I had been a girl guide) I’d like to wish anyone reading this a hopeful 12 months!  And, to celebrate the human condition of hope, I’d like to focus this season’s films on that great transformative energy.   So here are four films starting this Monday on, or around the theme of hope.   And, of course, I hope you like them…

I like them because I think they show the inevitability of hope rearing its spiky head often against a landscape of bad odds.  I like seeing how hope works in the world, and how it humbles and inspires everything it touches. Thomas Merton rendered it thus:  

“Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.”

Yep, that’s what I mean, I guess… the paradox of letting it all go, to hold on (god, maybe I am a girl guide) and just like so many other four (and five) letter words I reckon it’s much easier to spell than to practice: love, faith, trust par example…

So now, given that there are teeshirts walking around the world which say, “HOPE WON” -  I think we have a right to indulge a little bit of hope for the new year. 

That agreed, I’d like to invite you to this season’s CINEMA OF HOPE which runs for consecutive Mondays in  CLARENDON STREET SPIRITUALITY CENTRE, Dublin. It’s just off Wicklow Street. If you or a friend who hasn’t been beofe are not sure where that is, type in Clarendon Street, Dublin, Ireland in Google Maps.

The evening holds the familiar format of watching a film and holding a reflective conversation afterwards. 

So, without further fuss, let me welcome you to the wonderful world of cinematic hope, and hope that something in this rather eclectic collection tickles your fancy.

Here goes!

MONDAY 12th January
JOHN O’DONOHUE, ANAM CARA, Ireland, Betsy Scarborough, 2008

This portrait is a truly wonderful evocation of sacred imagining and the connection it holds with the landscape by the Irish poet, philosopher and former priest John O’ Donohue.  Born in a limestone valley, Caherbeanna, near Blackhead, County Clare, John was the son of a stonemason who, he used to say, “was in that realm of the mystically sacred”. The author of Anam Cara and a number of other bestselling books on spirituality, philosophy and poetry, John O’Donohue articulates a vision of deep renewal rooted in ancient tradition and a holistic approach to the human experience of life and death. One of his great influences, the German mystic Meister Eckhart, believed that nothing resembles God like silence and O’Donohue suggested that the highly strung character of western life was explained by the absence of silence. “When you acknowledge the integrity of your solitude, and settle into its mystery, your relationships with other take on a new warmth, adventure and wonder.  Based on more than five years of filming John O’Donohue in his beloved native landscape of the Burren and Connemara in the west of Ireland, this documentary is a tribute to the  life and work of one of Ireland’s leading contemporary thinkers. 

MONDAY 19th January
THE COLOR OF PARADISE, Iran, Majid Majidi 1999.

“The Color of Paradise” is a fable of a child’s innocence and a complex look at faith and humanity. Visually magnificent and wrenchingly moving, the film tells the story of a boy whose inability to see the world only enhances his ability to feel its powerful forces. Mohammad, a boy at Tehran’s institute for the blind, waits for his dad to pick him up for summer vacation. While waiting, he realizes a baby bird has fallen from its nest: he chases away a cat, finds the bird, climbs a tree, and puts it back. His father finally comes and takes him to their village where his sisters and granny await. The lad is a loving student of nature and longs for village life with his family, but his father is ashamed of him, wanting to farm the boy out to clear the way for marriage to a woman who knows nothing of this son. Over granny’s objections, dad apprentices Mohammad far from home to a blind carpenter. Can anything bring father and son together?   “As much as any film can, this explicitly religious movie offers a visionary experience of the natural world. Moving through fields of flowers and misty forests, across streams and into the craggy backwoods country, ”The Color of Heaven” makes sure that we hear as well as see the rugged Iranian landscape in all sorts of weather.  And in Majid Majidi’s stunningly beautiful film, ”The Color of Paradise,” the relationship between man and nature is evoked with an ecstatic sensuousness along with an awed awareness of nature’s destructive power that are nothing less than extraordinary.” Stephen Holden, New York Times.  Winner of NYT’s critique award

Monday 26th January
CENTRAL STATION, Brazil Walter Salles, 1998

The film centers on a young boy (Vinicius de Oliveira) whose mother is killed in front of Rio de Janeiro’s Central Station. Homeless and with nowhere to turn, he is reluctantly befriended by a lonely and cynical woman (Montenegro). Resisting her initial impulse to make a quick profit off the child, she commits to returning him to his father in Brazil’s remote Northeast region.  As buses and trucks carry the motley pair through the increasingly unfamiliar terrain, they defy their initial aversion to each other, journeying closer together and deeper inside themselves. Set against an epic backdrop of vast, majestic landscapes, the trip becomes a quest for their own identities: one boy’s search for his father; and one woman’s search for her heart  The film was an international co-production between Brazil and France.  The film’s title in Portuguese, Central do Brasil, is the name of Rio de Janerio’s main railway station. 

Monday 2nd February
SISTERS IN LAW: STORIES FROM A CAMAROON COURT Cameroon/UK Kim Longinotto, Florence Ayisi. 2005

Sisters in Law is a feature-length documentary film portraying aspects of women’s lives and work in the judicial system in Cameroon, West Africa. The film follows the saga of lawyer Vera Ngassa and judge Beatrice Ntuba as they prosecute crimes against women and girls — crimes long ignored by Cameroon’s patriarchal society.The film centres around four cases involving violence against women. It shows women seeking justice and effecting change on [universal] human interests issues.  It also shows strong and positive images of women and children in Cameroon.
“It’s always poverty, war and other problems: a staple diet of negativity. Of course, those things are there but it bothers that we don’t see any other reality. Also, as a woman I wanted to make a film about a strong woman,” says the film’s director Florenece Ayisi. This fascinating, often hilarious doc follows the work of State Prosecutor Vera Ngassa and Court President Beatrice Ntuba as they help women fight often-difficult cases of abuse, despite pressures from family and their community to remain silent. Six-year-old Manka is covered in scars and has run away from an abusive aunt, Amina is seeking a divorce to put an end to brutal beatings by her husband, the pre-teen Sonita has daringly accused her neighbor of rape. With fierce compassion, the two feisty and progressive-minded women dispense wisdom, wisecracks and justice in fair measure, handing down stiff sentences to those convicted. A cross between “Judge Judy” and “The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency,” SISTERS IN LAW has audiences cheering when justice is served!

Donations accepted..

Here’s the Morning Monday Mislet (MMM) letting you know of a riveting television season which will start as part of the Contemplative Cinema Club.
The season kicks off this Tuesday night (November 25) in Clarendon St. Spirituality Centre, Clarendon St (back of Brown Thomas carpark), Dublin, at 7pm.
Whilst last season’s exploration was about belief, this season’s theme is around radical or extreme uncertainty.
The ability to bear uncertainty and remain sane is one of the the hallmarks of the mystical life. However, since we are not all mystics, all of the time, these films look at the human condition encountering extremity and the resulting spiritual fallout which happens psychologically, socially, politically.
Again the format remains in using drama as the stimulus for spiritual conversation. I, for one, enjoyed very much our inaugural season of the CCC (we love our acronyms around here) and I’m really looking forward to sharing, reflecting and conversing on the following cutting edge T.V. dramas/documentaries.
I think it’s apt that the season should close with ‘Planet Earth’ – a Christmas carol if ever there was one.
So, I hope something in this season might be of interest for you, and that you feel most welcome to come on down and join in some pre-Christmas conversation.
With warm (will I say that again?), warm wishes on this cold November morning!
Christine

Touching the Void, (2003) BBC Films. Kevin MacDonald. (25th Nov)
Touching the Void is the story of two British mountain climbers whose climb up the Siuls Grande Mountain in Peru led to extraordinary events. In May 1985, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates ventured up the unclimbed west face with “no margin for error, no helicopter rescue and no 999″. Simpson slipped down an ice cliff and landed awkwardly, smashing his tibia into his knee joint and breaking it. What ensued left one man clamoring for his life and the other having to make the agonizing decision to leave his partner to die. This ‘triumph of the human spirit’ relies on the candid honesty of both men relating their stories. Yates’ admission that he spent most of his journey down the mountain trying to think up a story that would make him “look better” makes him surprisingly sympathetic.Meanwhile, Simpson’s account of sitting alone in an ice crevasse waiting for death while musing on the existence of God is harrowing, particularly since he came to the conclusion that he was completely alone in the universe

Boys from The Blackstuff (1982) BBC Films. Written by Alan Bleasdale (2nd Dec)

Boys from the Blackstuff follows the stories of five unemployed tarmac layers (hence ‘the black stuff’) after they have lost their jobs due to the events of the original play. Set in Bleasdale’s home city of Liverpool and reflecting many of his own experiences of life in the city, each episode focused on a different member of the group. The series was highly acclaimed for its powerful and emotional depiction of the desperation wreaked by high unemployment, and was noted by many reviewers as a critique of the Margaret Thatcher administration, which was seen as being responsible for the fate of many of the working class unemployed, although most of the series had actually been written in 1978.”[A] seminal drama series… a warm, humorous but ultimately tragic look at the way economics affect ordinary people… TV’s most complete dramatic response to the Thatcher era and as a lament to the end of a male, working class British culture.”[1]

CONSPIRACY (2001). BBC Films. Frank Pierson.(9th Dec)
Conspiracy is the historical recreation of the 1942 Wannsee Conference, in which Nazi and SS leaders gathered in a Berlin suburb to discuss the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”. It is Nazi Germany, 1942. The Russian Front has bogged down in snow and mud, and the Americans have entered the war. For the first time, defeat is a possibility. In light of this, fifteen high-ranking members from all areas of the Nazi government – soldiers, economists, administrators and lawyers – are brought together by order of the Fuhrer in a luxurious mansion in Wansee, Berlin. No records of their meeting will be kept, and they will not reveal the substance of their discussion to the outside world. The issue before them is to determine a solution – a final solution – to the Jewish problem. Lead by SS-General Reinhard Heydrich, this group of high ranking German officials came to the historic and far reaching decision that the Jews of Europe were to be exterminated in what would come to be known as the Holocaust. This is a record of the meeting which led to one of the most horrific and shameful episodes in human history.

Planet Earth, (2007) BBC Films, David Attenborough.(16th Dec)
Planet Earth is an Emmy Award and Peabody Award-winning BBC nature documentary series narrated by David Attenborough and produced by Alastair Fothergill. It was first broadcast in the UK from 5 March 2006. The series was co-produced with Discovery Channel and the NHK in association with the CBC, and was described by its makers as “the definitive look at the diversity of our planet”. It was also the first of its kind to be filmed entirely in high-definition. The series was nominated for the Pioneer Audience Award for Best Programme at the 2007 BAFTA TV awards.

The evening begins at 7pm and usually lasts until 9.30 – 9-45pm, and includes tea/coffee/biscuits and fruit!
Donations accepted.

In the hope that this September finds you dry – but bored and adventurous – I would like to invite you to the inaugural season of The Contemplative Cinema Club ( CCC – likeit?).

This is an endeavor to use cinema as the stimulus for spiritual conversation.

Starting THIS Monday I hope to show films from all over the world on the theme of human belief. Each of the films shows a dimension of what it is to believe in the unseen, whilst remaining sane, and I hope each of the films position inner strength and fortitude at the center of human life. Thats the idea, anyhow. So here is the imagined list for the next six week which I hope will tickle your fancy.

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATHEW (1964) PIER PAOLO PASOLINI 29th Sept.
Pier Paolo Pasolini was an atheist, indeed a Marxist, and his The Gospel According to Matthew is routinely interpreted as a proto-Marxist allegory. Yet Pasolini was perhaps first of all a poet, and the concepts of the sacred and the divine, far from repelling him as so much religious superstition, held for him a powerful appeal. In 1962 he came to Assisi in response to Pope John XXIII’s call for dialogue with non-Christian artists. While there, he read through a book of the Gospels “from beginning to end, like a novel,” later proclaiming the story of Jesus “the most exalting thing one can read.”

JOAN OF ARC (1928) CARL T. DREYER 6th Oct
“To witness Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc is to glimpse the soul of a saint in her hour of trial. The film is more than a dramatization, more than a biopic, more than a documentary: It is a spiritual portrait, almost a mystical portrait, of a Christ-like soul sharing in the sufferings of Christ.”

ANDREI RUBLEV (1969) ANDREI TARKOVSKY 13th Oct
The masterpiece, Andreiv Rublev charts the life of the great icon painter through a turbulent period of 15th Century Russian history, a period marked by endless fighting between rival Princes and by Tatar invasions.

THE DESTINY OF MAN (1959) SERGI BONDARCHURK.20th Oct
Andrei Sokolov, the film’s protagonist, had lost in the war with fascist Germany his wife and children, had survived the horrors of a concentration camp. He was already being led to be shot, but at the last minute the camp’s commandant, Muller, revoked the sentence. After his release from the camp, Andrei Sokolov marched with the Soviet Army as far as Berlin. But Fate would not stop testing him: on Victory Day he got the news of his son Anatoly’s death. And in spite of the fact that he seemed to have lost everything, he remained a good human being and became a father to an orphaned boy.
The great Russian director and actor Sergei Bondarchuk played the leading character in his own film, which was to become a hymn to human spirit and faith in life

THE DOROTHY DAY STORY (1996) MICHAEL RAY RHODES 3rd NovThis biographical drama was based on the true story of Dorothy Day, a devout Catholic who devoted much of her life to working with the poor and homeless on New York City’s Lower East Side. Born in an Episcopalian household in 1897, Day was a tireless and outspoken champion of the rights of the poor and disenfranchised. Day came under heavy criticism for her political and social activism; as she put it, “If you feed the poor, you’re called a saint, but if you ask why they’re poor, you’re called a Communist.”

YES (2005) SALLY POTTER. 10th Nov
A bold and daring work from one of the UK’s most exciting directors, YES is Sally Potters response to the events of 9/11. An American woman trapped in a loveless marriage meets a Lebanese doctor who lives in exile in London, working as a cook. The two embark on a passionate affair which gradually pushes them to the limits of who and what they are and challenges their assumptions about sexuality and surrender, about morality and ethics, about God and about love.

The films start at 7pm on Monday Nights in Clarendon St Spirituality Centre, (Edith Stein room), and the sessions will last until 9.30pm approx. and include tea, fruit, coffee, biscuits, POPCORN… Donations accepted.

SO, Please feel very invited and welcome at the opening season of…THE CCC!

Best Wishes,

Christine

_______________________________

ALL ARE MOST WELCOME.
To book please contact me on Email: Christine Clear

or TEL: 087 783 7421

SEEING THE BIGGER PICTURE IN THE WORKPLACE

CLEARVISION offers a series of courses which focus on energising and empowering people in the workplace.

CLEARVISION was developed from lectures examining the philosophical writings of eminent masters in the great spiritual/wisdom traditions.
Much of what emerged from these courses was seen as being as extremely practical and purposeful for how to live and work in the contemporary world.

CLEARVISION believes that such contemplative writings are an important and dynamic legacy, and when examined, encourage inner strength, affirmative behaviour and creative and sustainable working practices. Almost all of the different philosophical and spiritual traditions have pertinent insights on decision making, maintaining energy, and creating new possibilities in our lives.

“Creating Good Decisions”, “Cultivating Energy”, and “Change and Courage”, are three courses suitable for people wanting or facing change. Such courses will enable participants to make decisions with discernment and courage, to become adept at finding and cultivating energy and countering the challenges of change.
CLEARVISION facilitates learning from the wisdom traditions through study, conversation, and reflection on the great writing of our heritage. These courses recognise the wisdom within any group and may also encourage participation from each of the members.

DISCERNMENT

How do you make good decisions? How do you choose one course of action over another when the way isn’t obvious? How do you distinguish between what is valuable and what is redundant? What do you do when a decision is apparently failing, and what are the guiding principals that will fortify and support your decision?

This one-day course will explore the discipline behind affirmative decision-making.

Participants will learn techniques of how to reflect on their experience and see how a practiced discernment can be applied to every part of their lives. Often, how we understand and interpret our experience underpins what choices we see facing us. By reflecting upon our own beliefs, and desires, and understanding our often limited perceptions and reactions, we are able to gather information on both affirmative and destructive behaviour.

This course will combine both a short lecture comprising of philosophical, political, and spiritual writings and also participants’ own experience and analysis. For example, participants will examine two decisions from the course of their ordinary, working life. The first is a decision with which they are unsatisfied, the second, one which they are satisfied. They will be asked to explore the consequences of their actions; what were the conditions which made one decision more effective than the other? What was the outcome of either decision? What was the driving force behind either decision?

By concentrating on a decision-making process which is directed towards efficient and positive behaviour, an empowered and energized self is brought into focus. A workforce which is engaged in a conscious discernment process should facilitate greater vitality and creativity in the work environment. By focusing on the individual in exacting moments, this course will translate a process by which the whole organisation can benefit.

This course will benefit middle and higher management making daily decisions and those who would like to review this process and its efficacy.

CULTIVATING ENERGY
How energy is blocked and released

If we could see the universe as it truly is, most spiritual traditions say, we would know that positivity, not negativity is the foundation of all creation. Modern business now uses the phrase “Give as Gain” accepting the basic potency of affirmative behaviour.

~Where does clear-sighted, focused and creative behaviour come from?
~From where does the pursuit of excellence, justice, and self-actualisation spring?
~What does ancient and contemporary spiritual writing have to say about inner life and the nature of reality, and what do they know that business and corporate acumen does not?

This one-day course will examine the qualities of human energy. It will examine how philosophy, psychology, art and ethics combine to celebrate human creativity and endeavour. Throughout the day a number of exercises will bring awareness to the nature of human energy. What human conditions release our energy? What conditions block our energy? According to most wisdom traditions, love and fear express the extremes of human energy. How then might we cultivate qualities which secure energy and avoid or dilute those which drain it. Through certain exercises we will experience the effect of being filled and emptied of energy as a result of our own and others’ behaviour.

The aim of the course is allow participants define how affirmative and creative energy enables them, and how destructive and reactionary energy blocks them. The course will draw on self-empowerment techniques, and clear communication modes, to energise and empower work satisfaction and thus working relations.

COURAGE AND CHANGE, CHANGE AND COURAGE

What philosophical and spiritual writings can help us be courageous during change? What do the wisdom traditions say about the dynamics of flux? How do they relate courage to change, and how do they cultivate inner strength and vision during marked transitions? What practical teachings do such writings offer contemporary experiences of change?

This course is interested in how we exercise our choice and courage in our everyday lives.

It will explore the dynamics of how to move ahead slowly when the future is uncertain and unknowable, how to move quickly when presented with opportunities, and how to stay the course though everything might be changing. The course will show how spiritual writings have understood hope and the strength involved in believing in a desired future, and ponder the warnings of being burnt by the corrosive effects of doubt and despair. Using spiritual and philosophical texts this course will draw out the dimensions of effective and positive results of courageous change.

The course will be contemplative and conversational in nature, and draw stimulus from art, psychology, mysticism, literature and history to see how inner strength and vision have allowed people to stay focused during challenging times. The course will explore the nature of personal and social evolution, and see what if anything we can learn from spiritual, philosophical, political and historical testimony.

During the summer I undertook a Diploma in Life Coaching. As a twisted contemplative, I thought such programming was the chattering end of the capitalist imperative for my and other peoples’ attempts to run faster, with less baggage, to further places. This surely is the goal of coaching – the drummed up and hapless optimism which fuels the very human but ultimately conservative need to belong, to compete, to succeed.

Almost two weekends ago I attended a conference called ‘Mercy not Sacrifice’, which I found fascinating, edgy and sharp. It was a Feminist interpretation of Hosea’s God calling for love and not death to be the heart of human worship, and this was a community of precise feminist thinking which celebrated an economy of life.

What’s this got to do with Life Coaching?

Well, its two fold. I think good life coaching can give you legs in this culture. In other words, courage. If it’s surgical, passionate and if it’s purified it can cut to the chase very sharply. But, how do you keep life coaching sharp? Well, you hold onto the contemplation of love, you hold onto the idea that for every problem there is not just a solution, but an antidote to keep the beauty of balance. You hold onto the ideal of complexity. You allow contradiction, paradox, confusion and you keep an eye on the end game which is to assist the person to connect with themselves across the desert and rest at that oasis. Life coaching can, amazingly, deal in the local currency of freedom. And just like a good doctor the training for a good life coach is being able to reach a good diagnosis. A person might be suffering overload, not because they HATE THE GUTS OF ALL THEIR WORK COLLEAGUES, THEIR FAMILY, THEIR FRIENDS, THEIR NEIGHBOURS, ACQUAINTANCES, ANIMALS etc., but because every time their soul tries to steer them towards, or away from something – to integrate, and to create meaning – and their spirit begs to talk, they end up going shopping. They’re refusing the call of the wild because it can feel something like loneliness – well, at the beginning it can, at least. And so they flee. Good life coaching has the potential to give a person legs because it can present, nay, dangle courage before their eyes.

Does this sound righteous and unbelievable?

And aspirational?

And a product of our capitalist spirituality of always doing, and never being?

And theological even by railing against fear, i.e.,’be not afraid’?

Ultimately,I think the word here is edge, and the adjective is keeping. Keeping the edge. I heard at the conference that Dan Berrigman SJ, keeps his edge through purification, prayer and community living. Is this still life coaching. Contemplative coaching, perhaps?

I hope so.

Contemplative coaching is what I’m doing when I’m stirring up the passion of mysticism, the ideology of mercy, with the practicality of goal setting. Who says the end game for coaching isn’t a soul heard? A spirit rested? A body respected? An ‘unknowing’ borne? An endurance sexed up?

- Oh, that’ll be me I guess.

So, welcome to the wonderful, whacky but exacting world of contemplative coaching and join me in on the merry task of drilling for peace.

For further details, please see the Contemplative Coaching category or contact, Christine Clear