Convocation 2025
Creative Contemplative Sessions
On each day of Convocation, participants had the opportunity to participate in a Creative / Contemplative Immersion Session. These sessions were designed to spark creativity, nurture connection, provide a contemplative space, and open imaginative doorways of possibility.
Facilitators brought their unique passion, expertise, and curiosity to each session. Read below to learn more about each offering.
Listening for Earth in Young People’s Stories
with Eben Bein
What is it about young people that can bring us back to ourselves? Just as elders can sometimes see further into the past, youth can often see further into the future. In cultures that divide and extract from our minds, hearts, and bodies, the young can often help us unlearn bad lessons, retrieve our own humanity, and listen for more life-giving stories. However, truly inviting and listening to the stories of young people can also be very difficult.
In this workshop, we contemplated young teachers in our lives and how they make sense of some of the most intractable topics of our day. We practiced crafting and asking open and honest questions that may invite forth the wise Earth in a young person you know.
Eben Bein (they) is a 38-year-old biology-teacher-turned-climate-justice-educator, activist, and multi-disciplinary artist. They grew up in a cohousing community on Nipmuc land (Acton, MA) and received a BA in Biology and teaching certificate from Dartmouth College and a Masters in Science Writing from MIT. They currently empower and co-learn with young climate advocates at Clean Water and across the Massachusetts Youth Climate Coalition, while nurturing intergenerational relationships within the state’s largest climate coalition, Mass Power Forward. Eben draws on practices from Circles of Trust (Palmer, Wilkinson), Nonviolent Communication (Rosenberg, Kashtan, Mosenzon), anti-racist organizing principles (brown, Kendi, Okun), and 14 years of teaching and organizing to inform their facilitation. They also enjoy singing, dancing, visual art, writing, and most recently poetry. Their words can be found in the likes of The Atlantic, NOVA PBS, Nimrod International Journal, New Ohio Review, PINCH, four anthologies, their chapbook Character Flaws (2023 Fauxmoir Lit) and at ebenbein.com. They currently live on Pawtucket land (Arlington, MA) in a house they co-bought with their husband and poet friends.
Sacred Writing Circle: Mystical Storytelling
with Gianluca Avanzato
To imagine, enact, and enjoy more verdant futures in a climate-changed world, we must reflect on the teachings of previous wisdom keepers, root into our sacred creativity, and share our stories. In this Sacred Writing Circle, facilitated by Gianluca Avanzato, we will contemplate poetry, music, and visual art from medieval European mystics Francis of Assisi and Hildegard of Bingen and respond to their marvelous work through guided meditations, creative writing exercises, and inspired storytelling.
Within this sacred container, participants were invited to delve deeper into their interiority and harmonize their inner knowing with the important work they seek to bring into the world. People of all backgrounds, beliefs, and experiences were warmly welcomed.
Gianluca Avanzato is a writer, artist, and poet living in Upstate New York. Gianluca holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, where he studied religion and spiritual care. He has engaged in interreligious dialogue trainings and sessions around the world and holds a Diploma in Interreligious Studies from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas (Angelicum) in Rome. Gianluca teaches writing as a spiritual practice of self-knowing and offers one-on-one creativity coaching. He has developed and led workshops, pilgrimages, and programming around the United States and Europe, including Sacred Writing Circles and Apothecary of the Word. Gianluca strives to help others honor, enkindle, and cultivate their inner creativity and connect more deeply to the universe.
We Are the Stories We Enact
with The Rev. Alison Cornish
In their book Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in with Unexpected Resilience and Creative Power, Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone write about the three stories, or versions of reality, which shape our perceptions of the times we are living in: Business as Usual, the Great Unraveling, and the Great Turning. Each of these stories is characterized by specific assumptions and values, and each account points to evidence to show its worth. Macy and Johnstone offer “there is no point in arguing about which of these stories is ‘right.’ All three are happening. The question is which one we want to put our energy behind.”
The Work That Reconnects is a series of practices designed to help us increase our capacity to contribute to the Great Turning in the best ways we can, while also living with the reality of these other stories that are so alive in these times.
For our immersion session, we looked more deeply at the roots and expressions of these three stories of our times and experienced several practices to move us around the spiral of The Work That Reconnects. We also explored how these practices can be woven through the design of worship, as well how they might inform acts of resistance.
The Rev. Alison Cornish serves as the Coordinator of the Chaplaincy Initiative at The BTS Center. Alison attended Andover Newton Theological Seminary in response to a felt sense of call directly from Earth to address what we are doing in our daily lives and habits that is destroying the planet that we inhabit. Following CPE, field education in interfaith work and parish ministry, Alison was ordained in the Unitarian Universalist tradition. While serving congregations on Long Island, Alison began her studies with the Buddhist teacher Joanna Macy and Dominican sister Miriam McGillis. She became a GreenFaith Fellow in 2013, and a Climate Reality Project presenter in 2017. She served as Executive Director of Pennsylvania Interfaith Power & Light. Over the last two decades, Alison has facilitated the Work That Reconnects in a variety of faith-based and secular settings. A Program Consultant for the BTS Center since 2021, her work has focused on ecological and climate grief, religious imagination, and spiritual care in a climate-changed world. Alison and her husband Pat live in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, on the unceded lands of the Nipmuc and Pocumtuc peoples, in the watershed of the Deerfield River.
Actualizing Vision: Practicing the World We’re Longing For
with Madeline Bugeau-Heartt
Every day, we find ourselves steeped in normalized ways-of-being that perpetuate harm and collapse: it thus feels more important than ever to explore radical transformation in real time, to stretch our imaginations in order to weave stranger tales, and to move beyond cerebral processing into lived and necessarily different ways of being together.
In this experimental and spirit-led workshop, we explored the practice of collective actualization; of dipping a toe into the crack of something other than business-as-usual. Together, we harvested visions from the world we are so longing for and play with manifesting the essence of these inspired sparks in real time. This immersion session drew from experimental theater-making practices, activist facilitation structures, and theories of change from the edge-walking likes of Bayo Akomalfe and others. During our short but potent time together, participants were invited to embody an alternative story born from vision with the intention to make real the ways of being we thought we could only dream of.
Madeline Bugeau-Heartt serves at The BTS Center as a program associate. She is a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School and NYU Tisch School of the Arts. A longtime experimental theater and film-maker, Madeline currently serves as the “devising czar” and company member of the Counter/Current: Collective company in Belfast, ME. She is passionate about creating magical spaces for people to tap into their kindest, most imaginative selves, especially as we navigate this radical transition that our beloved, climate-changed world demands.
In her work at the The BTS Center, Madeline draws from her artistry, her “catholic-adjacent” mysticism, as well as her past-lives as farmer and caregiver in order to practice into better ways of being with others. When not working, Madeline can be found taking lengthy marches, spending time with her cherished family and friends, hanging out with radical local changemakers, and lifting weights; she is forever cooking up new and deeply remembered ways of how we might transfigure ourselves into a more loving existence.
A Guide to Defeating Hungry Ghosts: Identifying Limiting Internal Stories
with Rae Sage
Based on Rae’s Zine “Rage Them To Rest: A Guide to Defeating Hungry Ghosts”, this workshop will explore what it means to identify and disrupt our limiting beliefs to create lasting change. Dreaming into new realities requires us to reclaim our creative energy. One way to do this is to divest our energy from thought cycles that have overstayed their welcome. Through the metaphor of “Hungry Ghosts” participants ghoul-ified our limiting beliefs, drawing them, describing them, and sharing about them (many of us are being haunted by the same ones!)
The quality of our internal spiritual ecosystem depends heavily on what stories nourish and define it. This playful yet provocative activity shows how addressing our own internal “Hungry Ghosts” fuels both changes in our internal ecosystems and the broader work of addressing the “Hungry Ghosts” of empire (capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, colonialism).
As noted in the process of alchemical change, “As within, so without”. By identifying our “Hungry Ghosts” and divesting from the limiting beliefs they represent, we can collectively work towards cultivating new internal and external landscapes.
Rae Sage (They/She) is a 31-year-old multi-disciplinary artist and writer with an unending hunger for learning. Informed by a life spent at the intersections of Blackness, queerness, femininity, and rural living, Rae’s work is deeply informed by the way systems of oppression touch every facet of our lives. A born water lover, Rae’s work also explores the way relationship with the natural world radicalizes our understanding of life, connection, and what futures are possible. Rae co-organizes a BIPOC Affinity Space for farmers and farm works with MOFGA, does narrative change work in the food justice space with the Maine Food Convergence, and sits on the board of Maine Audubon. Rae is a body worker, veteran, and previously fulfilled a policy role for a state level racial justice organization.
Storytelling to Find Direction in an Obscured World
with James Cook
The world has become unpredictable, raising doubts and uncertainties in our communities. As spiritual and social leaders, we are called to serve as guides, but how do we respond when the way forward is unclear to us?
This workshop used techniques of storytelling to help us find a path forward and uplift what our own unique involvement might look like. A compelling story involves surprises, but incorporates them into a larger narrative in which an imagined future makes sense in the context of the past. Participants will chart the past moments of meaning and purpose in their own lives and the experience of their communities, identify current challenges and capabilities, and use these to identify a compelling path forward for community action in the future.
James Cook is a sociologist with published research in community, connection, gender, and political action. He manages a charitable thrift store in Camden that raises money for local nonprofit organizations and social work.
Between What We Thought We Knew
with Devon Kelley-Yurdin
In this workshop, we explored our own stories, identities, and connection to the divine through the portal of pronouns and transness outside of the gender binary. By exploring worlds that live within and beyond words, we will say YES to the typically overlooked invitations embedded and imbued within these seemingly simple identity markers. We wove our ponderings into something elegant to take home with us and suspend our experience. Vague? Hopefully, in a whimsical way. This workshop was forming and emerging until the moment we began, and from there we made it together.
Devon Kelley-Yurdin (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist, friend, and instigator of collective experiences living rurally within a web of chosen family and co-conspirators in the Wabanaki homelands colonially known as midcost Maine. Their practice is devoted to expanding the interpersonal and collective creative capacity necessary for liberatory world-building. This devotion is expressed through traditional media such as printmaking, cut-paper, installation; design, illustration, and art direction; event production and facilitation; performance; education; cultural organizing; mutual aid; and living a life. They orient towards interdependence, the language of invitation, queerness in all it’s forms, Jewish time, casual mysticism, beauty as a tool for accessibility, and finding the path while walking it.
Vocation, Community, and a Brave First Step
with Spencer Traylor
In this workshop, participants reflected on their community and what they can do to create positive change. They identified their community, its needs and assets, their current role within it, and the role each feels called to play. In small groups, we shared our reflections and helped draw out deeper insights from our peers. By the end, we had clear goals and commitments to the steps needed to move beyond our comfort zones and create change in our communities. This session flipped the script by centering each person’s lived expertise and letting their wisdom guide the transformation our world needs.
Spencer Traylor is the Co-Founder and Director of Community Development for Samara Strategies. A passionate advocate for community-led transformation, Spencer brings over a decade of experience in education, facilitation, and program design to his work at Samara. Spencer ran the internship program at Tree Street, led the design and development of Next STEP High School for Lewiston Public Schools, and served as a Facilitator and Camp Director for Seeds of Peace International Camp in Otisfield, ME. Spencer has consulted with schools, nonprofits, camps and colleges on topics ranging from implicit bias to dialogues on race and international conflict.