New Song

Renewing The Face Of The Earth Through Authentic Spiritual Voice

About

new song

Spiritual Direction

Renew the Face of the Earth With Authentic Spiritual Voice

Clothed In The Sun, The Woman of Revelation

New Song is about meeting our times with the love and wisdom of spirit. It is about renewing the face of the earth and the Church through authentic voice.

Living the New Song: Bearers of Hope

We no longer live in an age when we can afford that the gifts given by God to people be buried under others’ words, ideologies or mandates. The song of each person is to emerge — in all its uniqueness and its beauty.

This is particularly true of Christians whose early Church also held this vision. It will take much courage to reclaim it. Fear and conformity hedge in the emergence of authentic voice on all sides.

Collaborative learning communities are venues in which genuine questions may be heard and fearless inquiry undertaken. In these communities, we learn how to love our neighbour and recognize the hatreds, doubts and fears that still plague us. We see what joy and creativity are possible when we work together collaboratively with the Holy Spirit. For Christians, we can begin to live out the image of God as Trinitarian.

Spiritual Direction permits us to develop our own guidance system as we make space for the divine image alive in us.

Each of us has been given a mission by God born out of the transformative encounter with Divine Love.

In cooperation with the Holy Spirit, we are called to fulfill that mission.

We need Tools to reveal and discern this mission in collaboration with others.

How do you come to know what your mission — your life-song — is?

How do you share that song with the world? authentically and compassionately?

Karen Holmes

How I got here….

My spiritual direction practice began in 2001. At the time, I was coordinating a nine-month lay-ministry formation program in the Diocese of Hamilton. I explored the Ignatian path with the Jesuits and Sisters of St. Joseph, and then embraced the Carmelite path at Mount Carmel in Niagara Falls. In the mid 2010s, I studied Orthodox spirituality. In the lives of the staretsy (such as St. Seraphim of Sarov), I discovered many practices, including the Jesus Prayer, the aim of which are to open the heart. Through spiritual direction, I found a way to encounter Christ and share the gifts of Christian faith. I have provided spiritual direction and Annotation 19 for those seeking ordination and for the laity.
My work as a clown and actor began in 1990. Acting, especially improvisational theatre and clowning, allowed me to meet each person anew in a creative setting. Old patterns of speech fell away; old habits of being. In acting, I saw a way to connect with the Self. In later life, ensemble development — learning how to create community and create in community — became a source of great joy and is a source of inspiration for community-development in faith settings.
In late 2013 and throughout 2014, I journeyed to New Zealand to study Rudolf Steiner’s Creative Speech: an art-form and a practice which encourages a relationship with the sounds of language and invites its practitioners to develop Rhythmical and Living Speech (capable of producing images in the senses of the speaker and hearer, moving away from abstractions and cliches that weigh down and leave the person and the human being out of the word today).
In 1996, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Hamilton employed me to develop a program in adult faith education. The program, which ran for eight years with 120 graduates, was a nine-month lay-formation process in which each candidate sought out and articulated their own call to ministry. This work gave me an opportunity to use my background as a teacher and develop professionally as a facilitator of groups and of collaborative learning communities. These communities were, as I learned, a foundation for discipleship communities — groups of men and women committed to learning the ways of Christ.
In the late-2000s, I started working with young families and began my own home-schooling consulting business. In CareGroups, I helped parents behold the gift of their children. The design of home-routines and rhythms that nurtured children’s well-being was a central feature of that business. I saw it as Making Space for the sacred. I saw how these skills would help with spiritual direction.
As a young child, I rejoiced in the gifts of music and visual art. These practices open portals onto the soul. I received training as an arts-guide (the use of visual art to explore Biography) and as a visual artist. I continue to work as a musician, playing piano and singing (some of this in ancient Irish sean nos style) as well as employing music in liturgies, at retreats, and on pilgrimages.
In the 2010s, I worked for several years in the local food movement and with biodynamic agriculture. My partner and I farmed our land using biodynamic methods and I taught several nine-session courses in biodynamics. In biodynamics, the farm is to be viewed as whole living organism. The Church is also One Body. Biodynamics taught me a great deal about what it meant to be in community.
My work with young children expanded specifically into providing empowering, loving and expressive environments for children with Special Needs. I trained to work with children on the Autism Spectrum, and also developed and animated programming for Kingston Mosaic and volunteered with H’art School for Smiles (also in Kingston).
In the late 2010s, I was drawn to contemporary leadership theory and the hope that we might truly attend and listen to all voices in our communities. The promise of the Christian path is that each person is a member of the Body of Christ and that each are dependent upon the other. For the true work of the Holy Spirit to manifest, our communities need to be places of equity, diversity and inclusion so that genuine voice and giftedness might emerge. In the MA in Transformative Leadership and Spirituality program at St. Paul’s University, I am learning how to engage and involve all members of a community to realize a vision of a more just and inclusive world.
Theology has been a mainstay of my life since my teenage years when I remember walking home from the school bus stop reflecting on the origin of Evil. I have sought out a theology that was Christianity’s before schism and imperial decrees: Patristic theologians, Mothers and Fathers of the Desert. I found much resonance with the Russian theology of the early twentieth-century: its call to sobornost — a spiritual harmony based on freedom, genuine voice, and unity in love.