Desert Foundation.Org

August 2008
Join Tessa Bielecki in September in Hamburg, Germany or Fort Collins, Colorado. Or find out about her pilgrimage to Ireland in May 2009.

March 2008
Easter greetings from the Desert Foundation! Enjoy artist Deborah Dyer's vision of an ancient Easter hymn.

If you wish to observe present conditions in Israel and Palestine firsthand, join friends of Sabeel–Colorado June 14-28, 2008 for Seeking Understanding in Israel/Palestine: A Two-Week Fact-Finding Trip.

The Desert Foundation’s Fr. Dave Denny and Tessa Bielecki participated in Sabeel’s 2007 trip. We experienced the heroism of Israeli and Palestinian peacemakers and developed a deep bond with our fellow voyagers. Read Tessa Bielecki’s account of the trip, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem …” and share her experience of the meaning of the trip and the human encounters that left her “profoundly changed.”
For more information on this year’s trip, please contact:
Joy Lapp at 303-494-2338, or email lappj@earthlink.net.

Join Desert Foundation co-founder Tessa Bielecki June 6-8 at Shambhala Mountain Center in Red Feather Lakes, Colorado for Walking the Tightrope: Navigating Life’s Tensions Creatively. Work and play, service and celebration, solitude and community—explore how to balance the polarities in our lives by looking at the lives of the Christian mystics. Visit Shambhala Mountain Center’s web site for more information.

February 2008
During the forty days of Lent Tessa Bielecki looks back on forty years of gardening and composting. It's a good time of year to ponder how compost "grows such sweet things," according to Walt Whitman, "out of such corruptions."

Fr. Dave Denny reviews Three Cups of Tea, the tale of an American mountaineer’s mission to promote peace through education in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

December 2007
View a special Egyptian Christmas greeting from the Desert Foundation.

During the winter months, many of us take time to look back at the previous year and forward to the next. Follow Tessa Bielecki through the four seasons as she ponders the meaning and beauty of “our outer landscape and inner soulscape.”

Fr. Dave Denny welcomes you to his hermitage and reflects on the Abrahamic art that surrounds him in the Tent of Meeting. Our latest Walls and Bridges feature introduces Amal Elsana Alh'jooj, an Israeli Bedouin feminist developing partnerships in Israel between Jews and Muslims.

November 2007
One year after Muslim scholars criticized remarks about Islam Pope Benedict XVI made in September 2006, an even larger group of Muslim scholars has written an open letter, “A Common Word between Us and You” to Christian leaders throughout the world. See Fr. Dave Denny’s reflections on the current letter, which acknowledges that love of God and neighbor are central pillars of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

October 2007
As Halloween approaches, some American Christians question the appropriateness of the holiday. In her reflections on “The Jack-o’-Lantern and Jesus,” Tessa Bielecki encourages us to “celebrate the power of the risen Christ who overcame the devil and the power of evil, the power of fear and death.” The Jack-o’-Lantern glows, she declares, with the light of Christ.

September 2007
Join Tessa Bielecki for the 2nd Annual Celebration of Celtic Spirituality in La Veta, Colorado September 29th, 2007. Tessa will offer reflections on common themes in the Desert Fathers and Mothers and Ireland’s early Celtic Christians. Learn more about this autumn weekend celebration at the base of southern Colorado’s Huajatolla Moutains.

Fr. Dave Denny was honored as “artist of the month” by “Image Update” and Image Journal’s web site. “Father Dave demonstrates in his life and writing that a call to the desert is also a call to the world,” writes Image’s managing editor Mary Kenagy, “that an earnest seeking after God in silence and emptiness is the natural corollary to a profound, intimate love of the created order, and that beautiful work of human hands is not an impediment to the soul's stillness but a pathway to it.”

September 15 is the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows. One of Fr. Dave’s early poems is based on a fourteenth century devotion to the Sorrowful Mother. To aid your reflections on the feast, you may wish to read his poem, “The Seven Sorrows of Mary,” with art by Santa Fe santera Arlene Cisneros Sena.