The HeritageWork 2024
Greetings dear friends & sustaining partners for the HeritageWork:
As our 24th year is beginning, Sarah and I are grateful for how you 'see' us in our full-time unconventional work--- inspired by the gifts and vision of Anne Jeffs Harrison (1959-2001). Thank you for your belief in this work!
Our vocation: To make pastoral care, spiritual direction, marriage re-vision, healing, community and friendship available through organically-formed relationships, winsome invitation, and welcoming hospitality to neighbors and strangers--- outside traditional structures, but awake to the wily uncontained Spirit of Christ dwelling in & around us.
A new extension of our work is brewing-- yes! A mountain property of 35 acres has come to our attention in the last month, and we are diligently working to see if it can be a reality where we could host people for inspiration, contemplation & awe, retreats, spiritual direction, gatherings, solace, setting tables, personal re-creation of soul, hiking, fishing, and really, options are endless. We say extension because we will be maintaining a Centennial dwelling as well.
To Support our Work
Consider a monthly or one-time donation (we have $10/mo donors!).
Or a modest 'cost of living' increase of your recurring monthly gift perhaps.
If you are a recurring monthly donor, it automatically continues in 2025.
This work has been made 100% possible by individual partners for 23 years.
I submit my work and life to an advisory board.
This project is administered by a longstanding (since 1989) non-profit, tax-exempt public charitable foundation, New Horizons Foundation, operating strictly under state and federal laws.
photos from our 2024 adventures and family updates
The photo group below is in memory of our beloved Marilyn “grammare” Harrison who left us last March. Holding baby Rita Jane, her last day on earth (unexpectedly became fully lucid for that one day!), family gathering at her favorite bench in a private memorial, and time with her in the home she loved so much.
(below) Gavin & Hannah Cassidy will be wed this Spring! Winston lives in Dallas and continues to flourish as a videographer in Pro Rodeo; Haley & John Drinkwater have moved to Denver :) And ... Dylan, Katelyn, Jude, Geanna, and Rita are expecting baby Harrison #4 !!!
(below) Airstream adventures and visits from friends
(below) moments of hospitality and setting tables; the last 2 pics are the 528 ft table in Civic Center Park downtown Denver.
(below) Grandkids! Jude, Geanna, 3, Rita Jane, almost 2. and uncle Doug adores them!
thoughts I've collected this week on the mystery of incarnation
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not cling to equality with God, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross. Phil.2:5–8
This brilliantly connects... as one movement, down, down, down into the enfleshment of creation, into humanity’s depths and sadness, and into a final identification with those at the very bottom (“took the form of a slave,” Philippians 2:7). Jesus represents God’s total solidarity with, and even love of, the human situation, as if to say, “nothing human is abhorrent to me.” God, if Jesus is right, has chosen to descend—in almost total counterpoint with our humanity that is always trying to climb, achieve, perform, and prove itself. --Richard Rohr
For us? what are small gestures toward an 'incarnational life'?
1. look for a way to 'empty’ ourselves, or lay aside our privileges.
2. look for Jesus in a relatively obscure, lonely, humble, marginalized encounter or situation. (He still comes this way).
3. what would a descending path of humility look like in your attitude? your life?
Dorothy Sayers says: “For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is—limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—He had the honesty and courage to take his own medicine. Whatever the game he is playing with His creation, He has kept his own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that he has not exacted from himself. He has himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When He was a man, He played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile.”
For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and the things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs. —George Eliott, quoted in Terence Malick’s film, A Hidden Life; 2019
What is the one treasure the church has? The incarnational presence of God-- to love God and love our neighbor. Go practice being the incarnational presence of God in the world. --Adele Calhoun
Don’t try to explain the Incarnation to me! It is further from being explainable than the furthest star in the furthest galaxy. It is love, God’s limitless love enfleshing that love into the form of a human being, Jesus, the Christ, fully human and fully divine. Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity, Christ, the Maker of the universe or perhaps many universes, willingly and lovingly leaving all that power and coming to this poor, sin-filled planet to live with us for a few years to show us what we ought to be and could be. Christ came to us as Jesus of Nazareth, wholly human and wholly divine, to show us what it means to be made in God’s image. --Madeleine L'Engle
The God imaged by Jesus exerts no dominating supremacy. In Christ, we see an image of a God who is not armed with lightning bolts but with basin and towel, who spewed not threats but good news for all, who rode not a warhorse but a donkey, weeping in compassion for people who do not know the way of peace; God is the supreme healer, the supreme friend, the supreme lover, the supreme life-giver who self-empties in gracious love for all. The king of kings and lord of lords is the servant of all and the friend of sinners. The so-called weakness and foolishness of God are greater than the so-called power and wisdom of human regimes. --B. McLaren
