The Contemplative Gaze

04/19/2026

Excited to be one of the team teachers at this event today. Great work being done in Mamaroneck/Larchmont.

05/18/2022

Some lovely images from last Sunday at the Church of the Incarnation. Thanks to Adrian Dannhauser for the photos. We had a lovely session of looking and talking about art together. So much history about the parish comes out when we do this work. God bless our parish historians, who guard the institutional memories for us. And I promise I did not spend the whole time pointing! Adrian was just good at capturing those moments.

05/15/2022

A beautiful morning worshipping and then running the adult forum after the service at Church of the Incarnation. We spent an hour exploring this gorgeous window from the Henry Holiday Company in London, as well as the altar and reredos.

05/08/2022

Excited to join the congregation at Church of the Incarnation this coming Sunday May 15th for a Contemplative Gaze session. We will start at 12:30. See info below. Incarnation is on Madison Avenue between 35 and 36th streets.

05/02/2022

Lovely session yesterday morning for the adult forum at St Luke’s in Darien, Ct. Quite fascinating to conduct the session remotely while the participants were live in the room! We looked at illustrations of the gospel passage for the day John 21: 1-15. Fascinating to see how our thoughts about the story change as we see different artistic renderings. Medieval image by William de Brailes (13th C English). Contemporary image by John Reilly (English artist who died in 2010).

01/24/2022

The Episcopal New Yorker article about The Contemplative Gaze:

How can the art in our sacred spaces help us experience what it means to be part of a Beloved Community? This summer and fall, as many of us have cautiously returned to worship in our churches, we are once again experiencing the joy not only of being present with each other, but of being…

03/11/2021

Such a joy to be at Heavenly Rest last weekend as part of their Lenten prayer forum series. Thanks again to Matt Heyd for inviting me. Blessings abound! The link is here: https://vimeo.com/520599238

03/04/2021

Looking forward to discussing art and prayer with Matt Heyd as part of the Heavenly Rest Lenten prayer forum series this coming Sunday, March 7th, at 9:30 AM. Email [email protected] for details on how to register.

03/08/2020

Some of the beautiful images we used for Contemplative Gazing earlier this week at Holy Cross Monastery. Blessings on the new deacons, ordained today!

03/04/2020

Many thanks to Your Auntie Dasch for this beautiful write up about our session at St Luke in the Fields last Saturday. I added an image below and thanks to Vince Chiumento for the image.

Our sanctuary is so exquisitely beautiful in all its simplicity, and not just because of those who fill the pews, but because of the LIGHT ! O, the light that comes through the windows ! the LIGHT ! the different colours and strengths of light as it travels by each window throughout the calendar year. the LIGHT ! the light as it kisses the flowers about the altar, as it lands on loved ones, sifts through the smoke from our incense, that smoke which symbolizes our prayers rising before God.

During The Contemplative Gaze yesterday I realized how many hours I've spent on the altar as thurifer. During The Great Thanksgiving, the thurifer centers herself on the columbarium side of the altar, lined up in the Chihuly window behind the pulpit on the Epistle Side. The design of that famed window echos the other windows, but its center panels are no longer a not-quite-solid-mliky-undulating glass, but ones of different colors and patterns.

Mother Posey leading us (gorgeously, of course), remarked that the swirls around the perimeter of the window reminded her of The Galaxy, and I shared that I always feel like those are the eyes of the souls of all who have gone before us ... you know, the spirits of every person who has ever been a part of that sanctuary is everywhere you look, whether that person has passed on to That Heavenly Country, or whether they're in the Columbarium or if they're just living in West Virginia ... once you've been among us, you remain there in the eye of our heart.

I remembered when my husband and I went to the natural history museum the summer of 2019. We watched THE DARK UNIVERSE in the planetarium and they told us:

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Our troubles are big because our hands are small. If we can let go of our troubles and give them back to the universe, the universe can help us by swallowing them up, and letting us see that we're big after all, and the universe is in us, and surrounds us, and wants us to be well. Selah. xoxo

your Auntie Dasch. Quote from The Dark Universe, Planetarium, AMNH --> https://youtu.be/pOxG4aSQOO8 ~ photo by Vince Chiumento‎, October 26, 2016

DARK UNIVERSE, the new Hayden Planetarium Space Show premiering November 2, 2013, at the American Museum of Natural History, is produced by an acclaimed team...