Earth Week Retreat: Rooted in Earth, Rising in Creativity!

Join Trinity St. Paul's United Church community as we explore our relationship with the Earth, honour our feelings about the climate crisis, nurture and renew our spirits, and get inspired for healing work in the world. The day will feature Work that Reconnects practices, singing in community, creative arts workshops, and a workshop about sabbath as gift.

Info: In this workshop, Amy Lister will introduce The Work That Reconnects (WTR) as a set of practices that help us to discover and experience our innate connection with each other and the healing powers of the web of life in support of moving through our sense of isolation, despair and overwhelm into personal and collective embodied resilience. Amy Lister weaves together her embodied knowing and being, as Work That Reconnects facilitator, leadership coach, art therapist, partner, parent and community builder, into her living practice. To learn more about Amy and the Work That Reconnects, please visit www.spiralcentre.ca

Info: BYO bagged lunch or eat out with fellow retreatants at one of the great local restaurants in the Annex.

Info: Feeling overwhelmed? World got you down? Reduce anxiety by using your hands to create a meaningful artwork! Join facilitator Marth Davis in this workshop, where participants will assemble their own unique diorama around issues of the climate and sustainability. How does the climate relate to our current challenges with housing, food security and technology? All materials provided. You'll receive a professional photograph of your diorama at the end of the workshop. Space is limited to 20 people working together in 10 pairs of 2. The event page will be updated to indicate when capacity has been reached.
Check out Martha’s work at greenscreenqueen.ca

Info: In this workshop we'll reflect on scriptural understandings of Sabbath, and explore ways we can bring Sabbath practices into our daily life as a form of resistance to capitalist and colonial narratives. How can we embrace Sabbath as a gift for ourselves and our world? Emily Gordon is an ordained United Church minister following a call to support ministers, communities of faith, and individuals explore what it means to live faithfully in a time of climate crisis. Emily is the founder of burningbush eco-ministry and is currently the minister at Bathurst United Church. Find out more at, youtube.com/@burningbushecoministry and bathurstunited.ca.

Info: Popular theatre is a participatory, accessible form of performance. It emphasizes community engagement and is rooted in social activism. In this fun, low pressure theatre workshop Thomas Mckechnie will guide participants to express their creativity together exploring intersecting themes of climate and social justice. Thomas McKechnie is a playwright, organizer and a candidate for ministry in the United Church of Canada. As a playwright, their work tends towards narratives of working class life and struggle as well as secular rituals for a modern world. Their work has been presented by independent and professional theatres in Toronto and on festival stages across the country. As an organizer, they have worked with workers and tenants unions as well as bringing artists into an intersectional climate justice movement.

Info: Experience the transforming power of singing together. Open up from the belly and the heart to the power of communal expression. Feel the movement coming alive in your best self, changing the world and making harmony with neighbours and friends. Unfreeze and go, like they are doing in Minneapolis, under pressure: Open Your Heart. Hold On! Walk the Path of Peace. Pull ... to the Heart of Love. Alan Gasser is an experienced singer, professional chorister, conductor, and voice teacher. He has co-directed the Echo Women’s Choir (since 1993), and led countless choirs in Toronto over the past thirty years – working as College St United Church music director since 2021. Alan has sung Georgian folk music since 1985, with the Kartuli Ensemble, besides founding the Trio Kavkasia and the ensemble Darbazi. He worked with Village Harmony for many years in Vermont, and founded Worldsongs (in Canada) in 2005, as well as the hospice choir Singing Through Life (2015).

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Trinity-St. Paul's United Church and Centre for Faith, Justice and the Arts, 427 Bloor Street West, Toronto, Canada

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