My husband Bill Consiglio and I live as resident companions of The Community of the Holy Spirit at their Melrose Covent in Brewster, New York. The sisters at Bluestone Farm and Learning Center strive to live a life reflecting sustainable living, social justice, and spiritual fulfillment. Daily life involves organic farming, (maple sugaring, planting, tending, gathering and preserving food, raising chickens, ducks, and bees), as well as fellowship, "Eucharistic Living", service to others, and individual artistic pursuits. We chant the traditional monastic offices (Lauds, Noonday Prayers, Vespers, Compline), using inclusive language and an acknowledgment of how the “new cosmology” affects and informs our faith.
(See the sisters' website: http://chssisters.org) .
Bill works full time as the convent "handy-man." I tend the kitchen garden and grow and arrange flowers for chapel. I serve as priest for the sisters, and chaplain to the Melrose School which the sisters founded in 1963.
In addition to writing, I lead retreats and workshops throughout the United States. Before coming to Bluestone Farm I served the Episcopal church as a parish priest, a children’s priest, a Christian Education consultant, columnist on children's spirituality and as a college (Vassar) and university (Cornell) chaplain. I’ve raised four children who are now grown.
My interest in mystical theology began at the age of twenty-two when I read the Autobiography of Teresa of Avila. I'm interested in questions about how people "learn" to discern layers of consciousness of the Holy. And I'm particularly fascinated by the unending mystery of prayer itself.
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| Praying the Hours
When Suzanne Guthrie moves into a new house, she is forced to reposition her prayer life in the new space and rediscover in her new routines the steady rhythm of God's time that has governed her life. She brings us along with her as she does this in her new book, which is both a series of reflections on change and persistence in the life of faith and a guide to prayer as an activity that belongs in daily life... Woven into this appealing book are meditations on the traditional monastic hours of prayer, which Guthrie uses as an internal clock to call her to prayer throughout the day... Her message is simple and effective: all of life is suffused with the glory of God. - Kenneth Arnold
ORDER HERE from Rowman & Littlefield
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Grace's Window
In this popular book first published in 1996, Suzanne Guthrie teaches us about the seasons of prayer by letting us enter her own in these forty meditations stretching from Advent through Pentecost. “Pray as you are drawn to pray,” she tells us, not as someone has told you how to pray.
Against the landscape of northern California, the author gently leads us through the ancient ways of purgative, illumative, and unitive ways of prayer, learning to see the extraordinary reality of God in the ordinary – the dry grass and circling hawks, raging firestorms in summer and the heavy winter rains. - Church Publishing
Order from Church Publishing HERE
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| Scenes from our life on the farm |
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