What do we do when our spiritual journey takes us beyond the bounds of the belief system in which we grew up? How do we navigate the conflicts we feel between our loyalty to the tradition we inherited and the inner promptings calling us to explore new realms? Almost all religions teach some form of the message “You must be born again.” Does this mean there comes a time in our spiritual journey when we must have the courage to 'let go of the old' in order to open to new life awaiting us?

Join us on June 2 as artist, writer, teacher and former pastor, Patricia Pearce, shares her spiritual odyssey. Raised in the Christian church, her path turned toward ministry while she was serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Andes of Ecuador. After completing seminary she served as a pastor in Presbyterian and UCC congregations for 17 years, a vocation she deeply loved. Yet, after the death of a close friend in 2001, her spiritual journey took a dramatic turn. Resolving to open herself to deeper dimensions of her existence, she soon found herself in a vortex of dreams, synchronicities, and insights that precipitated a spiritual awakening—shattering her worldview and exposing the fallacy of the ego and the very idea of separateness. Faced with these discoveries, she struggled to remain in her pastoral role within a religion that she now realized had been shaped by the very ego consciousness that Jesus had transcended and called others to move beyond. As she writes in the introduction to her memoir, “When Christianity makes Jesus the point, it misses Jesus's point.” Patricia left parish ministry in 2010 to embark on a vocation of writing, speaking and teaching. She has authored two books: No One in I Land: A Parable of Awakening and Beyond Jesus: My Spiritual Odyssey.