Make Jesus the Center of Your Family’s Year The time-honored traditions of the liturgical calendar guide Christians through a year-long meditation on the life of Christ. Beyond just Christmas and Easter, each season of the church year offers special opportunities to remember and celebrate the work of God. In Sacred Seasons, Danielle Hitchen helps you incorporate the rhythms and rituals of this ancient Christian discipline into your everyday family life. Part theology, part church history, and part practical spirituality, Sacred Seasons provides an easy-to-use guide to observing the liturgical year complete with fun activities, delicious recipes, and meaningful liturgies. Grow your family’s faith in tangible ways as you experience the meaning and joy of each sacred season together.

Seasons of the Sacred weaves together poems, images, and stories of Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter, reconnecting us to our roots in the cycles of nature and our own soul. As our world appears more and more out of balance, our destruction of the natural world increasing, there is a vital need to remember what is essential, simple, and sacred. Likening Spring to falling in love, Summer with abundance and spiritual awakening, and Autumn with fruition and wisdom, this book continuously reflects the profound resonance of humanity within nature. Never more relevant than now, the chapter on Winter helps the reader remember what is most essential, showing how there is meaning and even peace amidst the most devastating losses, and how all life belongs to these deeper patterns of change. The book draws from such a variety of sources, such as Rumi, Hafiz, Lao Tzu, Rabia, Julian of Norwich, T.S. Eliot, and others. Each chapter opens with a unique woodcut or engraving image, further illustrating the beauty of our seasons. Vaughan-Lee adeptly connects the reader to the deepest envisioning of contemporary challenges. Climate catastrophe, refugees, cultural degradation, and political divisiveness are all contextualized within natural cycles of birth, loss, and transition, and the reader is guided to listen through the fear and anxiety of our age to the deeper ground of belonging that calls from even the most destitute inner and outer landscapes. Seasons of the Sacred is Llewellyn Vaughn-Lee’s fifth contribution to his spiritual ecology series, which places the human story within the story of the Earth and compels the examination of attitudes, beliefs, and habits in relation to the ongoing desecration, ecological devastation—and potential restoration—of our common home. “Vaughan-Lee encourages reconnecting with the Earth in this heartfelt compilation of essays, poems, and illustrations…. Suitable for readers of all spiritual persuasions, Vaughan-Lee’s soothing observations will inspire a more mindful contemplation of Earth’s rhythms.” —Publishers Weekly “Seasons of the Sacred is a beckoning down into the simple rhythms of nature. With his guiding eloquence, Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee moves us into conversation with the sacred, calling our awareness to the concealed gifts of each season. Drawing on the ancient poetry of Rumi, Hafiz, Julian of Norwich, Wordsworth, and others, we can’t help but fall into step with the numinous found in ordinary life.” —Toko-pa Turner, author of Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home

"Kazuko Shiraishi's poems are outcries, meditations, exclamations of fierce energy and playfulness. It is a joy to hear from a Japanese sister of such breadth and bravery." --Anne Waldman

Cliff Seruntine describes his family's adventures living on a secluded homestead in Nova Scotia.

Nurture your best self throughout the year with this enchanted guide to living in alignment with nature's cycles from a Sunday Times bestselling author. Before clocks, seasons were the original calendar that cultures would use to survive and thrive! The essential magic of the natural world is available to us all, if we are open to living back in alignment with nature's flow. And experiencing this meaningful shift doesn’t require a huge life overhaul—simple little daily changes and rituals honoring the turn of the seasons will make a huge difference in how we lead our lives. In Sacred Seasons bestselling author and moon mentor Kirsty Gallagher teaches us to embrace these moments of pause and ritual with nature. From solstices and equinoxes to festivals (Litha, Samhain, Imbolc) and the signature energies of each season, readers will learn to tap into the rhythms of the world to unlock the best within themselves. Organized by season (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter), the chapters in this beautiful book offer opportunities for us to check in, catch up with ourselves, review our lives, make any necessary nature-inspired changes, and move forward into a new season with renewed clarity, direction, inspiration, purpose, and motivation. Living in alignment with nature in this way ensures that we are constantly evolving, renewing, releasing and growing, just like nature does.

No one goes to the desert for forty days without expecting to find someone or something there. Christians, by their very nature, are seekers. We look for direction, we look for fulfillment, and we look for others who want to walk the road with us. We knock on the doors of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, seeking shelter and wisdom. Embracing the Sacred Season is a guide in this search, at the center of which we hope to find God. What happens when the door is opened, and we know that we are in the presence of God? These unique reflections for the entire seasons of both Lent and Easter, based on Scripture readings, are direct, and help us take an honest look at our relationship with God. Each is followed up by reflection questions and a prayer. Let Janis Yaekel take you on a spiritual dance with God, as you embrace the sacred season.

As we approach the hectic holiday season, many mamas find ourselves longing to add more meaning, resonance, and ritual to our family traditions. If you're looking to tone down the conspicuous consumption and turn your winter traditions from frenzy to reflection or from mundane to mystical, this book can be your guide. The Sacred Seasons incorporates activities and rituals from indigenous wisdom traditions and the Earth's holy days, based upon the Celtic wheel of the year. The Sacred Seasons is welcoming and inclusive to readers of all backgrounds, faiths, and beliefs. Parents and children awaken the wonder and magic of living more deeply connected to the natural rhythms of the seasons and co-create meaningful traditions on the holy days of winter solstice (Yule) in December, and the birth of spring (Imbolc) in February. Mamas steep in seasonal self-care, personal reflection and ceremony to attune the psyche to the elements and feminine archetypes of winter. As Mamas honor our bodies and the seasons as sacred, we awaken the true meaning of what is holy at this time of year, creating new family traditions that warm the heart and soul, as well as regenerate the Earth.