July 31 – Aug 3, 2023

Monday 5pm – Thursday 1pm
Residential Retreat, at St. Andrew’s House
Hood Canal, Union, WA.

We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. [One] who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. —Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love, 1963

It’s hard to love in our splintered and tragic times. This retreat will offer a life-giving paradigm of forgiveness that aims to set people free of hurt and bitterness within themselves, toward others, and in efforts toward social change.

• How might forgiveness as release into the Spirit free you to act in love?
• What spiritual practices nurture your capacity to forgive? How do they help you discern through motivations, strong feelings, and woundedness?
• How could you strengthen the inner muscles of trust and willingness that make forgiveness possible?
• How do your images of the Divine support or hinder your capacity to forgive?
• What might forgiveness offer your social activism?

Normal relational tangles, group divisiveness, and our society’s historical wrongs call out for transformation. The essential experience of forgiveness as release into the Spirit liberates and prepares us to be guided by Love to help heal and transform relationships, groups and faith communities, and the wider culture. On retreat we’ll engage spiritual exercises, prayer, and contemplative sharing to grow in our capacity to forgive. Content will be based on the author’s Pendle Hill Pamphlet by the same title (2023).

Facilitated by Christine Betz Hall—a Quaker educator, retreat leader, blogger, and spiritual director/companion. She founded and facilitates Way of the Spirit, an ecumenical program for learning, prayer, and faithful action from the wisdom of the Quaker tradition. For over a decade, Way of the Spirit participants have experienced how forgiveness sets them free to bring wholeheartedness and fresh energy to their unique faithfulness. Chris also served for eight years as adjunct faculty with Seattle University’s multi-denominational School of Theology and Ministry.

• Fee for three nights, meals, and program, $775 through Good News Associates.
• Now accepting applications online through link at right.

New Pendle Hill Pamphlet

March 27, 2023

This is a first, folks! With humble gratitude, I’m happy to share that I, Chris Hall, am now the author of a Pendle Hill Pamphlet: Forgiveness: Freed to Love. Since 1934, this respected organization has published short, substantive writings by some amazing Quaker voices. I’m honored to join the list. 

The forgiveness essay is based on a plenary talk offered to a NW regional Quaker gathering in April 2022. More than ten years of working with Way of the Spirit groups and guest presenters helped bring the message into focus.

My hope is to help reclaim the authentic inner experience of forgiveness, rather than survey theory or theology. So in the pamphlet, you’ll encounter spacious language, queries for reflection, and many suggested exercises. Several personal stories illustrate how forgiveness works with me—forgiving myself, forgiving a family member through the culture wars, and in big personal stretching about my own settler-colonial ancestry. 

Now… I wonder what God will do with this out in the world? Please join my prayers that it falls into the hands, and touches the hearts, that the Holy One dreams for it. Thank you.

If you want your own copy, access Pendle Hill publications through the image below.