This is a reflective and creative day drawing upon input from the course leader, images and poetry, and person-centred questions to make connections between life and faith.

We will explore how we inhabit the ‘callings’ to the different parts of our lives as women and how these interconnect with a vocation to leadership in the church.

Session 1: Calling to Locate
Explore our experience of moving and locating as we remember the special places in our lives, and how the experience of travelling can enable us to build a sense of being a pilgrim as we move through life.

Session 2: Calling to be Loved
Explore the power we have to love, through our friendships and family relationships, our own need to be loved and how this enables a desire to love a diversity of people.

Session 3: Calling to Embody
Recalibrating how we view the world, being at peace within our physical bodies, and how this calls us into a place of deep acceptance, a subject which affects women in particular.

Session 4: Calling to Reverence

Each session will begin by sharing reflections from Magdalen Smith’s recent book Reverence: A Priest’s Life of Holiness and Humanity to use as a blueprint/tool to reflect on the lives and vocations of participants.

The day will help those participating to discern where God might be calling them now and into the future in terms of who they are already but also who they might become.

About the Tutor
Magdalen Smith is Associate Priest in Moseley Parish in Birmingham and has been ordained for 28 years, working in many different contexts and roles including as the Diocesan Director of Ordinands for Chester Diocese. She has ministered in the countryside, in the city, on an outer estate, at a cathedral and in the suburbs.

She is the author of five books, the latest of which is Reverence: A Priest’s Life of Holiness and Humanity, a personal memoir but also a reflection on past and present priestly vocation, following on from her first book, Steel Angels: The personal qualities of a priest.

She has degrees in Theology and History of Art and her interest in the visual arts is woven into her theological reflection, as is her interest in films. She is also a spiritual director and has taken many retreats around the country over the years.