Cultivating the Practice of Resurrection in Place
As the tale is told…
What would it mean to leave behind the distanced, the hectic, and the exploitative, to strike out into the mysterious, dark wood you adventured in years ago; to gather around a fire and attend like a child to a story whose light refreshes the world; to pray with one another as if life actually depended on it; to be in solitude among the hills, trees, barred owls, and rivers of our home; to work the land in love and to share a meal grown from local soil; to see once more with the deep eyes of the heart the God who is here with us, who washes the world and our neighbors in holy splendor?
To love as if resurrection were real and right here?
What is The Kingfisher Fellowship?
The Kingfisher Fellowship is one fellowship with various expressions, cultivating placed, resurrection life in communion with Christ, our neighbors, and the created world here in Rome, Georgia.
We are a refuge set apart yet moving through our town and countryside, a fellowship to inflame a holy imagination, contemplate the risen Christ with trustful attention, and practice the love of God and neighbor among our three rivers and seven hills.
Our Liturgies of Place
Liturgies of Imagination
Stories and literature that help us see afresh. The creation of placed art. Holy discussion about the things that matter. The cultivation of an attentive, listening heart. Loving, embodied, neighborly work.
We live according to that which we find meaningful, and meaning flowers from imagination—from what we perceive as real, the story in which we believe we live. We stoke the fire of imagination as the catalyst for a life of love. In one sense, we cultivate reenchantment. In another sense, we cultivate waking up, to see again with the eyes of the heart.
Liturgies of Contemplation
Solitude and prayer. Mentorship focused on the heart. A dedication to the denial of self and a life lived in faith, hope, and love. An attentive focus on the risen Christ, who is the heart of all we do.
Resurrection life is contemplative. Within the Christian tradition, that life is one of quietness, trust, attention, and fixed focus on Immanuel. Such a life is not chaotic, self-reliant, distracted, or disincarnate. We walk the path laid out by ancient words: “In returning and rest you shall be saved. In quietness and in trust is your strength.”
Liturgies of Love
The fostering of deep friendship, neighborliness. and hospitality. The practice of sacrifice, service, honesty, and humility. The stewardship of the creation as an art of vocation, neighborliness, and worship.
Resurrection life is, above all, a life of love. The resurrected, highest fruition of our fellowship, one borne of imagination, quietness, trust, and attention, is not mere knowledge but the fulfillment of the two great commands: a love of God and neighbor here in place.
“To preserve our places and to be at home in them, it is necessary to fill them with imagination. To imagine as well as see what is in them. Not to fill them with the junk of fantasy and unconsciousness, for that is no more than the industrial economy would do, but to see them first clearly with the eyes, and then to see them with the imagination in their sanctity, as belonging to the Creation. To imagine the place as it is, and was, and—only then—as it will or may be. To imagine its human life only in harmony with its nonhuman life—as one, only one, of its possibilities. In that imagining, perhaps we may begin to see it in its sacredness, as unimaginable gift, as mystery—as it was, is, and ever shall be, world without end.”
—Wendell Berry, “Notes: Unspecializing Poetry”
