Formation for Creating Space
Creating Space experiences are both prepared and held.
Someone has prayerfully received and shaped the experience before it begins. Someone holds the people and the gathering as it unfolds. Sometimes these are the same person. Often they are not.
These are different responsibilities, but they serve the same purpose: to prepare a contemplative space in which another person can pray without being told what that prayer must become.
The creator prepares the whole experience.
The Core Contemplative Experience carries its interior contemplative movement.
The facilitator carries the people and the gathering through the prepared experience.
The participant remains free within it.
Holding the Experience
The work of the facilitator
A Creating Space facilitator does not need to create the prayer experience while leading it.
The experience has already been prepared. The facilitator’s work is more human and immediate: welcoming people, tending the room, providing clear transitions, protecting silence, holding the conditions for reflection and sharing, and remaining attentive to the people who have gathered.
During the Core Contemplative Experience, the facilitator can step back. The CCE carries the interior movement.
This requires its own kind of formation. A facilitator learns when to speak and when not to speak, how to listen without interpreting another person’s experience, how to protect freedom within sharing, and how to trust an experience without trying to improve it while it is happening.
The facilitator carries the people, the room, the sharing, and the transitions surrounding the contemplative experience.
Facilitator’s Guide
The Creating Space Facilitator’s Guide prepares someone to hold a Creating Space gathering with clarity, hospitality, restraint, and trust.
Resource coming as Creating Space production is completed.
Preparing the Experience
The work of the creator
Creating a contemplative experience begins before writing.
It begins with receiving.
A story, a passage of Scripture, a question, an experience, or something noticed in prayer may remain with the creator. The first task is not to turn it into content, but to stay with it long enough to discover whether there is an experience here to be created.
From there, the creator begins discerning a doorway: where might another person enter without being required to arrive at the creator’s conclusion?
Witness, Scripture, prayer, questions, silence, pacing, reflection, sharing, and sending can then take their places within a larger movement. Not every experience uses them in the same way. The structure serves the prayer rather than becoming a formula.
Creating continues through praying the experience, testing it, producing it in the form in which it will actually be received, listening again, and eventually entrusting it to someone else.
And finally, the creator releases it.
The participant’s experience does not belong to the creator.
The Contemplative Work of Creating
Creating Space: The Contemplative Work of Creating is a formation resource for those interested in the prayerful work of creating contemplative experiences.
Its movement is simple:
RECEIVE → CREATE → RELEASE
Resource coming as Creating Space production is completed.
Two Roles. One Experience.
The creator does not need to be present to explain what the experience is supposed to mean.
The facilitator does not need to become the creator once the gathering begins.
The experience should be sufficiently prepared to be entrusted. The facilitator should be sufficiently prepared to receive that trust.
And neither one possesses what happens within the participant.
That is part of what it means to create space.