Wild Goose Festival - A Spirit of Life Revival

Awake my soul! I'm back from the inaugural Wild Goose Festival in Shakori Hills, North Carolina and feel like I've been restored and refreshed at a good old fashioned tent revival - granted, the kind of tent revival that includes a parody of tent revivals... but we'll get to that later. Overall, I had the most amazing time and got to hear (and even talk to!) some of my all-star favorite religious thought leaders, both known and previously unkown to me, including: Brian McLaren, Phyllis Tickle, Shane Claiborne, the Darkwood Brew team, Nadia Bolz-Weber, Diana Butler-Bass, James Forbes, Paul Knitter, Richard Rohr, Jim Wallis, David Bazan, Jay Bakker and Frank Shaeffer. That's some damn-good Christian name dropping.

Over the course of three days, two campfires and one unquenchable thirst to experience as much as I could, I was able to: get career advice from Jim Wallis, talk with Brian McLaren about Unitarian Universalism, sing all my favorite hymns at top volume with beer, listen to the story of Genesis told in the oral tradition, witness an unplanned snake handling by a brave woman, take communion while singing bluegrass folk songs, meet more people living in "community" than I ever knew lived in "community," cry at everything that came out of Shane Claiborne's mouth, laugh uproariously at everything that came out of Jay Bakker's mouth, appreciate Buddhism in a whole new way, participate in a quacky tent revival as if it were 1911, lose all sense of time in contemplative prayer and ::inhale:: be baptized by a tatted Lutheran. Only 364 days until next year!

In the midst of all the busyness and excitement I started hearing two central messages rise above the din as if the festival were making a point to me - here's what I heard:

1. We are entering the epoch of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Life. Phyllis Tickle made the point most explicitly - painting the picture that there was the time of the Father that we see most clearly in our liturgical traditions like Catholicism, Anglicanism and Lutheranism; the time of the Son which came about in more modern forms of Protestantism such as Baptistist and Pentecostal traditions, but now -  with our postmodern appetites, our multicultural and multifaith societies - now is the time for the Holy Spirit. The festival itself is named for a Celtic metaphor for the Holy Spirit - and we were all chasing the wild goose this weekend. The implications for this are huge and it will take more time to unpack them.

2. New Monasticism is big... really big. I volunteer weekly at a Catholic Worker house but even I was unprepared to how many young Christians are living in community - or looking to live in community - these days. And not all of it is as radical as it sounds, I learned that there are many ways to live in community, some of which look like being in really intense small groups while others are the sell all your possessions and live next to crack dens kind. All of it life-giving and all of it walking the talk of Christian discipleship. I realized, personally, just how much I need to find accountable and transformational community in Atlanta.

Those are my initial take-aways. I'm still processing and reveling in all I learned and experienced. I look forward to your thought and reflections on the Wild Goose Festival and the future of Christianity - whether you attending the festival or not! What do you think? Is this the time of the Spirit?

Check out other bloggers reactions to the Wild Goose:

• Lee Smith - Goose Bumps: Opportunities Everywhere for Offense. A Fair and Objective Review
• Ryan Hines – 30 Years Later – “Controversy” at Wild Goose
• Karyn Wiseman – Flying With the Goose
• Kyla Cofer – I went to the Wild Goose Fest and came back in love
• Brian Gerald Murphy – Born Again (Again) at Wild Goose
• Chris Lenshyn – Chasing the Wild Goose
• Cherie at Renaissance Garden – Wild Goose Return
• Deborah Wise – Wild Goose Chasing
• Custodianseed – “every day they eat boiled goose”
• Will Norman – Back from the Wild Goose Fest
• Martin at Exiles in NY – Greenbelt and the Wild Goose
• Kerri at Practicing Contemplative – Waterfowl in My Life
• Allison Leigh Lilley – Chasing the Wild Goose and Catching the Wild Goose: Thanks and First Thoughts and A Pagan Goes To The Wild Goose – Part One
• Abbie Waters – Jessica: A Fable
• Steve Knight – Why Wild Goose Festival Was So Magical
• Tammy Carter – Visual Acuity and Flying
• Michelle Thorburg Hammond – I heart Jay Bakker and Peter Rollins
• Matthew Bolz-Weber – Remembering Wild Goose
• Paul Fromberg – Celebrating Interdependence Day
• David Zimmerman – Wild Goose Festival: A Recap
• Unfinished Symphony – Wild Goose Reflections – Part 1, Wild Goose Reflections – Part 2 Making Art Collages, Wild Goose Reflections – Part 3 Photoblogging, and Wild Goose Reflections – Part 4 The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
• Dan Brennan – U2, the Wild Goose, and Deep Freedom
• Mike Croghan – The Wild Goose is Not Safe
• John Martinez – The Table
• Callid Keefe-Perry – Gatekeeping the Goose
• Eric Elnes – The Inaugural Wild Goose Festival: Recovering Something Lost
• Shay Kearns – The Power of a T-Shirt, Apologizing to Over the Rhine, andPublic vs. Private (Part One)
• Glen Reteif – Duck Duck Goose
• Peterson Toscano – I’ve Been Goosed, What I Carried Into Wild Goose, and What I Blurted Out at Wild Goose
• Seth Donovan – About More than “The Gays”
• Exiles in New York – Greenbelt and the Wild Goose
• Tammy Carter – Visual Acuity and Flying
• TSmith – What I’ll Take From Wild Goose
• Dale Lature – Wild Goose Reflection
• Steve Hayes – Wild Goose Chase?
• Minnow – Grace Response
• Christine Sine – Encounters With A Thin Space
• Jeremy Myers – Giving Up the Wild Goose Chase
• Robert – Thoughts On the Inaugural Wild Goose
• Anna Woofenden – Slippery Slope Reflections
• Wendy McCaig – Loosing The Goose
• Joey Wahoo – Into The Wild
• Rachel Swan – goosed
• Patricia Burlison – I Called Life
• Jason Hess – While At the Goose
• The Bec Cranford – Wild Goose
• Anthony Ehrhardt – Chasing The Wild Goose on Independence Day
• Joel DeVyldere – So Lost at Last-(In the Woods)
• MK Anderson – Listening To The Wild Goose
• Jamie Arpin-Ricci – Wild Goose Fest
• Unfinished Symphony – #5 – The Last Post … for a while