Impossible?!? The Winter Youth Conference 2013
During the festival of Epipha
ny, we speak of the star that guided the kings as it was entering into the earthly sphere to take on a sunlike presence on earth, to guide humanity to renewal and healing. We can also call that star the incarnation of the Christ into humanity.
Spending a few days twice a year with a small group of teenagers at one of our youth conferences, it is possible to perceive the drama of this incarnation, the utter necessity and longing which the human being perceives in the soul to find that star—and a longing to summon the courage to align oneself with this true guiding star of one’s life—a great challenge, particularly amidst all the bright twinkling lights which shine along our way… We can be left asking: but which one is the right one?
Our theme each year at the Winter Conference, now fairly well anchored on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday weekend, always has to do with looking at how Dr. King followed the star that he perceived…and how it led him to great sacrifices for the healing of a broken humanity.
We also asked a question this year in our title for the conference: Impossible?!? What is it that makes something impossible possible? How do we overcome the obstacles of our lives to be able to do that which we are called to do, to become that which we are called to become? Read more
From time immemorial the stars have been, literally, a guiding light for mankind. In the dark nights of ancient times people lifted their gaze to the starry heavens: to navigate their way through the world, to know when to sow their crops, to receive guidance in making critical decisions. The world of the stars and the world of humanity were united in a symbiosis of which our times can only dream. The starry heavens, once the focal point of mankind’s relationship to the spiritual world, has been degraded to an object of pure science, functioning at best as a subject for sentimental art or religious metaphor. 
In artistic renderings of angels, three characteristics are frequently pictured. The first is of course that angels have wings. When we think of the earthly creatures that have wings, the birds, we realize that they inhabit a sphere above the earth, the airy regions. They live in a world of light and uplift not limited by earthly gravity. Picturing angels as having wings is an artistic way of saying that angels, too, are not bound to the earthly. They are limitless; they live in expanses. They live with the world of eternity at their backs.