Becoming Love
by Jasmine Bellamy
Stillpoint Executive Director
“Despite my devotion to Mystery, I have grown certain of Love.”
—Drew Jackson
There’s a quote I encountered in seminary from Clemens Sedmak that reminds us theology is an invitation to wake up.
And if God is Love, then the study of God—the practice of Love—is also an invitation to awaken:
from numbness,
from fear,
from disconnection,
into deeper aliveness.
This is not a practice of arrival.
It is an ongoing practice of becoming—of growing our capacity to love and to receive Love.
Not to escape the world, but to learn how to live within it more faithfully.
As Fr. Mark Bozzuti-Jones reminds us:
“Without contemplation the dying of our spirit will continue to go unchecked.”
And in a 1996 conversation between bell hooks and John Perry Barlow, hooks observed:
“There is always something trying to pull us back into sleep.”
Perhaps that is why contemplation—and the practice of love—becomes an invitation to awaken.
Love is not merely something we feel.
Love is a way of being formed.
It was such a delight that so many of you joined us for our first Contemplative Gathering, The Practice of Love. Your presence confirmed something we know deeply to be true: love is not an individual pursuit. It is a communal practice.
We hoped to create a space that invited us all to slow down, listen deeply, and explore what it means to live and lead from love amid the ordinariness and complexity of everyday life.
As I re-read The Human Condition by Thomas Keating this past week, I was struck again by his invitation “to become the word of God and to manifest God rather than the false self,” along with this startling insight:
“If we have not experienced ourselves as unconditional love, we have more work to do, because that is who we really are.”
This is one of the paradoxes of the contemplative life: we are becoming love through practice even as love is who we most deeply are.
In a world shaped by noise, fragmentation, urgency, and fear, contemplative practice gently returns us to what is most true.
This is why we practice.
What we practice, we become.
A Year-End Invitation
As we continue cultivating contemplative spaces rooted in love, belonging, healing, and spiritual formation, we are deeply grateful for your companionship along the journey.
Your support helps make possible:
contemplative gatherings and retreats,
formation for spiritual directors and leaders,
accessible spiritual companionship,
and the ongoing work of cultivating communities grounded in wholeness, courage, and love.
This year, your generosity will especially support the expansion of culturally grounded contemplative formation, leadership development, and spaces where people can encounter rest, healing, truthfulness, and beloved community.
If Stillpoint’s work has nourished or encouraged you this year, we invite you to partner with us through a year-end gift.
Together, we are helping create spaces where people may awaken more fully to Love—and become more loving in the world.
Looking Ahead
Cherished Belonging: The Healing Power of Love
A Stillpoint One-Day Retreat with Greg Boyle
June 27, 2026
Church of Our Saviour — San Gabriel, California
We are honored to welcome Fr. Greg Boyle of Homeboy Industries. Drawing from his work and his book Cherished Belonging, he will invite us into a deeper practice of kinship, healing, and the sacred truth that we belong to one another.
Fr. Boyle reminds us that people change when they are cherished—and that cherishing is love with its sleeves rolled up.
I hope you’ll consider reading Cherished Belonging with us as we prepare for the retreat.
A Contemplative Retreat on Love-Centered Leadership
Facilitator: Jasmine Bellamy, Executive Director of Stillpoint
What does it mean to lead from love in a world shaped by urgency, performance, and disconnection?
This contemplative retreat invites leaders into a deeper way of being and relating. Rooted in the wisdom of Howard Thurman, Thomas Keating, contemplative spirituality, and the emerging framework of The LOVING Leader, we will explore leadership as a practice of presence, truthfulness, discernment, and human flourishing.
Through silence, reflection, contemplative practice, and communal dialogue, participants will consider how love-centered leadership can transform the ways we lead ourselves, our relationships, and our communities.
The Heart and Soul Loving Leadership
September 22–24, 2026
Trinity Retreat Center, West Cornwall, Connecticut
More Loving in My Heart
May these words inspire you for the journey ahead.
“Deep within me, I want to be more loving—to glow with a warmth that will take the chill off the room which I share with those whose lives touch mine in the traffic of my goings and comings.”
“I want to be more loving in my heart.”
— Howard Thurman
Blessings,
Jasmine Bellamy
Executive Director, Stillpoint: The Center for Christian Spirituality
Jasmine Bellamy is the Executive Director of Stillpoint: The Center for Christian Spirituality and the founder of Love 101 Ministries and The LOVING Leader. A spiritual director and contemplative preacher, she is a doctoral candidate at Fuller Seminary, where her research centers on how love forms the inner life of leadership. She is a graduate of Stillpoint’s BIPOC Spiritual Journey Program and received her Certificate in Spiritual Direction through Liberated Together. Through her work, Jasmine integrates contemplative practice, spiritual formation, and leadership development to support individuals and communities in living and leading from love as a daily practice.