I’m Ann Keeler Evans, Priestess and Peacemaker, and you are welcome here!
Welcome, and thanks for dropping by today!
Peacemaking and Spirituality are serious pursuits. They can also be conduits for joy and fulfillment in everyday life. As Priestess and Peacemaker, I help you map a path while uplifting the world, uncover the delight and camaraderie in finding life’s meaning, as well as your place and purpose, as you become authentically and powerfully yourself. You deserve a joyous, practical, spiritual life, dedicated to Peacemaking, while living carefully yet abundantly on our Planet Earth.
It is a joy to be invited into communities to create ritual and meaning for people exactly where they live — across this wide country and deep in their souls.
A Prayer for Everyday
Out of the dark stillness
Light gathers, softening the sky.
A new day dawns —
Unknown potential and reborn hope.
I give thanks for the daily living of my life
Moment by Moment
The gifts and the challenges,
The sweet and the silly
Transformed by Time’s passing
Into Memory and History.
I offer myself to the world
As an instrument of Peace.
I will let every day and every endeavor
Be a prayer of thanks for life.
With Your Name on my lips,
I begin.
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Peace
As a Peacemaker and a Community Builder, I help people understand their gifts and strengths, while discovering the best ways for them to use them in to make Peace in the world. I have been working at being a Peacemaker throughout my ministry — and looking back, I realize that I have been working toward this for my whole life. It is a curious, confusing, and wonderfully rewarding way of life.
Peace matters. It matters enough that we are called to participate in building communities in which Peace can flourish. We are not Peaceful if we are not Peaceful in relationship, whether with Nature or Beings. Peace is so much more than a lovely concept. It is not simply an idea; it is a goal.
Throughout time, Peace has been understood far too often as either the opposite or the absence of war. That understanding severely underestimates the hope and potential of Peace. Peacemaking is an active verb that starts with a sense of wonderment about the Beauty and Abundance in which we live and leads us forward into community.
As a Peacemaker, I focus on finding the possibilities for connection and meaning, for creating rather than simply combatting. As such, I am a student of Nonviolence, which is the use of peaceful means, rather than force, to bring about political or social change. Nonviolence is a challenge to those of us raised in the Western World, but without it, without the creativity and collaboration, there can be no Peace.
We all need support in our process of building Peace and your Sacred Village(s) of Peace. As a Priestess and a Peacemaker, my calling is to be ‘in’ here for you to encounter and engage with for support and inspiration as you become a Peacemaker too.
Most Recent Peacemaker Pondering :
- Asked us what our deepest values are, we’re probably quick to reply. Everything we mention will be meaningful and valuable to us and to the world. But here’s the question. When you look at your life, at the way you go through your daily endeavors, how much are those values represented in your experience? Could … Continue reading "Values Make Us Who We Are"
More Peacemaker Ponderings
We need to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who are being questioned by life — daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the task which it constantly sets for each individual. These tasks, and therefore the meaning of life, differ from person to person, and from moment to moment.
Viktor Frankl, 1905 – 1997
Community
My understanding of faith is one of applied faith. What do you believe and how do you bring that alive in the world? For me, this is Spiritual Journey — a practical spiritual journey that brings your body and life along!
There are many Social Justice issues with which I am involved personally, emotionally, and financially, from the national level with Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival to the Takery, a local, interfaith food and product give-away in Sunbury, PA. (Held every third Thursday of the month – contact me for how you can help.) And my deepest commitment is to the Shape of Justice:
Shape of Justice: I am a founder of this project, which helps ensure that menstruators in rural Pennsylvania have period products that allow them to work, study, and play throughout their periods. Period Poverty is real. One in four women are forced to make decisions between period products and feeding their families. We’re about to expand to include incontinence products. Seniors don’t have the money they need. We need your help. We need donations. We need board members if you’re local. We need you to start programs like this if you live in rural America. (We can help!)
Worthwhile reading *
Please shop at independent bookstores. The covers on these pages are links to IndieBound.org where you can locate and purchase from various independent booksellers.
* Sacred Village has an affilliate account with Indiebound.org and may receive compensation
A Rite to Remember
Ritual has power. It creates a space and a moment to focus on the meaningful events in our lives. It joins individuals into a community that can acknowledge, honor, and strengthen our deepest sense of humanity. The need for ritual makes us long for familiar forms that link us to the past and for new words that reflect who we are today and for what we hope to become.
My services are designed to offer everyone the opportunity to shape and share in ceremonies that nurture life and to make language that echoes in memory, brings light to the present and helps us to thrive through lean and plenty.
Together, through ritual, we define our lives and speak our hearts during time-honored events. Ritual allows us to express the deeper meaning in aspects of modern life that deserve community celebration and support. Through my work I seek to create appropriate forms for all aspects of life that bond communities and families and to enhance our appreciation and patience for the splendid cycle of life and growth.
My approach is based on three essential processes:
- Trust: Together we build a working relationship that can explore the meaning of a ceremony, its purpose and its context.
- Personalization: Together, we find the words and actions that capture the significance of the moment and explain it in ways that are comfortable and natural to you.
- Connecting: Together we fashion a celebration that speaks your thoughts and feelings to your family friends and community while inviting them to listen, join and share.
Rituals of Celebration
Rituals of Commemoration
Rituals of Dedication
The Wedding Priestess
Your wedding ceremony is the focus of your wedding day and the cornerstone of your marriage.
Wedding ceremonies have certain ritual elements that move a couple from unmarried to married. Your wedding ceremony can guide you throughout your marriage, when you look back and consider the goals you set and the things you love about each other.
I will work with you to produce a service that will truly represent your loving relationship and commitment and be the foundation for the marriage you will build together. When you work with me to create the ceremony, the more time we can spend together, moving the ceremony and your relationship to the center of the wedding day, the better I can reflect your loving relationship, the more successful the day will be, and the more your ceremony can support you as a couple throughout your marriage.
I look forward to the joy of our working together to build the ceremony that will honor your dreams and celebrate the promises you will keep for a lifetime.
Peacemaker’s Tarot
Peacemaker’s Tarot
for the 21st century
“Not your grandmother’s tarot!” ™
Tarot helps us to be more present and aware in the moment. We don’t know what will happen in Life, so it’s crucial to know where we are in our own lives. However, old symbols and metaphors no longer have meaning in a world that is longing for new and meaningful reference points.
Peacemaker’s Tarot for the 21st Century is not a parlor game and does not predict your future as a passive event over which you have no control. PT21stC is intended to explore how you can actively create your future based on the values of Peace and nonviolence.
Peacemaker’s Tarot for the 21st Century helps us think about the moment with Peace and nonviolence at the center of our considerations. Read this and get curious about what comes next. Then come enjoy a reading with Ann. The Tarot Priestess is In for you.
Stories
I love the work I do. I appreciate the importance of work on ritual, tarot, and community within the context of Peace. Sometimes, however, my world can become too focused on this importance.
So I also write stories that emerge from the heart of my whimsy. Preaching and public speaking reaches to stir people’s souls; my stories wish to stir delight and laughter and joy.
As a high school Rotary Youth Exchange student in Sweden, I encountered stories of the “Hidden Folk.” I am fascinated by the notion of Nature Magic. In those stories, many of the folk are said to be mischievous or “pranky,” but usually you find that humans have tricked or mistreated them. I believe the hidden folk not only represent the possibilities of magic and the doing of good and caring deeds, they also show humans how life would be different, were we only to act as kindly toward one another as they act toward us and toward the land they represent.
I am very excited to be working with Siri as an illustrator, for her love for these beings is as deep as mine — and whereas I hear them and see their action, she has been catching their likenesses for years.
Hmmm…I wonder what magic being put us together? I can’t wait to see what you have to say about how they create community, and how they build Peace.
The Venn of Ann
Encompassing everything is Peace; Peacemaking is the ocean I have committed to swim in. It is the air I breathe. I work hard to keep the focus of all my work on Peacemaking.
Within are the circles representing my deepest talents. These are my gifts and the skills I have worked to develop. I create ritual in these arenas and I write, read, and reflect on them as well.
Tarot • Ritual • Community … and the places in between? Ah, those are where the magic happens:
Tarot – Ritual :
• Determine a course of action, then create a ritual dedicated to the work ahead.
• Recover from trauma by creating a ritual that purifies and moves the trauma into the non-active past.
• Seek out new possibilities and take the time to ritually commit to growing into what you hadn’t been able to imagine before.
Ritual – Community :
• Rites of passage for individuals, couples, and families that happen within proscribed communities.
• Celebrations and commemorations that concern the entire community, violence, regret, remembrance.
• Celebrations of dedication to possibility and peace.
Community – Tarot :
• Readings at gatherings that define what the community needs to work on.
• Readings for projects that examine the roles that will be needed to complete a project and who ought to be included.
• Readings that explore how groups can work together.
And in the center of it all, when the balance is right and I’m doing my best work, the Hickernell Springs Moon Fairy dances for joy.