Epiphania Sacred Arts
is a habitat for life-giving
& life-sustaining arts & practices.

Please visit our site often for updated digital reflections, art galleries, offerings, and events, such as open art studios, retreats, workshops, presentations, and other offerings.

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About Epiphania

“Our altar, the world.
Our canvas, the universe.”
~ Carrie Rehak

In 1990, Carrie wrote a pithy artist statement that still holds true today: “My paintings are my prayers.” Even works that depict seemingly “secular” subjects — seas, skies, light, shadow — are, to her, sacred.

In 2000, she opened Epiphania—a sacred arts studio and gathering space for making, teaching, and spiritual exploration. In 2010, she relocated her studio to Crockett, an unincorporated town, where the Carquinez Strait meets the San Pablo Bay.

The transformation of the space, from storage room to sanctuary, was both literal and metaphorical. Inspired by wayside shrines and santuarios, the studio, was designed to be ever-evolving. However, in 2020, Carrie made the painful yet clear decision to close the brick-and-mortar studio.

Where is Epiphania now? To quote Kit White in 101 Things to Learn in Art School: “The studio is more than a place to work: it is a state of mind.”

Soul Grove Sanctuary and &&& are outgrowths of Epiphania, and byproducts of day-to-day personal and communal experience and practice as well as proximate and remote, sacred and secular, ancient and future-oriented inspirations and influences, from restorative practices and performance art to permaculture and new cosmology.

Although reflective of Carrie’s rootedness in the Catholic tradition - or, more accurately, in Catholicity (a la Ilia Delio) - they are primarily fruits of friendships, with pilgrims, seekers, imagineers, innovators, change-makers, and communion with the living world.

It is in hope - what French philosopher Gabriel Marcel describes as the "memory of the future"—that we offer these digital and in-person sacred offerings—reflections and practices—that we may be more just, more merciful, more inclusive, more connected, more vibrant, more engaged, more loving, more whole — that is, more fully alive.

 

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About Carrie Rehak

Carrie realizes her creative, intellectual, and spiritual aspirations through an array of practices and media—including ecospirituality, permaculture, cosmology, restorative justice, nonviolence, theopoetics, and the arts.

In 2013, Carrie attended a formative training with Joanna Macy, Anne Symens-Bucher, and other community members at Canticle Farm, in Oakland, California, and has since become a certified Work that Reconnects practitioner and facilitator. Carrie also finds life giving Nonviolent Communication (NVC), which she also began training in and practicing in 2013.

Her approach – what Carrie finds most enlivening, transformative, fruitful, and authentic to who she is – is "art for life's sake": ethical aesthetics, theopoetics, and art/life, thanks in large part to the influence of such luminaries as Deborah J. Haynes, Linda Mary Montano, Maren Hassinger, and other contemporary visionaries who attempt “to dissolve the boundaries between art and life" (Montano), sacred and secular, personal and political, process and product, and ritual and performance.

Carrie holds both an M.A. and Ph.D. in Theology, with a concentration in the arts, from the Graduate Theological Union, in Berkeley. She has held positions in nonprofit leadership and as an instructor and director of programs in educational settings—forums that continually ground her ideas in real-world engagement.

Her quest is one of meaning: what is the relationship between our experience and our reflections on, and expressions of, that experience? And how does this relationship bear on personal, social, and ecological responsibility? Above all, Carrie is committed to formal and informal communities of makers, seekers, and learners—as creative agents of transformation, liberation, and flourishing.

Background & Credentials

 

Academic Foundations

  • Ph.D. and M.A. in Theology
    Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley

  • B.F.A. in Fine Arts

    Academy of Art, San Francisco

Certifications

  • Restorative Justice
    Simon Fraser University

  • Work that Reconnects Facilitator

  • Permaculture Design - in progress

  • Certified Life Coach (CLC, PNLP/MNLP, CHP, ICF Credential) — in progress

  • Hypnosis

    Fundamentals of Advanced Ericksonian Hypnotherapy, Mental Research Institute, and additional trainings with Eric Greenleaf, Ph.D., and others; Certified Hypnosis Practitioner - in progress

Spiritual & Somatic Modalities

  • Spiritual Direction / Retreat Design & Facilitation
    More than twenty years experience in individual and group settings, including university and residential renewal programs, e.g., School of Applied Theology / Graduation Theological Union (SAT-GTU) and Jesuit Renewal Program / Jesuit School of Theology-Santa Clara University (JST-SCU)

Key Influences & Ongoing Practices

  • The Work That Reconnects
    Training with Joanna Macy and Terry and Anne Symens Bucher, et al, grounded in deep ecology, systems thinking and being, engaged spirituality, and collective action.

  • Cosmology

    Cosmological and evolutionary spirituality, inspired by Teilhard de Chardin, Brian Swimme, and Ilea Delia.

  • Nonviolent Communication (NVC)
    Training and active practice in empathic, needs-based communication.

  • Permaculture Design & Ecospirituality

    Honoring Earth Care, People Care, and Fair Share; integrating regenerative design with spiritual practice.

  • Decolonization and Anti-Racist Praxis

    Informed by ongoing learning in trauma healing, decolonization, racial justice, and ancestral repair. Rooted in the belief that healing is relational and liberation is collective.

  • Trauma-Informed Recovery

    Inspired by principles grounded in Twelve-Step traditions and attuned to the complexities of generational and social trauma.

  • Art/Life, Theopoetics & Ethical Aesthetics
    Inspired by the vision of luminaries, such as Linda Mary Montano, Marina Abramovic, Cecilia Vicuña, bell hooks, and Deborah J. Haynes, who blur the boundaries between sacred and the secular, personal and the social, and ethical and the aesthetic.