This past week, a guest has been making an individual retreat in our retreat house. He traveled from Brooklyn to spend a week praying, resting, and writing on our campus. He has been joining me for the Daily Office regularly, and it has been wonderful to have the company. After Morning Prayer one day, he said that once he arrived at the retreat house and came to Sunday Mass, he suddenly understood what our retreat house is about. “You’re inviting people into the prayer life of a parish,” he said excitedly. “That’s right,” I replied. I was thrilled that someone “got” what the retreat house is designed to do without my having to explain it.
I’m not surprised that this particular guest “got it.” He is a seasoned visitor to monasteries and someone for whom the regular rhythm of prayer in a particular community is the backbone of a time of retreat. Since we opened the Rosemont Community Retreat House, we have been inviting others into the corporate prayer life of our parish. Every day of the week (with occasional exceptions) the church is open for public prayer of some sort. My hope is that over time we can reestablish the daily Mass, which has traditionally been the heartbeat of Anglo-Catholic parishes. The only reason we don’t have a daily Mass at present is that we don’t yet have enough people attending daily Masses to ensure that Mass can proceed (in the Anglican tradition, a priest must have a congregation to say Mass).
I also hope that as our parish grows, we may come to embrace our collective Rule of Life more extensively. Wouldn’t it be a wonderful thing if there were at least one other person besides the officiant for Morning or Evening Prayer? I wonder if some of you might consider taking one of the Offices during the week, or perhaps a Low (Said) Mass, and making it part of your own Rule of Life. Already, some in this parish are committing to either a Mass or Morning or Evening Prayer on a certain day of the week. Perhaps this could be part of an Advent New Year’s resolution!
We should not underestimate the power of this public witness to prayer within the Church. At Good Shepherd, I’m convinced that we have realized unconsciously far more of the fruits of this prayer than we would know. It is part of the Church’s duty to keep this stream of ordered prayer going. The Daily Office is a gift, because it can be prayed by anyone, anywhere. I don’t doubt for a minute that the vibrancy astir at Good Shepherd is directly related to our constant stream of shared prayer: Daily Office, Mass, and private prayer. Praying is not magically summoning God to bless us; it’s attuning our own hearts and minds to God’s will. When we do this, amazing things happen. You often can’t connect prayer to its fruit in a direct causal way, but I believe that we are always experiencing the fruit of prayer, whether we realize it or not. There is tremendous power in one or two persons praying the Daily Office on a regular basis in one place.
The heart of our retreat house ministry is to invite others into a holy place of prayer. But as I reflect on it, the retreat house also embodies every one of the pillars of our common life, which I enumerated in my weekly message back in August. The retreat house is 1) grounded in worship, 2) provides formation and is the current physical location for formation in the parish, 3) touches music and the arts through various retreats centered around those disciplines, 4) is itself an outreach ministry (our primary one), and 5) is a place of continuing fellowship.
We’ve only begun to scratch the surface of the ministry we will continue to see in the Rosemont Community Retreat House. For now, will you help us spread the word? With the generous help of the media center of the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania, we now have a promotional video about our retreat house that can be shared online. You can still purchase retreat house “swag,” and part of those proceeds will go directly to support the retreat house. You can even adopt a room!
And as we begin to close out 2023, please mark your calendars for our annual parish meeting on Sunday, January 28, 2024, held after Sung Mass. During that meeting, the vestry will introduce us to a series of future parish visioning conversations, centered around the pillars of our parish life, as we look to expand ministry in the future. These conversations will also equip us to devise new mission and visioning statements for the parish.
In the meantime, I’d love to see you at Morning or Evening Prayer on a weekday (or pray with us online!) Or come to our weekday Masses on Major Holy Days, Thursdays at 6 p.m., or Fridays at 8 a.m. There is one thing you can assume about Good Shepherd: we’re always open for prayer!
Yours in Christ,
Father Kyle