Over twenty years ago, I was serving as an organ scholar in an Episcopal parish in northwest Connecticut while in graduate school. My boss and mentor was a magnificent church musician who lived with his wife on a mountaintop in the middle of nowhere. One night, after a choir concert and an ensuing party, I stayed the night with my boss and his wife since there was another concert the following day and it was too far to drive back to my home nearly an hour away. After everyone had turned in for the night, I was preparing to turn in as well and noticed that the front door was unlocked. I spent a good deal of time trying to lock the door, but to no avail. I only fell sleep uneasily, knowing the front door was still unlocked. The next morning, I explained to my boss what had happened, and he laughed. He said the door was never locked; in fact, the door had to be locked with a key, but he had no clue where the key was!
I had never heard of leaving a door unlocked at night, and I suppose it was perfectly safe on a remote mountaintop in northwest Connecticut. It’s not a good idea, of course, in most places. But the sentiment is lovely. The door to that house was always unlocked, suggesting a level of trust regarding the outside world. Without literalizing unlocked doors to our peril, in what way can the Church—indeed, Good Shepherd—be a place with unlocked doors, all the time, for all people? To be such a place, we must be secure in our identity as the Church, formed and sustained by God in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. The Church isn’t called to lock our doors against the world as if the world is a threat. If we know who we are and understand our ecclesial vocation, then we can confidently unlock our doors to the world. That is precisely God’s call to the Church.
As a parish with a retreat house ministry based around hospitality, we claim to be a place with open doors. We leave the church doors open during weekdays for people to stop in and pray. We’re responding to St. Benedict’s encouragement to greet all guests as Christ himself. Over the past two years, the Rosemont Community Retreat House has opened its doors to visitors from across the world. Hardly a week goes by when someone or some group is not in the retreat house as a guest. I’ve been moved by the feedback we’ve received from guests. From vestries on day retreats to individuals making their own retreats, many have said how welcomed they felt here. There’s something intangibly warm and inviting about reading in the downstairs library or hearing the church bells ring the Angelus. The atmospheric qualities of being on retreat at Good Shepherd don’t go unnoticed by our guests.
When we started planning our retreat house ministry over two years ago, we took a leap of faith. It was a major undertaking for this small parish to renovate a large house with significant deferred maintenance and to build and sustain a new ministry. But it transpired through hard work and abundant generosity from the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania, the Association of Anglican Musicians, and numerous organizations and people. Because of the incredible labor of Kevin Loughery, our contractor, we were able to renovate the former rectory and turn it into a beautiful place for retreat. The parish’s leadership felt quite strongly that God was calling us to this ministry of hospitality. We looked around at several thousand square feet of largely unused space and were convinced that it could be a resource for the local community and wider Church. Ministry usually begins with a dream. Rooted in prayer, people assess the resources that God has given them and the gifts present in the faithful gathered in a particular place, and then an idea for ministry ensues. It was that way with us.
Many of you have come to Good Shepherd since the Rosemont Community Retreat House opened. But perhaps some of you have not spent much time in the retreat house other than for coffee hour or a parish potluck supper. As we look towards sustaining this ministry for the long-haul, we need and welcome your input, ideas, and help. The retreat house has already touched many lives. I pray that it will continue to touch many more for years to come.
But there’s a dimension to the retreat house that I don’t believe has yet been realized. While the house is a place for prayer and respite for people from across the wider Church, I pray that it will also be used as a vital resource to address needs in our local community. It is, after all, a community retreat house. We’ve not yet fully lived into this part of the vision for our retreat house, but it’s crucial to our identity as followers of Jesus Christ and especially as a parish within the Anglo-Catholic tradition. We may be a parish that draws people from several different states, but we’re rooted in the village of Bryn Mawr in Lower Merion Township in Montgomery County. I’m convinced that God’s vision for us must emerge from our local context as well as through our connections to the wider Church.
Last week, members of the vestry and some other parishioners met with thirteen people from the local community for a Community Conversation guided by Partners for Sacred Places. We gave tours of the retreat house, church, cloister, and parish house. And then we sat down with our neighbors to ask what struck them about our buildings. In what ways could our buildings be used to partner with organizations doing life-changing work in the local community? What unmet needs are there in our community that we can address through the development of our buildings and property? Because we’re still dependent on rental income from our Parish House, perhaps we should start to answer these questions by looking at our retreat house.
We must not forget the poor, whether the materially poor or the spiritually poor. They are and always will be with us in this life, as Jesus has said. Each of us is poor in some way. We move from honoring the Real Presence of Christ in the sacrament of the altar to honoring his Real Presence in the poor. What will that look like for us at Good Shepherd? Answering this question is not the sole responsibility of the vestry. It will start there as we begin to unpack it in next week’s vestry meeting, but it must then spill over into our whole life in community. All of us need to be a part of it. What those conversations with you will look like and when they will occur are yet to be determined, but they will happen.
In the meantime, I ask you to pray for a greater understanding of how we can engage more with our local community as a natural outgrowth of our worship together. Ask God to show us how we can be with the poor more intentionally. Spend a night in our retreat house. We will all be better interpreters of God’s call to us if we can understand the potential of our buildings. As we approach All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day, consider spending a night in our retreat house on Friday, November 1 after our parish potluck, and then stay on campus to attend the All Souls’ Requiem Mass on November 2. Book your room here, and if you’d rather not worry about a donation, email us. The retreat house is not just for outside guests; it’s for all of us. In the coming months, you will hear more about parish conversations intended to help us all discern the specifics of the outward-looking posture to which God is calling us. I’ll look forward to seeing you in church on Sunday!
Yours in Christ,
Father Kyle