The HeritageWork 2022

Mother Marilyn is in her 92nd year. Ted, the lamb of doG is 18 (that's NOT a fake background!).  They both inspire us with their deep grace-filled selfless lives, though often amidst daily pain. 

On the other side of the age spectrum, our grand twins, Jude & Geanna, inspire us too, with exuberance, laughter and wonder.  

Greetings faithful friends and sustaining partners! 

Sarah and I are grateful beyond measure to be surrounded by loving learning people.  Our thankfulness extends also to you all for how you believe in and sustain our unconventional work over the years.  In my 21st year, I continue to pursue my given vocation:  To make pastoral care, mentorship, marriage vision, and spiritual friendship available through organic relationship and neighborly hospitality to my local community, outside the organized church, but inside the vision of Christ dwelling in and around all of us.  

Here are some of the ways we are learning to attend to life and relationships: loving neighbors, gathering people at tables, awakening to daily Spirit-aware lives, being available to religious outsiders, guiding weekly and monthly groups and retreats, reading widely and deeply, and being present to and extending Christ's everyday hospitality.  

I had the chance to co-lead a retreat last summer at the Downing House on the art of attentiveness and presence. Here is a trailer to a wonderful documentary that can help us learn to live this way. 

some quotes on attentiveness and presence:

The soul is built on attentiveness. --Mary Oliver

Slow down to catch up with God --from film 'Godspeed'

I have abandoned all particular forms of devotion, all prayer techniques. My only prayer practice is attention. I carry on a habitual, silent, and secret conversation with God that fills me with overwhelming joy.

-- brother Lawrence

The immeasurable, untestable, irrecoverable moment of its passing

is the present, always already past before we can say that it is present,

that it was the future flowing into the past or is the past flowing into the future

or both at once into the present that is ever-passing and eternal,

the instantaneous abounding life.

--Wendell Berry Sabbath poem 2007 XII

You only need a tiny scrap of time to move toward God. --Anonymous, The Cloud of Unknowing, late 1300s.

Leadville in November

We call this 'suburban gothic'