Advent in a Real House

I (Matt) had a great time making an Advent Wreath at All Souls Episcopal Parish - the parish sponsoring our little intentional community via the gift of the living space. One of my big challenges in seminary has been observing Advent. The season always comes at the end of the semester when everything has piled up, and although we make a few liturgical changes in the CDSP chapel, sometimes it is easy to forget we have entered into this important season. When I lived in the dorm my first two years, the room just didn't seem right to add things to (and I was overwhelmed).

So, this year I made a point of making an Advent Wreath which sits nicely as you can see in the room we use as a chapel. I've also picked up an Advent Calendar, put up a string of festive lights, and I found an old Nativity Set that must have been left by the Benedictine monks of the Order of the Holy Cross who used to live in this building. I'm very grateful to be able to make these changes and already they make a huge difference in drawing my attention to the season!

So much for guidelines

A couple of weeks ago we had to revisit the guidelines we developed. After so carefully declaring that we weren't monks, we realized that we were not keeping to as many of our planned communal activities as we had hoped. In particular, the check-ins on Mon-Tue-Wed basically weren't happening.

The reasons for this varied. Our newest member, Baby Alice, has her own schedule for us to work around. Also, we began to discover other things pulling various of us away from our plan. So, minimally we needed to adjust to continue to work around our schedules.

But, it was also the case that when something was a "guideline" it tended to get dropped. This perhaps is where the monks have it right with a "rule." It is all well and good to declare how important it is for us for our communal time and prayer life to not be a terrible imposition and a drag, but on the other hand if we aren't at least somewhat intentional, then it slips away.

So, we simply revisited things. We dropped leading Morning Prayer in Spanish at CDSP. The only people there were us and maybe one other person and there were a lot of folks who would have liked to have prayer in English at CDSP, so it made sense to let that go. That in turn enabled us to establish a house prayer and check-in time on Wednesday morning after Ms. Baby Alice was up and feeling sociable. So far, we've been able to keep that schedule very diligently.

We all will probably keep revisiting it. We did discuss wanting to challenge ourselves - to grow, to learn from each other, etc. - but the problem is that in a seminary setting with lots of challenges it is hard to feel enthusiastic about adding another. Score one perhaps for the monks, but I hope we can continue to find a way to both be intentional and not be overloading.