Spiritual Direction
PLEASE NOTE that Mark will not be taking new spiritual direction clients until May of 2024. If you are interested in spiritual direction, we invite you to check back in with us at that time.
Spiritual direction is the art of listening deeply to the Spirit of God at work in a person's life. In spiritual direction, both the director and the directee seek to remain open to the Spirit and to be receptive to the Spirit's lead and guidance in the directee's life.
Mark offers in person, one-on-one spiritual direction for those seeking this kind of support in the Upper Valley of Vermont/New Hampshire.
Contact us with any questions or to arrange spiritual direction.
Home Liturgy Resources
Home liturgy, inspired by the Benedictine way of following Christ, is at the heart of our daily lives. Our commitment to this life is two-fold. We feel called to this life of prayer and intimacy with the land and to do so as lay married persons living the world. We also sense a deep need for this path to be blazed so others may more easily find it and walk in its way. The resources here are intended to be used by anyone intrigued by this way of life.
Liturgy of the Hours
We pray the seven traditional liturgy of the hours—Vigils (early morning), Lauds (morning), Terce (mid-morning), Sext (noonday), None (mid-afternoon), Vespers (evening) and Compline (bedtime). Our daily liturgy includes song, Scripture readings, spoken prayers, spiritual readings, and silence.
The Metanoia Homestead Book of Prayer can be downloaded here. You can follow this liturgy exactly, adapt it as it works for you, or use it as inspiration to craft your own home liturgy.
Corresponding Resources:*
Daily Scripture readings from the Catholic Lectionary (for Lauds & Vespers)
Taize chants (for Vespers)
Tune for Compline Prayer (from Mount Saviour Monastery)
*We will continue to add resources to aid in home liturgy here as we find and develop them.
Stations of the Cross
The great mystery of death and new life, radically revealed in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ, also unfolds in countless ways every day in the life of Creation. Everywhere there is life in the natural world, there is death, and everywhere there is death, there is restoration and life coming out of death. The Wilderness Way of the Cross is a way of prayerfully engaging with the dying of creation, in solidarity with the suffering and death manifest in Jesus’ own death.
The following Stations of the Cross can be used as a Wilderness Way of the Cross or indoors at home or a chapel. It includes a Taize chant to go with each station.
Centering Prayer
We practice Centering Prayer during the silent times of our prayers. Centering Prayer has its origins in Christian monasticism and is a receptive method of silent prayer that prepares us to receive the gift of contemplative prayer, prayer in which we experience God's presence within us, closer than breathing, closer than thinking, closer than consciousness itself. This method of prayer is both a relationship with God and a discipline to foster that relationship.
Mark offers Centering Prayer workshops for churches and small groups. If you and your community are interested in hosting a workshop, please contact us.
Body and Prayer
Mark has spent the past twenty years exploring the integration of Christian contemplation with physical transformation, most seriously through Systema, a Russian martial art and health system with roots in Eastern Orthodox monasticism. We offer retreats and workshops on the Body in Christian Prayer for groups and communities upon request.
Mark contributed an essay on this topic of the body in Christian prayer in the book Contemplation and Community: A Gathering of Fresh Voices for a Living Tradition, available for purchase through The Crossroad Publishing Company.
Excerpts from “The Body and Contemplation”:
“I propose that preparing the body to receive the Spirit must be included as an essential part of contemplative training within the broader Christian tradition. This body training would involve learning to soften the muscles and to relax the body in a way that parallels the opening of the heart in silent prayer. It would include the integration of breathing, posture, movement, and relaxation to heal physical imbalances. The practice would support deep physical well-being and especially heal and strengthen the nervous system so that the bodies ‘circuits’ are prepared to handle the great intensity of energies that are opened up in serious spiritual practice. When the tissues are open and relaxed, the Divine energies flow through our bodies in a way that is unmistakably physical. Physical health and vitality, a kinetic awareness of spiritual realities, and the ability to heal others are natural fruits of this opening.”
“When the body is healed, opened, and purified, it becomes a vessel of Divine Life, much as I saw in the vision described above. After a certain level of integration is accomplished through exercises, relaxation, and conscious breathing (usually a few years), prayer itself becomes an embodied practice, and accumulated physical tensions are released regularly and powerfully in daily prayer.. With additional years of silent prayer, a long-term fruit of body-integrated contemplation is that the body begins to take on what I believe is its natural state: – the state capable of bearing Divine energies into the realm of creation and of lifting up creation into God.”