My New Home

So, after a tumultuos 2 day marathon of moving, I am now ensconced in my new home, the Mill Street House. MSH is headed up by two members of my parish (Christ Church of Hamilton-Wenham) Mark Dirksen and Beth Maynard. Beth is an ordained priest, and her husband Mark is a conductor, talent musician, and supports those habits by being a real estate agent. MSH is a neo-monastic, intentional, and missional community in a low-income neighborhood in Beverly, MA. My desk is still in shambles, and I don't have a bed yet (huzzah for inflatable mattresses!), but things appear to be stabilizing. My room is much smaller than my old one, and costs more. However, I have plenty of storage space in the basement of our house, and because of the much shorter commute to both work and school from here, I will recoup the higher rent in fuel savings. So what is a neo-monastic, intentional, and missional community? Basically, the neo-monastic part is regular communal prayer twice a day kept in the form of Church 'Offices' i.e. morning prayer, and evening prayer (aka 'Compline'), observance of the Church Calendar, shared living arrangements with the other members of the community, and a commitment to a lifestyle of contemplation, prayer, and service. The intentional community aspect is rather simple. Rather than living on our own respectively, the members of the community have decided to live together in this house (a three-story multi-family arrangement, composed of three independent apartments stacked upon each other, with a chapel composing one of the rooms on the second floor), and to live a Christian life in community with others. I have much by the way of opining and philosophizing about this aspect, but that can wait for a later post. As for the missional aspect, the community hopes to live together as an incarnation of the body of Christ in this needy neighborhood by keeping the daily offices, as well as the Church calendar, and from that liturgical lifestyle moving outward in service and relationship. We basically just want to go be Christ to and with people. It is at once rocket science and at the same time not. Well, thats seems like enough for now, I should call it quits. I need to shower up, go to Compline, then head off to work.