Santa Barbara: Week One

Going into my first week at Mount Calvary, I wasn't sure what to expect. Although I brought a couple of projects to work on, I had no desire to be "productive" in any sense. So I was content to go with the flow each day. The daily offices -- lauds at 7am, eucharist at 12pm, compline at 8pm -- offered a loose structure to my day. I helped out with dishes after meals and closed up the house in the evenings. But much of the day was free time.

One of my favorite things to do at Mount Calvary is meeting other guests and hearing a little bit about their journeys. And during my first week, there was a great group of folks at the house:



Don, Tom, and Aurie are three associates from Marfa, Texas, which is three hours from the nearest airport! They are members of a neat little mission church and are opening up a small retreat house in their area. If the grace, peace, and compassion exhibited by those three are any indication, that mission church is a pretty awesome community. Geoffrey is a United Methodist minister from Mississippi on a month-long sabbatical consisting of national parks, various monasteries, and more traditional sightseeing. He has a big heart and great laugh. I decided that Geoffrey would be my Sabbatical Buddy, and we agreed to send each other emails and postcards from our respective travels. And Steve is a project manager from Vancouver, with a tart sense of humor and sharp mind. Turns out that Steve's job is taking him to Manhattan for a year. When he heard about my travel plans, he kindly offered to let me housesit his empty apartment in downtown Vancouver if he doesn't end up renting it out. Woohoo! I really hope that works out (though I have resisted actively praying that Steve not find a renter).

The six of us hit it off from the first day and ended up spending all of our free time together in the sun room, talking religion, church politics, you name it. What a blessing to have these folks on the first part of my journey. I am beginning to think that this phase of my journey is not about projects or productivity at all, but people.