HOUSTON

January 23-25, 2023

The Paschal Mystery: Finding ourselves within the cycle of life, death, and resurrection…and allowing God to lead us into the next step of wholeness, mission, and Christlikeness.

LOCATION: ECCLESIA WEST SIDE
GUIDES: FR RONALD ROLHEISER, SEAN PALMER, Shauna NIEQUIST, drew jackson, AARON NIEQUIST, lori shoults

Retreat Schedule

MONDAY

1:00pm Registration/Connection 2:00pm Gathering & Invitation 5:00pm Dinner Together 6:00pm Paschal Mystery w/ Fr. Ron Rolheiser 8:00pm Contemplative Compline

TUESDAY

9:00am Guided Personal Retreat 12:00pm Lunch 12:30pm Solitude 3:30pm Eucharist Service 4:30PM Free Night in Houston

WEDNESDAY

9:00am Practical Tools 12:00pm Prayer and Sending

Gathering & Invitation / Personal Retreat / Tangible Next Steps

On Monday we will arrive from all over the country and begin a shared journey. We’ll meet each other, worship together, orient ourselves to the retreat, and begin to exhale and slow down. Drew Jackson will help us “Embrace the Mystery” and Fr Ronald Rolheiser, OMI, will give a significant teaching on “The Paschal Mystery”. We’ll end with Night Prayer and the opportunity for a great night of sleep.

Tuesday morning will be a 3 hour, guided personal retreat. Through spiritual practices, simple liturgies, and embodied prayer, we will be led into holy space in which God can do what only God can do. This will propel us into an afternoon of solitude, either on campus or in the neighborhood of the church, and then back together for an ecumenical, practice-based Eucharist service. And then by 4:30pm or so, we’ll be released into the beauty and energy and art of Houston. Eat great food…explore the arts…and soak up the goodness of the city. (FYI, our hospitality team will help with ideas, plans, directions, and anything else you might need)

Finally, Wednesday morning will focus on heading back into our actual home communities. How can we translate the practices and rhythms of the retreat into our real lives and churches? What are tools and resources that can support this good work? How can we become menders of the church cracked open? We’ll end the whole retreat with a time of prayer and sending.

Or said more simply: the three movements of the retreat are (1) Opening to the rhythms of Grace, (2) Swimming deep in the rhythms of Grace, and (3) Learning tools to invite others into the rhythms of Grace.

The Paschal Mystery is the rhythm of death, resurrection, grieving what was lost, releasing the old, and receiving the spirit of the life we are now living. This is the cycle of everything. And Fr Ron observes that most Christians are pretty good at the first two steps (death and resurrection), but are often terrible at the last three (grieving, releasing, and receiving the new). We love to celebrate life, but we haven’t been taught how to grieve and release what was lost. We get stuck in the mess of what was—or was not—and miss out on the new life Christ is birthing in us. But it doesn’t have to be this way, thanks be to God.

Through Fr Ron’s teaching and a rhythm of spiritual practices, guided conversation, poetry, rest, prayer, and the discipline of celebration and delight, we pray that the Spirit would create holy space for the birth of something truly new. Within you. Within us. For the sake of the world.

A four minute story of the Paschal Mystery.

Get to know our gracious host…

ecclesia west side:

Houston’s Holistic Missional Christian Community

Learn more