Contemplative Communion Service
Worship with Scriptural Reflection, Silent Contemplation, Music, and the Sacrament of Bread and Wine
Thank you to all who contributed to making this collaborative service such a blessed time. Click here for a link to images on our Facebook album of the March service.
Shalem Institute and Metropolitan Memorial United Methodist Church unite in the Lenten season to offer a Contemplative Communion Service for the six Sunday nights in Lent:
| Dates: | February 26; March 4, 11, 18, 25; and April 1, 2012 |
Time: | 7:00-8:30 PM |
| Place: | Great Hall, Metropolitan Memorial United Methodist Church 3401 Nebraska Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20016 |
This is an ecumenical service—all are welcome!
Our worship will draw on the experiences of "The Mass that Takes Its Time," an innovative Roman Catholic liturgy; Shalem Institute's contemplative Eucharist, often celebrated in retreat experiences; and the Methodist Service of Word and Table.
This liturgy will encourage prayer and reflection within a supportive spiritual community and nurture awareness of the living Spirit among and within us. Scriptural texts will illuminate the theme of forgiveness as a gift of God. This service is for all who seek a deeper encounter with Divine Presence and a Lenten experience of renewal and healing.
The services will be led by Carole Crumley, an Episcopal priest and Senior Program Director for the Shalem Institute, and Drema McAllister-Wilson, a Methodist pastor and Minister for Congregational Care at Metropolitan Memorial United Methodist Church.
A reflection from a participant who attended the first Contemplative Communion Service on February 26
I'd been meaning to let you both know how grateful I was to be present for what one might call the Washington Premiere of The Mass That Takes Its Time!
I'd wanted to try to express why it was so different an experience than the "regular" Eucharists I'm part of week by week -- and the word that kept surfacing as a description of what I'd experienced was "vulnerability" -- vulnerable in a positive, undefended, and fruitful sense, as opposed to frightened.
After all that silence, and the slow, calm unfolding of the liturgy, the act of communion evoked in me what felt like a kind of infinite resonance. And whatever it was that occurred there has stayed with me in the days since -- and with an ongoing reverberation quite unlike that engendered by other speedier, more perfunctory Eucharistic celebrations.
And then, this morning, I bumped into this passage from Jacob Needleman's book, Lost Christianity. It gives voice to what I'd wanted to convey to you.
"What is prayer?" I asked. "In the state of prayer one is vulnerable." He emphasized the last word and then waited until he was sure I had not taken it in an ordinary way. "In prayer one is vulnerable, not enthusiastic. And then these rituals have such force. They hit you like a locomotive. You must be not enthusiastic, nor rejecting -- but only open. This is the whole aim of asceticism: to become open."
Yes, on Sunday evening, I felt hit like a locomotive, and it left me feeling not harmed in any way, but wide awake!
Thanks so very much for all the time and care that has gone into the planning of these contemplative liturgies. We hope to come again, along with our friend who has been longing for something exactly like this.
Please join us for one or all of these evening celebrations.
