CENTER FOR SPIRITUALITY & ACTION

Vision and Inspiration

St. Mark’s Cathedral’s Center for Spirituality and Action seeks to encourage, inspire, and support those who want to draw nearer to God and deepen the spiritual grounding of their daily lives. We do this by fostering an intentional community for a focused time of shared learning, personal and communal contemplative practice, compassionate acts of service, individual spiritual direction, and spiritual growth. This framework is designed to enrich relationships with God, self, others, and creation, guided by ancient rhythms and practices.

Engagement Through Cohorts

At the heart of the Center’s offerings are nine-month cohorts—small, intentional groups that gather weekly for prayer, study, and mutual support, and regularly for retreats and service. The first cohort launched in Fall 2024, and two more shared the CSA experience from September – June 2025.

Details of the CSA Program – Four Essential Areas of Focus

Some of the activities that assist us in growing in our four identified areas of focus:

 

1. Community

  • Sharing our Stories: Spiritual Autobiographies. As the group forms, each person will be asked to share their spiritual autobiography, guided by a process offered by the CSA
  • Weekly Zoom gathering. Discussions focused on shared learnings, mutual prayer support, and aspects of prayer practice will inform the group’s common life.
  • In-person events, including Wisdom school offerings, practice days, and retreats will continue to support mutual connection. The group may also choose to gather from time to time for a communal meal.
  • Prayer partnerships. Each month, each person will be paired with another as prayer partners. While everyone is praying for the community all along, these tandem partnerships afford the deepening of relationship that comes when we share our hearts of prayer with and for one another. The partnerships will change each month.

 

2. Contemplative Practice – prayer, retreats

  • Rule of Life. The group will work together to develop its commitments to spiritual practices and mutuality that deepen into a change in heart.
  • Development of the Contemplative Prayer Practice. Readings, videos, instruction, supportive staff, and opportunities for group sessions will assist in addressing questions that develop with extended daily commitment to contemplative prayer, and engage common hurdles in the early stages of growing a contemplative practice. Optional additional opportunities to engage in longer periods of communal prayer will be offered from time to time
  • Practice Days. Three Saturdays during the year will be set aside to engage in specific practices requested by the group, with on-site or virtual guides inviting a deeper dive.
  • Cathedral Retreat: a simple space for prayer. CSA cohort members receive a free 2-5 day stay in the St. Mark’s urban retreat, for those who are interested. (This does not include a spiritual direction session). Learn more.

 

3. Learning/Study, Spiritual Direction

  • Wisdom School – CSA cohort members receive a 50% discount on all Wisdom school offerings for the 2026-27 season, except for the icon workshop. Financial support beyond this level is available as needed.
  • Group-selected discussion topics – The cohort members choose items for group discussion from a variety of options, including books, podcasts, video clips, articles, websites, Wisdom school or CSA presentation speakers, and more. The cohort may request recommendations of possible books, etc. on a particular topic from the CSA Director.
  • Spiritual Direction – Cohort members commit to participating in regular (every month to 6 weeks) individual spiritual direction during the CSA period. Those who do not already have a director are given assistance in finding one; partial financial scholarships for spiritual direction are available as needed.

 

4. Service

  • Loving Action Shaped by Inner Spiritual Work. The Center seeks to equip participants for service in the world as a vocation of loving action. This work of justice and renewal arises from the inner spiritual work described above, discerned within the context of intentional community.
  • Engaging Realities with Contemplative Spirit While Avoiding Coercion or Imposed Solutions. These above practices inform our service in the world, which in turn influence our spiritual life. It engages unjust realities with contemplative spirit and compassionate solidarity, not by fixing others or forcing them into a prescribed vocational identity.

All CSA applicants must be willing and able to embrace and commit to these gatherings:

  1. Retreats & Practice Days:
    • Organizing Retreat – September 4, 2026 (6:30 – 8:30 p.m.) and September 5, 2026 (9:30 a.m. – 3 p.m.)
    • Practice Day – September 26, 2026 (9:30 a.m. – 2:30 p.m.)
    • Retreat Days in Advent and Lent—December 5, 2026 & February 27, 2027 (9 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.)
    • Practice Days – January 23, 2027 and April 17,  2027 (9 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.)
  2. Weekly Zoom gathering as community (day and time TBD by group that forms)
  3. Individual meeting with a spiritual director (every month to 6 weeks) during the CSA period
  4. In-person gatherings as community (how frequently, day and time TBD by group that forms)
  5. Closing eucharist and potluck June 12, 2027 (5 – 8 p.m.)

Who might be called into this way of being?

Guided by the broad capacity of the Christian mystic tradition to hold tension and honor all people, we welcome a diversity of age, gender, orientation, race, wealth, religious belief, cultural and political perspectives.

 

We seek to gather and equip individuals who have the desire and openness to embrace:

  1. Spiritual Renewal. Embody the wisdom of the Christian contemplative traditions as a source of transformation.
  2. A Pattern of Life. Develop a rhythm of daily contemplative practices, study, and service that opens us to the experience of union with the Divine.
  3. Mutual Accountability. Commit to forming intentional community with others, gathering routinely for worship, spiritual formation and occasional retreats, and engaging regular spiritual direction.
  4. Compassionate Solidarity. Embody the Spirit of Christ in the world at this critical moment in human history through activism rooted in Presence.

Fee and Program Components

Participant Fee: $495 includes

  • 50% discount for all Wisdom School event registrations in the 2026-2027 program year (excepting the icon workshop),
  • speakers’ and retreat leaders’ fees,
  • one retreat stay (up to five days/four nights) in the Cathedral Retreat (excepting a spiritual direction session),
  • resource materials for the intentional community’s gatherings

Spiritual Direction fees are not included, and run about $100 an hour.

Partial Scholarships for CSA tuition, books, and spiritual direction are available (inquire of the CSA Director).

For Further Exploration

If you would like to learn more, consider speaking to one of those who have been a part of a previous cohort, or the CSA director.

If you have questions, feel free to contact the Rev. Carol Westpfahl, the center’s Director, at CSADirector@saintmarks.org.

To apply, download the application at saintmarks.org/csa-apply

Complete and submit your application (three parts), along with $50 non-refundable deposit, by August 1, 2026 to join a group forming in September 2026.

Life is this simple
We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent
and God is shining through it all the time.
This is not just a fable or a nice story
It is true.
If we abandon ourselves to God
and forget ourselves,
we see it sometimes
and we see it maybe frequently.
God shows Godself everywhere,
In everything,
In people and in things and in nature and in events.
It becomes very obvious that God is everywhere and
in everything and we cannot be without God
It is impossible.
The only thing is that we don't see it.

- Fr. Thomas Merton, OCSO, 20th century monk, writer, activist, and mystic

God’s first language is silence.
Everything else is a poor translation.

- Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSO, expanding on St. John of the Cross

The CSA is Animated & Inspired by, & Founded Upon, the Following Principles

  1. Daily practice of contemplative prayer as an integral part of the daily rhythms of Benedictine life.
  2. Commitment to reading and meditation on the Christian mystical tradition which affirms the value of silence as portal for “luminous seeing.” We resist the modern impulse to address our spiritual inquiries primarily through cognitive patterns that beset us with binaries and contentious “over-against” paradigms.
  3. We privilege the radically consciousness-transforming teachings of Jesus.
  4. We affirm the primacy of Scriptures, Tradition, and Reason as sources of theological Revelation, while seeking inspiration from diverse postcolonial and non-Christian voices.
  5. We engage a Teilhardian incarnational cosmology, grounded in trinitarian theology, evolutionary science, and non-binary thinking.
  6. We honor and acknowledge that spiritual healing of what is broken is important work (e.g., woundedness, addiction, recovery, injustices and political correctness), and we orient to the deep work of seeking union with the divine.
  7. We embrace traditional monastic models of prayer and action without withdrawing from the world and its complex realities. Our practices are designed to orient to the world in which we live, and to prepare for action in the world.
  8. While we acknowledge the suffering and complexity of the world, we are dedicated to cultivating joy and wonder in our daily experience together.

 

Background

The Wisdom School

For seven years, the Wisdom School has aspired to be “a balanced path for spiritual transformation grounded in prayer and practice, drawing on the Christian contemplative traditions while respecting the diversity of experience born from contemplative practices of other traditions.” The curriculum thus far has been offered ala carte, and some 450 people have participated in various levels of engagement.

The Wisdom School’s model of offering a blend of programmatic content will continue—as a mix of free and fee-based workshops and speaker events gathered around a loose theme each year. Themes have included A Spirituality of Desire, An Embodied Spirituality, A Spirituality of Place, and Healing and Hope. Seasonal, weekly and daily offerings (e.g., Contemplative Prayer, Cathedral Yoga, Quiet Days, Daily Office, Labyrinth Walk etc.) offer additional points of connection.

 

The Radix Project

In 2019, the Radix Project was launched to invite adult participants into small groups for scripture study and prayer in a space intended to foster trust and connection with one another and God. Radix participants commit to meeting once weekly for six weeks in small group setting, and across ten series now, several hundred have participated in at least one group.

 

Pilgrimage

Our Christian tradition holds dear the spiritual practice of making pilgrimages that profoundly shape our understanding of what it means to follow Christ. One need not travel across the globe to do so; one need only be open to the holy experience of discovering God anew on the way. For centuries, cathedrals have served as Christian pilgrimage sites, drawing people of faith into the orbit of wonder and awe. For several years the parish community of Saint Mark’s Cathedral has encouraged pilgrimage as spiritual practice. Many have incorporated this spiritual practice into their lives, with transformative effect, and the Cathedral is exploring ways to broaden this experience as a local destination for pilgrims.