Community as the Engine of Transformation:Contemplative Change, One Place at a Time - Session 2 Feb. 2026

This month’s learning includes:

• A 9-minute video reflection - Watch part of a conversation between Brother James Dowd and Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe on the importance of this movement.
• A simple contemplative practice (one minute of intentional silence)
• Reflection questions for individual or shared use

This month’s learning may be engaged individually, in small groups, or within leadership settings. If you’re looking for a way to practice contemplation with others, this learning also connects directly to our ongoing live sits.

Explore the Month 2 course materials here. Use them as part of your personal faith study or with community groups, vestries, or Sunday school classes.

Come as you are. Begin simply. And, you are always welcome to join our Centering Prayer sits. View the schedule.

View the transcript of this video below, lightly edited for clarity and flow for reading:

Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe
The change we're talking about and the kind of action we're talking about is local. It's hyperlocal. The change that is going to happen is going to happen at the level of the community, the level of the congregation, the level of the cathedral — wherever it is that we're serving. We'll know when to act. What is key is that we figure out ways to amplify the work at the local level — to create and amplify more networks like what you've done, Brother James — and how do we continue to build those networks as they emerge. Our existence is resistance, but it's not in the way of being outraged at everything that happens. It's in a way of being formed in such a way that we know when to act at the local level.

Brother James Dowd
The other thing I would say to that is start really slowly. When I'm working with a spiritual directee who's never practiced any kind of silent prayer, I don't tell them you should do 20 minutes a day. I tell them: see if you can do one minute a day. Like when you get up out of bed, put your feet on the floor, just sit there for one minute in intentional silence — and do that for a month and then let's talk next month and see how you did. Some of them come back and said I can do a minute of silence. And some of them come back and it was a nightmare. So with them I try 30 seconds. With the ones who did okay I move them to two minutes. The same is true on a communal level. It's not: put in five offices a day at your cathedral. It's: can you add one thing a week? Can you do that and see who might be interested? If that works, if there's excitement about that, well, maybe there's a second thing you can add. You want to take people step-by-step on a faith journey. And you want to take communities in the same way. You take them step, by step, by step.

Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe
Drawing on your own spiritual conversion — the center that you found in Christ, calling that experience forward and thinking about how to communicate that. It does not have to be fancy. It does not have to be erudite. It does not have to be necessarily well-worded — but come from your own center of formation. Just draw on who you are and what you've been about in a way that brings out the depth. I took my 12-year-old daughter to an early service in New York City — it was the quick takeout Eucharist with a brief homily — and we walked out and I thought the homily was short, there was nothing there, you wouldn't publish it anywhere. But there was something about the authenticity of it — it was an older priest — and we walked out of there and my daughter said, “That was amazing.” She's 12. And critical. And she said that was amazing. It's not about entertaining or trying to be a personality. It's drawing from the depths. We know how to do that, and we have a liturgy that will support it.

Brother James Dowd
One of the things — just from an experience of my life long ago before I was a monk — my parish in New York was St. John's in the Village, and one of the deacons there has now gone on to glory. She said to me, “You and I are going to do something. We're going to start something.” And I said, “Well, I'm a very busy man, you know.” And she said, “Yeah — I've been walking the neighborhood.” And this is when the West Village in New York was a different neighborhood than it is now. She said, “I've been walking the neighborhood and do you know, down over at the piers, there were all these teenagers — gay and transgender teenagers — that are living there homeless.” And I said, “No, I didn't.” She said, “Yeah, we're going to start a theater program for them.” I said, “Oh, so you're having me do this because they're gay and we're going to do a theater program, right?” And she said, “No, you're going to do it.” And this is the way she was. She was very commanding. I loved that. And I said, “Okay.”

So we started a program on Tuesday nights in which I was teaching them improv theater. We would feed them. It was a really great program and had people who could work with them to potentially change their lives in terms of the homelessness and things like that. They were all kids who had run away from home because one or both of their parents kicked them out, whatever the case may be. And so we did this for two years.

The first year, the last Tuesday before Christmas, the parish was throwing them a big Christmas party — gigantic meal, the turkey, the whole thing—lots of gifts, mostly clothing for the winter. And I was going to have them put on a little show — one of the nativity plays from the Middle Ages, a mystery drama that they improv-ed. And, you know, it was horrible. It was the worst thing I had ever seen. I'm a professional director and I was like, are you kidding me? This is what’s going to go in front of people?

So we're working. We get to the last Tuesday, and I had decided months before that I'm in a completely religious situation here — I can teach them centering prayer as a way to help them to center themselves, get ready for this, and maybe — who knows — who knows what happens in their lives. And so by this point we had been doing it about three months, and every session we'd start with a sit. I started very short. It grew to 20 minutes. There was incredible disruption, loads of laughter, kids kidding around, doing all sorts of inappropriate things. And I'm thinking: this is the worst ministry I have ever engaged in. It's a complete failure.

And we get to that last Tuesday where we’re doing the rehearsal and I realize we just have to rehearse the whole time. We can't take the 20 minutes. Remember that as a motif here. We can't take the 20 minutes. And so I start and I say, “Okay, everybody, we're not going to take the 20-minute meditation today because we really need to rehearse and we want to make this as good as we can for the parish.”

And the young man — he was 15 years old, very young, very immature in lots of ways — and he had caused the most trouble during the meditations. Just always cracking up, making somebody laugh, causing trouble, all sorts of things. And he said, “No, no, Mr. Dowd. No, no, no, no, no. We can't do that. We have to do the meditation.” And I looked at him. I said, “This surprises me. Why?” He said, “Don't you realize — it's the only 20 minutes of peace we get.”

And these children lived in violent and abusive situations at home, then on the street. It was awful what they lived through. And the 20 minutes — I thought, who cares about the show? We're doing this. And it's contemplative prayer even for people who feel like, This isn't for me, I don't understand this, let's make fun of this, I don't get it. You do not know the power of prayer until you've had experiences like that in life. That is, not in my personal experience, in terms of my prayer life, but in seeing it through the eyes of others.