As members of The Arbor, we covenant with God and one another to form our lives around the practices and virtues of traditional Christian faith. We discern the following virtues and practices to be important to our community:
We eat together as a community on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday evenings at 5:30pm. We share a meal with our neighbors every 1st and 3rd Friday of the month around 6:00pm. This is a potluck meal, and all are welcome.
We hold Points Meetings every other Wednesday morning in conjunction with morning prayer. Points Meetings allow us space to discuss joys, concerns, issues, or areas for discernment within the community.
We practice spiritual guidance as a community with a spiritual guide that meets with us on a monthly basis. On the first Thursday evening of each month, we host a Hyaets family gathering for all partners of Hyaets.
We practice Sabbath on Sundays.
In her book Making Room, Christine Pohl writes that the "key components in the practice of hospitality" in past centuries included
We do our best to embody the practice of hospitality to strangers which we believe to be, in Pohl's words, "a fundamental expression of the gospel."1
Hospitality takes many shapes and forms through our community. A few of our ways of showing hospitality to our neighbors include:
1Pohl, Christine. Making Room. (Grand Rapids: Wm. B Eerdmans, 1999)
Prayer is at the same time the easiest and most difficult practice within the life of The Arbor. While we want to say without doubt that life is a prayer, we are aware that we must work diligently to cultivate prayer within our life - what an irony! Though we find ourselves engaging God and one another through many different 'types' of praying, our prayer life is shaped by Phyllis Tickle's The Divine Hours. We often find that silence is the most powerful form of prayer we practice. Symbolic acts, music, painting, writing, and reading scripture are also significant means of expression and spiritual formation as we pray both alone and corporately.
Through the Rule of The Arbor, we pray corporately on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings (8:30am) and Thursday evenings (6:00pm-ish). Residents of The Arbor are expected to participate in all corporate prayer times. In many ways, corporate prayer, along with shared meals and shared work/ministry through Hyaets, helps cultivate a common life within residents of The Arbor through a degree of common daily/weekly schedule and common practice. Non-resident members are encouraged to participate in corporate prayers at least once per month on the first Thrusday. In addition, residents of The Arbor are expected to sustain, cultivate, and develop personal prayer as well.
Praying with and for our neighborhood and our neighbors is a particularly significant part of our practice of prayer. Current neighborhood prayer requests are included and updated in our monthly Hyaets Update e-mail. We invite you to subscribe to our monthly e-mail updates.
Living simply seems to have become something of a trend these days. There are many articles, books, lectures, workshops, events, sermons, and seminars on the idea of simple living. And yet a look at the types of lives we tend to live in our society practically forces one to ask, "Do we even have a clue?" But simple living has been a formative and central practice to Christians seeking to follow Christ since Jesus was born into the utterly simple setting of a stable and manger.
Members of The Arbor seek to cultivate a life of simplicity through studying writing and following practices from faithful followers such as the Desert Fathers and other Christian monastics, Quaker, Shaker, Amish and Mennonite traditions, as well as modern day folks such as Clarence Jordan and Kononia Farms, Gordon Crosby and the Church of the Savior, and Wendell Berry. We do not claim to really "live simply," but to do strive to cultivate simple living within our personal and corporate lives. For example, we:
Through the course of The Arbor's shared life, we have at least begun a sort of working definition for simple living that we feel points us in a helpful direction amidst the scattered voices of simplicity:
Some contemporary pervesions/excesses in our own (US) society and simple living responses are as follows:
In sum, as we have thought, discussed, failed, and journeyed through the Christian practice of simple living, we have found the following resources helpful:
Our world is noisy. There are too many voices calling us, too many interests we want to fulfill, too many temptations away from the one who created us. (On Tuckaseegee Road, there are also too many excessively loud car radios assaulting our hearing.) We live in a world where the sound is constant, where our eyes are fogged from staring at screens, and where we can find ourselves lacking the ability to understand both ourselves and one another. We too easily lose sight of that which is true. We lack the wisdom to know which voices are those of God calling us and which are the slag and dross of the world.
This condition is not new, and for many centuries Christians have practiced discernment in order to listen for what is truthful among all of the competing voices that would claim our lives. To discern comes from the Latin meaning “sift apart.” Discernment is the process of sifting through those voices that call us to find the ones that are truthful. Discernment is about listening, listening deeply to God, to one another, and to ourselves. In the process, we search out those people, places, and ideas that are good and adjust our behavior likewise.
The practice of discernment is always imperfect, but in its best form it must involve others in helping us to listen. Friends, community members, pastors, spiritual directors, even strangers and enemies, can provide invaluable insight into ourselves and into the potential of those key decisions we make to be life-giving. In Hyaets Community, our practice of discernment includes sharing with and listening to one another, the cultivation of personal devotional habits, and the frequent observance of silence for the sake of listening. We also meet as a group with a spiritual director on a monthly basis, and some individual members also have individual spiritual directors. Through these several avenues of discernment, we hope to sift through the many voices that call us and to listen well to which voice belongs to God that we may act faithfully in response.