Welcome to The Abbey
Welcome to The Abbey.
Photo by Andrew Craig on Unsplash
The Abbey is an online gathering place for those who don’t belong but long for community. In history, an Abbey was the infrastructure that housed a religious community. It wasn’t the church, but the place where those who longed to dedicate their lives to the Soul’s connection to the Sacred shared real life. It was the place where monks or nuns ate, slept, prayed, read, worked together.
I’ve called this little corner of the internet The Abbey because of an experience I had travelling through the hills of Wales the summer of 2000. Friends and I took a hosteling/bus tour of the UK and the group on this bus was a strange mix. On board were us three Canadians girls, a Korean family, an Aussie in his 30’s and a German woman both travelling alone. A brother and sister from South America and a young, idealistic ponytailed American man and of course the Macy Grey loving Scottish driver. We were on this bus for hours a day together, dutifully getting on and off looking at the same sights, staying at the same hostels every night. But none of us were really talking to one another outside our own groups. It took the encouragement of the driver to connect us, suggesting on day 4 or 5 that we make and eat a meal together.
One afternoon, we stopped for a break at the ruins of Tintern Abbey, in the Wye Valley of Wales. The structure built to house the Cistercian community in the 1100’s had been plundered and left to decay since Henry VIII decided to cut all ties with Rome and absorb the considerable resources of the monasteries into his own coffers. We stopped here in the shadows of tall windows that survived excavations, fires, reconstructions, the Black Plague and then dissolution at the hands of powerful men and we drank hot chocolate. Not much happened that day outside the bus, but it struck me later that this old institution, now hollowed out, but with beautiful bones, was a good spot for a wary, eclectic, kind of shy group to get know each other, talk and connect. Just an old Abbey at the side of the road, but it was a site for strange community.
For many Christians, there’s been a realization that they do not or can not belong to the community of faith they had been given. Necessary excavations, reconstructions, pandemics and a hollowing out of value by self-promoting actors have left us wanting. But the longing for community, prayer and brave places to ask questions still exists. And we need places to do that.
This online portal hopes to offer a space to practice these things and that feels like a place to rest, even for awhile, on the road of Faith.
The Abbey is a place of challenge, a place to unlearn and open up to God.
The Abbey is a space for contemplatives and mystics to be affirmed in their vision of the beauty of God’s world.
The Abbey is a place for the spiritually homeless, the deconstructing, the decolonizing and the heartbroken. And for those who, even after all of it, have hope.
The Abbey is a place for both the excavation and the reconstructing we need to do; for finding practices that nourish and heal, body, mind and spirit.
The Abbey offers an honest word of life for imaginative activists, pastors, leaders as we seek to live this alive faith, following Jesus to people and places we did not anticipate.
And The Abbey will do these things with simple offerings - practices, prayers, commentary, reflections and prompts designed to continue carving out space for the Divine in the midst of your daily life.
The Abbey is founded by Jacqui Mignault, spiritual director and chaplain in Calgary, AB. She co-pastors a small church in NW Calgary, helping to craft a trust-filled space where people gather, believe, doubt, celebrate and mourn but in all ways are still welcome.