Besides raising two sons and living in Williamstown, MA…

After his first pastorate in Canaan, Mark served at First Church Williamstown for seven years. Before he left Canaan, some of us may recall that he once attended a one-week study retreat at the Center for Action and Contemplation a community founded by Father Richard Rohr in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Throughout the years, he continued his study with Richard Rohr and other CAC community members in his continuing faith journey. Three years ago, he left pastoral ministry to become the Digital and Print Publications Manager for the Center.

Recently, he has written his first book The Holy Ordinary: A Way to God which will be released on October 22, 2024.

We knew he was someone special when he was in our midst. He remains that special someone who is offering his gifts to the wider world.

About the Book in Mark’s Own Words

Most of the readers of this newsletter have heard me mention that my first book The Holy Ordinary: A Way to God is coming out October 22. It has been the slow work of ten+ years, writing my way through the beautiful and dense thickets of ministry, marriage, and parenting to complete this book. I’m thrilled that the day is nearly here, and I hope you’ll read it.

The book encapsulates a Christian-based spiritual path of mystical depth in everyday life. I draw on saints and prophets such as Jesus, St. Francis, my grandmother Margaret, John Muir, Thomas Merton, Howard Thurman, James Baldwin, and more to help illuminate a way to God that runs to the heart of the world, not from it. In particular—and this might be the book’s unique contribution—I have tried to mine biblical wisdom to inspire an engaged, contemplative life.

This book describes the integrated life I continually seek: devoted to the mystic vision of union with God and reality, passionate about justice, peace, and ecological wholeness, taking the Bible seriously and rigorously committed to inner and outer transformation. In The Holy Ordinary, social justice themes of the divine preference for the margins and the destructive power of whiteness show up alongside reflections on embodiment, prayer, the arts, the dark night of the soul, and the importance of choosing joy. All while pointing to the vast yet narrow path to God running right through our marvelous and mundane lives.