Trinity Retreat Center Announces 2022 In-Person Retreats
“What then, brothers? When you come together, each one has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation. Let all things be done for building up.” 1 Corinthians 14:26
After being closed to keep staff and guests safe during the pandemic, Trinity Retreat Center, in West Cornwall, Connecticut, reopened this fall, restarting its popular in-house retreats and announcing a schedule of retreats for 2022. These retreats include long weekends of rest and renewal, gathering together over the holidays, meditating on Trinity’s core values, the coming together of discrete communities for fellowship, and special themed retreats — such as icon-writing and birdwatching.
Other in-person offerings include group retreats for religious and educational nonprofit groups, as well as a new offering: personal retreats, a time for individuals, couples, or friends to come to the retreat center on their own time for prayer, study, spiritual direction, rest, and restoration. Vaccinations are required for all guests aged 12 and older.
Trinity Retreat Center, an Episcopal mission of Trinity Church Wall Street, is a place set apart for rest, quiet, prayer, discovery, connection, and reflection. The center and its staff celebrate the restorative presence of God in nature and in community for spiritual renewal, stewardship of creation, and support for the ongoing work of love, service, and justice.
“It has been a great joy to once again call people into prayer and to rest in the Lord at the retreat center,” said the Rev. Dr. Mark Francisco Bozzuti-Jones, the center’s priest and director of spiritual formation. “Journeying through these bewildering times together, the need to live and love and laugh and cry and pray and create together and be still together is more powerful than ever.”
In addition to in-person offerings, Trinity Retreat Center will continue to offer the regular online retreats and services it began providing early in the pandemic. The retreat center streams seven services per week on its Facebook page, including Candlelight Compline, Saturday noonday prayer, and a weekly meditation on poetry. Regularly scheduled online retreats also stream via its Facebook page, with a line-up of 2022 online retreats to be announced soon.
Joseph Rose, the center’s executive director of visitor experience, emphasized that all who visit the retreat center are invited to enter into the center’s daily rhythm of community, stillness, and prayer, including taking time to re-connect with the sacredness of God’s creation in the Trinity Forest and on the center’s working farm.
“Whether it is gathering to break bread together during our farm-to-table meals, spending time with our rescued donkeys, or walking through the woods—we invite people to come and make a healing space for grace together,” Rose said. “The Holy Spirit moves in so many different ways on retreat. It has been powerful to hear the retreat house filled with the sounds of footsteps, conversations, prayers, and laughter. It has been just as powerful to be among guests during periods of silence, when they are listening for God’s call in their lives.”