Years ago, I lived in New York City and went to a church where prayer groups met every Wednesday evening. We would have Eucharist together, then eat our brown bag dinners together, and then head off into small prayer groups of about half a dozen people each. They were a very important time for me as I tried to figure out how to live out my faith in a large city in my twenties. Today, I still seek out people to pray with this way.

Recently, I went on a silent retreat at Holy Cross Monastery in New York. One of the retreat leaders share an idea from her seminary days during one of the reflections. She spoke about how one of her professors had encouraged her to find her companions on her journey; not only fellow seminarians but also important religious leaders and thinkers from throughout the ages.

It was an idea that echoes in a place like Holy Cross Monastery, where you can a sense of the great cloud of witnesses that transcend time and space. It is a similar feeling you might get sitting in an Eastern Orthodox Church or kneeling at the communion rail in an Episcopal Church.

In a formation group of seminarians I’m part of, which has a bit of the same feeling as the prayer groups of years ago, we recently talked a little bit about that sense of the great cloud of witnesses, and it seems like all of this leads to in an interesting spiritual exercise.

Who is in your mystical prayer group, drawing in people from the cloud of witnesses across time and place?

Right now, I would chose Mary, mother of Jesus, Aelred of Rievaulx, Frances of Assisi, Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Avila, and Brother Lawrence. An interesting variation on this might be the unrecognized acquaintances of these people, one of the monks who learned about Spiritual Friendship from Aelred, one of the nuns that prayed over St. Frances, or a woman who came to Julian for advice.

Who’s in your mystical prayer group?