Father Vincent Pizzuto is the type of person who takes stairs two at a time. I noted this as he led me up to my room on the third floor of St. Columba’s Episcopal Church and Retreat House in Inverness, California, where he serves as vicar. In July 2023, I, along with seven other writers, professors, retreat leaders, and poets, was invited to participate in the first formal Contemplative Residency, a program meant to foster connections between contemplatively minded Christians and the local community.
As I bounded behind Pizzuto, trying to match his purposeful strides, I thought of my favorite quote from Psalm 34: “Seek peace, and pursue it” (14). Pizzuto has located his pastoral vocation in that pursuit of peace, honed by a kind of spiritual athleticism focused less on self-denial than self-emptying love for others. By extension, since his 2017 arrival in Inverness, he has also fostered the vocation of a spiritually authentic community.
“What St. Columba’s has provided is a kind of hybridization between a parish and a monastic life,” Pizzuto says. The resulting community is unique in that it names the contemplative vocation as a viable path for lay Christians and helps members live into this vocation through workshops, retreats, and communal prayer. If, as Episcopal priest Matthew Fox said at a presentation for the Association of Pittsburgh Priests earlier this year, “spiritual energy is moving away from the formal monastic orders into the world,” then St. Columba’s might provide a new iteration of religious life—in the fullest sense of the term—that could serve as a witness and model for the rest of the church.
Complementary callings
“Contemplating Christ is the Magna Carta for what my mission statement is,” Pizzuto says. “If you want to ask, ‘What does Contemplating Christ look like when embodied in a community?’ This is my attempt at that.” He is referring to the title of his 2018 book for Liturgical Press, whose opening line—“The incarnation has made mystics of us all”—could serve as a credo for the formation work of St. Columba’s, where members are encouraged to embrace the reality of their “deification” brought about by the union of God and humanity in Christ.
In his book, Pizzuto characterizes contemplation as a “manner of prayer marked by silence, interior rumination and meditation,” and a “way of being in the world” that “opens one to a deepening awareness of union of God and all.” He is convinced that it is a posture and a practice the church and the world ignore at their own peril.
“A spiritual truth to which our culture and society have so successfully numbed us is that the contemplative life is not a luxury or a quaint pastime but a matter of grave, spiritual, and now even planetary urgency,” he writes. “The prayer of silence that confronts the tyranny of the false self and opens us to the transforming power of the Spirit is a moral imperative.”
Unfortunately, many people have viewed contemplative life as being cordoned off from the church at large—the province of a select few monastics or mystics, with very little integration into ordinary parish activities. Pizzuto traces the moment when he recognized contemplation as a calling in and of itself to a discernment retreat at a Trappist abbey he attended in his 20s. “That retreat helped me realize that there was a distinction between a monastic vocation and the broader category of a contemplative vocation,” he says. Identifying that distinction “became the seed of everything I’m doing now, which is really trying to bring contemplative practice to the church, the people.”
Even as he worked out the nuances of his relationship to monastic life, Pizzuto was certain of one thing: He wanted to be a priest. This vocation continued in the midst of academic pursuits: Pizzuto received his doctorate from KU Leuven in Belgium in 2003 and began teaching New Testament and Christian mysticism at the Jesuit University of San Francisco shortly thereafter. Amanda Quantz, a professor of theology at the University of St. Mary who wrote about St. Columba’s in her book Radical Hospitality for a Prophetic Church (Lexington Books), says that Pizzuto “takes the intellectual life and the spiritual life seriously, and bridges them by coming alongside people.”
One example of this “bridging” is the ongoing Portraits of Christ lecture series, which Pizzuto designed and facilitates. Billed as being “for critical minds and contemplative hearts,” this biannual online offering examines each of the gospels in turn, using the historical-critical method to draw out both literary and mystical interpretations of scripture.
Quantz says Pizzuto “trusts people with the sources” and “lays the table with the delicacies of the patristic tradition.” Anna Haight, St. Columba’s administrator, describes a 2017 Triduum retreat Pizzuto gave as a “conversion experience.” “One of the things about Vincent was he could explain things in a way that made sense to me, and it wasn’t dogmatic,” she says. “He told me I didn’t have to leave my brain at the door.”
Concurrent communities
I first became aware of Pizzuto and his ministry through Portraits of Christ. Jonathan Montaldo, past president of the International Thomas Merton Society and previous director of Merton’s archive at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky, had recommended the course. “I have learned much from my association with Father Vincent Pizzuto and the St. Columba’s community,” Montaldo says. “Grounded deeply in scripture study, liturgy, and meditation, St. Columba’s offers a solidly vibrant witness, through its people, their activities, and its place, to what a monasticism without walls looks like in the flesh.”
This journey to cultivating a “monasticism without walls” is ever-evolving. When Pizzuto assumed his vicarship, St. Columba’s had seven congregants; now, there are more than 130. Several new members found their way to the community through a Sunday morning online prayer service that began during the pandemic. The format fostered spiritual intimacy, particularly with the inclusion of breakout rooms where participants from all over the world could meet one another.
“It was almost curiously like a bit of a confessional, because people got to hear each other,” says congregant Penny Washbourn. “We listened to one another, and we shared what was going on in our lives and how we were coping with everything.” The online service continues to be held on Sundays and features a recording of the morning’s sermon. Other events in the “virtual chapel” include a weekly noon prayer and a monthly Evensong gathering that incorporates contemplative prayer interspersed with psalmody.
Pizzuto sees these “concurrent communities,” which include individuals who come for retreats, as integral to St. Columba’s life. He also believes these communities point to a larger trend: that average Sunday attendance (or ASA), the head-counting method by which parishes traditionally measure growth and decline, is no longer a sufficient way of monitoring contemplative Christian communities that are arising beyond its reach. “I’m giving witness to places where Christians are gathering where there’s no ASA tool to measure it yet,” he says. “There’s a bigger story here. And a lot of people who feel alienated from churches are finding these emerging contemplative communities life-giving.”
St. Columba’s has even come up with a nomenclature to define these various groups. “Local” members attend weekly liturgy; “proximate” members are close enough to come once or twice a month, perhaps supplementing with visits to the virtual chapel; and “distanced” members participate online, at times joining hybrid sessions for all-parish meetings. This makes St. Columba’s something of a “community of communities,” where local, regional, national, and international members find themselves in overlapping circles of dialogue and prayer. It is both a sign of a post-parochial church and a means of reconceiving how believers belong to each other and to the body of Christ in a global world.
Liturgy and ecology
Inverness is located on the Point Reyes Peninsula, approximately 30 miles northwest of San Francisco in West Marin. As a national seashore, Point Reyes encompasses more than 70,000 acres of protected land and 1,500 species of plants and animals. The physical beauty of the bioregion, with its mist-shrouded microclimates and many shades of blue and green, lends itself to the kind of mystical expression that is consistent with St. Columba’s contemplative focus.
Gloria Strohm, who commutes with her family from the Bay area to St. Columba’s for liturgy, says, “There’s a hum in Point Reyes that I have not felt in other places”—a vibration she identifies as “this hum of peace.”
Poet and author Judith Valente, another member of the Contemplative Residency cohort, singles out the image of a giant redwood tree that grows up from the middle of a deck attached to the church as “really symbolizing the absolute closeness to nature that you have in a place like Point Reyes.”
Their comments point to a core truth of St. Columba’s identity: its weddedness to a sense of place and how this shapes its liturgical, ecological, and contemplative practices. “St. Columba’s, physically, is a place of refuge,” Washbourn says. As a member of the community’s Council for Ecological Discipleship, she speaks of the priority Pizzuto and his flock put “on our relationship with the natural world as very much part of our spiritual tradition.”
The ecological council coordinates events to bring parishioners into communion with the wilds around them. One example is the Peregrinatio (a Latin term meaning “wandering”) walks that take place on selected Sundays after liturgy. Participants hike out to destinations along the seashore, using poets like Mary Oliver and other nature writers to help guide their meditation. Each year on Good Friday, parishioners follow an “Ecological Way of the Cross” that links Jesus’ passion and death to the suffering of the Earth. There are also special events for the Season of Creation in September, including opportunities for council members to preach outdoors, as well as ecologically themed retreats, such as one in October 2025 called “Earth, Our Common Home” that focused on embracing climate grief as an expression of love.
Perhaps the clearest expression of the sacramentality of world and word at St. Columba’s is the regular use of the Celtic Rite of New Skellig, a contemplative eucharistic liturgy based on the Gallican Rite and rooted in the early Celtic Christian tradition. Pizzuto adapted the liturgy to better reflect a modern theology that celebrates the entire cosmos’ deification in Christ. It includes such texts as the seventh-century Bishop Tírechán’s Creed, whose words of praise anticipate St. Francis’ “Canticle of the Sun”: “Our God is the God of all, / The God of heaven and Earth, / The God of the sea and rivers, / The God of the sun and moon.”
“A contemplative way of doing liturgy is to be very open to the senses,” Pizzuto says. This tactile experience of bread, wine, and blessing “awakens an elemental, a very Celtic sense of God in all things.” Washbourn affirms St. Columba’s commitment to promoting the “language of Celtic spirituality,” which she lauds for being “very incarnational” and “grounded into the elements of nature.”
Community member Sarah Johnson, whose ministry as an acolyte gives her “a beautiful and unique experience of the liturgy,” would seem to speak for many congregants when she says, “I need to be in a community that questions, that doubts, that engages the real world and holds it in the context of this professed faith through the liturgy that we are sharing together.”
A school of love
In Contemplating Christ, Pizzuto writes of the contemplative life as a “school of love.” He describes contemplative discipleship as the “reintegration of the whole person within themselves and within the community of which they are members.” The elements of lay monasticism being cultivated and shared at St. Columba’s all tend toward this deepest aim of contemplative practice: to embody the realization that the “love of God and neighbor are not two loves but one, fundamentally rooted in a single interior movement by which the foothold of the false self is gradually displaced by love itself.”
People from the community make clear how committed they are to fostering a relational spirituality. “There’s trust there, there’s deep care for each other, in a way that I hadn’t seen in a lot of other communities,” says Nicole Walters, who discovered St. Columba’s while doing graduate research in contemplative practice at the Candler School of Theology.
Members speak of the vulnerability, honesty, and authenticity they feel comfortable bringing to each other and to their collective worship. “I think one of the unique things about St. Columba’s is that you do things from a place of love, but nobody does it alone,” says Strohm. “It’s not about one person doing any one thing on their own. It really is about the collective.” This atmosphere is a large part of why she chose to have her son baptized into the community in September 2025.
As senior warden, Kathy Maxwell is the primary lay leader of St. Columba’s, meaning that she is in charge in the event of the vicar’s absence. This gives her a unique perspective on the integration of work and prayer, an age-old monastic rhythm that helps to keep a person grounded. “We’re such a working community, you know, we have visions of this contemplative place where people just drop in and get to be in solitude. And yet real life is swirling around, and we have to jump in and care for what real life is. It’s our service to each other,” she says.
Valente recalls from her time at St. Columba’s “how open Father Vincent was, and the community, to people sharing their skills or sharing their treasure.”
Mathew Francis experienced this firsthand. When Pizzuto discovered Francis had a background in Unity Praxis, a physical expression of Christian prayer that incorporates the techniques of Tai Chi and other martial arts, he invited him to cofacilitate a retreat in which Francis presented the postures as Pizzuto elaborated on them with theological reflection.
Francis praises the way parishioners support each other in their spiritual journey. “Any church organization or any institutional system is going to bring correction to your life,” he says. “That’s why you’re there, because there’s correction or transformation that’s needed. The way that St. Columba’s and Vincent have done it, that transformation does not feel harsh.”
A spirit of invitation carries over to what Pizzuto calls the “spaciousness of contemplative hospitality.” This means understanding that “not everyone is going to enter the church door on a Sunday morning” and being open to the various ways by which people might arrive to liturgy, be it a community event, retreat, or lecture. Haight mentions how a Wednesday-evening meditation group has become “another door” for seekers to become more deeply involved in the faith life of the community. “We noticed that people consistently came to meditation, and they got a lot of peace and joy out of that,” she says. “And then some of them would step over and come Sunday, and some of them continued to come on Sundays and join in the regular liturgy.”
Widening horizons
When asked about his views on tradition and progress in the church, Pizzuto points out a chapter in Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation: “Tradition and Revolution.” Merton contrasts traditionalism—“objects and values which time destroys without mercy”—with a living tradition that is “like the breath of a physical body [that] renews life by repelling stagnation.” It is that “living, breathing sort of tradition that I’m trying to inculcate here,” Pizzuto says. In the words of one parishioner, this exemplifies “being flexible with your tradition and trying to grow it.”
Such a cycle of return and renewal informed the Appreciative Inquiry Summit, a two-year, synodal-style process of reflection and discernment the community embarked on in 2024. Across multiple sessions, laypeople and clergy shared their perspectives on St. Columba’s growth, contemplative identity, and vision for the future.
The results are already beginning to bear fruit. “We’re now moving from the model of a retreat house to what I’m calling a contemplative center,” Pizzuto says. “We are able to create contexts in which Christians can anchor themselves here, for long or short periods of time, to develop their faith within community, around word and sacrament, and in a place that will support and sustain silence, solitude, and prayer.”
Another image from the Contemplative Residency comes to mind here. A few of us ventured to the Tule Elk Trail that leads out to the tip of the bluff at the northernmost point of the peninsula. The land itself was a liminal space between the Pacific Ocean and Tomales Bay, much as St. Columba’s occupies the liminal space between monastery and parish. As the horizon widened at the end of the bluff, uniting both bodies of water into a single stretch of blue, the moment resolved itself into the title of a talk given by pioneering theologian M. D. Chenu: “The world becomes our cloister and the ocean our monastic cell.”
This article also appears in the November 2025 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 90, No. 11, pages 10-15). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: Fernando Esponda
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