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Please visit my wife, Barbara's Face Book/Meta page Corner Ketch Cottage.
She regularly posts photos of the many native plants growing in our gardens and throughout our property.
She is the gardener and I am her "go for."
Barb and I view our humble home as our retreat hermitage where we are blessed to live a simple life with our two dogs - Sassy and Bird, two cats - Elly and Penny, our gardens, and all of the birds, deer, foxes, rabbits, and other wild beasts and angels who call our property and surrounding woods and lands their home.
The beauties of God's very good creation are all around us to enjoy. It is all of our responsibility to be good stewards of the Creation.
A Postulant in the Community of the Gospel
of the Episcopal Church
After forty-five years of ordained ministry as an Episcopal Priest, I am now retired and in the autumn of my life. This offers me the opportunity to live into a balanced, wholistic and healthy life of Prayer, Study, and Service, which is the threefold Vows of the Community of the Gospel. This year 2026, I decided to become a Postulant of this New Monasticism dispersed community of the Episcopal Church. Scroll down to the next page of this website to find more information about the Community of the Gospel.
Introduction to the Community
We are a non-residential monastic community with standing in The Episcopal Church whose members help each other become more Christ-like. We do this by living a monastic life of daily prayer, reflective study, and personal service in the secular world. We seek to demonstrate our faith in unique ways while allowing our lives to be transformed by God. Although we are primarily a dispersed community (we live and work in and across the United States and in the Bahamas), we travel together as one in spirit with Our Lord. Our life together is ordered by “A Common Rule for Monastics of the Community of the Gospel.” We believe that our purpose is to awaken to God’s wisdom and love, and to shape our lives following God’s principles. The expression of our unique personal mission in life is in response to the love of God. We join together in Christ to share our journey and our resources, and to encourage each other’s faith journey. It’s all summed up in our motto:
“Know the Gospel;
Live the Gospel."
There was a bright light in the field.
My early childhood friends and I were playing in the playground a couple of blocks from home when it caught my attention. I do not know whether they saw it, but I did. The light was mysteriously beautiful and lasted for I know not how long. From time to time, I have remembered that light as a guiding beacon throughout my life.
Many years after I first beheld that beautiful light, a nature poem came to me that perfectly expressed my childhood experience. This is not just any nature poetry, but nature poetry transfigured, all things seen through eyes washed clean by prayer and love. It was written by R.S.Thomas, an outstanding Welsh poet who writes in English. He had been the Vicar of Aberdaron, Gwynedd.
Life is shot through with luminous beauty just waiting to be noticed. Be sure to turn aside from your business and notice such things. You will be blessed beyond your wildest imagination.
“God is light and in him is no darkness at all…” (1st John 1:5b)
The Bright Field
I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
the treasurer in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
Little Gidding of Penn's Woods offers this Ministry
to Chester County, PA Christian Faith Communities free of charge. A Free Will offering will be asked to support local charities.
For more information, contact Dan at this
email address
Little Gidding of Penn's Woods offers this Ministry
to Chester County, PA Christian Faith Communities free of charge. A Free Will Offering will be asked to support local charities.
For more information, contact Dan at this
email address
Praying the Daily Offices of the Book of Common Prayer, especially Morning and Evening Prayer, has become central to my prayer life. The Offices are very ancient and meant to be prayed in community with others.
I pray Morning Prayer with several other men and women Mondays through Saturdays at 7:30 am ET USA, and Evening Prayer on Sundays and Wednesdays at
8:00 pm ET USA.
See my Blog article on the Daily Offices for more information about this ancient form of prayer.
Contact me at dwh323@msn.com if you would like to pray with us. Join us as often as you are able.
On most Sundays and other major Holy Days, I worship at Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in West Chester, PA. For more information about this wonderful church, visit their website at www.holytrinitywc.org
I also worship with my Quaker Friends every month at Downingtown Friends Meeting. These Friends worship in silence. They have no paid clergy or programed liturgy. When led by the Spirit, Friends stand and share a message with the community. The Quakers complement and balance the Episcopal faith tradition that I was baptized and grew up in. Quakers have a long tradition of non-violence. For more information about the Religious Society of Friends, visit their website at www.downingtownfriendsmeeting.org
My study is centered on the life and teachings of Jesus as found in the four Canonical Gospels
with an emphasis on non-violence and
self-giving, radically forgiving, co-suffering love.
We certainly can not do all the good that the world needs, but the world needs all the good that we can do. Little Gidding of Penn's Woods offers two teaching programs to area faith communities. See the Little Gidding Ministries page above. Beginning this winter past, I started serving at the Friday afternoon dinners for the street people of West Chester held at Holy Trinity Church for thirty-nine years. And I was recently asked to serve on the worship & Ministry Committee of Downingtown Friends Meeting.
Jesus said, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God...
Do not return violence for violence."
Matthew 5:9 & 39 para.
Jesus also said, "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you." Luke 6:27
"War is unchristian"
Bishop Paul Allen 1941 Feast Day - September 4th
"The first step to peace is to stand still in the light."
George Fox
Since Christianity became the State Religion of the Roman Empire in 380 CE, the message of the church has drastically changed primarily by abandoning the teachings of Jesus regarding violence. The Christian's participation in the military and war now became acceptable and expected.
Little Gidding of Penn's Woods seeks to return to the teachings of our Lord Jesus by living a non-violent lifestyle and encouraging conscientious objection as an alternative to military service. I accept that this will not be a popular position to hold in the general culture or even in our local churches.
But, Jesus is Lord and Caesar is not. I will follow Jesus.
Jesus said, "Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one's life does not consist
in the abundance of possessions."
Luke 12:15
"Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich
to enter the kingdom of God."
Luke 18:25
As a child of God, I understand my life to be so much more than being a consumer of goods and services. I seek to live a simple and sustainable life so that others may simply live and our polluted world may be healed. Our children deserve to inherit a world that is just, where the few do not have most of the assets while others live in poverty, and where climate change caused by human activity is reversed.
I ask myself, "Is the work I do consistent with the teachings of Jesus? Is it meaningful and productive work?" Jesus himself may have been a carpenter, the family trade. Among other things, work may entail raising a family, caring for loved ones, gardening, active ordained ministry or another profession. Work is a part of a balanced and healthy life.
I am a life long Episcopalian and have been ordained as an Episcopal Priest since 1981. I retired in 2022 after 41 years of parish ministry, the last 22 years specializing in Interim Ministry. I am remarried and my wife, Barbara, and I have six adult children, two dogs and two cats. We love camping, hiking, recumbent bike riding rail to trails, and gardening. I studied Gestalt Therapy, Message Therapy, and play the Scottish Celtic Harp, otherwise known as the Clarsach.
I am grateful that we now live in the age of the internet. It enables us to be connected with others of like mind over vast distances. This is something Nicholas Ferrar and his community could never have imagined.
Perhaps you have been disillusioned by religion or even hurt by the church or "religious" people, or maybe you just are looking for a way to live your life in Christ that is more than local church membership but not the
cloistered monastic life.
Then I invite you to contact me an explore what I am doing with "Little Gidding of Penn’s Woods." Men, women, married, single, celibate, lay, ordained, straight and LGBTQ+ are welcome. Contact me and we can set up a time to talk.
Here is my email address:
The Peace and Love of Christ be with You