Brief historical comments by David Frenette & Cathy McCarthy (rough cut)

[David Frenette] After that experience in New Mexico, Bob Bartel, Mary Mrozowski and I joined in for this Chrysalis House live in community that we had the first years of Contemplative Outreach. Bob and I were both in our twenties, and Mary was a very charismatic spiritual mother, who had been forming communities on Long Island, and she threw her hat in with these, you know, two young hippie Contemplatives. Cathy McCarthy came after, I think, two years.

[Cathy McCarthy] All the wonderful courage and humility and love that I experienced in everybody right at the beginning and the freedom to grow as I needed to grow.

[David] We made these commitments to a form of monasticism in order to be trained in Centering Prayer and service and community life, so that we could return to the world at some point. It was not meant to be a permanent community. And Father Thomas as our spiritual father, he kind of left it up to us to come up with the inspiration for the daily practice and the lifestyle.

We gave a lot of retreats there. It was a laboratory for intentional community and for the spirituality of integrating Centering Prayer into life, which then flourished outside. Mary Mrozowski - she was a rich teacher and out of her inspiration came the Welcoming Prayer, a way of doing Lectio Divina in ordinary life, the Forgiveness Prayer, the Active Prayer, all these practices which were refined in this chrysalis and then after, you know, 11 years, the chrysalis broke open and those practices were shared more broadly in the network of Contemplative Outreach.

[Cathy] So I would show up at these places with these programs, and they would just have had a meeting or something that they're going to close because they have no programs. And so it was like they had the place and I had the programs. We needed to collaborate, and we did! Now that we were doing things, we wanted some kind of a list of people that we should let know, you know, and there was no mailing list. But Mary Mrozowski had bags and bags of little pieces of paper, with names and addresses and telephone numbers on them.

Every night after work, I came home and I sat at this table and with a typewriter - at that time no computers - and created this mailing list. And so I would go to Gail [Fitzpatrick-Hopler]. We would work at her table on creating these formats and it was so much fun. It was all these things that we were doing. We were putting together in a format that is like the handbook today. So actually we created the first handbook of all the events that go on in Contemplative Outreach.

We were always going all over the place doing these larger events for people. Father Thomas was making sure we got what we needed to get from his teachings, you know. And also he was observing, you know, what was happening with all of us, you know, He had no idea actually how powerful all of this was for us.

Thomas was like the theory behind everything. And Mary made it happen. Mary was the practical person, you know. She's what brought it into life, you know, and gave it life. And they were wonderful together. They were so wonderful together.