RHYTHMS | PRAYER, PRACTICE, PLACE
Vol 4.0 Preface
Friends,
As the New Year begins, we return to the hope and heart of our work as Sacred Place. We exist to help cultivate love for our neighbors and neighborhoods.
There is a growing awareness of the critical importance of our work. Last year, Harvard University’s Human Flourishing Program launched a Love of Neighbor Initiative, which states,“the promotion of love within society has tremendous underutilized potential to enhance human flourishing.”
We begin Year 4 of creating content around the love of neighbor and neighborhood with a Preface Issue. It includes a Prayer for our Neighbors, the Practice of a Neighborhood Rule of Life, and our Neighborhoods as a sacred Place.
Our hope is the rhythms of Prayer, Practice, and Place encourage you this year in deepening your love for your neighbors and neighborhood.
All blessings.
Jared Mackey
P.S. We are leading a Neighborhood Rule of Life Cohort that begins in Spring 2026. It is a 9-month learning community about deepening our rootedness in place over intentional conversations and shared dinner parties. If you are interested in learning more, please complete the Neighborhood Rule of Life Interest Form.
PRAYER | NEIGHBORS
By Jared Mackey
Father,
You have shown us from the beginning
Your Story is the story of God, People, and Place.
May we see our neighbors and neighborhood
As hallowed gifts and holy ground.
Thank you for inviting us into the sacred story
Of Your extravagant love and endless grace.
Jesus,
You are the Good Neighbor
The One who sees, stops, and sacrificially serves
When we are overwhelmed and overlooked.
May we love as You love,
And see our neighbors across the hall or across the street
Not as unwelcome interruptions or random strangers,
But as the Beloved.
Spirit,
Your presence brings comfort and courage
Lead us as we work for the well-being
Of our neighbors and neighborhood.
May we be formed as we labor with love
To see our neighborhoods transformed
By Your creative and generative love.
May we find You and be found by You
In the holy work of neighboring—
Welcoming, listening, remembering, and inviting.
Cultivate in us a love for our neighbors
That expands our hearts and extends our homes.
May our city blocks and our suburban sidewalks,
Our apartment hallways and rural highways
Become the sacred places
Where Your Kingdom comes
And Your Will is done.
Amen.
Thank you to Kyle Stanton, Jesse Blaine, and Kempton Jackson for their pastoral perspectives on praying for our neighbors.
PRACTICE | NEIGHBORHOOD RULE OF LIFE
By Jared Mackey
Practice
Walk. Walk at a time when people are out. Walk the same route at the same time. Walking helps you move at a pace to be present to people and notice details of place.
Map. Write neighbors’ names, work, pets, and interests on a simple map. Making a neighborhood map with names is a way to add specificity to your prayers.
Regular. Find a neighborhood coffee shop, grocery, restaurant, dry cleaner, or garden center. Be someone who knows names, tips well, and is curious about employees’ lives beyond work. Being a regular creates a rhythm to build connections with people and places.
Listen. Listen to neighborhood leaders—City Council, Community Resource Officers, or Faith Leaders. Invite them to coffee or lunch. Listening to leaders in your neighborhood is a way to know its needs.
Learn. Learn the history of your neighborhood. Visit a nearby cemetery, museum, or local library. Learning is a way to begin to love where you live with understanding and common memory.
Welcome. Host a front yard happy hour, driveway ice cream social, or holiday party for your apartment building. Hospitality in your home helps move beyond surface interactions to being known.
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
A Rule of Life is ancient language for spiritual practices to organize your life around what you love. We all have, consciously or unconsciously, created rhythms of life to protect and preserve what we value. Regardless of our age, gender, or personality type, we all have a Rule of Life. We all have practices we form. And those practices form us.
A helpful clarification is that the word “rule” is an English translation of a Latin phrase. The original word was “regula,” which is where we get our words “regular” or “ruler.” It’s a standard we set. Many linguists offer that the word “regula” was historically used to describe a trellis in a vineyard. It is the structure around which life is rooted and fruitful. The practices of a Rule of Life are not the focus of our lives any more than a trellis being the focus of a vineyard. No one walks through a vineyard and proclaims, “That is a nice trellis!” It is about the vine and the wine. Our Rule of Life is about love and life.
A Neighborhood Rule of Life is a set of practices to help us be more rooted in the love of God and the love of neighbor. The goal is not activity, but rhythms which lead to your life and faith becoming more deeply rooted. It is practices with intention and attention toward cultivating love for neighbor and neighborhood.
The majority of perspectives and practices of our cultural moment lean toward the dis-integration of person and place. Without intentional counter formation, this sense of placelessness contributes to the loneliness and divisiveness we witness daily. Crafting a Neighborhood Rule of Life is arranging your life to be more present to God, your neighbors, and your neighborhood. It is a way of being more aware of the sacredness of the people and place around you. It is a practice of being formed in the Way of Jesus and following him in “loving your neighbor as yourself.”
PLACE | NEIGHBORHOOD
By Jared Mackey
“It is by the place we’ve got, and our love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to heaven.”
The neighborhood is a sacred place. We too often come and go from neighborhoods without intention or attention. Our sidewalks can become ordinarily familiar, the houses and people passing by in a blur. But our neighborhood—our block, our street, or our apartment building—is sacred. It’s where the story of God, people, and place intersect.
God’s first question in Scripture is about place. “Where are you?” God’s inquiry was not for His benefit—it is for ours. And it still is. At the beginning of human history, God is working in a specific place, a garden in the east, in Eden. At the fulcrum of human history, God is present again in the person of Jesus, living and working in specific places: in Galilee, in Jerusalem. And it is in the place called Golgotha, the place outside the city, that his blood enters the dirt He created. From Creation to the cross, we are in a story of place.
Our neighborhood is ordinary. But God has always inhabited ordinary places. Mailboxes, porch lights, and recycling bins. Dogs barking, kids shouting, and sprinklers spraying. The home of the neighbor who has lived here for decades and the home of the new-to-the-city neighbor. The new coffee shop and the old corner gas station. These all form a liturgy of place with holiness hidden in plain sight.
Our neighborhoods are the actual location of spiritual formation. It is here we learn to be present to God, to our neighbor, and ourselves. Real neighbors have real needs. And real proximity often reveals real tension. To love our neighbor is not to exist in the absence of difficulty; instead, it is God’s presence that invites us to be formed as we navigate it. If we can see our neighborhood in this way, even conflict becomes an opportunity to grow in grace.
Our neighborhoods provide specificity to the concept of “love your neighbor.” The names of those who live next door are not an abstract concept, but physical beings deeply loved by God that we are invited to learn to love as He does. Our neighborhoods are often the environment where we have the unique opportunity for learning from longevity. Living in the same location for years re-forms us in the patient process of becoming a good neighbor. Our neighborhoods are places of reciprocity. Learning that love of neighbor does not only give, it also receives.
God is already present and at work in the lives of those in our neighborhood. When we learn to open our eyes, our hearts, and our hands, we join Him in what He is doing. The invitation to participate in the story of God by loving our neighbor is just outside our front door. The neighborhood is a sacred place.
More rhythms to root your faith in place.
Sacred Place provides a beautiful bi-weekly publication to share the rhythms of a Prayer, Practice, and Place as simple ways to help cultivate love for our neighbors and neighborhoods.
