Archives for October 2017

Here in our monastery there are thirteen different sisters, all of different ages and backgrounds. Some are from large families, others are only children. Some are from out of state, others from out of country! This creates, of course, a great diversity of interests and ways of doing things.

The beauty of community life is just this: the unity amidst diversity. We all love Christ, love his Church, love the faith and monastic life. These, then, are what bind us together as a family, and enable us to live in the ever-flowing peace of God. We begin to see that the face of Christ is revealed through many facets, as the hundreds of pixels that make up a digital image. So whether we’re sipping coffee, tea or just a little o. j. at breakfast, whether we like hot weather or cold, whether we’re boisterous or soft-spoken, we know that together we glorify the God who made us all!

 

Apples! Grapes! Zucchini! Squash! The harvest season brings forth its fruit, boasting of God’s abundance. Bushels and barrels full of produce are everywhere, making us smile with grateful hearts.

In Scripture, there are many images of the harvest, indicating how central the theme is to human life. God encourages us to be “wheat among weeds” (cf. Mt 13:24-30), “good soil” to produce a good crop (cf. Lk 8:4-21), “good grapes” rather than wild grapes (cf. Is 5:2).

We all know what it is to enjoy good food, and how unpleasant it is to eat sour, rotten or unripe food. God uses analogies that will resonate well with us, so that we may understand how much delight he takes in our own sweetness of virtue. And what’s more—he is the master gardener, who knows precisely what is needed to bring about a good yield. Let us trust in his ways, then, knowing that we will become “like trees planted beside running water which give forth fruit in due season” (Ps 1:3)!

 

We have a new member in our community—Sr. Mary Gertrude! Although this young woman has been with us since March, with her clothing as a novice she is now an official member of St. Scholastica Priory. A new habit and name mark the event, and we are grateful to have this white-veiled sister among us to carry on the Benedictine tradition.

St. Gertrude the Great, the patron saint of our novice, is a patron of the Benedictine-Cistercian order as well. St. Gertrude was a nun of Helfta, Germany in the 13th century, and was a great promoter of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the mercy which flows from it. Our present day is also marked with great devotion to Divine Mercy, and the Church is now blessed with another vocation to glorify this “greatest attribute of God” (Diary of St. Faustina)!

As we send up our prayers of thanksgiving for the gift of new religious life, we invite all to pray for vocations. May the Lord “send more workers into his vineyard” (Mt 9:38) to reap souls for life everlasting!

 

There is a quiet hum of excitement in the air these days, as our community awaits the clothing day of our senior postulant! Come this Saturday, October 14th, we will have a white-veiled novice in our midst. In preparation for this blessed day which begins her new life in Benedictine monasticism, she is spending five days on retreat; silence and contemplation of her Beloved will be her sole occupation. Then, too, the novice-to-be will challenge herself according to the Rule of St. Benedict, for he lays his expectations out clearly:

“After that let her live in the novitiate,
where the novices study, eat and sleep.
A senior shall be assigned to them who is skilled in winning souls,
to watch over them with the utmost care.
Let her examine whether the novice is truly seeking God,
and whether she is zealous
for the Work of God, for obedience and for trials.
Let the novice be told all the hard and rugged ways
by which the journey to God is made” (RB 58).

As we pray for the newest members of our community, we also ask for prayer for the rest of us—that we may all “truly seek God”, and persevere in this blessed monastic vocation!

 

In the homily at Mass today, the priest talked about the great love and mercy of the landowner in the Gospel account. He took precious care  of his vineyard and put a hedge around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a tower (Mt 21:33). The most incredible part of the parable is that the landowner trusted in his unworthy tenants again and again. Trusted them because he wanted the very best for them. He first sent them a servant, then a group of servants, and finally even his very own son. Why would he do so? The celebrant talked about the great love and desire of the landowner which drove him to keep trying to obtain his rightful produce.

After I heard the homily, I thought to myself, “this is the stuff of Christian life.” This is our story. As mere humans beings we fall all the time. Our life in the monastery is spent falling and getting up, falling and getting up. And the reason why we are able to get back up is because the Lord, the merciful and patient landowner, is right there extending his hand to help us up.  Never give up, because God never does!

St. Francis of Assisi, whose feast we celebrate today, was an outright lover of animals. Well, so are we! Some sisters more, some less, but there’s one thing we agree on: we love our monastic sheepdog Chaeli. True, she isn’t the most obedient of the bunch, but at least we can say we’re all working on that virtue together…

St. Julian of Norwich was known to have had a pet too—even modern icons include her fluffy, domesticated cat which she would keep in her anchorage. Supposedly, it helped control the rat population and gave her a chance to enjoy a bit of God’s creation all the while. Perhaps the joy that comes with petting some furry creature or another is God’s way of saying with St. Julian: “All shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well!”

Although we don’t officially celebrate the feast of St. Thérèse of Lisieux today because it is a Sunday, Carmelites do, and the rest of us who have a devotion to her can’t forget her day! St. Thérèse, among so many other things, knew through the Holy Spirit the depth of our vocation as contemplatives. In her The Story of a Soul, Thérèse tells us, “Yet I feel the call of more vocations still; I want to be a warrior, a priest, an apostle, a Doctor of the Church, a martyr—there is no heroic deed I do not wish to perform. I feel as daring as a crusader, ready to die for the Church upon the battlefield.” And she realized that through her contemplative vocation, she could in fact be all these.

It is through prayer and contemplation that she was able to be everywhere, and today she is the patron saint of missionaries. This is the the depth and breadth of our vocation as comtemplative nuns. Our prayer in Christ connects us to the whole body of Christ, spread through out the world.

St. Thérèse, pray for us!