Archives for May 2018

Imagine: the Mother of God—and the unborn Son of God—appear at your door one spring day. Well, if you’re St. Elizabeth, that’s precisely what happened! What a beautiful response she gave, saying, “Who am I, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” (Lk 1:43).

This biblical scene begs the question: Do I respond with equal receptivity and humility when God “visits” me? Perhaps he visits when we’re reading the Bible, or when a friend asks for a favor; the timing may be convenient or inconvenient!

St. John Paul II in his message for the 41st World Day of Prayer for Vocations writes: “The vocation to serve Christ alone in his Church is an inestimable gift of the divine goodness, a gift to implore with insistence and trusting humility. The Christian must be always more open to this gift, careful not to waste ‘the time of grace’ and ‘the time of visitation’ (cf. Lk 19: 44).”

Let’s throw open our hearts, then, and receive the gift of God, responding whenever he calls. For even if it costs us our earthly life with all its comfort and convenience, his visitation is truly beyond price!

 

In these days of growing environmental consciousness, we hear a lot about “going green”. It’s a way of knowing what’s good for the planet and what’s good for us humans too, while putting that knowledge into practice. Recycling, composting, and conserving resources are the little things that have a big collective impact.

Here in our Benedictine monastery, we’ve also gone green. Liturgically green, that is! We’ve just launched into “Ordinary Time” after fifty days of the Easter season, and it’s a very fine place to be.

What makes “going green” so good? Well, as with the environment, it’s the little things of everyday life that we do: our little duties, acts of love and efforts to live prayerfully. All the while, we trust that it will have a big spiritual impact when done in faith, when done for and in Christ!

Here’s one good sign of a monastic vocation: you’re not afraid to get your hands dirty! Well, alright—while there may be more to monasticism than sporting dirt under your fingernails, it is still a great feeling to dive into a little gardening project as a group of sisters working side by side.

St. Benedict did say, after all, that monks “live by the labor of their hands” (Rule of St. Benedict, Ch. 48). But we never go it alone! Two shovel the compost, two pull the weeds… and before you know it, the work is finished. At the end of the work period, we look around and say, “Wow! God is good!”

A few high-fives and a quick change later, you can find us side by side again—chanting the divine praises in church. Shoulder to shoulder we go to God, supporting each other along the way. For we strive to love him as individuals, to be sure, but rejoice that we can do it all together!

Where is heaven? This was a question that a theology teacher recently posed to the sisters in formation here at St. Scholastica Priory. An interesting question, indeed!

As the solemnity of the Ascension approaches, many of us have our gazes “heavenward”, thinking about “the things above” (Col 3:2), just as the apostles gazed at the sky on that dramatic day of our Lord’s return to the Father. This Scripture does give us a little clue about our relationship to heaven—Jesus floated not just away or out of sight, but upward! Truly, the realm of God is quite above and beyond us.

Whether we believe that heaven is another place, a different dimension, or simply “within us” (Lk 17:21), we can be sure of one thing: it is beyond our ability to access without the grace and aid of God. It is his own abode, and wherever it may be we can be sure that it is where God undoubtedly is, without shadow or restraint or any taint of evil. May he in his great mercy bring us all to that blessed place!

Looking toward the future is a pretty common thing. What will my life be like next week, next month, next year? And then there are the bigger questions, the “meaning of life” questions that rumble around in the heart or subconscious mind, feeding the low-level anxiety that we often carry around without realizing it.

Perhaps the biggest spiritual question, the most fundamental, bedrock-of-existence question might be: does God love me? Does he even notice that I exist? We walk through this world seemingly alone, perhaps with others who love us to greater or lesser extents like family or friends, but in the end we feel strangely alone.

So it seems.

“I am with you always, until the end of time,” Our Lord said to his disciples (Mt 28:20, cf. Is 41:10). Because we too are his disciples, we too can know that he is with us always. Not sometime in the future, but now. Today! God, the perfect fulfillment of our happiness, the one who sustains us in life, only hopes that we will feel his constant love by focusing on his presence in the present moment. It is he who supports us, who lovingly arranges everything that happens in our lives.

This is the answer to that “fundamental question”! If “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8), and if he is with us, then we can live with him in his love now, today!